ellen bell

It’s such a grandiose phrase. Proust had his Remembrance of Things Past, Milton his Paradise Lost and Dante his Divine Comedy. I cannot compete. I don’t have the intelligence, the self-belief or the talent. Is that OK? I’ve always been ordinary. I am ordinary. A quiet being. But nonetheless my ego is still strong. I still yearn for that all-encompassing, all embracing creative act. And yet, I don’t for I know the costs involved and a balance is what I am after – inner and outer. Mrs Gaskell struggled between the professional and the domestic. It’s all about rightness and peace. At least it is for me. But what is right? Acceptance is always the key in the end but my ego won’t have it. Fight fight, it shouts, to be heard, to be noticed, to be lauded. But what of the cost? And do I have it in me? I don’t know. There is so much I don’t know. This knowing of lack forever comes to the fore whenever I stick my neck out over the parapet and do sometime creative. And sometimes it overcomes me. I write with so little knowledge, a little heart, much enthusiasm (at least at the start) and a great deal of discipline. My discipline has remained constant. Sometimes I think that is all I am. A little woman of rigour. Is it enough?

There was a bee caught in his room. It was bashing itself against the window. Over and over again it buzzed and fretted. I fetched a wad of envelopes to use to coax him out of the opened window next to it. It took some time and I knew I was upsetting him further. I asked for help and he went eventually, succumbing to the urged offer of the envelopes as resting place and then he was off into the blue. And we all breathed a sigh.

I’ve the page to face in a moment. The empty page. I’ve been writing it my head for some time already. Keep it clear, keep it simple. Be authentic. Tell it from the heart.

Uglow’s book on Gaskell is drawing me in. Shall it be one of Harriet Martineau next? Such women.

The bleating of the sheep from the field beneath the National Library is an incongruous sound as it finds its way into our upstairs kitchen. I hear it in my bedroom too. A town caught between the sea and the field. A fisherman drove past me in his pickup as I walked down towards the harbour. Then I saw his boat, lit up with a strong staring searchlight, heading across the water towards Aberdovey. How I love those lights. So hopeful. Though I’m not sure why. He kept slowing down and changing the light from white to red. Was he collecting lobster pots from below? I’ve no idea of the season for such things.

He brought me asparagus for lunch. They were divine. And there is the promise of rhubarb too – though from the field not the garden. They are finished, apparently. Soon there will be gooseberries and blackcurrants. Then damsons. It is the small things, don’t you think?

He reminds me of Dickens character, though of course the clothes are wrong. He wears a hoodie, in Dickens’s time it would have been a great coat of some kind of a cloak. The colours are right though, grey on grey. We don’t know his name, or indeed anything about him. He lives in the top flat opposite us, above no. 1. We have surmised that he’s a Phd student. Sometimes we see him sitting in what I call ‘The Courtyard’ with several other twenty thirty somethings, mostly a woman and another man, sitting in his fold-up chair holding what looks like a seminar. Come rain, wind or shine he invariably has his hood up. He is rake thin and pale skinned. Sometimes there is a child with him, a boy, possibly about 5 or 6. He looks earnest, serious. He is awake at all hours. When I leave for my walk at 3.30 am his lights are often on. And sometimes he is outside smoking. We call him The Smoker. He smokes and skulks, his attention held by his phone.

How could he do it? Holding him down like that for 9 minutes. A living death, followed by a real death. How could he not know the human being he was killing? Was he so brutalised? It is shattering. One event out of countless that go on all the time. A killing of the other. We all do it in our small or big ways. In thought if not deed. It shakes me. Can there not be peace, acceptance, love? Are we not the same underneath? Where must it start? Where must it start? Inside ourselves?

A day of layers showing the cruelty. I cry out of frustration, out of compassion and a desire to know their pain and to see some way forward. The nurse washing her face as a child over and over to make it white. And then in fiction, Cadfael finding a son he didn’t know he had and then letting him go without claiming him. There is much to learn. And what of my peace? Can I ask for it if I don’t feel it inside? So much battling and I pick and snap as a result. It is fear, fear of not being good enough, always. Forgive me.

