Author: Ellen Bell

We both saw it. It was driving adjacent to us on the M4. A van with a logo sign-painted along its side that read ‘Traditional Mole-Catching’. What is that? I asked. Does it involve bashing down the hillocks of earth that they churn up? Or do they send a Jack Russell or some other type of small dog to ferret them out? Or do they smoke them out? And if that is traditional what is non-traditional? They do make a chaos of lawns and fields but they are the most delicate of creatures. I remember finding one on the stairs of my father’s first cottage in Stainforth. The stairs were carpeted, slightly dank and dark. The mole was half-way up, how it got there God only knows. A tiny being, shiny black, soft, blind and utterly helpless. I think I wrapped it up in something and took it outside. It was barely bigger than my palm. Moles are just doing what they do, like any other animal. Is it right, is it kind, or even appropriate for us to slaughter them purely for the inconvenience they cause us?

I am less muddle-headed this morning. Though I am sad. It makes me sad, he said this morning. We’d talked about communication the night before and how I feel things have changed. It is partly his deafness, age and the new drugs he is trialing. Things have to be repeated frequently, and where in the past we just understood each other, now we have to search for meaning, often getting frustrated or irritated. It is not peaceful. He says he will give a hearing aid another go.

Whenever I see someone walking towards me, or ahead of me, in the dark hours when I stroll, I go into a kind of red alert. I read all the signs, taking note of gait, what they are wearing, how they hold themselves, build, height and age. I notice everything, even their smell. This man was coming down the little hill from the Buarth. I stayed in the middle of the road. The streetlight behind him kept his face in shadow. He was a big man, his arms were held out, up away from his body. His shoulders were rounded. He bounded down the hill, almost rolling. His hair was cropped short and the back of his neck was several rolls of flesh. He felt safe, there was something malleable, jaunty in his rolling walk. Morning, I called out. He looked up and smiled. You alright? he asked.

He’s just gone. A friend is taking him. It’s hard to let him go. I watch and wave from the window. He looks vulnerable, has done for such an age. Will they do it? Will it be smooth, without complications? Let him come home safe. It might be better if I died, he said during supper. Why? I asked, holding my breath. It’d be simpler, for you. Simpler, yes, I answered, but I’d be without this, without you.

Morning comes  – that blue. Black opening to blue.

Was it a nightingale? It sounded so beautiful with a truly complicated song that trilled and tra-laaed for almost half an hour, at least until I went to sleep. There is a bank of trees on the edge of what is, and has been, a building site since we moved in almost five years ago. The fact that it is a ‘building site’ means that on its outskirts Nature is left to her own devices, and excepting a few of the flats’ cats who pick their way over the muddy trenches left by the JCB, the birds that come to sing in the trees are virtually unmolested. I have no knowledge of birdsong, I can recognise a blackbird but that is probably it. It may have been a nightjar. But I like to think it was a nightingale.

The kids were out in force this morning. The balcony-cum-fire escape of the Pier Pressure was teeming. I had some music playing in my ear as I walked but I could still here the hiss, the clamour of voices. When I generally go past they are coming down from the high of the evening, the alcohol is wearing off and they are preparing to stumble off home. A girl sat on a lad’s knee on of the Prom benches as she chatted to her friends. Later striding along Llanbadarn Road I see a couple from the corner of my eye. She is leaning provocatively against a wall, part of the little slope that winds down from the Buarth. I can’t hear what they are saying. I catch the shimmer of her sequined mini skirt in the street light, the whiteness of her blouse and the pout of her red-lipsticked lips. I think of parodies of old French movies, Allo Allo and Joni Mitchell’s song about Yvette saying ‘Avez-vous une allumette?’

He is to go into hospital tomorrow. The consultant wants him there for 8 am. A light breakfast. They may operate tomorrow, it may be the next day. How do they manage with so many ifs and buts? He seems calm. And we drove there OK, with just a little bickering. I notice a difference in him its the new drugs, certainly. But I was tetchy too, tired and ragged. It’s all this holding of breath. Can I ask that he be alright? I think of the knife on his neck, his skin cutting. It is routine for them. No big deal. To me he is love.

