Author: Ellen Bell

It was a phrase Uglow used in her Gaskell book and one that Ralph Waldo Emerson apparently used to described Unitarianism. It is apt to appropriate it here and now thinking as I am of the TED talks yesterday on death. And yet they were uplifting fare, such as the one about the woman who has devised what she calls her ‘mushroom soup’ to add to the ground above and around the grave of a ‘dearly departed’ so that their decaying remains become a ‘useful’ part of the future earth. Or there was the paramedic who started to tell the truth to those he attended during road accidents etc. when they asked if they were going to die. He then described the peace that came over (most of them) when they realised their end was near. Acceptance again. Accepting one’s lot but not in a defeatist way but in a beautiful resigned, yielding one. And then there was the doctor who lost both his legs in an accident, during the recovery of which a nurse placed a real snowball in his hands and his delight at that. He went on to found the Zen Hospice in San Francisco where the dead are led on a stretcher to the morgue via the garden where the other residents can pay their respects, sprinkle flowers etc. And where the kitchen is an ‘important place’ where appetites though small are delighted with ‘cookies’ and such like. Die from death he said but not from a lack of imagination. I was inspired and moved as I was when I spoke to C. but this morning I’m in the doldrums caused by fear. Fear of not being good enough to write this piece. You always do it, he says at breakfast, you always pull it off. And I do don’t I? Mostly not as well as I’d hoped but I can and will do it. Is this fear necessary? It assails me. But onward. Duties done. Time to listen and then begin. ‘Are you sitting comfortably children? Then I will begin.’ Daphne someone. He told me about her yesterday as he came in to say goodnight. Listen with Mother. Do you remember it?

He tells me to ignore them, those dreams that linger in my mind from the night before. My impulse is always to try to understand, to make sense of them. His is to leave them be. I was with my sister in a doctor’s consulting room. Her lover was there, a huge man. Was he also lying on the couch? She was being examined but they were also extracting fluid from her. Was it meant to be blood? It was coming out black. I was horrified. Is that from her kidneys? I asked. Yes, the doctor said, but also from her liver. She made no reply. Perhaps she was under sedation. I seemed to be in the position of carer. The huge man was angry with me, he appeared to hold me responsible for what was ailing her. And yet she is so fit, I said.

Still deep in Elisabeth Gaskell. What a huge life. So many visitors, and five children too. She took to the couch when her little son died of scarlet fever but still managed to write Mary Barton. I am constantly in awe of these prolific Victorians, even if they did have their ‘Hearns’ to see to all the domestic stuff for them. I’m always a little put-out on those servants’ behalfs that they must be known by the surname alone. So impersonal. They become like an adage, a chattel. I baulk at it.

An overcast day. It promises, well they promise, some sun. I miss it. I await my interview with her. There is always butterflies. I find encountering others harder and harder as I grow older. I’m glad that he doesn’t insist on an open house. This closed one of ours suits me. As it does him. We don’t entertain, I said to that neighbour who invited us over and didn’t repeat the gesture. I wasn’t rude merely honest. It felt refreshing to be so. After all, where would they sit? We only have two of everything.

Another hole in his one of his jumpers to mend. It is a juggling act with little fanfare – a muddling along life with only my thoughts that reach beyond and those little sparks of ideas like foetuses yet to be born, or even developed. In my head I have largesse like GS and a world of possibilities.

It wasn’t an unpleasant dream but it felt like it was when I woke. I was pregnant and gave birth to a series of spider’s eggs (I didn’t see them hatch). But what seemed important was the place in which I gave birth rather than the birth itself, and the fact that I would return to that place again. And yet, it wasn’t anything special – a rented room in a boarding house. Then I was sewing with someone, someone who was extremely gifted in it. I think it must’ve been embroidery as they kept showing me how they could transmit a pattern from an Ipad onto cloth. I believe it was a man, a huge corpulent man.

I cleaned out my studio and listened to Kirsty Young’s radio celebration of 75 years of Desert Island Discs. It was a repeat from 2017. Many were moving, some funny. And some poignant, like Wainwright (I forget his Christian name) who said that he didn’t much like music, preferring silence and that he’d had to stop walking due to failing eyesight, having gone out for the last time in some particularly foul weather and hadn’t been able to see his way. The mountains cried for me that day, he said. He refused to go to London for the recording, insisting they come to him in the Lake District (how I love that kind of determination to not yield, that not feeling one has to be ‘nice’ a responsibility that has dogged my life). He gave in somewhat and they made the programme in Manchester. The writing and researching of walking guides obsessed him impacting on his life. My wife went out with the dog one day, he said, and never returned.

This time she answered. I think I make her cry. She says she cries a little everyday, that she is not used to being alone. I married when I was 21, you know, she said. And that she takes sleeping tablets to help her to sleep. My heart aches for her, I want to be of comfort but can say nothing. What is there to say? She tells me to come out there. Yes, I will. I want to. And then my mind starts to race with ideas – who I want to see, where I want to go, what places to investigate and explore. Her grave and then hers, and find out where her was school and his shop. I both long to go and dread it. Leaving him is always a wrench, as is the leaving of my home and relative safety and my language. She doesn’t know me, not now, perhaps then, but she kept me steady, looked out for me, cared enough to get close. She doesn’t know me either, but I like her, feel tenderly towards her, as I do her. It is enough, isn’t it?

