ellen bell

You’re only a writer when you’re doing it – at the point of the pen, said Alan Bennett on the radio yesterday.

Gosh, she’s plain, he said. That’s such a welsh thing to say. GOSH, she’s plain. Homely they call it in America. Your work is often described as homely the interviewer said to Bennett. Do you think that’s fair?

That vicar gets on my tits, he said as we got into the car. Why? I asked. He’s always scurrying about with his trolley and when he barges in front of you, or nudges you with it, he never says sorry. What’s he doing in the supermarket anyway, he said, he should be saving souls somewhere shouldn’t he? Scurry. I think about Richard Scarry. The writer and illustrator. I loved his books as a child. Spot the cat up the ladder or driving a fire engine. I think one of his books was my first library book. The first one I borrowed.

The sun is out, what a delight.

She sounded better, chattering away like a sparrow.

Some ancients believed that the wind was God’s voice. Sometimes in the early morning it seems so.

He’s got a flat over Gannet’s Bistro. He likes it. Is proud of it. Always the rolling stone, never setting down roots. Not properly. Leaving his stuff with friends, in attics, in spare rooms. Now he’s got this place they’ve returned them. Boxes everywhere, blocking the hallway. There isn’t room for it all.

He’s a bit of a bruiser, isn’t it? I said. I knew I was being uncharitable. I couldn’t help myself. He likes it when I am a little less good. Goody two shoes. That’s not like you, he says. I know. But it’s just a description. We are talking of the baby in the high chair. We’d just walked into The Granary in Hay-on-Wye for lunch. He was sitting with his mother at a table by the stairs. A great stocky child, his face covered in food. Not smiling but not scowling. Just staring. I tried to say hello to him, he said, but he was too busy putting food in his ear.

The mother brings him upstairs later to change his nappy. She beamed with pride. She loves him. She sees something else. Of course.

I am tired. Jaded from a lack of sleep. It is enough to tread water today. So be it. Amen

But I want to be good.

To be kind. And yet, all too often I transgress. I am sharp, I feel my face pull itself into a grimace. I do not listen. I think an unkind thought. I am cold. Today in the gym, when the two women had moved my coat. What does it matter? I felt my snarl. I tried to recoup my warmth, smiled. Asked if I was in the way. But it felt like the damage had been done. A subtle coolness in the room. A chill.

I want to be kind. But sometimes I am weary. Weariness erodes my resolve. I know it. Writing makes me weary. Thinking too much makes me weary. Trying to understand the nature of faith makes me weary. Perhaps it is not about understanding some might say, but about being. Yes. I see that. But how? How can one be? How must one be?

Dust yourself down and start all over again. The song goes. Start over and over again.

I am so blessed. He returns me to myself. He dusts me down. Picks me up so that I can start again.

The bag woman was in again today. There was a door in one of the cupboards that wouldn’t shut. She kept pushing it, disturbed by it hanging open. I was too. We are no different, she and me. Or is it she and I? I never know. We need it just so. More and more as we grow old. Imposing some control over the chaos. I want to be kind to her, to me. And yet, I don’t make eye contact. Don’t, he hisses looking down, don’t or she’ll start talking at you. Why not? She is lonely, distrait, I think. She sighs. Pours a glass of water, then another. Her tread is heavy. All those bags.

A drizzly day with a milk-white sky. Let me be kind. Show me how.

She refers to it as serendipity. Isn’t seren the Welsh for star? Serendipity. We’d been talking about the Brontes and there it was a reading of a new Charlotte Bronte biography on the radio. Read by Hattie Monaghan. She played Eleanor in a recent TV adaptation of Sense and Sensibility and I saw her a couple of years ago on stage in London as Nora in The Doll’s House. She has gravitas as an actress. Is earnest, solemn even. I like her voice. The bit I heard the Brontes were endeavouring to publish a collection of their poems. They had to cover the costs. Two copies were sold. Worse than nothing, Charlotte wrote in her journal. Worse than nothing. She’d written to the poet Southey the year before. He’d encouraged her to quash all ambition to publish, to know her place, accept her status in life as a woman. Nevertheless, she had taken heart, he had not said her poems were bad.

Tenacity. You’ve got tenacity, said ‘The Beast’ as he leaned out of his window smoking a cigarette, going out in this. I must have my walk, I said.

