Author: Ellen Bell

Is it the weather? I’ve felt enervated these last few days and it makes me a little cross. Poor love, he gets the brunt. But the crossness is really down to frustration, frustration with self for not….for not what? Being different? For not accepting what is? Who knows? I’ve done all I set out to do but resented some of it, particularly the domestic stuff. He says how important it is. And he is right. I need the order of it and so does he. It’s just I want to be doing other things too. I heard back from them. They never choose the images I would select. So be it. It pays the rent. It’s a job. I will do it the best I can. It isn’t great art. But I like to be paid for what I do. And what I do is create. An ideas person he called me. And they keep coming, though their sights are less, or at least more modest.

I’ve been reading Dickens, his last book. I’m entranced. It took a little time. His language is layered, heavy at times but so rich. I take it in small bites and savour it.

Is that what age promises, small joys, in small pieces but time (or perhaps the predilection) to really enjoy them?

It was an intermittent sound, not continual. I couldn’t work out where it was coming from. A laugh. A forced laugh. Was she in one of the flats to the left of us? It was certainly coming through an open window. A laughing woman. A high-pitched, uncomfortable sound. I was trying to sleep. Admittedly early for most and I would drift towards it only to be woken by her laugh again. It makes him cross. He is getting more deaf but noise still makes him cross. But it is a free country, isn’t it? And people should be able to laugh. He wrote about noise specifically and how we can still be peaceable amongst or amidst it. It tried it and it worked. I fell asleep.

The red poppies are out in that garden on Llanbadarn Road. Gorgeous blooms, and so fragile with petals like vermillion crepe paper. What a joy! Even in the half-dark. Joy.

I try to catch a sense of them before I am fully awake, before they disappear into the ether. The last one was centred around an ex of mine, an officer in the army, well he was then. He was young, as he was when we were together, a beautiful man but there was real knowing. Or perhaps I am being unfair, he was young and callow, I think, though his experiences in the forces had been hard. There was no real rapport between us other than desire. Anyway, we were travelling together, due to separate, I think I had to go for a job interview. The travelling was on foot, a road that we were being led down by an officious woman. However, the road, or the path was waterlogged and we had to veer off it into a boggy ditch. I had on my new walking shoes and hoped that they would hold out, my ex was less well shod and was growing distinctly irritated. The bog was marshy and fresh green grass grew up from its wetness. I wasn’t that perturbed, though I did ask ‘will we have to come this way on our return?’ Yes, said the officious woman.

I don’t know how to live, says the fictional Mary Ann Evans in a play I listened to on the radio about George Eliot and George Lewes. Nor do I. Not yet. I hanker. I hanker for peace, emptiness and simplicity. A cottage, a croft with white walls and a garden and wide open views. To write and sew and read and walk and to rid myself of this fear, this constant anxiety. Show me. Show me my home.

The sensor light comes on when he opens his window and I can see it when I’m locking our front door as I leave for my walk. Can I own that my heart always sinks when I know that he is awake and smoking through his window? Don’t get me wrong, I like him. He is a little wry, but always friendly, and he is a kind man, I am certain of it. It’s just that I don’t want to talk. I want to preserve my silence and walk out into that dark alone. It’s all that forcing of politeness. I am sure that he feels it too. It makes me awkward and I can hear myself saying silly things. What must he think of me? It is an unnatural situation. He is at his window because he wants a fag and I am leaving our flat because I wish to walk and it is our only exit. We are forced on each other at 3.30 am and we must be gracious, both of us. I had a card in my hand. Writing letters? he asked. I mumbled something about having to rifle through our card collection to find a decent one, our not being able to get one from the shops etc. I think Smiths is open, he said, looking bored as he said it. I replied saying that we were trying to avoid going into too many shops. We said goodbye then, neither of us lifted by the exchange and he wished me a pleasant walk. What do you talk about?

I am edgy – I set myself too much to do. A little of each perhaps is the best way forward. Finish work first. First things first, eh?

