Molly Drake was born into English middle-class privilege, endured the vicissitudes of war, raised two gifted children, and suffered terrible family trauma. She was also a remarkable poet and musician who did not publish any of her work during her lifetime.

For her, creativity was a private pursuit; a natural articulation of her thoughts and feelings; an expression of talent that didn’t need recognition or affirmation.

‘I sometimes think when it is time to die
I may perhaps have learnt the way to live.
I may have learnt to sift from out the grain
The chaff of littleness that blurs my eyes,
Small worries, little thoughts and little ways,
That creeping canker of insignificance
That eat away the very heart of life
And leaves behind the dull and flaccid shell.
I live hard, and oh, I hardly live
If living is become life’s only business.
And so I go stumbling and all perplexed,
Puffed on the dreary wind of little fears,
An eddied leaf jostled upon the tide
And seeing not the tide’s magnificence.’

Molly Drake, ‘Martha’ (Poem)

Molly was born in 1915 to military parents stationed in Rangoon. Educated in England, she returned to Burma, where she met and married Rodney Drake. With the outbreak of World War 2, Rodney enlisted and Molly made the gruelling trek on foot to Delhi with her sister Nancy. In comparative safety there, she formed a musical duet with Nancy, and worked as a co-host on All India Radio. Towards the end of the war, she was reunited with her husband, and gave birth to their two children, Gabrielle and Nick.

In 1952 the Drakes moved to England, to Tanworth-in-Arden, where Molly spent the rest of her life. As well as raising her children, she composed poems and songs, and played the piano for family and friends.

‘I never thought I was glamorous,
Nor dreamed I could inspire
Feelings that were amorous,
Red-hot flames of desire.
But now the door has opened on
A land of milk and honey.
It’s wonderful, it’s marvellous
But Lord! It’s terribly funny.’

Molly Drake, ‘Laugh of the Year’ (Song)

Molly was quiet, shy and somewhat reclusive, and her life was in many ways typical of a woman of her era and class. It was marked by conventional milestones; sustained by the usual hopes and disappointments; encumbered by the ordinary domestic duties. And yet it also saw terrible tragedy.

Gabrielle grew up to become an actor and Nick a musician. But Nick had poor mental health, and in 1974, aged 26, he was found dead due to an overdose of antidepressants.

Molly dealt with her grief in the old-fashioned way. She didn’t complain. She kept busy. She wrote, composed and played. She carried on.

‘But time is ever a vagabond,
Time was always a thief.
Time can steal away happiness,
But time can take away grief.
So I won’t try to remember,
For that way leads to regret.
No, I won’t try to remember
What I can never forget.’

Molly Drake, ‘Do You Ever Remember?’ (Song)

With Rodney’s help, in the 1950s Molly recorded some of her songs at home on a reel-to-reel tape machine. The recordings were later re-engineered by John Wood (who had worked closely with Nick) and finally issued in 2013.

Accompanying herself on the piano, Molly sings tunefully, mournfully, in a Home Counties accent. With precise phrasing and occasionally a wry smile, she tells of mercurial love and fleeting happiness; of consoling nights and sustaining dreams. She relates stories of birds and butterflies; wild winds and summer rains; of the pain of nostalgia and forced separation; of regretful recollections and the constraints of motherhood.

I was particularly struck by one composition, ‘I Remember,’ in which Molly recounts how a couple have completely different memories of the same events.

'We tramped the open moorland in the rainy April weather,
And came upon the little inn that we had found together.
The landlord gave us toast and tea and stopped to share a joke,
And I remember firelight,
I remember firelight,
I remember firelight,
And you remember smoke.

We ran about the meadow grass with all the harebells bending,
And shaking in the summer wind the Summer never ending.
We wandered to the little stream among the river flats,
And I remember willow trees,
I remember willow trees,
I remember willow trees,
And you remember gnats.’

Molly Drake, ‘I Remember' (Song)

At the conclusion of this recording, you can just make out Rodney’s quiet approval:

‘I should think that's really good.’

Memory is an elusive space, sometimes crisp and clear, sometimes vague and nebulous. Rarely consistent, often disputed, it binds us together and drives us apart. Some of us view the past through rose tinted spectacles; others see it through clouds of gloom. ‘Recollections may vary.’

And because of all this, memory is a prime source and subject for creativity.

'To me a poem is not a forever thing, nor the statement of long held views, but the product of a moment so suddenly and hurtingly felt that it has to burst out into words.'

Molly died in 1993 and was buried in Tanworth-in-Arden, alongside her husband and son. Early on the morning of Christmas Day 1992, her last Christmas, she had written the following stanza:

‘Amid the unceasing starts and flurries
My heart is busy at its usual game,
The manufacturing of woes and worries
Lest the serene of life should seem too tame.’

‘We strolled the Spanish marketplace at ninety in the shade,
With all the fruit and vegetables so temptingly arrayed,
And we can share a memory as every lover must,
And I remember oranges,
I remember oranges,
I remember oranges,
And you remember dust.

The autumn leaves are tumbling down and winter's almost here,
But through the Spring and Summer time we laughed away the year,
And now we can be grateful for the gift of memory,
When I remember having fun,
Two happy hearts that beat as one,
When I had thought that we were we,
But we were you and me.’

