Deck Shoes

By Anthony Wilson

Deck Shoes is a book of influences and enthusiasms about poetry and the writing life, in which everyday objects and experiences — pencils, a notebook, going for a swim — sit alongside meditations on illness and ageing mortality. In these short, lyrical essays Anthony Wilson honours the debt of gratitude he feels to poets, writers and artists who have made their mark on his imagination. Through them a wry and complex portrait unfolds of the different roles a poet plays, from performer to friend, father to academic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Impress Books
• Release date: Sep 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911293422

Book preview

Part I

Deck Shoes

I’m talking about real influence now.

---

–Raymond Carver

Deck Shoes

I am not sure why I started wearing deck shoes. I am no sailor – I have been on a sailing boat twice in my entire life – so have always worn them with the strong consciousness that their function to me is far removed from their original purpose. They are what I wear in the gaps. Posting a letter; shuffling up to Ian’s wine shop; darting out for some milk; returning John Ash to the library: that’s when I wear them. They say: I am in a state of relaxed being. Whatever the season, I nearly always wear them without socks. Not for them the traipse round town in the rain (too permeable), the day-trip to London for a meeting (not smart enough). They live in a crate of shoes by the front door, always on top of the pile, in case. They are slip-on-able. They make no fuss. Just as easily I slip them off again, nearly always mid-stride as I re-enter the house, in search of their moccasin-cousins my slippers, only to surprise myself hours later when I find them a yard apart in the hallway, as though their owner has been mysteriously spirited away in some rapture. My father aside, I don’t think anyone else in my family has committed deck shoe. I have cousins who practically live in them, but then they practically live on boats, so fair play.

The first pair I tried belonged to my best friend at school, Charlie, when we shared a study together during our lower sixth form year. They were the most beaten up shoes I had seen that still performed the function they were intended for and yet which barely resembled anything close to a shoe. There were some laces, which may as well not have been there, so loose were they, all semblance of maintaining a grip on the foot all gone. There were soles, more hole than sole. And there were uppers, holes ditto. They looked as if Charlie had been gardening in them from the moment he pulled them out of the box. They were also extremely comfortable. Our shoe sizes were not identical – Charlie’s feet were bigger, if memory serves – but from the moment I put them on I felt as though I had come home.

I found a pair just like Charlie’s the other day, one I thought I had thrown out, at the bottom of the front door crate. Like Charlie’s, their heels have blown, revealing a small cavity into which have crawled several tiny stones. Like Charlie’s, they look as though they have been used exclusively for gardening, though I know at one point they were new, and fêted, and worn only to social events out of doors, the sound of white wine uncorked a mere stride away. I must have persuaded myself that they had one more season in them, though what I mean by ‘season’ cannot equate to daily wearing as they are now fit only for the garden. Or the bin.

But even these do not begin to compare with those I found in the garage last week. A lace-less pair of Timberlands, they were the pair I wore when I had cancer, literally shuffling around the house or into the shade, as my chemotherapy progressed. Why they are there I have no idea. They are beyond gardening, which is to say beyond all hope. If I was sentimental about them, I am no longer so. To misquote Charles Simic, they don’t just smell of nice nests, they have become one. Yet here they remain, keeping an eye on the hoe and the spade and the shears.

My current pair is manufactured by Sebago. They took an eternity to wear in (one of my feet is longer than the other, they told me in the shop) and cost me more than my house. Slightly more tan than I am comfortable being seen in, they now fit me like the proverbial. Perhaps I have come full circle. My first pair – the ones that began this fondness (I dare not say ‘craze’) – were also a label, Timberlands (again), picked out for me by Tatty, that seemed to go on forever, again with that sensation of coming home, for no other reason than she told me they suited me, not who I thought I was, or even what I thought I looked like, but me, though it took me a lifetime to believe it.

Notebook

At the start of each academic year, usually when I have known them for a week or so, I make this confession to my students: ‘To survive this course you will need to have the stationery thing.’ It’s not a confession as such, but to get it they need to have it. Indirectly, I am telling them: I have it too. The point of this is not confession for its own sake, but to make the very serious point, hidden in plain view in the form of a personal anecdote, that if we do not note down that which amazes and inspires each day we will lose it in what Ted Hughes called ‘the crush of information’ of living.

I can always predict how this will go down. Half of the room will look at me uncomprehendingly. They do not say anything, but I know they are beginning to wonder if they made the right choice to choose my course. The other half of the room are nodding and making small squeals of approval. They get it. They touch their scarves and look as though they could curl up with a bowl of hot chocolate.

