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She felt emptied at last; emptied of all life; of all trying and hoping. Then it screamed. A shrill jerking scream. Dolly was crying. The rubber faces and voices peered down on her smiling. "It‚s a boy, my dear. a fine boy." He screamed again. "Come on little man, Mum needs a rest." But Dolly felt they were wrong. It screamed, not for her. not for her at all. It screamed with anger at the horror of its birth.
Ralph Fiennes: The idea of generations, of blood ties from parent to child, fascinated my mother because for her that encompasses everything. That was humanity, your blood tie was who you are, how you were conceived, who were the people, how they conceived you. Was it accidental, was it in full passion, and follow on the fact of that was of central importance to her. And I think that is the basis of the book she wrote called Blood Ties.
Narrator Sian Phillips: The actor Ralph Fiennes is the eldest son of the late novelist and painter, Jennifer Lash and her photograher husband, Mark Fiennes.
Mark Fiennes: It was November 1960 when I first set eyes on Jini. The second time I met her, she told me she wanted six children and so eventually, we had six children. She used to do little drawings on the backs of envelopes or scraps of paper how she thought her children might look like. It was all very endearing and made me very enthusiastic, (because we have the) same idea ! (laughter)
Ralph Fiennes: Six children all under the age of seven. I was seven when the twins were born so at the age of seven, I was the eldest of six.
Narrator: Jennifer Lash put a successful writing career on hold to bring up her children ˆ Ralph, Martha, Magnus, Sophie, Jack and Joe. This is a film about their unconventional family life together. The blood ties that shaped her life and work.
Joe Fiennes: As the youngest, I was introduced to this chaotic adventure. You were constantly stimulated as a child, with crayons, paints and drawings and books and music and plays constantly and so there is a joy in finding your own expression. I think gradually for all of us, the stimulus of the slightly bohemian artistic environment rubbed off.
Mark Fiennes: All we really wanted them to do was to find fulfillment. Jini had had her second novel published shortly after we were married and then there was a long pause, the children came, entered the world. And she found painting more expressive and so eventually she did write again, not until the children, all six of them, have been born.
Magnus Fiennes: She wrote one very, very powerful children's story called "Tristam and the Power of the Lights" which was a classic about a story of good and evil, told through a story of a young family. I think, the eldest, the boy, Tristam, is very much based on Ralph.
Ralph Fiennes: Tristam who is the quiet deep-thinking but urban young boy, sent off with his cousins to live in the country, on a farm with gum boots and mud. They meet this priest who initiates them into the secret of Silencia, which manifests itself into the form of this incredibly strong blue light and with this blue light comes incredible silence, profound silence and its opposite force which is this harsh aggressive yellow light called Cacophruga [sp?] comes this noise horrendous, jangling and discordant, aggressive, violent and these were the two opposing forces.
Magnus Fiennes: She [Jini] would typically draw in characters of people and you immediately identify with it. It was not so much a children's story as it was a powerful fable.
Narrator: The themes of good and evil, childhood and motherhood, dominated Jini's paintings and her six novels, culminating in Blood Ties, her last work of fiction, written in 1987. Set in rural Ireland, Blood Ties is the story of four generations in one family. It is a study of the cycle of damage inflicted on children by parents who have lost the power to love.
Mark Fiennes: Blood Ties is about relationships between parents and children and how just because you are tied by blood does not necessary means that love is incorporated into that.
Narrator: The main focus of Blood Ties is Spencer, a child abandoned by his mother and comforted by his grandmother's housekeeper, Maura.
Ralph Fiennes reads from Blood Ties:
Maura very soon had Spencer sitting in the kitchen with a plate of fresh bread and butter and a little scrambled egg, and a piece of chocolate cake. Gradually he begin to watch Maura, as she busied about in and out of the cupboards ; heating things, mixing things, washing things, wiping things.. All the time she spoke. It was tireless gentle talk, like a flow of fresh spring water. It would never occur to Maura to think her deft gentleness as a particular skill,it was simply the natural way anyone would be with a wounded creature.
Michael (Mick) Emery (Jini's and Mark's foster son) who is an archaelogist: The character Spencer and myself, the link between the two, I don't think you should underline too heavily, but there are elements I do identify with.