Wherever we go there are wood pigeons. Here, in Spain, I even remember them from boarding school. I love their call. I’ve heard people via the radio complaining about it. I love it. That woo, woo. That coo, coo. We give them names, like Woodrow (Woody) Wilson and Wilma. Alliterative, childish, silly names. Our code. Our restricted code. There are a couple that perch on the trees outside our bedrooms. The bird song is getting more insistent, the warm weather and lighter (oh, joy) mornings must be making a difference. I hear it when I walk. The blackbirds especially. Such a hopeful sound. I am walking better, not so tired, not so lethargic. I take on three hills. Good for you. Good for the arse, the thighs. Go on do it. Faster.

She sounded terrible, bless her – scared, sad, defeated. I got so ill, she said, I had to go to the doctor. I haven’t made myself a cup of tea in a week, she said. It’s hard to yield, I understand that, you feel like the whole of life, the life you’ve been holding together by the skin of your teeth will crumble if you do. I understand, I say. I am just the same. But sometimes you just have to, your body insists. It needs rest. I like it when she says my name. I’ve been phoning her now for what, seven years? And it was tricky at the start, she was so shy, so reserved, so withdrawn. But now, she says my name, acknowledging me as someone who cares, who is interested. And I am. I’ve never met her but I like to picture her. She who loves those dogs who stray into her parlour from the farm up the road, and the cat who sleeps in her shed. She who grows green beans and patiently awaits her daffodils which come later then the ones here because she is so much higher.

My poor man. He too gets scared. Don’t we all? A small blip and he is spinning with fear. The doctors become a lifeline. He wants to be told it’s going to be alright. Fair enough. I feel his spinning. It is getting me in the gut. What next? He flies off the handle so easily. It can’t be easy being in his head. Be kind. Be compassionate. Don’t react. Let it be. Be steady for him.

I thought about my book as I walked. I don’t see the whole yet. Just snippets, as I said. There was a book I read years ago about a series of photographs this woman found of her ancestors and near family. She created a narrative around those photos. I think about Mum and her mother. And the photographs she had on her wall of her. She does the same. They were so absent and yet the photographs belie that fact. See she was there all the time, they say. Their presence, their pride of place states this. And she was so beautiful, my grandmother. The sun shines in her face, from her face in those black and white photographs. Who has them now? Probably she does. She has claimed most of the manifested memories. I understand, that is not a judgement. The absence is too painful to show, let’s mask it with untruth. And yet, untruth sounds harsh, more a kind of re-telling. I don’t remember the photographs of my maternal grandmother being in any of our family homes, they seemed to appear only when she went to Spain. Was it nostalgia, a longing that was being expressed? She never articulated such things. There is so little to go on. I will be writing absence. A land of absence. A land of absent mothers.

We are off soon – a long drive to see his consultant. He seems sanguine – willing to give his body over to the knife. I seem to be watching from behind glass.

I think about that little house. Does it miss me?

I love the documentary programmes that come on air in the early hours on Radio 4 Extra. This morning it was about the hot-housing of children into becoming ballet or sports stars. Some begin at the age of three. It takes a massive toll on their bodies. I’ve always hankered after that kind of myopic brilliance. To be a master of something. It never happened. I am too interested in too many things. A magpie. A butterfly brain. But I can see the pitfalls too. What if you find after all those years you don’t have want it takes? Better to have many baskets eh? (The sounds of those echo-y dance rooms with the plinkety-plonk piano on the recordings were so evocative of my childhood visits to ballet classes. I had no confidence, even then, and felt awkward and clumsy and couldn’t for the life of me remember the choreography. I believe Mum sent me to gain some grace. )

Still a little moon this morning as I walked. And just now I heard the owl – with its waaah, wooooh, sound, like a rather bad impression of  a ghost. Certainly no twit, to twoo.