To make my point more memorable, more personal, and strange, I go into a riff about Great Stationery Shopping Experiences I Have Had (France: a Mammouth hypermarket; Switzerland: a Co-op in an out of season ski resort; the time I spent a whole day dragging my family round Stockholm in search of the famous Bookbinders Design shop. It was the last place we came to.) Just as half the room are zoning out and thinking about coffee, and the other half are starting to make orders on their mobiles, I read them some random (always random) pages from a notebook I have pulled from my shelf that morning.

It will say things like:

Carrots, Butternut, Car MOT (?) check

Dentist – family or just me?

Metaphor article by Cheryl – where is it?

‘Crystals of purpose’

Peter’s Book.

There is a silence.

Even those who are now looking out the window are now paying attention. The thing is, I tell them, some of this may not lead to anything, but nearly all of it nearly always does, because it teaches me to pay attention. Not just to the things I discuss over breakfast with Tatty that need doing, but the really important leads like my colleague Cheryl’s marvellous article on memory and metaphor and the fact that Peter’s new book is amazing and I need to spend some time with it.

Over time, this has made quite a library of snatched moments of attention, what DH Lawrence called the ‘effort of concentration’ of looking at and capturing the world around me. Not to mention colourful Clairefontaine (of course) notebooks, with their grid lines and smooth, fountain-pen-friendly 90 gsm paper. My fetish has prompted me to wonder on more than one occasion that I engage in writing poems as a way of feeding my notebook-habit, rather than the other way round. Cloaked in this joke is the serious observation that years of note-making practice has taught me: it is not really about the notebook; it is about the noticing.

Somewhere (you’ll have to trust me on this) I have a one-page entry which reads: ‘The woman in the anorak at the swimming pool.’ I agree, it’s not much of an observation. But, in its way, it has become monumental to me, a touchstone which reminds me why I do this.

Picture the setting. It’s a Monday night in the depths of winter. I am watching my kids at their swimming practice, as I do every Monday, at the local baths. I am sitting alone on some tiered seats, a respectable British distance from the other parents, some of whom are eating, some chatting, and some shouting at their children below. I notice the man in charge of the swimming practice has a whistle and wears a black, skin-tight tracksuit. He is also shouting. My kids’ group is in the lane nearest to the tiered seating. I have a very good view of their progress.

But, being me, my mind wanders. I fidget. (This is in the unimaginable age before mobile phones and Facebook.) I look at my book. I close my book. I pretend to listen to the trainer. I fidget some more, finding with surprise that I have brought my notebook with me. I begin to flick through the entries, pages of lists and weird phrases I have no memory of writing. Then I see her.

At the end of the pool, at pool-level, is a small seating area. It is only ever filled by the good parents who arrive at the training sessions first. The woman who has caught my eye is the mother of a former friend of my daughter. We would have spoken, years ago, in the school playground, perhaps exchanged small-talk as we collected our daughters from parties. I have not seen her for some time. I notice she looks tired and a bit drawn. Like me she is not chatting to other parents or eating. She is watching her daughter intently, between glances at the pages of a magazine. No one speaks to her. At the end of the session, she smiles briefly at her daughter, waves, and puts on a blue anorak. Then she vanishes.

All I have in my notebook is: ‘The woman in the anorak in the swimming pool.’ I do not need any more. Since I wrote it thirteen years ago I have had cancer, lost too many friends to the same, and my eel-like kids have left home. But were an iceberg to float on the surface of that water, it would contain all the information I need: the smell of chlorine, the noise, the vast sense of isolation of a Monday night in December. Originally I thought it may go in a short story. I may never use it for anything. (In a sense I just have.)

The Next Swim

For a number of reasons – too much grief in my life, too sedentary, too much television, too out of breath on the stairs – I have started swimming again. Ten minutes to the pool in the car if we time the traffic right, maybe twenty on the bike (out of breath before I start). Going away from town, against the flow. How appropriate. Not a plunge, but a slow ooh-ahh descent down galvanised steps into the steaming water. Tilt of the head as I adjust my goggles. Couple of deep breaths. Then in. Under.

It’s amazing, how it comes back. The last time my body performed swimming, without thinking or gratitude, was during the endless summer holidays, as a teenager. My sister’s school, a ten minute walk away from our house, would open up to families of the school and their friends, on a voucher system. Looking forward to a moment’s peace, my mother bought sheaves of them, like raffle tickets, knowing she had just won the main prize. We wrote messages to girls in the condensation which collected on the plastic corrugated windows. 25 metres, bright blue, with a roof which let in the sun. In, under, crawl, kick, breath, turn. I got to the point of going even when my siblings didn’t come with me. Length, length, length, length, length. Another. Another ten. Go on. You can do it. Fifty? Why not. I used to time myself on the clock above the entrance. These days I always lose count after first ten.