There’s no doubt it stirs things up, it is inevitable, but it is the wrong time of the day for me. I go to bed whirring with it all. And last night the story was so close, too close. Though I didn’t put her in a dustbin. They were so kind to her. Was that realistic? Wouldn’t the police at least have been a little more suspicious? Who knows? It is fiction after all. And all was well in the end, as it mostly is. Is it with me? And with her? I love her. I always have, though I haven’t always known her. I have loved the existence of her, the being of her in this world, breathing this selfsame air. Does she know this? That is all that remains important, her knowing that she is loved, held. I cannot do more. I cannot erase the past. No one asked me, that is what hurt. He sat on the edge of my bath. I would’ve, he said. I would’ve said, is this what you want? Perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to say in truth what I wanted, but at least he would’ve asked, would’ve cared to question me. She took care of it all. He thinks unkindly, I don’t. I owe her much. She gave her a family. Though even now I think she struggles to belong. Bless her. My love, what have I brought you? I hope some joy. Life, if not else. Is that enough?

I heard a crash from above and a cry of ‘Oh, no’. It was one of the glass tumblers she had given me in celebration of my first marriage. There were six originally now there are just two left. They are all the tangible things I have from her. Two glasses. I like them very much. They are square, art deco in form, simple and elegant. She had a very particular style – set somewhere between the 40s and the 70s. In the 40s she would’ve been in her twenties and in her fifties in the 70s. She liked colour but not too much pattern. I remember her pride over some silk cushion covers she’d bought for her sofa. They were of orange and pink and they looked so striking together. She had an artist’s eye, I think. I miss her. She was a difficult woman, a demanding one, as all the women of the family were, but I loved her. But in the end they are just things, and another part of me just wants to shrug them all off. She gave me a less entrancing gift while I was living out there. They were a set of fake candles that you charge up and they remain flickering for up to 6 hours. She was delighted with them, had a set herself. You save on matches, she said, and all the fuss of candles. Catholic churches use the same kind of thing now. But they are not the same. Candle flames are alive, they smell, they flicker. I gave them away but I wish now I hadn’t. Perhaps I can buy another set. So practical. She wasn’t naturally so, but when she was she was pleased. My love. My lovely love.

What a delight a fishing boat just getting ready to set out when I walked into the harbour. I tried to work out what it was that delighted me so. The lights perhaps? Like Christmas lights. Or the sound of the fishermen talking so softly in the fast-coming dawn. Or the sense of normality it suggests. Or the gorgeous slow entry into the open sea and the gentle bobbing of the boat. I watched it sail off into the distant horizon a part of me wanting, nay longing to be with them. All is well. See, all is well.

We were talking about fairs, I can’t remember how or why we got onto that subject. And then he said that they always remind him of ‘that stuff on a stick’, you know it’s pink. Candy floss, I said. That’s it, he said. Then he went on to say that he’d never had it. And I tried to describe what it was like, how the fluff-like stuff melted into a kind of soft toffee, very sweet. I was enthralled by the texture as a child, particularly the metamorphosis from floss to stickiness on one’s tongue. But all the same I felt as he did about fairs and fairgrounds, a mixture of fear and fascination. I’ve probably told you this before, he said, but I remember going to a fair as a child and seeing a man coming out of one of those fighting rings, you know the ones where anyone can fight, and his face was all bloodied. He hadn’t told me it before. And I was thinking about how such things would’ve been outlawed by the time I was his age when I heard him reasoning through his memory and suggesting to himself that what he saw was actually the man washing off fake blood, not real and that he must’ve been a plant to induce others to participate. All this in a matter of moments. And the memories flood in, indistinct ones, as childish ones often are, unresolved, unworked through, all those sounds, smells, fears and clamouring.

