D.H. Gamon

Continued from first 'DOWN TWELVE' blog)

(I made a separate blog in the hope -- the wrong hope as it turned out -- that this one would not repeat the irritating insertion of extra blank lines between paragraphs. So I have once again put / in between pp.)) /When I think, 'I've seen a lady without a face. Suppose I see a face without a lady!'/I'm picturing to myself, see, that when I slide the cupboard front open there'll be just this face - skin, nose, mouth, hair, et cetera, with or without eyes --yeugh!/Now I'm not seriously frightened, it's just a passing or rather not-so-passing notion. And since nobody else is there (just as well!) I don't feel bound to put a brave front on it. I just do what I come for. I drinks from the top of the milkbottle, I know it's a bit uncouth, but no-one's to see, and put the silverfoil top back on, return it to the fridge, put the kitchen light off, and go back upstairs. Being naked I feel myself I'm like a trespasser./I must have gone back to sleep almost instant. I can't remember putting my nightgown on, if I did. But that morning I look in the fridge careful. Though without coming to any conclusion. I take out the lefthand milkbottle and look at it careful. It's not full. But then, in the night, or in my dream, whichever it was, I was drinking from a bottle that wasn't full to start with, and I can't have had more than a good mouthful, so nothing's proven./Next I open up the cupboard. And I see plates, glasses, cups, bowls and that, in a few words exactly what I'd expect to see. No terrifying face. But I felt a bit queer just for a second as I was opening it up, even slightly sick./'Don't think about all that, Lize, my lover,' I said to myself over and over -- just like that kids' trick, that was, you know the one, 'Stand over there for five minutes and whatever you do DON'T think about a purple giraffe' and natural you can't think of anything else. So thinking about not thinking about it was the same as thinking about it./This lady I'd seen, I got to think, was powerless, despite being frightening. Like someone who's had a stroke, she was wanting to speak, she had a clear idea of what she was wanting to tell me, but she couldn't get it across. She was someone more to be sorry for than anything else, I thought (then.)/None of this, course, was much comfort. Who was she? What was she doing there? Above all, why? These were the questions which buzzed./After that night, lull. Again. Three days' later I'm thinking about it still, but not so obsessive. The weather's still bad, but not in any dramatic kind of way. There's just this long, slow, wide grey mizzle that has descended down from the sky all over the fields and possesses them -- as if it's ever been there and ever will. A sharp wind might make people angry, those who enjoy being sharp-tongued and sharp-tempered might be quite pleased to quarrel. But this is just wettish and dreary, and a lot of us who aren't under twenty no more are getting twinges in our limbs. Nothing dramatic, not pain or agony, just enough to remind you you're no longer young./Out doing my own shopping in the village, who should I run into but Pask's grandfather old Seydell-Mertz? Now his wife's dead (they didn't really get on, except at the beginning, like so many of us) the old gent's usually pretty dapper, spring in his step, always looks as if he's got a flower in his buttonhole even when he hasn't. That is, he is usual, though not today, there's the baddish weather, and the mystery of his daughter's disappearance and staying away, or of course no-one knows for certain she's not dead now, their only child. I don't exactly know him, but I can't say I don't know him either, in a small village you're always passing people; also of course he employs Blowse often. He's wearing one of those plastic pack-a-macks you scarcely ever see nowadays, which detracts from his usual elegance./'Good morning, my dear,' he says in a half friendly, half-formal way. (This is in the baker's, the better one in our village who makes his own bread.) 'I was just going upstairs for a cup of coffee. Would you be kind enough to join me?' (We was both in the corner of the shop, looking at the wire-rack where there's yesterday's bread half-price; I suppose he's careful rather than hard-up, though I don't know his business.)/Now his old-fashioned courtesy of manner turns what he said into more an order than a request, so we goes together to the tea-shop on the first floor, and he politely takes my outer coat and brolly and hangs them up (wish Alf'd do that kind of thing) then he takes the pack-a-mack off with more care than it seems really to warrant, he's habitually careful. He's got a well-cut though old browny Harris tweed suit on under, and he's got a 'colonel' type of moustache, clipped regular, brushed up at the ends, as if he's trying to make himself look like a Britisher, though somehow failing. A tall man, only a little bent over, though by now he must be past seventy./Anyway, he looks at me with his strikingly blue eyes, bleary at the edges, and, after asking me what I'll have to drink, ect, pauses a bit, looking at me like I was the cover of a book he was considering reading, then says, 'I gather you've made quite a friend of young Pasqueline.'/'Yes, sir,' I says. The 'sir' slips out; poor or not, he's a sirry kind of man. (Mind you, it's really more that Pask's made a friend of me than the other way round.)/'Good,' he says. And after a moment, as if he's turned over in his mind whether it really is good or not, he says 'Good!' again, firmly and decisively this time, and, quite formally, 'I am grateful to you for that. The child has not been with grown women enough. Her-mother-my-daughter' (he puts the words altogether like that as if it's a formal title) 'resembles in that direction too much her own mother, my deceased wife, in being ungregarious. It is necessary to be in the company of others frequently, otherwise one rots!' He puts a lot of stress on this word. 'My Angelikka, you think of her as Elaine doubtless, she has not always had much talent for happiness. Or taste for it even. Not since her early teenage years. And she has tended therefore to make Pasqueline an aloner, as she is herself. That is not good.'/The waitress (who is a neighbour of ours in the Close) brings us coffee and biscuits. It's clear that the old gentleman has something on his mind that he's a bit unwilling to speak out. His habit of caution in speaking is either because he's deeply thoughtful and able to see both sides of the question, or, contrariwise, because for all his dignity he's not really very clever intellectually. To help him along I say, 'Well, Mr Mertz, we can't help ourselves, we all try to make our children the same as ourselves, we can't help it, or even if we try to make them different, it don't always work. If you see what I mean.'/I wouldn't have thought this remark deserved no prizes for being original, but he mulled it over and then said, 'You are doubtless right' concludingly./'Please continue to give her what help you can, ' he went on. 'My feeling is that Pasqueline is, in some spiritual way, at risk.' Spiritual! That word struck me; was it just a foreigner's clumsy use of English, though he has lived here almost four decades, or did he mean exactly what he said? Don't know./The decoration of the room was old plates flat-up along the skirting-board. He drew my attention to one particular, which had a cow on it -- very clearly changing the subject -- and explained now in a quite technical way, so I did not fully follow him, why that one was far superior to all the others. He spoke charminglyand interestingly, at some length. This is the kind of thing of course that he knows a lot about./* Well, I left the old gent after ten minutes or so, having been 'courteously dismissed.' He stood up and all, and went to get me my coat, I was quite touched./Out in the street it had stopped raining, but the pavements were still wet, and I remembered now what I'd forgotten inside, that my feet were a bit wet and a bit cold and that I could do with a new pair of shoes. For once there wasn't much excuse for not buying them, except I suppose laziness. Every other time I've been wearing too-old shoes it's been because I just didn't have the money to replace them, but nowadays I could just have written a cheque from the chequebook I now had and was keeping under my frillies, where Alf, I could be sure, would never look./Passing the public library, I decided, well, not to pass it and went in. (Alf knows how to read, but I don't suppose he's ever read a book through, Ma neither, Dave never stops, frightful serious stuff too, and as for me I do sometimes read nice romantic novels that end happily. Yes, they've got to end happily, for me, there's enough misery in real life. Blowse'll sometimes pick up one of my borrowings and read it, but wouldn't dream of visiting the library herself. As for me, the very thought of knowing as much about make-up and spending so much time applying it as she does makes me quite sick.)/This time I was after a book on ghosts, and there were dozens. Apparently people have tried to measure them, catch them in cages, even photograph them, often in old big houses or in churches, but pretty unconvincing them snaps looked, just up and down blurs.) And other people say there's no such thing. Me, I'd half-thought that any of these people who could get books published, who must all be very clever indeed because it's such a difficult thing, would all be in agreement with each other about what and why they are, ghosts, but that's wrong./Anyway, I got out one of these books, and that night our Dave -- who can't bear to leave alone anything he sees he hasn't read -- picked it up and kindof sneered silently. I took umbrage at that, and made him a little speech. (He was almost as surprised by that as I was.) I said, of course Alf and me couldn't have afforded to pay the fees at his precious Sharth if he hadn't won the free place, but certainly we hadn't stood in his way, and defininately we hadn't insisted he left school as soon as it was legal and get a job and started paying us back for the considerable expense of bringing him up. We'd contributed to his education, and reading this book was my own way of forwarding my own, so he could either put up or shut up, make an intelligent comment or stop the snide teenage expression (which, I must admit, though I didn't say it here, isn't usually his way.)