Back to the windmill
I have a line for the beginning of the book I am writing, I say a line rather than the line because these things are forever changing in the process of creation until they fix in a shape that feels comfortable, which is "We all of us have our totems. Hers was the windmill." The windmill in question is not far from the village of Appleton Roebuck (Lat: 53:52:31.59N, Long: 1:10:33.36W) which sits just off the A64 between Tadcaster and York. It's the area I grew up in: a wide flat plain of agricultural land, the kind Millet painted, with only the taller groups of beech, birch and lime trees and church spires breaking the skyline under such immense rolling clouds. Grey roads line across the fields in straight directions linking farm to village, and looping strings of telegraph poles seem to bind the place together loosely.
You can, if you're quick enough and know when to look, see the windmill from the window of a train, to the right hand side in the direction of York. It rises from a field, above a small pond, beside the road that leads to Appleton. Blink and you'd miss it. It's a derelict brick built windmill in a wheatfield. But it is a point of gravity around which the story I am writing slowly swirls, the events and characters unaware of its magnetic pull, its position at the centre of the loosely bound events that occur over a number of years.
I say the windmill was her totem, in truth I suppose, it is mine also. Not having lived in the Vale of York for something like 30 years, it has been a peculiar mix of nostalgia and objectivity to be a relatively frequent visitor to those parts once more. We have a client based near Castle Howard, and meetings usually necessitate an overnight stay in York. OK, they probably don't actually, but I will seize the opportunity to be in the place I called home while I was between the ages of seven and 18.
The view of the windmill from the train carriage is a sign I am back. A marker. The fact that it has remained unchanged over the years while I have aged disproportinately against it provides a rule -- a measure -- of invisible change, against which the past seems, as with the characters in the long-promsied book, to be among the present.
This was brought home in a rather alarming way last year when I stopped off at the windmill on my way back down from a shoot up in Newcastle.
I had my iPhone with me and, as I tend to these days, snapped off a series of shots using the wonderful Hipstamatic app. Here are a few of them:
I love the way the Hipsta filters replicate the instamatic camera I used ot carry round with me as a boy, as I cycled the back lanes of the Vale of York mapping out the village forms for my Geography A level assignment.
We're using the Hipsta thing for the shoot in Portugal next week -- amazing how one used to have to hire photographers and expenisve cameras, now we can travel with nothing more than an iPhone and an HD GoPro and will be able to get good enough quality imagery for the entire campaign (in theory). But I shall save my rant on the pros and cons of the democratisation of technology for another post sometime. Bet you can't wait.
Back to the windmill. I moved house last February. Decided to have a clear out of boxes that had been in the loft for years. Boxes that had been in numerous lofts over numerous years and never once opened or explored. What could possibly be in them that I felt I must drag around with me all my life? Nothing that important or needed as I hadn't used or looked at these things for something like 20 years.
In one such box I found a pile of old letters to friends, girlfriends and bad sixthform poetry, news clippings that must have meant something at the time. And a plastic bag full of photo-wallets -- from the days when you had to send your films away for two to three weeks to get them developed. Among these wallets I found pictures taken on the old instamtic of the Geography field trip to Kettlewell, shots of Castle Howard, friends who have long since lost their names... and these: from 1981.
