Author: Ellen Bell

She started to cry. She cries like her mother used to, almost noiselessly and certainly unexpectedly. I pricked her with my question. I shouldn’t have said anything but I wanted to stand in her shoes, to feel her frustration and indeed her sadness. She talked of the humiliation of relying on others to do everything from going to the toilet to dressing. She is bed-bound, chair-bound, room-bound. And there she was just before her fall walking, albeit with an aid, around the corridors, and outside if the weather was fine, sometimes four times a day. Poor love. Well, might she cry. But she doesn’t. So stoic, so strong, so brave. What is your perfume? I asked her. Quelques Fleurs by Houbigant, she said. A feminine woman. A pretty woman whose hands, now bent and swollen are forever turning over and over, stroking and rubbing and seemingly searching the air for something, what? Another life now gone. We talk about the characters of 44 Scotland Street. It’s a lightness we can share.

She needs a name. It’s my way of making machines mine. We are slowly getting used to each other she and me (is that right, or should it be I? – he usually picks me up on such grammatical issues). I am slow and she is fast. I am old and she is new. I miss my old laptop, though her languour was beginning to get under my skin, but I will grow to love this one. She’s an HP laptop and I spent my morning walk trying to think up names for her and chuckling to myself as I did so. She really needs a thrusting name but I can’t bring myself to give her one. So old-fashioned it will be. Hilda. I like that name, it’s steady, grounded, a little strict but also sweet-tasting. Then the surname. She needs one. Definitely. I came up with Primly as I walked from the Perygyl and along South Marine. Hilda Primly it is. Welcome. Work well my love and I will care for you to my utmost. E x

She is sounding better. Her voice is stronger when she answers the phone to him. Though the sprain in her chest is clearly giving her some discomfort. She is a stoic, a non-complainer, nevertheless one gets a real sense of the restrictions the Home imposes on her autonomy. They are well meaning, clearly, but its the little things like a decent cup of tea or coffee, “theirs is too bitter”, and a hot water bottle to put on her chest to ease the pain “they don’t like hot water bottles here” and the ability to take two paracetamols rather than just the one they are currently giving her. Oh, I know it must be all about health and safety and they’ve countless residents to attend to so there’s little time to sate personal whims and foibles, but I feel for her. She is chair-bound, even reaching for a change of book is an issue. Though she did manage to put her weight on her foot yesterday. It’s enough. It’s progress. Give her the strength to keep going, to want to keep going. Let there be enough in her life to want that.

(As to the monkeys – was she watching them on the TV – I forget now it was too long ago and life has moved on such great steps since. Sorry for forgetting. She made us laugh about it, I know that.)

I love hearing her family stories. She is a wry one. She clearly loves them dearly but sees their ridiculousness too. Ah, we all have it. This time it was about her mother-in-law. She’s featured before in our discussions. In her eighties now she’s had lots of time to build up a stock of habits and mores. I hadn’t heard about the jigsaws before. I’d asked if they were going to stay with her when she took her to see Madame Butterfly at Swansea’s Theatre Royal. She said she was this time but the last few times they hadn’t been able to on account of the jigsaw. “Yes,” she said, “she had a 10,000 piece jigsaw of the New York skyline spread out on the spare bed, so we’ve been having to stay in a hotel.”

We saw him as we walked into town. He was standing looking at the list of buses due in the makeshift bus station. He had on a lime green jacket and he was standing there brushing his teeth, sans water and sans toothpaste. “Mad as a box of frogs,” he said, “and his eyes are a piercing blue.”

It’s so often the way that just as I am packing up my drawing things someone gorgeous comes along that I would’ve love to have drawn. Yesterday it was an opera singer. She was such a pretty, elfin like thing in her green woolly hat, huge coat and Doc Martens. She told us that she there to perform in Hansel and Gretel and that she was to be Gretel. “I normally have to be all wigged-up,” she said, pulling off her hat and shaking out her tousled cropped hair, “but this time they’re letting me be all tomboy. ” Apparently they’re setting it in the 1980’s and she showed me a photograph of the set and I got a pang of nostalgia for those long, long ago days of my theatre design training. “They’re basing the witch on Maggie Thatcher.” She was so light, so blithe. What a fillip she gave me.

