The Chapel- Two views

This is the chapel of the old De La Pole Hospital. Did Mary Jane go there? Did she play the organ, or was she too far into her own head?

It is now a crematorium and when we visited there was a service going on.

She must have walked these paths......

Hull etc

When I was a child I lived behind a shop which was closed on Mondays. So that was the day when things were quiet when I came home from school. However every so often Dad was missing having been to "Hull". As far as I remember there was never any discussion certainly not when I was around, we just knew he had been to see Grandma Brown. Full stop. Nothing.

My Dad died aged 91 in 2000 keeping his memories to himself. Two weeks ago, 54 years since Grandma Brown herself died I finally went to "Hull", to the Mental Hospital which at that time did not admit people under 16. I had a look for myself.

I also had a look and photographed everywhere she lived, as far as I know, and went to a service in the little church where she played the organ before she was married and later when she was widowed.

It was a satisfying trip,clearing up mysteries and getting some sort of sense of the life. The Mental Hospital was a huge complex still containing some of the buildings Mary Jane would have been very familiar with among more modern places.

The most moving was the church and the organ. The familiar architecture, the lonely priest, who says evensong every day, usually alone, the surrounding trees, must have been exactly like this in 1905 when she was married there and later after 1927 when her beloved husband died. We believe that she resumed playing the organ when she returned to the village in somewhat straitened circumstances after the terrible times of the farm diseases of the 1920s.

The music, the religious observance, the familiar village, her son and daughter, grandchildren,do not seem to have been able to stabilse her mind. Ten years later she was "put away", "certified insane?". I`m still searching. I consider I owe it to her, to honour her memory.

Ode to the Tomato

The street
drowns in tomatoes:
noon,
summer,
light
breaks
in two
tomato
halves
and the streets
run
with juice.
In December
the tomato
cuts loose
invades
kitchens
takes overlunches
settles
at rest
on sideboards,
with the glasses,
butter dishes,
blue salt-cellars.
It has
its own radiance
a goodly majesty.
Too bad we must
assassinate:
a knife
plunges
into its living pulp,
red
viscera
a fresh,
deep,
inexhaustible
sun
floods the salads
of Chile,
beds cheerfully
with the blonde onion
and to celebrate
the filial essence
of the olive tree
lets itself fall
over its gaping hemispheres,
the pimento
adds
its fragrance,
salt its magnetism-
we have the day`s wedding:
parsley
flaunts
its little flags,
potatoes
thump to a boil,
the roasts
beat
down the door
with their aromas:
it`s time!
let`s go!
and upon
the table
belted by summer,
tomatoes,
stars of the earth,
stars multiplied
and fertile
show off
their convolutions,
canals
and plenitudes
and the abundance
boneless
without husk,
or scale or thorn,
grant us
the festival
of ardent colour
and all-embracing freshness. Pablo Neruda

Tales Of The Tomatoes

Irealise that my pictures are not a very accurate record as I don`t always stand in the same place. I`ll try to be more like Tom Phillips and be in the same place at the same time etc in future