Category: Writings

There was an ambulance parked outside one of the houses on South Marine Terrace. It was still dark. Not yet day. About 5 am. There was no one inside the ambulance but the lights were on. Green.

Lots of serendipity. I forgot someone’s name, the name of singer, and then someone said it on the radio. And then this morning out walking listening to my favourite song. I listened to it twice only to hear it played on the radio on my return. Little things. Such little things make life seem circular, enfolded – everything is connected. Meant. Maybe.

We were sitting out of the rain. By the harbour on a rickety bench. A small man walked past. You called out a greeting to him. He stopped. Do I know you? he asked. I’ve got dementia, where do you live? You told him your name. He shook his head. His trousers were loose, hanging low over his shoes. They found two men in the harbour, he said. Drowned. Then he shuffled off, ignoring our goodbyes. He reminded me of another small man. I am reduced, he said.

The grey November gloom hangs heavy. We just have to sit it out, this waiting. I dreamt she came for us. A nice woman. Warm. He wanted to stay in the dark, hiding. She came for us nevertheless. Time to go. It was in Jersey. I’ve always wanted to go to Sark, I said. What is it like? I asked. Oh, you’d love it, she said as we walked out into the sunshine.

We stop. We stop what we are doing. Stop to think. To remember. There is a well of grief. A tremendous sensation of grief that isn’t mine yet it takes me over. The crying is forever. Forever. Lest we forget. Never forget.

They have moved her. Is it because she became too difficult? She sounded happy on the phone. The new home is by the park. In the Spring I will see all the colours, she tells me. Twice. She mixed me up with someone else. I didn’t know you were an artist, she said. When’s your operation? It doesn’t matter. She is discombobulated. Is he forgotten, her friend Laurence? She forgot Terje almost immediately. Out of sight out of mind. Are they just means to an end these men? Someone to talk to, to focus upon, to gain the attention of? Or is it just the brain growing old, tired of having to remember and reverting to a more childlike, omnipotent state of I. Me, myself, I. Perhaps she was always a little selfish. No, not selfish, self-centred. Loss had taught her to be so. I think.

The strategies I put in place at the drawing class worked. I think. I lowered my expectations and tried to just enjoy the process of making marks, of looking, of remembering. Drawing is just remembering, she said. Possibly. Or is it more than that? Listen to the sound of the charcoal on the page. Draw the sea. Yes. Simple. It was nice to not have to think. We were there early, the illustrator and me. I asked him about his work. A lived-in face and a disgruntled demeanour. Well, about the work. You wouldn’t believe what goes on, he said. No, probably not. He makes images for book covers. Not drawn any longer, photographed. I’m a weekend painter, he said. Sad. He draws well, with confidence. Back in the sixties we drew from plaster casts, he said. It shows, I thought.

A gust of wind caught up the leaves, animating them. Outside his bedroom window they are custard yellow. A beautiful dying, virulent and gorgeous.

Alice gave him up when he was just a year old. She is shy, awkward. There are no words for such grief. Such loss. Let there be silence. Let us stop for the silence. Lest we forget.

In the supermarket everyone is complaining about the cold. The frost will be getting at my wisteria, says a woman in the queue behind us.

I cried after the class last week. The grief of failure joining hands with other griefs, some known some not. Kitaj, he said to me as he stood staring at my drawing. You know Kitaj? he asked. I nodded. How many times have I come to this frozenness? Over and over. Time and time again. Meeting my averageness – pushing through the mass of not being able in the hope of finding that something, that spark. Of what? Wonder? Best in show, I had overhead two women say the week before, as they surveyed my initial sketches. Best in show. And yet, last week I was frozen. Again. Immobilised by fear. Tactics. That’s what I need. Some tactics to have in place so that I keep drawing, keep moving – keep the momentum going.

She can see me next week to discuss my proposal. What is it? What is my proposal? What is it I want to do? What do I have to offer? I need time to think about it. Radio off. In the silence.

Cornwall was good. Wet but good. Her lovely house. Cool, white and serene. We talked all night, Mary Margaret. Not enough sleep but good soul work. Good soul work. She has a studio. In the garden. Everything in place. Ready. She is ready.

