ellen bell

I’ve mentioned before about the seemingly random sentences that often reverberate in my head when I wake. Sometimes they are being said by me though often it is another voice, a strange, unfamiliar one. This morning it was mine. I cannot remember the context, it has been lost to me. The sentence however was lucid and clear. ‘What an amazing set of tools,’ I said, though to whom I do not know.

The dark morning assailed me again as I walked. The form feels overwhelming. I need to reduce it down to bite-size pieces. I can do it. I can manage it, but this morning it feels downright impossible. I snap at him. But then it is alright again, and my petulance abates.

They’ve stopped getting staff in to work the tills at 6 am at Tesco’s. So this morning we had to use the self-service one. No more chatting. I don’t mind. Change comes frequently these days. Always new tricks to learn. We managed. We manage, he and I. Always.

The first cup of coffee has been drunk. It disappoints these days, coffee, I brew it mostly for the smell, tea has taken over. I shall make a pot now and then get down to work. Onwards.

We were sitting at breakfast when he looked up from the paper and said: ‘Do you know what the next storm we’re to have is going to be called?’ No, I said, Storm Helen? ‘No,’ he replied, they’re not alphabetical. It’s going to be Storm Ellen.’

It’s rather nice actually. I like that. Ellen is such a benign name, reserved for Victorian maids-of-all work, and spinster sisters or maiden aunts. I like the power attached to being a storm name. See we can rise up, we wallflowers and background lilies.

I raged yesterday. The tension in my body got too much and I raged against it. Self-pity reigned. I am sorry for he gets the worst of it. He is kind, sympathetic, but even the most patient will be tried eventually. He always advocates anti-depressants. They have saved my life, he says. I know. And I accept that for him they work. But I don’t want them even if saying no to him is difficult. Not now, not ever. I need to feel this and come through to the other side. For I believe that there is one. An other side. A brighter side, where my contentment or possibly even happiness lies.

The wind blew wild as I walked, forcing me to cling to walls when I turned the corner from South Road and up that little side street. The sea rocked and rolled.

I caught a reading of Nicola Bayley The Mousehole Cat yesterday on the radio. I knew of the book but I’ve never read it. Lovely. Everything is seen through the cat’s eyes. Even the storm is a cat which Mouser lulls to calmness with her singing. Lovely serendipity. You see I can’t bring myself to listen to From Our Own Correspondent (which was on Radio 4 at the same time) when I’m this black. It is too much. I need light. Forgive me. I atone. I expiate. Wash me clean in your waters.

Sometimes it is just a word or phrase that I catch as it or they emerge from the radio. Yesterday it was a man voice talking about what he called objects of small pleasure, which were in his case pencils. I didn’t catch the rest. Small pleasures make life liveable, for me at least. They don’t overwhelm or threaten an anticlimax, they are comfortable, hand-able and pocket-size. Like the daffodils he bought for me, or the little jug she gave me for Christmas two years ago, or the taste of tahini yesterday, or a line in a novel that makes me smile. Such things aren’t everything, they won’t solve much – world poverty, hunger, the coronavirus or stop the floods – but they cheer, they lift and that has to be enough.

I walked this morning as usual even though they threatened howling gales and it surprised me how many people appeared to be awake. They weren’t out like me but windows were lit in the darkness. A Hopperesque scene with those oblong blocks of yellow light, usually from a ceiling light. No figures just a shape of yellow, seemingly amorphous, floating in the black.

Reading Worsley’s book she informs me that it was women who used to sew together the printed pages of a book before it was bound, which in those days printers didn’t do, this was then courtesy of a bookbinder. She also makes lots of connections between Austen’s sewing and writing. Her niece describes her as ‘doing two things at once: ‘working’ on one task with her needle, and another with her brain.’ Nice. I find sewing does the same for me. On the next page Austen is quoted as saying: ‘I really am impatient myself to be writing….I can command very little quiet time at present, but yet must I begin.’ Amen to that, Jane. Me too. Me too. I am impatient to be writing but first things first. That form. It must be attended too.

There is an artist who’s work I admire that uses his dreams as material for his drawings. They are texts, handwritten that describe his night time reveries. They are beautiful documents, copper-plated and written on thick, watermarked paper, and huge. My dreamworld has become increasingly important to me. I try to read them, to unravel them. Often topsy-turvy they are mines of information. Last night there was a baby. It was mine, and it was hungry. I knew that I’d made it a bottle but in all the mess of rubbish in the space I was living in I could find it and the baby kept crying and crying. It was distressing. I wanted to satisfy it, calm it but I couldn’t.

