Author: Ellen Bell

My knee is giving me jip. It’s the knee I bruised when I fell. It is healing for it itches at night, a sure sign but it is stiff and awkward. I walk anyway, sometimes with my trusty stick to guard me from further tumblings and sometimes not. The Pelican Bakery is open again – thank the lord – and its smells delight me once more, as did the large fishing vessel I saw down in the harbour, lit up like a christmas tree. There were two young lads on the beach beside a raging fire – the aroma of burning wood is such a comfort, as is the sight of the flames in this dark blackness. The starlings under the pier were chattering awake as I strode past. And another bird called out from across the invisible water – I don’t know what it was, a curlew, a guillemot or an oystercatcher? I also heard the screech owl as I walked down St David’s Road – its cry more like a wooo than a twit twoo. I don’t want to walk these mornings, the cold and ice are not welcoming but when I see and smell and hear the world in this liminal space it is worth it.

And as I walk I write stories in my head. They are cooking away in there. I want to give them life on paper but for the moment I enjoy being with them as they are – small embryos of possibility.

She’s still in hospital after over two weeks. Poor love, she cried over the phone. It doesn’t suit her. She is a tender soul. And then I find out that that isn’t her name and then she is so much older than I’d previously thought. I want to do what I can. Send her a bag of things as succour. I wish I could go and see her. Just to hold her hand and make it better.

The other night I dreamt that a woman was preparing a home for me, a basement room with now windows but one that was flooded in white light (even though her son had broken the light). Then last night I walked through a house with old wooden panelling, a beautiful house but there was no furniture, it was empty and yet I’d known it full. I remember the textures. And I dreamt of a pizza. It was because of what her daughter had said about hospital food. ‘We don’t eat pizza,’ she’d said.

He walks later on these cold, frosty mornings, which means that he walks in the daylight and can see things. He comes back with news and pictures of the graves of friends and acquaintances he’s found in the cemetery. All long gone. There are his golfing cronies, the parents of his sister’s first husband and those of his younger brother’s wife. It doesn’t seem to make him sad, it is more a rather pleasant continuum and one that gives him comfort. He tells tales of them. Some I’ve heard many times, others are new.

He came back with four bunches of daffodils, or was it three? We talked of seeing them and of the joy the first sightings would bring. I didn’t expect them so early. I’ve placed them round the flat, I even have some in here. He is kind. And generous.

I listen to people talking on the radio, so many speak with such confidence of what they know, offering it as truth. How can they be so sure? Do I envy such knowing? And then there was one voice that quavered. Here was a real person, an uncertain being. He was speaking about the song ‘The Look of Love’ and how he’d bought a record that had Mireille Mathieu singing it in French. He loved it and still had the LP. He’d given it to his mother when ‘she left us’, he said. Everything hung on that line. She left them, him. When she died she made sure he got it back. I still have it, he said. Oh, the ache of other people’s unspoken pain.

I keep dreaming about him. I haven’t seen him for years. I loved him once, passionately. And now he keeps cropping up and there is that same hint of nervousness in his company. I’d made him a christmas card and he clearly wasn’t impressed but when he folded it he could see that it was stunning – even I was amazed. It had an image of church or Abbey on the front and it seemed to burn with light.

Do you get jumbly thoughts just before waking? He calls them ‘jumbly thoughts’. I lie there after the alarm has sounded just for a few moments giving my thanks for my warm bed for him and thinking of the day ahead and sometimes I doze slightly. This morning, in that pre-waking doze this sentence came in: “with this chasing of experiments is there any…?”

Any what?

He comes back from his walk with videos that he’s taken on his phone of the shooting snowdrops. He is delighted with them and wants to show me. I look at them as I prepare supper and hear the twittering of the birds and see his shadow on the ground. What a joy he is.

I told him of how in one of my dreams I was teaching Sister Julienne (aka Jenny Agutter in Call the Midwife) how to use an electric toothbrush while tactfully suggesting that age makes the gums recede. He laughed out loud. How I love to make him laugh.

He came home the other morning with pictures of green shoots. What are they? he asked. Snowdrops, I said.

I caught the end of the news bulletin on the World Service and my panic bubbles up. Don’t listen to it, he says, I will tell you what you need to know.