We’ve been tetchy with each other ever since I’ve come home, I said to him yesterday. And it’s true. We scrapped over parking, him riding the pavement, and various other silly things. His emotions are near the surface. He is better but ever aware of the anxiety lurking, or even trying to push through. It is up to me. I shouldn’t react, dampening that egotistical desire to fight back. I can be bigger than that, can’t I?

A drama on the radio called the Launch about an ex-fighter pilot writing an expose of his brother’s death from ‘friendly fire’. It was full of bile, of recrimination and bitterness. He meets the perpetrator of his brother’s death and the launch of the book in an old aerodrome outside Cambridge. His ‘enemy’ reminiscing about the ‘good’ bits of war said, ‘You had purpose – you knew who the enemy was.’

Sometimes I think about what I’ve started, the book and I am made rigid with fear. How can I take it on? Will I ever complete it? And I have to take a grip on myself. It is too early to make decisions. Just read. Make notes. Plot the structure. Take your time. It is about being in that place of indecision, of panic, of fear. Nothing is shown. There is no concrete proof that it will be done. And yet I know that,  as with any leap of faith, one has to be comfortable in that place of not knowing. For after all that is the space where as yet, any thing can happen. It is the unconstrained space, the open to anything place. Find your peace with it. Take little steps, he said all those years ago.

Sometimes we ask each other questions we don’t really want the answer to. Like last night when he asked me if I’d be happier living alone. You would wouldn’t you? Sometimes, yes. It is my natural state. And yet, look at this. Look at how close we are. And I know it isn’t about a change of place. The adjustments, the real adjustments are internal. Always. A least at first. Else we just take our problems with us, unconsciously stowed away in our suitcases.

The massage was sublime. I needed that kind warm oblivion. But I am knocked out the next day. But thank you and enjoy Amsterdam.

He always stops him to ask after her. The postman’s wife. She has cancer. She is undergoing chemotherapy. Of course, they are poisoning her, he said to me afterwards.

He called just before lunch, he was badly shaken. I’ve just had a shock, he said. It was clearly a scam. Someone, well two people really, telephoning him and purporting to be from the HMRC and accusing him of not paying enough tax. They threatened him with a possible prison sentence. I was in the loo, he told me, and didn’t take the call but called them back. Two foreign-sounding men, one was his supervisor, he said, and they were so aggressive. I told him to call our accountant. Who, when he did, just laughed, apparently. And I wasn’t much better. Come home, I said. And when he did all I could focus on was giving him tips as to how to deal with fake calls in the future. And yet all he wanted was to be hugged, to be given succour. I got it eventually. They make you feel such a mug. But it is understandable, they can come across as so credible.

No moon again this morning, I have missed it. I do miss it. A man up a cherry picker was fiddling with the top of what looked like a lamp post just outside the station at 3 am this morning. What can be so vital that it cannot wait until daylight? The headlights from his van had been trained on him to give him more light. Three police cars were parked outside the back of The Marine Hotel. One also has its headlights full on, lighting my path as I walked, in lieu of the moon.

He told me of his friend, a Californian potter who gave up making because of the pain and difficulty it caused him to get his work ‘out there’. It is always been my motivation, to be seen, to be recognised, to be acknowledged. Never have I done the work for its own sake. DM asks me to look at his new films. They are sublime – studies of the extraordinary amid the ordinary. Birdsong mingles with the chatter of tourists, nothing happens then a leaf drops – gentle pieces that make you watch intensely. And that, surely, is merit enough. Are we working in a futile vacuum if the work has no outside destination? I think about my sewing. I want to finish them. To see them through, to see the process through. For after all they were never about the end result. It was always about the sitting still, the being still, the extraneous sounds (radio, birdsong) and the reading. There are others who work, worked, for works sake – Emily Dickinson, Primmy Chorley, Proust – can I not do the same?

