Tender Maps E-Book

Alice Maddicott

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 499

Beschreibung

'Of all the places where I feel the translucency of things, places that are thin for me, bluebell woods are first among them.' Some travellers are driven by the need to scale a natural wonder, or to see a city's sights or a place of history. Others, like Alice Maddicott, travel in search of a particular scene, feeling or atmosphere, often inspired by music, literature and art. Taking us deep into our emotional and creative responses to place, this extraordinary book explores the author's relentless travelling, from the heat of Sicily to the mountains of Japan. With her uniquely lyrical approach to psycho-geography, Maddicott explores the relationship with landscape that is the very essence of human creativity. From seventeenth-century salons of Paris to the underground culture and crumbling balconies of modern Tbilisi, through writers as diverse as Italo Calvino and L. M. Montgomery and artists like Ana Mendieta and eighteenth-century girls embroidering their lives, Tender Maps is a beautifully evocative book of travel, culture and imagination that transports readers in time and place. 'A rich and beguiling work of literary travel memoir that nimbly tracks the wider contours of the world in terms of feeling, memory, introspection and the imagination.' - Travis Elborough, author of Atlas of Vanishing Places

Leseprobe

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First published in 2023 by September Publishing

Copyright © Alice Maddicott 2023

The right of Alice Maddicott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, www.refinecatch.com

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books

ISBN 9781914613326

Ebook ISBN 9781914613333

September Publishing

www.septemberpublishing.org

Contents

Prologue: The Maypool

Part One: Thresholds, Kingdoms and Borderlands

The Walk

Maps of Tenderness

Prince Edward Island

The Woods Between Our Worlds

The Lost Domain

There was a Time when our Shadows Talked to Each Other – Sicily

Part Two: Sentient Shapeshiftings

Invisible Cities

Venice

Istanbul – Old Water

Belgrade Dream Noir

Lost and Found

I Once was Held in Perfect Calm – Japan

Part Three: Natural Histories, Habitations and Hauntings

Nashville

A Gentle Haunting

The Imagination of the Overgrown

Part Four: Constructions and Manipulations

LA – Autopia of the Non-Place

Poundbury – The Atmospheric Mystery of Pastiche

Tiflis/Tbilisi

Bucharest

The Beautiful Commodity

Writing the City

Atmospheres of Construction

Part Five: Home, Art, Land

Childhood Home

The Poetics of Home

Homelessness

Three Women: Alternative Ideas of Home

Realms within Realms

Part Six: West Country Magic/West Country Gothic

Part Seven: Definitions

Multisensory Layers

Conscious Pathways

Of Soul-Thought and Joy

The Optimism of Inspiration

Epilogue: A Manifesto for Being in Place

Bibliography

Permissions

Acknowledgements


To Hannah Little, kindest of people

‘Delight is a secret. And the secret is this: to grow quiet and listen; to stop thinking, stop moving, almost to stop breathing; to create an inner stillness in which, like mice in a deserted house, capacities and awareness too wayward and too fugitive for everyday use may delicately emerge. Oh, welcome them home! For these are the long-lost children of the human mind. Give them close and loving attention, for they are weakened by centuries of neglect. In return they will open your eyes to a new world within the known world, they will take your hand, as children do, and bring you where life is always nascent, day always dawning. Suddenly and miraculously, as you walk home in the dark, you are aware of the insubstantial shimmering essence that lies within appearances; the air is filled with expectancy, alive with meaning; the stranger, gliding by in the lamp-lit street, carries silently past you in the night the whole mystery of his life …

Delight is a mystery. And the mystery is this: to plunge boldly into the brilliance and immediacy of living, at the same time as utterly surrendering to that which lies beyond space and time; to see life translucently …’

Alan McGlashan, The Savage and Beautiful Country

‘No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.’

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Prologue

The Maypool

The water moved yet was still – a contained rippling, dark yet reflecting, a temperamental mirror choosing to show the sky rather than its inner workings deep below.

I sat alone in the rowing boat on the lake-sized pool and magic was everywhere, despite my leggings and nasty orange sweatshirt, whose colour clashed all wrong with the dark greens and deep water of sky. Hair high ponytailed, with an inappropriate large royal blue net bow that caught dandelion seeds in the wind perched on my head against my mother’s wishes.

The world began to divide around me. Gossamer veils cut through the view, spider-silk lines to break up the real world of this holiday in deep Devon, and where I was in that moment. It was a realm within a realm. I was close to somewhere else – nearly touching a different place – a place that filled my body with feelings so strange and strong that it was as if I had travelled there. That I was both there and no longer there.

The sun was cool, glinting stars of light that pulsed and made me squint as they fractured the view. Dragonflies were not just dragonflies, but flying jewels. Pond skaters whispered to me the secrets of walking on water, left feet ripples – miniature hints of something profound. I could not move. I was in a kaleidoscope. It held me both out of body and more alive in my awkward, chubby nine-year-old flesh than I’d ever been before. I did not want to go back to shore and the old stone cottage we had hired as a family, not all that far from our home in the once-upon-a-county that was Avon. I did not want my parents or siblings – I wanted to be with these creatures who, it was suddenly clear to me, knew something my family didn’t. The smell of water – the light and colour and shapes I could hear as if they were birdsong. The landscape was alive. The natural world was alive with a different force – one that I had missed till this new moment.

I whispered hello, cautiously, waited motionless in the boat, let the anticipation drift around me.

The fields and hills nearby shuddered, rounded tummy rumblings, shivering grass fur.

At this young age I had discovered something: a quest that would follow me through my life. A thirst for this feeling, this travelling within my world to somewhere new; this communication, connection; an awareness of something different; an invisible realm that was not separate to, but part of our visible realm.

I was convinced from that moment that places have feelings too. This feeling was too strong, too mutual a chemistry, to belong to me alone, to not be a communication. As I let this knowledge flow over my skin, as I closed my eyes to the red glow of the sun through lid-blood, then opened them to the seeds that floated and made the breeze visible, I let them cast their magic and it thrilled me.