Was it the tea? I cannot be sure. Whatever it was I felt distinctly odd. My head was light and woozy and I was so very agitated. It was the agitation that was the worst. You can see or think clearly when you feel all edgy. Small problems become giants. And it get snappy. I can sense it building up inside, like a volcano about to erupt. I can’t like myself then. Or indeed anyone else, much. Poor love, he gets the brunt. So it’s back to tea bags today, though the loose leaf tastes so much better. Can it really have such an effect? It is a drug, he said, sagely. He thinks it’s because I’m so ‘clean’ inside that I am so easily effected. He also says tea makes me gobby.

I’ve much to do and a problem to solve. You will do it, he says. Will I? I always seem to get myself to this point with every commission. So full of fear and uncertainty. Onward. The flat has been cleaned. And the space is ready. Onward my lovely girl, be brave.

‘Romantic notions’ the character called them. I have them too. I can’t help it. Those high, virtually treeless islands are beautiful to me. The simplicity of the cottages, the lack of ornament. Yes, I know it is cold, harsh, windy all the time but a soul could breathe there, accept the nothingness and not try to fill it. A place to think, whilst one survives. No distraction. Will I go?

I happened to see it as I walked past this morning. A name. The Eddie Stobart Refrigeration truck parked outside Tesco’s loading bay had a name. Just like a train or a ship. Victoria May this one was called. Do the drivers always have the same lorry to drive? Do they make it their own, a home from home? They have to come a long way to get to us. All that way over the mountains. Was he waiting to be let in or was he on his way back? His lights were on, and I could see him in his high vis jacket sitting high up in his cab. I always think of her when I see one, I think her father used to drive for them. What a thing it must be to drive such a juggernaut.

The sky was turning blue as I made my way home. A lovely blue, a hopeful blue. And the morning is beautiful, colder but fresh and clear. He is agitated, BJ has given an unclear message. Go back to work he tells some, but don’t use public transport. Walk or cycle instead, he says. Here in Wales the message is clearer, we are still in lockdown, the restrictions are the same, at least for another 3 weeks. Will work be generous? All I can do is wait.

Several blackbirds were competing in song along Llanbadarn Road. Their music echoed across the thoroughfare. It was a real opening of day. Two screech owls also made themselves heard. The birds own that time. That liminal time. I walk in awe of them. They know who they are, their place, their work. I have yet to learn mine, perhaps I never will.

A girl of ‘strong sensibilities and not high spirits’, Jane Austen wrote, describing Anne Elliot at fourteen.

The radio programme set us off. It was one of the compilation ones where they play old comedy shows for three hours. This one was involving 70s ones and they aired a Gas and Gaiters (I think it was called that, now I’m not so sure) about a group of clergy, with the curate being Derek Nimmo. I believe his character was called Moon. I never heard it as a child but I’ve heard it since. It is light, easy to listen too, full of nonsense and a little ponderous but sweet all the same. It got us talking about Nimmo. He was ubiquitous in the 70s, synonymous with slightly shy, bumbling characters often with a some kind of a speech impediment. I think he died young, he said. And began to sit on the stairs below, as I worked on the quilt upstairs reading from his wikipedia biography. Apparently he fell down some stone stairs after a night out at some award ceremony and cracked his head. He was in a coma for months before eventually dying. He had an illegitimate son, he called out from below, whom he recognised and included in his will. But his other, legitimate son was cut out. It can’t be easy to have your private concerns become public property. Our inner and other, less public lives, may surprise and I’m glad of it. But let them remain private, eh?

I thought about what it must be like to have a house and garden. Had I always assumed they would be mine? I have not eclipsed my parents in wealth and possessions by any stretch of the imagination. Some of my siblings, have, at least one, perhaps. I have not. We get by, we have enough but a garden. What would that have been like? We had one in Cambridge. But that was his house, not mine. And one in Truro but I rented that. And I couldn’t give time to either. Would I do so now? Perhaps not as much as I felt I ought to. But to sit in it, that would be nice. And to grow sweet peas, some vegetables, maybe and some fruit. Will it come one day? Please?