I might even get my hair cut.

I know that there has been a shift towards a more secular approach and that to focus on a specific religion such as Christianity is now frowned upon. But I like it. It is familiar to me. I like the marking of ritual and festival even if I don’t attend church anymore (if I was still in Bath I would, I would). It represents a structure, a safe reassuring measuring of time passing. And Lent is one of those. I don’t personally see it as a time for self-denial but one of reflection. The darkness imposes that, don’t you think? It’s a going inward period. I hear them mark it on the radio both Radio 3 and Classic FM. I appreciate it. It’s old school, of another era. And long may it last. Oh how I miss the Abbey…..

It was on a radio news bulletin. An Italian, a rescue-worker from the Red Cross, I think. He was talking about the people, many of whom drowned, trying to reach the shores of Italy. Hundreds of them in a wooden boat. A small boat, too small to hold so many. They said there were in a small wooden boat. What did they pay the people smugglers for the privilege? Was there room to sleep, eat or even sit? Was there a canopy against the elements? I heard someone say that it is mostly young men who make these hazardous journeys, but I can imagine that there are whole families involved. Parents with small children, grandparents and young couples, all trying to escape hardship, oppression, war and hunger. We label them as ‘boat people’ as if they are a particular species distinct from ourselves and therefore need not empathise with them. They are not, they are sentient beings as we are with the same physical and emotional needs – the need for refuge, security, order and the possibility to flourish . What can we do but stop, think and feel for them – the desperation of their plight and the abuse of those who set them out on this treacherous journey and hope that if they do survive that they are met with kindness, generosity and love? The Italian man’s voice was full. He stumbled for words. The ones who were pulled from the sea are traumatised, they cannot articulate what they have been through. “They are destroyed,” he said.

It never feels enough. It never feels good enough. I never feel good enough. Just do your best, he is forever saying. You did your best, that is all you can do. It reassures for a while. I like to hear him say it, for I cannot do so for myself. I just don’t feel it, I never have. I don’t feel I was ever good enough as a daughter, a mother, a sister or a friend. Funnily enough, I do feel good enough as a wife, well, his wife. He shows me that. I sink in the evenings. I am tired and when I look back over the day I cannot see that it has been good enough. The work done, the writing or the drawing is never enough. The problem is mine. A hand-me-down sort of non-esteeming. I know this. I will try to circumvent it. I will. I promise.

I managed to steal some time a few days ago to sit in the sun. It wasn’t warm even though I was wrapped up in what he calls my Tellytubby suit. I wanted quiet but alas there was the woman with the baby standing by her car, jiggling it about as it wheedled and griped and the family (including grandparents) of the Sri Lankan doctor, who chose that self-same moment to file out of their flat and head for the back lane. It was a noisy business particularly as the father was insistent about negotiating the pram down the sleep slope also. I waited for peace. It came for a moment. And then my phone rang. Did you call me? he asked. No, I said. Funny he didn’t even know I’d gone.

I was over-tired. Not enough sleep makes me cranky. And her asking me if ‘I was up for another’ was the last straw. I wanted to stop. I needed to stop. To implode and have some empty space ahead of me. I could’ve said no, and was childishly petulant when he wouldn’t give me permission to do so. I don’t want to infantilise you, he said, with his usual wisdom, adding, even though at this moment you want me to. And he was right. I wanted him to save me, to carry me. He cannot do that and when I am strong and well rested I don’t want him to. So I said yes. Of course I did. It is my living. Nevertheless, I heard all those petulant voices in my head, longing to snap and carp at him. He is sanguine. He knows me. He knows that my crossness is short-lived and that I will think again, evaluate my behaviour and be remorseful. As I was and am. And I am grateful for the work. Always. It was a learning day, certainly.