It’s St David’s Day on Sunday and the daffodils are out way before. She told me last week that she remembers that they always came either on the day or after. As I walked into town at 3 am a man was coming towards me carrying a bunch of freshly cut daffs. Even at that time. Was it a present?

The floods continue to ravage Shropshire. My heart goes out to those affected. Poor souls. It is biblical in its impact. May there be relief for them, soon. Please make it soon.

I often dream deep when I don’t get enough sleep, as I did last night. Lots of them, broken by visits to the loo. The one that stuck featured a group of people, myself included being taken around this house. We were led to a door to a flight of stairs. Well that is what it looked like. Actually it was a self-contained flat. We were told that an old lady lived there, a Mrs Smith. The man showing us round told us she was his client and proceeded to open the door. It was jammed all the way down the stairs and beyond with boxes, clothes, plastic bags all full with stuff. He asked if any of us would like to look inside. One man came forward and began to try and push himself through all the clutter. He got nowhere and soon returned all creased and hot. She thinks she is still alive, said the man showing us round, but actually she is dead. It reminded me of yesterday’s dream in an airport, a kind of no man’s land where we were waiting for our flight for days. I remember stairs there too, but normal, domestic, carpeted stairs and a big door that I was going to open but then didn’t realising that once I did I wouldn’t be able to return to where I was. On the stairs was an envelope under which was someone’s wallet. Had they left it behind? Should I check? I was asking myself as I woke.

A good, good day yesterday. A full day. A rich day. There is much there, much enthusiasm, much support. Now I must make sense of it all, establish some order, some control. And begin.

Some books give me such joy. Lucy Worsley’s Jane Austen at Home is one such book. It’s the detail, the minutiae of Austen’s day-to-day life that captivates. Worsley is thorough, painting a real life, a nuts-and-bolts life of a woman not the literary genius that she has now become. I love it. Truly. And it is worth going into work to engage with it. I’m currently in Bath with her, just before she is to leave. (When he was looking for a flat for me, all those years ago now, he looked at the one that the Austen family almost took in Sydney Place, for it seems that it was too expensive in the end. He thought it shabby, so we didn’t go for it. It was a gentle connection nevertheless.) Biographers’ opinions vary but it does appear that Bath wasn’t a happy place for her. I get it. I loved it but sometimes, just sometimes it brought me down – though whether that was a fault of place, I cannot say. She did write Northanger Abbey there (she initially called it Susan) though it was years till it was published, posthumously, I believe but mostly it was an unproductive time. Too topsy-turvy, the death of her father, the constant moving and being at the beck and call of wealthy relatives – I suspect. In a letter from that time she writes: ‘I do not know what is the matter with me to day but I cannot write…..fortunately I have nothing very particular to say.’

I get myself in a tizz over nothing it seems. My body is rigid with it. The rain lashes outside, though it was dry, thankfully, when I walked earlier. Some mornings the most that I can do is go out and do the food shopping and come home. I do my best to rise to the occasion, for we must greet the people we have come to know there. The managers, the under managers, the shelf-stackers, the other shoppers, who like us are out at 6 am, and the staff working the tills. Morning, campers, called out one man whom we see most mornings there. He looks like an ageing Roy Orbison, for he always wears dark glasses and his hair, long and dyed black has that same distinctive fluffy, brittle quality. His over-cheerfulness gives him away. Is this hard for him too? I want to run. He stands his ground and chats with him. We talk to S on the till. It is expected. It passes the time of day, he would say. He is singing when we get to his till. He talks about the job he had before. Too much responsibility, he said. I’d get home and I’d be worrying. No, this is better, he says, it’s just beep, beep and then go home. Perfect. His Liverpudlian accent makes the word like treacle and ends it with a k. I ask whether he will make pancakes. No, he says, my sixteen year old daughter makes them. He chooses a mixed pack of mini cereals for the food bank and it takes me back to staying with J and how we’d fight over who got the Coco Pops. I loved those little packets. Anything in miniature captivated me. And to be able to have something entirely to myself. I could give way over the Coco Pops, as I often did, Frosties were fine, I even secretly preferred them, not liking the way the Coco Pops turned the milk brown. J wasn’t a natural host, or indeed grandparent but to stay away from home was nevertheless a treat, and I loved the sparse, neatness of her house.

