scotland – tracey doxey

Making the, Dear Susan jumper.

AN EXTRACT FROM MY, ‘DEAR SUSAN,’ memoir from when I lived in Shetland

Shetland, Arrival August 2020

Dear Susan,

I begin with the outside, with what I have to hand; my reason, my eyes, my spatial understanding, and an openness tinged with the unknown.

On arriving, I need my first investigations of your croft house interior to be made alone. I want to inhale the house, listen to my internal feelings at first sight then recognise how my body responds to the old stones – I need to let body and stones talk to me. Thoughts and feelings need space. I need space. I haven’t yet found you. I do not know that you were born in this house 145 years ago.

It is a pale grey day, mist rolling over the hill behind the house as if a blind has been half pulled down a window. The sky is bleached out, the day is calm and windless, not particularly notable.

I open the front porch door, then, I try the house door with its mismatched glass panels. It opens. To the right in the tiny vestibule area, there is a third old, board-door, painted white with a hand-hewn square wooden knob which I turn to the right. The simple mechanism lifts a wooden latch inside. That sharp click sound of the latch lifting and hitting its wooden casing is the sound that I will forever remember of this place. It is my first sound here and it will probably be my last when I leave. It is a click of old wood against old wood, heard by every man, woman and child that has ever entered this house before me, for the last 180 years. Human touch leaves tangible traces of every hand that has opened it before me. The patina of years lies dirty on the paint’s surface.

Simultaneously, within the sound, my heart is given over to the first sight of the flag floor and fire place in the sitting room. In an instant, I am sold on sound and sight. I know I will not pull out of this crazy unseen deal to buy a house and change my life entirely.

Heart over head, I move in three weeks later, with two cats and a bag, the furniture and belongings on a lorry, to arrive a week later.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.Anais Nin

Dear Susan,

I am finding you.

I have been sent an image of your Brother – John Halcrow, in his Naval Uniform. I begin to look at censuses and the local history ancestry website then I ask around to find out about the previous inhabitants of this house. I called in at John’s to ask about you because I know nothing of the woman I had heard lived in the house for many years. He said to speak to Jim, so I went over the road to Jim’s and Martin was there too. They were off to Anne Mouat’s funeral but Jim was gracious with his time with me. He told me of you – Susanna (Susan, Cissie) who lived in the house that I now live in and that he was sent as a child, nearly 80 years ago, to collect the milk from you at your house. He told me that you had one cow on the croft, you sold milk, and you rowed the little hand-written paper milk bills up on a shelf in the porch – the same porch that I have. He was a young boy then but he clearly remembers you.

At the funeral, Martin spoke with Raymond whose Aunt lived in the house after you. You knew her, her name was Alice. Raymond came to see me the next day with a mesmerising handful of photographs of you. He introduced me to Susanna Halcrow (Susan, Cissie, or even Zizzie) The photographs, he told me, had been left in the house after his Aunt Alice had died some 30 years after you.

For the first time I could put a face to the name of a woman who lived in my old house for 83 years. Your face, your name. I sank to sit on the floor to look at your serene face in the images dating back to early 1900. Your candid expression caught by the lens of a camera, looking openly right back at me opened something inside me to find you more deeply.

You were born in this house on the 6^th February 1876 and Died on 4^th January 1960.

In the archives at the museum, I found that your Halcrow family had lived here through the 1800’s – 1960. They were listed in the 1888 valuation roll of the Symbister Estate, Whalsay, partly owned by the Laird, William Arthur Bruce (In 1888, John Halcrow, your Father) tenant, paid a yearly rent of £4, 10 Shillings for croft number 7. You would have been twelve years old (registered as knitter). The whole family are on the census of 1881 and ‘Susanna’ is listed as being five years old – there were seven people living in this small house at that time – Thomas Halcrow aged 86, Barbara Halcrow aged 83 (your grandparents), John Halcrow aged 40 and Ann Halcrow aged 41 (your parents) John aged nine, you aged five and a boy named John Brown aged 13, but you will already know this. Seven people living in this small two bedroomed house. Afterwards, I looked at records from 1838 and found your family, here, in Upperton.

In the grave yard at Levenwick cemetery, you lie on your own next to your parents and brothers. Your head is against the sea and in May, you rest above a bank carpeted in pale lemon primroses. I wonder if you are lonely, or if you are free.

