ellen bell

I heard a crash from above and a cry of ‘Oh, no’. It was one of the glass tumblers she had given me in celebration of my first marriage. There were six originally now there are just two left. They are all the tangible things I have from her. Two glasses. I like them very much. They are square, art deco in form, simple and elegant. She had a very particular style – set somewhere between the 40s and the 70s. In the 40s she would’ve been in her twenties and in her fifties in the 70s. She liked colour but not too much pattern. I remember her pride over some silk cushion covers she’d bought for her sofa. They were of orange and pink and they looked so striking together. She had an artist’s eye, I think. I miss her. She was a difficult woman, a demanding one, as all the women of the family were, but I loved her. But in the end they are just things, and another part of me just wants to shrug them all off. She gave me a less entrancing gift while I was living out there. They were a set of fake candles that you charge up and they remain flickering for up to 6 hours. She was delighted with them, had a set herself. You save on matches, she said, and all the fuss of candles. Catholic churches use the same kind of thing now. But they are not the same. Candle flames are alive, they smell, they flicker. I gave them away but I wish now I hadn’t. Perhaps I can buy another set. So practical. She wasn’t naturally so, but when she was she was pleased. My love. My lovely love.

What a delight a fishing boat just getting ready to set out when I walked into the harbour. I tried to work out what it was that delighted me so. The lights perhaps? Like Christmas lights. Or the sound of the fishermen talking so softly in the fast-coming dawn. Or the sense of normality it suggests. Or the gorgeous slow entry into the open sea and the gentle bobbing of the boat. I watched it sail off into the distant horizon a part of me wanting, nay longing to be with them. All is well. See, all is well.

We were talking about fairs, I can’t remember how or why we got onto that subject. And then he said that they always remind him of ‘that stuff on a stick’, you know it’s pink. Candy floss, I said. That’s it, he said. Then he went on to say that he’d never had it. And I tried to describe what it was like, how the fluff-like stuff melted into a kind of soft toffee, very sweet. I was enthralled by the texture as a child, particularly the metamorphosis from floss to stickiness on one’s tongue. But all the same I felt as he did about fairs and fairgrounds, a mixture of fear and fascination. I’ve probably told you this before, he said, but I remember going to a fair as a child and seeing a man coming out of one of those fighting rings, you know the ones where anyone can fight, and his face was all bloodied. He hadn’t told me it before. And I was thinking about how such things would’ve been outlawed by the time I was his age when I heard him reasoning through his memory and suggesting to himself that what he saw was actually the man washing off fake blood, not real and that he must’ve been a plant to induce others to participate. All this in a matter of moments. And the memories flood in, indistinct ones, as childish ones often are, unresolved, unworked through, all those sounds, smells, fears and clamouring.

Was it the tea? I cannot be sure. Whatever it was I felt distinctly odd. My head was light and woozy and I was so very agitated. It was the agitation that was the worst. You can see or think clearly when you feel all edgy. Small problems become giants. And it get snappy. I can sense it building up inside, like a volcano about to erupt. I can’t like myself then. Or indeed anyone else, much. Poor love, he gets the brunt. So it’s back to tea bags today, though the loose leaf tastes so much better. Can it really have such an effect? It is a drug, he said, sagely. He thinks it’s because I’m so ‘clean’ inside that I am so easily effected. He also says tea makes me gobby.

I’ve much to do and a problem to solve. You will do it, he says. Will I? I always seem to get myself to this point with every commission. So full of fear and uncertainty. Onward. The flat has been cleaned. And the space is ready. Onward my lovely girl, be brave.

‘Romantic notions’ the character called them. I have them too. I can’t help it. Those high, virtually treeless islands are beautiful to me. The simplicity of the cottages, the lack of ornament. Yes, I know it is cold, harsh, windy all the time but a soul could breathe there, accept the nothingness and not try to fill it. A place to think, whilst one survives. No distraction. Will I go?

I happened to see it as I walked past this morning. A name. The Eddie Stobart Refrigeration truck parked outside Tesco’s loading bay had a name. Just like a train or a ship. Victoria May this one was called. Do the drivers always have the same lorry to drive? Do they make it their own, a home from home? They have to come a long way to get to us. All that way over the mountains. Was he waiting to be let in or was he on his way back? His lights were on, and I could see him in his high vis jacket sitting high up in his cab. I always think of her when I see one, I think her father used to drive for them. What a thing it must be to drive such a juggernaut.