I want to spend another day working on the alphabet piece – I think that is the struggle, not feeling I can justify it to myself. And yet, I’m trying to find something, a way of working, a path and it needs that time, that dedication to unfold. Let it be. Allow yourself the time.

We’ve met a few times now, that is, when I can fit it in in my oh so rigid routine. I like her. She is fresh-faced, open, young but 23 and fearless. Or so she seems to me. We meet ostensibly to talk Norwegian. My mother’s tongue. I persist in trying to get a hold of it. I know little. I struggle with the pronunciation and feel tongue-tied and stupid. But she still chatters on to me. Mostly in Norwegian, though sometimes, when it is clear that I haven’t the foggiest what she is saying, in English. We meet in a cafe, an unpretentious place where hoi polloi go for egg and chips and sit on the banquettes in the window overlooking the street below. I feel comfortable in there. He knows the owner from years back. I buy the girl a drink. She never offers to pay, why should she? She, after all is helping me, letting me stumble through the foreign tongue so patiently. Yesterday she brought me another book. They are always childrens’ books. I struggle through those too but they are good practice in seeing the words in print. This particular book was written by a dentist to try and encourage children to take care of their teeth. They are so practical the Norwegians. She shows me another side of the culture. I am used to city dwellers, at least those from the suburbs of Oslo, wealthy, intelligent, cosmopolitan. She is a farmer’s daughter. Both her parents are farmers. And yet, she is brave, and her English is amazing. She has big plans. After her degree her she wants to go to Edinburgh. She never asks any questions about me. I am of no interest to her. I wonder why she meets me. She is kind I think. But not curious. Is that a feature of the young, this lack of curiosity?

I had many dreams last night. In one I was in the sea, it was deep and I was frightened of drowning and what was underneath me. I felt something. Was it a shark? No, it was two dolphins, they rose smiling in an arc in front of me. And yet, it was all very illusory and the sea, rather than being cold, wet and dark was white, like sheets, and billowy as a duvet. My fears were groundless. I was safe, not drowning.

I can’t always catch what she is saying down the phone. Her voice is quiet, apologetic. A cancelling out of noise, rather than a making of it. I thought she said Denmark. And then when I questioned her I realised she had. It’s at Denmark, she said again. Denmark? I asked, thinking surely not, she never travels, hasn’t even been in a plane. Denmark Farm, she said. It’s like a shorthand, a restricted code. She has always lived in that place, that small community, she knows it as she knows the back of her hand and offers it up with her quiet voice as a cipher, not intentionally, but that is how I hear it. She talked of wanting to do a craft class over Easter. Again, I had to struggle to hear it, to make sense of what she was saying. Something to do with woolen animals. Then it came, felting. Felted animals. It is brave of her. All these forays into a bigger world are brave steps for her. I want to hear them described and hand them back to her as prizes. See what you have achieved. And the two of them so open to all viruses – so easily assailed. I want to wrap them up and make them safe. She was as grey as I was yesterday. I didn’t lift her. I was sorry for that.

I cook things sometimes just for the warm, rich smells that give the flat. Sometimes it is coffee in that wonderful authentic Italian coffee pot, other times like this morning it is almonds toasted in a frying pan. No fat just the heat turning them brown. Nutty, honeyed, toasty sort of smell. Gorgeous.

It’s the small things, she said, or implied, I forget which. Do what you can to instil joy. He tries to convince me. It is getting lighter, he says. It is. Promise.

I’ve listened to the whole series of Geoffrey Wheeler’s forays into the UK’s Grand Theatres on the radio. Yesterday I listened back to one on the Grand in Swansea and another on the one in Ayr. In the Swansea one he interviewed the ex-Theatre Chaplain, a woman, I forget her name. She talked about going to that theatre as a child and her feelings at seeing the red velvet curtains hiding the stage before the play opened. ‘They shared an enchantment with you’, she said. I followed those with a programme hosted by Roger Law (of Fluck and Law) on breeding English Rabbits, a special spotted variety based on a painting that a wealth of breeders are trying to emulate. Fascinating. It ended, perhaps inevitably with Law eating rabbit pie.

A good day yesterday, even work was fun with some guests for Ifan show bringing in Poppy the Jack Russell and two ferrets.

I send you love, and you and you my love. Nothing is as bad as we think it is. Even in my worst bleakness I know this. Trust it. You are loved. All of you.