ellen bell

It’s always been about the details for me. I love it when writers pay them attention. William Trevor did it well in Love and Summer, as did Edith Wharton in Ethan Frome. The first I am in the middle of reading, the second I’ve just finished listening to. Both describe scenes in farm kitchens. One is in Ireland in the summer, the other is in New England in the winter. Both are slow. The spoken language, the conversation, is rare. The rooms are sparse. In both there is a stove. In one a rocking chair, in the other a sagging sofa. The inhabitants watch each other. Changes in mood are noted but rarely commented on. I love to read, or hear about the women moving around these kitchens. The laying of tables, the putting out of food. The banal sameness of the daily rhythm of things in between which life happens. Sometimes slowly, sometimes fast. And there is such a feeling of loss when the story ends. Even of grief.

It isn’t much but it is enough to raise my spirits. I struggle with that knowledge though, wishing I could do it for myself. Why do you think people drink? he asked, as we washed up the breakfast things. I know, I said. And it is a small thing. Yet the fillip is nice. And I need it in this lengthening dark.

He woke cold. I’m shivering, he said when he went for his early pee. I made him a bottle and tucked him back in. He was slightly better at breakfast. I worry so. I watch him as he watched me. We are all we’ve got. And I know that I will have to lose him but let it not be yet.

A bee was on the window in the shared hall was I prepared to go out for my walk. It was still, stuck or clinging to the glass just above the geraniums. Should I help him outside? I thought. I decided against it. It would distress him so, and he looks peaceful and perhaps he has come in to die. Let it be, I say to myself as I walk, trying to circumvent the tension in my back that always comes.

There were 3 red kites circling in the sky when I went upstairs to make lunch, yesterday. They are such majestic creatures. Sometimes the rooks try to chase them away but they were unmolested then in their circling.

She told me she was slight agoraphobic and I said that I was scared of the dark.

Two boys with their hoods up sat in the space under the castle, conspiratorial in the dark.

I dreamt of Mum again. I was following at her heels trying to find a very particular face toner made of rose water from a trail of shops. I was good to be with her again. And she wasn’t phased or cross at our lack of success. We would just keep trying, that’s all.

Morning is coming.

A laminated A4 sheet has been attached with plastic ties to a bench on the Prom halfway between the Castle and the harbour. It is entitled ‘The Happy Bench’. The sign goes on to encourage people to sit on that particular bench if they would like people to ‘stop by and say hi’, adding that ‘nobody need be lonely’. He was scornful of it when I told him about seeing it this morning at breakfast. Probably another scheme by Advancing Aberystwyth, he said. I wasn’t sure about it. The language is a little cloying, admittedly but the sentiment is a nice one, I think. Though probably a little unworkable during the next lockdown due to come into place this Friday. Will people use it? Is it a British thing to offer oneself up to strange company like that? There is another such sign further down the Prom. I just don’t know. Aren’t they just trying to be kind whoever they are?

I’m reading yet another Trevor novel. The language, the slow, easy story-telling gets under my skin and I itch to find the same resource in myself.

Will I, if I keep trying, will I, will I ever?

I wrote two more letters yesterday. I write them for myself mainly and to show and give love. I suspect that sometimes I bemuse and probably frustrate the receivers of them into feeling obliged to reply. They don’t have to. I am imposing the scripts upon them, the act is mine. Some do reply, others don’t sending an email or just not responding at all. I took a short walk this morning, having domestic work to do, carrying the letters in my hand to post. There is a post box opposite the Pelican Bakery. My heart sank as I saw the young man who sometimes waits beside it for his lift standing there. What are the modes of conduct for such situations when you don’t want to get too close? He was intent on his phone and didn’t see me at first. Excuse me, I said, can I just put some things in the….? I didn’t finish the sentence perplexed by the fact that I didn’t say letters? Oh, sorry, he said, in what sounded like a Mancunian accent. Where can he be going to work in his black uniform and supermarket carry bag in hand at 3.30 am? He moved out of the way and I let the letters fall through the mouth of the box. Some of the replies have surprised me, delighted sometimes, others have not. Such is the way. The risk is always there and I am needy of love. I know this.

It descends upon me. I drag my feet through the morning, the dark. It is a tunnel. How must it have been in Norway? he asked me this morning. I didn’t know what it was then, I said, but I felt pretty low. They must’ve thought me just grumpy and bad-tempered, I said. Six months of it. And now the morning is trying to come. Out there, it barely came. And yet, there were parts of it that I loved. They know how to make the best of the light when it comes. Gloomy thoughts and gloomy rooms. I light candles. And as Christmas approaches I will set out fairy lights. Others, students mostly, I see have them in their windows throughout the year. They gladden my heart, as do the lit trees that I see through living room windows, though most turn them off during the night. It must be lived through, endured with grace. As people are enduring this pandemic. It is all we can do.

Down at the harbour everything has been brought on land. The lobster pots have been piled neatly atop of each other. The ropes are all coiled. There is order. The winter cessation of fishing begins. Boats will soon be placed on stilts and painted and mended. I never see this process. I am too early to watch the industry of others. But I pick up the smells as the crab and lobster nets dry out in the late October sun, like that of a wet dog in a car, though slightly sweeter, mustier. Sand and sea salt. Sticky. It’s a closing down time. The dark sets in. And I must prepare myself.

