One of the reasons I love Miniatura is that I go there to meet friends.
I am not a person who makes friends easily. It may be because of being an only child. If you are one, and only one, you do not learn the rough and tumble of relationships. The only relatives you have every day are your parents. Children learn as babies that they are dependant on their parents for survival, rarely does the sibling relationship carry the same overtones or undertones. You can be rude to your sister and she’s not going to stop your dinner or lock you out.
At this point, I realise as I write it that some sisters may very well have done exactly that, in which case all you have to do is click on Leave a comment below and do so.
I have a cousin who said, once, ‘Well you know what it’s like, it’s you and your sister against your parents.’
I did not know what that was like and still don’t but the nearest I have got to that is miniaturists.
When interviewing artists at Miniatura, I used to call the show the ‘I had a nasty Mummy club.’ In fifteen years of saying it, no miniaturist ever said they didn’t know what I meant or asked what on earth I was on about. Anyone I said it to always laughed.
Life is rarely perfect, if it was there would be no learning, but the lessons involving abuse from the people you depend on for survival, are of a high level of difficulty, unsurprisingly. You can learn at a young age not to trust people.
In all the years I taught children I only met one who I considered to be intrinsically unpleasant. There are not many people who are born nasty and then work on it, but damaged people damage other people.
This was certainly the case with my mother, though I only suffered the effect, I did not learn the cause until I became my mother’s carer when she had dementia. I only knew my grandfather briefly, he died when I was a toddler. From my mother, belatedly, I learned what a very difficult alcoholic he was, though to be fair, there are no easy alcoholics, no one who allows a volatile fluid to do their thinking for them is going to be of an even-tempered disposition.
It is also the case that it is not what happens to us that solely determines our future but rather how we react to it. There is a strong possibility that Hitler’s grandmother was impregnated out of wedlock when she was a worker in a household by the Jewish son of the householder. History is a bit murky on the subject but enough historians have come to the conclusion that this was the case to give the subject consideration.
How he reacted we all know, but why is a different question. Did he love his grandmother very much and feel she was wronged? Did she tell him stories of her bad treatment when she became pregnant? Did the household make it her fault (which would have been consistent with attitudes of the time)? If she had taken it stoically and been glad that after all, the outcome had been a grandson, would history have been written differently? History repeated itself when Hitler’s mother, Klara, who had been a maid, was impregnated by the father of the family. He was a difficult and aggressive man, given to corporal punishment of his son, who was impatient, not academic and keen to hold a grudge, apparently.
Could the whole of World War Two have been about the unjust treatment of women?
Life is unfair. We don’t even all start off as wanted children, me for example. I began in a children’s home, left after six weeks. The story of how I was adopted changed each time my adopted mother told it. She knew the power of stories and wanted the power of power. Sometimes, in a very Dickensian twist, my natural mother staggered forward holding the baby out and begging the young couple to take the burden. Sometimes the young couple wandered along a row of babies trying to pick a good one (given that the babies were all illegitimate and therefore intrinsically bad.) I don’t think I ever heard the more likely story which would be about paperwork thrown at a problem to relieve the state of a difficult boom in babies following a war which had taken all the resources. I was aware from an early age that some of the other babies had been sent to Australia, which is the furthest they could be sent round the globe without being on the way back again, as slave labour. This left me in the interesting position of having to be grateful for abuse, as the alternative would have been worse.
Whilst I was the only adopted person of my age at school, I did make friends more easily with girls with an alcoholic parent. My adopted mother you might classify as a dry drunk, someone with the attitudes and controlling personality of her alcoholic father, but without the drink until much later in life. I visited households where everyone except one adult was skilled at dancing on eggshells, hypervigilant to changes in atmosphere and excellent at withstanding sudden in-house hurricanes of one sort or another and great at pretending nothing was happening even as they were whisked up emotionally, only to be crashed and crushed a moment later. I fitted right in. A couple of the girls with whom I made friends had fathers who were GPs, relieving insane workloads in the days before group practices, with a drink or twenty at the end of the day.
I found some semblance with people who had been very powerless as children, among teachers, though mainly they were people who wanted to get their own back by wielding power like a baseball bat, which I never wanted to do.
Then I fell into miniatures and at last I was home. Everyone had difficulties. Some you could see, they had actual wheels on. Some I only learned of in conversation while interviewing.
One, who was Lynne Medhurst, I set out to help and then found as time progressed, to be a mirror image of myself in many ways. She it was taught me the chilling phrase ‘colluding parent.’ She was an only one and an abused only one with one parent the abuser and the other urging the abused child to go along with it in order to save their own skin. She too had married into health difficulties, and had her own health problems, arising from her treatment. Her abusing parent continued to be controlling and unexpected throughout his life.
And yet we rarely spoke of these things, we didn’t have to, we just knew.
And, very amazingly, no one in Lynne’s professional life was aware of her difficulties. They only ever heard her laugh and be cheerful and admire the miniatures.
That is the wonderful thing about miniaturists. They nearly all come from a place of extreme difficulty, but none of them invade Poland.
Instead all the control goes into the miniatures. Out of misery comes perfection and laughter and art. Reducing a stifling life to absurdity diffuses it in a safe and happy way. People who have been shrivelled with scorn and abuse all their lives turn it around by shrinking the damage and growing their self esteem. Unlike life you have all the choice in miniatures. Are you going to make it the perfect little life, or the very imperfect little life?
Lynne had absolutely no self regard. She was a cracking writer, a great encourager, a selfless volunteer and a person who turned all her disappointments either inward or into her dolls’ house. When I rang her answer phone said, ‘This is Lynne,’ then there was a pause as she explained herself, ‘Lynne Medhurst,’ which is easily the most self effacing recording on an answer phone I’ve heard.
I miss hearing it.
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