The sky was turning blue as I made my way home. A lovely blue, a hopeful blue. And the morning is beautiful, colder but fresh and clear. He is agitated, BJ has given an unclear message. Go back to work he tells some, but don’t use public transport. Walk or cycle instead, he says. Here in Wales the message is clearer, we are still in lockdown, the restrictions are the same, at least for another 3 weeks. Will work be generous? All I can do is wait.

Several blackbirds were competing in song along Llanbadarn Road. Their music echoed across the thoroughfare. It was a real opening of day. Two screech owls also made themselves heard. The birds own that time. That liminal time. I walk in awe of them. They know who they are, their place, their work. I have yet to learn mine, perhaps I never will.

A girl of ‘strong sensibilities and not high spirits’, Jane Austen wrote, describing Anne Elliot at fourteen.

The radio programme set us off. It was one of the compilation ones where they play old comedy shows for three hours. This one was involving 70s ones and they aired a Gas and Gaiters (I think it was called that, now I’m not so sure) about a group of clergy, with the curate being Derek Nimmo. I believe his character was called Moon. I never heard it as a child but I’ve heard it since. It is light, easy to listen too, full of nonsense and a little ponderous but sweet all the same. It got us talking about Nimmo. He was ubiquitous in the 70s, synonymous with slightly shy, bumbling characters often with a some kind of a speech impediment. I think he died young, he said. And began to sit on the stairs below, as I worked on the quilt upstairs reading from his wikipedia biography. Apparently he fell down some stone stairs after a night out at some award ceremony and cracked his head. He was in a coma for months before eventually dying. He had an illegitimate son, he called out from below, whom he recognised and included in his will. But his other, legitimate son was cut out. It can’t be easy to have your private concerns become public property. Our inner and other, less public lives, may surprise and I’m glad of it. But let them remain private, eh?

I thought about what it must be like to have a house and garden. Had I always assumed they would be mine? I have not eclipsed my parents in wealth and possessions by any stretch of the imagination. Some of my siblings, have, at least one, perhaps. I have not. We get by, we have enough but a garden. What would that have been like? We had one in Cambridge. But that was his house, not mine. And one in Truro but I rented that. And I couldn’t give time to either. Would I do so now? Perhaps not as much as I felt I ought to. But to sit in it, that would be nice. And to grow sweet peas, some vegetables, maybe and some fruit. Will it come one day? Please?

It was the last bit of my dream, just before the alarm went off. (It’s funny how one’s body or one’s mind knows when it is about to ring.) I was with a group of people, some I knew but the others were strangers to me. They wanted to commission me for some work. ‘Ellen,’ they said, ‘do you think you could make us a train that stops?’ ‘Not on the budget I assume that you’ll have.’ I replied, perhaps a little too brusquely. A response that I quickly followed with, ‘but what I think I would be a good idea…’ Then I woke, a little frustrated that I couldn’t resolve their problem. What had I been going to suggest? I tried to pull it forward from those hazy recessesses as I bathed. A trick of the eye, an illusion of a train with lights and human bodies miming it, perhaps? The interesting thing was that their request was not for a train (which I note that in my dreaming I felt I could do if they money had been available (there’s confidence for you)) but for one that stopped. A stopped train. What a metaphor, eh?

She is sounding so much stronger. She was out walking when I called, breaking off from our conversation, now and then, to shout or call for the dog. She was excited by a run-in she’d had with the taciturn farmer on the other side of her house who’d accused her of letting her dog worry his sheep (it isn’t hers but a ‘borrowed’ one for the farm next door). He’d called the police in the end and threatened to report her to the RSPCA. Her daughter had been made anxious, worried that they’d notice their cockerel’s gamy leg. The police had humoured him and told her not to worry, the dog had not been doing anything wrong. And the RSPCA never came. They were to have a VE picnic in the garden. What her daughter had made was to be a surprise. They are kind to each other, loving and self-contained. But it was good to hear her sounding so brave, so vigorous. Long may it continue.

