Author: Ellen Bell

In her marvellous autobiography Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson writes about home representing order. Order and safety. Order. A sense of order, of rightness, of calm. Things in place. Routines that follow a pattern and method. It struck me. Order can be in place on the outside. Clothes can be washed, bodies fed and watered but a chaos can still reign. A volatility that cannot be contained. I loved and continue to love imposing order. It does hold me in place, but when I am without, I am more than a little bereft. And yet, I see my rigidity and am, at times, sorry for it. It is straitjacket and corset to me, tether and noose. But I can still thrive. Bloom where you are planted. Be who you are. And then breathe. Let it be. Let it be as it is. Not how you’d like or imagine it can be. I didn’t write about my grief at not being selected. And it came, even though I’d prepared myself, and saw that it probably wasn’t for me. It is so often an ego thing. I needed, or thought I needed, to feel chosen. There were 58 applicants the email informed me. We hope you are not too disappointed, it read. How I hate such missives. They do nothing to ease it, the failure, the gloom, the wish that you’d written something better. But it’s OK. My current workload is done. I can rest a little, gather myself for the next tranche of emails sending out suggestions for writing. You never know when they are going to come. Enjoy the space when it presents itself. It is a gift and there is so much you’d like to fill it with. Isn’t there?

The train entranced him. He was aglow. I loved the steam in the air before us, the sharp tooting of the whistle, and it’s slowness. We took our time climbing. And the meadows looked so beautiful. Untouched long grass, vividly green. Stunning.

Sentences, phrases, words come into my mind,  my head on waking. Are they mine, or do thy belong to another voice or plane? I’m at a time in my life, it said, when I’ve married a dead person. That was it. Word for word, verbatim. What does it mean? he asked at breakfast. I don’t know. It sounds wise, knowing.

Time for coffee, the radio and, as I need grounding, sewing.

I woke from a dream in which I was in a classroom of sorts. There were other students and we were all waiting for our teacher. DH turned up, late as usual and singled me out, talking about me in front of the class. It was jocular, or at least it appeared to be. He didn’t embarrass me, if that had indeed been his attention. It had been years, and he seemed as pleased to see me as I had been to see him. The class was on Thomas Hardy.

I wrote some notes in my notebook on the train, notes I would’ve used to write my journal the morning after. I never got the chance. The first was about two boys sitting on a bench in the Castle Park. It was dark, all I could hear as I approached them was the hum of their voices in the gloom. One of them was leaning forward and pointing to the ground. There’s Whitehall, he was saying. Then I wrote about being on the train. I love setting off, anything could happen. And then in the station café. It was a Starbucks and they always ask you your name so they can write it on the cup. Why not give yourself another name? I thought. So I did. I even spelt it out but he still wrote it wrong. Then in the next station café, a Pumpkin this time with a perfectly dreadful coffee in my hand,  I sat and listened to four women of a certain age chatting as they waited for their train. I think they were going to Chelsea, though were unperturbed by the cancellation of the London train so perhaps I got it wrong. They were talking about a hotel or country club when I sat down. They are completely rigid over afternoon tea, said one.  And I’ve been with you, said another, and we had a champagne evening. We’d had the menu chosen and everything, replied the smallest one with tiny, black, bird-like eyes, but they don’t really care. This lovely man called Cosmo, said the red-head, apropos of nothing. To the right of them a woman in a navy coat was talking on the phone. She held a speaker to her mouth. She stood. She looked like R. and mentioned Steve Redgrave. To the left of the women a man was also on the phone, a large man striding back and forth. And I was saying to Graham, he said, still walking to and fro, ‘not vanilla’ is a phrase he loves.

Why does travelling make me so tired? I was only sitting. Is it the being between places, that liminal space of not belonging, that does it? I read and read. Sad stuff mostly. Simone de Beauvoir and Jeanette Winterson. Both about mother daughter relationships that were taut, hard and heavy. And the middle train was so full, so fraught. People stood in the aisles, it was hot and delayed. Fridays on trains should be avoided at all costs. But it was worth it. I felt rested and made healthy by the walking, ferry rides and those hours sitting doing nothing in that beautiful garden. And I return to the last reading of William Trevor’s novel:

‘Her tranquility is their astonishment.’

