To Soup

via Starve Acre and a hare.

From the sitting room, the sound of my daughter pushing the buttons on the xbox controller, their hard mechanical click becoming its own rhythm; the TV volume’s down, I don’t know what she’s playing. The boys are upstairs, intermittently, the sound of laughter, they do not do this often enough for me to trust it won’t end in tears, the washing machine clicks in the kitchen, the uniforms clean for the week. The house is still and quiet and it’s late summer now; most mornings have a bite to them when we leave for school, the grass dew wet when I hung the first load of washing this morning before picking apples littering the lawn in the way they have these last few weeks. Crumble. Pie. Cake. By 9, it was warm on the tennis courts, the air smelling summer burnt still: rosemary, jasmine, pine; soon the light will turn and the leaves too bringing its own kind of sadness, a longing for the warm days and the long blue evenings but a freshness too, a turning to the end of the year and what the next might bring; and this afternoon is still, in spite of the yells now from upstairs, I think of the mismatched strength of my sons and try not to think about what they might be doing, of bruised legs or bashed heads or broken noses, things all inflicted at one time or another by one or another but they are bigger now, and the stillness doesn’t break, not yet, this stillness of the sort that work can get done in, I cannot think properly without a sense of peace.

Friday last and the children were in a carnival mood. Shabbat Shalom! they shouted as we lit the candles, before turning on each other and I reminded them what they were saying. Their wish to connect with their Jewish heritage backfiring as I insisted on peace, and it is difficult, right now, to think about being Jewish, it is complicated but it is essential, however ish the Jewish part is, there needs to be a reconciling and a reckoning and this is something I have spent much of the last year thinking about, how to connect with the past, what was lost when my family assimilated, what might be gained from remembering where we came from, what it means to observe, what it means essentially, to re-member, what it contains too, the inevitable combination of the blessing and the malediction.

I watched Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre last week. I’m still thinking about it. It’s a feat of a film, beautifully rendered, one shot in particular, of a night murmuration, is stunning. It’s also a brilliant adaptation of the book, and Daniel’s retelling brings an careful insight to horror, a deep respect of the folk customs informing it. Nothing’s played for fun. In it, a hare comes back to life, whereas most horror is concerned with dismembering, the hare literally re-members itself as organs, sinew and flesh build on previously bare bone. As it does so, it becomes the embodiment of the uncanny, the use of an animatronic hare adding to the sense of unease the viewer experiences as the hare infiltrates the home of a recently bereaved couple. Ultimately, this act of re-membering leads to destruction, nothing good comes from going back into the past and yet the lure and pull of the past remains almost inescapably strong. The blessing and the malediction again, one impossible without the other.

Considering Kokotajlo’s background, it isn’t a surprise that Starve Acre deals with themes of memory, place and the past; a kind of unholy trinity. It won’t come as a surprise either that Kokotajlo’s first film, Apostasy, about a young girl leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, was a film that resonated deeply with me. I could barely watch it because it was the first time I’d ever seen Jehovah’s Witnesses portrayed accurately in culture, and the accuracy was almost too much, representation is powerful when you’ve never experienced it. I watched it after I’d written the second draft of The Last Days, and watching it gave me the determination I needed to keep going with subsequent drafts. Sometimes, you need to know someone else has done something a little bit subversive with their past if you’re to do the same with yours. But the act of remembering, putting flesh on the bones of memories, comes with its own price, and it’s not a surprise to see Kokotajlo veer into horror and away from less obvious echoes of his upbringing. Or for me to do the same. Although, I think the draw of folk horror is a kind of trying to understand where we came from. Who were we as an island before the imposition of Christianity, which is something I’ve often asked myself since I left the religion, I have spent years trying to get back to the before, in a way dismembering myself, trying to remember what was originally there. Perhaps that’s why out of all the characters in Starve Acre, I identified with the hare the most. Likely, if you’ve seen it, I shouldn’t say that.