The day promises fine. x

I’m a stayer, I stick at things, doggedly, well mostly. I try to. And I apply the same kind of perseverance to books but the one I began today at breakfast broke the pattern. I couldn’t get along with it. It wasn’t the story or plot as such but the exposition of it. It was badly written, at least in my opinion. I ended up watching the words rather than reading them. Nevertheless I don’t like giving up. Should I have continued beyond the first two chapters?’ I won’t give the author’s name. Others may approve, even enjoy his writing. I did not. So be it. I returned to Austen. She is familiar, much-known, much-loved. And the sentences are to be savoured, read and read over again, such as her mini portrait of Mrs Croft, Admiral Croft’s wife (played so wonderfully by Fiona Shaw in the film version of the book). ‘Her manners were open, easy, and decided, like one who has no distrust of herself, and no doubts of what to do..’ Isn’t that marvellous? So succinct, but so rich in detail. It says it all. And how lovely it would be to be Mrs Croft and have no distrust of oneself. Amen to that.

She’s grown up now. A proper woman. A wonderful mother. I am so proud of her. Happy birthday for yesterday my love, my darling girl.

The moon was a full circle. I think it’s a new one, in Scorpio. Thanks for that, he said when I told him at breakfast yesterday. It might be a good omen, I said, not a bad one. Auspicious, I said, particularly for Scorpios.

The air smelt of boiled sweets outside Tesco’s loading bay. I pass it as I walk. Another Eddie Stobart lorry was dropping off its load. It hissed as the steam from its engine fizzed out. I thought of the sound of the New York streets I walked seven almost eight years ago. There was that same hissing of truck engines there. And the smell of fried doughnuts and waffles from the pavement food vans that opened up early, just like the diners. Could it really have been so long ago?

I go to sleep in the daylight and wake in the dark, ridiculous, I know. But by waking early I have so much of the town to myself, and it has to be safer, doesn’t it? I saw no one else walking, except for a figure making its way up Penglais Hill, then just a police car and another civilian one. I fall asleep to the sound of the birds, the wood pigeon mostly. Woodrow Wilson we call it, and the one we used to see and hear in Spain. A universal name for wood pigeons, seemingly. And why not?

The morning is quiet. He has gone for his walk and I’m about to start work. I want to find pleasure in all that I do. I’m often in the dark about what they want so I try to enjoy the ‘freedom’ of that not knowing, even though I’m acutely aware that it may be rejected. So far so good, as they say. Grant me brilliance, this day and always. And show me how best to help her. She chattered away. The discomfort was mine. I never feel good enough for her or indeed for anybody. Was I born that way? So uncertain of my own worth? Can I learn to accept even that? Help me.

According to one specialist (I’m not sure what his specialism was, he quoted parts of his article to me from the paper) we are dreaming more in this lockdown time because our subconsciousnesses are creating the stimulus our minds are not getting during the day. I’m not completely convinced, I think it’s more to do with an underlying universal anxiety that is making our subconscious minds more alert, though what do I know? I wake from dream after dream. I know they are intricate, textured but not unpleasant. In one of them I was offered an almost full-time university post teaching drawing and writing. You’ll have to come to Birmingham, she said (a face I vaguely recognise from my past, she also hired me to teach) we’ve moved the department there. I was pleased, knew that I could do it and tested the idea of all that commuting in my head. Yes, I could do it. Will they pay expenses? I asked, ever practical, even in dreams. My main concern was telling him. But the money, I thought, will come in useful to put towards my old age. Meanwhile, in the real world, if you can call it that, no news from my employer. They can’t furlough us, apparently, at least not under the government scheme, then what, what can or will they do? Another beautiful morning and I have work to do. Hey ho. But I am glad of it. Really.

I know they are naff, ubiquitous with that seventies and eighties hippy-style of expression, but I still think the sound is lovely. I heard it first the other day when I walked sans music. I initially thought it was coming from the Nursery School garden but then I saw it hanging from the tree of the house next door. For all their gated entrance and fake-tiled driveway, those particular householders do do things that give me, as a passer-by, pleasure – such as their host of daffodils in the spring and the lit reindeer that they sometimes put on their balcony at Christmas. The wind chimes are another small delight. Thank you.