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Wednesday Early Closing Find!

This is the title of Norman Nicholson's autobiography published in 1975. Norman Nicholson was born in Millom in 1914 and lived all his life in the same house in St George's Terrace. He is obviously best known for his wonderful poetry but I would recommend this book to anyone - it is quite delightful. His power of recall is amazing but perhaps that stems from growing up in such a close-knit community surrounded by your extended family. The poet in him emerges in the lyrical prose and his powers of description are second to none. No words are wasted yet the reader can picture as they read the small rooms of the house with the shop at the front; the grandparents, aunts and uncles; the iron works; the school and the surrounding countryside.

The book opens with Norman, at the tender age of 5, being told by his grandmother that his mother has died and "gone to join the angels". There follows a passage describing how he is sitting by the fire which he can remember so clearly: 'On my eight-inch stool I was about the right height to stare level into the fire. I have always been a good starer into fires. And this fire was framed like a picture by the old fire-place of black marble, or what I thought was black marble, though I now know it to be of polished and painted slate. Set round it were three long panels - one, upright, on either side, and one, horizontal, above - all of red marble, like red grained wood or red ink running on blotting paper. A few years later I would see the pattern as a map of unendingly explorable archipelagos. The canopy or hood was of iron, embossed with lily stalks, heart-shaped leaves and snakes knotted like bow ties. Similar bows appeared again, red on green ground, on the square tiles my father had set into a kind of entablature on either side of the fire. In the half-light, before the gas was lit, the fire-place turned into a cave, glowing red and green deep down in the gullet, where my fancy could tunnel and hide and lose itself for hours and hours'. What wonderful writing - as I read that passage I was sitting on a small stool next to the young boy staring into the fire myself.

By coming to know the daily life of Norman Nicholson as he grows up the reader also comes to learn of what life is like for the people who live in the small town of Millom. He describes the shopkeepers, the teachers, the children, the sporting heroes of Millom cricket team, the Wesleyans and Methodists, the Catholics and the Non-Conformists, the bank manger and the owner of the Iron Works. We see the hardship and poverty of many of the families as they struggle to make ends meet.

Later on I discovered the reason Norman Nicholson gave his book the title 'Wednesday Early Closing'. He describes how hard his father worked in the shop and how he looked forward to the respite that came with early closing on a Wednesday.

'Sunday, of course, was everybody's day off, but Wednesday afternoon was the tradesman's own privilege. I learned, as a very young child, to look forward to the peace which came over the house on Wednesday afternoons. To other boys, holiday times meant bustle and stir, the shops lit up and the streets crowded; to me they meant quietness. Even today, when I visit a town for the first time, I prefer to go on an Early Closing Day. I enjoy seeing the shops empty, the shop doors shut, the streets un-crowded. In later years, when I was lying ill in the bedroom two storeys above the shop, I would often start up with a little thrill of pleasure when I heard the yale lock click into place at twelve-thirty on Wednesday. "Early Closing", I would say to myself, and lie back on the pillow, determined to enjoy it........For Wednesday seemed to be a quite special kind of Red Letter Day - one not shared by the public, but private and peculiar to my father and me. If Sunday was the Lord's Day, Wednesday was our day.' 

Look out for more blogs about Norman Nicholson from Grange Reading Detectives but in the meantime read this book - a true hidden gem.

There are lots of websites about Norman and his poetry but here are links to two of them:

www.normannicholson.org.uk 

http://www.cleo.net.uk/consultants_resources//english/norman3/index.html/

The first link is to the Norman Nicholson Society website whose patron is Melvyn Bragg (more about him later!) and the second link is to a site where you can hear Neil Curry (you've already met him!) reading five of Norman's poems.

30 August 2009 from Mary Rossall

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