Most of the galleries were shut. Tourists gone. Season finished. High tides. Lemon Street slippery with wet leaves. The promise of the Alba. Upstairs closed. A gift from the kitchen. Yes. I sent out a wish. It was granted. Shining, full of love in the Sloop. The stink of stale beer. I didn’t mind. It could have been anywhere. As skittish as a gazelle. Beautiful.

Thank you.

I have come across his name before, though I can’t remember the context. Was it to do with fairy tales? Perhaps. Michael Rosen made a programme about him and it was aired yesterday on Radio 4 Extra. He used to give broadcasts to children. He took his own life in the end fearing he would never escape the Gestapo. A woman tells Rosen that she has one of his quotes tattooed on her arm. Words on the skin. Embedded. Indelible. I think of Hetain Patel. Text like lace etched into his skin. What was the quote? I look him up on the internet. Was it ‘The work of memory collapses time?’ Possibly. I like it anyway. I will read his essays. This is how listening works – it takes you somewhere else into other encounters. A sad man, a scared man, a vulnerable man, certainly beautiful.

Walking down the stairs at 5.00am I pass a couple coming up. They are dressed for Halloween. He in a bowler hat and Charlie Chaplin-esque suit, she in a long black lace dress. Both their faces are painted white with kohl-drawn circles around their eyes, daisy-like. On the promenade students lolled, make-up now running.

There was another Emma, not just the fictional one in the song. A sister. Red hair and stunning blue eyes. We spoke only once. She talked of being disappointed. No, not exactly talked of but implied. She didn’t feel good enough. That much I sensed. And yet, what a beauty. What a vivid girl. Like Benjamin she also took her life. She wasn’t escaping from the Nazis but from herself. That not good enough self. The failing self. In his CD The Poetry of Self-Compassion David Whyte talks about how the soul doesn’t care whether we fail or succeed, that it only cares whether the failure is our failure, whether it is authentic, truly ours. If so, the soul is satisfied, he says. You do not have to be good, writes Mary Oliver. You did not have to be like your other sisters, Emma. You just had to be you in all your beauty and chaos. You did not have throw yourself in front of that train in Didcot. You did not. I still see your eyes, though only I met you once. Rest in peace.

Tomorrow I go to Cornwall. I exchange one tide for another. It will be good to return. Though the pull is strong. I give myself to the experience, the journey. May there be tea.

I remember a song from my late teenage years by Hot Chocolate, I think it was called Emmaline. It was a story song about a girl who longed to be an actress, to see her name in lights. She doesn’t succeed and one day her lover comes home to find her dead. ‘Emma, Emma, Emmaline’, wailed Errol Brown – it always gave me goosebumps. She couldn’t live with the disappointment, couldn’t adjust to the smaller view, the lesser ambition. I was much moved, though my dreams then were small, smaller than now.

As I walk I think of Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch, she too longed to do something big, to make a difference, make a mark. In the end she gives it up (the potential power for change that wealth had given her) for a smaller, simpler, interior life of marriage, of love, of service to one, one individual. She retreated to her hidden life, that authentic, un-historic life and was happy. Who knows? It is fiction but we romantics take solace where we can.

We’ve been watching Cranford again. She is clever that Mrs Gaskell. Amongst the silliness the minutiae is writ large. The nobleness of small acts (such as Miss Matty’s friends offering what little money they have to help her when the bank fails). What are those big lives? Are they necessarily better? Can we still shift the world along with our tiny gestures? Our little births, bursts of something like creation. Every day plays its part – even the grey ones. Mrs Gaskell wrote about Charlotte Bronte – hagiographic some say, so what – describing those grey Yorkshire days where nothing happened. Just rain. Rain and wind. Trapped in doors. Charlotte and her sisters. Small corseted bodies held in, vivid with life. The creation was still shifting, still moving, its momentum still surging within the grey.