/ He actually said sorry!... Even more, he actually explained a bit. Did I really believe that there was anything in us human beings which went on somehow or other after the body was dead? Well, being asked seriously, it was my turn to answer serious. I thought to myself, well, I always have up to this instant. But do I really believe it, or do I say it because everyone else do? Or I think they do./'When poor old Gran stops being alive,' he says (she was in the frontroom then, we was in the kitchen), 'will you have a church service?' Yes, course!' I said, 'I suppose.' 'What? Even though she's never been religious?' Well, yes, I was saying, surely that's because that's what she'll be going to have wanted (so to speak!) 'And it'll be a comfort,' he went on even more smoothly, 'Won't it? To think that there's a bit of poor old Gran that's going on living somewhere else that isn't Belker?' 'Yes!' I said. Loud, almost defiant! But it's being soothing didn't mean that it was true, did it? No, and it didn't mean it wasn't neither, I said./I'd gone in those few seconds, no longer than it takes to tell you (less, even) from thinking that I didn't really believe it to thinking that perhaps there was something to be said for it after all. Life after death, see?/I'd also worked out (well, more or less, I didn't get that far along this line of reasoning at the time, mind) that the fact that I myself didn't believe it and it being untrue were two different sorts of things. See, the first was information about me, and I couldn't possibly be wrong about that. Except of course unless I was deliberately lying, which I wasn't. The other was -- I'm not sure what it was, quite. But it was different. It wasn't talking about me. It was another kind of thing to say./Now Dave picks up the book again, but this time he looks at it rather more serious, and after a brief time (he's still actually standing up, stooping his handsome head over it) he gets interested and obviously immediately forgets that the other two of us, Pask and I, are there. She kindof grins at me, half embarrassed and half annoyed, partly amused too, at this allofasudden switching off from us; we both know what he's like./'Whatever he says to me, ' Pask says, 'there was that queer trouble last winter -- the cold patch that just wouldn't go away. On the landing just outside my bedroom, I mean. You thought it was something odd yourself, didn't you, David?'/'Pardon?' he says. She repeats it. 'Well, I was younger then,' he says. (Six months! Or possibly that's his weak idea of a joke!)/'You thought it might be my poor dead cousin who was topped,' she says. 'Confess.'/'Well, yes,' he says, 'I admit I did entertain that notion. For a while.'/'Everyone's heard ghost stories,' I say./'Yes, but are they true?' she says./'There's only one thing trustworthy,' he says. 'Your own observation.'/'What? Not take anything on trust at all?' I says./'In theory, no,' he answers.'But of course in practice you've got to. Therefore you must ask, "How trustworthy is the person who's telling me all this"? Whatever it is.' And he closes the book and puts it down, very reluctant. A bit of the air of someone giving us smoking and hating it he had./'And I think you're saying you don't trust me,' Pask says, herself with the air of someone trying to feel offended./'Well, yes and no,' he says (his lack of tact is famous in our family.) 'Course I believe you when you say you felt cold. But I'm not going further than that now.' /'You did think then that it really was a ghost, Dave?' I say. I was fascinated./'Well, Mum, yes, I did toy with the idea, it's true. In those days I'd got the bee in my bonnet that, just possibly, it might be possible somehow to talk to a ghost. Stupid, really. I hadn't thought it through properly. See, if you're going to talk to anyone you've got to have a language in common. And I don't mean just words, you've got to know and care about the same things. And that's only for starters. You've got to be in more-or-less the same place. You've definitely got to be in the same timescheme. So it breaks down even before you've started it. You can't even make a clear idea beforehand of what it is you're hoping to do or who or what you're going to do it with!/'But o' course, all that really, I must admit, rather silly idea started from the idea that there's such a thing as ghosts. I was starting from the wrong place. That's a sure recipe for getting lost! Once I thought about it more clearly, it was self-evidently wrong!/'No,' Pask says, quiet but firm. This time she sounds more as if she truly is personally offended. Cause it's her blooming family we're speaking indirectly of, after all. 'Everyone knows what a ghost is.'/'Yes,' says Dave. 'And it's like a lot of these things everyone knows. Like -- say, a swan being able to break your arm with its wing. There's no hard evidence whatever. Things seen and misinterpreted out of the corner of your eye. This "ghost" idea just won't stand up.' /'Yes, it will,' says Pask. No reason or argument, she just says it. Now that's just the sort of remark likely to annoy Dave when he's on his high horse, and he, I thought, was just about to snap 'brainless twaddle!' at her as he so often did me them days, so I puts in quick, 'A ghost is someone who is dead.' /'No,' he says. 'A corpse is someone who is dead. Corpse. "Ghost" is just meaningless, Pouf. Feel that!'/Pask looks a bit dopey. She doesn't 'get it'. I do. He's putting out his right hand, palm up; it seems that he wants her to take it and feel his pulse. She realises that's the idea after a while, but says she don't know how to, and in -- come to think of it now, though I didn't notice at the time -- a faintish kind of voice, though I can't think why. Now I did a bit of elementary red cross training a while back, so I do know myself, and I takes his wrist instead./Warm it is. 'Feel that,' he says. 'It's my heart beating. It makes my whole body vibrate with it. That's the most obvious thing about a living body, that and breathing. A human being's...' but I'm not listening really, I'm out of it '...a complex of physical, chemical, electrical and mechanical exchanges'...and I really am hearing his voice, it's coming out of this body which was once part of my own body, back then, not really so very long ago, yet which I've scarcely touched -- we don't go in much for kissing, our sort -- or seen, for ten years at least, ever since he was able, and indignantly keen, to manage for himself having a bath, this body which I've not seen, except under thick clothing, since that day, which I've not hugged or embraced, being English, which I've barely as much as felt this much during a whole decade or so as much as I'm feeling it now. /'When all these various exchanges cease,' he's going on, 'that's it. Curtains, kaputt! Life's gone. Stopped, rather, nowhere to "go". All this chemistry and physics and so on is life. What we call life is them. When they vanish life vanishes.'/And I was still holding his hand, his warm, clean, soft hand. Those lips speaking clever arguments, they'd fastened tight and eager on my breasts once upon a time. I went all dreamy, didn't pay much attention to what Pask was saying back to him. I really wasn't thinking anything much, but if my feelings was to be put into words they'd have been, 'Is that all, what you say, is that really all?' Some time during all this, I left go his wrist, and he moves it away as gentle as floating dandelion fluff, as if, yes, at some level of his soul he has caught my emotion and understands it utterly./And the air of the kitchen goes a bit cold./ Not instantly, though over just a few seconds. And the reason's not far to seek. It's because the door of the freezer has suddenly come open. No eerie explanation's called for. Pask who's nearest closes it again. 'Just think what anyone who's superstitious would have made of that!' she says. (Yes. Specially because it's never happened again before or since.)/ Now someone else whose started speaking far too earnestly for a little family gathering might well be put off his stroke and come off his high horse and been only too glad to, but not our Dave, of course. No, he's embarked on his little lay sermon, and he'll jolly-well go on with it even if the sky falls in and covers us all with blue stuff. He goes on a good deal more about how any idea of 'the soul' is nonsense, and how 'life after death' is an illusion with its root in wishful thinking. And very convincing it is too as an argument./Total convincing, I mean. Apart from it not being true. Because round every corner you come across things that kind of attitude can't possibly explain, premonitions, telepathy, Ma being told somehow that Elaine was in Prague (which she didn't even know how to pronounce), striking coincidences, some dreams, what had happened to me in that very kitchen. And all them sort of thing, according to Dave, don't need any explanation at all. Why? Because they don't happen! But they do, they do, everyone knows they do! Well, apart from Dave and his like, that is./But I didn't try to argue with him, just said dark-like, muttering, speaking to myself almost, 'Just wait till one of these things happens to you.'/ I reckon, if he heard me at all, he put it just down to feminine silliness./ Because, apart from his fixed idea that 'The Scientist', the man in his long shining white robe, can explain every single thing either here or in the whole Universe (you know, like the Pope, only infallibler still) he's got fixed in his mind that Men are much superior to women. And when someone like our Dave puts the force of his great intellect behind a prejudice he's never even though about, it's less movable than the Great Wall of China as a result!