On generosity

We are nothing alone yet alone we can be all things

Author’s note: This week, Beth Kempton, in her Soul Circle Summer of Substack Essay Festival, invites us to write something about a writer who we know, might have known, or will never know but whose work does something for us—be it inspiration, entertainment, education or possibly simply a plain “how not to do it”.

I like the idea of generosity

I write because not to write would, I think, be much the same as being dead. Still some way off, I trust, and so for now, I write.

I write to see the patterns of my life afresh, to sort things out, to celebrate—and to apologise, too, though probably not nearly as often as I need to. I write for me, to be sure, but I also I write for you, if you're reading it.

my writing is freely given

The Fertile Void Café offers my writing—essays, poems, audio pieces, occasional videos and even a few mini anthology e-zines—for free. This is not some self-effacing mock humility, where I modestly dismiss my work as not being good enough to be paid for. A friend observed this week that sharing writing, like all art, is intrinsically an act of generosity: a giving away without strings of something so that you, my reader, may take whatever you wish from it. Perhaps you will get something positive, an uplift or an insight, a stirring of deeper emotions, or even just a warm feeling whilst you’re reading. And if it’s none of these, if you don’t enjoy it at all, if you didn't get any take away from my words, then I probably didn't write it for you—but thank you for reading it anyway.

The essential point is for your response to be entirely yours; I do not present you with a formula of prescribed responses. One of the roots to this selfless behaviour can be traced back to a small conversation I had with Nan over fifty years ago. You can find it in the second half of this piece, where it is confusingly subtitled Part One, as it’s my intention for more to unfold next time.

Generosity generates good feelings; it's a way of making contact, of creating friendships and building relationships. Relationships are a key element of the growing community that is The Fertile Void Café Society—a group of us who like to come together and share our art (or everyday life troubles - there are no rules) for no good reason except that we are a community of like-hearted souls. Soon, I must travel a little. Not too far – just enough to meet up with some of the people I've encountered in the Fertile Void, to sit down with them over a cup of coffee and share a piece of in-person cake. This will take a modicum of money and my plan is that The Fertile Void Café’s new adventures coming later this year will help towards this - but not the writing, that will remain free.

My appreciation of the generosity of fellow writers brings up quite a few names; people whose friendship and presence in my life is enriching and who have been generous to a fault in sharing a part of themselves with me. I'm reluctant to pick individuals out - if I started I’d find it hard to know where to stop. And then of course there is always the risk of leaving somebody out who later I wish I’d included. There are so many. But I’ll have a go.

For now, I’d like to acknowledge all current members of The Fertile Void Café Society - especially Yvonne Moore, Sara Starling and

Arnaly Arriaga Blanco

. I look forward to our weekly get togethers and you are good for my soul. And I’ll add

Jacqui Taylor (she/her)

for her purpose and patience with me,

Kole Flatau

for making me sit up and pay attention,

Simone Kornalijnslijper

for her poetry,

Lynn Tammadge

for daring (and succeeding) and all members of Soul Circle in whose company I am starting to feel like “a proper writer” simply for being in the company of proper writers. There’s a couple of others just now -

Ros Barber

for her inimitable passion and

Anna Wharton

for her insightful challenging. I enjoy

Tom Cox

, too, for his observational wit along with

The Solitary Rebel

for an intriguing live memoir.

“La Kempton”

But let’s imagine that I am persuaded, right now, to pick out just one individual for the purposes of this essay. It would be the phenomenon I think of as “la Kempton".

When I started over a year ago now, hesitantly, shyly, unsure of my writing voice, still dressing myself in an armour designed to keep the people who I wanted to read my work from reading my work, I floundered around, following this Substack here, that Substack there, always searching for the correct way to do things, to get it right, looking for some formula that was guaranteed to work. Luckily, outside of Substack, I came across “The Fearless Writer”, after which I listened to “Kokoro” (necessitating me having to stop my car at one point because the tears were so much that I couldn’t see the road) and I saw how I could open up, be me, all of me, I could drop the armour and write in the only voice that matters – my own voice.

And when Soul Circle started up, I signed up immediately. Writing little winter poems, reading so many essays, noticing what others were writing all helped to give me the feeling of coming home – a place for me and for my writing. Which, of course, quickly became the same thing.

Beth’s books have inspired me; her courses have enlightened and enlivened me. In Soul Circle, I see what

Beth Kempton

herself does with community. Being part of it for me is like a long sunny day spent on the beach at Instow with a gentle breeze off the sea as the tide slowly comes in over the wider-than-wide warm sand. It’s as good as being wrapped up in one of those huggy–cuddly blankets on a chilly winter’s evening waiting for the fire to take fully, warming the Chateau Goodenough between your hands.

Evening on Instow beach, North Devon, tide out,

Beth, you hardly need me to mention you here as if you were a newbie on Substack, struggling to make an impression. But the huge impression you do make on many (including my daughter in Tokyo) has a lasting impact and I kinda feel that in extending some small generosity to you in this essay, I am at the same time extending this infinite generosity that I feel towards every single member of Soul Circle and beyond.

And now onto this week’s offering for you, gentle reader.

Time and Tide - Part One.