Beginning the biography of Mrs Gaskell was a pleasant escape with all its images of dear Knutsford. And last night the recaptured joy of To Walk Invisible with the feral Emily (so tall) and the pugnacious, cross Charlotte (so small) and the house, so barren, so beautifully empty and the landscape. Ah, my soul is lifted. But I want it for real. Sometimes.

He told me once of a girl he encountered way way back who’d told his friends at the time (he’d probably not turned up or was late) that he was probably ‘pruning himself in front of the mirror’. It tickled him then and still does. My love has the gift of not taking himself too seriously, and of infinite self-knowledge and therefore is fully aware of his propensity for vanity. I pruned him yesterday, outside on the tip, the dump or for the moment ‘our garden’. I cut his hair. He’d bought a pair of hairdressing scissors and a pair of thinning cutters. Just now I’ve also shaved his neck of all those rogue loose wandering hairs. He looks better for it. Neater, tidier and smarter. He seems pleased with my attempt.

Another warm night. My hips ache. I thought it was muscle fatigue from walking up hills or striding too purposively. But on second thoughts I think it is more likely a reaction to something my body is trying to oust. A bug, a mystery virus, a bad tummy call it what you will, something is fighting something off. I shall be stoic. There is no point in fasting if one is going to throw it all up and take painkillers. And pain has its own gift. So I sit with hot water bottles and herb tea, and try to distract myself instead.

My work frightens me. I am in fear of the empty page. But if I sit with it, give it my time and my attention something always comes through. It is inevitable. It is the reward of that attention and of my intention which is always to do the best I can, to honour those of whom I write and tell the truth as I know it, now. Yes, there is lots I do not know. I do not profess to genius, or skill, I’m a work-a-day writer who tries to throw off artifice and respond authentically to what is before her. That is all. I make no claims. The fear is mastered by my sitting with it. And my work is precious to me, not only as a means, however small of earning money but as a way of creating that stilling, that focussing on something, someone other than myself. It is a gift. Nevertheless be with me when I write. Please.

It was too warm to sleep last night. I lay there for what felt like hours moving this way and then that. I did sleep eventually for I dreamt. A later one was of a girl, a singer and a concert that she decided to cancel at the last minute. I was with her but also seeing her in a through a camera lens kicking her feet up high and wearing thigh length white boots. She was a little spoilt, the daughter of a friend who I tried to call but the phone I had was so small I couldn’t read the names or numbers. In the dream that followed I put my trusty black leather gloves on (the ones I wear for walking) and they began to disintegrate. I told him about them. He was there in my dream, in the wings as he often is. I’ll have to get some new ones right away, I said and headed off to do so before I woke five minutes before the alarm. Are these details significant? Or are they just a meld of symbols concocted from waking thoughts and fears?

The morning was perfect. The sea a gentle folding of water. A sheet of blue. From the Perygl I heard the purr of a fishing boat engine and turned to see its lights, full bright in the leaving dawn. I waited a little to see if they’d sail beneath me but they didn’t. The new shoes worked out fine, thankfully. A goodbye to thick socks and walking boots for a while, thank god. Now there is admin to do, a clearing away and a sorting out before other work can be done. So be it. Embrace it for the order it gives. All is well.

He is fifty today. Was he really so young back then? Still enigmatic? Probably.

I cannot tell you of the blue of the sea from my studio window. It is a welcome cool, a deepness. Aquamarine? Cobalt? What do those colours mean to you? DLS began translating the Divine Comedy. I stand humbled. And what is to be my life’s work?

I thought I recognised the blue. I thought it was a cornflower and I felt a fillip of joy. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t a cornflower. I think it’s a scabious. They mentioned scabious in the TV adaptation of Cranford. It was one of the flowers that the Major gave Capt Brown’s daughter and she hurried with the Jenkins’s to look it up in the Language of Flowers. I forget what they found, but she was pleased nonetheless by its inference. No, it couldn’t have been a cornflower, what was I thinking, cornflowers grow in fields and meadows on the side of crops, like those ones we saw in Cambridge that summer with the red poppies. But it is beautiful anyway, isn’t it? A spark of loveliness in a mass of debris and broken things.