Over the months after arriving, I became obsessed with you and wrote thoughts that occurred to me about you, on scraps of paper. These papers began to litter the house. I connected with you through a field of built environment in the house, photographs, your old pottery, the view from the sitting room window and eight sessions in the Shetland Museum archive which revealed the legal documents relating to some of the most notable social changes in Shetland between the 1880’s and mid 1950’s. The *Register of the Sasines, recorded the sale of the house from Laird to local in 1923, valuation rolls of rent paid for three generations of the Halcrow family for over 100 years are traceable, the Napier Commission registered the croft and detailed their calculated rental value and reduction of rents for Shetland crofters and the legal rights for tenants, the Small Holding Act, and I found the registered wills of your brother and finally your own, which gave me an insight into over one hundred years of three generations of Halcrow life within this old house. To the very end, with your serene looking gaze of steady calm and with a glint in your eyes, you put everything in order to the very last moment – crossing every t and dotting ever i. All of your wishes are written clearly in the directions of your will.

But, how am I to find out about you – what you thought and felt and how you lived? The neighbours reveal little.

So, I turn to the physical things to look at our lives carried out in the same place – the same stone walls of a house built so long ago – with no record of its beginning, how the breeze moves through the house through its open doors, the sound of the wooden doors and their opening and closing then there is the view – a view that has changed every single day of every single year but it is the same frame from which you looked and I now look out of at the changing world.

Your artifacts have been returned to the house – some pitchers, jugs, vases, plates, bowls. Before mixing them on the shelves with my own plates and jugs, I turn them around and around to connect with a life before and then there is the biggest connection of all – that you were and I am single women, living a life and paying the bills on our own in an old stone house facing the sea. Did you talk to Ralph, the dog, as I talk with Tiggy and Alfie?

I wonder about the touch upon things, the patina laid down by years of paint, of opening and closing the door, of turning door knobs, of opening and closing windows.

Finding you is like the moment I removed a damp layer of wallpaper in one gentle pull upwards, in an old abandoned derelict Shetland croft house, to reveal a perfect hand printed layer of pre 1950’s paper with wildflowers printed up it. Then, in one more pull that strip of hand printed wallpaper also came off the wall completely intact. I folded the paper and placed it under my jumper, its dampness pressed against the skin of my belly. I thought that if I were to paste the top layer of wall paper back over the void, then no one would know what had been before. No one would know what had been removed from underneath the top layer. It was as if it had never existed.

Finding you IS like finding old beautiful handprinted wallpaper lying beneath layers of less attractive paper. Then peeling it off in sections and placing it under my jumper for safety. Susan, you are under my jumper, next to my skin.

I lift the pewter lid of your old Victorian salt ware jug to look inside. Revealing, peeling, pasting, painting, lifting, closing, opening things in the house, as generations have done so before me. I paint over what has been on the walls and doors. I sit quietly to look at the layers of layers, like the quiet man who mediates first thing in the morning, stripping away layers of noise to his core, before all else happens in the day.

I spoke to Marylyn, who, as a 10-year-old child, moved in to this house with her family. It was the year you died. She told me of a wash stand in each bedroom and jugs and bowls, a sink at the bottom of the stairs and a radio on a dresser in the front room. These were your things left behind. I can picture them now. She told me that her and her brother slid down the green linoleum on the stairs and they telephoned their cousins in the house behind by joining two cans with a long piece of string and shouting out the back window in the north bedroom. I can hear their laughter now. Children in the house for the first time in over 60 years.

But, I wonder, who cares for our loved things?

The above words are from the beginning of my memoir which was never published. I did have an agent but she couldn’t get a publisher interested

While I lived in Shetland, I designed many hats and then branched out to my first jumper – The Dear Susan, which was supported by a VACMA award – Visual Arts, Creative Makers from Creative Scotland. The award bought me time to create and the Dear Susan jumper came out of that creation.

The Dear Susan Jumper, was released in July 2021 and had a 13 page story included about the woman that the jumper was named after

Susan Halcrow would have been one exemplary woman – crofter, single, attractive. She was alive through so many huge social changes in Shetland and she knew her rights. She lived in the houses I bought for 83 years.

After I designed the Dear Susan jumper in 2ply and in many sizes – I knitted a very quick, easy Aran, Dear Susan. which was finally published in December 2021. It was designed with love and enriched with the winds and rains of Shetland.

Looking back, I am proud of these two designs and the story behind them.

If you would like to knit either of these jumpers, you do get a 13 page story about my life in Shetland, with it.