It was a nasty tasting dream ending with the sensation, texture and sharp unfamiliarity of meat and potatoes in my mouth and my eager expectation of soon being able to rid it of it with some chewing gum. Why was I eating foods that I didn’t want to, and that felt morally repugnant to me? I was at some sort of funeral. At least I was in a churchyard with several other women and we were taking it in turns to hug, hold and comfort some stuffed effigies of women. We were treating them as if they were real and sentient beings. Where they to be buried or had someone they had ‘loved’ been interred? It was dark and gloomy in the churchyard, a rural one I think for I remember standing under a tree and the moonlight was all around. Then I was eating the meat. It was expected of me and duty to the fallen, apparently. And then I was at a table in a pub with some other women, one who was to pay for our lunch and she was picking a lottery ticket which would tell her what she would be eating. She was delighted with her choice and read it out loud. I shall be eating….. she said. And I’ve forgotten what it was, it was definitely something meaty, chinese-style ribs or something with lots of sticky barbeque sauce. I kept my countenance and sat there fretting about what I would chose. Prior to that another woman of my acquaintance was supposed to have arranged some washing for me. Had she done it? She wasn’t known for her organisational skills, but she’d offered. The rest is unclear, lost, foggy.

I shall sit with my writing today. Sitting with it helps. Sometimes it comes easily, in a flow but this is rare. I sit and wait. I have ideas as I walk, as I sit in the sun. Yesterday I came up with one character’s name, writing it over and over again until it felt right. I don’t know where the story is going. Shall I let it lead me where it will?

My dreams are a mish-mash of reflected thoughts, images seen or stories heard, crossword clues and conversations had. Last night’s one was no different. The bit I remember is he and I walking down a dark street and meeting a man who looked decidedly shifty. He had a box in his hand with a label saying Rooibos Tea. Somehow that made him less troublesome to me. He had a gift for us, well for me principally. A gift of food. And he led us down a flight of stairs into a chamber to give it to me. He opened the box and started to pull them out one by one. The only one I can remember, the fourth item was dangling from a wooden spoon. My delightful subconscious had somehow managed to come up with something that was called sea creatures and what looked like wet seaweed hanging from the ladle. I woke then and wrote down what I could remember while having a pee.

The morning was gorgeous, not too cold to be unpleasant but fresh and clean with the sea just lapping. And the stars were all out. A boy was sleeping in a doorway. I saw his legs and started as I walked by. This virus makes me reluctant to offer help to strangers and I am sorry for it. Should I wake him? I thought as I walked on, slightly faster. Help me to be kind amidst the fear.

She manages to purport herself with dignity despite her profound deafness and weakness of sight. We see her sitting in the afternoons on a pile of fencing in the wasteland we treat and call our garden. Do you want to sit here? she asked when she finally noticed us, her head inclined upwards at an odd angle as she tried to get our faces into focus. She is just waiting it out. She has faith. Let that be a comfort to her.

It took me all morning to sew a star, and even then I didn’t finish it. Does it matter? I sew and unpick it and get frustrated that something as simple as counting stitches seems to confound me. I want to get it right, even if it is only experimental. I think that the more I do the more I will learn and the patterns, the motifs will become ingrained in me. Becoming my language too. So it must be slow. It must be small. I am fastidious. Can I not accept it and see it as a good thing? And then William Stafford’s words come to me. And I am momentarily calmed. Such a wise man, a kind man, I think. He wrote everyday, rising at 3 to do so. I lean to such regularity of behaviour, I am the same. Every day. Write something every day. I want to sew. I cannot always say why. And I am trying to find my way through it, in it, beyond it even. It is the process, the slow building of image or word. (Words seem more comfortable with me.) I need to keep bringing myself to the cloth, as I need also to bring myself to the page. They are the same. Both equally slow, both awkward. Stafford talked about writer’s block saying that he wrote anyway, just not as well and accepted that (I paraphrase, of course). It is the flow of doing, no matter what, the getting stuff down. A pacifist, his son remembers his father telling him of an occasion as a child when two black kids were being bullied in the playground and his father rather than trying to fight the bullies he just went and stood beside the victims, in silent solidarity. Such bravery. We spoke of it, he and I, sitting in the sun later that day. We both remembered similar occasions at our own schools and both had wanted to intervene like Stafford did but lacked the courage. I wish I had. I wish I had.

I saw a shooting star this morning. The second I’ve seen, ever. It dived behind Constitution Hill. A great falling, fast and bright. A moment and then it was gone. Beautiful. Am I wrong to feel special for having seen it? Was it for me? Of course not. But I like to think so, for an instant.

I don’t know where I’m going with it all. With either my writing or my making, I just don’t know where they are taking me, if anywhere. He would say, in his wisdom, what does it matter?Just do it. Don’t analyse so much. And he is right, but I can’t quite let go of the need for purpose, for direction and for that awful word, an outcome. In the abstract I know that working is its own goal. That it’s the doing of it that matters. And it is, but there is also a need for completion, a sense of achievement, at least that is how I feel, perhaps I need to slough it off. Knowing that it is all just puff and wind. I love the thinking about it, the ideas that come thick and fast. My mind loves that; the somersaults it does, the journeys it takes are marvellous to me. Maybe that should be enough. There is much internal satisfaction then, and ends, after all are mostly anti-climatic. It is the doing, he is right, the being here, working with my hands, writing my words, listening and reading, always that, and trying to learn, to do better, to be better. To deserve all this.