Posted: 04/04/22

Sunset 14 February - Joan Venus-Evans

Valentine’s Day.  

In memory of my friend Kim Gardner who would have been 68 today if she hadn’t passed on 15th July 2017.   

When I first entered the . . . (Room) I was overwhelmed with emotion, a city lay before that I knew so well but not from this perspective.  Memories flooded in of my children chasing pigeons in Queen’s Gardens, me picking my daughter up from College on an exact spot just below, young people leaving school as I had all my life at dusk. 

At first, dark clouds with gulls ducking and diving suddenly grabbing my attention, then the clouds put on a show, as if a storm may come, they swelled in big waves somehow clearing a space where blue shone through. 

I thought of mine and my ancestors’ lives in Hull, only going back to Great Grandfather who came here with his brother in the mid 1800s up the Humber in barges.  He stayed and fathered 17 children; my grandfather being one.  He had a hard life growing up here, mine and my father’s weren’t great and the city broke my mother who was from Dundee and hated it here, calling it a swamp.  Alcohol played a big part in their lives and my mother’s death.  It is a city where many need to anaesthetise themselves against the difficulties faced by lack and bogged down in these thoughts I’m suddenly distracted by the sky clearing over the Humber Bridge . . . more memories of Kim and I at the foreshore, down by Railway Dock, drinking cider and pledging to travel the world.  We got away from Hessle Road, became teachers, I came back and stayed, not her, free spirit. 

All that scrabbling around down there trying to make a living, making friends, making children but from here there’s a clear perspective, a transcendence of that life, those lives. 

Then it’s all beauty because the Humber is lit up orange, to the North there’s a purple haze, there’s pink reflecting in a pond in Queen’s Gardens and the clouds are like those in Catholic children’s books where the face of God peeks out to look down on the earth.  The emotion is there again but this time with an overwhelming appreciation of the beauty of a sunset as another day ends on this city on the edge.