Author: Ellen Bell

He tells me that it was forty years since he went to art school and now he’s painting again. He can’t get enough of it. He paints all day. He resents having to come into town. You come to the dentist, he says, you talk to people and before you know it that’s two painting hours lost.

Oh, ‘im, he says, they bought a painting of his of a chapel and gave it President Carter. His ancestors were from there. Was it good? I asked.

What does it matter? What does it matter? You do not have to be good, intones Mary Oliver, you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. He loves to paint, let it be.

Town was full of kids this morning. Early. 4.30 am chucking out time for the clubs. They were everywhere. Coatless and heedless of the wind. A chaotic queue of them at the fried chicken place on Pier Street, one of them shouting at a group of lads across the road. Down Great Darkgate Street and a young man is sitting on the pavement, his arms encircling the metal rod of a bus stop sign, his head bent over. Further down the street a young girl in a sleeveless dress is striding up the hill. The soles of my wellies slide in a mess of discarded chips and pizza slices. Pizza boxes, paper wrappers, cans and bottles are strewn across the pavements. The wind stirs up a sense of havoc. Post-apocalyptic. Down on the prom the mess is nature’s work. Sand and pebbles left by the high waves, crunch under my feet. A white plastic Aldi bag dances in the air.

I see her in the gym regularly. A tall, dark, gazelle-like girl, aloof and unsmiling. Dutch maybe, or Scandinavian. Certainly from Northern climes. The other day I said hello and she smiled. She brings her own yoga mat. The tall, dark, gazelle-like beauty with bruises on her arm.

Monet choose to paint in Etretat in November. Outside in the rain. The skies just grey. Once a wave came over and stole his painting away. Sisley died in poverty, bitter at his lack of success. So they tell me. And yet, he was good. Wasn’t he?

Walking into the wind is hard going. Sometimes I shout. Other times I succumb, leaning into it, against it. I remember our horses and the wind stirring, agitating them. Their manes flurried. Sometimes they would whinny and then canter hard around the field. The wind makes me feel alive.

Shall we walk today? The sky is still white. No sun. No break in the thick membrane of cloud. Sunday morning. Sunday morning.

The sky is milk-white. I can hardly see the rain, though I know it is falling for the roof tiles outside my studio window are shiny with wetness. A grey whiteness. And I am cold. I sit at my laptop, a hot water bottle against my stomach and a blanket wrapped around my knees.

The session this morning was cancelled. I thought it might be. It would be inappropriate to talk of such inconsequential things after last night’s happenings in Paris. I didn’t know till he told me at breakfast. I’d missed the radio news bulletins. How does it make you feel? I asked him over coffee. Feel? he’d said. Yes, what do you think of? How do you cope with such knowledge of such pain inside your head?

I know that I am not making much sense. His voice gets sharp. I usually cry then. I have not made myself understood. It’s something to do with standing in another’s shoes. I am compelled to do so. To feel what they are feeling.

Does it help? How can it help? I want to hold them, to touch. To love.

We talk about forgiveness. But what about punishment? he asks. Do you think they should be punished? This step brother, he continues, should he be punished? Of course, I say, but society must mete out the punishment not the individual. But what do I know? And who am I to dole out judgements? I do not want to. I just want to find a state of grace. For myself, for all.

We need to find a way to talk. For doesn’t it always come down to this, a need to be heard, acknowledged, understood?

Is there such a thing as evil? Is it separate from what we are?

Preparing breakfast I’d listened to the end of Jack London’s Sea Wolf. Wolf Larsson is dying but even in death he tries to choke the life out of Humphrey van Laden. It is so that I can feel alive, he says. His last muster of strength. The night before he dies Maud asks him about his soul. He is dismissive, Pah, he says. He loses the power of speech. They give him a pen and pencil. The next morning they find a crumpled piece of paper in his hand. Just one word written there. BOSH.