Back for another five? Quick, of crawl, or perhaps a length of back? My own school’s pool was a joke by comparison. Built no later than the 30’s, with a harsh, concrete surround, and a solitary, inflexible diving board, wooden huts for changing, where, inevitably, your towel or clothing could go flying out of the windows or onto the cracked felted roof, not quite out of reach. The public pool next to my aunt’s flat in Renens, Lausanne, was from another world. There was a turnstile, and changing rooms that gleamed. I set out to conquer its Olympic acreage at the same speed and was soon at sea. I was desperate to stay in it for the long haul. To do that, I learned, I would need to slow down, and stick to a rhythm. The thought occurred that I was better over shorter distances.

Even though it kills me, I still love backstroke the best. I swam for my house in it, which is not as clever as it sounds. A prefect shouted for volunteers, and because no one else’s hand shot up with mine, I was in. I remember staying competitive for the first length, then realising half-way through the next that my arms were made of lead. Our pool wasn’t wide enough for five lanes, so I was able to tell my parents without lying that I came fourth (not last, by about a minute). Short enough to swim a length under water, the blue riband event, much more difficult, was to dive from the deep end and float as far as possible without kicking or offering a stroke of any kind. Champion of this for several years running was a boy called Bill Stainthorpe. One of life’s natural prop forwards, his dive was more of a belly flop, scattering the judges. On the surface of the water that remained in the pool Bill floated, and floated, and went on floating, indiscernibly making progress down the length of the pool without moving a muscle till eventually his lungs gave up and he surfaced, grinning, to explosive applause. Like a lot of what went on at school, if you bothered to look over your shoulder at what people thought of you, reaching for your towel as they spun it over their heads, swimming equalled pain. But if you dived in anyway and just got on with it they left you alone. A lesson for life? In our final nights we snuck down there and went midnight skinny-dipping, lungs bursting with the effort of not laughing, desperate to be caught. Perhaps that was the more profound lesson.

The pool, as Billy Collins doesn’t quite say, steaming like a horse, in the early morning. The other day I had the whole place to myself for a couple of lengths, maybe more. I celebrated by trying one of butterfly, surely the most tortuous thing we’ve invented on or near the water. Like writing, the worst bit is starting. Tatty and I will say to each other, ‘Are we going?’, as though needing the other’s acquiescence as proof of our own uncertainty. Until she says yes, I’m not really ready to go. I persuade myself that somewhere there is an email that needs replying to. Or an essay needs marking urgently. I need to remind myself that the day I sit at my desk preparing for Ofsted has more appeal than swimming in the open air I have started to negotiate like a condemned man.

Down, under, circle the arms, fling your legs back, and glide. When unconscious intention and bodily decision come together, there is nothing more delicious. That it might take twenty lengths to get there reminds me of another solitary, un-chatty activity where I move up and down in lines forgetting how much I have already accomplished, certain I will lose momentum at any moment. Swimming, even more than writing, helps me lose the day. That I sat pondering an email for an hour, or a sentence for longer. That my coffee went cold, my right hand clasped around it, without my noticing. That I went on sitting, forgetting to eat. It brings me back to my adolescent reading, ambitious, hopeful and shy, prepared to go it alone. Didn’t Benjamin Braddock do all of his best thinking at the bottom of a swimming pool? What better place to let out your fury, where no one can hear (or see) you? And wasn’t Orwell in love with swimming pools? How you could fall in love with, and be repelled by the flesh on view, all on the same afternoon? ‘The naked democracy of the swimming pools’. You could fall in love with worse. Later, reading Heaney’s ‘The Otter’ and Lawrence Sail’s ‘Seeing Through Water’, I learned that lust might be a bit more complex. Hockney knows it. Hollywood ditto. All that lemon light, blue refracting blue. How could you not love it?

Another? Then another? On chance meetings at the end of lanes Tatty will look across at me and whisper ‘Another ten’, not pausing to hear me groan as she pushes off on her back. Kick, kick; length, length: out of breath. Like writing, anyone can do it: young, old, black, white, gay, straight, fat or toned. This is not for the special, just the alive. Like writing, it is a joy in and of itself, with no real point except to see where it might take you, which is always further than the imagined next length or line. Like writing, once you make a habit of it, it is hard to lose it, but easy at the same time to