The rain didn’t come till later. I had a dry morning walk. Though it was windy. Abigail is coming. The sign for The Angel pub creaked and whined as it swung back and forth. Down at the harbour the through road is lined either side with boats on bricks. Makeshift stilts, they look so unsure. Some of the boats are in a right state. Peeling paint, rust and sagging rigging. A sorry state. I’m glad they are out of the water. It’s like the lobster pots. All are safely gathered in. Anticipating winter. Battening down the hatches.

I saw two cats in the dark. One crossed Llanbadarn Road the other was on the promenade. They are not scared of the dark. Like me.

Sometimes I see coins on the pavement. Usually they are five pence pieces, sometimes a pound. Today I collected pebbles. Twelve of them. Off the prom. The sea had hurled them there. I create of a line of them on the window sill, like Kettle’s Yard. The outside brought in. I washed them. Do they still smell of the sea? Like shells?

They came in to talk about peace poppies. White ones. There had been a fracas last year. Everyone kept calling them pacifist poppies. No, she said, in her soft German brogue, they are peace poppies. They are to commemorate everyone who has been killed in conflict not just the fallen soldiers and armed forces. Everyone. We want to encourage the end of wars through negotiation, through diplomacy, she said. We spoke with the Legion and found we had much in common. I’m glad.

No hands and no feet. I remember the Grimm’s fairy tale. The Silver Hands. She has her hands cut off so that the Devil can’t take her. She is given false hands fashioned from silver. This woman had become ill, her extremities growing sceptic. So brave. So strong. Really. What lives I encounter through the radio. She is waiting for a transplant. A double-hand transplant. Can you imagine? I am humbled. Our hands and feet – they carry us through, help us to make sense of the world. I wish her a speedy recovery. Though what she has learnt through her trial must be immeasurable. In the story the girl’s hands grow back. I wish her well.

Walking home I hear the train. The trundle train I call it. A slow train. A rolling, meandering train. Chugger, chugger. No whistle. In the summer there is a whistle. A whistle from the steam train. At three o’clock in the afternoon. A nice sound. A gentle sound. A summery sound.

Outside my studio window the rain is lashing the panes. Spitting hard. There is a Paul Simon song about raindrops on a window pane. Melancholic. Gorgeous. There but for the grace of you go I, it ends.

Take care, he said, it would break my heart. Mine too, my love. Mine too.

At boarding school the Spanish master used to call me Medium Bell. My elder sister having gone before and my younger soon to follow. My eldest sister put chewing gum on his chair. I think he was quite sanguine about it though my parents had to foot the dry cleaning bill. She just wanted to come home. That’s all. She couldn’t stomach it. Not at all. Not at all.

I didn’t know whether they’d go for the fact that I’m a medium as well, said the head of Ceredigion toilets. She is a major character in a new BBC Two Wales documentary. Coastal lives. There is an Elvis impersonator and a couple who keep snakes. It’s all about proper cleaning, she tells me. We’ve won top loo over the years and platinum, and Aberaeron who’ve got gold keep saying how comes you got platinum? It’s all about proper cleaning, I say. It isn’t enough to just swish a mop around, she says. You’ve got to do the skirting boards too.

Fifteen minutes. Fame. Fifteen minutes of fame. Do you know who he is? she asks. Oh, I say. Yes, I heard about it. He was on telly yesterday, she said. I saw his picture on the front of the paper today. A gentle young man. Small, slim and white-faced. There is no bandage. The tear is still bloodied. They cluck around him. Poor love. Poor lamb. An innocent. The man on the radio keeps asking him if he did anything to warrant it. Not at all. Wrong place, wrong time. He was wearing a poncho. The perpetrator. There must’ve been blood. Will you press charges? I ask. Of course, he says, I ‘ave to don’ I?

There’s Farter, he says, stopping the car to let a man with a grey-moustache wearing a brown anorak cross at the junction between Thespian Street and Terrace Road. Farter? I ask. Yeh, Non the Pon said he is notorious for farting in the Nat Lib. They all call him Farter. He can’t help himself apparently.

Early November brings a birthday and an anniversary. How old is Peter Noon? he asks. I know, I say, exactly the same as you. That’s right, he says. That’s right. And the anniversary? Eighteen years married. And in between five years divorced. Not really, he says. No, I say, it wasn’t. In my head we never divorced, he said. No, I said.

We watched the fireworks from the window. The sky was smoky white. I remember the sparklers spitting sparks onto my gloves. That miasma of burnt wool. I loved Sparklers, white-hot and fizzing. Parkin, he asks, what’s Parkin?