I told him. Serendipity, he said. Yes. It had been a crossword clue. Nonsense. I’d suggested bosh but he’d said, no, there’s no such word. It’s tosh. I’d relented. Not trusting my judgement. This morning I checked in the dictionary. Bosh = nonsense.

It gives me comfort. A kind of reaching out. Sometimes we are so far from home. That’s how it feels.

Writing my life is tough. I revisit it’s bleakness and I am made grey. It is inevitable. No walk today. I think I shall sleep. Sleep myself into a lightness. A light lovingness.

Please.

I know it’s nonsense. A sugary kind of nothingness that is easy to watch after a long day. Snuggling up on his bed. With him stroking my feet. I know. But sometimes, even in the most cloying of TV nothingness there is wisdom.

We watch them through, the box sets. They call them costume dramas. The original books are usually weighty, important even. Mrs Gaskell’s North and South, Elliot’s Middlemarch.  But they are tinkered with, adapted for contemporary taste, lightened, sugared. It’s OK. They are easy on the eye, on the mind. We are almost through with Lark Rise to Candleford. I borrowed the book from the Library. A great tome of a book. Hardback. Much-borrowed. Some pages are falling out. It couldn’t have been more different. This is social history. The adaptation, a saccharin nothingness. Though the actors do their best. Linda Bassett as Queenie Turrill. Last night she’d been to Banbury Fair to sell her lace. I’ve been at the pillow since I were a little girl, she said. No one wants hand-made lace anymore. It’s all that machine-made stuff, now. She is thrown. I always saw the purpose before, she says to Ruby Pratt of The Stores, her hands crisscrossing the bobbins, now I only see the beauty.

Is creation still creation when there is no place for it? No one to buy it or even see it? Do we, can we create just for the sheer joy of it?

He is so cheerful. A truly contented man I think. A photographer by trade. I’ve known a few. And in so many cases they’ve been bashing sort of men. Not tender. And yet, their craft is a careful one, is it not? A patient one. All that waiting, that blowing away of dust.

I saw it shimmer in the light from the lamppost. Black sequins, the large ones. A skirt. A sequinned skirt. I could make out a skirt, and stocking tops with bare thighs. It was still dark after all. Not yet five am. There were two of them. I heard their voices first. They were arguing. Standing on the corner of North Road and Loveden Avenue. The skirt was tiny, a mini skirt. As I approached I saw it was a man. A man with a beard wearing a mini skirt. A sequinned mini-skirt.

If he doesn’t die soon they will have to move him out of the hospice. They are only allowed two weeks dying time there. But he likes it there. He is safe, he is cared for. Will they move a dying man? Disrupt this period of grace. She writes that she fed him bananas and custard. Nursery food. Baby food. Everything turning full circle. They have reached a state of grace those two. How potent death makes life.

The drugs are making him hiccup. He doesn’t understand.

I am having my feet done. I love her voice. Warm treacle. Syrup. The condition makes him so honest, she tells me. We’d gone away for the weekend and my husband needed a haircut. We were at breakfast and Dad said to my husband. David, he said, can I ask, is that a wig?

Have they moved him from the second floor?

Sian’s meant to be taking care of the weather in Aberystwyth, he told me over the phone. I think there is supposed to be some flooding along the sea front.

Ulster. That’s it. That’s the answer to the crossword clue. A long overcoat, ending in r. I found it. I asked and I found it. In Lark Rise to Candleford.

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for. He quotes it a lot. I will try. I just want to send it out. These little pieces of something. He looks concerned. If it gives you joy, then fine, he says. Joy. There is joy in the making, certainly. One just has to learn to care less, that’s all. Care less. Careless.

I’ll try.

You’re only a writer when you’re doing it – at the point of the pen, said Alan Bennett on the radio yesterday.

Gosh, she’s plain, he said. That’s such a welsh thing to say. GOSH, she’s plain. Homely they call it in America. Your work is often described as homely the interviewer said to Bennett. Do you think that’s fair?

