We wouldn’t usually run Shadows & Reflections this far into the New Year, but due to last week’s editorial gastrointestinal disaster, we’re a bit behind! No complaints from us though about drawing out our most favourite season of submissions just a little bit longer.
In one of the last handful of 2025/6 pieces, artist and writer Sam Francis contemplates the Malvern hills — which hold her family history in their haunches.
But on a May morning on Malvern Hills
A wonder befell me, an enchantment I thought.
I was weary with wandering and went for a rest
Under a broad bank beside a stream
And as I lay and leaned down and looked on the waters
I fell into a sleep as it flowed so sweetly.
– The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland
I found this book on the shelves where my Grandma’s poetry books live in the single spare room where I sleep when I visit. Like most of her books, it is deeply annotated in light pencil scrawls — always difficult to decipher, and more so as she got older. She was an English teacher, and an avid reader of poetry amongst other things. She loved Hardy the best. She liked that he told of ordinary lives, and that his words were grounded in everyday realism. My fierce Grandma, who while was encouraging of my writing, when I sent her something that had been published, said it was pretentious. Be more like Hardy, she meant.
In May this year, my Grandma died in bed, at home, in Malvern.
The Malvern hills have been omnipresent in my life. Those shapely rolling hills that dominate the otherwise flat lands of Worcestershire, or so it seems from the Worcestershire Beacon looking 360 degrees over to Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and further beyond to Wales. Having grown up there, at the foot of the North West hillside, they were my playground. As a teen I resented being dragged up their banks on family walks, yet gathered with friends for boozy rendezvous — they were our stomping ground. When I was young I couldn’t wait to leave Malvern to escape the confinement of its beauty. I wanted more grittiness in my own realism back then.
Malvern is somewhere I’ve regularly returned to throughout my life. I know the hills well. I’ve walked up and down and across their spine, their edges, and explored their high and low places, the lay of their land. I’ve slept on them, kissed on them, cried with them, dreamed with them, enchanted. As I turn off the M5 there they are, holding my family history in their haunches, all those tangled memories of lives played out there, the joys and the sadnesses. It always felt like going home. My Mum, who lived in Malvern since her own childhood, eventually moved from the hills to the coast, then five years ago my Grandfather died. This October, my Grandma’s husband (my Step-Grandfather) of 45 years, died too. Their house is now slowly being dismantled, and emptied of them. The walls that housed their lives soon to be put up for sale.
All this marks the loss of one tier of my family line, and the end of any familial ties to the place that connected me to my family history and my formative years. In a peculiar way that I don’t really understand when I first notice it, it feels as if Malvern itself has been a part of the family itself. A sturdy, unmoveable member who is unfailingly there. I feel as if i’m also grieving the loss of a place. People talk about grief being layered. Though it feels to me more like folds turning in on themselves, or more like a wrapping – much like leaves do to a tree in spring. I find myself drawn into attempting to make sense of the strange feeling this brings about of a place as a person, being, or entity so stitched into the fabric of family, with all of its memories and traces and sense of belonging contained within it.
Place attachment is the emotional bond people form with a location, serving as a way to describe the relationship between people and the places they inhabit. But what do you do when the people that occupied a place are no longer there? Is the place then stripped of its meaning? How does a place exist as an entity in its own right? Can we mourn the loss of a place as a person even though it still continues to exist? Might a place hold as much importance as a person? And I wonder if I have a tendency to anthropomorphise things even though I don’t believe this is the only way of something non-human being itself for itself? Does this make the thing more alive or relatable to me somehow? And in this case, does it make the people that once lived here feel more alive? Is it a subconscious plea to bring them back to life even? Or am I merely attempting to get a better sense of myself in the world, within grief in this way? These are the questions I’m asking.
In November I went to Malvern and stayed in my Grandparents’ house. I was the last to witness the Autumn flames of the Japanese acers in the garden that my Grandma loved as they continued their own cycle of life. I was back in part, as I had been invited to show some work in a phonebox-come-gallery at the Dingle on the foot of the West Malvern Hills. It was a reason, an excuse to go back. The work I was showing was about movement and cellular life-forms, reimagining a walk along familiar routes through the Malvern Hills. I attempted to see where in this movement I might find a sense of my feelings of loss as part of the slow course of mourning.