Narrator: Jini's dedication to motherhood extends beyond her own six children and prompted her to foster a child in care.
Voice of Jini Fiennes: While I was ironing and I have The Times propped up in front of me. And in the personal column, there is this advertisement saying : Desperately needed, foster home for a very disturbed child, must go somewhere where he can read a book. I took that as a message to me.
Michael Emery: Basically Jini said - Right, we must give him a home. He must have a place to read, of course, the child must read. That was Jini, you know. When I first arrived at Elm [?] Farm (Mark and Jini's home) in Suffolk, I was given a room, instead of sharing with lots of other children in care. Having books in your own room, just having a table and chair, things that you actually handle, seemed amazing.
Ralph Fiennes: She was, I think, brilliant. She was completely honest that Mick (Michael Emery) was not literally our brother, that he was our brother in the sense that he was now part of the family. She never lied. I think Jini's honesty and integrity were of huge value to me.
Mark Fiennes: Basically Mick had lacked the all important thing called 'mother love'. Like every young animal or lamb, born or calf born out in the field, you'll see the mother licking it, loving it, caring for it and if you don't get that, you are immediately rejected or not wanted, you are damaged.
Mick: In all the homes I've been brought up in, I don't think/understood what love was. But Jini, in her own ways, just explain that love is being compassionate, being aware of people and in the end, I think I got there.
Narrator: As the children grew older, the Fiennes ran into financial difficulty. They left Elm Farm and moved 15 times in as many years, buying and selling houses to make ends meet. In the early 1970's, they left England all together for Ireland.
Ralph: My father and mother went to Ireland, my father had a photograhic job there, and they fell in love with Ireland and the Irish people that they met. They came back saying - we believe we should live in Ireland, we want to go to the west of Ireland. And at that time, the term that was brought up, that was in vogue then, called the 'rat race', they (my parents) said we must get out of the 'rat race.
Narrator: While in Ireland, Jini took up photography, working with Mark to produce a series of images of vanishing Ireland which they sold as postcards.
Mark: She loved people and took a lot of photograghs of people. She also love hands, the gesture of hands. [He then went on to describe some of the photos they have taken - of people and of hands]
Narrator: In 1973, they set about building their own house in West Cork and it was there that Jini decided to educate the children herself.
Mark: All the materials that went into the house becomes a point of education - volume, mathematics, component parts of a house, proportions, a very good practical lesson for the children.
Martha Fiennes: She had this unit on Wednesday which she had called 'Making', she literally called it 'Making', that was something in which we all had, projects according to our age. And that could be doing anything for the project like observing rock pool life because there were lots of rock pools on the beach where we live, weather, patterns, anything you like, the daily life of Mrs O'Donovan up the road. She would encourage observation.
Mark: Our children have had, are having, some measure of success in all their individual endeavours. I think the one thing that Jini instill in them was a very strong belief that if you want to do it enough, and you give it your all, you will do it. She had one particular expression - you've got to get your guts into it - she liked to say. And the children all remember that - you've got to get your guts into it.
Mick: The first book she gave me [didn't catch the name, sorry!], I just got totally fired up by it, it's amazing. The first time I was actually going into a book for an imaginative landscape rather than inventing it for myself. And it was from there that I got into history and then from history, the next step, a long time later, archaelogy. I think one of Jini's great strength was bringing out the best in people. I think she basically just want to stimulate all of us.
Martha: She encouraged us, I so remember one time she said - let's go to Spain and I took my camera and we went to observe this incredible festival in Seville. We watched the bull fight and we wanted to film in the abattoir underneath. I remember people saying - No camera, no camera and me going Mummy, better not film in here, better not and her going 'Go on, go on, darling, film now, it's alright!', tapping me with her stick. [laughing] It was just so sweet because it seemed to be the embodiment of her encouragement. Go on, it'll be just fine, go on!
Ralph: I wanted to go into the army and I knew it wasn't an idea that appealed to her. But she said - Go, go to the barracks of whatever regiment and see what it was like, of course, you must go. I came back from the barracks wherever I had an army visit and told her - I don't think this is for me. And she said 'now you know what it might be. It wasn't like she said 'I knew, I knew I am right.' It was as if 'Well, I am so glad you went and you've seen it and you know.'