She was almost garrulous. I like to hear her like that. I’m being lazy today, she said, still in bed at beyond 9. We talked of her cat and the kittens just recently given away to good homes. And how the cat is frightened of the chickens and the dog of the cat and how the dog wants to befriend the rooster but the rooster, having grown cantankerous won’t have it. All is topsy-turvy. She laughs and I laugh. It enfolds her, that life. And soon her precious daughter must return to work fearful of what she will bring home with her.

The rain pours outside. The wind was fierce and continues strong. He is not going out. I am to clean my studio from top to bottom then bake scones and shortbread. Still a little tired. I thought of that little girl. I want to eclipse the darkness with light but cannot. Those poor parents. I stand beside you in your grief.

I think it was a crossword clue that made him think about it. Well, the answer, which was Peter the Great. Did I tell you that my brother had a horse called Peter the Dog? he asked, looking at me, daring me to sigh and say I’d heard it before. I had but I like the quirkiness so I didn’t mind being reminded of it. It wasn’t a real horse but a rocking horse. Nice though. Am I sometimes impatient with his reminiscences?

A quick one today. I’ve got to get back to the article before the fear of it paralyses me completely. Breathe.

It rained this morning. It was still warm but the air was fresher, cooler nevertheless and everything smelt wonderful. A new day feeling. I went the wrong way round the Prom being too distracted by thoughts about this writing I’ve to do and the renditions of the Bronte sisters we are currently watching each evening. The power of Emily and the contained force of Charlotte and the pure sweetness of Anne. I am bowled over once again. He is too.

I read the hand-written sign affixed to the glass door of Capricorn Gowns on on Terrace Road. It read something like ‘PARCEL POST. Please return to sender any parcels sent to Capricorn Gowns, thank you‘. Why? I wanted to ask. Don’t you even want to see what they are? It hasn’t closed down, or at least doesn’t appear to have done. There are still the stiff mannequins in the window sporting various floaty cake-like efforts favoured by women of a certain age. And that large papier mache dalmatian. What that is about God knows. Odd times, eh? And then, distracted as I was, I walked past the Pelican Bakery wanting my fix of the bread smell and I had a jolt for there was the baker standing in the doorway in his shorts and apron. Good morning, he said. I did a kind of dance, trying too late to observe a social distance. Odd times, indeed.

It’s such a grandiose phrase. Proust had his Remembrance of Things Past, Milton his Paradise Lost and Dante his Divine Comedy. I cannot compete. I don’t have the intelligence, the self-belief or the talent. Is that OK? I’ve always been ordinary. I am ordinary. A quiet being. But nonetheless my ego is still strong. I still yearn for that all-encompassing, all embracing creative act. And yet, I don’t for I know the costs involved and a balance is what I am after – inner and outer. Mrs Gaskell struggled between the professional and the domestic. It’s all about rightness and peace. At least it is for me. But what is right? Acceptance is always the key in the end but my ego won’t have it. Fight fight, it shouts, to be heard, to be noticed, to be lauded. But what of the cost? And do I have it in me? I don’t know. There is so much I don’t know. This knowing of lack forever comes to the fore whenever I stick my neck out over the parapet and do sometime creative. And sometimes it overcomes me. I write with so little knowledge, a little heart, much enthusiasm (at least at the start) and a great deal of discipline. My discipline has remained constant. Sometimes I think that is all I am. A little woman of rigour. Is it enough?

There was a bee caught in his room. It was bashing itself against the window. Over and over again it buzzed and fretted. I fetched a wad of envelopes to use to coax him out of the opened window next to it. It took some time and I knew I was upsetting him further. I asked for help and he went eventually, succumbing to the urged offer of the envelopes as resting place and then he was off into the blue. And we all breathed a sigh.

I’ve the page to face in a moment. The empty page. I’ve been writing it my head for some time already. Keep it clear, keep it simple. Be authentic. Tell it from the heart.

Uglow’s book on Gaskell is drawing me in. Shall it be one of Harriet Martineau next? Such women.

The bleating of the sheep from the field beneath the National Library is an incongruous sound as it finds its way into our upstairs kitchen. I hear it in my bedroom too. A town caught between the sea and the field. A fisherman drove past me in his pickup as I walked down towards the harbour. Then I saw his boat, lit up with a strong staring searchlight, heading across the water towards Aberdovey. How I love those lights. So hopeful. Though I’m not sure why. He kept slowing down and changing the light from white to red. Was he collecting lobster pots from below? I’ve no idea of the season for such things.

He brought me asparagus for lunch. They were divine. And there is the promise of rhubarb too – though from the field not the garden. They are finished, apparently. Soon there will be gooseberries and blackcurrants. Then damsons. It is the small things, don’t you think?

