'Do you like raspberries?' On Holding and Containing, Part One

We are caught in a time of containing. Keeping things we cannot see – the virus – and those we can – ourselves and others – in place. It’s even harder to know ‘how to do’ this now we have reached some neither/nor in-between state, as if the sides of the box have failed. 

I have not flourished in lockdown and have marvelled at friends who have. It’s not that I haven’t done anything, more that I’ve not lived up to my own expectations. It started well. I would walk every day and stitch the memory of my steps into a loosely woven linen cloth. I planned to stitch every evening, thinking it might be an opportunity for reflection and keep me going, somehow. An expansive socially distanced walk at Worm’s Head, another with an old friend at Southgate. I stitched as if map making, small houses, shops, farm buildings. Then my walks became tighter; to the local woods, a night time beating of the bounds. Before long I was stitching only the short space between the back door and my studio, and then my awareness shifted to the steps taken inside the house. Shrinking. I stopped the stitching, too small, too still and too much a reminder that I wasn’t going anywhere. I have done an excellent job in containing myself, of becoming stilled.

Containing has a physical turn, at least in ambition, and often a corresponding anxiety. A brim full coffee cup carried gingerly across a pale carpet. Generously poured gravy spilling across a plate, the meniscus bulge of a soon to breach bath, containing my nerves so that I might be able to write this. The risk of failure, the relief of success, that well understood sigh of achievement when our overladen arms reach the table.

When I was working with the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery at King’s College, I gave nursing and midwifery students metal tins, containers in which they might hold those things that helped them stay well, acts of self-care. And now, at the point of writing up the research, I’m thinking again about containing, and also holding, their differences and similarities. In both cases, the story begins with mothering, with nursing a child.

The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion described containing as the mother’s ability to ‘hold her baby’s anxiety and her own’ (Waddell, 2002: 33). In moments of heightened anxiety, a containing mother ‘gently talks, rocks, strokes, feeds, reflects, until her baby, basking in the calm of trustful intimacy, begins to recover’ (ibid). For Bion, containment is a process requiring container and contained. The container, a responsible adult, carer, nurse, physician, therapist. The contained, a crying child, an anxious patient, a grieving relative. The container’s function is to process, reformulate, make the situation bearable. It is not the container’s role to erase or dismiss. Containing is to be emotionally authentic, it has the quality of a re-framing. It also has a spatial quality, somewhere to be ‘like this’ when I am unable to contain myself. Containing is modifying, balancing, and ultimately enabling. Not surprising that the idea of ‘container-contained’ extends into care and therapeutic settings. 

I have a longing for John Berger. Properly unpicking this is for another time. For now, there is something in the sound of his writing that reassures, the pace and the extended pauses, the quality of holding, of being held. Berger collaborated with his friend, the photographer Jean Mohr, in storytelling the working life of the rural GP, John Sassall. Their book, A Fortunate Man is full of small acts of containment and that very particular silence. 

‘She died quickly, her hands very still […]

In the parlour the old man rocked on his feet. The doctor deliberately did not put out a hand to steady him. Instead he faced him. The older man was the taller by nine inches. The doctor said quietly, his eyes extra wide behind his spectacles, ‘It would have been worse for her if she’d lived. It would have been worse.’ (Berger, 2015:35)

My commitment to Berger unfolds onto the screen, well, my laptop, which perches on my stomach as I lie in bed. Made in 2016, The Seasons in Quincy features Berger towards the end of his life. It begins and ends with his friend and twin, for both were born on the same day thirty four years apart, Tilda Swinton. It is winter and snow is falling. Swinton chops apples at Berger’s kitchen table in rural France, Berger sits across from her. Each share childhood memories of stoic fathers, both traumatised in war and both tightly wound in their shells. Berger describes his silent father quartering, coring and peeling an apple for the young Berger at breakfast. Swinton begins to quarter the apples on her side of the table. She reaches across, a quarter bayoneted at the tip of her knife, and offers it to Berger. We see his eyes, how they come into focus around her gesture, acknowledging her gift, which reaches backwards – to that earlier moment of bliss - as much as forwards. He brings the apple to his mouth and bites into its flesh. He imagines this act might have existed for his father as a ‘wished for’ event that sustained him in the trenches of the first world war. In the telling, Berger is stilled, eyes glistening as if about to spill. But I am the one who cries, my tears collecting in the cupped shells of my ears. I’m not quite sure for whom or for what I am crying.

