HereWish You Were Here (Isle of Wight)

Wish You Were Here (Isle of Wight)
2023

I’m thinking a lot about Margaret Thatchers hair…

Not the iron ladies bouffant helmet immortalized in parliamentary portraits, I’m thinking of when she was younger and working making ice cream emulsifiers for Lyons. To be fair that isn’t entirely true about her, but many people including the Bishop of London who read her eulogy said it was, so who am I to argue, to let the truth get in the way of a good story?

I am thinking of The Grand Hotel, photographic images of it after the bombing, white and cracked open like a fruit cake, its perfect Mr Whippy ice cream layers broken by a chocolate flake of kindling. Its insides out, wooden beams reduced to sticks like the inside of the fibre glass cone of the ancient ice cream seaside display I found on The Isle of Wight.

I’m thinking about my first job working at the hotel owned by my grandparents. Jewish first generation immigrants relocated to The Isle of Wight from Poland, via London and South Africa.

Now I am an immigrant and 6000 miles away from home I have become preoccupied with the materials of the place of my childhood, the small island of white, crumbing chalk cliffs, dinosaur bones, smugglers and shipwrecks, the legends, and stories of family. Tourists trebling its population for a few months of the year.

 I’m thinking about the sugar cubes for the teas I made for the older ladies, their American Tan tights pooled slightly at their ankles swollen from waltzing together on the waxed wooden parquet dance floor. Each Friday when they sang Auld Lang Syne I felt something in my chest that I had no words for. My grandfather drank whiskey with a quick fizzy squirt from the soda syphon, silver and glass, and he danced with me on his toes. I never saw him without his tie. 

I am thinking of the sound of the lids of the small, individual, steel tea pots that always, always, dripped however you poured them, the stain of the tea in the saucer, from elderly unsteady hands, and the feel and smell of warm white ceramic catering cups straight out of the noisy industrial machine. The sweet yellow cream in the custard creams in cellophane three packs that I ate myself and served the guests the boring Rich Tea. The sour disinfectant smell at clean up.

My second job was chamber-maiding. The crisp, starched, cotton bed sheets, the paper bag of boiled sweets measured at the Rock Shop by the quarter with just one sweet left by change-over day, paper made stiff and sticky and translucent. The hotels names embroidered on cotton napkins with thick, red, thread.

I’m thinking about the one week coach holiday that the working classes from ‘Up North’ might take on that cheap, crumbling island. Sticky, shiny faced kids sitting on incongruously colored, fibre glass dinosaurs, perched perilously close to the edge of the fragile white cliffs of bones-both big and small. Slipping chalk paths and hedgerows disappearing into the ocean, dissolving into nowhere. Sweet Nothings. Family truths hidden like fossils revealed only after a catastrophic landslide.

 I wonder about Lady Thatchers hair, and if it was an Elnett covered fire hazard as she lent over, warming her test tubes on her bunsen burner and working out that perfect ratio of air and oil and sugar that would make ice cream taste creamy without the use of cows, and would feed a million holiday makers lying oiled and sandy next to bright striped windbreaks, deck chair seats puffed into arcs by the wind below flapping Union Jack flags. I’m thinking about damp gritty bikini gussets. Sand in sticky crevices.

 ‘Kiss Me Quick’. Bumper Cars. Two little ducks.

Tongues sticky from stamps pressed on seaside postcards home. Candy floss fingers writing ‘wish you were here’.

And ice cream, soft serve ice cream. How happy, and sad, and how happy it all is. Mr Whippy, (now just called ‘Whippy’. Recently rebranded with the ‘Mr’ removed) held aloft, an antihero’s torch, a beacon of hope with a chocolate flake, the enduring and ubiquitous symbol of the escape from the grind of the 9-5.

I’m thinking a lot about Margaret Thatchers hair.

Accompanying photographic works include images of chalk landslides, cotton hotel bed sheets, sea foam, the insides of a fibreglass ice cream cone, the bone handles of vintage silver cake knives, fox skulls scarred with bullet holes, Druid flowers, and wool found on Glastonbury Tor.