/Pask once more looked in to see me accidental-on-purpose a day or two later. She immed and ammed (heitatated, I mean) and it was fairly obvious she had something she wanted to talk to me about, more than just the weather. It was one of her half-days off, and I doubt very much whether she felt any great need to rush to get back to that big house where her great-aunt and great-grandmothers had maids to wait on them, but is now just big and cold and empty; her father wouldn't be back for at least four hours from his office, and, though she's not exactly what you'd call imaginative, well, she knows nowadays that a murder was committed there only roughly a generation ago./Course, her father Tom is a good man in his way. He really do make an effort to do well. He's not like Alf and his mates who just drift through life./Not, mind, that that don't make life more difficult in one enormous respect, this very virtuousness of Tom's. Speaking personal I'd much rather admire from a fair distance one of these men with high character and high moral principals than have to live with them. Also Pask, I don't know why not, has never accepted his religion. And yet in another way she's far more like him than her funny mother ever was, and maybe it's all a bit too comfortable; they're both over-fond of being alone, yet they're always available to be company to each other./ Now I'm not, of course, and I must make this absolute clear, not suggesting anything indecent or wrong. It's just that, without thinking about it at all, she's accepted, and even enjoyed, filling up aspects of his life, lacks he now feels by not having his wife there (no, of course I don't mean that sort of lack.) That's what I feel, anyway, though, mind, Pask's never discussed it with me./I wish she wouldn't smoke, but there it is. Folk who are a bit twitchy physical, like she is, find it only too attractive because it gives them something to do with their hands. But she never looks as if she enjoys it. Anyway, she was sitting there with her 'fag' sloping into an old cereal bowl I'd given her for an ashtray with raised flowers in its cheap grey glass, and wriggling the fingers of her other, right hand. 'David's not right about ghosts and things, I don't think, ' she said./'No, I don't think he is neither' was my reply. And I sat down beside her with my cuppa and said nothing more for a while, nor did she, yet there was unity between us, we both loved and both criticised the same man. /Mind, we didn't get there the same road. Her disagreement was an equal's. He's cleverer than her and she knows it, noneedsay he knows it too. Now she's not a snob unlike 'Vee-Vee' Franklyn her horrid aunt, but for all that she's aware that she's a Gritnall-Ferrace and that makes up the difference in brain-power. As for me I had long ago reckoned it out, as those of us without much book-learning often do, that education and intelligence are quite capable of driving out common sense, or even of stopping it take root at all, and that Dave was a case of that. To some extent anyway./Now as I sat silent beside her I was wondering whether to confide - and that's something I don't do often -- confide, I mean. True, she's less than half my age, but who else is there? Yet I was unwilling or worse to talk about some of the strange things I've experienced, I'd almost rather blurt out the secrets of the marriage bed. 'I've seen things myself' was all I said. And when she made answer, as was natural enough, 'What things then, Lize?' I only answered vague, 'Oh, I've had dreams and things.'/I think she had the gump to know that I was meaning that I did and did not want to talk about them, that is, I did, but not this momentin. She told me more now about the queer experiences she'd had on the landing outside her bedroom, how it was as if there was ice, though dry, packed all around her, even (see what I mean) reaching up inside of her, and hugging tight, just for a moment, or a few seconds only, and yet for all that not completely able to hold her, so she was able to go on in./Always, but just suppose.....! She'd worried that one day the whatever-it-is would get her and hold her fast, and that this would be like dying, or worse, and if it did keep her, somehow she wouldn't be 'there' on that particular spot on the landing, no more. It would have been total terrifying, this holding, if it hadn't been so brief, it had gone on every time she went to go into but for some reason not out of her room, the experience was very nasty in itself but the threat it seemed to hold was far worse. That is, of being trapped by it for ever./Oddly enough, it wasn't as strong going up to bed in the dark, she said, as it was other times when it was light. And it was only going in./She said, Dave could say what he liked, but that really was queer. And almost as queer, though not in any way frightening, of course, was the way it all stopped./When was that, I naturally asked. About the time your ma was taken ill in our house was her answer. Then both of us wondered aloud and moreorless at the same time whether there was any connection. And hadn't the dreaming in our house started about then too? What reason could there be for that, possibly? I saw quite clearly in my mind's eye Pask sitting outside in the back seat as if someone else had been in the front. Suppose Hetty had sortof hitched a lift? Then I thought, don't be ridiculous, Lize, it was our ma who'd been in the front seat. But when I'd opened the door to Tom in his gardening clothes, hadn't I had the fleeting impression......?/ For a second or two I thought I had. Then I replayed the video of that day, went over the memory of what I'd seen in fine detail, and when I thought about it real careful, I knew that no, I really hadn't had no such impression. So when I thought I had I'd been romancing if not lying./Or just tidying up things in my own mind, see? But thinking about that I learned something I've never yet seen written down in a printed book; your memory's not a camera or videorecorder, it can get things wrong./Now since that's the case I'm giving all you people out there reading this a problem -- without meaning to, mind. Honest, I'm telling you the truth, the plain truth, as I remember it. But now I know I can't be certain I'm not remembering part of it wrong, it's not gospel./Well, enough of this philosiphicallimating, as Granpa Fred would have said. More of the story:-/Pask must have turned sixteen by now. The summer term came with its burden of long-worked-for exams, and with them almost as much tension for the kids' parents as the kids (Tom and me, I mean, Alf couldn't have cared less.) Dave was doing Advanced Levels, Pask was doing what was then called Ordinary levels. After that exam they was all idle and at a loose end, for all the second half of term, neither of them had ever learned anything much except to prepare for exams, learning, revising, actually taking them, schools don't offer much more than that, I sometimes think. And now there weren't any exams in prospect./For once! So what to do? Nothing! But they hasn't had any training in that!/I wished Dave would get a little job. The only thing that appealed to him was his own suggestion, that I'd pay him (but how, for goshake?) for rewiring the house, which had never been done since it was new (probable - I should think Ma would remember it if it had.) He said that with a bit of luck and lots of patience we'd be able to reclaim it from the council because we were improving their property. But I said no, though I did worry just a little about the safety aspect./(I managed to forget that, after all, I did have money in the bank.)/At least the weather was decent. Good even. Much as it ought to be in the Summer. The two of them, Dave and Pask, went for long country walks together. It seemed all innocent (but then you would try to seem that to your mother, them days.) Seemed? No, I reckon it was, really. I scarcely ever saw them do as much as hold hands. But this very innocence really distressed our Blowse, funnily enough. For the first time in her life she was really and truly shocked. 'It's not decent, Lize, it's not decent! Specially at their age!' were her very words. Me I wasn't being either romantic nor on a moral high horse. I just took the attitude that life's difficult enough without kids going about to manufacture others!/Pask had decided, about then, that she'd look good in dresses, ones which were mainly white. She probably had an 'allowance' from her father to pay for that kindof thing, and a 'little woman' somewhere in the village who'd run them up for her. She did look nice too, though not particularly fashionable. Did Dave notice? I don't know. Apart from his precious school uniform, he never cares about his own clothes much, as long as he looks neat and clean. If he noticed - if! - you can be certain-sure he didn't say so./Pask had by now, and fairly quickly too, lost nearly all the physical clumsiness which had made her for years and years a figure of cruel fun to the unkinder kids at Sharth, a school which do seem to me to have a quite remarkably high proportion of such, and she had developed what women call a good figure, slight and almost elegant (which is much different from what men call a good figure in a woman, and if you don't know what that is look in the Star, a newspaper (so-called!) which I just will not have in my house.) But it didn't really suit her to be so much in the sun as she was that summer. She's not one of those teenagers who run to pimples, neither is Dave, by the way. Her skin's always been clear and smooth and pale -- well, the last bit's not quite true of that summer, she was getting a bit brown so there wasn't the usual contrast between her clear face and the deep rich colour of her chestnut hair./I was wondering then (and still am really) if there wasn't more between her and Dave, as well as less, than there is usually in these teenage boy-and-girl friendships, where, more often than not, it's just their age and the hormones buzzing that turns them towards someone the other sex and, though it sounds pretty cynical, I know, to say it, one boy or girl who lives near will do in most cases as well as any other, and being known by others your age to have made such a friendship, that's almost half of it too. Dave and her had the same type of psychology. they were always 'discussing' things and often disagreeing, but for all that it was clear to me that they thought the same type of questions worth answering./Oh, but how their youth stirred up in me a dreadful disappointment! Their freshness, their hope. They had at the back of all they did or thought the confidence that they'd never be old, or failures, or unhealthy, or anything at all like that. I don't mean they ever said so -- well, you wouldn't tell anybody you breathed air, would you? No, that's a part of being young you can't see or even imagine it's there. More like not seeing air? This optimism was like the air for them./Youandme felt like that in our teens, surely. They must have been feeling it too./I said that to myself and then thought of me and Alf marrying as young as we did, me nineteen, him twenty.....!