Part One

Thresholds, Kingdoms and Borderlands


The Walk

Press pause on the world.

What would you miss? The sounds, the beauty of movement? The world does not work as a stage set. It needs to breathe, to talk, to live like one of us. When we think it is still or silent it is not really – it is just about to show us something different: this is its chance to show what is really there.

There was no bustle. Traffic noise was taken over with the gentler ambience of birdsong. In the spring of 2020, when the whole world seemed to be falling apart, places that we knew transformed in feeling.

I lived in a village in Somerset, but in the cities the streets were also empty. We could not be indoors together, yet outdoors was still distanced – even in my village there were queues outside the local shop, people nervous to stand too near to each other. Driving to buy essential supplies, I felt suspicion. People perceived a threat in the air. There was an invisible enemy that could catch any of us. My friend got told off by the police for going for a walk too far from her house, even though the place she had gone to was only a ten-minute drive away and more remote than her street, so she would be less likely to catch or spread germs.

We were scared, yet the landscape was not. With people gone the animals came out more and the air was cleaner. Ironically for such a terrible time, it was the most glorious spring. The places changed physically through lack of people, but also atmospherically. We suddenly and unexpectedly, in good and bad ways, experienced the feeling of the world differently. There was a change in how we felt around people through this invisible threat of germs; how our lives and routines, purposes, jobs had all been upended, the horrific news with growing graphs cataloguing deaths – but this was the fear of our human reality, a reality of human contact, projected onto the places where we lived our lives. The places themselves, made remote, emptied, changed in a different way, were more noticeable without the human distractions.

During a spring where my world had fallen apart, as so many others’ had, job gone, family in crisis, I was more alone than I had ever been in my life. And as I navigated this strange existence, it was the world that kept me company. The feeling I had been so affected by as a child rose in my local bubble of West Country landscape with a different strength – and it was transformational.

I had walked in my local forest nearly every week for years. I knew the paths and different trees, the changing seasons, bluebells and first green leaves, foxgloves, deep winter mud, evergreens and bare branches, the deer and birds of prey, the baby frogs, the evil flies that bite near the pond. It had always made me feel better, and if you’d asked, I would have said I was aware of its atmosphere and cherished this. But now it felt different. I walked and felt the breeze stroke my skin as if alive; the trees threw the breezes between high branches like a Mexican wave of fake traffic noise; the deer didn’t run away so fast; and as for the light … It was the same place yet my experience of being in it was not the same; it was transcendental and it was company. The memory of that pool in Devon came back to me – the sense that there was something else going on, that I had somehow travelled within my real world – and this time, as an adult in a place I thought I knew well. No distortion of childhood and holidays, the unreliability of memory – the forest was feeling like this here and now.

What was this place I was responding to? What had happened? Atmosphere as travelling … I had never really thought of it in these terms before. I looked around and the forest was the same, yet I felt totally and utterly different. It climbed up me and got inside. My mind was lifted almost as if drugged by the sheer scale of it – the feeling of the forest. I grew up in the Church of England, but do not consider myself particularly religious in my adult life, yet if I were to try to describe this new feeling, I would say that a religious experience, a sense of something else – a divine presence in every part of this place, a spirit in each plant and tree – is as close as I could get.

And when I left the forest after the first walk when this happened, the feeling did not go away. The immediacy of the atmosphere was no longer there, but a trace of it seemed to have latched on and come home with me. I was aware of something. I went back and each time I expected the intense feeling to have gone, but the way I felt in this forest could never disappear. Something had been awakened in my body and mind when I was in this place – as if it recognised my visits and how I had unlocked its secrets, and now it was open to me. I was no longer there alone – I was walking in but also with the place. This experience felt like something we were feeling together.

This is how a place can feel … I said to myself. I thought back to past intense experiences; usually when travelling in my twenties and a place was exciting and new, I was hyper-aware of the intensity – its contrast, but this felt different. It was not literal travelling to access an atmosphere that would obviously be new and therefore striking. I had opened myself up, or rather it had opened me, and now this strange symbiosis was done, every tiny bit of wonder was flooding into me, into my familiar world. Each subtle change as I walked, metre by metre, path by path, noise by noise, the smell of pine rising or bluebells – hot earthy air … The world slowed and the miniature world danced, seeds and lichen, moss worlds and discarded feathers. I felt like I was on a different plane of existence, yet more deeply embedded in the real world.

It seemed impossible that it was so transcendental yet anchored, but like the difference between earth and sky, the elements of the natural world, it also felt unequivocally true. I had found some thing – it was not merely in my head. And another truth was that it changed me, was a complete joy at a time of despair. And that in my fumbling cage of language, whatever a spiritual interpretation might be to each individual, the word that kept falling into my thoughts was ‘atmosphere’. For the first time, I had truly, deeply felt the atmosphere of these woods. And rather than the word simply being a description of somewhere feeling cosy or creepy or sad, atmosphere was far more complex and profound than I had ever imagined. It was key. It was the heart, the essence – yet fluid, alive and changing; it is the true evolving individual personality of place, and it is there for us if we want it. The world can speak to us, but obviously its language is different. Atmosphere as earth words …

I took the atmosphere of being in the forest home, glowing like a secret pocket of pulsing light in my heart, comforting yet strangely, awesomely powerful. I felt like I’d discovered a secret of the world that my childhood self, back on that magical pond in Devon, knew and lost. I could not lose it again. And so my quest to understand it began.

But how can we ever understand something as elusive yet present as atmosphere?

When I began to research online the scientific reasons behind the atmosphere of a place, the combination of things that create it, I could find nothing; no matter how I phrased it in the search engine, there weren’t any mentions of atmosphere other than the kind that encases planets. The gaseous sort that enables us to live, makes somewhere habitable or not. Yet when I think of atmosphere in those terms, habitable, life-sustaining, the other kind is not so different – it might be what attracts or repulses us about a place, makes somewhere feel like home (we always say ‘feel’ when it comes to home – an emotional rather than a rational response to a place), terrify or inspire us with awe.

