Swallows for my nephew
Egg-box card, newspapers, tissue paper, watercolour paper, balsa wood, ash wood, sardine cans, take-away tray foil, yogurt pots, milk bottles, dry lentils, brass, lead, ink, watercolour, humbrol enamel and paper varnish
approximately 58cm x 38cm x 23cm
October 2020 to January 2021
I made this mobile as a present for my new nephew. He was born October 2020, while the UK was in lock-down. My sister’s family and I formed a ‘childcare bubble’. The winter that followed was wonderful and difficult. In November I wrote about what was happening and what making the swallows led me to remember. The text was published in Adaption, Retelling, the eighth edition of Soanyway Magazine.
With thanks to my family and the editors of Soanyway Magazine.
Some stories of our swallows
November 2020
These birds will be passed down with stories. The memories below are my own, though, and will probably be largely left out of family retellings.
My sisters and I made this collage for our mother. We don’t know when — she is dead and our father can’t remember. My swallows are easily spotted because I was the youngest and least adept. The differences between my sisters’ are subtler but I think I know who made who. When Judith Kerr was working on The Tiger Who Came to Tea she made a tiger suit that her son or husband would put on to help her capture the poses. She said she could tell from the posture of the tiger on each page who had been inside the suit. Her son should pass that on.
I made these as wedding presents for my sister and her husband when I was 27. Their eyes are made of watch glasses from a Hatton Garden jeweller’s workshop. The lead sheet came from a roofing merchant on top of Forest Hill. It was so heavy in my backpack I could hardly control my descent when I cycled home.
The next Christmas I made the swallows tiny foldable maps to guide them on their migrations. I was home for the holiday from Sweden where I had started a Masters and a mental breakdown. I felt my ability to make anything had evaporated. On Christmas Eve-Eve I sat in the sink on the phone to my cousin and asked what would happen if I couldn’t finish the maps. She said nothing bad, and that when you’re walking through hell it’s wise to keep walking.
This August I began a mobile for the same sister’s new baby. Three swallows on a line, two flying below. In March I had shut up my Cairo flat, paid Mr Sayeed 6 months’ rent and travelled back to Somerset. I turned my childhood bedroom into a studio. These days the distinctive dome of a swallow’s skull arrives faster between my fingers but vital Egyptian words are taking far too long to form. Wary of the fogginess of the future, I make inchingly slow progress forward, even in that saggy-roofed old room.
It didn’t matter that the birds weren’t finished when the baby was born. He’s been lying between my sister and I while we give them a final layer of inky tissue paper. Sometimes during these post-natal days she has seemed surrounded not by fog, but smog. Cold and murky and mean. I hope I can use the past tense: ‘It was cold’.
The day we finish the first one, Iris died. Nearly 90, she hadn’t left her care home room since March. Tracy phoned to tell me the next morning. This morning. She was asleep and felt no pain. I am so relieved. After lunch I show my sister the beginnings of this text. She says she feels like she has to keep walking.
I write this bit in my head that night / right now, with the warm breathy weight of the baby on my chest. Five kilos already. I read years ago that one of Breughel’s contemporaries said his figures looked like animated bags of sand. It was intended as an insult but sounds like perfect praise to me. The table lamp is on a timer. It snapped us into darkness at midnight, making the beloved sandbag flinch. Now I am lying under him trying to think about Iris. I remember this effort of comprehension from 11 years ago, when a hospice nurse hugged me and said I’m so sorry about your mum darling and I thought, well she was almost dead yesterday and now she is, it’s not so different. Actually, I think the effort came later, and only ever in fits and starts.
Now I am tapping out these words, holding my phone above him. Nearly three hours asleep. Good baby.
