— 2016 —
You exhibitionist
P. J. Harvey
Cranes and cooling towers are hazy in the distance. Kylie Minogue sits by the edge of a swimming pool, enormous and blonde in her eyewear. The postergirl of solitude. People leave the train, duly reminded to make sure they have taken all their personal possessions with them.
Someone will no doubt have left something behind. Someone always does. Human nature to scatter ourselves carelessly around – a subconscious desire, perhaps, to leave a trace, a fragment of what we once were, abandoned in transit as we go on our way.
There are different textures of loss. The lost we hope to find again, and the lost that we think is gone for ever. The loss of an object in the silt of mud, the loss of a smell or a sound. People are lost to us, or make themselves irretrievable. They seek loss. A hundred years before my birth, among the classified sections of The Times, there are all of these things – page after page of absence. A catalogue of despondencies, absent-mindedness, ache.
A carriage clock is left in a cab from St Pancras to Westminster on Monday last. A lady’s sealskin muff-bag, containing articles of jewellery, is lost in a first-class carriage of a local train on the Great Northern railway, on a Monday afternoon. There are things people seemed to lose a lot in those days. Keys, bond shares, purses and small bags (generally containing money, as well as, sometimes, nothing of value except papers, which are important only to the owner). They lose their watches, their rings and their lockets, their bracelets and other jewellery. Dogs, opera glasses and pencil cases, Bank of England notes and spectacles are misplaced or abandoned or stolen. Each loss feels like a novel in miniature. A roll call of lost objects in 1875 brings some poetic specifics: a London dock warrant, a cane of Brazilian palm, a map of the British Channel, an opal brooch, a small case of surgical instruments. On 12 August, an aeronautical pioneer seems strangely deflated.
BALLOON LOST. Started from Taunton at 3 o’clock. Direction about a line from Taunton to Chepstow – Joseph Simmons, Aeronaut, 38, Regent-street, London, W.
There are the sadnesses of letters, possibly lost. Someone who calls themselves AMULET complains of not hearing from their correspondent on Tuesday. Perhaps it was never sent. There are some strangely coded missives. I look at one placed on Christmas Eve, 1875:
WILL a Black Swan glide again to the entrance of a stream? Exit on last occasion more hurried than graceful. Same address. – GRAPE AND SEALSKIN.
I long to know who GRAPE and SEALSKIN was or were. Did the Black Swan ever arrive? It seems a language buried too deep to recover, lost in time.
People are missing too. A young gentleman, age 26, height 5 feet 6 inches, fair and pale complexion was last seen at Charing Cross. It’s often young men (some presumed to have enlisted) who disappear. But women young and old vanish too – some, in Hitchcockian fashion, have vanished on trains before arriving at their appointed destination. One gentleman with very depressed and emaciated appearance: walks with short steps, and narrow feet not turned out, disappeared while looking much troubled in mind. I worry for those left behind. The costly ads.
Every day of the year seems to bring new trauma, large and small. On 4 January, along with a lost gold Albert chain, there is an advert placed for FRED D.L., its tone hovering somewhere between the plaintive and the demanding.
If you have any regard for yourself and your family, WRITE, or telegraph at once to B.S., and say when and where you will meet him.
January brings further losses, in trains and cabs and hearts. A black bearskin carriage rug, lined in red, is left in a brougham; a brown leather case, well labelled, on a first-class carriage from Ealing. Fred D.L.’s family continue to ask for him. There is a letter for him at the General Post Office. He must not fail to call for it. Someone called A.T. has left. If they return at once, all will be forgiven. ‘T.’ writes to ‘W.’ for £20. They are still very ill. The doctor says there is no cure.
A lady’s black silk umbrella, ebony handle, with a carved pug on the top ring, has gone astray in the last fortnight, along with a black leather portenoisie purse containing a first-class return ticket to Barnet. A son admonishes his mother. He has nothing to say. Someone has received a black bag from Newton. They are full of love and pity and entreat a reader to write. No inquiries will be made.
Two manuscripts are lost. One has been borrowed and not returned. The other left in a hansom cab in Fleet Street, wrapped in a sheet of The Times. People hesitate about where exactly something was lost. Either in Chapel-street or Belgrave-square. Between Kew-bridge and the Strand, via South-Western Railway and Waterloo-Bridge, near Paddington Terminus. It is hard to retrace your steps when they have wandered.
A black portmanteau has been taken by mistake. The owner of the similar one, unclaimed at the Victoria Station, will have been surprised to find a case full of baby’s linen.
Heart-shaped gold lockets are lost. Presumably hearts too. E.P., who left Eastbourne by the 2 p.m. train for Victoria on Monday, and was expected at a station on the Sevenoaks line, is earnestly requested to communicate with one of his anxious relatives. Perhaps he wants to be lost. Many do. Maybe the thirty-year-old woman with dark brown hair, dark blue eyes and a slight limp, who left Sheffield for her home in Devon, but disappeared at Paddington Station, wanted not to be found. Four children aged nine, seven, five and two, disappeared with her.
So many of these missing people seem like ghosts:
MYSTERIOUSLY DISAPPEARED from her home, on Friday, the 5th inst., a YOUNG MARRIED LADY, 24 years of age, tall and upright, straight dark hair, dark eyes, finely arched eyebrows, very pale complexion; lisps slightly when speaking; was dressed in gray silk dress (two shades), moleskin jacket, black bonnet, with white feather. INFORMATION of her present whereabouts will be most handsomely REWARDED
So fine and slight and pale. She is destined to vanish, to dwindle away. I wish her luck. A shade (two shades) in Victorian limbo.
There are many lost letters, and lost addresses. Quite a few lost tempers. Writes THE ONE of the VALLEY – You do not know how sorry you have made me. Farewell. There are ongoing stories, too, some of which stretch across the years: Mrs T is concerned about the wellbeing and whereabouts of Mrs M Jones for at least two years in the 1870s; ‘W.’ writes that he wishes to see his friend at 96, particularly at regular intervals throughout the same time period. Others are brighter, shorter-lived flames. What trouble was ‘Fred. D.L.’ in, I wonder? Did he ever get out of it? I see the reaching out of nearly lost hopes. Write to me, one advertiser begs. Do not fear about the thing lost.
Have you forgotten me and the pretty gardens? asks ‘M.’. Will you write, or call?
Or a simple message to ‘Henry’ – Your return will be most welcome.
No doubt whole conversations, indeed whole lives, are hidden here in these classified columns. An exhibition of loss. Take the one from 9 February 1875:
BR. – Same address. Nothing constant. Wants.