Research note 02 : Heat, Travel and a Pair of Boots

After several days in Northern Ireland, getting back to my second home became something of a journey. A lightning strike grounded flights, plans changed, and I eventually travelled by bus, plane and train, arriving back in Bath to a flat that seemed to have stored every degree of the day's heat.

Somewhere between the delays and the long journey home, my thoughts drifted back to a novel I had been re-reading: Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

There is a brief episode towards the end of the book in which Tess walks to see her estranged husband's family. As she nears the house, she removes her heavy work boots and hides them in a hedge before changing into a smarter pair of shoes. She never gets to speak to the family and walks back the way she came. On her return, the boots are accidentally discovered by her husband's brothers, and she walks away without them. Hardy never mentions them again.

For some reason, those boots stayed with me.

Not simply as objects in a novel, but as something carrying the experience of countless working women whose lives were rarely recorded. The boots are fictional, yet the lives they represent were real.

I found myself wondering what might happen if such objects escaped from literature and entered an archive. How would we look at them? Would they become historical artefacts, or would they remain somewhere between fact and fiction?

Perhaps what interests me is not the object itself, but the way certain images continue to surface in memory long after the story has ended. They emerge unexpectedly, carrying meanings larger than themselves. And it is not always an object that brings a memory to the surface. It can be a described sound, a turn of phrase, or a fleeting image. Out of nowhere, an idea appears, and in that moment of emergence, something moves me on.