My guesses were all I had and they were obvious – geology and architecture; but that is how somewhere looks, not feels, and as any descriptive writer knows, ignoring all the senses other than sight leads to a poor portrait of a place. And beautiful places can feel sinister in one location and in another – a similar landscape or building – cosy. So is it the associations we bring to a place? Perhaps in part, but my inkling was that it lay deeper than this, seemingly intangible but somehow physically there, invisible to the eye – a beast of instinct, ancient, stealthy rather than subtle, it can hit you in the gut or soothe the greatest pain. It is a presence. It is a very real ghost.

Atmosphere is intrinsic to place. Even though we may not always be consciously aware of it, we would not experience a sense of place without it, but rather, a disjointed combination of experiences that don’t define where we are. Places would blur into each other, become a series of images, with smells and sounds and other sensory experiences; and that sense of where we are, where we truly inhabit in any given moment, would be confused or watered down and no more powerful than a reproduction. Atmosphere is what gives a place its identity. It might change for each of us, yet that is no bad thing – it doesn’t need to be consistent, but to communicate with us as to where we are, as to who this place is. Atmosphere is the voice of place.

We all have moments in our life when we are more alert to our surroundings than others. My particular circumstances during lockdown were strange and would set me off on a weird life I had not planned; a search for a new home at a time when I hadn’t been looking for one. My walks made me more in tune with the landscape I loved and comforted me like an invisible blanket. However, this solace-in-place wasn’t a fresh need, but a quest that had been alongside me the whole time. With the enforced introspection of lockdown, I realised I had been strangely dedicated to my craving to feel the world around me for years; to feel alive in a place; to sense its atmosphere; to feel at home within small corners of the world.

Even as a child I was in thrall to atmosphere. As a teenager too. Then in my twenties I took flight and travelled. Relentlessly. Peculiarly so: at a time when my friends were settling down, moving in with boyfriends, building careers, I was either ill at home or saving up through working in not-so-great jobs, to fly, to be in the world, to feel free and excited and open to everything. I did not realise it at the time, but I think now that I was in thrall to the same impulse I’d had on the Maypool, the same quest to experience places, to inhabit places in a heightened state of feeling, to experience the world emotionally; not to collect, but to feel as many places, as many atmospheres, as I could. The woods in lockdown reminded me that atmosphere is not mere background, but all around: it made itself known.

As I looked back at my own travels and realised how urgent but unexplained this search for atmosphere was, I wanted to understand better what atmosphere actually is. It was both the most unknowable yet most powerful thing I had experienced, and it influences everyone. I wanted to explore how others responded to it – to search through history, writing and art; to see how people have tried to show it, to illustrate, understand and explain it. I wanted to search through my travels and other people’s travels and the places that linger as an atmosphere in our heads. I wanted to know if – when something is so alive and in constant movement – it can ever be caught, fleetingly embraced in a net of words.

As I started this journey, I had a single conviction: that being open to atmosphere was key to the creativity of being in our world. A place’s personality is mapped through our feelings. We create it, tenderly, together.


Maps of Tenderness

A group of women sits in a Parisian drawing room. It is the seventeenth century. There are no men present. Refreshments are brought in by a discreet servant, but the main focus is the talk – is each other. They are discussing an idea. It is a private though animated setting. Let us imagine a room painted soft green-grey, pictures on the walls, a small ornate sofa, ornaments from across the newly discovered world, books. There is a large table and on it a large piece of paper – a blank luxury not to be lightly filled.

The women are standing around, leaning forward, only marginally hampered by the stiff garments of the day – corsets under stomachers, petticoats peeping through the heavy skirts of pastel silk held in shape by padded rolls; ruffs have given way to wider collars now. They have ink, they are mark making. They are mapping. They are creating a Carte de Tendre – a Map of Tenderness.

Because of their class, and because this is Paris in the seventeenth century, there is a freedom, for these particular women, in this space. Intellectually, Paris has always been experimental, hungry for ideas: over a hundred years before the revolution, the French salon was already going strong. But these women, here, are free to talk about how they feel. They are free to create.

Picture the ink flowing as if quills are but extensions of their fingers and the ink a strange product of their veins. Picture the feelings taking form, quivering out, sniffing like small creatures before forming shapes on their chosen bit of the large sheet. They need homes, and the shapes they have chosen resemble places. Houses, mountains, rivers and sea. There is something for everyone in a landscape.

Maps of tenderness. Emotion. Stories located in feelings on a map. These were real physical things, published and celebrated, discussed in salons, a realm of creativity that was the terrain of women before fashionable men caught on. They were linked to literary publications; part of experimental fiction. Yet they were not physical guides of imaginary worlds, such as a Tolkien map of Middle Earth, but depictions of the emotional journey of the protagonist in the form of a map. This was a new way of mapping the world through how they felt – landscape becoming feeling, emotion as location, rather than location as a physical place on a map we could follow. Topography as vessel, co-conspirator, keepsake box.

The woman who most notably brought this genre to the literary world was Madeleine de Scudéry. Her 1654 novel Clélie shows a map of the land of Tenderness, but rather than a real place this map is a narrative voyage. Created by the main character, it tracks the location of her emotional journey: Lac d’Indifférence, La Mer Dangereuse, small settlements, little clumps of houses and trees like small humps holding the feelings of Oubli, Tendresse, Exactitude, Perfidie … The dangerous sea spans the top, calm yet full of rocks, and above it the edge of an unknown land, Terres Inconnues … Undiscovered. Where desire might lie, just out of sight. There are no borders as such – drawings of towns and feelings as written words, acknowledged. There is no set route; like old maps of the earth, depicted as if it were flat, we could wander off the edge. The sea pierces the land made up of little humps below, tears a vein with its river, a strange tentacle named Inclination Fleuve that,if dwelled on, starts to look like a tube, a birth canal, a map of the interior of a woman’s body.