Another ‘twinship’. Swinton travels with her son and daughter from Scotland to Quincy via Paris. They carry two boxes of eggs, their harvest, each tied with a green ribbon. One box for Berger, who has moved to Paris after the death of his wife, Beverly. The second for Yves, Berger’s son, who continues to live in Quincy. Eggs nestled in newsprint and carried across land and sea. In Paris, Berger asks the twins ‘Do you like Raspberries?’ and asks that when in Quincy they gather some of his wife Beverly’s beloved raspberries into bowls, that they find an image of Beverly and eat them ‘where she is there, because your pleasure will give her pleasure.’

In Quincy, Swinton’s twins are joined by Berger’s granddaughter. Raspberries are spooned from a bright green colander into blue ceramic bowl, its well-worn lip to camera. Spoons, cream, sugar and dishes gathered together on a wooden tray. Three children looking for Beverly. Two images. A death bed pencil portrait sketched by Berger and a smaller black and white photographic portrait of a younger Beverly, smiling, reaching back to him. A peculiar parade makes its way to the assembly point, an area of the garden so close to the house that it might be its hem. They sit in this fold of green, on the grass as children do, two kitchen chair sentinels posted to their side, on each sits a portrait of Beverly. Swinton’s son smiles to camera, the granddaughter turns her head to the right, her gaze towards and beyond Beverly’s portrait, elsewhere.

It’s a remarkable scene, all the more touching because of where we are now, this distance. It’s months since I have seen my mum in the flesh, almost as long since I have seen my son, whose work as a nurse keeps him busy and physically distant. Many, many years since I saw my brother. Like so many, I am well practiced in talking to photographs. 

But the raspberry moment is very special. It returns me to thoughts of holding and containing and a phenomenon Margot Waddell names as ‘kept in mind’ (Waddell, 2002:38), which describes thinking of someone in their absence. For Waddell this might involve physical acts of care, such as cooking a favourite meal or making up a bed; socks darned for my son, flowers sent to my mum. Embodied within ‘kept in mind’ is some anticipation of return, my son to us, me to my mum’s garden. There has been so much of this metaphoric holding these past months, wished for thinking.

Yet, when Berger anticipated the children picking the raspberries, there was no possibility of Beverly’s return, or, as it would turn out, his. Berger’s request was as much for him as it was for them. The imagined ceremony of picking and preparation, the children following his instruction to have Beverly with them – and of course, as it turned out – Berger himself, in one of those two chairs. More than this, in sharing the raspberries, Berger makes a very particular gift, one that will tie all of them together, a continuing bond that enables a living with or holding on. For their softness, smell, taste and stain – the very tale of how they came into being through Beverly’s care - now belongs to them all. 

There’s another moment in the film that resonates. Beverly dressed for the 70s, tending the raspberry canes. It seems, at least to me, that she might be walking both forwards and backwards, some trick where everything appears as a strange dance between past and present. It’s very brief, nothing more than a few seconds, Beverly carrying a cardboard box filled with cuttings, a garden rake in her other hand. A peculiar toing and froing, a near literal going over old ground. It brings me to think of loops and threads, things joined, old and new. Margaret Atwood describes writing as an act of hope, growing food similarly anticipates the future, and the satisfaction of a different sort of appetite. ‘Do you like raspberries?’ is a simultaneous appeal to the sensual and to remembering, a holding together of past and present, it means that Beverly and Berger will be forever held in mind, bound to the pleasure of raspberries.

Berger, J & Mohr, J (2015) [1967] A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (Edinburgh and London: Canongate)

Klass, D (et al) (1996) Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (London: Taylor and Francis)

Waddell, M (2002) Inside Lives: Psychoanalysis and the Growth of Personality. The Tavistock Clinic Series (London: Karnac)

Wagner, E  Writing is Always an Act of Hope: Margaret Atwood on the Testaments New Statesman, 18 September 2019

The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger Bartek Dziadosz, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth, Tilda Swinton (2016)