Sally Wakelin – Studies in Creativity
Paintings, drawings, sculpture and writing
During the last 6 months or so, access to Greenwich Park has been very restricted whilst the Equestrian Olympics stadium has been built, used and taken down. The public now has access to more of the park whilst the structures are being dismantled. The scale of the structure supporting the seating is extraordinary. A mass of scaffolding poles, its hard to even begin to think how it was planned.
The Olympic Equestrian events were held in Greenwich Park, as will be the Paralympic Equestrian events in early September. A complex bridge structure has been built to allow pedestrians to safely cross the busy A2 road as they arrive at Blackheath station and make their way across the heath to the park.
The sheer number of elements makes for such interesting graphic images. As yet I am not allowed to climb the structure but hope to access the top platform next week.
In the Barbican lecture hall I caught a glimpse of a man with the most interesting hair, he must have let it grow long all over and the had it sculpted like a topiaried box hedge. The dark angular shape stood out against the sculpted white plaster wall beyond making such a strong image that I felt I must attempt to record despite the fact that everyone was rising from their seats and pushing past. It was a fleeting moment and I only had a mobile phone, the low light and the urgency made for a blurry result.
Its been a week of chopping it seems. Having been away for 6 days I was struck by my changed surroundings when I turned the corner outside No22. The tree, as high as the roof of the two story house in whose garden it resided, opposite the front of my house has been reduced to a 6ft tall stump. To be fair, it was dying, there had only been one branch with leaves this year, 90% of it was dead. The 20ft radius of its arbour was now brightly sunlit.
This morning men are back, properly attired in hard hats, ear defenders and tough trousers with tool belts. Now the twinned sounds of two chain saws, their pace and pauses just slightly varying, are loud outside my window, one man working on the stump, the other on the finer branches of another still-living tree, one of those self-seeded nondescript trees that seem grow a foot each time you turn your back.
There is a triangular metal sign set across the pathway, reading “Tree Cutting” – helpful if you are deaf but otherwise redundant, though one supposes a legally required warning.
I hope the blind couple who often walk this way are not inconvenienced by the sign across their route.
More cutting has been done in the back garden of the Stomper’s old house. I noticed that one of my shrubs looked odd, it was leaning forward as though it might have been blown by the wind. It is a pyracanthus, tiny evergreen leaves on long waving stems, with equally small white flowers just now, in late June. I planted a dark red flowered clematis at its foot hoping that it would entwine itself through the shrub – it did for a while but no longer. I saw from the bedroom window, looking down onto the pink concrete garden, remnants of my clematis lying wilting on the pink slabs. How sad that the Landlady didn’t discuss it with me, I would have been happy to train it back my way. It is hard to believe that people are such haters of greenery that they must chop away every single bit, whether it belongs to them or not.
A note about walking versus catching the bus : yesterday as I was coming home with a heavy (wheeled) suitcase, I pondered whether or not to catch the bus for 2 stops to save some energy (mine not the bus’s) I saw a young woman with sturdy legs and a Topshop bag waiting there at the stop. As it was a lovely sunny day and I had been cooped up on the train for 5 hours I thought walking would be pleasant and “good for me” and indeed it was. The linden trees that line the route are in flower now and the scent is delicious, light and a wee bit citrussy. All the lawns had been cut and all seemed peaceful in the afternoon sunshine. As I turned into my walkway, the young woman with the sturdy legs crossed in front of me, she had caught the bus the two stops but had not got here any faster. Perhaps, had she walked more often, her legs would be trimmer or perhaps it was all muscle from all the times she too had walked, I don’t know.
The Assassins have cut their front lawn just in time, it was wild with dandelions just about to burst forth their heads of downy-tufted seeds ready to be blown across the neighbourhood.
The roses that surround the corner lawn at No.22 are glorious this year, the best I’ve ever seen them and the scent is strong and lucious with attar. I wonder if Stan would mind if I cut some for a vase?
In the bright morning sun, birdsong is the sound that wakes me, living in my 60’s terraced house on a pedestrian way in a London suburb.
Suburbia though, as we know, has dark undercurrents. Here is no exception, not sinister perhaps but odd. Over the years I have absorbed compelling details of my neighbour’s lives and habits.
The couple at 41, in their early 40’s are assassins, they live here only about a third of the time and they each have matching strabismus in one eye. They never draw their curtains and they do “Projects” in their back garden which involve earth moving, gravel and big chunks of wood. They cycle a lot and leave at odd hours of the night with large full suitcases.
