The photo in the header for this post is probably my favorite of all the extant pictures of Robert Maas as a child. There’s so much to unpack, so much mystery and so much long-forgotten history.
I grew up in Britain, but very few photographs of myself in the country are known to exist. For the first twenty years of my life, there are less than 40 photos that I know of: a scattering of baby pictures, mostly in studios or the hands of parents, some school portraits, some mementos of family trips. Most were lost in the turmoil of my parents’ divorce and my mother’s death.
It’s possible other relatives and school friends have some, but I’m not in touch with them. Certainly there used to be photos in the possession of various girlfriends. I doubt they’d still want to remember me. I wouldn’t.
The first thing to note about the header photo is: what a fat baby I was. I grew up the tallest in my year and thin as a rake. I was a cross between a basketball player and a daddy longlegs. But here’s a plump little fellow with a square head and a beach ball body squatted down on his washable diaper with little stubs of feet sticking out.
The second: what’s that jolly poodle harness for? I have no idea. Maybe I was just starting to walk and my mother would lead me around like a dog. My brain was surely not developed enough for the instinct to run far far away, but I know from my own son that this instinct develops very quickly. From the moment he could walk, we’d let him go and he’d be off like a shot in a straight line —a precise straight line, never deviating — as fast and as far as he could.
And the third: yes, those really are two packets of cigarettes I’m clutching. Since my mother was an on-again-off-again smoker, and my father only smoked cigars at Christmas, these are the cigarettes belonging to my paternal grandparents, whose garden I’m sitting in. What am I doing with them, my first known cigarettes? Babies like to clutch things. Babies especially like to clutch things that rattle. Those cigarettes were mine, for as long as I could keep them in my fat little fists.
And incidentally, the local village post office sold boxes of candy cigarettes (white chalky sticks with a red-painted end). I loved them. You could suck them or you could snap them and chew them. All this conditioning from birth. And yet I’ve never smoked more than a few exploratory cigarettes in my life. They never imprinted themselves on my psyche. That argument is false, at least in this sample of one.
Fourthly, I could probably date this photo accurately if I was a better horticulturalist. The slightly dry grass and abundance of flowers mean this is probably high summer. Therefore I have recently celebrated my first birthday.
High summer or not, my mother has done what mothers always do: bundle me up in thick warm clothes from my home knitted woolen top to my home knitted woolen booties. I’m red cheeked with heat. My hair’s slicked in sweat.
The main point of this post is not the lumpy boy with the cube head but his surroundings. Do you own a lawn like this? And if not, why not? It’s so much more evocative to me than a sterile green-painted expanse of grass.
This garden is a mess of weeds and daisies and dandelions and other meadow flowers. The grass itself is unkempt and ragged with clover. There are dead petals everywhere. To the rear a cardboard box is certainly evidence of gardening.
But this small patch of semi-wild grass is what I associate most strongly with my childhood, because I spent much of my time here, in my grandparents’ garden, a thickly overgrown and unmanageable landscape of tiers and beds and bumble bees and holly bushes and vast tangles of web-speckled leylandii with a lily-clogged pond at the highest point at the very center of the maze.
I’ve written about this place both in a previous post and in several novels, most notably The Music Of The Rending Of The Night, whose entire first section is set in a fictionalized version of this house, and less recognizably Poems Found In The Ruins Of A Pagan Commune.
My grandparents owned a large pebble-dashed manor house set in an expanse of jumbled gardens, vegetable patches, aviaries, and gypsy caravans. There was a working farm house on the estate, as well as a row of workers’ cottages, a separate farm yard with cattle sheds, an abattoir across the way where my grandmother could indulge in her favorite food, sheep’s brains on toast, and fields stretching out like reaching arms to the ridges of the valley.
I spent the first couple of years of my life here in one of the workers’ cottages, a place less than ideal for its age, decrepitude, and lack of even basic facilities. There was no electricity or running water. The only water into the estate was a stream which ran from a capped spring and reservoir at the top of the slope all the way down the side of the fields, through the village in an open culvert, and into the manor.