Mrs Eglin was our baby sitter. A local. A true Lancastrian. As a girl she worked in the textile mill. Once we visited her in her home. She had a Chihuahua and a canary in a cage. On Sunday nights she would sing along to Songs of Praise. If we were good she’d take out her teeth and show us her gums. Up the apple and pears, she’d say. She reminded me of Nanny Clarke. Long gone now, long gone.

I don’t like rain, said Iris. It poured. Now the sky is a Titian-blue. Nothing lasts, good or bad. The clouds scud. Faster now. Shall we walk this afternoon? Have a blow? Yeh, then tucked-up tidy. Mmm, sounds nice.

Two cups of coffee and we talked of the Brontes. They used the name of Bell, I said. Really, he said. Yes, Acton Bell, Currer Bell, I said. I couldn’t remember the name Emily took. Was it Ellis? Charlotte saw them all buried. Such sadness. Such passion. I hope we can go. Yes, though I mustn’t force it.

How is the man? The dying man. I miss you, she wrote. Yes, I miss you too. Let it be. Don’t fight it. Let it be. Don’t rage. Don’t fight. Let be. Let be.

The white witch of literature she called her. Angela Carter, the fabulist. Fabulist, what images that word conjures up. They’re on the radio talking about some poems of hers that they’ve found. Unearthed, unpublished. Marina Warner, Salman Rushdie and Andrew Motion, picking over the bones. God, she was visceral. I read her with bated breath. Gorgeous. A feast of gorgeousness but oh so horrid at times. Was it good poetry? the presenter asked Motion. Private scribblings in a journal. She made notes of what she read on one side, her writings were on the other. Picking over the bones. I remember seeing The Magic Toyshop on stage in a studio theatre in SOHO. That marvellous company Shared Experience. The tumbling, the nakedness and the blood-red feathers. Can one love and be repelled at the same time? I think so. I do think so.

Early morning, not yet light, and a tall black girl with blue hair wearing Doc Martens is walking aside a diminutive man in a leather jacket. Are you Italian? I hear him say. No, she replies, I’m Portuguese.

A pigeon, sleeping in a doorway, flaps its wings in a flurry of feathers as I walk past.

A robin bobs before me onto the pavement. A tiny dot in the still dark.

A man walks towards me, a hood over his head. He licks the side of his cigarette paper before rolling it into shape. He scowls at me as we pass.

She isn’t well today, her voice is querulous. My head is like a bucket, she says. I’ve earache, it’s making me grumpy. Sorry. I could swear, she says. I’m hot then I’m cold. My daughter says I should go back to bed. And the weather. That’s right, dear, she says. I will. Speak to you next week. Bye.

He was thrown. I thought it was radio, he said. We’d met before. Was it last year? I helped him onto the stool. It looked awkward. I touched his arm. An encouragement, a gesture of solidarity. Are you nervous? I asked. A bit, he said. His skin through his t-shirt was burning hot.

A slither of moon.

If I keep writing, she wrote in her journal, I will get better. I will be good. You do not have to be good, wrote Mary Oliver, you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. She wanted a feast before she died. Yesterday a dying man had egg and chips. Some people are more alive just before death than they ever were living.

Can you forgive yourself? Isn’t that the beginning and end of it? Self-forgiveness.

I thought it was a graze. I’d been filling the flower jug with water. It was pollen dust. Lily pollen dust. Ochre-yellow, like saffron. Staining my skin. Yellow. He’ll be yellow again, tomorrow, she wrote. Mellow yellow. They call me mellow yellow. Yellow is the colour of the solar plexus chakra.

A drizzly day. A melancholy day. I wrote my thousand. Enough. For today. Enough.

From my studio window I often see crows. They perch on the roof tops. Yesterday there were two on a TV aerial. Something made them take flight. The aerial continued to shake way after their departure. This morning I watched as a jackdaw drank from a guttering. Perched on the edge, it bent down to drink then pointed its beak towards the sky letting the liquid slide down its throat.

See that parking, he says, bloody awful. It’s not so much how they park but the space they take up. It’s his main bugbear. It gets his goat. Not much else does, not these days. He is gentler, calmer, happier. Have I done that? I think so.