That vicar gets on my tits, he said as we got into the car. Why? I asked. He’s always scurrying about with his trolley and when he barges in front of you, or nudges you with it, he never says sorry. What’s he doing in the supermarket anyway, he said, he should be saving souls somewhere shouldn’t he? Scurry. I think about Richard Scarry. The writer and illustrator. I loved his books as a child. Spot the cat up the ladder or driving a fire engine. I think one of his books was my first library book. The first one I borrowed.

The sun is out, what a delight.

She sounded better, chattering away like a sparrow.

Some ancients believed that the wind was God’s voice. Sometimes in the early morning it seems so.

He’s got a flat over Gannet’s Bistro. He likes it. Is proud of it. Always the rolling stone, never setting down roots. Not properly. Leaving his stuff with friends, in attics, in spare rooms. Now he’s got this place they’ve returned them. Boxes everywhere, blocking the hallway. There isn’t room for it all.

He’s a bit of a bruiser, isn’t it? I said. I knew I was being uncharitable. I couldn’t help myself. He likes it when I am a little less good. Goody two shoes. That’s not like you, he says. I know. But it’s just a description. We are talking of the baby in the high chair. We’d just walked into The Granary in Hay-on-Wye for lunch. He was sitting with his mother at a table by the stairs. A great stocky child, his face covered in food. Not smiling but not scowling. Just staring. I tried to say hello to him, he said, but he was too busy putting food in his ear.

The mother brings him upstairs later to change his nappy. She beamed with pride. She loves him. She sees something else. Of course.

I am tired. Jaded from a lack of sleep. It is enough to tread water today. So be it. Amen

But I want to be good.

To be kind. And yet, all too often I transgress. I am sharp, I feel my face pull itself into a grimace. I do not listen. I think an unkind thought. I am cold. Today in the gym, when the two women had moved my coat. What does it matter? I felt my snarl. I tried to recoup my warmth, smiled. Asked if I was in the way. But it felt like the damage had been done. A subtle coolness in the room. A chill.

I want to be kind. But sometimes I am weary. Weariness erodes my resolve. I know it. Writing makes me weary. Thinking too much makes me weary. Trying to understand the nature of faith makes me weary. Perhaps it is not about understanding some might say, but about being. Yes. I see that. But how? How can one be? How must one be?

Dust yourself down and start all over again. The song goes. Start over and over again.

I am so blessed. He returns me to myself. He dusts me down. Picks me up so that I can start again.

The bag woman was in again today. There was a door in one of the cupboards that wouldn’t shut. She kept pushing it, disturbed by it hanging open. I was too. We are no different, she and me. Or is it she and I? I never know. We need it just so. More and more as we grow old. Imposing some control over the chaos. I want to be kind to her, to me. And yet, I don’t make eye contact. Don’t, he hisses looking down, don’t or she’ll start talking at you. Why not? She is lonely, distrait, I think. She sighs. Pours a glass of water, then another. Her tread is heavy. All those bags.

A drizzly day with a milk-white sky. Let me be kind. Show me how.

She refers to it as serendipity. Isn’t seren the Welsh for star? Serendipity. We’d been talking about the Brontes and there it was a reading of a new Charlotte Bronte biography on the radio. Read by Hattie Monaghan. She played Eleanor in a recent TV adaptation of Sense and Sensibility and I saw her a couple of years ago on stage in London as Nora in The Doll’s House. She has gravitas as an actress. Is earnest, solemn even. I like her voice. The bit I heard the Brontes were endeavouring to publish a collection of their poems. They had to cover the costs. Two copies were sold. Worse than nothing, Charlotte wrote in her journal. Worse than nothing. She’d written to the poet Southey the year before. He’d encouraged her to quash all ambition to publish, to know her place, accept her status in life as a woman. Nevertheless, she had taken heart, he had not said her poems were bad.