On Friday, around the table, the candles burning low, I tell the children a story about about me as a child. It’s one I’d forgotten, and suddenly, out of nowhere it seemed, I remembered it. In it my mother has asked me to sit on the front step and wait for my sister to come home from school. I am very young, too young to speak clearly, and with a nickname that’s an amalgamation of my first name and my Hebrew middle name, unable to say my name in a way that strangers would understand. Either I mishear her or decide I have a better plan. Aged two, I set out to collect my sister from school. Likely I think there’s little point in waiting. I make it as far as the busy main road bisecting the village before I either become distracted or unsure where to go next. My mother answers the phone when the post office calls, no, she says, she’s right here, only to look outside and see that no, I am not right there, I am in fact in the post office, where strangers took me when they found me walking up the middle of the busy road, and unable to tell what I was saying, took me to the post office. It’s a well known fact that if you want to find anything about anyone in a village out, head to the post office or the pub. The children laugh at this story, telling me I’m just the same now. I’m not sure exactly what they mean by this or if this is a good thing, but I think it feels reassuring to know there’s a connection between the 2 year old I was and the 44-year-old I now am. A kind of constancy, a kind of muscle memory maybe, unpolluted by years of imposed religion; a reconciliation, an about turn back to what I was before.

After dinner, we sit on the floor in the sitting room eating apple crumble, when they start to talk about what their childhood tastes like, what they will tell their children they ate. Tomato soup! ventures Estella, that’s what I’ll say, and what she means is the soup I have made since I was 10, the same colour and texture as Heinz but not the same at all, soup I make them when they’re ill or sad or cold or tired; and one by one they reel off many meals and foods, getting more and more excited as they do, until it becomes a kind of lexicon of childhood food, becoming more sophisticated as they continue. They attach to this recounting other memories, kicking leaves in the park, or visiting the Tate or ramen in soho or ice cream on birthdays and this conversation lasts until Avery says he might cry, the crumble is so good and we laugh at him, with his spoon to his mouth, like a tiny version of the critic in Ratatouille.

On days out, my mother would say we were making memories, she was encouraged to do this by the elders speaking on the platform, who said family memories were essential. As if it’s days out children remember, the holidays, the high days, as if these are enough to act as counterbalance for the more painful memories, as if the every day is not worth remembering, or more likely to be remembered, as if memory can be selectively triggered. I see mothers at it on Instagram, the memories that need to be made over school holidays and the pressure of it all and their touching, blind faith, that they can influence their children’s memories becoming a kind of tyranny. I wrote about it in Ava Anna Ada, Anna continually preoccupied with making memories, unable to see that Adam already had plenty of his own.

Let them remember soup, I think, as I stack the crumble bowls in the dishwasher. Yes, soup. And crumble. And roast chicken and dippy eggs and pancakes on a Saturday and French Toast and French Onion Soup.

I remember my Grandmother’s soup and it was Heinz and I remember us around the kitchen table and the steam on the window before the blind was pulled down and the pans on the side and the morning rolls cut in half from lunch, a tiny bit stale already but perfect for dipping, where they turned that lethal if it got on your school shirt orange red and those memories, of being safe and warm and soup meaning you were beloved on this earth with someone to look after you, they are the the ones I can return safely too. Let me remember soup.

In Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov writes something along the lines of how much memory can one person take. I used to think this was why old people forgot things, they were too full of data and something had to fall out. This summer, I was lucky enough to sit in on a talk by Dr Akira O’Connor about memory in relation to memoir, he spoke about how memory works on a last in first out basis, which is why people with dementia often return to childhood, forgetting their children, or mistaking them for their parents or siblings. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like not to be rid of memory, but to be freed of it, individually and culturally.

For a time, I thought writing The Last Days would have this effect, freeing me of my memories, instead it was a kind of pharmakon, sickening me as it cured me, overwriting memories until they became something else. Dr O’Connor spoke about this too, how the frequency of returning to a memory affects the accuracy of telling/re-telling it. I have become increasingly suspicious of memory and of ritual tied to memory, what it might be used for, how it might corrupt; the blessing and the malediction again of cultural memory, how difficult it is to reckon authentically with heritage and identity but also how embodied memory is, what we inherit without knowing we’ve inherited it. When my children raise their glasses saying l’chaim, I hope they think of this too, I hope they are good at complicating their lives, in the same way I hope they remember soup and how simple happiness can be. Soup, and being beloved and the steam on the windows and the thrill of a weekend on the air and so many empty hours, free of the obligation of memory, or the pressure of belief, just life.