Intimate. Female desire laid out for the literary world to see – a map of the unspoken, the undercurrent of the female point of view of love and relationships. We take our bodies with us, they are how we experience place, they are key to atmosphere, not dislocated from it. Intimacy is integral – it is our relationship with place. At this point in history – long before the eighteenth century with its Romantic male writers and painters striding the hills, the twentieth with the largely male Situationist movement, and the twenty-first with its hipsters exploring urban ruins, voyeuristic, conquering – psychogeography, emotion, was a uniquely female approach to place; a way that place could make visible the female experience. Yet psychogeography as a discipline is concerned with places that exist in the physical world, or at least could. Before the golden age of intrepid early women’s travel writing in the nineteenth century, still in a time when most did not stray far from their homes, women created their own imaginative lands of exploration, and they called for place to be seen differently. To show their experience through the veil of allegory and fiction. A necessary filter that was seeking to reveal safely in plain sight, rather than conceal women’s lives and loves. It was searching for the truth, and the way to do this was to work with the idea of place – metaphorical, not tagged and literal, locations.

None of which means these places don’t exist – they are just not places as we think of them normally. The place is in the moment. The room, the map, the collaboration, the feeling. It is there: your physical surroundings may not be treacherous seas and little villages, but your mental surroundings can be …

Look at Scudéry’s map on page 9. The Lake of Indifference stands alone, marooned and strangely pale, a crater to the east, a place of entrapment. To the west, the Sea of Enmity is choppy and rough, with traces of lost boats in danger of sinking, the shipwrecks of emotion gone wrong, a sea that falls off the map. We too could fall off the map … Women often fell off the map if love went wrong. This is a treacherous land, but one that is open to women, a site of exploration, emotional freedom outside the confines of society, a narrative, the route and layout of which could be simple or not. There are choices in how to navigate this space, but if you strayed just a little you could be sucked into an emotional place of no return.

To discover Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre, this map, to know that it was created by a woman and published all the way back in 1654, seems radical. Yet Madeleine de Scudéry was a well-connected and respected woman of letters: she wrote extensively, not just novels but essays and correspondence. The salon she hosted at her home in Paris was a collaborative intellectual and creative space for women, and her Map of Tenderness triggered a fashion for both men and women to create such maps. It is clear that her idea spoke to something missing in how people saw both emotion and place represented: it was emphatically emotional yet there was something deeply logical about seeking to represent place through feelings, and feelings through the creation of a map, a containing document, a place. As these maps became fashionable it is inevitable that some would have not had true emotional depth, but there is an openness to Scudéry’s original. Where most others were of islands or had borders, hers spills over, leaves land undiscovered … It leaves room for subjectivity, as true experience of place does. And hers was collaborative – created in a salon where women poured in their experiences, discussing it together, creating this place together, mapping their bodies and experiences in this collective realm.

By locating feeling and story in a map, Scudéry shows how place and feeling are interconnected. This mapping is an acknowledgement of a multisensory experience not only going beyond sight, but beyond the idea of the five senses to locate our connection with our bodies in space somewhere else: a corporeal mapping of place, tied up with memory and emotion, personal and collective experience.

It is both subtle and political, active and simmering gently. Maps, songs, love letters – a peculiarly female communication – a way in to the secrets, the undercurrent, the hidden conversation that atmosphere understands.

Are we all living maps? Not in the sense of the physical analogy, the scars on our bodies that mark our experiences, the wrinkles that show our age. I don’t mean even the slightly stranger analogy palm readers believe in, the idea that there are other lines mapping our futures, holding our life experience, its inevitabilities quite literally in the palm of our hands: skin roads. Perhaps a better term is map makers, or map vessels, with which as we move through places, rather than our lives being detached from place, we absorb something. That our experience is not disconnected, that it inhabits the places we walk through, and those places contribute to it. We are connected to our landscapes; we take them with us as we keep moving. We are always moving.

Entropy: the second law of thermodynamics. We leak energy, and emotion is energy. Even sitting here at my computer at a little table in this cottage, which has become my home this last year, I am not static. I am moving onwards. This small house, which has existed for a couple of hundred years, the surrounding chalky downland and the nearby forest are moving with me. Changing, ageing, layering up all that has happened here.

It is part of something large, multisensory, faceted, fluid.

We are interactive.

I have often felt as I walk that I am mapping a place inside myself. That as my feet move one in front of the other, the ground is imprinting itself in me. That the thoughts triggered in each moment become part of my own personal map of the place. And the urge to record what this feeling gives me is sometimes the urge to draw lines and landscape, what we would recognise as a map, but equally the urge to write – a story, a memory, a poem. It is the urge to play a song in my head that feels like the soundtrack to this landscape. This moment in this place.

When I think of that pond in Devon, I know it has both a physical location which is still there, and another which is part of me. I know that the cottage and the pool are still there, but in another way I am not convinced they are. It seems surreal that the pond could go on existing, and also that the place as I knew it – that moment of atmospheric thrall – has travelled. It belongs to its place, but it is also mine, within me. I take it with me as I travel onwards.

If places are like this, then how can we map them? Maps in their traditional guise are pieces of paper, or these days, interactive layouts on screen, which give us the information we need to get around. But their creation is something else, a measuring of place yet also an extraction; an attempt at distilling the moving, the changing, the impossible. Mapping a place is about collecting data, yes, but it is interactive, collaborative. It is our attempt to both capture place and to understand it. It is a personal act, a creative act. I am not even thinking of the wealth of artists’ maps. Mapping goes beyond maps. It is a quest to pin down that which will always be fluid. It is an open quest: moments caught on paper that are out of date – like all present time – the second they have happened. But still we keep trying, searching, travelling to try to make sense of the world and show that, in some way, we know it.

The seventeenth century was a time of great world exploration, which was not available to women. Nearly two hundred years after Columbus, whose expedition was based on the misreading of an old map (he sailed west thinking he would reach China, not the then-unknown-to-Europe Americas, and died still thinking he had been in the Far East), post-Raleigh and his ‘discoveries’, this was a golden age of world mapping.

