ellen bell

I hadn’t expected it. In one Call the Midwife that we watched featuring the elderly lady who had been a suffragette in her youth and imprisoned, talked about the sleeplessness during their hunger strikes. That was the worst of it, that and the hunger, she said. And I only did a day. The other unexpected symptom were the palpitations. My heart was racing. It couldn’t calm it. So we talked about it. And he quoted Maynard Keynes, something like, when the facts change, I change. It helped. So a rice fast it is. I had my first portion this morning. Plain brown rice with a little oil. It sits a little heavy in my gut but it is nice not to have that yawning hunger pulling my chest inward.

A cloudy morning. Heavy. A few drops on my head as I walked. More and more shops are opening. The cafe, that used to be Lilley’s, is now offering takeaways, and the hairdressers that I thought had gone out of business has merely been refurbished and looks raring to go when they are allowed to open next month. We talk of what I should do come July. I want a new job, part-time, with regular hours and no take home work, so that when I’m home I can concentrate on my writing and my making. Thinking of it, the application processes and the toll they take on my self-esteem gave me indigestion. Let’s not think of it now, he says, let’s leave it for now. OK. But I need to send out a request so that something will come, something will wait for me. When it’s time. I walk past the bakery and yearn for that cosy, warm busy-ness. Romantic I know. All that standing would take its toll. It’s the smell really. Heavenly. Simplicity. That’s it. And usefulness.

He’s going to bring me gooseberries later. They are from her allotment. I can’t eat them yet, so in the freezer they will go. Ready for the breaking of the fast.

I need to get back to my writing. And I will next week. I promise.

Day one.

He looks at me with concern. Are you sure you want to do this? Yes. I am. I am certain, though my body may have other ideas. I have done it before. A few times. Did I manage a whole week? Possibly, but I think I drank fruit juice too. Why do you want to do it? he asks. Good question. There isn’t just one answer. I want to clean myself out. I want to stop getting the stomach pains, the cramps, the bloating and all the other myriad symptoms that are lumped under irritable bowel syndrome. I want to feel at peace, emptied out, lighter in mind and body. Food makes me feel heavy, weighed down. Not fruit so much, at least not citrus fruit. I have a crap relationship with food. I’ve ingested so many of the dos and don’ts, often conflicting ones, that I no longer know what I should and shouldn’t eat. And my appetite. Well, there’s a thing. I can’t remember when I began to be scared of it. You’ve got a good appetite, say my family, friends and him sometimes. Ugh, I hate it. Have I? I eat slowly. I eat a lot of vegetables, fruit. So it looks a lot. You see it isn’t clear cut. The other thing is is the desire for an unclogged mind. I might see my way forward then. Clarity. And time. All that preparation time, think what I might do instead. But I have to be careful. Remember what happened in Bath, he says. Yes. I know. I will take it one day at a time.

So house has been cleaned, emails read, this done and then work. No tea. I miss that. Two weeks until I have another cup. Today it’s lemon juice and ginger. Breakfast was a huge pot of licorice tea. I shall work on my taste buds and direct them to focus on the taste of the teas. Like the lemon zinging on my tongue. It will have to do.

I dreamt of both my parents last night. They were together and happily so. It was a mishmash of families. Mine, her step one and the one from Tanum. All together in one house. But we were also out at a restaurant, on a foreign street I am always revisiting in my dreams. We were trying to plan the evening ahead. My father said to my mother, we may as well dress for dinner. And there was a baby there, my baby, who suddenly started to wail. I want my milk bottle, it said to me. My mother handed one to it and it began to suck. I thought it was a stranger’s bottle and not clean but she pooh poohed my worries. She took care of everything. I felt loved by her. I even think she told me I was beautiful. Earlier in the dream she’d pinched the flesh on my arm, not brutally, but to demonstrate and said that I would grow old and have sepsis. It’s what happened to her. And she died of it. I miss her. Like that. She could love. But in the end it just got to hard. She was so brittle.

It is marvellous the chance encounters one has via the radio. Yesterday it was with an adaptation of J B Priestley’s play ‘I Have Been Here Before’. It was a little dated, but nevertheless gripping and more than a little unsettling. I told him about it as we sat in the sun on our new chairs between our car and one of our neighbours, sheltering from the wind. It will do. Now that the pallet and bricks we used to sit on have been bulldozed away, we make do. And making do is OK. He is so wise. I tried to fix the gap issue with our front door by sticking down some insulating tape. It was too thick, making us struggle to open the door. Off it came. Life is messy. I feel messy. Now don’t go allowing your mind to convince you that you are hopeless and that the whole day is a waste of time, he says. He knew that it would try. I can change, as the play suggested, it is possible to stop going round and round in the same groove. I can stop it. It isn’t you, he said, it’s the tape. We can learn from it. It doesn’t matter. Nor do her comments matter. It’s up to me how I take them. I stuck to my guns. I gave a little but not wholly. It’s all a juggling act. But in the end it is he and I. Our love, our care, that’s what counts. He means the world to me. He’s funny, loving, eternally patient and so loyal. Be grateful for every moment with him.