I shall look the complete collection out. And find it. Such writing.

They’re up again. The deckchairs have returned. The giant deckchairs, that is, that promote the PR company Advancing Aberystwyth. What a nonsense, he said at breakfast, no one elected them. It makes his blood boil the idea that people are taking over his town. There’s one by the Bar and two in the paddling pool now soon to be sandpit again. They get vandalised. Considered a jolly jape no doubt to slash away at the striped fabric. But they are always repaired. Perhaps they have lots of spares in reserve. Sad that. He read out the story of the ‘trashed’ model train exhibition and how donors (including Rod Stewart) sent in thousands of pounds in support. Nice.

Another beautiful day. Or at least the promise of one. Much to do. Another journey tomorrow. I make the best of it. I can read and rest.

The work is done. Sent off. Wait and see. I worked hard at it. Is it enough?

Oh, and I almost forgot. This line from William Trevor, heard on the radio as I made breakfast:

‘He wondered if his wanting would be all there ever was.’

He’s a dapper little man, no taller than I am, who gives the impression he’s rather pleased with himself. I give him the benefit of the doubt, as I try to with everyone I encounter. We all have shadows that follow us. He dresses nicely, is spruce, jaunty. But I’ve seen him on the Prom with his child with Down’s Syndrome. Other people’s lives are never how we see them. We need to be thankful for what is. Here now. Here.

You’re welcome, he said as I passed him on the wee incline, his having stepped aside to let me go by. He smelt of beer. I rarely see people on that hill, though it is a convenient short cut for Llanbadarn Road. He was young. A student. Nice voice. Polite. Have a nice evening, he called after me. You too, I replied. You too.

The moon was full and huge.

Must I give up grapefruit?

I caught the tail end of an adaptation of a story called ‘Cuckoo’ on the radio this morning as I prepared breakfast. It flitted back and forth from the past to the present and ostensibly was about a mother who was sent away from her children, home and husband because of her volatile mental state. A state that was ‘created’ by a so-called friend who ousted her. ‘The word mother should never be mentioned’ – she told the children. One of her sons is looking back trying to remember what happened. ‘My mother printed a hundred copies of her memoir’, he says, ‘and then threw ninety-three in a skip.’

They’re meant to be good for your heart. I love them baked and steamed but the smell can be noxious. One of the contributors on From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4 yesterday spoke of their importance in Indian cuisine and its economy. Onions. Know your onions, what is that all about?

He answered. I’m on the Perygyl, he said. He’d walked. I was pleased. He was pleased. It’s lovely, he said.

So much to do. Sit with me as work. Help me to find the words. Help me to be relaxed, to let the narrative unfold.

Town was a din. Kids in shorts and mini skirts, bare-legged and noisy. It’s mayhem. They shout and bluster across roads into the path of mini-cabs as they duck and dive. The debris of half-eaten pizzas and burgers and their containers litter the streets. Gulls fly overhead, swirling and screeching or swooping down to scavenge on the scattering of chips outside ‘Finger Lickin’. They seem perturbed, unsettled by the clamour. Or are they joining in, participating in the chaos? We talked about it over breakfast. He thought it might be to do with their nests. They nest in the roofs above this particular student drinking ground. Maybe they are being defensive, warning off rather than merely adding to the melee. One gull’s wing whisked past my ear as it landed. So near. I felt the power of it, it’s force, it’s might. You have to be careful, he said, they can attack. There are all sorts of tales, some tall no doubt, others apocryphal, of seagulls dive-bombing people to protect their young or to steal food. Some call them ‘flying rats’. I don’t know. Everything has it’s place. In those early mornings they are more like a mirror – the madness on the ground being reflected above.

I listen to William Trevor’s writing with such pleasure.