Jake Fiennes (the gamekeeper): I see another side to her. To me, she was a naturalist and animal lover and she wasn't necessary arty as far as I was concerned. We always had dogs, and I kind of bonded with the dogs, as well as she did. The only picture I've got from her is a dead hare, which most people think was sleeping. But I know it was dead because she had a fascination with skulls, to her, the interior is just as pretty as the exterior of any animal. She actually gave me a stuffed fox and weasel for my 16th birthday. She understood and love the countryside as much as I do.
Sophie Fiennes: I think as we all entered into adolescence, it really got more exhausting, surrounded by dirty clothes, by smelly adolescent boys, by people always wanting to be fed, there's always the next meal. And all those things were very real, very exhausting. So it's not like our upbringing was this hippy-dippy great, lovely, rambling, you know, painting.
Ralph: It was full of, hmm....you know everyday practicalities, domesticity, rows, arguments, slamming of doors, screaming "shut up, leave me alone!" you know, the usual stuff that goes on.
Sophie: But I think within all this, she was creative with it, she was creative with her family. And I think Francis Bacon said if he wasn't a painter, he would like to have been a mother. I always think of that in terms of Jini because she did approach it in that way.
Mark: To her, love of the children was an all important factor, she was the product of a background lacking in mother love, certainly. And she was determined to put it right in her life not to repeat that mistake.
Narrator: Jini's upbringing was often difficult and unhappy. She was a child of the Raj, her father, Hal Lash, also known as Binker, was a brigadier with the Royal Gowal [sp ?] Rifle and her mother, Joan, was the daughter of a high-ranking member of the Indian Civil Service.
Martha: I had vivid memories of Mummy describing how being kissed goodnight by her mother would always be a cheek proferred and there wasn't any sort of contact because she was terrified of getting her lipstick smudged all over her. And there was this sort of glamorous painted face and she had no real emotional contact and she felt far closer to her nanny.
Jini's brother: The parents didn't look after the children. I mean, we were taken into the drawing room before we went to bed for an hour or so but the actual upbringing was left to the nanny."
Narrator: After the second world war, the Lashes moved back to England, exchanging a life of glamour and servants for the post war austerity of surburban Surrey and the struggle to keep up appearances.
Sophie: Jini's father, Hal, I think, he felt that his whole life had been pulled from under him, I think he never recovered. I think the whole family entered into a sort of very stagnant, strange, thwarted life.
Jini's brother: I think it wasn't always easy, their marriage. My mother like Jini, my sister, was very temperamental and would throw scenes of drama whereas my father was precisely the opposite, he just sat there and said "I never argue", which means he didn't and which means he made it worse.
Sophie: The unfulfilled life of her parents and her father, particularly, was such that he sort of used and abused her, to the point where he abused his power as a parent. And that was the source of a lot of her pain, this sense of being a prisoner. What happened to Jini was that when she was 16, she locked herself in the room and she just screamed, she just screamed loud, hysterical and that is the same scream of the child in Blood Ties.
Ralph reads from Blood Ties :
Spencer knew he must make the sound... and the sound came. It heaped upon itself up and out from every scarred inch of him. It rallied all the forgotten emptiness of the small room. The house rung now with nothing but the sound of the howl. The careful, avoiding silence of so many summers was punched into this great spire of sound.
Sister Rue Wilson: I was Jini's headmistress for one year and I realised at one moment that she was very nearly on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I was extremely worried about her. So when I read Blood Ties, I found it almost impossible to read. I found it was so distressing. I realised her capacity to enter into the feelings of the battered and abused and destroyed child is sourced in her own experience of pain. I cannot imagine that anywhere else that anyone could find that sort of experience and the power of expressing it.
Narrator: Jini escaped the oppressive atmosphere of her parents, home as soon as she could, leaving when she was still only 16.
Ralph: She had that intelligence which could say I am a vital living soul with an imagination and thoughts and sense of independence and I am in an environment which does not allow that.