I begin it tomorrow. I think of hunger, mine and others. I want to do it. To manage it. I want the discipline of it but also the clarity it promises. Think of the time it will free up and how my taste buds will zing afterwards. Make me strong. And kind.

It woke me up with its buzzing. I was barely asleep when I heard his high-pitched (what seemed like) screaming and the continual bashing his tiny body against the window. I tried to ignore it, like I was trying to ignore the fact that the day had been a difficult, edgy one. It was impossible. I went to get him in the end and he dealt with the being. I didn’t want him to kill it. But it seemed like there was no choice. It wouldn’t fly out. It was my fault, though I didn’t do the deed, it was my responsibility. I wanted peace, I wanted to sleep. I didn’t afterwards, not for a long time. My dis-ease had taken a life. I am sorry. Really.

Do all writers struggle with editor’s ‘suggestions’? I must take a deep breath and deal with it, but not now.

Uglow writes of a happening when Charlotte Bronte was staying with Elizabeth Gaskell. Painfully shy, Bronte was always reluctant to meet a ‘strange face’. Gaskell’s friends the Winkworth sisters wanted to meet her. She met one and got on well but when asked if she come over to be introduced to the other, she’d hesitated. Gaskell and she had walked over there only to loiter outside the door, go for another walk, loiter again and then to give up and return to Gaskell’s Plymouth Grove home. I understand it completely. How difficult it is with other people. A friend writes that she is all alone in her family’s winter cottage in the mountains, that is excepting the sheep and the mosquitos. My heart yearns for such solitude and space, though this is no comment on my love, I love his company but it is escape from obligation that I seek. It is that, that obligation that another person sets up. Not their fault but mine. (My stomach is growling away as I write this, God knows why.)

It had felt like ours. It had been left as it was for such a long time, undisturbed except for the occasional visit from our Chinese neighbour who wandered over there with her little son to let him paddle his wellies in the mud ponds and generally poke about with sticks, or from H who’d stride across to ‘the Dell’ with garden waste, all hail and hearty. It’s gone. That little haven of messy peace has gone. A digger has begun to flatten it. They’re to build a block of flats, apparently. So he’s bought some chairs, you know the kind – light-framed, metal with stripey covers. And we’ll try sitting in the car park instead. It’s a case of making-do. I need to get out and I need the sun. So we make do. Those of us who don’t have gardens. One day. One day I shall. Then I’ll plant sweet peas, lavender and rhubarb. I’ll grow thyme and mint and parsley. I cast seeds of cornflowers and poppies and cross my fingers that they sprout.

She absorbs me as I walk. Is she to be a modern incarnation or true to her time? Who would the book be for? How would she speak? She comes and goes, sometimes I know her sometimes I don’t. I just have to try. That’s all. Simple, isn’t it?

It’s been there for a few days now. It’s a white slip-on sandal, a man’s shoe with the brand name PUMA written across the front band. Hasn’t anyone missed it? Our neighbour was at his window smoking when I went off for my walk this morning and asked if I or he knew the number of the top middle flat opposite. I said that I didn’t and waited to see if he would give me an explanation for his enquiry. He did, eventually. I wanted to tell them about the shoe, he said, pointing at it, as I saw it flying out of one of their windows the other day. Was it the result of a row, or a jolly jape? I asked him at breakfast but he doesn’t know the number. He’d remonstrated with them last year because they were making such a noise, but it had involved shouting at them (a few had come to the window) rather than going up to knock on their door. It’s funny how his encroaching deafness makes him less and less tolerant of noise.

A misty morning, very still, very peaceful. I go up and down with my confidence over this book idea. I like this stage in all my creative endeavours, the stage that is before my ideas leave the safety and comfort of my head and offers themselves to the critical eye and commentary of others. She, the young protagonist, begins to flesh herself out within me. I think I shall like her.

It’s been almost eight years now. It feels like a lifetime away.