I am scared they don’t want it. Give me the strength to resolve this. Amen.

I’m glad about the crackles, he said during supper. She hadn’t found any. She’d got me to lean forward on the bed and take deep breaths through my mouth as she listened through her stethoscope. Nothing. And the oxygen intake was a hundred per cent. So all good. He seemed pleased. But they will still do all the tests. Am I wasting the NHS’s money? It seems so. Best be sure, she said. Blood, ECG, something to do with an echo and a chest X Ray. Pitted and prodded. So be it. It seems to make him happier. And he is. Happy.

They’ve started painting the Prom railing. A long job. A sign of summer. Make it look its best. Even if it does look like an Iberian building site most of the time. Oh. And the Lifeguards’ Hut is out too. Nice.

So much to do. Will he like it?

Six hundred miles give or take. Twenty hours give or take on trains. We read, ate, did crosswords, slept, laughed, bickered and cuddled. It was a joy to see them. To see her and her. A Tasmanian Devil. A Tasmanian Devil with a beautiful smile. What a winner. She trashed the place but no one seemed to mind. And the sun shone. And on.

Bristol Temple Meads station and we’re waiting for our connection. He is watching a seagull. He acts like he owns the place, he says to me. Look, look. And nudges me in the ribs. He’s right, the bird is strutting about wholly unperturbed by the waiting passengers. One of the railway staff is walking towards us grinning. I grin back. A nice face with warm brown eyes. He must’ve seen us watching the gull. He stops to talk and tells me how that particular bird hangs around the kiosk on the adjacent platform waits until the assistant has gone into the back and then flaps up onto the counter and steals a packet of Quavers. He does it every morning, like clockwork, he tells me. Always Quavers? I ask. Always.

There was a dead wasp on the hallway floor when we got home last night. I was sorry. It must’ve been flying around trying to escape all day.

I’m going to apologise right away, said the woman with the red hair, we’re going to be really noisy. And drink has been taken. It’s about 10.00 am and we’re on our way to Plymouth on the train. She has taken a seat across from us. Then her friends arrive. The same orange tans, lacy black bras under jackets, tattooed ankles and false eyelashes. They sit at a table and gesture for her to join them. She grins at me. We’re still going to be noisy, she said, sorry. And they were. But lusciously so. They were going to the races and were clearly determined to have a whale of a time. Stories were recounted, in particular one about a club called the Barracuda (though the woman telling it kept pronouncing it Bar-ra-cuda) and a friend who’d been legless. When the train got to Newtown Abbot there was a mass exodus and when the guard’s voice came over the tannoy announcing that this was the station to disembark at for the races they all let out a whoop of delight. I felt a tinge of sadness when they went. And the train became silent.

‘Already the first of his summer freckles had come.’ (William Trevor)

Today we will see if we can fix my heart.

It was in the middle of the road. At first I thought it was just a chair. You know those metal tubular chairs with a fabric seat circa 1950s. Church hall kind of chairs that you can stack. But this one  had a hole in its seat. A seat that wasn’t fabric but plastic. It was a commode. And the bucket and lid that fitted under the hole were also strewn across the road. Mercifully it was empty and clean. Who’d put it there? To be fair it isn’t a main road. It’s a square really, flanked on two sides by rows of once gorgeous, now a little dilapidated Nash houses. Was it a student prank? If so, where they’d got it from. Perhaps they were student nurses or doctors? Or was it an elderly person? A protest perhaps against the onset of old age, of infirmity and incontinence.

It’s from word commodious, surely. But which came first?

I walk past them almost every day and the name chimes in my head as I do. A name that has taken on mythic proportions. I haven’t see it written anywhere else. Just there on the two man-hole covers outside the Four Seasons hotel. Peter Savage. The name Peter Savage etched then raised in metal. It makes me think of Huxley’s A Brave New World. 

The sun shines. I think of our journey tomorrow. The apology I must make. I read and read. The reading is as important as the writing, I think. Both are taking me where I need to go.