The man at number 20 also lives at the adjoining number 22 connected via a single door between the third bedroom of number 20 and the main bedroom of number 22. He lives alone, with two of everything. He has a wife who wears a lot of purple and turquoise but she lives somewhere else. He is trying to kill the listed tree in his back garden.
Number 45 is the rented home of the Stomper who is addicted to stair-walking, he cannot resist going up and down, fast, furiously and noisily multiple times in a row, I’ve lost count at eleven times in a continuous session. He likes also to save empty bottles to throw casually into the recycling box adjacent to my bedroom window at three a.m. Incidentally his landlady, who mercifully visits rarely, is quite the rudest and most offensive person I have met.
A “widow” in inverted commas because her husband is still alive, lives alone at number 49, he lives in a home, having mislaid his mind somewhere, almost 10 years ago. She has to visit him every single afternoon, where she must watch him sleep for 3 hours before returning to her solitary marital home. If she misses a visit he becomes violent. She is frail and pale but has a steely look in her eye and a laugh like a peal of bells, but we don’t get to hear it often enough.
The Shouters are less noisy since he retired from being a pub manager, he used his lump-sum to double-glaze the windows so now they only disturb me in the summer when the windows are open. She emits loud rants about immigrants taking our jobs, and writes horoscopes, he only ever shouts the one word “Candy!”. He doesn’t know that she is 13 years older than he thinks she is, he likes to go fishing in the early morning, leaving at the same time as the assassins who then don’t know which way to look.
At the corner, there lives a short man with a very big shiny car. He won’t cut his hedge so now that summer’s new growth is here, the path has narrowed to a mere 18 inches. I think the problem may be that he is simply too short, he forgot all one summer and then it was too high and now he’s embarrassed to be seen next to a hedge nearly twice as tall as he.
Further to the hedge issue, the new couple opposite bought the house from an old Burmese lady who had never cut her hedge either. I had high hopes when they moved in as he started slashing away at undergrowth in the garden which brought him good luck and bad, she gave birth to twins but a week later he broke his shoulder and three fingers in a cycling accident. The listed tree in their back garden is now 90% dead as the local ‘‘tree surgeons” employed earlier by the previous owner, were actually butchers and did a very good job.
Candy’s husband cuts my front lawn as I have a back problem and in return I make cakes for him, which I like to make but can’t eat as I am trying to regain my girlish slimness and Candy can’t eat because she is diabetic. Always chocolate, prune and almond polenta cake, I gave some to the new parents opposite too. The grass in my back garden is now more than 2ft tall and lurking within in it, like sunbathing lions, are an old basin and bidet which the plumber refused to take away with him two months ago when he worked on my bathroom. I don’t own a car and can’t take them to the dump on the bus as it doesn’t go that way.
At the opposite end live another new family, a girl born 6 months after they moved in is now the charming thief of the little inedible fruits on my weeping ornamental cherry tree, she speaks Spanish and English and calls out “Bolas, bolas” in chirpy excitement as her tiny fingers force them from their twigs.
The Stomper is due to move out, the landlady wants to sell, so I am eager to discover who my new neighbours will be, the previous occupant was from a Gospel Church and held prayer-meetings there three times a week, worshippers came and went like a tide, twenty or so at a time, streaming across my lawn with a flurry of bell-ringings, greetings and door-slammings.
The much missed previous occupants of the Assassin’s house were renting; a shy Scottish architect who painted portraits of his house-mate in bright shades of green and orange and the sitter, a lithe young man from Brazil who liked to dance pirouettes in the living room but suffered from migraines. He was an I.C. nurse at St Thomas hospital. I met him again by chance last year and he told me of how his migraines had been caused by a tumour from which he almost died soon after they had moved from here.
Their landlord had been a young man who wanted to change the world, he left to sail around the oceans on the Raleigh International Project, helping young people to learn about the world and themselves. He left 26 small Cyprus trees in his garden and returned eight years later when they were 26ft tall, with his New Zealand wife and baby. My garden had been in darkness for years, on that first day, I asked him tentatively “could you maybe cut back your trees a bit ? “ He smiled and nodded. Early next morning I looked out of the window, a scattering of cut greenery and an abandoned machete was all that was left. Sunlight has bathed my house and garden ever since, though the energetic young seafarer has long gone, he’s building a paradise above the clouds in Costa Rica.
Sally Wakelin - Studies in Creativity 
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