Walking in the wind and rain, I came to what we call the ‘prow’, a kind of corner of the Prom that looks like the front of an ocean-going liner. The wind had grown fierce by then and I saw, from a distance what looked like a man going round and round in circles. I got near and could see he was wearing a Mexican-style poncho and dark glasses. His car, which was parked just ahead of him, had the driver’s seat window open and Indian music was coming through it. On the dashboard was a plastic sunflower in a pot. He nodded his head in acknowledgement of me and continued to go round in a circle.

Two dreams in rapid succession though only the first stays with me. DH was a deejay and I kept wandering past his studio window and giving him bon mots and quips to share with his audience. I made him laugh, delighted him. Some other  woman in the studio, seeing what I was doing, suggested that I should be interviewed, Yes, I said and they could translate it into Welsh. I was delighted by the attention, happy to be useful, wanted, loved even.

Accepting is the key. The key to it all and a way of halting this gut-ache. So be it.

It was a quote from a trailer advertising a radio play that was due to be aired in the next few days. I think it was a play by Arnold Bennet. ‘It’s an act of faith to make anything’, one of the female characters said. An act of faith, the belief that it will happen, that you will make manifest an idea. Yes. My life has been an act of faith, all too often with a wobbly faith in myself. Drawing, writing and sewing, and not necessarily in that order – those are my main acts of faith, of making, of creating. They run into each other, are often indivisible. I think about drawing as often as I think about writing. I want to master both. To be the best I can. To make without self-consciousness. To write without self-consciousness. I woke from a dream in which I was at a party held in my honour. Everyone was there, family and friends. There were plates of food everywhere, lots of green food, some looked more like plants and shrubs than salad or vegetables. I was in  wheelchair. I knew I could walk and as I was trying to get myself about I was thinking to myself I could just walk. Sometimes I was slow, other times fast. I was hungry and went off in search of food, offering to get some for L. as well. I came to some cold chicken, thinking she might like some and almost took some to see what it was like. You don’t eat that, I said to myself as I tore the flesh from the carcass and went in search of olives instead. A seemingly prosaic dream but to me one that is weighty with import.

I pondered on the nature of work yesterday allowing myself to consider the notion of work –  learning, education –  for the sake of it. I want to learn the craft of writing, as I want to learn the craft of drawing. What if I just dedicated my time to that – regardless of whether it brings in money or not? I have my journalism and my BBC job to bring in cash, however intermittently. And they? Well it will come when it comes. My life is more than that. I want to be the best I can be. To be a craftsman in every sense of the word. To dedicate my time to honing, to bettering, to flying. It would be an inner, inside experience, nothing to do with outside recognition. It will be interesting to see what P. C. has now done with her work to introduce it so overtly into the exterior world.

No moon this morning. Or the usual array of lit windows that give me such pleasure, particularly when I walk down from the Buarth. The windows in the terraced houses there are very fine with curved, arched tops and stained glass.

He is so much better, even staying up with me for a protracted breakfast, reading the paper all the way through. And we are back with birthdays. It was good to write up my notes yesterday, I mulled them over and re-remembered the texts that I read, seemingly such a long time ago. It is in fact hardly a week. I have booked to return. I see that little house in my mind’s eye, waiting for me. Anticipating returning to that compactness, neatness and simple modesty warms my heart. And he talks of our trip to London with optimism. He wants to come. Hurrah.

I was lying on the floor or our kitchen-cum-dining-room-cum-living-room at the top of the flat, waiting for the oven to finish cooking the supper. He was reading the paper by the radio/TV ready to switch Classic FM to mute when the adverts came on. What are you thinking about? he asked. And I told him. About a man I saw at Boston airport last year. I’d seen him first behind the till at one of the newsagent. He was Hispanic. Then I saw him again when he sat across from me in one of the eating areas by the big windows that look onto the runways. He was clearly on his lunch break. He was eating white rice. Just white rice. No sauce or vegetables or meat. Just cold white rice from a Tupperware container. He ate fast, hunched over the table, shovelling the rice into his mouth. He called across to another man just behind me, also airport personnel. (I could tell from his uniform.) He was West Indian. Whatya eating? The Hispanic man called out. The other man, also eating out of a Tupperware lidded bowl, tilted it towards the other to reveal what looked like a cold pasta salad. Nice? questioned the Hispanic man. Yeh, said the other. Neither seemed fazed by the spartan nature of the Hispanic man’s fayre. Just rice. I think about food a lot. Not out of greed but out of a wish to plan, to control what and how much I eat and to simplify. Just rice, is, can be nice. I hope it was choice and not poverty in the Hispanic man’s case. Sometimes just one foodstuff at a time is a good thing. You taste it then, really taste it. Like on a fast.

