Hands - Can't Avoid Them

How I imagine Dad's hand back in 1939

Dad was born in 1935 and remembered growing up during the war (there are a few of those stories coming but not today). He also remembered always drawing.

“My aunt brought pencil stubs home from the office where she worked. I drew everything, whatever was around me.”

His mother saved sheets of butcher paper and I imagine Dad drawing on those while he lay on his tummy on the floor, or sat at the kitchen table while his mother (my Granny) ironed.

The old (writer) me would now be thinking about how best to describe the scene - the iron heating on top of the scorching hot coal stove, the small kitchen where every inch of space mattered, the ironing board that disappeared into a shallow vertical cupboard and folded out when needed, the slender boy at the table, drawing on sheets of newsprint and butcher paper using pencil stubs scavenged from his aunt’s job at an office (she was maybe a bookkeeper? I’m not sure… poetic license, I’ll say she was a bookkeeper or worked for a bookkeeper or maybe she kept the books at the mine office? Given I don’t even know her name - Dad had a lot of aunts - I suspect I will never know. Suffice it to say, an aunt worked in an office and brought him pencil stubs because he was already obsessed with drawing even before he started school).

All that to say, in this new graphic novel world I’m inhabiting, I don’t need to think of juicy verbs and use all my senses to evoke the scene for the reader… I need to show all of that somehow… (which puts a whole new spin on the adage, Show, don’t tell.

What the heck did an old iron look like? What about old ironing boards? Asking these questions and doing some online hunting, I had a strange flashback to visiting Granny’s house in England 40 years ago and seeing an ironing board fold down out of a narrow space in the wall. I have no idea if that is a real memory or if I’m making that up, but this evening I did a few scribbled sketches to capture the idea of a scene in a small kitchen, boy at a table, ironing going on…

I think the upper narrower board that also folded down was maybe for the iron to rest on? Or laundry? Or a way to keep sheets from dragging on the floor? More research required. I don’t actually remember that bit from my foggily dredged up visit somewhere back in the last century, but if anyone reading can help me out, I’d appreciate hearing about your memories of foldout ironing boards and how that all worked…

Of course, these scratchy scribbles won’t be in the actual manuscript, but when you read the book one day and see the finished panels where I capture Dad’s earliest drawing efforts, you’ll perhaps be able to see where we started, what gets left in and what stays behind on the cutting room floor.

Maybe that’s what I should rename this newsletter… The Cutting Room Floor.

See you tomorrow!