Author: Ellen Bell

I walked through the harbour early this morning. Still dark, I cannot always make out what is ahead of me. But there are also the noises and the smells that seem so particular to the place. The boats’ rigging alternately rattling and clanging in the wind, the water making the vessels bob and clash and then there’s the stink of the lobster pots and the nets. I negotiate all these sensory interruptions blind. This morning there was a sound I couldn’t decipher. It was a kind of rasping, a metallic grinding. Was someone working on their boat at that hour? I never discovered the answer. I felt alone but perhaps I wasn’t.

It’s so black at this time of the year. I walk into its bleak dankness with a low heart. I seek light. The moon cannot give it. It is but a thin, smile. I walk the Prom to the sound of the sea rolling its mass over stony sand. Turning the corner and there’s a tree, lit with tiny green, red, blue and yellow sparkles. It’s a joy. My heart leaps up to meet it. I see its reflection everywhere, in the windows of shops, cars and bars. It’s even there in the puddles left by this relentless drizzle. Had someone forgotten to switch it off? Its not a real tree. A metal structure formed into a tree, welded and rigid, it, and its three sisters, isn’t much liked by the townspeople. But I like it. I do. And the lights make me a as child again, remembering wonder.

I put them out early. I needed it. He needed it. The weather has become bleak. Storms have raged and the world is more and more askew. We need light. I’ve only put some out. Not all. Save those for advent and beyond. It pleased him to have them on his bedroom sill. I knew it would.

A branch broke of the yew tree in the storm. It lay shattered on the ground. They are such ancient trees. Who planted it there? And why? Usually they are associated with graveyards and churches. There is something sancrosanct about them, though I believe that they are poisonous to horses. This one stands beside the fence that encloses the old school’s bin area. Hardly a hallowed site for it to oversee with its creaking grace. It made me sad to see it (though I’d missed the evidence of its breaking in the dark). An omen? Perhaps. The world seems shaky. As do I.

I know that they are there. That they have always been there. Always. It’s just that they get eclipsed by the charismatic, the famous, the lauded and, if there is truly such a person, the wholly bad. They are quiet. modest, usually. Like that young girl who offered herself to be parachuted into Germany in an effort to save people from Auschwitz. She didn’t survive and was shot at 23 years old. And my neighbour’s husband, who, as a missionary in the 40s and 50s, I was informed yesterday built sewers and schools in India. He had the face of the Dalai Lama, she wrote.

The wind worries and moans outside. Winter comes hard and fast. A storm, with usual benign-sounding name is predicted for tomorrow. I go out into the dark reluctantly, though it is rarely as bad as it looks from the inside. The air is clean and fresh on my face and the wind buffets me. I don’t mind. Not really.

The cold makes my body rigid. Leaving my bed to begin the day when the flat is so chill, is tough. I walk out wearing layer upon layer of woollens, only to see wandering-home students, coatless in T-shirts and tiny shorts.

I dreamt I restored his daughter to life. It was something to do with his sketchbook. There was some sort of key there that only I saw. The family were overjoyed. As they would be.

Winter comes. And it comes fast. A flurry of snow yesterday, too wet to stay. This morning there were white spots of hail on the ground. I walk as Frank l. Baum’s tin man, his body in need of oil, of grease, of cranking up. And yet the air is delicious, and when the wind ceases, so still. A half moon shone its best and stars glittered. No birds. No shouts. Just me and the milkman.

3.45 am. The rain poured down. A head-down and trudge sort of walk. No one about. No birds. Just me. Getting wet.

I heard him on the phone. It sounded dodgy. I went into his room but he waved me away, irritated. It was a scam. Someone purporting to be from Paypal. I fell for it, he told the woman at the bank. Poor love. Trust is a good thing, but perhaps a healthy scepticism and a habit of ‘examining all things’ (as Deborah Jenkyns in Cranford used to say), just in case.

I cooked a caterpillar. I found him in my spinach and tomato stir-fry lunch. Another poor love. I never meant to kill him. He was white and puffed up, scorched but not discoloured. His body curled-up in the agony of his decease. Poor, poor love. It quite turned my stomach. R.I.P gentle being. Where you a moth or a butterfly?