Narrator: Shortly afterwards, she had a mental breakdown. It was her uncle, a Benedictine monk, who helped her to find the psychiatric care she needed.
Dom Sebastian Moore (Jini's uncle): I think her teenage breakdown, in retrospect, was an indispensable condition for her growth. I mean, reading all those fairy stories which start with getting lost in the forest. The hero, heroine, is lost in the forest. In Jini's case, her breakdown was precisely that, I think. It was terribly painful for her but it was the preparation for the real journey, I think.
Voice of Jini Fiennes: When I was painting, what leads me, so often, to make the crucial marks, I can hear myself saying, make the mark where the pain is, where the pain is. And that is how I know what to do.
Narrator: It was while in therapy that Jini went to work as a nanny in Suffolk. There she found the freedom to begin to write her first semi-autobiographical novel, 'The Burial'.
Mark: Suddenly the east coast of East Anglia with the wide open skies and the marshes, bird calls and crash of waves along the shore, the long, long shores, that gave Jini a huge sense of freedom, liberation from the life she lived. It was like losing a caged bird in a way.
Dom Sebastian Moore: The transformation went along two tracks: one track was creative and the other was personal, something she became, she became a wonderful woman, a wonderful woman, a wonderful mother, a nurturer, she became more and more herself.
Sophie: She had felt unloved as a child and then having a huge family was her process of healing in a very natural sort of way.
Magnus: I think she made the decision to throw herself at it a 100%, even though this deprived her of the time to do other creative things but to her, being a mother was her number one job.
Ralph: It was interesting the times when I think, you know, the family she had had, the thing she, the seven human beings she had nurtured, was what she valued most and at the same time, the fact that what she valued most was the thing that maybe stopped her from another kind of life.
Magnus: In some way, she was looking forward to this point whereby the children were gone so that she can indulge 100% in her creative processes. But by that time, she had cancer, you see, the cancer had begun to set in, which meant she never really had a period of time to write and paint.
Narrator: Jini Fiennes died of breast cancer in 1993. Her final novel, Blood Ties, had been rejected by her publishers, leaving her deeply frustrated as what she saw as a dismissal, not just of the ideas in the book but of the beliefs by which she had lived and brought up her children.
Mark: To have, her, she thought, her best and latest work work of fiction rejected was like an arrow to Jini's heart.
Sophie: She felt like a woman who had given up 30 years of her life to rear her family, when she had completed this piece, when she completed Blood Ties and it was rejected, she felt like she was this disposable, white, middle-aged, middle-class woman who had no place in the world of making work.
Narrator: But a chance conversation between her son, Ralph, and the author, Michael Ondaatje was to change the book's fate.
Ralph: I met Michael Ondaatje and I was filming English Patient, and I talked to him about Jini and I told him about the existence of Blood Ties. And he suggested to Liz Calder from Bloomsbury Publishing that maybe she could read it.
Liz Calder (Bloomsbury Publishing): I had a reaction which I never had before in reading a book. I've often been moved and indeed, moved to tears reading manuscripts but with this one, at the very end, I literally bursts into tears and this was, you know, a shock to me. I KNEW this book had to be published and that we HAD to publish it.
Ralph: When Liz Calder read it and said how instantly moved she was by it, that was always the response that I had hoped Jini would witness when she had written it.
Liz Calder: I suspect this book, its time has come in a funny way now, here at the end of the 90's, there is a willingness perhaps to be more emotionally open and I think the emotional response it gets in readers is to do with that mixture of pain and love and hope.
Mick: In a strange way I always feel that I would never have got to a position, maybe to have two children, I would like to say Jini has given me that opportunity and Mark but Jini, in her particular way, nurtured me, showing me that I can love, I can feel love and at the end of the day that I am a loving parent.
Ralph: A couple of occasions I remember her saying - the fundamental thing is love, love is the most powerful thing there possibly ever is, anything that engenders, encourages a situation and environment of love and loving and receiving and exchanging of love, that to me is all that matters, that was sort of her basic thing.
(Narrated by Sian Phillips, Original Music by Magnus and Maya Fiennes
BLOOD TIES THE WORKS BBC TV)
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on December 1, 1997
EL STEPHO