He’s adorable, I said to Linda on the checkout at Morrison’s. It was a strange word to use, I admit. But I meant it. I do adore him. She wasn’t expecting it. You’re supposed to moan, to carp, albeit playfully, about your other-half in the supermarket. You know, raise your eyes to the ceiling, tut and say, typical. But I don’t feel it. I just feel blessed, in every which way.

It is enough. It is.

I find things when I walk. Yesterday there was bed in the road. Well, half in the road and half on the pavement. A perfectly good bed. Clean. A single bed base. Had it fallen off a lorry? And today I found some money. On North Road, two notes. Two twenty pounds notes. I felt sorry for the person who’d lost them. But what can I do but accept the gift? The gift of providence. Just like him. My gift. I pinch myself. I am blessed.

Later I saw two magpies in a tree. Is it to be a lucky day? Joyous. Of course. Of course it is.

She said that Enid Blyton was supposed to have written up to a ten thousand words a day. She was certainly prolific. I write a thousand and I am spent. Grahame Green wrote eight hundred at a push. Just write your thousand a day, wrote Stephen King. You need a structure, a regime, else all is chaos. Did I like her books as a child? I’m not sure, that I did. I didn’t warm to them, the characters that is. Whom did I prefer? The Narnia books perhaps? And yet, they were so heartbreaking. The capture of Aslan, his flesh bitten into by that rope. Too tender a child. Always have been. When he asked Derek Walcott to talk about Seamus Heaney, he couldn’t. Was he crying? Over-sensitive, they always called me. Perhaps I am like a poet. He was a beautiful man, he said finally.

I no longer blush, I am denied that warmth, muses the protagonist in A. L. Barker’s short story, Something of Fancy. It is only at the end that you realise it is the ghost of Jane Austen. Nice. Piano. Pronounced pi-aaa-know.

Sunday morning, 4.30 am. Remnants of Halloween. A young man in a body leotard painted to look like a skeleton walks home along Llanbadarn Road. There are girls in cat’s eyes and eyeliner whiskers, some wear nurses uniforms with bloodied aprons, one has a black tinsel halo fixed to her head. A man sits in the road.

On Desert Island Discs Marjorie Wallace describes her melancholy as ‘a winter of the mind’.

They’ve collected all the lobster pots. They are piled high on the harbour. They stink. A stench like rancid sweat or unclean tummy buttons or knicker gussets.  It is overpowering. I shut my nostrils as I walk by. The smell of landed sea. Too much. To alive. To potent.

I am glad we are to meet. Lunch will be nice. I will dress up. I’ve missed you. I miss all of you. All those parts of me that make me smile, sometimes laugh out loud. It is a balancing act all of this, the yin and yang, the inner and the outer. Winter is the inner, the being inside, hunkering down. But not yet. Another day of sun beckons. The sky is a perfect space of blue. What a joy. What a gift. Thank you for this. Thank. You.

He is captivated. There are hundreds of them, he says, as we sit staring at the sea. They revolve up and round, rising up then diving down into the water. It is an elegant, graceful slow arc. It always lifts us seeing the dolphins. They do not need to show themselves to us but they do. Mermen and mermaids of the sea. Bringers of grace.

A radio feature on dolls houses. The children are in control, says the presenter. It is their little world. It is real but small, says a little girl. Yes, I remember. The making of the real in miniature. Holding the tiny, the delicate and the impossibly small. The scale is 1:12. We only make the equivalent of ten quid and hour but we love it, says a man at a trade show. There are courses that show you how to make tiny ceramic versions of cakes. It is the intensity, the concentrating down of detail. It is a world that one can manage, orchestrate, keep from the chaos of the big, the outsize.

A man in a woolly hat smiles at me.

The rain is heavy. Gum boots and waterproofs and my old rackety umbrella. The early morning air is warm. Students wander about, coatless, in a different reality to me. There is a man in a banana suit. He is with his friend. They are running. Come on, man, he shouts, encouraging him to run faster. I can’t, says his friend, bending over and wheezing. He is carrying a pizza box. Sam’s Fried Chicken is busy. The ceiling lights are white yellow and glaring against the black air. Their customers sit at Formica tables, in t-shirts and vests. Their voices are loud. It is still not 5.00 am.

We have begun watching Citizen Kane. I’ve never seen it. I love black and white movies. I love the stuttering, halted-ness of the camerawork. I love the old-fashioned language, idioms and timbre of the voices. It is clearly a ground-breaking work, even from the little we’ve seen. I think of a Taiwan-ese girl. Everyone calls me Angel, she said, they can’t pronounce my real name. She was taking a film module to improve her English. What is a rosebud? she asked me. She didn’t understand why I had to leave.

