Roadkill

Strange childhood memories and how they linger. I keep getting images of roadkill in my head; January tends to have that effect. Not roadkill when it’s completely dead, but when it still has just enough life to drag itself off the road and into a ditch. I wonder what sort of roadkill I would be: a fox, a hare, probably a ferret.

On a family holiday to Lake Garda, I saw a huge dead badger at the side of the road, right at my feet. I must have been only nine or ten, but it’s still vivid. It had been ripped in two by the impact, flies buzzing around its exposed insides. We were on our way to the nearest pizza restaurant.

Mum found the holiday as a cheap package deal, which meant a coach to Italy. We slept on it for two nights, the seats reclining so everyone slept like suspended dominoes. I remember passing through Switzerland and being filed off the coach for breakfast in a wooden chalet. The holey cheese was a revelation. When we finally reached the campsite, we were led to a ramshackle little caravan with no toilet. Dad emptied the slop bucket every morning. Half of the campsite was used by the army for training, and the men would do their synchronized marches early. My older sister sat and watched them in fascination.

If I tried to draw the badger from memory, what would it look like? John Berger, has written extensively on drawing and I find myself turning to him recently when frustrated with painting: It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations…This is quite different from the later process of painting a ‘finished’ canvas or carving a statue. Here you do not pass through your subject but try to re-create it and house yourself in it. Each brush-mark or chisel stroke is no longer a stepping-stone, but a stone to be fitted into a planned edifice.’*

Maybe drawing offers a way out of the ditch and back onto the road, a clean slate, a tabula rasa.