/Had I really been fair to Alf? Had I married him 'on the rebound'? I don't know at this point whether I'm going to write about all that or not./*/Yes, I will, after all. I've hesitated, but here goes./I suppose ar-cees can talk about this kindof things with their priests. I'm churchofengland, at least I suppose I am, though I've hardly ever gone. And Benedick has helped me, true./See, there's so much bottled up in me. There was a time in my life when I was bitterly unhappy and it seemed as if it would go on for ever, but it hasn't, and it hasn't because in some way I've by now seperated myself from the experience, I'm revisiting it now in my mind as if it was an episode of 'Neighbours' or some other teevee programme. It's not total real no more. But that's diminished me, not facing it properly./Yes, it was my own experience and it cut deep -- but somehow I've got so I don't belong to it, not quite. That toughens you up for the next bad experience, I reckon, but at cost. The sap's sortof drained out of the experience, but it has out of me too, I'm no longer able to respond to things, bad things AND good things, like I really ought to./Look --/A man like my Patrick (mine, ha ha, I'm saying), well, he couldn't help it. So tall and straight and well-proportioned, lovely fluffy fair hair well-cut, marvellous swimmer, he was good at most things athletic but swimming particular, always polite and amusing and good fun to be with, easy sort of air with him which those have who've never had to count the pennies. We met on the beach, in a bright summer, on the Isle of White, twenty-two years ago it was now, oddly enough I forget which town, his parents owned a caravan site there./Blowse and I were teenaged, we'd taken a summer job together in a hotel, the only time I ever did that kindof thing. Me I was mostly behind the scenes washing up and making beds and dusting, dusting. She, though only seventeen, and it was against the law then, probably still is, was out front as a barmaid, grinning all over her chops and chatting to the customers. There, I've made a funny and didn't mean to; they preferred her to me out front because there was more of her out front!/Anyway, I fell in love with Patrick. It was the only time completely. And --/And nothing came of it in the end, not much then really either, some might say. A young man like that, such lovely skin and colouring he had apart from anything else, he could have the pick, naturally. Girls use to throw themselves at him (well, I did myself, or almost), you can't blame him for behaving the way he did. Specially as it wasn't anything he actually did was wrong. No. Just what he didn't do, not answering my letters (quite a few), not coming to the phone when I rung up and his mother answered, that kindof thing. In few short words, never having any contact again ever after those few shining summer weeks. And he's alive still, round about forty like myself, I'm sure of it, I've always known somehow that I would know it somehow if he was dead./He wasn't, of course he wasn't, wicked or evil or anything, though it hurt me so desperate and bitter at the time, and does now at least a bit if I revisit it all in my mind. He was just so beautiful and pleased with himself for it, he couldn't help being pleased with himself for it (well, could you?) he was just being what nature made him do./I mean, only a bee-eff thinks a cat is being nasty when it 'plays' with a mouse they way they do, grabbing it with his mouth, hurting and terrifying it, not killing it, letting it seem to escape wounded and frightened and then bunting it with his paw and biting it up again, next doing it over and over until the poor mouse is exhausted as well as terrified and in pain and has half its fragile bones splintered inside it's still just living body, no, thats natural, no-one with any sense thinks its cruel, its not a choice the cat has made about whether to be vicious or not, it was made that way by nature and Patrick was the same. And yet if you see a cat doing that not only does it seem really cruel, really sickenly horrible, but it seems that God is cruel and the whole Universe is cruel, that it's proved absolute that the whole earth is horrid and vile and bloody! For as long as youre watching, that is./Patrick was such a handsome man. And these days whenever I see him again in my memory (which is quite often, even now) of course he looks so young too, not a line on his lovely face, hair all the same colour all through. Not clever, but his mind, his well-balanced body, his new, smart, fashionable clothes, his thoughts and the words he put them in -- o, they all went together so well, nothing there was odd or eccentric or out of place -- and the easiness in spending money, he'd never had to scrimp or save -- there was just this marvellous satisfying completeness to him. You know how a really skilled garageman looks and feels when he hears an engine he's been working on running really smooth, kind of delight which is more than satisfaction, there was a pleasure watching all Patrick's movements and hearing everything he said which was like that./And was he cold and shallow underneath it all? No, I really don't think so now, I don't even believe I thought that then, really, in those first few months when I'd gone back home and he made no attempt whatsomever to keep in touch like he'd promised or I thought he'd promised, yes, he really did promise, but some other young girl or girls came along, no doubt about that, and I suppose he's always been one for living in the present moment./He and I never did, quite -- well, you know what I mean, just a bit (no, a hell of a lot) of necking or petting or whatever you call it, part-undressing each other, but never all. Our Ma instilled in us that we must be respectable according to her lights, so I'd been brought up to keep myself decent -- and of course Blowse was too though in her case it didn't catch. Though, mind, even a generation or so past, then, probably more girls than not thought that 'keeping yourself' for marriage was terrible old-hat (though quite a few wouldn't do it until they were already engaged to the chap first, so some I knew had been engaged an awful lot of times.)/I don't know whether it would have been worse or better, then or now, once it had got clear to me that we weren't going to see each other no more, if I'd ever given myself to him physical, I mean total. You could argue both sides equal weight. Would it have made me certain-sure that it was even deeper, more important? I don't know./And you readers are thinking, I daresay, soon after that she met her Alf? No, my dears, it wasn't like that. He was in the primary up Tap class above me when I was there, his family moved down to Eastbridge from the village proper was he was thirteen. Our mothers say they often met and nattered to each other when we was both in our pushchairs, I don't know if that's really true, but I do know it's true there isn't any time of my life when I didn't know Alf, for what that's worth./And if you was to ask me to describe to you how, later in the same year, Alf and I got to know each other bit better than we did already and how after a while we came to make up our minds to get wed, and did, and all that sort of thing, well, of course I could tell you, but in a 'flat' way that'd be dreary to read, 'and then I did this', and 'then he said that', it'd be like a review in a freebo newspaper, there wouldn't be no life in it./Knowing Pat, see, that's got meaning for me, even now, twenty years on approx. Alf is just something what happened./So I gets his meals and makes sure his shoes're soled and heeled regular, I do his washing, and the ironing too, though I'm sure he'd not miss that, he's not keen on the tidy, and I have his old mother to tea most weeks and the sister too, his aunty, I mean, his ma's sister that's come to live with her now his dad's gone on, NOT the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me, believe you me, (they've got only the two subjects of conversation; other people's personal business and where things are cheapest in shops, even things you don't want and you'd have to make a mile-long bus journey to get!) and I puts up with his mild tiresomeness and always flare up into temper if anyone else criticises him to me. And I don't to speak of criticise him myself to myself in my private thoughts. And yet I look back at that summer down Wight, and think, if things somehow had only been a tiny bit different then how enormously different all the rest of my life would have been!/And I wouldn't have had my Dave, and I wouldn't have known Pasqueline or Tom well, in fact I wouldn't have known those two at all, not living round here any more. And that would have been a great loss, cept that you don't miss what you haven't had. I'd still have been serving in a shop, mind, which gets up my wick occasional, but it'd have been my own husband's shop on our own caravan site so that would have felt a lot different too./Yes, and what would have happened to our Dave then, I wonder? Yes, I really do wonder. No-one at all on earth could tell me that, no, not even that very clever man who's on television such a lot and is so badly crippled, poor man, and sounds as if he's speaking out of a cake-tin, and he knows everything there is to be known, or almost.)/Well, anyway. When you've made your bed you must lie on it, as they say. As if you yourself are in charge of your own destiny. As if! Even the Franklyns aren't as free as they think -- they are compelled to send their children away to boarding schools, they never think why!/But Luck, Fate, call it what you will (God, even?) we can't fight against it./Well, enough of being philosophimical, as my Alf says too (far too often!) I'd better get on with the story./Such as it is, that is, cos nothing much was happening. I was feeling really sorry for those two kids. All that swatting for the exams, the exams, the exams, as if it was the most important thing in the Universe, and our Dave sincerely believed that, and then afterwards what? Nothing! They had to wait from mid June until nearly the end of August and.....and.....and what? Of course it's obvious their papers couldn't be marked instanter, but they appeared now just to be drifting along suspended and the term didn't end till well in July and I thought the school could have done much more to have occupied or entertained them. Or something. Or anything. Dave wasn't even clear, total, whether he was going to stay there beyond the Christmas or not, or maybe it was just that he wasn't concerned to explain it to me, but he wasn't 'going up' as he called it now until next year's October evidently, which is a really silly phrase he's just learned, silly because Cambridge unlike the Demnets, everyone knows, is pancake-flat. As for his university ambitions, I was feeling proud and jealous and that it was all a bit boring all at one./I was doing what I could to follow through his present experience in my imagination, mind, which I'm sure a lot of mothers who hadn't been 'ground in that mill' themselves wouldn't. Try to, I mean. (Not that he appreciated it that you'd notice.) But Blowse was positively hostile, almost venemous, he ought to get a proper job, I'd left school by his age now and was working really hard, she'd say quite often, though to me, not to him, and I refrained from saying Blowse, you've never done a hand's turn in your life except in front of the make-up mirror, and you've always thought if you've broken a nail that it's a far worst tragedy than all the wars and famines black people have in Africa you've never heard of./Now, Dave and Blowse have never appeared to get on. Probably they never will. It's no use saying, though many folk do, that relatives have blooming-well GOT to love each other. Look, I picked my Alf out to be my husband out of all the dozens of men who were queueing up all down St. Osgyth's to ask for my hand, did I? Joke! No-one else ever thought to ask me! But in theory there might have been lots, didn't they? I mean, he's my choice, my decision, not thrust upon me by fate or whoever, unlike my blood relations. (And some of them are so boring I could scream!)Whether love for Alf is there deep down I just don't know any more -- mayhap it is and I just don't feel it, but how could I know?