Tenacity. You’ve got tenacity, said ‘The Beast’ as he leaned out of his window smoking a cigarette, going out in this. I must have my walk, I said.

The rain didn’t come till later. I had a dry morning walk. Though it was windy. Abigail is coming. The sign for The Angel pub creaked and whined as it swung back and forth. Down at the harbour the through road is lined either side with boats on bricks. Makeshift stilts, they look so unsure. Some of the boats are in a right state. Peeling paint, rust and sagging rigging. A sorry state. I’m glad they are out of the water. It’s like the lobster pots. All are safely gathered in. Anticipating winter. Battening down the hatches.

I saw two cats in the dark. One crossed Llanbadarn Road the other was on the promenade. They are not scared of the dark. Like me.

Sometimes I see coins on the pavement. Usually they are five pence pieces, sometimes a pound. Today I collected pebbles. Twelve of them. Off the prom. The sea had hurled them there. I create of a line of them on the window sill, like Kettle’s Yard. The outside brought in. I washed them. Do they still smell of the sea? Like shells?

They came in to talk about peace poppies. White ones. There had been a fracas last year. Everyone kept calling them pacifist poppies. No, she said, in her soft German brogue, they are peace poppies. They are to commemorate everyone who has been killed in conflict not just the fallen soldiers and armed forces. Everyone. We want to encourage the end of wars through negotiation, through diplomacy, she said. We spoke with the Legion and found we had much in common. I’m glad.

No hands and no feet. I remember the Grimm’s fairy tale. The Silver Hands. She has her hands cut off so that the Devil can’t take her. She is given false hands fashioned from silver. This woman had become ill, her extremities growing sceptic. So brave. So strong. Really. What lives I encounter through the radio. She is waiting for a transplant. A double-hand transplant. Can you imagine? I am humbled. Our hands and feet – they carry us through, help us to make sense of the world. I wish her a speedy recovery. Though what she has learnt through her trial must be immeasurable. In the story the girl’s hands grow back. I wish her well.

Walking home I hear the train. The trundle train I call it. A slow train. A rolling, meandering train. Chugger, chugger. No whistle. In the summer there is a whistle. A whistle from the steam train. At three o’clock in the afternoon. A nice sound. A gentle sound. A summery sound.

Outside my studio window the rain is lashing the panes. Spitting hard. There is a Paul Simon song about raindrops on a window pane. Melancholic. Gorgeous. There but for the grace of you go I, it ends.

Take care, he said, it would break my heart. Mine too, my love. Mine too.

At boarding school the Spanish master used to call me Medium Bell. My elder sister having gone before and my younger soon to follow. My eldest sister put chewing gum on his chair. I think he was quite sanguine about it though my parents had to foot the dry cleaning bill. She just wanted to come home. That’s all. She couldn’t stomach it. Not at all. Not at all.

I didn’t know whether they’d go for the fact that I’m a medium as well, said the head of Ceredigion toilets. She is a major character in a new BBC Two Wales documentary. Coastal lives. There is an Elvis impersonator and a couple who keep snakes. It’s all about proper cleaning, she tells me. We’ve won top loo over the years and platinum, and Aberaeron who’ve got gold keep saying how comes you got platinum? It’s all about proper cleaning, I say. It isn’t enough to just swish a mop around, she says. You’ve got to do the skirting boards too.

Fifteen minutes. Fame. Fifteen minutes of fame. Do you know who he is? she asks. Oh, I say. Yes, I heard about it. He was on telly yesterday, she said. I saw his picture on the front of the paper today. A gentle young man. Small, slim and white-faced. There is no bandage. The tear is still bloodied. They cluck around him. Poor love. Poor lamb. An innocent. The man on the radio keeps asking him if he did anything to warrant it. Not at all. Wrong place, wrong time. He was wearing a poncho. The perpetrator. There must’ve been blood. Will you press charges? I ask. Of course, he says, I ‘ave to don’ I?

