Author: Ellen Bell

It was good to be back in the coffee shop again. I have missed drawing there and listening to the stories. I fall out of myself and the intensity inside my head for a wee while. It is nice (even if the drawing never seems to go well). Everyone seemed to have had a haircut. Is it the heralding of Spring coming? It was quite funny. All these newly shorn heads. And then there was the revelation of new relationships burgeoning. Dancing man has a lover. We are quaintly pleased, he and I. I hope it brings him some joy.

He read out the whole article to me over a period of two days as I prepared supper. Written for The Guardian by a Punjabi journalist and film-maker, it’s main premise was a plea for an end to public library closures. Growing up in poverty in Wolverhampton he wrote feelingly about the impact (he ended up studying English at Oxford) that access to library books had on his life. The self-same library that he used to walk the two miles to each Saturday with his father is now derelict. Though I did grow in the same need, I can concur with his love and celebration of public libraries. They fed my child too. Oh, the pleasure of being able to choose a book for myself. It was almost too much, like standing in a sweetshop and being told you can have anything you like, price or sweetness no object.

She’s had a fall and broken hip. She’s now in hospital and the operation was yesterday. We’ve heard nothing since. Poor poor love. She’d come so far with her walking. I wish her the will to start again. I hope she knows how much she is loved.

I listen to them talk on the phone as I make supper. He always has it on speaker phone. I prompt some of their conversation. Sometimes it is because I can sense he is running out of things to say to her, but other times it is because I am curious about her life. She has always been there but we’ve had little interaction of the years that I have known him. He asks about her first child, the one he never saw, the one who died of cystic fibrosis, I believe. The child’s remains are buried with his and her parents. And it was given the same name as his. Was that an act of fondness? She talked of going for walks with their father as a child. They walked to see another brother who was in a sanatorium with scarlet fever. I think my father had that as a child too. He was only two. She was four. Poor love. I had no idea. To be taken from your family at such a wee age. How did he make sense of it? And then he asked her how long her first born had lived. Six weeks, she said. They used to travel every other day to see him in hospital. They weren’t there when he died. We got a phone call, she said. It must’ve broken her heart. It still must.

I am curious about the way other people live their lives, particularly those who are close by. There’s nothing prurient in my interest, merely a wish to find a common ground, to notice and feel compassion. Take Smoker (2) for instance. As I have said before we can see his bedroom window from the front windows of our flat. We look down on him so to speak. I haven’t seen his two young children arrive for some time now. They used to come almost every weekend. I’d see them running up the steps after being dropped off by their mother while Smoker (2) would linger behind with her for a word. The kids would rush into the block, clearly knowing their way and seemingly happy to be there. He’s been alone each morning this week. I’ve seen him sprawled or sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, a hoodie on in this cold weather, reading his phone. I attribute a sadness to him but I could be wrong. He may be content in his solitude, who knows.

The snow was unexpected. I was rushing to an appointment. He’d offered me a lift. No, no, I’d said. I want to walk. I watched the snow turn to rain from my studio window and braced myself. The walkway from our hallway out to the steps into the car park was slushy and slippy. And the small flight of steps even worse. I heard him first. He was using some sort of mechanical strimmer on a bush on the edge of the car park. We know him. We’ve seen him loads of time and we nod, though we don’t know his name. He is a slow, lumbering sort of chap, not old. An employee of the super-fit, brown-skinned, ever-friendly, quasi-Australian (he’s really from Cardiff) director of the landscape gardening company that our agents contract the keeping of the estate to, he doesn’t emulate his boss’s saviour-faire. He saw me struggling with the steps while balancing my stick and umbrella and came over. Offering me his arm, and then taking my hand he walked me down the hill. I was so touched while at the same time thinking he must think of me as an old woman. A gentle being, clearly. The kindness of strangers…..

It was a painless visit. That is it was relatively quick and smooth. The nurses are so gentle and kind, and the surgeons, though a little aloof and distracted, are solicitous when you are before them. Well, I am the list. It may take a year the surgeon said unless the X-ray shows a collapse. I asked him what he meant though his explanation didn’t really make it any clearer. It’s just a phrase that they use, he said as we walked him, like heart failure. Waiting for the X-ray the technician put me in a tiny cupboard like ante-room with a blue concertinaed curtain. I sat and listened to him talking to the farmer’s wife from Aberaeron. Lambing started and her real name is Nanci. I wasn’t having that, she said. The girl doing the X-ray spent ages feeling my bones. What are you looking for? I wanted to ask. Previously a woman had tried to verbally spell out her name – Micklewright – for her. In the end she had to write it out. She was kind about it, thankfully. A&E was empty. No war zone today.

Is sleet preferable to rain? I wasn’t sure at 4.00 am this morning as I readied myself to go out. Is it less wet, perhaps? Whatever the answer, I went prepared. I put on three coats, two hats, one scarf, two pairs of gloves and two pairs of waterproof trousers, oh and my waterproof gaiters over my boots. I must’ve looked utterly ridiculous. Do I care? Do I poppycock. There were two men unloading a delivery lorry outside Holland & Barrett when I came down Great Darkgate Street. One – the one who called out Good Morning to me in a cheery, not a typical 4.00 am voice – was wearing shorts and a thin kagoule, as a nod to the weather I suppose. It was nice to hear his tones. God, it is bleak. Winter is a challenge. And now, I must write. The heating is off, naturally. I’m in the studio with two hot water bottles, a blanket, two jumpers on and the little fire going (which I will soon turn off, well when I’ve opened my flask of tea). Then its the hospital…

He’d insisted that if there was ice I was to come straight home. I promised I would. But there wasn’t. In fact it was a good winter’s morning – cold but still. I walked stiffly, as if my legs were iron. And it wasn’t long before I lost all feeling (other than a kind of stinging numbness) in all my extremities. I remember the pain of cold hands as a child. And it was pain. A sensation that was sometimes made worse by going into a warm environment. Is this was frost-bite feels like? I thought as I walked. The rest of me was as warm as toast, it was just my hands and feet. No one was about, except a tall, rangy student who loped past me, no gloves on his hands. I didn’t check to see if the rough sleeper was still in the Prom’s shelter. He can’t be, surely not?

One written, one more to go. And I’ve no idea what I’m going to say.

I forgot to mention the fox yesterday. How could he have slipped my mind when he forged such an impression by his brief appearance last Saturday morning? I love seeing them. I’ve seen four. I remember each one. One was in our garden in Cambridge. It stood by the kitchen door holding my stare for what seemed like hours (it wasn’t) before turning tail and bounding over our fence. The other was years before in Manchester. It was another early morning and it was crossing a busy, though then empty thoroughfare. Then there was the one I saw on the Prom. He too held my stare. I could see his body move with his breath. And now this one. It crossed the path of our car just after the new Dovey bridge roadworks. He was a flash of fur, a pointed nose, sharp-ended ears and then a brush tail escaping into the scrub. Seen and then gone. Marvellous. Life is made anew by such wildness. I thought about how he saw the world, the smells he caught, the sensations of being out there scavenger, trying to survive. How I love them.

He puts his head round the studio door to say, “Look it’s only eight o’clock and dawn is coming.” One of the woefully small hyacinths in the window box outside our front door is beginning to open and I saw a woman carrying some freshly cut daffodils into the gallery yesterday. And the buds on the magnolia trees are beginning to show. Do I need more evidence? Can I not be heartened by it? I shall try. I promise.

A rich day yesterday. My soul was fed.