Coming back

Hello again.

It seems like a long time since I've been here. I think that it's good to be back, I hope so because I don't much like where I've been.

If you are reading this let me know. I've been writing (as you know I have to, even if I'm just writing away in my head with my mental pen). I just haven't been writing here. I don't know how frequently I'll be visiting in the future, but I will when I can. Anyway I'm here now and I have this for you.

Don't forget to let me know if you read it - and don't worry it isn't very long. It's about going back to somewhere special after an absence...a bit like being here again really.

A shadow on the landscape.

It had been a long and difficult journey. It had tired him and the indigestion had returned after all this time. He hoped that it had been be worth the effort. He remembered the weeks of standing that first time, in all weathers, waiting for just the right moment. It had made his legs ache and his eyes water. That had been the start of the indigestion – goodness knows why, but it had been with him for life after that.

What had drawn him back after all these years? At least it wasn’t raining. It had rained continually that other time. He’d got soaked on more occasions than he cared to remember and Maria had been worried that he’d catch his death. Poor sweet Maria – he’d loved her so much. Why had her grandfather been so opposed to their marriage? It had made her so unhappy, even at the end it preyed on her mind. He remembered their honeymoon. What times they’d had in Weymouth, Brighton - the love and the light.

He looked around. It wasn’t even as if he had really good memories of that time. Willy Lott had caused him a deal of trouble, shouting and complaining continually that his father had sent him to spy, and how could that be? His poor father had been dead three years or more. Old Willy was mad, and John knew a little about madness - it had almost cost him his freedom. His older brother had suffered badly. Thank God for Abram. Without Abram it would have fallen to him to stand for his older brother, he’d have been doomed to take on the mill. The boredom would have killed him, withered his spirit and destroyed his vision - and what about the gift? Would that have deserted him?

He stared over at the cottage where Willy used to live. Willy had hardly left it during his lifetime, he’d been born there and he died there, finally leaving in a beech wood coffin. The house had changed a little but not too much. The bushes were trimmed and it was freshly painted, but apart from that it was not so very different. He remembered the sound of the water as it escaped from the Mill’s dam, the look of the willows, the old rotten planks and slimy posts, the crumbling brickwork - how he had loved such things. He could never have become a miller, he was too much tied to the landscape – it owned him, not vice versa.

He glanced down at the river. It was higher with the rising of the sea, and it would be hard these days to cross - the huge trees that had stood on the far bank behind the cottage had all been cut down – but for all that it was the same place.

He remembered how his father had strolled around, out for a constitutional or on his way to church, Sunday morning, dressed in all his finery, gold watch and all. He had been a proud man with much to be proud of, two mills, and his own ship, a small one - but a ship. Often, as a young man, he’d sailed on ‘The Telegraph’, leaving her moorings on the Stour Estuary as dawn was breaking, transporting the corn to London. How he had loved London, and after that first time he knew that he had to be there. He couldn’t wait to be there to begin his studies and start living the life that he knew he must, and eventually his father had given him his blessing and a little money. It all seemed so long ago now. He watched the ripples on the water and remembered himself a young man, twenty-three, leaving for London to chase a dream. Was it really that long ago?

Those early days in London had been so good. So many people and such good conversation, passionate debate, poetry and laughter – but in the end London hadn’t really appreciated him.

Now Paris…Paris had been quite a different matter. They loved him in Paris, adored his work, how stupid that he had never journeyed there - ‘I’d rather be a poor man in England than a rich man abroad,’ he once told Arrowsmith. How pompous that seemed now, and how wrong he’d been. If it hadn’t have been for Arrowsmith, he’d never have made it. It was Arrowsmith who’d made his name in Paris, and Arrowsmith who’d asked him to go to the Salon - he didn’t go though. Why hadn’t he? He wished that he’d taken Maria to see the sights and drink champagne at the Jardin du Luxembourg, maybe even stay out late dancing. What fun they would have had together. Why hadn’t he taken the opportunity when he had the chance? Too late now, both opportunity and chance were lost - and he should not have quarrelled with Arrowsmith.

He stared at the swirling water. At least that dog wasn’t around. It had been the bane of his life - nasty, smelly, flea-ridden thing. It had snapped at his ankles and once had made water on his satchel, ruining the work it contained, days worth of work lost - how he’d hated that dog. It would be long dead now, poor thing.

A movement - he glanced right towards the mill, a fisherman sat in the exact same spot that John had placed that other angler all those years before. He was setting up his rod, what was it made of? It didn’t look like cane, it was impossibly black and very shiny, maybe it was some sort of lacquered wood? He looked towards the bank where he’d placed the boat - no boat today. That other boat would be rotted to powder, just worm eaten dust by now - he’d often rowed that boat into the centre of the river to look at the cottage from a different perspective, catch it in a slightly different light. Good light today, interesting shadows.

It was a fine day, warm and bright, no need for a fire in Willy’s cottage on a day like this. Did it still have open fires? Was there still a need to draw water from the river? No. Running water would be piped inside, another miracle of science. He understood science, it was everywhere, in the trees, making the weather. Out in the fields across the way he could hear the buzzing of a combine harvester, no scythes, or wagons and horses these days. The miracle of science - running water and the internal combustion engine - a different world - not his world, his world was far away.

It had been well received in Paris, but they hadn’t liked it in London. All that effort, the standing about in the sun and rain, the flies, that horrible mongrel dog - shaking his head he remembered the hundreds of hours spent in his London studio striving to get it right, working to capture that single perfect moment. All that and still they hadn’t seen it. He was proud to have been awarded gold by the Salon, but he’d never really understood the indifference of London.

Perhaps he should have packed up his brushes and moved to Paris with Maria and the children. After all, there were landscapes to paint in France; he may even have enjoyed painting them. He loved landscape. The world was so wide, no two days alike, not even two hours the same, no shadow repeated, the sky continual movement. Yes, he could have painted the landscape of France. But his heart would have stayed in Dedham Vale, that was why he was here – to revisit his heart.

He shivered. The wind had changed. Above him he could see the purple clouds forming. They reminded him of the clouds he’d made from paint and sweat and forced onto that canvas. A storm was on the way. A Suffolk storm, full of beauty and fierce as a she cat. He’d lived through many like it in his lifetime. He glanced across to the mellow pink brick of the mill. It had begun to rain heavily, darkening the brick to blood red with each falling drop. Flatford, his family home, how happy they’d been all those scores of years ago, how happy now for this time to return, a little time to see what had become of the landscape that he’d painted so lovingly. It was almost worth the indigestion, he’d forgotten how it felt. Had it really killed him?

Time to go. Maria and the children would be waiting - all seven of them - and their children, and his Mother, Father, Abram - even old Willy. It was good to be with Maria again, it had been less of a life without without her.

He pulled his long black coat around him, the rain was very heavy now. Looking up, his face wet with rain and tears, John Constable took one last look at the place where once he’d painted the horses that pulled the hay wain to the fields across the river. No, It hadn’t change that much at all.

Turning, he smiled and walked back into the wind.