Be patient. Life will happen. Still happens. Perhaps not as we envision it. So be it. Acquiesce. Learn peace. Peacefulness at what is. Be still for the magical. Even in the grey. Listening to a 1940’s recording of the Conan Doyle’s The Speckled Band on Radio 4 extra, then a discussion about The Secret Garden, making pancakes, solving a knitting problem and the nearer prospect of a work room.

A dead wasp lies on the window sill. I sneak out and wrap him in cling film. I shall draw him. A small thing. A small life. Un-historic. Part of the family of things. Remember. You do not have to be good. Just let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Thank you Mary Oliver. I shall. I shall.

We are looking for a new home. Somewhere with a little more room. One more room. A room in which I can work. A room of my own. We have begun looking, seeing our first last week. It wasn’t right. It was the smell of it. A home has to smell right. It smelt damp, unloved. A little mean. It is going to take some time, I think. Well, it has to be here. The world is no longer my oyster. Well, it could be but I choose to narrow my focus, at least externally. He needs to be here. At least for the meantime. So we work with what there is, what we’ve got. Should we write a list? All those pros and cons. What do we want, what do we need? Light. Warmth. Space. Quiet. Beauty. A tall order? Do we envision the same space, he and I?

Years ago I moved into his house. Years ago. Eighteen years. His house in Cambridge. I was escaping and he took me in. I brought colour, order and turned it upside down. We laugh about it now. Out went the dried flowers, the golf trophies, the curling photographs. He was tolerant. I made us a home. It was nice. Now I bend. I am willow.

That house was small with only a chink of sky. I like to be high up. Like now. I just don’t know. Can we find a new home in this town that meets our needs, wants and aspirations? I don’t know. So what can I do? Remain open? Try not to say NO too quickly, wait and see. Wait. See.

I have been lucky. Such wonderful spaces. Made into homes. Home. A place to daydream, Bachelard called it. A space for those dreams. May it come. When it is ready. We can wait. I can wait.

Waiting. I am waiting. And I have never been good at waiting. It is the space, you see, that emptiness, that room. That waiting room. Time without obvious purpose, a void into which anything might come, anything might happen. This is good. I know. Creatively, it is important. But it scares me. It is unknown. And yet I must wait. Wait for something new. Something unforeseen, unimagined.

There are all kinds of waiting. One can wait impatiently – drumming fingers, jogging legs or biting nails. Or one can wait expectantly – certain of a positive outcome. Or one can wait with grace – open to all or nothing. Happy with the nothing. And there may be nothing to wait for. I wrote before of the poet who said she was waiting to become herself. To become that self she always thought she could be. It may never happen. This may be all there is. Would it be so bad? I am smaller than I thought. At least on the outside. Inside, I cannot see the end of me. This is a good feeling. As my outer world shrinks my inner world increases. Does it matter that no one sees it but me? Does my inner, shining world seep out into my outer one? I’d like to think so.

Can I learn patience? Can I learn to sit quietly, peacefully with the nothing, the nothing-ness of my present creativity? I don’t know what I want, what I need, so therefore I should do nothing? Right? And yet life happens still. It does. See. What do I see?

I thought it was a cat. In the dark. Running ahead of me up the hill towards Constitution Hill. It wasn’t. It was a rabbit. On the road. Bounce. Bounce. It’s white bob of a tail flashing through the blackness. Later in the kitchen a moth flew onto the window – attracted by the light inside. I peered at it. A rare view. It stretched its legs. Stuck like glue to the glass. Held by impulse.

Waiting. I knit. I am re-learning. Nanny taught me years ago. I remember the sticky fingers. I think I told you. Already. Expecting. Expectant mothers used to knit. Did they all know how by instinct? Possibly. It is just what you did. Sit and wait but keep your fingers active. Sit and wait. Wait. Wait and see.

What can I give him? Give my heart. Are those the words? In a bleak mid-winter, the carol by Christina Rossetti with the two tunes. I prefer the old one, we both do. Giving. It isn’t straightforward. Do we always give to receive? Do we give to help another? Or is it just a passing on of something we no longer want, require or wish to have around us. Give. Give what? We talk about having a simple Christmas this year. I am intimated by stuff. I think I always have been. I am monkish. I would live even more simply than I do but cannot really impose it on another. It wouldn’t be fair. I am uncomfortable with clutter. Though there is a little girl-like being inside of me that leans towards the tiny, tiny things in boxes. I try to reason with her. The adult me prefers the pristine, the clean, the empty space – that waiting space, waiting for other possibilities. Yes, Christmas. No presents. Give but don’t receive. No thank you. I need to clear more space. Can that be my gift? Space. Empty space. Growing lighter, slipping it all off. Slipping off the weight of all the stuff.

