The things we collect tell the story of our life and loves. Author Julia Blackburn and her friend and neighbour, artist Tessa Newcomb, decided to explore the objects in Julia's Suffolk village home
In a corner of a Suffolk village, a simple wooden eco house, with light floorboards, white walls and a high, pitched ceiling, is filled with the objects and memories of author Julia Blackburn.
Fossils are arranged on a windowsill and across a table top. One, the size of a fruit bowl, is a mammoth's knee bone. A little Victorian jug holds a bunch of feathers and the sloughed skin of a grass snake has been framed like a painting. A stuffed sparrow hawk in a glass case looks down from a high bookcase, a gift from a much-loved great-aunt when Julia was five years old.
“To me, objects have a kind of metaphoric power,” Julia says. “They tell of your own life, and they tell of themselves. They all hold their different stories, and they inform you about your story. They are part of the kaleidoscope of who I am.” These objects, the everyday and the extraordinary, also fired the imagination of Julia's friend and neighbour, the artist Tessa Newcomb, who has now reproduced them in a beautiful new book called Thoughts in a House.
Each of the delicate monochrome watercolour paintings of objects, plants and animals is accompanied by a short sentence from Julia. It is deceptively simple, yet savoured page by page, it is mesmerising in its sparsity and tantalising in all that is left unsaid. “It’s nice to do something different,” says Tessa. “And I really enjoyed putting these together. They have an intensity, a presence. I wanted to get to the essence of each thing.”
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Some of the pictures have simple descriptions - ‘tulip fireworks’ and ‘dusty roses’. Another shows a comic scene of Julia and her late husband, side by side with matching spectacles, sewing ‘to keep our hands busy so that our minds can wander’. There are elusive and intriguing phrases too. ‘The silence of the house. The cold silence of the day,’ reads one page. “It’s from a notebook of some 30 years ago,” says Julia. “Tessa’s painting of the door into my old work room seemed to explain the solitary process of moving into a different space, to withdraw from the world in order to be ready to write.”
Tessa has come to know Julia through spending time in her house. She has often looked after the chickens, dog and guinea pigs when Julia was away, when she would paint and draw her surroundings. “She would leave a little painting for me and say ‘this was from being here’,” says Julia. “But Tessa has been coming here for so long that she is now rather proprietorial, so she’ll say ‘where’s that jug?’”
“It’s such a part of my life,” says Tessa. The two friends first started working on the book 15 years ago but abandoned it until a conversation with friend and publisher Jamie Gilham reignited the idea. Then, prompted by the isolation of lockdown, they revisited their early words and pictures, and spent happy hours laying out the paintings and notes on the floor to plan the book.
“We were fortunate to have our work,” says Tessa of the past two years. Both women have been busy with other projects. Julia was asked to write a volume of fragments of prose and poems for independent publishing company Hazel Press. The resulting book, called The Wren, became something of a companion to Thoughts in a House. “I wrote it very quickly,” she says, “over about three weeks, mostly at night. And then I realised that it overlaps with Thoughts in a House. There’s something of the same meditative thought in both of them.
"Many of the objects in this house tell of the people I have loved and the life I have lived.” She tells about the wooden cricket cage she bought in France, for example, and the sparrowhawk in the glass case. She also offers a glimpse into her lockdown when she made a vegetable patch. When the pandemic hit, Julia was in South Africa researching a new work of non-fiction. In recent years she’s written about the fisherman artist and embroiderer John Craske, and ancient Doggerland, a region off the east coast now lost to the sea.
Her latest book describes Karoo, the land of a now extinct indigenous people called the /Xam (pronounced 'ham') who were forced from their ancestral lands by European settlers. A five-week research trip was reduced to just 16 days as Julia was forced to return to England the day before lockdown. Armed with her notes, remote access to archives and keeping a journal of her days at home, she completed Dreaming the Karoo which is published this summer. “I had nothing to do but write,” she says.
Tessa also found it a productive period. “I’m so excited about painting at the moment,” she says. The recently published book Where I Belong explores how landscape, primarily East Anglia, has influenced her work. “There are 10 places that I keep returning to, that mean something to me,” she says. “Like Julia and her objects, these places are important to me, and when I’ve been away those are the places I go back to.”
Also like Julia's, her home is filled with cherished objects. “Books do furnish a room, but so do the little things we keep on our bookcases and windowsills. Little shrines to the past. The one Lego spaceship kept, the one painted stone, or a postcard of a forgotten place remain. The windowsills may change, the boy may have children of his own, the rest of the holiday is forgotten, but a story is held in that object.”
Thoughts in a House published by Rylett Press
The Wren published by Hazel Press
Where I Belong published by Sansom & Company
Julia Blackburn and Tessa Newcomb, with Nancy the dog, on the zig-zag steps in Julia’s garden.