/Anyway, what I'm trying to get round to saying is that Blowse and Dave wouldn't have chose each other. She'd have wanted a grinner, a dancer, cocky, for her nephew, the sort they came to call 'streetwise' later. He'd have wanted a serious person like a teacher or a doctor for his anty, or even one of those women priests, he'd have disagreed with her religion but he'd have liked her serious, thoughtful, educated side. Anyway, more of that a bit later./The tension there was between them two, and in a small house too, was another thing adding to the strain I was under that summer. And the worst thing of the lot was, I didn't know I was feeling it! Because you can get so use to a distressing situation it can come to be like the thick frames of my heavy glasses which are there all the time but I just don't notice them, in fact I can scarcely see them if someone says to me they must be there in plain view and makes me try to look for them./See, those 'ghostly' disturbances (if that's what they were), I'd actually got used to them in a way. Isn't that remarkable and plain ridiculous? I'd actually seen, with my own eyes, they're not that bad, a person who wasn't there and yet was there, in my own house, and I'd felt just as I would have done if I'd seen someone without permission walking across our bit of lawn -- annoyed, but not affronted! And when after that things were to get worse, I went on feeling just irritated. On the surface, that is, but I think now that I was furious and frightened underneath, though up top I wasn't feeling the sheer horror of it. Clear? No. But best I can do./The next bad thing was this. One day, it was seven o'clock, I got up a bit earlier than usual, woke up by the early summer light. To get myself a cup of tea I went down into the kitchen./Then I screamed!/I'd left the kitchen neat and tidy last night, no washing up left to drain even, but now....! Some of the cookery books what I keep in a shelf there were on the floor, one of the cupboards was open and bags of flour and sultanas and sugar has been turned over all knobbly and scratchy and dusty on the floor, there was a knife draw pulled out and everything thrown together all sharp and spiky and shiny, also the toaster was on and very hot indeed though there wasn't any bread in it, and (by far the worst) the little freezer which we've got top the fridge had been turned off, and it had defrosted and made a puddle of cold water which at it's edge ran gluily into the flour etc. mess./It was for all the world as if a clever yet silly nasty-minded child had been there nuisancing, but had only had five minutes when it wanted ten so he (or she of course) could do far more damage./It's not like me to scream. Everything inside the chest-freezer apart from the meat was soft and sopping. I turned it on and hoped that since everything was bagged up no permanent harm would come (and it didn't) and put down an old towel to soak up the water and switched off the toaster at the wall and I was filling the electric kettle preparatory to make tea for myself after all before I automatically began to tidy up the rest of it when our Alf came down very early for him with an old dull-surfaced greeny-brown jerkin over the top of his jimjams. 'Wossup 'ere then?' he says, his tone-of-voice making it clear he's more puzzled and amused than concerned./I explains, getting out the dustpan-and-brush to tidy up sultanas and stuff at the same time. 'Someone musta have broke in,' he answers, sensibly enough, and goes round trying the windows and door of the kitchen, then into the hall and the front room to do the same, but they're all five firm shut, chain across the frontdoor still in fact. 'That's reely odd,' he says. 'How could 'e have got in then?' but immediately after he loses interest in it as a problem, see, just because there don't seem no easy solution, you can actually see the curiosity draining away from his face./Blowse is next to be up (or down, whichever it is. And, come to think of it now, what got her - or Alf either - to wake up so early?) By then I've destroyed all the evidence and she opines that I've been making things up, still dreaming, not properly awake, and all that. But I opens the pedalbin and shows her the mess of flour and sultanas, enough to make a cake almost it was, and I say sarcastic that I wouldn't have done that myself in my own kitchen, would I? and she has the grace to say, no more you would./ Now of course it's just possible that Dave crept in in the night to do it, in fact Alf stubbornly insists on facing it with him later, while I'm cooking their breakfast. 'You know very well I'm not the type of person to do that!' he says. I wish he'd spoken less hotly to his father, with more respect, or more appearance of respect at least, but, however much I objected to his tone-of-voice, I couldn't for a moment think that what he said was wrong, it would just be so totally out of character. And as for Ma, of course its quite unthinkable./I've often heard of burglars doing deliberate harm of this kind or far, far worse, but in the rest of the house, and I checked careful later, nothing's been touched and nothing's not where it should be, it's only the kitchen, and not much there seriously either (when I got to think of it after as coolly as I can, though that wasn't all that coolly even then, the kitchen's my own particular place, see?)/But anyway this isn't the kindof area to attract burglars, we don't have much to steal around here, apart from one or two of Blowse's necklaces and things maybe, no, anyone who wanted to steal if he had any sense would go into the middle or north of the village, surely./'Well, what do you think of it, Dave?' I say later on when we're by ourselves. He looks up out of his book all puzzled, as if he's not for the moment sure what I'm speaking of. /'I'm worried,' I say. Trying to confide in him for once (which is pretty stupid, because if your looking for sympathy you'd do better to talk to the nearest wall.) 'I mean, what happened last night, it's not natural'. /'Everything's natural,' he says in his don't-mean-to-be-irritating-quite-but-I'm-blooming-well-going-to-be-anyway fussing kind of way. 'It's twaddle to say that anything at all is natural, just because there's nothing that can't be.' 'Well, if it wasn't natural it must be supernatural, then!' I say, making a movement with my arms, though not, I think, because I wanted to strangle him, quite. 'Mother, I'm not sure you take my point,' he answers. 'There's no such thing as "supernatural", there just can't be.' 'Isn't there just, my son?' I answers. 'How else d'you explain this kindof thing?' 'It's not my brief to explain it,' he replies./Just then - and just as well - his gran slops in in her worn-through slippers and starts fussing over him as she does usual, almost as if he's her dog, but he's so use to that, it's been seen as his right, all his life long, that he lets her. There's something unattractive about seeing a perfectly well lad sit around while a woman her age and state of health makes him coffee before having a drink herself, something he could easily do for himself, you'd think, yet contrariwise if he was to do it for himself he'd be depriving her of one of her innocent little pleasures. It's his looking so like our dead dad that's the real cause of all her fussing./'Only stupid people ever use this "supernatural" word,' he goes on. It's not that he wants to put me in my place so much that he wants to make things clear to himself. 'In the operating theatres up Bishoprick General they've cut up every single part of the human body and they've never found anything called a "soul". 'That's because it's not the kind of thing you could find by doing that!' I say smartish. Ma at this time is looking as if she don't quite understand either of us, but a bit upset too, as if what we're both on about isn't quite nice or decent./'Look,' he says now. 'I'm going to train to be a scientist, in fact I am one already in truth. And if I ever find something I can't see or hear or smell or touch, though God knows how I will find it because it's got no characteristics at all to recognise it by, but when I do, I'll call it God or the supernatural or the soul, because words have already been invented, though I can't think why, to name things that aren't there anyway and can't possibly be discovered.' /(Now Ma's never gone to church yet she thinks it's rude to say such things, by the way.)/'Why can't they be discovered?' he goes on. 'Well, the simplest explanation's always the best. They can't be discovered because there's nothing there.' Next I put it to him -- and I do enjoy a good argue, which you don't get from the women down our street, only what was on 'the box' last night - that Tom Ferrace is a religious man, who Dave liked, and surely Tom Ferrace has a degree from Oxford, which shows he is a pretty intelligent sort of man. I thought I'd made a good point, but our Dave just took up my claim that old Tom was intelligent as if it was an open question, and mulled it over, and said final that, well, I suppose he is. In a way, that is. Which didn't get us much further./'Come on, explain what happened last night!' I pushes him. 'I've already said I have no call to try,' he answers grandly. 