Tracey Doxey Kofi

Have you ever wanted to know what it is like to sell up and go and live in Shetland?

Tiggy out on the lane outside the croft house I bought in Levenwick.

July, I made the decision to return to the city and share the reasons why.

July starts like this:-

July – Shetland

A month of sea swimming at Levenwick, at Spiggie, then on the west side.

Vegetables growing in builders’ sacks that I filled with sieved soil, in the roofless byre.

Speckle of Wild purple orchids peeping out of the long grass.

A long line of sea urchin shells residing in my newly painted deep bathroom window sill.

I return to sit upon a hill, by the sea, where the gulls drop the sea urchins to crack open for dinner – it is, Sea Urchin hill.

The old flagged back yard is dug out and cleared of a hundred years of weeds.

I cradle a large hedgehog curled in a great ball in the palm of both my hands, at Sumburgh Head where the fog horn sounds and the light spears out in the night.

The beautiful gift of a full Fleece from Francis, shorn from a ewe that I greatly admired daily in his field.

The most exquisite incomparable morning light over sea and sky.

The return of heavy fog for days and days.

I write ‘worry’ in the sand at the beach and let the sea wash it away but my worry still lingers in every moment.

The ‘Dear Susan’ jumper is finished – it glows upon the sands

I met with Hazel Tindel in town. She lifted my spirits and didn’t know that I had felt so low

Reading Saturday’s guardian on the bench on Sunday, a Sheffield potted baby oak tree at my feet.

The inside of the understairs cupboard door is papered perfectly with the wallpaper that I lifted from the derelict house.

My first intrepid knitting visitors to the house for a colour blending workshop are welcomed – A hint of things to come.

A visit back to my city of Sheffield, where a daughter meets me for 3 hours from London and I know. I just know.

Here is the beginning of July’s post – extract

Moments on the edge

Have you ever driven to the very edge of the rock upon which you live, so that you can see the curvature of the earth on the horizon in the fading light of the day? To sit, to knit, to think, to feel? To Be grateful for this roller coaster of beautiful life? Have you sat still long enough to hear the call of a thousand birds beneath the whir of a lighthouse light gently turning and the sea slightly roaring below your feet? This is where time stops and the world slows down.

Four New online knitting workshops

New online workshops.

I live in Sheffield. Whilst I was sorting out yarn this afternoon for my 2^nd Fair Isle Pullover, Richard Hawley’s ‘People’, was playing on Six radio. I stopped to listen. Sheffield, is, I have realised my home – I have lived here since 1998 but honestly, I didn’t realise until a conversation with my son last week, that ‘I live in Sheffield’ . I may sound odd to you but to me, I have always been looking to other places, mostly far away.

_{Saturday 8th June, my bike outside the beautiful Three Tunns pub, Sheffield}

I have got on a train and got off and lived and worked in China, I’ve lived in Salzburg, London, and of course, Shetland. I have been a traveller for some years and travel is part of my art but, honestly, I have only just realised that, Sheffield is where I live, where I want to live; it is my home. And then, Richard sings, ‘People’ and I could understand every word – every place mentioned and how people are called, ‘Love’ it is a colloquialism – People in this city, call us ‘Luv’ – On the bus, at work, at the fruit and veg markets stall, at the chip shop, about town, not always, but a certain generation, it is often.

I love Sheffield, the city centre is a bit broken, the SHU university is financially on its financial knees, and there isn’t much here but there is also everything here. Art, music, friends, cinema days, festivals, history, vintage shops, people – ‘who fight for every breath’ and so much more. I am proud of this gritty city.

Anyway, I digress, whilst I was setting up my little video of my swatch book for my new Swatch workshop on 5^th July, Richard’s new song – ‘People’ came on the radio. I found it quite haunting. It is love of a city and a life and people. So, I recorded the video with Richard singing in the background. It seemed quite fitting.

I am not sure how the swatch workshop on 5th July, will pan out yet but I am asking for registrations of interest.

I am also doing a one off special FREE online zoom workshop for everyone who has bought the Fair Isle Pullover worksheet. The session will help anyone who has bought the worksheet, to develop ideas of colour, alignment of Fair Isle motifs in your project and ideas to help you get the best out of the worksheet to make a great project – it could be a hat, scarf, jumper of vest. This session is on 22^nd June at 3-4pm UK time. You don’t have to register for this one – I will email everyone who bought the pattern with zoom joining instructions on 19^th June – so you still have time to buy the worksheet, if you have been thinking about it. It is here.