It was a word she used a year or so ago when we visited her. It sounded funny coming out of her still young mouth.

She continues to fascinate me. Do you know she wrote over 350 reviews of Detective novels for The Sunday Times in just two years? And all the while she wrote plays, novels and short stories. Such busy women, they put me to shame. All of them. And so bright, so sharp. In the biography Coomes includes a kind of mock list she wrote outlining her domestic duties – I’ve not yet finished it but you can imagine the thing (or perhaps not) I paraphrase: get up, wait for the bathroom to become available (husband or maiden aunt using it), then breakfast at 8.30, then reading letters, scanning paper, then telephone calls, then interview with new ‘girl’, then sewing a hem and so on. All of course to be done before any ‘real’ work is done. Remarkable how even though she had a cook, a housemaid and so on she still had so much to distract her from her real aim and daily purpose. Her alcoholic husband can’t have helped. But she was strong and determined. Still I am humbled. What do I achieve each day? So many little things but what of the big?

It was a dream, again. Do they wake me before the alarm, always a split second? Or is it my body clock as she called it so many years ago sparking me awake? It was a funeral, her funeral, my grandmother’s. Though it wasn’t of course, she died long ago and I was young when I attended the real one. This one was more contemporary. We were in the car following a line, a cortege of sorts of mainly black vehicles. There was a man and then a woman on the periphery, both crying. They weren’t allowed in, they were kept in the wings, ousted, but nevertheless, they’d come. He was hirsute in the face at least and she looked familiar, and wore green. He touched his hand through the car window and I hugged her. We were going in but felt sympathy and compassion for those left outside and not welcome. The sun shone. It wasn’t a sombre day. Not sure where it came from or what it means.

I continue to read about her, getting frustrated with myself when I finish breakfast later than intended. Did she really feel so little about leaving her child with another? The language of the day perhaps pretends an indifference that she didn’t experience. Is the discomfort hers or mine? Last pot of tea today for a bit. A retraction is due, anything to ease the gut and to save the infernal chopping of fruit. The big things reign on out there and I am, as usual, concerned with the trivial, the small. Work must be done for the photography is booked for tomorrow. Another venturing out. A little scary still. And another commission for an article has been secured. I’m looking forward to it. So far. Keep that up. There is joy even in the always daunting challenge of writing. A bientot (sans little triangle, I don’t know how to get it).

I didn’t know what the word meant. Dorothy L Sayers used it in one of her poems that David Coomes quotes in his biography. He was reading The Times online and I asked him to look up its meaning on Google. He is always happy to oblige. I find if I don’t strike when the iron is hot I lose the chance and it is forgot. It’s a religious word, usually to do with the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit as a guiding force. I don’t even know how to pronounce it. It is para – ‘cleat’ or ‘clet’? She was clearly a bright woman, and more than a little awesome. But we all have our trials, even if we are brilliant. She kept losing her hair. Whenever she was ill it just fell out. A doctor told her it was because she was troubled mentally. Is it such a ridiculous suggestion? He suggested that she find contentment. Just like that?

It drizzles a little outside. No sun today. Never mind, there is much to do. Get everything ready. Then tea. Then work.

She replied almost straight away and sounding happy. I’m glad, so glad.

I miss her. I miss them. I want to connect, to see my loved ones. But it must be put on hold. Such is life. Not what we want but what we need. Possibly? Dorothy L Sayers grows more and more interesting to me. I don’t miss my breakfast puzzling, the reading is proving most rewarding. See a small mercy. I tell him all. It tumbles out, all that self-baracking. He understands mostly and when he doesn’t he tries to. What more can one ask? Too much to do. At least I set myself too much to do. Crowding out the creative work, on purpose? Perhaps. The scary bit. The wild bit. The untrammeled bit. Cleaning and cleaning. Nice when it is done though. And mending and emailing. Then shopping and putting it away and then? Then? Sitting and thinking and trying and working. It is enough. And there is the sun and the birdsong. Mopping the floors is made OK with Radio 3 up loud and Petroc warm voice and the sun shining in through the (dirty) windows. Thank you.