1970

Nan is standing at the gas cooker, with its eye level grill, boiling mince for the cat. She adds Angostura bitters, because Smokey likes it that way. Nan has the additive because she likes it in her Gordon’s gin. Nan, that is, not the cat. Nan drinks pink gin in moderation, possibly because her hands and mouth are normally occupied with a Players Navy Cut untipped cigarette which is either newly lit, its blue smoke curling upwards, or half smoked with a length of ash still attached or almost entirely consumed, in which case it is being used to light the fresh one already between her lips.

“Yes, well,” Nan is saying, “a gift isn’t truly a gift when given with conditions or expectations,.” Her back is towards me as she stirs the pot with one hand whilst expertly diverting ash into the tin ashtray beside the cooker.

I’m fifteen, the youngest of three. Outwardly, I’m regarded as the cleverest (reading by the age of three, comfortable with Latin and algebra by eleven). Inwardly, I am stomach-churningly shy to the point of shame and of the three of us, the most naive (still quasi-faithfully attending the local Catholic Church every Sunday, a hangover from religion-based boarding school when younger). I regard Nan, Dad’s worldly-wise mother, as the fount of all wisdom not readily available from either Dad or Mother. Nan is also my literary guide, on account of her having read more books of substance than anyone I know; she likes me because I read everything too. An added attraction for me is how Nan never takes anything at face value; instead squinting through cigarette smoke so as to avoid it getting in her eyes as she shows me a different way to see things. Any things.

We are squeezed into the tiny kitchen, which is now all that remains downstairs of the retail premise’s living quarters. Until last year, our family of five had lived in the relatively spacious three-bedroom arrangement above and behind Dad’s rapidly expanding business venture. It occupies a prominent spot on Queen Street, a road that runs the full length of the slightly faded Edwardian seaside resort of Withernsea, these days our home town now that Dad has resigned his commission in the RAF. This is because, eighteen months earlier, “they” had deemed him too old to fly their aeroplanes. He didn’t see any point in staying on once he couldn’t take off.

Dad had started the Army and Navy store back then as something of a sideline. His idea was for my sister to run it while she waited for someone suitable to propose to her. In the following year, it had expanded beyond anyone’s expectations, becoming the town’s chief supplier of workwear for local farmers and fishermen, branching out into leisure wear and even men’s underwear. Dad had named it for his daughter, too—Vicky’s Army Stores— and it was fast turning into a local legend. And earlier this year, as the lounge, dining area and most of the kitchen were vacated to make room for more shop space, a temporary changing area, a proper stockroom, and Dad‘s office, we’d moved out to a large semi-detached on the brand new housing estate just to the west of the town.

Vickie, my sister and five years older, doesn’t spell her name with a ‘y’ but Dad thinks the shop sign works better with one and what Dad says, happens. Vickie has left us, the shop and the town for far away Harrogate where there are more suitable suitors, and Nan has recently moved here from Devil’s Bridge in Wales, after the Half Way Inn she’d run there had become too much for her. Dad has had the shop’s former upstairs bedrooms rearranged into a flat for her, leaving only this original kitchenette downstairs. Nan helps out in the shop, too, becoming as much of a legend in the town as Vicky’s (with a ‘y’) Army Stores itself. Walking along Queen Street with Nan is a slow business, not because of any mobility issues, but simply down to frequent stops to exchange greetings, weather commentaries and philosophy with almost everyone whom we pass. She isn’t just “Nan” to me - everyone knows her by this name.

Vickie and an early version of me outside the shop, 1969

I digress; back to the matter of gifts and generosity.

Nan’s observation has been prompted by me asking her advice on the matter of a 12” record whose purchase I am contemplating with the intention of presenting it to Anne, a fellow Catholic who is a whole year older than me and with whom I plan to spend the entire rest of my life. Navigating the course of my first true love is proving tricky, causing me some anxiety. I have an idea that I will buy the latest album “Old Songs, New Songs” by Family, a band we both like a lot, and give it to her as a Christmas present—with the proviso that she promises to think of me when she plays it and also continues to go out with me, possibly for ever. I am asking Nan what she thinks of my strategy. Nan’s input has shown me a higher, more noble level—to give without expectation, altruistically, and with only the slightest suggestion of spiritual smugness.

It’s a pivotal moment, now I look back, though I don’t realise this at the time. Do you wonder, sometimes, what might have happened if at, such points, you had actually known what was coming next?

I had no idea then that this first love would end in less than a year when, bored with my immaturity and indecisiveness Anne found another boy, one who didn’t ask her whether she wanted to go left or right every time we reach a T-junction whilst out walking. To make matters worse, at least for my immature low self-esteem and the wholeness of my heart, was that he was a year younger than I! I think the appropriate expression here is “a learning curve“.

I definitely didn’t know, that within five years, we would all, including Nan, have moved into to a big old farmhouse in a nearby village, I’d have discovered LSD, Nan would have died from cancer and been buried in the village cemetery.

And I certainly would not ever have guessed that within five years I’d have married a Geordie lass or that our first marital home would be this self same flat above the shop, although by then, the kitchenette had given way to improved changing rooms and a new one installed upstairs in what had previously been my bedroom.

Withernsea Lighthouse dominates the town

Part Two follows. Soon.