If I was still living in Shetland, my workshops were sold out within 30 minutes of advertising them. Now they take time because I live in a city far away from Shetland. But, I am still the same person, and my workshops have developed into much better experiences than when I was in Shetland. Come and join me.

TWO NEW DATES FOR MY ONLINE COLOUR BLENDING WORKSHOP IN JULY

DATES AND INFORMATION on all workshops in this link HERE

PS, if you don’t follow me on instagram – there are lots more images in updates there – https://www.instagram.com/traceydoxey/

Let me know your thoughts in the comments. See you soon.

Tracey 🙂

A journey to Shetland and back

I am sitting in the calm, welcome sunshine resting on the small patch of grass outside my flat in Sheffield, which I have surrounded with strong sunflower plants that I grew from seeds, a sea of forget me nots, beautiful jasmines in early bud, potatoes growing in bags, peonies in bud and the hydrangea taking over. I am at my laptop setting up my June post for ‘My Shetland life’, on Patreon – the month of June in Shetland.

I remember when I first moved to that beautiful croft house in Shetland and the wonders of existence that I felt every day, until I had to leave 14 months later. I wrote a book in monthly chapters of my life that year on the island, I also wrote to the woman who had lived in the house from 1976 to 1960.

If you have ever wanted to live on an island, or move to a remote place, either as a couple or a single woman – then, you may be interested in the story I have to tell. I have released each month as a chapter, that aligns with the month that we are currently in so that it will give insight into where you live and what Shetland is like. I release the chapters on the 1st of each month. I am sitting in the city calmness, rereading my June chapter before I set it up ready for release and I wanted to share an extract with you.

Extract from May

It is the first day of the fifth month. I’m excited to take a seat on the small seven-seater plane to Fair Isle. The trip is easier for me than someone not living on the island but even so, it’s not a straightforward flight, which makes it all the more unique. I’m used to the flight path from one island to another, but the close proximity of the tiny plane flying low above the land and sea coupled with the craziness of flying in something so small never ceases to amaze me. In the small building at Tingwall airstrip, I watch the flight safety video on a small tv balanced on a table, take a seat amid the two rows of six orange plastic chairs to wait. One of the guys who loads the plane plays his guitar in a room behind me – I hand my bags to the official man, whom I know by name, at the weighing scales to measure the weight of baggage going south (never on the return flight though), and smile.

Outside, where the plane rests on the tarmac, I wait to be seated inside, related to body weight and distribution of balance. We don’t want all of the bodies on one side, tipping the plane, do we. Bags are stowed in the back of the tapering metal tail, behind a net. I’m seated above the wheel and love it. My view down is obstructed by the tiny comical looking triangular metal blue leg with two fat small rubber wheels. It’s like the spindly leg of a blue metal bird.

Extract from June

At 1am, the horizon line between sea and sky is still visible. In the gloaming, the sky to the North is a pink stripe of clouds where the sunlight lingers between setting and rising, neither dusk nor twilight. Suspended half-light where everything is still visible. A magical dreamlike world twists in the atmosphere. The energy of the island atmosphere charges our weak bodies. The magnetism in the environment of this northerly world is palpable. It makes me spin. It draws me outside like a moth drawn to the light bulb.

Together, the two merging lights and the calmness of the evenings full of bird calls are recognisable as only Shetland.

Time is like a breath. It feels as if our island world held its breath so long during Winter and spring, that now, there is an opportunity for a gentle exhale.

On the 12^th, I do the rarest investment of time and money, I leave the island for Edinburgh for four days, and I take a small plane from Sumburgh. On the tram into the city, I see healthy green trees for the first time in 10 months. Before my friend arrives, I drop in at the City Arts Centre and find the oil painting, La Musica Veneziana, by Charles Hodge Mackie. So beautiful is a dome of light in this painting that I sit opposite it for some time, thinking of Chinese style lanterns dancing in the breeze above the gondola at night. The grand buildings framing half of the painting draw the eye to a life I have never known. Gondolas float on the water at the forefront. But it is the dome of light that holds my attention. It may be the lights of a building, I couldn’t say and I didn’t need to know. it’s such a captivating work that it needs time. It was painted in 1909 and I thought of Susan, living in Shetland in 1909 at the age of 33 and that if I could pick any single work of art from here to show her, it would be this painting. So that she could see something of another floating sea world so different to that of her own.