'Oh. And I thought explaining things was what you're precious science is for,' I answers. That annoyed him. But at much that moment something happened to distract both of us./*/Did I say that Blowse had gone back up upstairs? I should have done. She was calling out from up there now, 'Lize, Lize!' Bit like Ma does in the night sometimes, her tone was sort of frightened and yet not wanting to make a fuss (pretending to, rather) both together. So I goes out into the hall and shouted up what did she want kindof thing, and she replied that she wanted me to come up to her bedroom and look. NOW! At once! Pronto-bonto! She even said please./Now there's real alarm in her voice, so I dashes up as fast as my two pegs 'll let me, and in the 'boudoir' there's a plant pot which has been on the windowsill and is now on the floor. Some kind of big flashy scarlet thing, soft and speading, the flower was, obvious why Blowse likes it.)/Now the whole caboodle has fallen down hard on the nice carpet, and somehow the crash hasn't broken the shiny ornamental thing it was in, halfway between a dish and a bowl, light blue with a mother-of-pearl effect where the light strikes it) but for all that the ordinary earthenware pot inside has had a big curve taken out of it like something has bitten it, and a fair proportion, quater or third or more, of the red earth is spilled out. The plant itself, and the big bulb it's growing from, are lying on the carpet sideways along looking a bit sorry for themselves./First things first. I call out down to our Dave to tell him to bring up the dustpan-and-brush (our Ma will affect to be too hard of hearing to hear that sort of thing these days) and I kneels down and brushes the carpet. I puts as much of the earth back as I can, and sets the whole caboodle up where it was, though the 'bitten' part of the pot will just have to be thrown away./Then I turns to Belinda, whose pale and trembly, flopped down on the bed, staring at the innocent pot as if it was a poisonous tarantular spider or something. 'I didn't touch it, Lize!' she cries. 'I didn't touch it! I swear it by all that's holy, Lize! I wasn't nowhere near it! But I saw it! It just moved! All on its own! I saw it happen, I tell you! Just a few minutes back! As soon as I caught my breath I called out for you! Look!!' she finishes./As if I'm not doing! Now it had been on the windowsill, as I think I've already said. Now it's true that the window there was open partly, but there wasn't no wind to speak of. It was a nice bright day. And it wasn't as if what had fallen over was something light that a moving curtain could topple, it must have weighed quite a few pounds, or kilograms as we must say nowadays. Also, I did believe her. I'm not saying Belinda wouldn't tell a lie to avoid blame winging its way to land on her delicate shoulders, but this evidently wasn't one of them times, and if she'd knocked it over herself accidental she'd have been furious-angry at her own clumsiness, but she certainly wouldn't have been upset in this shakey way./Now our Dave, after the charming fashion of young men, had brought the brush and that up quick enough and had then vanished even quicker, just in case he got asked to sweep it up himself. Course, it's not precious Belinda's style either to do that type of job. Though, to be fair to her, at this moment in time she was ever so pale and shocked. Yes, she really was, I'm sure. Even so, she's so much the little actress by nature and instinct that it comes quite automatic for her to make an elegant gesture with her right hand's long smooth fingers, while the other was directed towards her ample b. as if to say, 'Look at me! Look at me! How pale and shocked I am! But oh, how beautiful with it for all that!' kind of posture like someone in an old picture./I'd flumped down in her bedroom chair, not looking a quarter as grand. We exchanged a look. The look said it all really, but we kind of repeated it in our words:/'It's another of those bleeding things, innit?' I said. (I don't normally use this kind of language, but this was an exception.)/'For sure it is,' she answered./And we exchanged another look. Bit of fear there was in this look, and, speaking for myself, a bit of anger which all of a sudden became a lot of anger, and I lost my rag for near the first time since I was a kid, though a bit more controlled. 'Well, I'm sick of them. D'you hear?' I called out loudly. Not of course addressing Blowse, but rather the whatever-it-was or whoever-it-was that was causing all this upset and kerfuffle. 'And sick of you and your interfering too. D'you hear? We was just an ordinary little working-class family living happy enough in our own home until you came along and tried to spoil it. What's the point of it? Are you trying to ruin our love?' Yes, I was almost getting carried away. 'If you are then you'll find that we're tougher than you think. We're stronger than you, we can take it! There's love in us and in you there's nothing but hate, hate, hate. You're a coward like all bullies and a bully like all cowards both! We never see you plain! You're like nasty-minded yobs yelling names in the street and hiding as soon as whoever they're tormenting turns round to look for them, you're like "ladies" sniggering over their china teacups mocking those who haven't had their advantages (and what's meaner or sneakier than that?) You're nothing, nothing at all, and yet you want to be noticed all the time like a spoiled child with the belly-ache.'/'Yes,' says Belinda in a more relaxed kind of way. 'Whoever you are, we're peed off with your silly games, you can just' (I don't like to write it) 'eff-yew-cee-kay off, d'you hear?'/'It won't work anyway, whatever you're trying to do. Love holds us together, it's love that makes us tough, and brave, and makes us clever, even! You can't break us, you can't bend us, we're united, see? Do your worst! I challenge you. Do your worst and you'll still not break us. But, best of all, go back to wherever it is you come from!'/So there!/Yes, I told 'n, whatever it was, straight, and at the time it didn't seem no nonsense to speak out loud what was in the nature of a curse onto the empty air./'Yes, you just try it,' I muttered now. 'You try it as much as you like and we'll not....' but somehow the passion had gone from what I was saying and I didn't finish the sentence, I reckon now I was trying to thing of the words of that song people in odd clothes use sing at demonstations about not being moved and that./A half-minute or so of silence, seemingly, then, 'O well done, our Lize, well done!' says Blowse now, and I recognise in her voice a tone of whole-hearted admiration such had never or very very rarely come my way in forty-odd years and specially not from her to me./So you might think I'd just like to stop there and bask in her unwonted approval. But, having got it all out of my system like that, the irritation building up towards fury against all the silly or nasty disturbing things it had been doing over the last few months, what I was feeling now after was an enjoyable kind of sleepiness as if I'd had a glass or three of Riesling too much, and this change in my own emotions, come to think of it now, was strange. Not so much in itself as coming on so sudden./But I certainly didn't ponder about that at the time -- you don't --instead I let my body relax into the pleasure my body was feeling. 'I'm sorry, Lize' a good friend said to me after. 'I think that's the worst thing you could possibly have done. Shouting at it like that, you were sortof admitting it had power over you, it was even something like you were inviting it to take more, it could all have worked out dreadful'...'You understand why I did, don't you?' said I. 'All that provocation would have made Saint Francis of Assisi lose his rag, I reckon. 'Yes, but lots of things that are perfectly understandable just aren't wise,' he says. 'It's just like being teased by ordinary earthly people, show them you've lost your temper and they're triumphant, it proves to them they've got mastery over you and that's what they're longing fo--'/'And not show them, and they know they have anyway,' I snapped, interrupting rather rude. I knew what I was talking about here, having been half-blind as a kid, the others at our school so delightfully taking advantage, again and again and again they never got bored with it, Belinda too sometimes, and little preachings from Miss about how they mustn't be nasty to poor unfortunate little Lize which in some fashion gave them encouragement though meant to do the opposite. 'There is that,' he says. 'It's difficult either way, God knows, but even so it's better not to actually show you've lost your temper' and so on. Now I'm not saying he's not right in its way, when it's not you they're aiming at it's easy enough for him to say, good friend though he's been, just sitting by the hospital bed and listening and talking./Anyway, after this outburst, it was about mid-morning by then, which maybe I've already said, then I did something I don't think I've ever done before, not ever. See, tension builds up and up, you release it, there's that feeling so wonderful you cant describe (mind, it don't last, necessarily.) I felt much too laid-back to bother looking at the clock, but it must only have been about half-past ten. In I went, smooth as if I was on greased runners, into my own bedroom. It seemed -- I know this sounds like rubbish, but I'm telling you how it seemed, not how it really was -- that my progress there was so calm, relaxed, sedate (like a procession with only one person in it!) that I passed over the threshhold without opening the door and closing it behind me, and there was the bed and the bedding shining at me with their own light as if it was a very holy person, an angel or something./Well, course, I've seen pictures of the Mona Liza and that stone lady with no arms and have been told to think they're beautiful, but never really paid much notice, thinking I thought that because I was told to, like, but oh! that ordinary bed! that day! I've never been moved by beauty deep down by anything or anyone like I was that morning by that ordinary enough cheap bed worn by twenty years' use./I went towards it as smooth, as calm, as quiet as the Bentley G'anpa used to drive for Mrs Gritnell when she was rich, and I laid down on it as if, I don't know, as if it was the magic slab going to transform me into a beautiful princess like in the stories, no, as if I was one already.../And what a dream I had, same as I shall tell you in just a minute, and in much the same words as I told Reverend Hudson. Or if it wasn't a dream, then it was a -- well, something else, which mattered ever such a lot, it really did. He came to me because, I'm told, I was yelling out 'Benedick! Benedick!' though I can't remember it myself at all. If it was really him I wanted to see I got my wish; see, Benedick's not at all a common name and one of the nurses or such must have known him./Anyway, I've got to realise however reluctantly that I must tell you where this interview with him took place, and I don't want to. I mustn't make a meal about it, I keep telling myself I've got no real reason to be embarassed, but I am for all that. Big grey building just outside Sharth with a round black tower, which they call 'The Psychiatric Observation Hospital' these days, but I've not forgot, nor has anyone else I knows, that we kids growing up always called it 'The Looney Bin.'