Ali Smith: Autumn

In her head whenever she thought of the true-life story round the Scandal scandal, one tiny detail in the story barbed into her like a fishhook.

An art historian called Blunt, who’d soon have his own sex/intelligence scandal to deal with, had turned up, in the middle of the Scandal trial in 1963, at an art gallery in London where there was an exhibition of portraiture. It was the work of Stephen Ward, who’d become the villain or the fall guy of the scandal at the time and who’d shortly be dead in what looked to be suicide. Ward had done portraits of rich and famous people of the time, aristocracy, royalty, political royalty, and many of them were on show here. Blunt had handed over a massive amount of cash and bought them all, everything in the gallery, outright.

He’d apparently taken them away and, the books and articles said, had them destroyed.

How had he destroyed them? Had he set them alight in some well-to-do hearth? Had he doused them in petrol in an isolated country house garden?

What Elisabeth imagined was that there was a hole dug deep in a stubbly harvested cornfield somewhere in the middle of nowhere by a tractor-sized digger, properly deep, deep enough for a couple of bodies. A small team of people stood round the rim of the hole and tossed into it portrait after portrait, making a mass grave of portraits, a pile-up of VIPs.

Then she imagined the small team of people dragging and shoving a freshly slaughtered horse or cow off the back of a lorry into the digger’s mouth. She imagined the digger mechanically positioning the horse or cow carcass above the hole with the portraits in it, then the driver pushing the lever and the carcass dropping into the hole. She imagined the digger shunting the field’s earth over the art and the carcass and filling the hole. She imagined the treads of the digger flattening the mound, and the people dusting their clothes down, washing the earth off their hands and cleaning it out of their nails when they got back to somewhere with water.

The horse or the cow was an extra flourish. If Elisabeth were a painter it’d be how she’d have signified the rot.

Sometimes she imagined the Boty Scandal 63 painting in there too, the carcass falling on to it, the weight of it splitting the picture’s wooden stretcher. She imagined Blunt coming up the stairs of the house Boty’s studio was in, his pockets full of banknotes, him not deigning to touch the banister with the filth of the pre-war years, the war years and the post-war decade still deep in its wooden ridges.

But you can’t write any of that in a dissertation.

Look, she’d been doodling in the margin. There were swirls and waves and spirals.

She looked back at what she’d actually written down. Art like this examines and makes possible a reassessment of the outer appearances of things .

She laughed.

She took her pencil, rubbed out the capital A with the rubber on its tip, made it the lower case word art, then added a completely new word right at the front of the sentence so the sentence began

Arty art

Portrait in words of our next door neighbour

Our Next door neighbour to our new house we have moved to is the most elegant neighbour I have so far had. He is not old. My mother will not let me ask him the questions about being a neighbour that I am meant to be asking him for the portrait in words project we are meat to do. She says I am not allowed to bother him. She has said that she will buy us a new video player and the Beauty and The Beast video if I make up I am asking him the questions in stead of ask them in real life. To be honest I would rather not have the video or video player I would rather ask him them, what it is like to have new neighbuors and is it the same for him. Here are the questions I would ask him 1 what is it like to have neighbours 2 what is it like to be a neighbour 3 what it is like to be meant to be old but not to be 4 why his house is full of pictures why they are not like the pictures we have in our house and lastly 5 why there is music playing when ever you walk close to the front door of our next door neighbour.

Next morning in 2016, the little TV up on the shelf in the kitchen is on but with the sound turned down; it must have been on, lighting and darking the kitchen by itself, all night.

Elisabeth is the only person up so far. She fills the coffeepot with water and puts it on the ring and as she turns the cooker on she sees on the screen two young twenty-somethings shopping separately in a supermarket advert suddenly simultaneously dropping the products in their hands, a loaf of bread, a couple of packets of pasta, and finding themselves in each other’s arms as if by magic, then waltzing in amazement that they know how to waltz. In the next aisle a small child catches the carton of eggs his parents have just let slip. He watches his parents as they spin round and round together by a pyramid of cheeses. Near the fish counter an old couple, the man holding a tin of something up to his glasses, the woman holding on to the trolley like a zimmer, both look upwards, like they hear something above them. They exchange a knowing look. Then the woman holding the trolley pushes it away, steps backwards unbelievably light and poised on her feet, the man lets his stick fall to the ground, bows low to her and they start waltzing with old-style grace.

Elisabeth runs across to the shelf for the remote but she only gets the sound back on for the final seconds of the ad, where the child who caught the eggs shrugs his shoulders at the camera, the last shot is the sunlit summer supermarket from outside, people dancing in its car park, the warm middle-aged male voiceover saying: all year round making a song and a dance about you.

When her mother gets up she finds Elisabeth watching an advert for a supermarket over and over again on the laptop.

What’s that burning smell? she says.

She opens the windows, cleans up round the cooker and throws away the singed dishtowel.

It begins with a supermarket car park full of cars heaped with snow, snow falling. Then the song and the dance. Then, as the song ends, the summer supermarket from outside.

Pretty gloomy song for supermarket advertising, her mother says. Then again I can’t listen to anything these days without feeling maudlin.

Oh, I don’t know, Elisabeth says. You’ve always been maudlin.

True enough. Over the years I’ve had a substantial career in maudlin, her mother says taking the computer.

Has her mother been this witty all these years and Elisabeth just hasn’t realized?

Mike Ray and the Milky Ways, her mother says.

Never heard of them, Elisabeth says.

Her mother looks it up.

One-hit wonders, 1962, Summer Brother Autumn Sister (Gluck/Klein). Number 19, September 1962, her mother says. Well well. Maybe you’re right. Maybe our Mr Gluck did write it after all.

Verse 1:

Snow is falling in the summer / Leaves are falling in the spring / Gone the reasons, gone the seasons / Time has gone and taken everything

Chorus: Summer brother autumn sister / Keeping time through time / Autumn mellow autumn yellow / Give me back a reason to rhyme

Verse 2:

I will find her in the autumn / Autumn kissed her. Autumn mist / Summer brother autumn sister / Autumn’s gone so summers don’t exist

Chorus x 1 Bridge:

Summer brother autumn sister / Time and time again are gone / Out of season I will find her / With time’s fallen leaves behind her / Every time I sing this song

Chorus x 2 Ad lib to fade

(© words & music Gluck/Klein)

There is almost nothing else online about Gluck songwriter , or Gluck lyricist or Gluck/Klein words & music except links back to this song and to the supermarket advert. There are lots of those links. Twenty five thousand, seven hundred and five people have watched the advert on YouTube.