It’s like looking for the green shoots that herald the return of snowdrops after a long winter. The municipal gardeners have been out for there are new marigolds in the beds along South Marine Terrace. And Coffee# is opening today, only for take aways but it is something. Some kind of normalcy is returning. And yet, there is much that I want to hold on to. Being at home, working at home is the main one. And the peace of not having to engage too much with the outside world. Though I do miss the escaping. My dreams are full of the journeys I am not making. Last night I dreamt of M and how I was to join her and J in the christening of their new puppy. It made absolute sense in my dream. However, it involved a long journey to get there, on various modes of transport that she supplied, one was a strange Quad bike contraption with two platforms behind, the other a moped that got stuck in a waterlogged trench, which I had to drag out. We stopped alot to buy supplies (at one point after admitting that she’d also cut out bread we took a break to buy some salad cream, of which she confessed to being very fond – standing before a great row of bottles she asked me which one I’d like, none I said, they contain eggs, oh, she replied, we always have two large spoonfuls of it). I remember watching myself opening a bag of very watery and dirty iceberg lettuce and beginning to chop it up but then giving up and resealing the bag. I also looked at material, one roll of which was a deep pink muslin but already formed into seams seemingly for a ready made shirt. She also kept disappearing to go to the loo. And her flat was situated in a Hobbs store, its entrance being just a door next to the changing rooms. The store, I’d noticed before I went in was up for sale. I recognise many of the scenarios, the allusions to food and toilets and vehicles – they play out my day thoughts, though twisting them into stranger shapes. They say the people we dream off are really aspects of ourselves. Possibly. She was still M. And as lovely as ever.

His mother was OCD he said. She made him, as a child, hoover his bedroom carpet with the nozzle bit over and over again, insisting that she saw the lines in the pile.

She doesn’t live her life easily, said Peter Hall of Maria Ewing.

A good day yesterday. Was it the tea? Or Sherlock Holmes?

A crying day yesterday. It had to be. All that tightness had to find a release. And it did, outside on our tip, in the sometime sun. He knew. He always does. Saying what was already in my mind to share with him. He is tireless in his support, in his listening, in his trying to understand my fearfulness.

The dream came as a gift. I was at work, though it wasn’t really work. It was an office and C was there. I’ll try to get you some work in local radio, he said, shuffling through some papers. Kind man that he is, even in my dreams (why should he be any different?). There were other women there, secretaries mostly. I’d had to go through a safety door before being admitted, one in which a button was pressed and you had to dash through before it closed behind you. My sister was with me and she was reluctant to come through, I persuaded her. But then she was gone. Did she come in with me? Was it my sister or another side of me? Anyway, one of the women in the office started to stare at me. You’ve got the most amazing feet, she said. And then proceeded to describe what she could see in them. It was the equivalent to reading a palm. She talked about my specialness, my deep self-knowledge, and how she’d never seen anything like it. Then she seemed to grow bored, the message had been passed on and she was back to her normal distracted self. I felt I had to return the compliment or at least be friendly. And noticing a matching series of cups and flask on her desk (rather pink and gaudy) asked if she’d got them for a Christmas present. Yes, she said, bored now. Then I was trying to get out. The office had become a rather faceless hotel with terrible carpets. I asked a waitress serving breakfast where the exit was. I dunno, she said, I’m new here. I asked her colleague who gave me a long description of how I was to go up one set of stairs then down another and so on. But then I was out. And walking. I’m going to get paid anyway, I thought to myself and took off at a leisurely pace down a path, the sun shone and there was birdsong and I felt free and happy. I woke then, ten minutes before the alarm.

I write these for myself. I’m sure my dreams are of no interest to anyone but myself. It’s a good exercise nevertheless. And one day I may wish to reread them. They come back then. The words are a key. He gets flashes of old dreams sometimes, some might say it’s just deja vu. Who knows. It’s all knowledge. A step closer.

Tea now. House has been cleaned, rent paid and now it’s time to work. I feel better.

It sounded like a title for a novel or a poem. It came into my head in that time between sleep and waking. The alarm had sounded, and I’d just switched it off and then fell back into an almost sleep. The phrase came then. They make no sense those pre-waking sentences. I get them alot. Mostly they are forgotten, lost a grip of.

A blustery, blowy day. The wind seemed to be coming from all sides as I walked through the town. Things clattered and battered and seagulls were jettisoned across the sky, their whiteness soaring. Ah, now the sun makes an appearance, lovely. It is needed.

I’m tired today. A gentle day researching the babushkas, it is enough. I think about writing to her. I find it hard to let go. Is it still a friendship? We know so little of each other’s lives these days. It was such a long time ago, wasn’t it? I feel a debt to her. But I sense her interest has waned. And it hurt that time when I was due to visit and she’d either forgotten or needed, or preferred to let out the room. Shall I let it fall away? Will you guide me? I dreamt of EG last night. The biography still engrosses me, though the amount of people mentioned in it does make it a slow job. She writes in her diary of her temper and impatience. Ah, me. And then of the diary she began to trace the early life of her daughter. I felt a pang and go to her FB page just to look. They are all there. My loves. My little ones. I claim you from a distance. With love. Always.