My work is stuff. Matter. Yet again another contradiction. I need to make. To create. To form. To use my hands. Then the stuff must be framed, given authority, protection. Then what? They need homes, those thoughts of mine. They need to become part of another’s story. Mine melding with theirs. I give to share the stories. Will you hear mine if I listen to yours? Here. Have it. Do you want it? Have it. Please.

I give to become whole. I give things away to become lighter. I become lighter, I grow closer. Closer to home. Home is our things. We fill our homes with things. Gaston Bachelard writes that the ‘chief benefit of the house is to shelter daydreaming’ that ‘the house protects the daydreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace’. Yes. And the things we own, hoard, collect, muster, spark those daydreams, knit them in a cosy familiarity. This is us. These things. It can hurt to let them go. Go. Go. Go now. See how it feels.

She packs them up for me. She is sweet, a gentle woman, busy as a bee, with a purr for a voice. Off they go. Those thoughts of mine. Those things tiny in their conception winging their way to another’s home. I give them away. Do they want them? Are they wanted? I think so. And what of me? What do I want from such giving? It is complicated. The work comes alive. The work finds home. Do I? Is that what I search for? To belong in another’s life? And yet, the thought is an uncomfortable one. Either way it is an action. I need to act. It is a potent action. I need potency. I give what I have. I come alive amidst the shedding. Yes. That is enough I think.

Other thoughts? Yes. The man in the navy-blue sleeping bag still sleeping each morning in the promenade shelter. Bless you. Others? Yes, I keep thinking about Emily Dickenson and that man saying that he was glad that he didn’t live near her. She was too much. Too intense. Don’t be so intense. You are too intense, Ellen. Why so? I live intensely. I live a small life, whole-heartedly. What more can one do? Pursuing happiness. That’s what Jeanette Winterson calls it, the pursuit of happiness. Worthy of the attention of one’s whole heart, I think.

A woman talks on the phone to a radio presenter. She wants to wish her nine-year-old daughter happy birthday. How nice. They sound nice, her family. They’ve moved to Basel for her husband’s work. So brave. Two girls, nine and eleven. So brave. I would’ve liked to work abroad. To live properly abroad. (I have done so but in a borrowed way, in other people’s houses.) To set up my own home, abroad, one step removed from what I know. My own home. New. My own space for those daydreams. I have it now, but in a small way. Not wholly. Not yet. A waiting room, really. Waiting. Patiently. In love.

She was on a bench this time. At least I think it was her. It was dark after all. A bench on North Road, overlooking the maze, just beyond the tennis court. A figure in a duvet coat, smoking. It started to rain, quite heavily, but she didn’t move. She just sat there staring into the blackness, smoking. Does she sleep at all? I crossed the road. I wanted to leave her to her silence. It seemed wrong to force a greeting. And after all what do you say to such closed-off-ness? Hello? It isn’t enough, not near enough. A blank stare. A stare borne of not enough sleep. Not enough life. Not enough joy.

I run away with myself. I know. I know. But I feel the sadness, I always have. Other peoples’ sadness. Lame dogs my mother used to call them. Why do you always attach yourself to the lame dogs? she’d ask. Because they are the ones I understand, the ones I might be able to help, I wanted to say but didn’t have the words then. Not then. Possibly, not even now. I feel for them, for me. I know how it feels. Lame. An inner lameness. Not perfect. Not strong. Uncertain.

Why does she leave her house? Is it best to be outside when you can’t sleep, to join the world, to be out in Mary Oliver’s wind storm? Mend my life, they whisper. Buffeting wind. I clung to the promenade’s handrails as a walked, sliding my gloves along. Gust after gust, pulling at me. Lifting me, making me totter, falter. Making me vulnerable.