There’s Farter, he says, stopping the car to let a man with a grey-moustache wearing a brown anorak cross at the junction between Thespian Street and Terrace Road. Farter? I ask. Yeh, Non the Pon said he is notorious for farting in the Nat Lib. They all call him Farter. He can’t help himself apparently.

Early November brings a birthday and an anniversary. How old is Peter Noon? he asks. I know, I say, exactly the same as you. That’s right, he says. That’s right. And the anniversary? Eighteen years married. And in between five years divorced. Not really, he says. No, I say, it wasn’t. In my head we never divorced, he said. No, I said.

We watched the fireworks from the window. The sky was smoky white. I remember the sparklers spitting sparks onto my gloves. That miasma of burnt wool. I loved Sparklers, white-hot and fizzing. Parkin, he asks, what’s Parkin?

Mrs Eglin was our baby sitter. A local. A true Lancastrian. As a girl she worked in the textile mill. Once we visited her in her home. She had a Chihuahua and a canary in a cage. On Sunday nights she would sing along to Songs of Praise. If we were good she’d take out her teeth and show us her gums. Up the apple and pears, she’d say. She reminded me of Nanny Clarke. Long gone now, long gone.

I don’t like rain, said Iris. It poured. Now the sky is a Titian-blue. Nothing lasts, good or bad. The clouds scud. Faster now. Shall we walk this afternoon? Have a blow? Yeh, then tucked-up tidy. Mmm, sounds nice.

Two cups of coffee and we talked of the Brontes. They used the name of Bell, I said. Really, he said. Yes, Acton Bell, Currer Bell, I said. I couldn’t remember the name Emily took. Was it Ellis? Charlotte saw them all buried. Such sadness. Such passion. I hope we can go. Yes, though I mustn’t force it.

How is the man? The dying man. I miss you, she wrote. Yes, I miss you too. Let it be. Don’t fight it. Let it be. Don’t rage. Don’t fight. Let be. Let be.

The white witch of literature she called her. Angela Carter, the fabulist. Fabulist, what images that word conjures up. They’re on the radio talking about some poems of hers that they’ve found. Unearthed, unpublished. Marina Warner, Salman Rushdie and Andrew Motion, picking over the bones. God, she was visceral. I read her with bated breath. Gorgeous. A feast of gorgeousness but oh so horrid at times. Was it good poetry? the presenter asked Motion. Private scribblings in a journal. She made notes of what she read on one side, her writings were on the other. Picking over the bones. I remember seeing The Magic Toyshop on stage in a studio theatre in SOHO. That marvellous company Shared Experience. The tumbling, the nakedness and the blood-red feathers. Can one love and be repelled at the same time? I think so. I do think so.

Early morning, not yet light, and a tall black girl with blue hair wearing Doc Martens is walking aside a diminutive man in a leather jacket. Are you Italian? I hear him say. No, she replies, I’m Portuguese.

A pigeon, sleeping in a doorway, flaps its wings in a flurry of feathers as I walk past.

A robin bobs before me onto the pavement. A tiny dot in the still dark.

A man walks towards me, a hood over his head. He licks the side of his cigarette paper before rolling it into shape. He scowls at me as we pass.

She isn’t well today, her voice is querulous. My head is like a bucket, she says. I’ve earache, it’s making me grumpy. Sorry. I could swear, she says. I’m hot then I’m cold. My daughter says I should go back to bed. And the weather. That’s right, dear, she says. I will. Speak to you next week. Bye.

He was thrown. I thought it was radio, he said. We’d met before. Was it last year? I helped him onto the stool. It looked awkward. I touched his arm. An encouragement, a gesture of solidarity. Are you nervous? I asked. A bit, he said. His skin through his t-shirt was burning hot.

A slither of moon.

If I keep writing, she wrote in her journal, I will get better. I will be good. You do not have to be good, wrote Mary Oliver, you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. She wanted a feast before she died. Yesterday a dying man had egg and chips. Some people are more alive just before death than they ever were living.