Serendipity. A joining up of ideas. I first saw the crumpets on an advert in his morning paper yesterday. With a picture of a middle-aged man smiling and talking about eating healthily for less. (Not quite sure about that.) It reminded me how I used to love crumpets as a child. Their texture was so singular. Mum would grill or toast them and I’d spread butter then honey on the hot, holey surface. I loved the way the butter and honey seemingly disappeared, only to wait beneath to catch in my throat and drip down my face after that first bite. I thought them so sophisticated, such an adult taste. Then later in one of the Hancock’s Half Hour repeats on Radio 4 extra Sid James refused a crumpet moaning that the melted butter always dripped on his tie. Then this morning walking to the harbour I walked past an open bin bag, its contents spilling out, amongst which were three whole crumpets.

The bag lady was out again today. You know the one I see on the Prom with her bag for life swinging as she trundles along in her trainers, always wearing that same pink sweat top. She never looks at me, though we must have passed each other countless times. I smell the cigarette smoke on her. She normally shops in the 24 hour garage on Mill Street. And then she walks. Is it a health thing, has the Doctor advised it? She doesn’t look as though she enjoys it. But there again I probably don’t either. The moon, which is full today, I think, makes a difference. All that light – I feel lifted by it. No Perygyl today. Too wet.

He’s asked me to go with him. Of course. I want to help, to put him at ease if I can. It will be an adventure, I said, like going on one of our trips. She responds to my email to say that her job is on the line. Her skills, which are legion are no longer wanted. I thought of her all day. Poor love.

Samways. That’s the name on the fish truck. I sometimes see it down by the harbour when I walk in the early mornings. It’s parked up, it’s lights are off. No doubt it is waiting for the ‘fish to come in’, for the fishing boats and trawlers to bring in their catch. Have they been out all night? There is always a beautiful drawing of a fish on the side of the lorry. A blown up watercolour of a fish, its tail curving its body into a half moon.

The moon is almost full. Not quite but almost. I love to walk in its light. I feel lifted by it, even if it is a cold white light rather than the warm yellow of the sun. No one about this morning. Lovely, just lovely. The wind was churning up the sea, lots of froth and foam swirling as I looked down from the Perygyl.

I continue to think back over my journey on Friday. For all its stress and protracted-ness there was some memorable moments. Such as the guard on the platform at Manchester Piccadilly, just before he leant over and whispered that I’d have to find another way of getting to Shrewsbury as the train had been cancelled, calling out, are you eating fruit? I thought I could smell it, I love the smell of fruit. I had eaten an apple but at the moment I was gnawing my way through some raw carrot. Was it that that he was smelling? And the beautiful elderly woman on the seat next to me on the Leeds train (have I already mentioned her?) telling me that she had dementia. Such an open, intelligent face, with that oh so subtle Canadian accent. I’ve lived here twenty years, she said.  But you could still hear it. Are you scared? I asked her. Of course she was, but somehow I believe in the power of articulating it. She was unfazed by my familiarity. Yes, she said. She talked of some important research she wanted to do before it took hold. And there was the man on the Shrewsbury train trying to look up alternative trains for me on his mobile. And the other, pretty, man eating soup with a leather bracelet around his wrist with a little wooden bead on it inscribed with the name ‘Amy’, with his gentle enquiries. I watched his hands as he ate.

Anne Cleves was on DIS.  I’ve no time for people saying they’ve no time to write, she said, talking about how she snatched 10 minutes here and there while her children were small. It took her 20 years to gain the recognition she has now.