I guess it wasn’t drinkable after all that. I certainly never drank the water. I was brought up on a diet of strong local cider from my grandparents’ orchards.
I loved the place. It was playground and escape and a thrilling window into the unknown: incredibly old houses that had accumulated memories like ghosts. As I mentioned in that previous post, I wasn’t afraid of them. There were deeper secrets in the gypsy caravans, in the jumbles of wreckage in coal sheds so choked in spider’s webs they looked like they were filled with cotton candy. People and events breathed in the dark, rotting corridors and boarded-up rooms. The earth itself was astir.
And hence that mown but abandoned meadow-like grass. There was no controlling the past. All you could do was trim it twice a year. Nothing else could be achieved, and the past kept growing.
I left ghosts of my own there. I certainly carried them with me. When I was a kid my grandmother had an old dog called Winnie, which became the name of my lead character in Rending. In a thousand ways I’ve tried to reflect the spook and shadow of that place, and it will inspire and inform a thousand more ways in the things I have still to write. I will never run out of stories of this house.
And you know the dichotomy of this already. Boo to a ghost, naturally, but not to the deep-breathing monsters of the mind. I saw a world of things that ran on clockwork principles but never shrugged off the throb of the beating of midnight. There’s something alive in that ground.
I remember I went through a long stage, when I was maybe three or four, of waking up in the dead of night to find myself standing on the landing at the very top of a straight steep flight of stairs. Nightmare sleepwalks driven to something or from something. I had terrifying dreams of small points of light in vast fields of darkness.
I would go to the window in nights lit only by the dazzle of stars to watch horses moving slowly in the garden. My grandparents kept no horses. At times I was aware of a vast, immensely heavy presence squatted over the manor and scrutinizing me. It’s there, in this photo. I’m staring straight at it.
Robert Maas the writer was born in this place.
But then again, there are people outside this frame. There is the person with the camera, and those who knitted for that boy and strapped him into his harness and gave him the cigarette packets he clutches. The house itself is behind them, down the tumbles of at least three levels of flower beds and lower crescents of grass, down to the fuchsias draped in a smother over the narrow cobbles of the path to the never-used, nailed-shut front door of the manor. The kid only has to turn to look at all this, but he never does.
Even after my parents moved out of the workers’ cottage to a house in the village where they could have clean water and light bulbs, I visited the manor every single day. I would call on my grandparents on my way to primary school (and I now feel so guilty that I obviously dragged them out of bed every morning to await my arrival), and spent as much of my weekends there as I could. I stayed with them whenever possible. I adored every rotting, collapsing beam of the place.
But I moved on eventually, and the house moved on. My grandmother died in my late teens (you can read more about her, and see a photograph of myself in her arms, in this post), and my grandfather sold the manor. He built himself a modern bungalow in the corner of the estate he carved out for himself. He sold the farm and farmyard to the farmer, and the cottages to their tenants. Everything else was destroyed. The house was gutted and renovated for sale. The garden — the entire garden — was dug up and flattened and turned to turf. No spirit at all remained in there.
My grandfather, too, became the target of baser forces. The Jehovah’s Witnesses got to work on him. They systematically separated him from his family and stripped him of all the assets he owned, which were considerable. He’d been a book illustrator and he still had a large income from that, though all the real money in the family was his wife’s.
When he died a few years later, he owned nothing but an enormous library of the ultra-expensive books the cult had pressured him to buy. Even the house was no longer his own. What a greatness he bequeathed us, in the end. After his will was read, in the last full family gathering we ever held, thirty or so members of the Maas clan took all those books to the center of the farmyard and burned them in a big pile.
I could hear my grandmother’s cigarette-roughened chuckle. And beyond her something huge and weighty, sat back on its haunches and roaring.
Photographer unknown but probably my father.
active maas 