265 x 975 mm
I am the only man I know to come from here,
My memories of home are undimmed and quite clear.
I used to think this place the land that time forgot
But then a lot of what I thought was mostly not.
The land that time forgot’s the land that never was
And now I cannot go back home, because, because …
I stitched the panel years and years ago and only fished it out upon rediscovering it in a bag of my early needlepoint work which had not been sold. I had been experimenting with different stitches which produced different effects and could be applied to relevant subjects. The idea of the ‘big house’ and the gardens and grounds in front of it I think came from my time at Homewood Park in Hinton Charterhouse near Bath where I learned whatever I know now of gardening and cooking and country life and making a home. And survival after that home has proved uninhabitable.
As you can see, I had taken the stitches far too close to the edge of the strange form of canvas to mount it properly, the warp and weft would have soon pulled apart and loosened the stitches. The whole would have been in grave danger of unraveling.
The only way I could think of displaying it was to Copydex it to a panel and improvise a painted frame, an exercise which in the doing also prompted the poem, improving the original a thousand per cent by giving it a resonance.
Panel made up and painted by Yours Truly.