'Opera of the Winds' by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh; gesso on panel
After slogging more than halfway through a long novel that was described as having a key storyline about a mother and daughter that looked intriguing, it was put down in sheer boredom with all the male teenage angst of two other characters that felt interminable. Fortunately, I picked up Esther Freud's eighth novel instead.
It was published during the First World War's centenary and not long after the Glasgow School of Art was terribly damaged in a fire; it's based on the short period Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret Macdonald, spent in the small Suffolk fishing village of Walberswick at a low point in their lives at the beginning of the war. The village is near Southwold, right across from Flanders and the story is told by the Blue Anchor's publican's young son, Thomas Maggs.
The voice here is pitch-perfect as is the way the story is told and the characters. Tom is thirteen, has a damaged foot, dreams of going to sea, and is infatuated with anything to do with sailing and ships. He draws brigs moored in the harbor and sneaks into the Sailors' Reading Room in Southwold to draw their ship models.
…I don't want Mother knowing how often I sit beside the river and copy the boats that are moored there, or how many hours I spend staring into the glass cabinets of the Sailors' Reading Room where models of all the greatest ships are on display. Schooners and frigates, warships and cruisers, and one big old fishing boat Danky made one winter when there was no fishing to be done.
He has two older sisters, Mary and Ann, and is the youngest and only surviving boy. His mother gave birth to nine children. His father is a man who is certain the world always does him wrong, drinks too much of his product, and is abusive. His mother has planned and scrimped to send Tom to get some schooling from Mr. Runnicles, and he also works for the rope-maker George Allard.
Walberswick is not only a hard-working fishing village, it's a place of summer visitors, some of them artists who paint the picturesque views, and Tom's mother is one of the residents whose best room is rented out to them. The village is a very insular place and when the war begins, the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), makes their mistrust of anyone from outside even greater. There's increased fear knowing that this part of the coast could be a likely location for a potential invasion. Tom's active imagination takes the bits and pieces of information he picks up and adds them into his vivid notions of the world.
Welcome visitors to the village are the young women who come down from the Scottish Highlands each summer to prepare the herring catch the fishermen bring in, and a new visitor who has a similar accent comes into the pub one night as Tom is doing his copying for Mr. Runnicles and drawing ships in the margins.
He's got a gruff voice, low and hard to understand, with rolling Rs and sudden lifts and burrs, and if I close my eyes I can hear the chimes and rises in it just like the girls who come down from the Highlands every year to gut and pack the herring. But those girls are mostly red and pink and jolly, whereas this man is dark, with a stern, pale face, and eyes as black as bark.
This is Tom's introduction to Charles Rennie Mackintosh who compliments him on his drawings. Mac, as he is known by the villagers, often walks the beach with a pair of binoculars, wearing a 'a great black cape and a hat of felted wool' and smoking a pipe. Tom thinks he looks like Sherlock Holmes and behaves as a detective might who is secretly protecting them, but soon realizes he's an artist as is his red-haired wife. Tom sometimes follows or joins Mac on his walks and stops by the fishing hut the couple rent to work in. On his explorations around the countryside Mac hunts out various botanical specimens which he then turns into meticulous watercolor studies.
He's drawn the outlines first in pencil and now he's using the tip of his brush, spreading colour, filling the dry wood of the twigs from inside, I squat down beside him. He has a stem of larkspur, must have picked it from the Millside garden, and he squashes the brush into the powder, stirs and flattens it until the pink is mixed, and then he lets it spread out inside the pencilled lines so that the edges catch it like a dam. He uses blue, the crushed blue of canvas, and yellow and red for spots and creases that I don't see are there, overlapping each other and ballooning into buds, so that they seem to be growing right there before us, the stalks silvery, the leaves grey.
This architect who has created such unique building designs cannot try to continue his design work any longer, that avenue has been closed off by one of the strictures of DORA—there are to be no new buildings in all of Britain for the duration of the war. And the vague plans they had for perhaps moving on to Paris or Vienna are now out of the question. They stay in Walberswick and quietly get on with the work they can do. Margaret has her own painting and needlework projects, and Tom sees pictures of the gesso artworks she has done previously and Mac's building designs. Both of them encourage the boy's own artistic endeavors.
The war brings change to the village, soldiers from around the country pass through on their way to the front and are temporarily housed in every nook and cranny; first thing every morning Tom runs down to the harbor and along the river to assure himself all is secure; rolls of barbed wire appear on the beach path and is strung everywhere; but the herring girls do arrive to carry on their work as usual after all.
There are many wonderful small moments in this book to discover and the portrayal of the setting and the time are exquisitely done. The hard work and precariousness of life of the villagers is made plain, and as war begins, the conviction that the army will quickly defeat their foes seems perfectly understandable. But the changes that are coming have started and when Tom and George Allard are talking about things going back to the way they were before Tom thinks:
I want to say the world will soon turn back once the fighting's finished. But I've stood on the cliff path beside the strings of wire, and I know, because I've felt the jagged barbs, that this new rope will outlast us all.
There's a slight thrum of tension that can be felt throughout the book, part of it comes from Tom's father, part from the war, and part from things unknown in the past and future. Esther Freud's family visited Walberswick for years and she eventually purchased a place in the village that was formerly a pub. She knows her territory intimately, and the story in Mr. Mac and Me is based on the time the Mackintoshes spent in the village and on a specific event that took place. A quietly luminous book.
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