Past, Present..…

Andrew Baldwin, The Sisters

Embedded in the heavy red-brown mud and silt of the River Deben wholly visible at low tide is an iron-cast sculpture by Andrew Baldwin named The Sisters (2020), which appears as two life-sized statues sitting straight-backed, face-to-face in a rowing boat. It was commissioned by the present owners of Woodbridge Boat Yard as a posthumous ‘thank you’ to the previous owners, the Everson family, and especially to sisters Molly and Ethel for their stolid contributions to the Woodbridge river community. At high tide, The Sisters are up to their necks in turbid river water as if waiting for the receding tide to reveal them once again. Aside of this unintentionally comedic framing they are here represented as they were in life, a stalwart presence in a quiet landscape. On the quayside plaque accompanying The Sisters is a black and white photograph of siblings, Molly and Bert. Molly is standing full square in front of one of their yachts with a pipe-smoking Bert smiling into the camera. The image isn’t time-stamped but from the clothing worn, the style of Molly’s spectacles, I think it’s from the 1960s, but it could be earlier. There’s also another photograph of Ethel, her face blurred and cast downwards as if in deep contemplation of some matter relating to the yard. I get the impression from the dearth of online images that the sisters weren’t accustomed to standing in front of the lens, or at least not for matters relating to public engagement at a time in history when women were expected to remain in the background, even if working in recognisably key roles like these two sisters.

In what ways do these iron-cast women contain the seeds of their lives lived in flesh? Ornery women whose presences are recollected in the boatyard with voices boomeranging the open river, directing with a military precision the day-to-day business on the yard while brothers, Bert and Cyril, in cloche hats and dungarees, smoked their pipes and crafted the hulls of yachts to a smooth finish?

How do they compete with their former selves from the pitted shallows of a rowing boat sequestered in the silt of the riverbed? Seated among the yearning cries of gull and curlew, never to leave with the tides, the sisters have to endure the burbling agitation of water about their feet, hands, chests, necks—higher still when the river is in spate. No complaints. Never those. Countenances stern and fixed. Breaths held for the duration of their watery inhumation, enduring those happy days—and nights—on the river just as those similarly cast figures of Another Place from the foundry of Antony Gormley’s creative imagination might endure their own version of happy days and nights dug into the foreshore of Crosby Sands…enduring the salt marsh, the seawater rising in fathoms above their heads, enduring also the at-swim in a world of nematodes, cephalopods, crustaceans perhaps? I marvel at the majesty of another of Antony Gormley’s kind cast, Sound 11 (1986), in the flooding crypt of Winchester Cathedral with water falling gently into the figure’s cupped hands as would befit the grace and favour of the finest Italian palazzo. Richard Holloway writes on the ‘Arts and Christianity’ website that it ‘captures the uncertainty of the human condition’. I feel something of this temporal uncertainty in my view of The Sisters from the quayside when I contemplate the relationship between art and politics. Does this sculpture lead me to thinkabout the sisters’ busy lives and how they formed an important part of the socioeconomic history of the river?  Does it take me on a ‘journey’ of time and topography? The sisters and their lives transmuted into this provisional form for all to see while dominated by the relentless ebb and flow of this busy river channel? Does it compel me to think about human suffering: the war on Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza? I believe it does. 

When the tide recedes, the sisters reappear oftentimes bedecked in weeds of their enchantment—verid tresses about their crowns that dry to lacey wevets in the sunlight. A puff of colour stealing across their cheeks…Through the weeds of their perceived infirmity, I touch these imagined pasts. Hard surfaces dressed in the memories of past lives. A veil through which to perceive them more. View them differently. Are they lonely there in the tides? Ciphers for our thoughts now? Disconnected from their time. Carl Phillips writes of this in his essay, ‘On Loneliness: To You’, in which this delineated state ‘is just another of those veils, like grief, through which the world as I thought I knew it remains visible, only less so’. Around them the water keeps on moving. A relentless kinetic.  

