The
Letters
In the early summer of 2009, I
attended a day organised for poets by Anne Sherman, Arts Development officer
for Cheshire East. She had arranged for two artists in residence for the day
and one of them was Maria Walker, whom I had never met before. We were sent
outside to write an observational poem and I included Maria in mine because she
was so absorbed in her work and was beaming with pleasure as she sewed.
Summer
Song
After Walt Whitman
The sewing machine chugs its rhythms
as the seamstress smiles.
Outside the woodpigeons baptise the
morning in liquid croons.
Spires of lavender describe the wind
like artists’ brushes.
The sun bleaches everything bone
white.
A red bicycle rests against glass
walls, doubled.
A single vulgar dandelion bursts
through wood-chipped beds.
In the powder-blue sky, the sun is
an ode to summer.
Sage spreads its spicy flavour on
squeezing fingers.
Inside the seamstress sews on, her
work is her song.
Her cottons and silks and pins
scatter round her as she sings.
Over the lunch break I looked at the
displays of the two artists and noticed Maria’s had a bundle of letters tied up
in pink ribbon. The name on the envelope was Lightfoot, which is my maiden
name, but the address was Manchester so I thought nothing of it. Maria had produced
a body of work based on these letters, including some fabric shoes embroidered
with words from the letters, a number of pictures and a framed set of spoons
with words from the letters written on them.
I told Maria I had included her in the
poem, we swapped business cards and agreed to keep in touch. Soon we were
collaborating: she was using my words on her artwork and sending me artwork
which I wrote poems about. We are similar in age and background and interested
in many of the same things, such as recycling and reusing old materials, and in
working class history, particularly that of women. We decided to meet up again
so I could see the artwork properly, at Castle Park Arts Centre in
Frodsham. Maria explained it all to me: how she had bought the letters in an
antique shop thinking to cut them up to use in artwork. She had decided they
were too good to destroy but felt reading them would be intrusive. Eventually,
she did read them and was moved by them. She gave their name again and I
told her it was my maiden name. She then mentioned Widnes – my home town. It
began to look like it might be my family, but I knew there were lots of
Lightfoots in Widnes, so I did not get too excited. I asked her for more
details and she told me the address was 19 Russell Street, Farnworth. That was
the house where my father was brought up with his five siblings. A few first
names confirmed the link.
We were very spooked and had to sit
down for a minute and take it all in. The odds against this happening must be
very long indeed. Maria and I felt a huge responsibility towards these precious
documents. We began to plan the next steps in bringing these letters to light
for the general public, using our combined art forms. Maria was bowled over to
have found the family they belonged to, as she had always hoped to share them
one day, knowing they would be important.
On
First Hearing of the Letters
for Maria Walker, textile
artist
First the artwork with the letters
printed behind photographs
of a different family, enlarged,
framed in a gallery, palimpsests.
Words from the letters
are embroidered on a corset,
traced on shoes, painted on spoons.
A bundle of letters, the artist
explains,
bought for the stamps but too good
to cut up. From Widnes (my home
town)
a family called Lightfoot (my maiden
name).
Not necessarily my family, but may
be.
Then the names Frances, Ada,
Dorothy:
co-incidence too great. We stand
awed, making webs intricate as old
lace,
beautiful as buttons, miraculous as
bread.
She has already used my words
to embroider on her art, but I was
the follower.
The letters came before me into her
work.
They have travelled through time and
space
to find me, tied with pink ribbon,
bringing me my father, lost so long
ago.
19
Russell Street was in a row of terraced houses in the Widnes village of
Farnworth. The present day Russell Court is on the same site. My grandfather
Peter Lightfoot (1880-1968) worked at Gossages soap factory. My grandmother was
Ada nee Woodward (1882-1933). She suffered from asthma and died at only 51, ten
years after the letters were written. My father was one of seven children:
William, Frances, Peter (who died as a baby) my father Peter, Vincent, Ada and
Dorothy. At the time of writing the letters, Frances was living with her aunt
in Manchester, most likely in service. The various family members wrote to her
and she kept their letters all her life. My father was born in 1911, so he
was 12 when most of the letters were written in 1923.
In early 1924, Frances was called home
from Manchester because her mother could no longer cope with looking after the
house and the children. However, after Frances came home, things became more
and more difficult. The family suffered crippling poverty and there were only
two wages coming in, with Frances unable to work while she was managing house
and children and caring for a sick mother. Both William and Frances had been to
grammar school, but my father, who had passed the 11+, was told he could not go
and had to leave school and get a job. He already worked as a delivery boy for
the local grocery store, Bridges, and before that had done some farm work for
which he was paid in food. He was a very bright boy and it always galled him
that not getting an education past 12 years old had hampered him in life,
particularly when William and Frances did very well for themselves later. The
letters, then, come from a time of innocence before things went badly wrong for
my father’s family. He is happy and enjoying his childhood.
The family writes of many things;
Willie's traumatic tooth extraction; the 1923 election with Widnes' first
Labour candidate; skating on the frozen pond; how difficult it is to get the
washing dry; lectures at Gossages; gossip about people in the village;
household chores; what they were having for supper, and how different things
were where Frances was staying.
As Ada, my grandmother, became
increasingly ill, she had a bed downstairs. Ada died in the February of 1933,
the year my father was married. No-one from his family came to the wedding,
because my father married a Catholic and changed his religion. His family were
staunch Protestants. They may also have been in deep confusion and mourning
because of Ada’s early death. There was a ten year silence from the Lightfoots,
and it was Frances who broke it, turning up on the doorstep to mend the breach.
The letters have survived because
Frances kept them carefully all her life. There is no chance of recovering the
letters she wrote, so we have only a one-sided correspondence. The letters must
have been part of a house clearance after Frances died.
I was taken to visit my Lightfoot
grandfather and his second wife at 19 Russell Street, usually by dad, only once
by my mum, when grandfather was thought to be dying. He did not, and lived on
to 1968. Both he and Ada are buried in the same grave in St Luke’s Church
graveyard, Farnworth, Widnes. Until the letters turned up, I had no keepsakes
except a few photographs. I will always be grateful to Maria Walker for
rescuing them. The artwork she has created, inspired by them, documents
exquisitely what it was like to be a working class family in the 1920s and
makes a beautiful addition to the letters. Maria created a book cover for the
exhibition book, which was the first time she'd designed such a thing. She
should do more: I really love her cover collage.
The book is available at a cost of £5
from Erbacce Press, or direct from Angela Topping. It includes most of the
letters themselves and ten poems.
By Angela Topping (poet)
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