Up Sheringham Way

When we pick up Julia Blackburn’s Threads…

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Two worlds flow into each other like the sea into a river’s estuary. There is much turbulence, and some, we are told, are washed out never to return; one terrible incident occurring at Norwich’s Castle Museum, a Mr John Craske lucky to survive. 

Regarding a large needlework picture of the retreat of Dunkirk, although I am quite willing to arrange for the dispatch to New York, I do not wish to have my name associated with such an exhibition because, quite frankly, I do not think work of this type comes under the heading of art.

Thank god for the lifeguard! Sylvia Townsend Warner getting her boat out drags him ashore. Craske’s work is folk art of a particularly vivid sort - his pictures and embroideries move (we should write sail) across these pages - though it lacks the subtle touches of the trained and almost sinks under the clumsiness of the untutored. Of course the “prune-coloured sourpuss” of a curator doesn't appreciate them. It will be decades before the avant-garde visit this art gallery. But what if, on their holidays, they had followed Sylvia? Breton would be shown the door; Dubuffet tumbled over the castle walls…

John Craske and his wife belong to a class a hundred miles away from the denizens of high culture. They are innocents; herrings swimming off the coast of Norfolk as the fisherwomen sail out to sea… It is Valentine Ackland, Elizabeth Wade White and Sylvia herself, the most detached and aesthetically acute, who are coming with their nets. These classes as different as two countries, their mores as incomprehensible as a foreign language. The one simple and poor, whose emotions overwhelm speech; the North Sea flooding the beach, to leave a few words behind, marram grass clinging to the dunes. The other sophisticated, rich, excessively fraught, inhabiting beautiful gardens of cultivated conversation; there is the Acklands' family home admiring the view.

The success of this book its ability to weave both into its texture, so that we feel each separate world together with their interactions; Julia Blackburn using a range of wools, some soft, others coarse and hard, plus a few fine silks, to embroider her portrait. Letters from writers, collectors and singers are interlaced with those from an unlettered fisherman and Laura herself, John’s wife; a folk story adds salt, and there are snatches of conversation, diary entries, odd tales, fancies and Einstein’s wisdom; Einstein a sort of benevolent golem on the North Norfolk coast: the legends that have accrued around him more alive than the freeze-dried facts. This is folk art of another kind, springing directly from life, whose memories are more important than history, where tall tales trump truth, and what we believe is far more important than what others know; that’s too dull to be remembered. Like so many before us we cannot resist the old sage.

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best, a simplified and intelligible picture of the world: he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience and thus to overcome it.

There is rich poetry, as the author imagines herself in the seascapes of John Craske’s mind. Some passages are made with the softest of wool, from sheep who grazed on old grass untouched by modern fertilisers…

A muddle of little birds in the snow. Sudden explosion of blackbirds, using all their energy in fighting with each other even though there are plenty of apples and porridge oats for all of them. Herman feeling very frail. I drift without focus. Thoughts on Craske move like clouds through my head.

Lady Jacynth Fitzalan Howard is hauled on board. There are vignettes in supermarkets, odd scenes in hotels and an informed conversation in a gallery. We touch the blunt edge of a modern fisherman, feel the emptiness of Norfolk’s coastal resorts, and are thrust into weird Great Yarmouth, when a clutch of Father Christmases photograph themselves on the promenade. Julia stitches her own life into the story, as John Craske unravels out of it.

In the Spar supermarket I got talking to two blonde ladies behind the counter. I told them I was writing a book and I wanted to know what the village had been like in the old days. They hadn’t heard of anyone called Craske, but when I mentioned Mr King, they brightened up and said, ‘Oh, there are lots of Kings round here!

They brought out the video rental book and began to look up all the Kings, but they couldn’t find anyone among them who would be old enough to help and so we gave up.

How real this is! (Now outlawed by the government: for this is “data” to be protected.) These ladies are spontaneous, excited, happy and…that word again…innocent. They live in a world very different from the person who wrote this book. 

How do you capture the character of a working man thrust into the wild waters of art and its environs? A place where lesbians enjoy sadomasochistic sex and a painting becomes an object of sexual politics; Dorothy Warren and Elizabeth Wade White using Craske’s work to detach Valentine from Sylvia. You write snippets of prose poetry, add the detritus beach-combed from Norfolk and its coast, then you frame it with one’s own life. You create a collage from out of which emerges the character of a common man; John Craske, fisherman, invalid, artist. Julia Blackburn has done something remarkable here. She has found a way inside someone utterly unknowable, and returned with his hidden treasure. Or simply: she conveys the atmosphere of an alien world. Marvellous!

After an hour or so the upward flood of the tide held its breath for an elongated moment and then it had changed direction and we were being pulled back the way we had come, down towards the meeting of river with sea and now there was no need for oars, except to stop us from banging into the mud banks when we got too close. 

I listened to the lapping of water against the boat and watched the enormity of the sky and the clouds moving within it and I felt the dancing energy of the pulling wave, as it tried to teach me to let go. A heron with heavy dishcloth wings lifted its body up into the air and dropped aback again to land as the same place it had left.