Molly Drake, ‘I Remember' (Song)

No. 508

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the art of Tirzah Garwood. (The Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 26 May)

Garwood was a wood-engraver, paper marbler and painter, who approached her work with a sharp mind, a sensitive touch and a satirical eye. She prompts us to see the amusing, absurd and uncanny in the detail of everyday life.

Eileen Lucy Garwood was born into a military family in Gillingham in 1908. She acquired the nickname Tirzah as a corruption of Tertia, Latin for ‘third child’. Having grown up in the various towns of southern England where her father was posted, she studied at the Eastbourne School of Art. There she was taught wood-engraving by Eric Ravilious, whom she married in 1930.

Garwood’s engravings were imaginatively conceived and precisely executed. They abounded in wry observations and witty juxtapositions.

Here’s a young Garwood on a trip to Kensington High Street with her formidable aunt. The shoppers, wrapped up against the cold, pass comically posed mannequins in summer fashions. Back at home, in her comfortable dressing gown and slippers, an older Garwood stretches and yawns extravagantly, as her contented dog sleeps at her feet. Here a cloche-hatted Garwood, in a neat pussy-bow blouse, sits in a third-class railway compartment. She clutches her purse to her lap, wide awake and alert, as the two suited men opposite take a snooze. Meanwhile her bald, moustachioed father, concentrates on composing a letter at his desk, closely observed by a flat-capped window cleaner. And Ravilious stands enigmatically in the garden, in a trench coat and fedora, a marrow under each arm.

Garwood’s conservative parents were suspicious of working-class Ravilious and the influence he was having on their daughter.

[My parents] ‘thought my subjects hideous, and that Mr Ravilious was perverting a nice girl who used to draw fairies and flowers into a stranger who rounded on them and did drawings that were only too clearly caricatures of themselves.’

Tirzah Garwood - The Train Journey 1929. Wood engraving. Private collection

Garwood’s theme was not just her family. More broadly it was mid-century English society. She shows us the domestic rituals, the complex relationships, the contours of class and gender.

As a group of uniformed schoolgirls marches along the street in a crocodile, one pupil gives an affectionate pat to an attentive black terrier. Formally dressed partygoers conduct a séance, concentrating intensely as they reach out their hands in the dark. A lady marvels at her distorted reflection in the Hall of Mirrors. A young woman chats to her sister as she bathes. And granny plays an ace at the card table.

Garwood’s gaze is always acute, amused, affectionate.

Garwood and Ravilious set up home in rural Essex, where they had three children.
Increasingly, her time was taken up with childcare and domestic tasks. Her art took a back seat.

‘I always regret that I stopped working because it is difficult with a house to think about.’

*Tirzah, 1950, Photograph by Edwin Smith. Private Collection*

Nonetheless, Garwood still found time to take up paper marbling for lampshades and books. This involved dropping blobs of thinned oil paint onto a ‘bath’ of gum-thickened water, and then teasing patterns from it with a stylus. Her nature-inspired designs were fragile, complex, harmonious, and became popular with London interiors shops.

‘Marbling gave me pleasure because I felt no-one else could do this.’

Garwood clearly had a restlessly creative mind. At the exhibition you can see a scrapbook filled with her fantastical cuttings and illustrations. There’s also a patchwork quilt, a design for a children’s counting book, a series of ‘portraits’ of local village houses, and some charming ink sketches - including one of a melancholy snow woman in the back garden. She effortlessly crossed the divide between art, craft and design.

Tirzah Garwood - Window Cleaner c.1927, pen, ink & watercolour. Private collection

While still in her thirties, Garwood suffered a double blow. In 1941 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had emergency mastectomy surgery. The following year, while Ravilious was serving as a war artist, his plane went missing off Iceland. His body was never recovered.

Garwood later wrote that she endured ‘spasms of dreadful sorrow because Eric wasn’t there to share some joke, or some odd occurrence… and worst of all, to appreciate the children.’

Two years after her husband’s death, Garwood began painting in oils. She developed a style that was both sophisticated and naïve. A seemingly innocent world of toys, animals, flowers and insects is haunted by anxiety. A kitten looms over a toy castle by a row of black pansies. A goose in a field rears up as she senses a threat to her goslings. Seen from above, a group of children play hide and seek in a garden in deep shadow.

In 1948 Garwood was again diagnosed with cancer, and, with no hope of recovery, she was subsequently admitted to a nursing home. Often in pain from her therapy, she nonetheless completed some twenty small oil paintings. She described her last year as the happiest of her life.

Tirzah Garwood died in 1951 and was buried in Copford. Her gravestone reads:

‘Blessed be the eyes that see the things that ye see.’
Luke 10:23

'Each little day is a world of its own,
Each little day is a tomb.
Whenever the day has drifted away,
It's back to the womb .
As I lie alone in the darkness,
Waiting the next rebirth,
I say for me what could very well be
For everyone else on earth.
Could be the first day of the best of my life.
There could be sunlight, there could be rain.
But losing or winning, this is beginning all over again.
This is the birthday of a brand new start,
Change of direction, change of heart.
When I think of today, I feel tempted to say,
Destiny, do your worst.
Of the rest of the days of the rest of my life,
This is only the first.’
Molly Drake, 'The First Day'

No. 504

Molly Drake: ‘I Remember Firelight and You Remember Smoke’

The Satirical Perspective of Tirzah Garwood: ‘Blessed Be the Eyes that See the Things that Ye See.’