ellen bell

A branch broke of the yew tree in the storm. It lay shattered on the ground. They are such ancient trees. Who planted it there? And why? Usually they are associated with graveyards and churches. There is something sancrosanct about them, though I believe that they are poisonous to horses. This one stands beside the fence that encloses the old school’s bin area. Hardly a hallowed site for it to oversee with its creaking grace. It made me sad to see it (though I’d missed the evidence of its breaking in the dark). An omen? Perhaps. The world seems shaky. As do I.

I know that they are there. That they have always been there. Always. It’s just that they get eclipsed by the charismatic, the famous, the lauded and, if there is truly such a person, the wholly bad. They are quiet. modest, usually. Like that young girl who offered herself to be parachuted into Germany in an effort to save people from Auschwitz. She didn’t survive and was shot at 23 years old. And my neighbour’s husband, who, as a missionary in the 40s and 50s, I was informed yesterday built sewers and schools in India. He had the face of the Dalai Lama, she wrote.

The wind worries and moans outside. Winter comes hard and fast. A storm, with usual benign-sounding name is predicted for tomorrow. I go out into the dark reluctantly, though it is rarely as bad as it looks from the inside. The air is clean and fresh on my face and the wind buffets me. I don’t mind. Not really.

The cold makes my body rigid. Leaving my bed to begin the day when the flat is so chill, is tough. I walk out wearing layer upon layer of woollens, only to see wandering-home students, coatless in T-shirts and tiny shorts.

I dreamt I restored his daughter to life. It was something to do with his sketchbook. There was some sort of key there that only I saw. The family were overjoyed. As they would be.

Winter comes. And it comes fast. A flurry of snow yesterday, too wet to stay. This morning there were white spots of hail on the ground. I walk as Frank l. Baum’s tin man, his body in need of oil, of grease, of cranking up. And yet the air is delicious, and when the wind ceases, so still. A half moon shone its best and stars glittered. No birds. No shouts. Just me and the milkman.

3.45 am. The rain poured down. A head-down and trudge sort of walk. No one about. No birds. Just me. Getting wet.

I heard him on the phone. It sounded dodgy. I went into his room but he waved me away, irritated. It was a scam. Someone purporting to be from Paypal. I fell for it, he told the woman at the bank. Poor love. Trust is a good thing, but perhaps a healthy scepticism and a habit of ‘examining all things’ (as Deborah Jenkyns in Cranford used to say), just in case.

I cooked a caterpillar. I found him in my spinach and tomato stir-fry lunch. Another poor love. I never meant to kill him. He was white and puffed up, scorched but not discoloured. His body curled-up in the agony of his decease. Poor, poor love. It quite turned my stomach. R.I.P gentle being. Where you a moth or a butterfly?

Something is rattling on our roof. It is impossible to get up there to find out what it is. I’ve tried looking from the outside, but the angle of the roof is such that nothing of it can be seen from below. I think it is a stray branch, dropped, no doubt by a gull, when building its nest, which they do frequently up there. Whatever it is it the wind catches it. I don’t mind it. In fact, I find it rather a companionable sound. He doesn’t.

They spoke on the news of secondary school teachers washing their pupils school uniforms. Teenagers hygiene in this country is a real concern, apparently. Bless them. We need order, don’t we. Someone to feed, clothe, warm and keep us clean. Someone to provide order, regularity. Jeanette Winterson wrote of it. And I agree. I had it, and needed it. Love, really. That’s it. I wish it for all. The young and the old. Let it be so.

It goes round and round inside my head. There’s so much uncertainty. I find it had to stomach. I um and ah. I waver. I am uncertain. I listened to her rules on ethics. They are good ones. Steady, kind. I want that. Them. But how to do what I wish to do. Without harming others. That is the key. Can harm be done tacitly, unknowingly? I don’t know. Intention not to do so., clearly isn’t enough. I must and wish to tread carefully. To leave no trace.

I read Austerlitz. Such sadness.

I woke from the first and my alarm broke the second. In the first I was going to die. He was driving too fast down a hill and the car we were in plunged straight into the sea. It was deep and dark. I knew that we couldn’t be saved. That we were to die. I thought about how that might be, through lack of oxygen or drowning. I reached for his hand in the dark. I didn’t want him to panic, to feel frightened. I wasn’t. Then I woke. The second was much more convoluted. I was in a foreign country and had a philosophy class to attend. I didn’t know where it was and S. said that he would show me. H. was there sitting on a stool. I looked at his hands they were tiny, a doll’s hands. I touched him and felt his pulse through my palms. Then I was at the reception of this institution, not with S. but with a woman. We went into a canteen and another S. was there. I asked the woman who was sitting next to me, and who appeared now to be one of my sisters, if she’d ever read German Literature. I was still worried about this class I was supposed to be attending. Then I was outside, here, in the car park where a man with a small van was cremating bodies from his boot. On a Sunday? I asked.