What light we lose in the winter, we gain in the summer. The Simmer Dim rolls in upon us bringing days in waves and folds of calm, still light so long and rich that they stretch my mind. The bank sides on the drive home from Lerwick, are covered in long swathes and carpets of dancing white dog daisies. I’m shopping at Tesco at 10pm thinking it is day time and on the way home, at St Ninian’s at 11pm, the gloaming light astonishes me – I am home at 11:20pm feeling restless, so, I nip to Levenwick beach at midnight There are two magical lights in the calendar of the Shetland year.
One, is the cracking open of the world between sea and sky in the deep winter where the sun light spears then leaks along the horizon just before the sun rise and now, this crazy time of Simmerdim, where I am out at 1:30am looking at the sky to the North where a pink line of clouds lie suspended where the sun light lingers in a place that I don’t know about. Suspended light…

I am wondering if I actually do tick things off a subliminal list – the sun sets after midnight, ducks flying overhead quacking, a beautiful boat bobbing in the bay. I don’t feel that this is ticking things off, this is just watching, listening, waiting, experiencing. My face glows in the setting sun light while I knit on the beach. My legs shiver with cold. I feel it all. Nothing is missed. I knit the sea, air, and light into this jumper of mine and I am grateful to take the risk to live here. If I squint at the setting sun, it becomes a pointed star shooting deepest red, orange rays across the sea. The red fire ball sinks into the sea but there is no boiling water as if a hot iron dipping at the iron smiths. Suddenly a few folks arrive at the beach to witness the spectacle I wait for the green flash but there is none, the sun sank into the sea at exactly 10:30pm having bored its light into my retinas.

https://www.patreon.com/Tracey_Doxey

The Dear Susan jumper that I finished in May, is also here

An accumulation of Impulses – Dear Susan

I had a dream, I achieved that dream but I had to leave it behind. My story is about finding joy / fear, love and loss, heart and soul – trapped and free over the duration of 14 months.

Capturing that year is too big a task. So, I am trying. Many people write about their dream to leave the city and to move to an island life – few write about the reality of that seismic change and the decision to leave the dream, of leaving behind hopes, love, dreams, can be read as failure – but only to those who have never tried.

I tried my hardest and here are the remains of that massive attempt. This is the story I created, then broke down with hardly a word to say for it.

THE HOUSE OF TWO WOMEN

Dear Susan.

Synopsis

‘I stand for a second to take in the moment, to look at the old plank-board door with a square wooden knob, which I finally turn sharply to the right. The simple mechanism lifts a wooden latch inside. Human touch has left tangible traces of every hand that has opened this door before me. The hollow sound of the sneck – a door latch hitting its casing – is what I will always remember of this place. I understand that it is a unique sound to this house, one that will forever embody a simple place of great beauty. In this exact moment, I am sold on the sound of a wooden latch and the view of the stone flag floor in the empty room in front of me. Before the agent has even arrived, I know that I will not pull out of this crazy unfinished deal to buy this house and change my life forever. I won’t admit to the agent that it is the sound of the sneck that sealed the deal, but it is.’

This book is my story: a single, 57-year-old Yorkshire woman who dared to follow a dream against all odds; to sell up and risk all to move lock, stock and two cats from a small city flat to a home facing the sea, in the northernmost reaches of Scotland, the islands of Shetland. It is a love letter to Shetland and its extreme elemental landscapes; to an old croft house and three generations of the same family who lived there for more than 140 years, knitting and landscapes. It is an accumulation of impulses. This is also the story of hope and desire and of demise and leaving.

Here, are the bones of my life of one year on an island and the letters I wrote to Susan Halcrow, a woman that once lived in the house, from 1876 to 1960. It unfolds in monthly instalments, beginning on the very first day I visited the house, and heard the sneck, in August 2020, to my last sunrise in October 2021, when I walked away, never to look back again. I dreamed of living on the island to be closer to nature, creativity and a life less ordinary, with my knitting practice at the heart of every day; of moving through slow travel across sea and natural beauty, to come to a personal understanding of both inner and outer landscapes. I never dreamed I would want to leave to return to the city.

I hope to share how emotionally challenging it is to make such a seismic life-change from city to island life and how my being an incomer, made it hard to find community both with some islanders and with some other local incomers.

The full book, written entirely from the islands of Shetland, ending abruptly in October 2021, offering an insight into island life and, finally explaining the reasons why I had to sell up and leave, to never look back again. Here, I draw out the bones of it in letters to Susan.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver.