Ali Smith - Autumn

An expert gets really excited. She explains to the camera that the brown clothed boy charity box, a Dr Barnardo’s boy, is the most vintage of the set. She points out that the typography on the base the boy is standing on is pre-1960s, and that the little verse written on that base — Please Give, So He May Live — is itself a relic from a different time. Then she gives the camera a nod and a wink and tells it that if it were her she’d go for the spaniel regardless, because things in the shapes of dogs always do well at auction, and the brown clothed boy, though it has vintage status, is less likely to do as well as it ought to, unless the auction is an online one.

What they’re not saying, her mother says, and maybe they’re not saying it because they don’t know it, is that those boxes came about because of real dogs back at the turn of the last century who worked going round places like railway stations with boxes hung round their necks for people to put pennies into. For charity.

Ah, Elisabeth says.

Those dog boxes, like that one there, were modelled on the real live creatures, her mother says. And furthermore. After the real live creatures died they would sometimes be stuffed by taxidermists and then placed back in the station or wherever, whichever public place they’d spent their working lives in. So you’d go to the station and there’d be Nip sitting there, or Rex, or Bob, dead, stuffed, but still with the box round his neck. And that, I’m certain, is where those dog-shaped charity boxes came from.

Elisabeth is faintly perturbed. She realizes this is because she likes to imagine her mother knows nothing much about anything.

Meanwhile the contestants on the screen spill out of the door excited about a set of mugs with Abraham Lincoln’s Fiscal Policy printed on their sides. Outside the warehouse, in the green wastelands round about, there’s a butterfly on the screen behind the heads of the presenters, small white waverer going from flowerhead to flowerhead.

And in astonishingly good nick, a celebrity is saying.

Hornsea, 1974, her mother says. Collector’s dream.

Mid-70s, Yorkshire, the expert who’s bought them says. Good clear Hornsea mark from the American Presidents series on the base, the eagle mark. Hornsea started in 1949 after the war, went into receivership fifteen years ago, thriving in the 70s. Above all it’s unusual to see seven of these together like this. A collector’s dream.

See? her mother says.

Yes, but you’ve seen this episode already. So it’s no big deal you knowing where they come from, Elisabeth says.

I know that. I meant I’m learning , her mother says. I meant I now know that that’s what they are.

And I’d say that’s the lot I’d be most worried about at auction, the first expert says in voiceover while the programme shows pictures of the chipped old charity boxes, one of the ordinary people rocking the red girl with the brace on her leg from side to side to see if there’s any money still inside it.

I can’t watch any more of this, Elisabeth says.

Why not? her mother says.

I mean I’ve seen enough, Elisabeth says. I’ve seen plenty. Thank you. It’s very very exciting that you’ll be on it.

Then her mother takes the laptop back to show Elisabeth one of the celebrities she’ll be on the programme with.

Up comes a photograph of a woman in her sixties. Her mother waves the laptop in the air.

Look! she says. It’s amazing, isn’t it?

I have absolutely no idea who that is, Elisabeth says.

It’s Johnnie ! her mother says. From Call Box Kids !

The woman in her sixties was apparently a person on TV when Elisabeth’s mother was a child.

I actually can’t believe it, her mother is saying. I can’t believe that I’m going to get to meet Johnnie. If only your grandmother was alive. If only I could tell her. If only I could tell my ten year old self. My ten year old self’d die with the excitement. Not just to get to meet. To get to be on a programme. With Johnnie.

Her mother turns the laptop towards her with a YouTube page up.

See? she says.

A girl of about fourteen in a checked shirt and with her hair in a ponytail is dancing a routine in a TV studio made to look like a London street, and the dancer she’s dancing with is dressed as a phonebox, so that it literally looks like a public phonebox is dancing with the girl. The phonebox is rather rigid, as dancers go, and the girl has made herself rigid too and is doing steps to match the phonebox’s. The girl is bright, warm, likeable, and the dancer inside the phonebox costume is making a pretty good attempt at dancing like a phonebox might. The street stops its business and everybody watches the dance. Then out of the open door of the box comes the receiver, up on its flex like a charmed snake, and the girl takes it, puts it to her head and the dance ends when she says the word: hello?

I actually remember seeing this very episode, Elisabeth’s mother says. In our front room. When I was small.

Gosh, Elisabeth says.

Her mother watches it again. Elisabeth skims the day’s paper on her phone to catch up on the usual huge changes there’ve been in the last half hour. She clicks on an article headed Look Into My Eyes: Leave. EU Campaign Consulted TV Hypnotist. She scrolls down and skims the screen. The Power To Influence. I Can Make You Happy. Hypnotic Gastric Band. Helped produce social media ads. Are you concerned? Are you worried? Isn’t it time? Being engrossed in TV broadcasts equally hypnotic. Facts don’t work. Connect with people emotionally. Trump. Her mother starts the forty years ago dance routine up one more time; the jaunty music begins again.

Elisabeth switches her phone off and goes through to the hall to get her coat.

I’m off out for a bit, she says.

Her mother, still in front of the screen, nods and waves without looking. Her eyes are bright with what are probably tears.

But it’s a lovely day.

Elisabeth walks through the village, wondering if those children-shaped charity boxes, since the dogs were modelled on real dogs, were also modelled on real beggars, small ones, child-beggars with callipers, boxes hung round their necks. Then she wonders if there was ever a plan afoot to taxiderm real children and stand them in stations.

As she passes the house with GO and HOME still written across it she sees that underneath this someone has added, in varying bright colours, WE ARE ALREADY HOME THANK YOU and painted a tree next to it and a row of bright red flowers underneath it. There are flowers, lots of real ones, in cellophane and paper, on the pavement outside the house, so it looks a bit like an accident has recently happened there.

She takes a photograph of the painted tree and flowers. Then she walks out of the village across the football pitch and out into the fields, thinking about the cow parsley, the painted flowers. The painting by Pauline Boty comes into her head, the one called With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo. Maybe there’s something in it whether she’s got a job or not, something about the use of colour as language, the natural use of colour alongside the aesthetic use, the wild joyful brightness painted on the front of that house in a dire time, alongside the action of a painting like that one by Boty, in which a two-dimensional self is crowned with sensual colour, surrounded by orange and green and red so pure it’s like they’ve come straight out of the tube on to the canvas, and not just by colour but by notional petals, the deep genital looking rose formation all over the hat on the head of the image of Belmondo as if to press him richly under at the same time as raise him richly up.

The cow parsley. The painted flowers. Boty’s sheer unadulterated reds in the re-image-ing of the image. Put it together and what have you got? Anything useful?