/That's where they put me -- mainly because I was having such a 'lively' kind of sleep, as I've now been informed; apparently I was jerking from side to side and yelling out all sorts of queer things no-one could understand, and Benedick's name too which they could, but I just couldn't be woken up./Yes, Benedick said to me afterwards, and he'd get the Nobel Prize for Understatement if there was one, that his considered opinion was that I had, almost certainly, been ill-advised, that is, unwise, to defy the whatever-or-whoever-it-was to do her worst. Now Benedick's been a great help several ways, and I want to say thankyou to him here public for everything he's done, and yet but he doesn't fully understand. Here. He was meaning that I'd put myself at serious risk. I think he was wrong./I'd laid down thinking - not that I was thinking all that much, mind you, that I was just going to have a thoroughly refreshing short sleep. Short it wasn't. See, they just couldn't wake me up whatever they did, though they yelled my name and stuck things in my arm, or bottom, maybe they even gave me electric shocks, but I just wouldn't come to. That is, until I woke up in my own time, a whole week later. Yes, seven whole days, and nights of course, it was. That, and the shouting, was what made them think I was mental. Well, that was their mistake, not mine. Not insane at all, just different. By the by, I'd lost more than half a stone in weight, doing without food so long, which I thought later improved my appearance no end and tried unsuccessfully to keep it off. This loss was a gain, see?/And I've changed since, inwardly, see? Look, I can tell you what happened in my sleep, or it'ud be more accurate to say 'what seemed to happen' and from what you've read so far you can work out what the change in me was, at least I hope you can. Not easy to put in words, though./Now it's an awful thing to say, because, you can be almost sure, they meant to be kind, but I bet these doctors and nurses wouldn't have been in quite such a rush to think I was potty if the clothes I came in and the voice I was shouting in was more like their own; think about that. But in a way it doesn't matter, I'm alright now./But I mustn't blame them all that much. I certainly can't have looked normal or have been behaving normal, but it's a bit of a leap, it's just not logical, to say that because you're not normal you're mad. Anyway, there was my body jerking and shouting and inside -- oddly enough! -- my mind, my 'me', was quite calm. They told me later that soon after I'd laid down I began shouting and Blowse came along to see what was up, and even poor old Ma stirred her stumps and came up, then even Dave. Alf too when he came in from his bit dinner up the pub. Well, they couldn't wake me, and I imagine it was Dave who first called the dr, and old Ostlethwaite when he failed to wake me up too called out an ambulance. I'm pretty sure he was remembering how Ma was took queer up Pask's a few months before and thought it might be a family failing.../So there I was, running out on my plain duty to slave night and day looking after four people either capable of doing it themselves or of learning how to, and not just this once caring about how they got on, can't say I'm sorry about all that./Yes, I needed a rest, and by God how much I deserved one. I hadn't had one, not proper, since about a year after I married Alf, and as for holidays, they've got fewer and fewer, and self-catering, i.e. Mother has to go on slaving. But I don't think I consciously rewarded myself that rest. Unconsciously? Well, who knows? That's what the word means, doesn't it?/Though if I was intending, underneath, to give myself a rest, I didn't get one. No, it was some of the hardest work of my life. The joke was on our Lize, and not for the first time either./*/Now what's coming is the last chapter -- I think!/ Funny thing is, while my body was wriggling and shouting, my mind or soul or whatsomever was calm and peaceful. /It seemed to myself that I was walking along the Shour which goes in a reversed-C-shape through our village, but I'm putting 'seemed' because I can't explain to you what there was about this river that made me name it to myself the 'Shour'. This one was wider and deeper and despite the fact that the water was going slower it had more an appearance of thrust, there was real strength in it, deep down. Though it didn't seem to be dirty this river, unlike the real Shour, you couldn't see the bottom./But it wasn't like a dream. I could feel things. It was all solid, physical. I could feel the light wind on my face and how it blew back my long grey dress across my knees, I could feel the earth pushing up underfoot; I don't think I had any shoes or sandals on./Very pleasant it was there, though not at all exciting; that is, at first. I was, inside, utterly cool and self-collected, I couldn't have been moreso if I was one of the Franklyns at some posh bash. Just walking, not fast, not slow, taking my ease./There're willows or something of that kind bent over the riverside here and there. Behind them the bank's quite definite, like a mini-cliff, the grass stops, a foot or so further there's the water. (The real Shour has gentler banks.)/And I'm in one way quite sure that this is a 'vision' or whatnot, that it's not ordinary life; no, it matters more, not less, than that, I'm certain. NOT like any dream I've ever had. This doesn't faze me at all, the new me. Oh, it's 'well-bred' I am now, gracious, graceful, intelligent, full of good will, calm, diplomatic, able to organise, gentle, and courteous, yet able not to be if it's absolutely necessary, though only then, I'm like everything a 'lady' ought to be in our world and most often isn't. I'm more properly grown-up than I ever was before, in fact on reflection I was when I was there more grown-up than anyone I ever did see./And I saw this child. At first she hadn't seen me, so I got a good look. About eight or nine, slight build, wearing -- I don't know what, quite, something loose, I mean, she wasn't naked or anything, nor me, but clothes weren't very important in that place, not worth noticing much. Not a pretty child, nor ugly either, despite the expression on her face, she was sitting on the ground with her back against a tree and her legs thrust out in front of her. She was pulling at the grass and some little flowers there, daisies they must have been, in a fractious fed-up fashion, as if bored and not knowing whether to blame herself or the world around, or of course both. Low-spirited, I couldn't see the colour of her eyes, she was directing their gaze along the ground./And all at once I felt very sorry for her, as if her pitiableness had taken me by the throat. And responsible too, I just knew that I had to do everything I could to help her, I couldn't thrust helping her off to anyone else because there was no-one else there (except her, course.) 'Whoever you are, young lady,' I was saying to her, to myself, not aloud as yet, 'You need taking in hand sharpish. You're a bit spoiled. Not that you're doing any real harm except to yourself, though I bet you've tried. You need someone loving but firm to give you a bit of guidance.'/And at that moment she looked up. Her eyes were very dark (can't say 'black eyes', it would give the wrong idea) and she looked all at once very suspicious./Quick to startle she is, quick as a faun. Up she jumps, goes to the other side the next tree, and there she squats down and begins fiddle-faddling with the earth again. She can't see me no more so she thinks I've must have gone somewhere, how stupid!/Mingled pity and exasperation I'm feeling, at the poor kid -- who's proud and stubborn and confused and unhappy and withal not as clever as she thinks she is./No-one there to help but yours truly, as I said. 'Why me?' I exclaimed to myself. Dear knows I've done my share of the world's work and here was some more, and other people's too often, all my days, and now here was yet another job, maybe the most important of the whole lot, and, like so many other jobs, it wasn't one I'd volunteered myself for. But then, I'd wanted a little girl of my very own, very much some years back, still did in a way. Years and years we'd tried, but....Well, I couldn't paint pictures or do embroidery and that, bringing up my daughter well would have been my artistry. Now playing the mother's part was crying out to me./I'd got to help. But how? Go to her? No. She'd just skip away again./'Come here.' There's this voice saying just them two words, but in a manner that no-one - surely - would dare refuse to obey. It's my voice, and after I've spoke I was amazed at the authority in it myself, but wouldn't let it show in my face./Well, she darts her head out from behind the trunk. 'Come here, I said, ' I'm saying. I'm sure you heard me just now. You're only a little girl, but you must be a very great fool if you think that I'm not able to see you.' Oh, very authoratative I was, and this time I wasn't surprised at it myself./Out she comes, and stands just a yard or so in front of me, hands at her side, still fiddling with grass or something in one hand, head cast down. 'Poor, poor little thing!' is what I'm saying inside myself, but my voice says automatic, 'Drop that, whatever it is, and stand up straight and look at me.' She does./Not a bad-looking child after all, and her dark hair like mine means that she could really be my daughter; though I was feeling soft to her inside, I wouldn't show it outward. 'What's your name?' 