A story on the radio about a radio producer. He collects silences. Yes. The spaces in between the noise, the ceaseless forming of ideas of complaints of not being satisfied with just being. Is that what she is doing on that bench? Just being. Being awake. In the dark, sitting still. The same stillness of the bodies in the nursing home, a bovine, weighty stillness. Immoveable. A stubborn staring. Wilful, almost. Wilful in their now nothingness. I don’t know. The wind buffets me but not her. She sits her ground. I do not. I am not still. Still not still. Not yet still.

In my dream, I looked through a window at the wind. It was drawn, painted, big swirls of blue and brown as in a van Gogh. I watched as a train pulled into a station and all the passengers alighted. Hundreds of them and then suddenly they were lifting the train. Moving as one, joyously, easily carrying the great iron beast forward. Forward. Onward.

A man has come to mend the lamppost outside our kitchen window. It has taken several phone calls to get them to come. They say it isn’t broken. It is. It hasn’t shone in days. I miss it. I miss its yellow light, at night when I wake for a pee. The dark is coming. In the winter the Scandinavians light candles. They place them outside their houses. Candles in tins. Flares. Flames blown in the wind. Sometimes it is all you see, in the dark, in the snow. Those candles lighting your way home.

Do you sleep now?

It’s all about worth, the woman is saying to the radio presenter, I need to feel worthwhile. I want to work to feel worthwhile. What would you like to do? asks the presenter. There is a pause and I wonder if the woman, who is wheelchair-bound, has ever been asked that question. There is a sudden lightness in my voice. Possibilities. Yes. Do? she asks, Oh, anything. Well, I think I would make a very good researcher.

Worth. I remember that word as a child. My mother had some perfume by Worth. The letters WORTH elegantly printed in a black-lined border. Then there was Harry Worth the comedian. I got the two mixed up. Where they connected? Did he sell or even make perfume? As a child I was always trying to make connections. Just to make the chaos less so. Worth. What are we worth? Are we worth more than what we do? Worthwhile. Worthwhile work. The debate had been about paying disabled people to work. Heated discussions. Emotive. Are we worthless? Worth less. Less is more.

Walking in the dark. Will it rain? It threatens to do so. The wind is getting up. A leaf becomes a bird. A robin? I think so. It darts, flashes ahead of me and then lands. Toying with me. Here I am, come and catch me. Here. No here. Down on the prom sits the insomniac. Sometimes I see her on North Road sitting on her doorstep. I see her because of the red end of her lit cigarette. She looks sad. She is sitting on the metal steps staring out to sea. No umbrella. Waiting. Waiting for sleep. Jeanette Winterson’s mother didn’t sleep with her father. She eschewed sleep to keep intimacy at bay. Didn’t want sex. Didn’t want the comfort, the being known. To stay up all night. To not succumb. Some people just can’t. It is too scary, that falling, that renewing. Better the dark. By the sea.

Waiting. Another luscious programme all about waiting. Gorgeous writing. Waiting for what? For God? For life. A poet. She is waiting to be what she is meant to be. Not there yet. Not there yet.

Down by the harbour the boats are on stilts. Makeshift stilts. Boxes, blocks, oil drums. Precarious towers. Watch out it may topple. Nay, fiddlesticks. Safe as houses. Safe as boats. They look lost on land. Like beached whales, sea lions, they are immoveable. They are stuck. Graceless. Barnacle-bottomed and exposed.

A mess of a day. Nothing really achieved. Started to knit. To try out something. So much fear with the new. Push through the membrane of it. I love to use my hands. I watch them working. Tick tick go the needles. I think of Nanny Clarke. She taught me to knit. What was I, four, five, six? The wool was sweaty in my hands. Clumsy. Heavy-handed. Not now. Good hands. Nimble. Jack-be-nimble. Be quick. Nay, fiddlesticks. Take time. Take your time. Feast on your life. Find its worth. Its worth is in the small things. The memory things. Tick tick. Did she wee in the milk bottles, dance naked in the rain? I hope so. I loved her. I hope so.