The Mercator projection, the origin of the most common world map today, was made in 1569. We can presume someone as educated as Scudéry would have seen it. As an intellectual woman of means, she would perhaps even have owned a globe, giving her a better sense of the layout of countries on the earth. So her approach to maps was not in ignorance of world mapping as done by scientific cartographers. It was a conscious branching out. A way of taking a form men used to contain the world – to represent the travels that women would be prevented from going on, and the scientific capturing and tagging of adventure – and claiming a representation of the world for the personal, for women’s lived experience. They chose to do this not by mapping the domestic sphere, but the emotional and creative. Something that no physical limitations can bind. The creative emotional sphere is within the power of each of us – it can be shared with creative output, but not invaded, not ‘discovered’ in a colonial sense. It is personal. And by locating it in place, we are claiming a bit of the world for the unseen.

For many years I have taught creative writing to children. When I teach with a therapeutic angle I often use the idea of world building as the creation of a safe space, escapism as healing, and the importance of an imaginative space of one’s own to retreat to. I have drawn maps with children to build ownership of their imaginative worlds, to make their ideas more concrete. These could be seen as maps of tenderness – places carefully chosen to chart the world of their minds, to make them feel safe. There is arguably a human need to locate our feelings, to put them into place.

This is echoed in the history of maps. In medieval maps the unknown places in the world are often labelled with emotion, with fear, full of monsters, with walls of fire to stop those regions that Christians thought the Word of God had not reached from seeping in. The known world is calmer. Catalogued. Even though it may have been full of war or famine, on the map it is not depicted with the language of emotion in the way the unknown world was. Monsters keep their distance.

Yet we still use the language of emotion when mapping. Especially when we reach for the unknown.

Quests for the North and South Poles are the stuff of exploration legend. Poles are remote, unreachable: fixed locations for the purpose of cartography that also move as the earth does; that remain unobtainable for most, a strange conceptual frontier. ‘Accurate’ globes rotate on points that could be technically wrong. As if acknowledging this, their frustration of mapping, their elusive yet essential quality, the Antarctic – container of poles, the last great unexplored landmass – is described in a language that would seem more at home on Scudéry’s Map of Tenderness than in a modern scientific atlas.

The Pole of Inaccessibility. The Pole of Ignorance. These are real places, the least known places in the known world. When faced with a lack of knowledge, even in modern science and cartography, we linguistically return to our emotions.

I could see the Poles of Inaccessibility and Ignorance as metaphorical top and tail to Scudéry’s map. The outer reaches of what goes emotionally wrong; causes of romantic pain. It seems that to map what we cannot explain is the geographer’s or cartographer’s primal urge – secret feelings, held at a safe distance.

In a way, a map of emotion could be seen as a method worth trying in the impossible task of recording that most elusive feeling, the personality of place.

It seems to me that if we really want to know a place, we should abandon attempts to contain, to name, to stamp our identity on it. We should listen to its identity. Communicate. Abandon control.

For places to open up – for us to truly travel not to, but in them – we need to think of our places as companions, not destinations.

We need to travel in a different way. To hold place dear.

Dear beautiful, strange, dangerous, glorious, dark, wonderful, brutal, gentle wide world.

You are my one true romance.

And this book is my map of tenderness.


Prince Edward Island

‘Willows whiten, aspens quiver …’

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’

I stand on the seashore and look out. Rolling sand and crispy ice. Back in town, low generic ranch-style houses, wooden walkway, a smell of salt and water and a sense of fishing ever there. Souvenir shops – surreal somehow. Diners sell lobster. I eat pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Another day, grass and the odd tree, no hills really, low down. Pretty, but I can’t distinctly remember this landscape. I sit in the car and I can’t remember the roads. But the sea, I can always sense the sea.

Yet if I close my eyes I see orchards, blossom blooming, gentle valleys and old wooden houses by babbling brooks and secret streams – lakes shining like happy bloated ribbons round gabled farmsteads, cows and chickens, little birds. I wander down paths framed with birch trees, tiptoe through gently haunted woods. The sun star-pulses the air. Temporary gold-blinded, I look at my feet and see buttoned boots. My dress long, puffed sleeved and gently flowered. My hair is once again the henna red I dyed it in my teenage years. I stop and make a crown of flowers. Softness and warmth. This place is pure comfort, yet looking back there’s a poignancy, the suggestion of a life that could have been in how I imagined my future when I was a child.

In 1997, when I was eighteen, I made my one and only literary pilgrimage, though to call it that is perhaps false. I was not so much visiting the setting of a book as a fan, as searching for a place that lived inside me in a way that has formed who I am today: Prince Edward Island as it exists in the books of L. M. Montgomery.

When I was a child, Anne of Green Gables was my favourite book. The intensity of this was fed by the 1980s television version made by Kevin Sullivan and starring Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie as Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe. When something happened that my childhood brain found hard to cope with, I disappeared into this fictional version of Prince Edward Island, where I deeply felt I would be happy and understood. Before I met Anne, I had never met a character who I knew would understand me – who would get how I thought, who would be my friend – but it was the place she inhabited too, the atmosphere of which the TV show made so vivid to me. Even now, in my forties, I save the DVD for when I truly can’t cope with something; I retreat into its atmosphere as the one consistent imaginary sanctuary in my life. I cannot bring myself to watch Netflix’s Anne with an E, even though I’m told it is good, as I can’t bear the thought that the later TV series may somehow pollute the earlier version for me.

While it may not inhabit my imaginary life in quite the same way now as when I was little (I remember dragging a dinghy into the middle of a pond in order to play the ‘lily maid’ as Anne refers to Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’in one of the most famous scenes from the book), it retains an atmosphere part visual, part memory, part literary that is so entwined in my life and key experiences that it is part of me now, in a way no other place created by another is.

I was travelling on a gap year before moving to Edinburgh for university. My trip was part adventure, part work experience on the children’s show Sesame Street in New York and then at another children’s television company in Montreal. I caught the train from Toronto to Vancouver – itself a strange experience of changing atmospheres, as each day I woke to a new landscape: forests and lakes, prairies, mountains … But I knew where this trip was to end. I’d saved up from my pub waitressing job so that I could spend the last ten days in a B & B just outside Charlottetown, on Prince Edward Island.

People in the Montreal company were bemused. Why go there? You’re in the best city in Canada (true – I really love Montreal). The countryside is kind of boring. There’s nothing to do there. I kept my secret safe – that this was an Anne of Green Gables pilgrimage – knowing they would belittle it and it would feel too personal to have this dream dismissed. Like Anne hating the grown-ups laughing at her when she was being serious, I wanted this secret, this imaginary realm, not to be spoiled by those who were not, in Anne’s words, ‘kindred spirits’.

Leaving Montreal, I boarded a plane to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then another for the short hop to Charlottetown. The B & B owners kindly came to pick me up (all organised by phone and letter in those pre-internet days) and drove me to their beautiful old wooden house. I climbed up to my room and grinned – it was just like Anne’s, iron bedstead and patchwork quilt in a room high up in pointed gables. It was an instant haven.

Yet the reality of Prince Edward Island, or PEI as locals call it, was slightly different to what I had in mind. I didn’t have enough experience to know people rarely walk outside the cities in Canada, and the house was a few miles out of town, with only a main road and no pavement to get me there. There was also no public transport to speak of, and the tourist house they say is Green Gables was closed for refurbishment. But I was not going to let this deter me.

The lovely people I was staying with gave me lifts into Charlottetown so I could potter round its streets. They even drove me to ‘Green Gables’ and to Summerside, another town where Anne of Windy Willows is set, to get a sense of the island and then the sand dunes round Cavendish, much closer to where Avonlea was supposed to be.

I had a wonderful time. Just by chatting to her in a shop, I made a friend who I am still close to twenty-five years later. But the atmosphere I craved – I didn’t find it. I started to wonder where this atmosphere existed. Was it through the filter of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s mind? Was it through my own childhood experiences? Was it simply that conjured in a TV show back in the eighties? I began to think more about atmosphere as an act of creation – as human as much as natural phenomenon of the world; how we can take a place and change its atmosphere through our own creative acts, both as writers and artists, or through the creative power of the reader or viewer.

The Kevin Sullivan TV production starts with Anne walking through some woods while reading Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’. The trees are thin. Music plays in the background as Anne whispers the words, ‘Willows whiten, aspens quiver, little breezes dusk and shiver.’ At this point we are not even in PEI but on the Canadian mainland, yet all blurs into the same atmosphere. The combination of image, music and words brings me instantly to tears in a way that is gently primal: I have no control, it is a soft mourning for a childhood self and a world I am not in. Yet rather than upsetting, this grief is comforting, a welcome home, a refuge which this atmosphere never deadens for me; for it is always, reliably, still there.

It is not located in a real place, but a place of the imagination. It is both inside me and accessible in the outside world. It is one of the only atmospheres that it is in my power to trigger, and consequently I use it sparingly; save it so it does not dull.

As Anne moves from the mainland to Prince Edward Island after hearing she will be adopted, the atmosphere is still a lasso isolating the intense feeling of the film, but the light changes. Gone are the muted woods, the darkened room of the orphanage where Anne talks to her imaginary ‘window friend’ Katie Maurice – her reflection in a glass pane – and we arrive in a rich springtime full of blue sky and blossom.

Anne is met at the station by Matthew Cuthbert, who hasn’t the heart to tell her there’s been a mistake and he and his sister Marilla wanted to adopt a boy. It is as if Anne, transformed by her arrival in this beautiful place, has cast a spell on him. As their horse and buggy make their way to Green Gables, we pass along the strange red roads so characteristic of the island. But there is a particular moment that truly feels like our crossing over into Prince Edward Island as a magical place: when they begin to drive down a grassy lane through an orchard of blossom (in the book, it is more of an arch – a sloping blossom tree tunnel), and something significant happens. Anne asks what the place is called and Matthew says, ‘The Avenue – pretty, ain’t it?’ But Anne responds that pretty isn’t the right word for it – it is wonderful, so from this moment on it becomes ‘The White Way of Delight’, its rightful name. This renaming continues throughout the journey like a strange awakening of the landscape – Barry’s Pond becomes ‘The Lake of Shining Waters’. Other places throughout the book have new names – Idlewild, Lovers’ Lane, the Dryad’s Bubble–but there is something in the combination of arrival and journey and spring and renaming on that first journey which pulls back a veil on a gentle, hidden depth of atmosphere; it speaks to Anne so strongly that it invites us into her interior world. The renaming shows the landscape’s potential for imaginative inspiration. We each have the power to rename the ordinary (renaming or the knowing of true names has always held power in folklore and magic, a famous example being Rumpelstiltskin) and by connecting with it in a creative way, to transform our experience of it and perhaps how it exists in the minds of others – how it feels to them. We can make our own places within places, imaginative sanctuaries for ourselves, yet we can pass them on creatively.

L. M. Montgomery was very aware of her own internal world. For her, it was built in childhood, and as she grew up and her life wasn’t quite what she expected (in her early thirties and, after a time spent at university and working on a newspaper in Halifax, Nova Scotia, living with her austere grandmother, who needed her care in Cavendish), she retreated into her childhood world, her own world, where her creativity could, and did, flourish. In her memoir, The Alpine Path, she talks of how when young she inhabited ‘a world of fancy and imagination very different indeed from the world in which I lived, moved and had my outward being … Well, I grew up out of that strange, dreamy childhood of mine and went into the world of reality I met with experiences that bruised my spirit – but they never harmed my ideal world. That was always mine to retreat into at will.’ On having to move back home she said: ‘I did so less unwillingly because I knew I could possess my ideal world here as well as elsewhere – that no matter what was missing outwardly I could find all in my own peculiar kingdom.’

I for one am glad she could, as it was in these years that she wrote Anne of Green Gables and created the world, her own peculiar kingdom, which I still retreat into as an adult. But this idea of her imagination as a kingdom, as a place where she could live differently, is an interesting one. It is not an abstract thing, but a location; an inner world. It interacts with the external world, takes her experiences and through her creativity produces a concrete thing for the outside world. This then, in the form of the book and its later incarnation on film, creates another space whereby it can live in our imaginations and become part of our world too.

I strongly believe reading is a creative act, and in being so it occupies a special space, our place of creativity and play, the potential space where I believe we may experience atmosphere. Therefore, something that should be a place devoid of atmosphere due to lack of sensory experience, becomes another form of it. However, this is different to virtual reality. The place within a book is not trying to compete with the physical world, but is rather comfortable in its own parallel world. It is not a simulacrum but a different realm, a collaboration with the author’s mind, just as atmosphere is a collaboration with a physical place.

So there can be two Prince Edward Islands, both rich in atmosphere, subjective for each visitor. There is the place I visited as an eighteen-year-old; the island that I returned to for a friend’s wedding in 2008; the sliver of land hovering in the Gulf of St Lawrence. Then there is the place that is the ‘reality’ of the atmosphere of L. M. Montgomery’s mind – the creative power of atmosphere made tangible through her writing, her pulling back of the veil to reveal her inner essence of Prince Edward Island, both contained in the book and lost to time in how it is the creation of another age. Imagination as a place.

I think L. M. Montgomery would have understood this idea. She said in her memoir, ‘[A]mid all the commonplaces of life I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never draw it quite aside, but sometimes a wind fluttered it and I caught a glimpse of an enchanting realm beyond – only a glimpse – but those glimpses have always made life worthwhile.’ She uses this concept with another of her characters, the lesser known but I think equally wonderful Emily in Emily of New Moon, who regularly experiences something she calls ‘the flash’. The flash is a moment when Emily’s experience of place changes; it hits her suddenly, atmosphere supercharged and world-changing:

And then for one glorious, supreme moment, came ‘the flash’. Emily called it that, although she felt that the name didn’t exactly describe it. It couldn’t be described – not even to Father, who always seemed a little puzzled by it. Emily never spoke of it to anyone else.

It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside – but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond – only a glimpse – and heard a note of unearthly music.

This moment came rarely – went swiftly, leaving her breathless with the inexpressible delight of it. She could never recall it – never summon it – never pretend it; but the wonder of it stayed with her for days. It never came twice with the same thing. Tonight the dark boughs against that far-off sky had given it. It had come with a high, wild note of wind in the night, with a shadow wave over a ripe field, with a grey bird lighting on her windowsill in a storm, with the singing of ‘Holy, holy, holy’ in church, with a glimpse of the kitchen fire when she had come home on a dark autumn night, with a felicitous new word when she was writing down a ‘description’ of something. And always when the flash came to her Emily felt that life was a wonderful, mysterious thing of persistent beauty.

It is fleeting but the feeling it gives her, this momentary crossing into what feels like another world, leaves her ‘breathless with the inexplicable delight of it’. She cannot explain or control it, but it is there in the natural world for her to experience. It reminds me of the transcendent feeling I get walking in the woods or up on the downs, and of the trance-like pleasure when writing is flowing. Both are inherently feelings that are deeply connected to atmosphere. They are also intrinsically moments of hope; and ‘the flash’ is a truly hopeful thing: if it comes, Emily is suddenly content, transformed if feeling down; it supersedes everything as the most powerful of atmospheres can, but it is active, not passive – it takes over, is key to life moving forward without despair, as hope is.

The real PEI, as opposed to the fictional world of Avonlea and its surrounds, feels extraordinarily of the sea. I was aware of the sea in Anne of Green Gables – Anne and Diana take walks on the sand dunes, and there is a great poetry reading given by Anne at the seaside White Sands Hotel. On rereading the novel with this in mind, I was surprised to discover that from Green Gables you can see the sea too. All the same, the idea of PEI being an island and therefore surrounded by sea, rather than an island in order to contain the imaginary space, had never really reached me in the atmosphere of the book or filmed version.

Charlottetown smells of the ocean. I almost expected locals to dress as fishermen, bright yellow waterproofs licked with salt; and in the salty air, my hair immediately frizzed. (In fact, I’d met my dear friend by wandering into the local branch of The Body Shop for emergency curly hair products.)

Cavendish is the village where L. M. Montgomery lived much of her life and where Avonlea is thought to have been based, and it is an area of beautiful expansive sand dunes. I wandered. I saw a lighthouse that I felt I had seen before, where Anne and Diana walked, but still the atmosphere I was looking for was not there. This island is a comforting, lovely place. But I’d expected blossom-filled valleys … That first visit in 1997 took place in May, deep spring in England, yet it was the first time I’d seen frozen sea …

Chunks of ice crenellated the surface like cracked, glistening icing. This whole area of Canada is called the Maritimes. The accents sing softer than elsewhere – feel cosier somehow, comforting. It is a lovely place. However, the Avonlea of my imagination it is not. The closest I have found to the Maritimes in the Anne books is in the fifth story in the series Anne’s House of Dreams, when she is first married to Gilbert and they live in a little cottage near the fictional village of Glen St Mary in the wilds of the more remote north shore. The sea is everywhere in that book; it feels like a different island, yet atmospherically it rings true.

Part of the difference in atmosphere today has to be down to the obvious changes since the 1900s … cars, modern houses, drive-through Tim Horton’s and fast food restaurants … But one of the things I really hadn’t thought about was the Anne tourist industry – I just didn’t think it would exist. Literary tourism does a little in the UK; I’m from Bath and there’s a Jane Austen museum and festival, even though she didn’t like the city. Up on the Yorkshire Dales, they are rightly proud of the Brontës. In the Quantocks, the National Trust owns Coleridge’s cottage, but it is easy to avoid it. To experience the place without noticing any of it. However, on Prince Edward Island Anne of Green Gables is possibly the most famous thing its tourism industry capitalises on. Locals have a love–hate relationship with the book; there is a frustration caused by the way in which visitors try to redefine the residents because of it. Souvenir shops were full of Anne pens and key rings and mugs. Cafes were themed.