Can you forgive yourself? Isn’t that the beginning and end of it? Self-forgiveness.

I thought it was a graze. I’d been filling the flower jug with water. It was pollen dust. Lily pollen dust. Ochre-yellow, like saffron. Staining my skin. Yellow. He’ll be yellow again, tomorrow, she wrote. Mellow yellow. They call me mellow yellow. Yellow is the colour of the solar plexus chakra.

A drizzly day. A melancholy day. I wrote my thousand. Enough. For today. Enough.

From my studio window I often see crows. They perch on the roof tops. Yesterday there were two on a TV aerial. Something made them take flight. The aerial continued to shake way after their departure. This morning I watched as a jackdaw drank from a guttering. Perched on the edge, it bent down to drink then pointed its beak towards the sky letting the liquid slide down its throat.

See that parking, he says, bloody awful. It’s not so much how they park but the space they take up. It’s his main bugbear. It gets his goat. Not much else does, not these days. He is gentler, calmer, happier. Have I done that? I think so.

He’s adorable, I said to Linda on the checkout at Morrison’s. It was a strange word to use, I admit. But I meant it. I do adore him. She wasn’t expecting it. You’re supposed to moan, to carp, albeit playfully, about your other-half in the supermarket. You know, raise your eyes to the ceiling, tut and say, typical. But I don’t feel it. I just feel blessed, in every which way.

It is enough. It is.

I find things when I walk. Yesterday there was bed in the road. Well, half in the road and half on the pavement. A perfectly good bed. Clean. A single bed base. Had it fallen off a lorry? And today I found some money. On North Road, two notes. Two twenty pounds notes. I felt sorry for the person who’d lost them. But what can I do but accept the gift? The gift of providence. Just like him. My gift. I pinch myself. I am blessed.

Later I saw two magpies in a tree. Is it to be a lucky day? Joyous. Of course. Of course it is.

She said that Enid Blyton was supposed to have written up to a ten thousand words a day. She was certainly prolific. I write a thousand and I am spent. Grahame Green wrote eight hundred at a push. Just write your thousand a day, wrote Stephen King. You need a structure, a regime, else all is chaos. Did I like her books as a child? I’m not sure, that I did. I didn’t warm to them, the characters that is. Whom did I prefer? The Narnia books perhaps? And yet, they were so heartbreaking. The capture of Aslan, his flesh bitten into by that rope. Too tender a child. Always have been. When he asked Derek Walcott to talk about Seamus Heaney, he couldn’t. Was he crying? Over-sensitive, they always called me. Perhaps I am like a poet. He was a beautiful man, he said finally.

I no longer blush, I am denied that warmth, muses the protagonist in A. L. Barker’s short story, Something of Fancy. It is only at the end that you realise it is the ghost of Jane Austen. Nice. Piano. Pronounced pi-aaa-know.

Sunday morning, 4.30 am. Remnants of Halloween. A young man in a body leotard painted to look like a skeleton walks home along Llanbadarn Road. There are girls in cat’s eyes and eyeliner whiskers, some wear nurses uniforms with bloodied aprons, one has a black tinsel halo fixed to her head. A man sits in the road.

On Desert Island Discs Marjorie Wallace describes her melancholy as ‘a winter of the mind’.

They’ve collected all the lobster pots. They are piled high on the harbour. They stink. A stench like rancid sweat or unclean tummy buttons or knicker gussets.  It is overpowering. I shut my nostrils as I walk by. The smell of landed sea. Too much. To alive. To potent.

I am glad we are to meet. Lunch will be nice. I will dress up. I’ve missed you. I miss all of you. All those parts of me that make me smile, sometimes laugh out loud. It is a balancing act all of this, the yin and yang, the inner and the outer. Winter is the inner, the being inside, hunkering down. But not yet. Another day of sun beckons. The sky is a perfect space of blue. What a joy. What a gift. Thank you for this. Thank. You.