The birdsong arrives before the passenger jets. The clouds from the window stretch all the way to the English Channel. Chinooks carry dignitaries to and from Brussels. London wakes early. A little scooter sound makes you think of Truffaut. One car always over-revs its engine. We have had enough of conflict for one week.
By lunch I am on the other side of the river, sitting out a downpour in a small black and yellow cafe as a block of purple clouds inch slowly across the North London sky. This is part of my assault on The Place close to the favourite haunt of Diary of a Nobody’s George Grossmith—Canonbury Tower. The Place happens to be where my good friend’s mother Joan Dannatt is exhibiting her paintings and prints. Joan Dannatt is 100 years old.
In Joan Dannatt’s Winter Walk a lone figure leaves us with a dog and two reflections. In Ferryman a similar partnership works a boat by the water’s edge. Evening Ride is a determined pedal through spindly trees on arduous wheels. Paris Window anticipates, perhaps conceals, an otherness. Elsewhere, a figure, a woman, reads on some steps. Rosehip is pert, dry, self-contained. Tulips are rendered as if beyond our ken. Two empty chairs dash everything through a window in a garden. The inside of a pomegranate is like a metaphor. Unbitten figs await. A knife sits with continued menace by an already sliced lemon.
In Joan Dannatt’s landscapes, English marshes conjure up Wilfred Thesiger. Our only way out of a field is a path. The panoramic Walk to the Sea is more than that. Winter Field by The Sea tempts courage. A daughter sits alone in doting sunlight.
‘Be on the alert to recognise your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur,’ wrote Muriel Spark. We speak informally in Joan Dannatt’s studio as the post-rain March sun highlights her perfect face like the pilot of a 747–-her life—reaching a clearing of rich blue sky. (Her son will understand the reference.) Joan Dannatt is searching for something, like many an artist before, though in her case a print of another of those beloved Suffolk marshes. ‘Then I put the fastenings as I had found them, opened the door at which I had entered when I ran home last night, shut it, and ran for the misty marshes,’ wrote Charles Dickens in Great Expectations.
A journalist friend invites us down to Cornwall. We cannot go. Few things would have pleased me more than walking with friends upon a long and quiet beach. Well, few things now other than seeing Joan Dannatt in her family home where other people’s art hangs like armour from the walls. The show has been a success. Mother and son discuss a review in The Week by writer Digby Warde-Aldam, whose music-loving father I remember fondly from my teens.
As I take a seat in the living room, I unwittingly park myself where Joan Dannatt gave birth to my friend. We have been discussing teeth—mine not his—and my friend allows me to take a photograph of him looking like Somerset Maugham in that 1949 Graham Sutherland portrait. On the subject of teeth, Joan Dannatt remembers Kenneth Clark’s in the TV series Civilisation. My friend and I had already mentioned Martin Amis in this regard: ‘Toothaches can play it staccato, glissando, accelerando, prestissimo, and above all fortissimo,’ wrote Amis in Experience. ‘They can do rock, blues and soul, they can do doo-wop and bebop, they can do heavy metal, rap, punk and funk.’ My friend had already plucked from a bookshelf a booklet from the writer’s memorial.
I watch presently as Joan Dannatt looks out at the world from the far corner of the living room and her son looks for somewhere to write down the name of a well known cricketer who sadly took his life a year ago. My friend has a penchant for short as well as long lives—as his book Doomed and Famous testifies. A well known London film director meanwhile is arriving the next day to see the last few hours of Joan Dannatt’s show, only the second show in her life. My friend had told him he had a New York filmmaker coming the same day to film. (‘Woody Allen?’ smiled the director.) Everyone warms to a person of longevity.
As my friend speaks, I am thinking how incredible it must have been for him to have had in addition a father who lived until he was 101. It was actually his father when 99 who told me his life was measured in forks in the road after I had asked what the view was like up there. (He was a tall man but I had actually wanted to know the consequence of his years.) Like a comparative novice, I told him I believed our lives were always trying to tell us something.
The next morning, those birds again. A rare pink moon in the sky. Nick Drake as a watercolour. Traffic through the night. Transported lonelinesses. Recurrent lights from the motorway that are more Ridley Scott than Stanley Kubrick. Though I remain determined not to mention war, life is still unfair. One bird however sings above the others. I used to think birdsong like background music, atmospherics, but at this moment it feels central to everything. Like a bird on a wire. Or that bird singin’ just for you. Or the blackbird singing in the dead of night. What I am remembering most however are the blossoming trees that can house such birds outside the home of Joan Dannatt.