Alone in the house I wondered what to do. I’ve always been drawn to objects — personal stuff that once meant something to others. Objects that have become part of the fabric of a domestic landscape. The things that hold memories in some way representing parts of the person who they once belonged to. In some other way I have the feeling that such everyday objects are person containers. Going through my Grandma’s extensive chronicled life archive of papers and folders of family insights, notes, lists, and photos of loves, sorrows, losses, passions — vignettes of a richly lived life. They were formidable Scrabble players, keeping detailed logbooks of their games dating back to the 1970s — every word and score documented, even an analysis of all the games played. One of her last games was with me (a rare win for me). A historical game played with my long-absent father — one of the only traces of him left. I included these logs in an exhibition about collections many years back. They still fascinate me. I have long felt drawn to do something with her archive and the social history it tells, and centring this around the Scrabble collection. Yet when I looked for these logs in the fabric bag where they have always lived, only the more recent ones were there.
Who would have thought that Scrabble could be another wrapping of grief. I am lost for words. Oftentimes, the only way I can really make sense of what is going on is through engaging in a creative act that transforms my experience into something more tangible. I let this loss rearrange itself inside me, tile by tile. In a way, this is part of how I’m processing it here now by responding to the invitation to write my way into and through the year, as I tussle with the discomfort that these folds of loss have brought to it.
Early December, after my Step-Grandfather’s memorial, we gathered as a family in their home, probably for the last time, choosing objects to remind us of them, and sharing memories with new family secrets revealed. As the North Malvern clock tower that echoed through my childhood struck twelve, we went to see my Grandfather — his ashes buried beneath a sycamore tree on the hills opposite the house where many of us grew up. Signs of the first thin fingers of the daffodils we had planted were already beginning to emerge within the ring of stones gathered from the North quarry marking the site of his ground-up bones. My Uncle, passing the house on his way up, happened upon the current occupants in the driveway who invited him into the house. He said it was strange; so much the same and different. The house with the same conifer tree and bamboo shielding the front garden where my Grandfather sunbathed, and once people were rumoured to have danced naked at infamous old movie-themed family parties. The same wrought iron gate made by his hands, the outside garage where he made it now a room.
Before I headed home, I went for a compulsory walk on the hills. Taking a familiar route up from the clock tower, over the stone bridge where we would hang out as kids making fires and such like, past the spooky shelter, through the wooded valley and up the steep incline to the top of North Hill. Tracing out a map of memories that have neither shape or form as individual moments, yet seem to exist together as a mass, a life-long amalgam of consciousness with roots in the past. Try as I might, I couldn’t summon up a tangible sense of this as anything other than a vast awareness of an aura of place and people intertwined, their personal landscape, their wider terrain coupled together. There are moments whilst walking that feelings of grief can be evaded, as if through the motion of stepping I can shed it all off behind me. Yet of course you must stop at some point, and it catches up quick. The spaciousness of this landscape, these hills holding traces of my own life, and those I have loved taking occupancy in their contours, radiating out into the fresh air.
In this way, walking can be understood as a method of processing and repair, during which it is possible to just be with loss as it is. Grief with all its shadows and flickers of light appearing through traces of memory. As I approach the half-century mark I feel a sense of loss of the falling away of my youth, a recent fledgling relationship that didn’t make it, and the cat, nearly eighteen, who is going senile and isn’t long for this world. And it occurs to me there are many kinds of loss and grief, each becoming part of me in these dark days. Yet in the end, it’s all just a part of what makes up a life. And I wonder if I can re-define my relationship with Malvern for its own sake and transition into a different kind of relationship with it. I wonder if I will go back, and if so, what for besides nostalgia and a longing for the past. I wonder about the particular aspects of Malvern and what defines it for me as being quite different to what draws people to visit it as a beautiful place. And I wonder if I would feel this way about a less-than-beautiful place. I imagine I might, but I can’t be sure.
Epilogue
As the short day dwindled I carried on walking down into Green Valley, passing a broad bank beside a stream on the way to St Anne’s Well to fill my water bottle from the spring. Up the path towards Summer Hill, and across to the Wyche where I was weary with wandering and went for a rest. The trees were all but unwrapped, naked save for the odd amber leaf still hanging on, the bracken golden and drooping. The winter taking hold, folding in for now preparing for a reawakening, and with it, I fell into a sleep.
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Sam Francis is an artist who writes, based in North Somerset. You can follow her on Instagram here.