Beginning with a statement of truth or one of accepted fact is relatively easy. It is more complex and problematic, however, when attempting to penetrate minds… summon the thoughts of a person or persons I am writing about. Then it might become, unintentionally, more of an intuitive fiction especially when all there is to imagine minds or lives are a handful of photographs and slivers of biographical information offered by a couple of print journals or an online website. What is known about the lives of the Everson sisters, Molly and Ethel, is that they lived and died in Woodbridge, a small Suffolk community on the River Deben, working the business inherited from their father—Everson & Sons Boat Yard. Their work was in the chandlery, sail store and office for the middle part of the last century while brothers, Cyril and Bert, built and maintained the boats and racing yachts. From the little that is written about them, I get the not entirely fanciful impression that Molly and Ethel were brusque and direct in their manner as indeed they would have to have been to survive a lifetime working in the harsh conditions of a boatyard in all seasons. But also, not without humour. Andrew Baldwin’s sculpture suggests more…more of an insight into their characters, how their lives were lived. In 1969, the business was sold, later changing its name to what it is today, the more generic-sounding Woodbridge Boat Yard —now a more Google-friendly name!  

Woodbridge and the area of East Anglia around the tidal Deben was settled in ancient times because of its proximity to the North Sea, or Mare Germanicum as it was known until the First World War, and the lands of what is now Northern Europe. On the far side of the Deben, rising steeply upwards through woodland is Sutton Hoo known for what is believed to be the ship burial site of the Saxon King, Raedwald, and the cache of treasures that were excavated in a dig initially led by Basil Brown in 1939, treasures that are now held in the British Museum.

When my friends moved from London to Orford then to Woodbridge four years ago, we would often plan walks along the fringes of the Deben. Baldwin’s sculpture would invariably catch our eyes as we passed the pier’s edge, setting our minds racing with thoughts about the twin lives it was commemorating, and their connectedness to a landscape that would become more vivid with every twist and turn of our river path, with every visit to Suffolk.

The silent reverie of The Sisters contributes to the sense of the river and its environs as a mysterious place. The great expanse of water. Past histories of Saxon Kings and their kingdoms, their cultural practices and their worship of gods, Tiw, Woden, Thor and Frig make it so. When I stand where the sisters once stood more than half a century ago, I get a real sense of this. A sense of it having been a Saxon stronghold and how the sisters were connected to it by their occupations on the river. I feel that I can almost hear them speaking -- their Suffolk dialect overlapping with those more sonorous lines of Beowulf broadcasting in Anglo-Saxon, creating a sonic palimpsest:

Grendel were the name of this grim old git,
Wæs se grimma gæst Grendel haten,
lurkin’ 'round the marshes,
mære mearcstapa, se þe moras heold,
pillagin' 'round the heath and the lonely fens;
fen ond fæsten; fifelcynnes eard
he'd lived for a spell in bleedin’ misery
wonsæli wer weardode hwile,
among the exiled beasties,
siþðan him scyppend forscrifen hæfde
Cain's lot...
in Caines cynne…

The river was their soundscape. Will it capture my voice, too? Standing there, I feel the urge to time-travel to near and distant pasts. Observe in my mind’s eye the communities that once lived there, especially in remembrance of those moments of looking out at the broader landscape from the observation tower near to what was once Mrs Edith Pretty’s hilltop house at Sutton Hoo, which is now a National Trust site. Seeing for myself how the river and the land bend together in co-existence…feeling its synergy still.

Stonemason and Medievalist, Alex Woodcock, recounts the perceived power of the landscape and its willingness to support his time-travelling into the deep Romanesque past by means of ‘the humble and broken artefact, ruined building or piece of weathered masonry’[1]. Time-travel by the power of his and my imaginations.

Molly and Ethel spent their entire working lives on Woodbridge quayside watching the ebb and flow of river traffic: who was coming in for what service; the supplies they might need from the chandlery; the staging of the next boat-build. In wartime, the threat of German invasion would have been felt acutely by everyone not least by the sisters who would have felt duty bound to scrutinise the river for anyone or anything remotely suspicious or out of the ordinary that might have posed a threat to the safety of the community. They were the eyes and ears of the Deben; the Deben was them.

On the quayside, again, looking outwards to this dilated portion of the river for a final time before leaving for London and home, I get a keening sense of the sisters’ benign yet wilful presence in a landscape that seems to have changed little in the intervening years. A landscape where time pools and histories are revealed in navigations on the water— the plashing of oars, engines turning over softly as they approach their moorings. Simple apparitions on land of persons in rapt conversation. Commissions agreed. Deeds done. Light arrowing the lacey canopies of trees. Time at its most malleable.

 as though the past could be present and
    memory itself
a Baltic honey […]

(‘Amber’ [2])

• References:

  1.     Alex Woodcock, King of Dust (Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2019)

  2.     Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence (Manchester: Carcanet 2007)