She’s said yes to two commissions. I am pleased. They are small things in the whole scheme of the world’s economy but I like the challenge of them and the chance it gives me to send something out there.

I backed flapjacks and shortbread at his insistence. I like the way the sweetness of the treacle permeates the house, masking that miasma that is always there when I’ve been away. Is it him? Or glue from under the floor or something more sinister? He doesn’t smell it. I burn sage and it masks it a bit. It is passing but perhaps that is just me getting used to it.

A day of writing up my notes from last week. A chance to rediscover my ideas and thoughts. Just peace, that is all. A peaceful acceptance of my self firstly and then what is, where I find myself. A slow, paying attention towards death. It is a good enough life.

I continue to rifle through my sketchbooks. It’s funny how I remember places far more through the drawings I make in them. Or perhaps not so funny. I have to concentrate and the people I draw in them somehow seem to incapsulate them. Like the girl in the coffee shop in Shrewsbury, that Friday morning while I whiled away time waiting to meet an old friend of my parents. She was in there with her mother, I presume. She looked surly – her peroxided curls held tight under a wooly hat that she never removed. Her mother, or maybe it was just a friend, had a couple of blonde curly-haired children in tow who she was trying to keep under control with bribes of porridge and honey. They weren’t having any of it.

The trawler I saw yesterday wasn’t there this morning. I missed it. Maybe trawler is a bit extreme. It was a fishing boat, almost ready to go. I saw one of the fishermen on deck, hatted and sou’wester-ed. It’s their lights that I love – bright white spot lights – a stark glare made comforting in that blackness. They light up the harbour. And it is also their heralding of adventure as they get ready to rock and jostle on the tide out to sea.

He is so much better. A different man. Letters keep coming through the post with appointments. The operation nears. How will it be? I want to be steady for him. I must be sanguine.

The moon was a glory this morning. Oh, I walk bathed in its light. It is always about light.

It is a simple task, really. Just accept it. Accept what is. Here it is. A quieter life. A hidden life. An inner life and nonetheless rich. Go with it. To fight it is to give oneself unnecessary pain. This is your life – see it, embrace it, it is no one else’s. There is much to love.

It always throws me returning home. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been away, a week or a night or a couple of days, it’s the leaving of one place and the returning to another that I have also left. I inhabit spaces so completely – not always a comfortable thing. He doesn’t. He is never as at home as when he is at home. I make home wherever I am which makes the wrench of leaving, whether it is my real home, or my temporary one, hard. It fitted me that little space. A glove, a coat, a cardigan – it fitted me and knew me. I liked it’s rhythms, it’s nooks and crannies, the way that the smallness was turned to an advantage. See how near everything is – it was the smallness of my childhood, a doll’s house kind of smallness. It asked so little of me. I needed that, though the grief still surfaced. Was that such a bad thing? Everyone seemed to welcome me, or perhaps it was just that I was happy to be there. In that simplicity. A simple life, modest. I lived on yoghurt, fruit, spinach and porridge. Simple. And I read and read. Almost all the six books I took with me, their maternal stories weaving into my dreams. And I wrote and wrote – longhand, trying not to think, trying not to compose but to write automatically to see what comes out. I am tired. Yet I have to clean, to make the house ready, neat. The journey was long and with yet another Friday debacle. A train on fire apparently that virtually brought the network to a standstill. The carriages took on  wartime spirit. Nice. And in the end they got us a taxi all the way from Shrewsbury. We chattered, mostly of Norway. Small world. She’s going to see if she can find someone to ‘talk’ to me. I’d like that but fret about when and how. It’s tiredness, as is our niggles with each other. He too wants changes. Small ones, tweaks as to how we manage our life together. The rest, the break from me has done him good. He looks positively rosy. So much to do and I want to do it all at once. And I can’t. Breathe. One thing at a time. Another prize. Such childlike delight. I feel looked after each time. Like finding a coin or a feather. I met such kind people on my journey yesterday. They opened me.

You look lovely, he said as he met me at the station. I feel like shite but thank you, thank you.