He reminds me of Dickens character, though of course the clothes are wrong. He wears a hoodie, in Dickens’s time it would have been a great coat of some kind of a cloak. The colours are right though, grey on grey. We don’t know his name, or indeed anything about him. He lives in the top flat opposite us, above no. 1. We have surmised that he’s a Phd student. Sometimes we see him sitting in what I call ‘The Courtyard’ with several other twenty thirty somethings, mostly a woman and another man, sitting in his fold-up chair holding what looks like a seminar. Come rain, wind or shine he invariably has his hood up. He is rake thin and pale skinned. Sometimes there is a child with him, a boy, possibly about 5 or 6. He looks earnest, serious. He is awake at all hours. When I leave for my walk at 3.30 am his lights are often on. And sometimes he is outside smoking. We call him The Smoker. He smokes and skulks, his attention held by his phone.

How could he do it? Holding him down like that for 9 minutes. A living death, followed by a real death. How could he not know the human being he was killing? Was he so brutalised? It is shattering. One event out of countless that go on all the time. A killing of the other. We all do it in our small or big ways. In thought if not deed. It shakes me. Can there not be peace, acceptance, love? Are we not the same underneath? Where must it start? Where must it start? Inside ourselves?

A day of layers showing the cruelty. I cry out of frustration, out of compassion and a desire to know their pain and to see some way forward. The nurse washing her face as a child over and over to make it white. And then in fiction, Cadfael finding a son he didn’t know he had and then letting him go without claiming him. There is much to learn. And what of my peace? Can I ask for it if I don’t feel it inside? So much battling and I pick and snap as a result. It is fear, fear of not being good enough, always. Forgive me.

Beginning the biography of Mrs Gaskell was a pleasant escape with all its images of dear Knutsford. And last night the recaptured joy of To Walk Invisible with the feral Emily (so tall) and the pugnacious, cross Charlotte (so small) and the house, so barren, so beautifully empty and the landscape. Ah, my soul is lifted. But I want it for real. Sometimes.

He told me once of a girl he encountered way way back who’d told his friends at the time (he’d probably not turned up or was late) that he was probably ‘pruning himself in front of the mirror’. It tickled him then and still does. My love has the gift of not taking himself too seriously, and of infinite self-knowledge and therefore is fully aware of his propensity for vanity. I pruned him yesterday, outside on the tip, the dump or for the moment ‘our garden’. I cut his hair. He’d bought a pair of hairdressing scissors and a pair of thinning cutters. Just now I’ve also shaved his neck of all those rogue loose wandering hairs. He looks better for it. Neater, tidier and smarter. He seems pleased with my attempt.

Another warm night. My hips ache. I thought it was muscle fatigue from walking up hills or striding too purposively. But on second thoughts I think it is more likely a reaction to something my body is trying to oust. A bug, a mystery virus, a bad tummy call it what you will, something is fighting something off. I shall be stoic. There is no point in fasting if one is going to throw it all up and take painkillers. And pain has its own gift. So I sit with hot water bottles and herb tea, and try to distract myself instead.

My work frightens me. I am in fear of the empty page. But if I sit with it, give it my time and my attention something always comes through. It is inevitable. It is the reward of that attention and of my intention which is always to do the best I can, to honour those of whom I write and tell the truth as I know it, now. Yes, there is lots I do not know. I do not profess to genius, or skill, I’m a work-a-day writer who tries to throw off artifice and respond authentically to what is before her. That is all. I make no claims. The fear is mastered by my sitting with it. And my work is precious to me, not only as a means, however small of earning money but as a way of creating that stilling, that focussing on something, someone other than myself. It is a gift. Nevertheless be with me when I write. Please.

It was too warm to sleep last night. I lay there for what felt like hours moving this way and then that. I did sleep eventually for I dreamt. A later one was of a girl, a singer and a concert that she decided to cancel at the last minute. I was with her but also seeing her in a through a camera lens kicking her feet up high and wearing thigh length white boots. She was a little spoilt, the daughter of a friend who I tried to call but the phone I had was so small I couldn’t read the names or numbers. In the dream that followed I put my trusty black leather gloves on (the ones I wear for walking) and they began to disintegrate. I told him about them. He was there in my dream, in the wings as he often is. I’ll have to get some new ones right away, I said and headed off to do so before I woke five minutes before the alarm. Are these details significant? Or are they just a meld of symbols concocted from waking thoughts and fears?

The morning was perfect. The sea a gentle folding of water. A sheet of blue. From the Perygl I heard the purr of a fishing boat engine and turned to see its lights, full bright in the leaving dawn. I waited a little to see if they’d sail beneath me but they didn’t. The new shoes worked out fine, thankfully. A goodbye to thick socks and walking boots for a while, thank god. Now there is admin to do, a clearing away and a sorting out before other work can be done. So be it. Embrace it for the order it gives. All is well.

He is fifty today. Was he really so young back then? Still enigmatic? Probably.

I cannot tell you of the blue of the sea from my studio window. It is a welcome cool, a deepness. Aquamarine? Cobalt? What do those colours mean to you? DLS began translating the Divine Comedy. I stand humbled. And what is to be my life’s work?