I’m not sure if the man in my dream was John Wayne or not. We were getting into a car together. I knew that he had died but accepted that he was present, and there with me. He was getting into the front passenger seat and I was to get into the back. I only saw his back. He was a big man, though he’d lost weight due to age and illness. He wore baggy, American-style jeans and a loose jumper. I noticed the pattern of the wool, a kind of spotted black and white fleck. The radio was on in the car, perhaps it was a taxicab, and someone was discussing politics.

Someone was outside their back gate as I walked behind South Marine Terrace this morning (I still had my stick but thankfully there was no ice). He was fiddling with bags of rubbish and recycling and wearing pyjamas and a striped dressing gown. It was 4.00 am.

The radio often brings me what I need or want to hear. Yesterday it was the TED radio hour with speakers talking about activism and then one came on and talked about activism for introverts. Are there angels?

I am often ashamed of myself. I know the trivialities of my mind, my obsessions with order, with cleanliness, with a petty control over my environment – the fuss I make over spots of blood – and I am sorry for it. He is forgiving of me, for it is he that is most inconvenienced. But worse, worse, I forget the others who have nothing, who are starving, who have no home, no shelter, no source of warmth, of water, or care. I fill my head with nothing and by doing so become nothing. To hear those stories of the starving people of Yemen and of Syria – grown men who weigh but 6 stone, towns where there are no cats and dogs because in extremis they have been eaten. It is shocking to hear such truths. But I need it. And then there is my ‘fussiness’ my mother used to call it over food. I, who can pick and choose, I who have never known a hungry day (food has been short on occasion but there has always been something). I am sorry for my ridiculousness in the face of such suffering. Truly.

What can we do?

I happened to catch the tailend of a programme about the World Service hosted by Terry Waite. He was talking about what the World Service meant to him during his captivity (he was given a radio during the last few months). Then he went on to explain how he would picture the presenters and newsreaders and continuity men in the studio and how important imagination had been to him while he lay there in his cell chained to the radiator. Yes. I understand. Even in this relative comfort and freedom imagination can still take us to those places and people we cannot at present visit. He is a lesson to us all to be thankful, to be grateful for small mercies. Always.

It is very beautiful, the world is almost ossified by it. Chancing to look up at one of our velux windows in the roof I did a double-take – the frosty deposit looked like a layer of silver glitter, and a thick layer at that. It reminded me of my childish joy of such things and my memories of the smell of glue (was it Gloy gum?) when covering cards and Christmas objects in it and how the unstuck bits were caught up in old newspaper and how beautiful it looked en masse like a pool of shimmering argent. I don’t like the slippery surfaces but the look of frost is stunning. It doesn’t blacken and dirty like snow but remains pristine in its whiteness. Grass, leaves, tree trunks are caught in its frozeness and the ground is hardened, even the shail thrown by the waves onto the Prom. I like the cold hush of it all, though my fingers smart even under three layers of gloves. Along North Road a robin bounced along beside me. I stopped for a while to see what it would do. It hopped about a bit then flew off. The flat is cold. We hunker down with hot water bottles – he in his room and me in the studio. The day stretches out deliciously. I have much to do and for now the chores have been done.

She didn’t call. Don’t feel bad. I do understand. Honest.

I believe I heard of it in Norway, that if you put socks over your shoes or boots it will stop you slipping on the ice. So I begged him for a pair of his old socks and tried it. It seemed to work, at least I didn’t walk like an ancient but strode, boldly. The stick helped too. I didn’t care what people thought, I mean who is out at that time? Anyway, I had my walk – though the cold was bitter. We went to sleep at our normal times but woke to the sound of fireworks, first at 12 pm and then on and on until about 12.30pm. Fireworks sound like gunshots when one is sleeping. It was too cold to get out of bed and look, though I wish I had. I hope they were having fun. I’ve always found New Year Eve rather melancholy. Does alcohol help?

Treacherous was the word that the postman used all those years ago in Cambridge – meaning it was it was too treacherous to walk the pavements delivering the post. It was treacherous this morning. He left me a note imploring me to take care. I did. I walked like a old woman, inching my way down the little hill to St David’s Road. I hate it. I like to stride to get my blood going. I swear under my breath as I lose my footing. It’s no good, it’s no walk all that ‘gingering’. Perhaps it will be better tomorrow.

I dreamt that I was on a dark road and I fell through some ice. It was deep and I fell into cold, cold water, up to my waist and as I fell I anticipated the sensation and of having to walk home wet and frozen through. A schoolteacher took me into an empty classroom and offered to drive me home. It was like a farmstead and the classrooms were in the barns. She was kind, warm and beautiful. The rest has gone from me.