ellen bell

We drove there and back to Birmingham yesterday so that I could see and then review two art shows across the city. I wasn’t looking forward to it. Cities are becoming rather too much for me, living as quietly as we do. But we braved it. And people were kind. Apart from the occasional loud beep of horns when we dithered about road lanes, it was a good experience. There was the garage man who let me use his very very filthy loo (‘Be careful in there, love’), the woman in the car park who gave us her ticket, the other woman in the gallery (I’m from Marple) who wrote down directions to the second gallery, the invigilator who talked about the art and gave his opinions openly (he had a Liverpudlian burr) and the other woman in the second gallery who explained the works to me. It was heart-warming. And now I must write.

They were an incongruous grouping. I noticed the girl (I say girl but she must have been in her twenties) first. She was fleshy, rotund and pink with a large round glasses. Her hair had a middle parting and was tied back in a plait. Her arms were bare and she wore a thin strappy vest with a floral design on it. I tried to draw her several times but her head was never still. She talked, certainly, at one point mentioning the castle and stressing how far away it was. The other two women with her listened and paid an inordinate amount of attention to her. What was their relationship? I’d assumed that the woman on the right was her mother as they shared the same build and massiveness but in fact it was the woman on her left that stroked her face and took her to the toilet. This woman was petite, a tiny thing with white hair and small hands. She was the parent, clearly. Had she turned her hair white? The love was clear.

They were swabbing down the lifeboat when we walked to the harbour yesterday afternoon. There were several men in waterproofs and wide-topped yellow wellies. They were even scrubbing its underneath. For barnacles perhaps? A man in shorts and no top was taking photographs of their progress.

It was quiet again this morning as I walked. The rain had finished, the sky beginning to clear so that I could see the stars. There was nobody about and all signs of the rally cleared away. There is gravel on the Prom again, autumn with it high tides is coming. I walk in discomfort and yet I love to be out, the air is clean and full of smells of wet earth, salt and sand. I am renewed by it.

Last interview today.

Was that the tinkly-jingly sound of an ice cream van that I heard late in the afternoon?

I’m reading Barbara Pym’s autobiography, A Very Private Eye. Well, it’s not really an autobiography, that is it is a compilation of letters and diary entries compiled chronologically by her sister and friend. A letter she wrote in February 1939 speaks of her happiness. She is living in rooms in London with her sister Hilary and she is writing a novel. She is twenty-five. I have known such times, that kind of happiness. It a quiet thing generally, and not usually associated with being in love, that is too topsy-turvy. No, that kind of happiness, that I think she is referring to is a domestic, settled one. How prescient that those words were written just before the outbreak of war. I too feel moments of contentment now, yes there is a world in chaos all about me and those moments are fleeting (and I am full of fear about my work, my practice and not being good enough and my hips hurt) but I do feel it. I do.

I was cleaning the bathroom sink this morning and she came into my mind. Well, both of them did really. Not they were both domestic helps (I don’t really like the word ‘cleaner’ or indeed ‘char’), the other one, Mrs E., with her chihuahuas and her canaries and her habit for taking out her teeth when she sang along with the hymns on Songs of Praise was more of a babysitter. Mrs C. was Scottish and I thought of her because I remembered how the smell of the sink after she’d cleaned it used to make me feel safe. Was it Jiff that she used? Though I think it is called Ciff now, or maybe that is the French version. She brought order and calmness to the house on her weekly visits. A no-nonsense sort of body, our mother was less frenetic, less volatile when she was there. Mrs E., had the same effect. A mountain of a woman, or so she seemed to me then, and a through and through Lancastrian (I worked in that Mill when I was a girl, she told me once, pointing at a derelict black edifice above the fields where we were walking, on the way back to her little council house in the town.) They were steady women, grounded. I loved them.

It’s a tiny thing, they are a tiny thing but to the spiders who spin them they must be the whole world. And there I go walking through them, breaking them like some great clodhopping giant. They pull against my face resisting with all their might my tearing them but the force of me is too much. Will they be spun again, ready to be broken once more?

It was quiet again as I walked this morning. Quiet that is except for the intermittent rustling of leaves in the trees, the lapping of the tide, the purr of an ambulance’s engine as it crawled through the town, the tinny clamour of music (possibly something by Genesis) from a radio lying next to a body in a sleeping bag outside Smith’s next to which were two empty vodka bottles and the tapping of my stick on the tarmacadam.

I haven’t seen them for a while and then this morning I saw both of them. The Sikh came first, walking into the gloomy dawn shining white like a phantom. And then I saw the young boy and his grandfather, holding hands as always, (though who leads who is hard to determine for at one point the grandfather had to jerk him up onto the pavement at the approach of a car). I only saw them from the back but the boy seemed to be wearing an adult coat, for its’ sleeves hung down covering his hands. The old man walks with a determined if slow lilt, the boy looks tired as if pulled from sleep. What is their story, I wonder?

And now, I must write.

I’ve been going out drawing most mornings this week so haven’t had a chance to write this. Things that I want to write about or mention or just remember then begin to stack up and what ought to be a lyrical, spontaneous musing becomes more like list. Here goes:

1. The man who stopped me on the Prom the other morning at 4 am asking if I’d seen the fires. He had a jumper or some such thing tied around his head and was carrying a whole honeydew melon.
2. Looking at the scan of my body on the consultant’s screen at the hospital and marvelling at my little form up there, seeing my ovaries, my genitals, my ribs and watching the flow of arteries from my aorta. Fascinating and more than a little surreal. Is that me? I kept wanting to ask. And the best of all bests? No more tests. Shall we just leave it then? I asked him. Yes, he said. Good, I said.
3. The Pelican Bakery is shutting. It shut yesterday. The baker wants to spend more time with his family. I’m sad. I love the smell in the mornings. Now our ugly (very shabby at the moment) little town is sans bakeries.
4. The man the ex-butcher referred to as ‘Cock’ has died. It was rectal cancer apparently. And the house he was building for his in-laws is not yet finished. I am sorry. And then thinking about him as I passed his home a huge lorry came round the corner (a great shining silver thing) with his name blazoned across the top (well with an added s to be exact). A nice bit of synchronicity. Rest in peace.
5. A man was standing opposite the 24hr SPAR having clearly spent the night sleeping in the doorway of Barnado’s. He was shouting. It wasn’t at me. He held a bottle in his hand. He had a Irish brogue. He shouted that someone was a traitor. Did he say Jesus?

The sea was barely moving as I walked this morning. The calm after the bank holiday rumpus was lovely. I soaked it in. Three young people had opted to sleep on the beach, and one was kneeling over a makeshift fire and trying to blow it alive again, while the other two were endeavouring to drape a sheet over themselves.

My first interview in over a month today and I struggle to let the intensity of my drawing practice go. But it must be so. Both elements of my work require my full attention. For now my drawing must take second place. Oh, the ache of it. You see there is still so much to do……