If I accept the rain it is beautiful.

I do wander around hoping something funny will happen ‘cos that’s all I’ve got, said John Bishop on Desert Island Discs.

What’s her face was in again yesterday, he said, and she ‘ad a tea cosy on ‘er ‘ed.

I stood on a snail. It was dark, I didn’t see it. I hear the crunch. It makes me sad to take life.

Yesterday a man was set free after thirteen years in captivity. I am glad.

I want to write a poem. I want to capture a feeling. It is complicated. And yet, I want to make it simple. Reduce it down to an intense singularity of sensation. It isn’t a story as such, more a reaction to something I’ve seen. Something that someone gave me. It is a happening from the past. It isn’t my memory. I wasn’t the one behind the camera and yet, now I have seen it. I wasn’t alive when the film was taken. When the film was made. I was nowhere. I was nothing. Not a jot. And she? She was a child.

She is dressed in a kind of romper suit. It reminds me of the one that Andy Pandy used to wear. It is striped, its legs are wide. She is with another child. Adults surround them. They are expected to play. To preform a kind of play for the adults’ benefit. There is clearly no rapport between the two children. Is it her fault? She is the older child. She has picked up a broom and is sweeping the steps. The other child mimics her. The other child is a blonde poppet, a toddler with a face framed by a cloud of curls.

I remember seeing a picture of that house. Was it that one? The older girl turns to face the camera. Has someone called out to her? In the film her movements are jerky, too fast. There is no sound. A silent picture.

She is beautiful, the older girl. A beautiful child. A child-woman. Her dark wavy hair is pulled back from her face by a hair slide. Winsome. Affecting. She smiles at the man behind the camera. Is she trying to get his attention? The other child is his. She is not. Her parents lurk in the distance. Her father stretches out on a chair, her mother crouches on the ground, her hands outstretched towards her.

Nothing is ever how it seems. This is an new encounter. My encounter. I can only write about my encounter with it for I know nothing else. But there is much to leave out. To write bare. To strip it down, bare. Perhaps the context must be set by the title. And the rest, the shock, the surreal-ness of seeing her, that must become the poem. How do you write such things?
What would her child-voice have sounded like?

A girl, with hair the colour of straw, is talking loudly to a boy who sits on the wall opposite. It is 5.00 am and they are outside their student house on Llanbadarn Road. I catch a sentence. They’re actually trying to teach people, she is saying, ending the sentence with a lilt, as if it is a question, rather than a statement. I don’t hear his reply. She has a striped rug around her shoulders, which I initially thought was a fur coat, and holds a mug in her hand. It is held aloft like a movie-star with a cigarette. My bright blue wellies make a flump, flump sound as I stride past.

The tides are high. Yes, they’re always high at this time of the year, he says, though he can’t tell me why. The chorus from Blondie’s song plays in my head. The promenade is a mess, sand, pebbles, rocks and seaweed strewn everywhere. Thank goodness for my wellies. The crunch of them is most satisfying.

I am not alone. It must be the mild night. People, students everywhere. They sit on walls, on benches and in cars. One is asleep in his car, his stereo thumping. At the harbour car headlights blind me. I drop my torch and it breaks, its bulb tumbling down onto the beach. It is too dark for me to find it. So be it. I pass another car with music. Two bodies in the back. I walk on. Do they call it dogging?

I took the bar of chocolate. He’d been there the night before, perhaps he’d be there again. Don’t wake him, he’d said. Of course, I won’t, I’d said. I’ll just leave it next to him. There were two of them sleeping in the shelter in sleeping bags. One of them shifted their body as I walked past. Was it a girl? I left the chocolate at the other end of the seat. Might it bring some pleasure? A small thing. A sweet thing on a cold morning.

I think about a dying man. One to two weeks she said. How does that feel? How does it feel to know that your end is close? Is there peace in the knowing? Death brings life into focus. A sharp focus. She told me she rubbed Vaseline on his lips. That’s a kind gesture, particularly as they’d never got on. Didn’t see eye to eye. But she is kind. Humane. A good woman. My friend. My dear friend. I wish them peace. All of them. All of you. When it comes, as it will to all of you, all of us. To me also. May I be ready.

Amen.