When I stood outside the closed Green Gables, historic home, the lady I was with told me that it wasn’t the ‘real’ Green Gables. A suitable house had been found and no one could tell me what, if any, connection it had to the book or L. M. Montgomery. Looking through pictures now, it seems to be where her aunt and uncle lived, so there is a connection. But truly the inspiration for Green Gables? It was a lovely old wooden house with its window frames, not gables, and roof painted green. But to me it wasn’t as convincing as the one in the eighties TV series. It had less character. As I stood in front of it, a teenage pilgrim from across the Atlantic, the atmosphere was wrong. Just like L. M. Montgomery herself felt when visiting the Trossachs as a fan of Walter Scott’s novels, my PEI was a lost domain of the imagination.

As a child, I lived for moments spent intensely in my imagination. I found them wandering the woods, playing in the river, sitting in that boat on the Maypool, but I found them too in the made-up worlds of the books I read, the imaginary friends in their kingdoms that spoke to me. I found them with Anne. I travelled in my mind, and, as I grew up and travelled in the real world, I still held these places within me.

I think back to Anne’s island. How alive it is. The trees are sentient. The brook talks. She names and befriends her pot plants (a geranium named Bonny, a detail taken from L. M. Montgomery’s own childhood). Can a place only be this alive if we know it intimately? Does it have something to do with the strength of our having been a child there? Of our imaginations developing in it? And can we ever regain these places or are they lost to our pasts – somewhere we can only reach again in a poignant but wonderful flash …


The Woods Between Our Worlds

It is the 1790s and two young girls at different ends of the country have come into possession of an exciting new belonging that will enable them to travel in their minds.

One of the girls is a farmer’s daughter, Ann, who lives in the North West, Lancashire or perhaps further north, into Cumbria. Picture her walking down a familiar country lane when a pedlar approaches; she knows this one, she has been warned to be careful of strangers but her mother has bought things from this man and they have always been of serviceable quality. She waves at her father out in the fields to let him know she is there, as she chats and discovers that the pedlar has an exciting new product – perfect for a girl her age.

Picture another girl. West Country now – deepest Devon, perhaps the South Hams, an area that is rural and gentle and wild, not taken over by rich tourists yet, just valleys and farms and sea. She sees the front door open and the pedlar stands there. He talks to the female servant and she seems happy; he has something that will be perfect for young Dinah’s birthday. The maid hands over money and hurries inside before Dinah can see what she has bought – the mistress will be pleased!

Days later and the two girls hold their treasure. It is the latest thing! A piece of fabric, marked out and ready. A piece of fabric holding a template of the whole country, and with their gentle stitches they will mark it as their own.

In the Wells & Mendip Museum in the heart of Somerset, there is a wonderful collection of embroidery samplers created by girls, sometimes as young as seven, hundreds of years ago. Among the samplers of biblical scenes and passages of text, of Gardens of Eden, prayers, houses, animals and alphabets, there are a few that are different: for these samplers are embroidered maps of Great Britain. They show a flutter of nearby borders, France, the still unified Ireland, but the focus is on England and Wales and their counties; Scotland is there in outline but less known, less detailed.

We don’t know much about these maps, beyond that they were probably bought from pedlars (maybe later sold in shops) and therefore created, as many samplers were, by ordinary girls across the class divide, practising their needlework skills. There are some examples that we know were created as a school-leaving task, which while beautiful, with a high standard of stitching, follow the templates set out. But the ones bought from pedlars are different; they include a degree of personalisation. Over two hundred years ago, a young woman couldn’t set off alone and travel the world. Their places were familiar locations that they could reach and see; or imaginary, where they could travel, like I did as a child, in their minds. This was not a task to be assessed by a teacher, but a way for these young girls to make their mark on their country; to follow the lines on the map, but also to claim it, to add places they knew or were interested in. Maybe to mark their own homes, to mark their presence in a country they were unlikely to travel. Like initials carved in a wall or tree, these girls let us know they were here.

The map embroidered by Ann Mercer, possibly in 1794, is unfinished, but compared to the ‘text book’ embroidered maps by other young girls, this farmer’s daughter’s is tantalisingly individual. She outlines the main map, partly delineates the counties as is required from the template, practises her lettering by stitching letters, yet then she adds her own marks which were not on the template. It is the mountains, hills and rivers that she chooses to make visible. The dramatic markers, the lifeblood waterways, the natural borders that no county line abstractly stitched can show. If we are correct and she was from the North West, then the Peak District or the higher Lake District might have been known to her. But the Mendips, Exmoor, the peaks of Wales are marked too. Dark brown, stronger in stitch and colour than the county boundaries, they hold more power – seem to show her defiance of how the land is conceptually divided, revealing her interest in the bold, the landscape of adventure. Her young working-class girl’s nod to the contemporary obsession, far from her world, with the sublime. They curve and scar and make no pretence to be contained, to dampen their impact.

Ann also marks the rivers – the Thames, Severn, Exe, Tamar and more are there – strange black veins pushing out from the surface. Again, these are true boundaries of land, true markers of place, key to its spirit, its feeling, more than any arbitrary county delineation. They are boundaries, but also landscapes that are definers of place. Places with hills and rivers are consumed by the identity these features bring – the creatures, the smells, the beauty and dangers. While perhaps her father travelled or she had cousins who visited the family, it is unlikely that Ann went to any of the locations beyond her local area; yet we can imagine her at home in the farmhouse, dreaming of what those other places were like, choosing to add them to her map, to change its feel, to show the landscapes that emotionally spoke to her. On her map, counties have but initials. The seas are written in full.