'Harriet.' I wait for her to have the gump to ask me mine back, but she doesn't, so I tell her briskly that my name is Elizabeth, and I'll be capable to help her, as long as she answers my questions as truthfully as she can. I'm not a bit surprised to hear myself saying this, I'm totally confident that I'm able to keep my word I'm giving./Because this - wherever it was - was a serious place./ Without being asked little Harriet now comes round beside me and takes my hand. A bit shy she is still, but nothing like so much. Very soft and warm and damp-skinned it was, entirely like a real child's hand, not very clean, I remember the feeling of it quite clear, yes, I remember it not just with my brain but with my own palm and fingers too, I can feel her little 'puddy' inside mine, quite as if it was real. /She's got her left hand in my right, and is looking up at me with a mixed expression -- it's hopeful and trustful, yet there's a tad suspicion built in. Me, I'm looking very self-assured; it's not just cunning, put-on, I really do feel this self-certainty. But I'm a tall woman and she's a child rather short for her age, so -- easing the stiffness of my manner just a bit -- I go and sit down, her following, in the shade of one of them floppy trees and make her sit down too beside me./'I've been here a long time. A long, long time,' she says, and shuts up./After a bit silence, I ask, 'Isn't it a good place, then?'/'Well, yes,' she says, 'it sort of is and sort of isn't. I did use to like it.'/And she shuts up again. Garrulous she isn't, she doesn't fully trust me, but after a while by 'judicious questioning' I get out of her that this river-bank, in her opinion, is a good place to be passing through, but a bad place to stay in, 'and I've been here EVER so long,' she repeats. She knows in her heart, utter-certain, but don't ask me how, that the opposite bank is where she's got to be, but she's frightened, terrified even (of drowning? I don't know!) and she keeps trying to cross, or rather she keeps thinking about trying to think about trying to cross, but the whole thing's so horrible, she can't quite face it./She's been doing this, wishing to cross and yet unable, oh, years and years, and she's seen no-one all that time, except me, she says (but not as firmly as she says some other things) and there's nothing to eat or drink, no music, only wind in the trees sometimes. Now and then she has slept, and had odd dreams. They used to be about being in a big house she thought she knew, later on they were about a small house she didn't. She'd wokle up from these dreams unhappy, she knew somehow she'd gone where she wasn't wanted to be, and she knew too that this was a way of calling out for help, yet all the same it was a wrong way./ Help's come at last, child, I thought, and -- dear God! -- it's me! I was thinking./And I said to myself, inside my head, one of those very short, very rude words I'd never say aloud. /'Why me?' I was asking./A voice which I think was outside of me, though I'm not sure, but certainly it was very firm and authoritative, answered, 'Why not?'/Now we've all read stories of horrid tortures, and they're very different all kinds of ways, but one thing's clear, no-one ever offers themselves voluntarily, no-one goes into agony freely. And, it was only too obvious, the child was right, the crossing would be hard. She was assuming (or maybe I'd told her in words, I just don't know) that I was coming with her. And when I made this true clear to myself as well I suddenly knew that I was standing up straight and young and strong and fit and healthy and even beautiful, which no-one's ever said I was in ordinary life, oh it was as if I had a completely new body, functioning perfectly, ache-free, like a goddess's. And sensitive it was, as sensitive as a snail's stalked eyes./ Any hurt that was coming ( and -- my God! -- how sure I was that it was going to come!) would be felt far more completely than any other hurt I'd even got done to me before, just because I was so fit and healthy and that. And I was going to have to endure without complaining, without flinching, I'd have to set example as if it was all nothing whatsoever at all. And the first step would not be the hardest./So I took her hand again, or maybe I'd never let go of it, and I turned my own body, and hers with it, towards the river, and we went down into it together (there were steps underwater, which somehow was no surprise.)/Now I can't speak for her of course, but for me it was as if I'd put my foot into ice, or fire, or somehow both of them at once, agony is too weak and thin a word for it, and in a fashion of speaking I was doing it to myself too...../Now the other foot came after, and ankle and calf of the other, calf and knee of the first, and so on down and down, every nerve screaming out pain, right on down under the peaceful-looking water that was as cruel as boiling lead, her hand still in mine, every moment hurting worse still, every step./And yet somehow I found or was given the endurance needed to bear it, even though it was like being torn apart and somehow not dying, it was as if my bones themselves were first red-hot, then white-hot, melting even, as if I was flame all through, and I suppose she was too./But once we were right under the water, in some way things had changed. We were going along some biggish shining-brilliant passageway together, its walls were like the sun, and the pain, though it knew how to, at least wasn't getting any worse. And then, of herself, the child at last let go my hand, I don't know if she looked up at my in gratitude or not, but I felt her gratitude as if it was a cooling shower, and now she was going on in front of me by herself into a more brilliant light still.... /And I was on a hard bed in a shabby room, sweating as if I'd been drowned, looking up at a cheap lampshade, and quite in my right mind (I was certain of that though others weren't.) Very thirsty and tired, but otherwise well enough./ I suppose that I had been mad then. Or was that just the wrong measuring-stick to apply? I mean, if I made up all this what I've just told you out of my own head, it must show there's some very odd things indeed in there, besides the price of fish fingers and clothespegs and chocolate bars and that. And what I've been saying all my life long, self-praising myself under cover of modesty, about how I'm just 'ordinary' (as if that's an achievement!), that's been just an excuse, and a weedy, silly excuse even by the low standards of excuses, for avoiding admitting what I already am, and have always been. Yes, I know full well of course that most people wouldn't give me a second glance in the street, but it's them that are sleepily dim not to understand at once that I'm exciting, fascinating, important or w.h.y. They're wrong. That's the beginning and the end. I'm -- well, how do I put it? -- I'm one who has gone out of myself, this physical body, to the very border of Heaven. Or Hell? Looks as if I had to force us both through Hell so she could go on to Heaven, yes? By my sheer force of character. And if you say, as many do, that there isn't really a Heaven or Hell out there somewhere, there still is, in me, inside me, they're existing in me, and that must mean I'm significant./Now I tried to tell Benedick, since he was there beside me, what it was I'd seen. And this time, too -- well, no, it was later on, his third or fourth visit, but it was all a continuation -- I told him, in quite a lot of detail, and trying hard to get the order and everything else right, of all the various things that had happened in the house that led up to it. I even told him about the money I'd got, only keeping back what I'm thinking in my mind I'm going to do with it. All these odd experiences, 'apparitions' might be the word, I could see that they puzzled him and he didn't quite approve; he was trying his best, and no-one can doubt that he's a good man, to sympathize and understand, but a lot of it just didn't key in with the sorts of ideas he was used to thinking about things with. It was like he was doing a jigsaw quite contendly and someone came and looked over his shoulder in the irritating way people do and picked up some pieces and foced them in where they don't belong, pieces of some different puzzle too!/I was still in the hospital, of course, and was for about ten days after I'd woke up. I refused point-blank to take any of their nasty drugs, even though they were very charming about it. But I thought, good manners be blowed, it's ME we're talking about here, and the very first and the most important duty I have is to preserve that ME. And since I was only in there for what they call 'observation' they had not any right to force me. (Poor souls, those they have. Cousin of my Alf's is one of them, he started off sad and a bit fat and useless and now they've given him tablets for years and he's sadder and fatter and uselesser.) I refused a good bit more politely Benedick's offer to bless me ritually in the asylum chapel with robes and incense and crucifix-holer-upper and all that, saying -- which wasn't wholly true, in fact, come to think of it, it wasn't true at all, (though it felt it at the time) that having been brought up chapel it just wasn't my style. On the other hand, I went on, to soften it a bit, if he'd like to pray for me in his church I'd be grateful (that is, I couldn't stop him). I felt I ought to do something really good for him because he had helped so very, very much just by listening, but I didn't know what. Still don't, really.**/And now I've got to look back on it all, now it's finished, I'm certain-sure of that, well, very nearly sure. I've got to try to make sense of it. What has all this been about?/But where do I start, trying to explain it? Dave thinks every blooming thing's got an explanation, but suppose he's not right after all?/It didn't make much sense while it was all happening, it maybe I'm just wrong to try to make sense of it now. No. I can make some sense, yes, but full and complete sense, no. Not a clear pattern./The best I can say is, I've learned an awful lot. But if you ask me what I've learned, the answer sortof vanishes. New way of looking at things I don't quite understand, that's as near as I can get. Now you've read practically the lot of it, you see if you can put it any better!/ What I needed now I was recovered was, more rest, and decent food, not the asylum's half-warmed pap. And to think things out some more. But rest is hard to come by when there are women round you so sunk in misery that they seem to hoover up all happiness out of the air, or talking, talking, talking, very intelligently in a way, lots of clever puns and plays on words, but you don't know who they're talking to and neither do they, and they're at it, and I don't exaggerate, twenty hours a day./I told the drs all that and, give them their due, they took notice and put me in a convalescent home by the sea, where the company, generally speaking, was bad in another way because people scarcely talked at all. Tom came down to visit me there several times and brought Alf or Dave or Pasqueline, Ma and Blowse wouldn't come, but they didn't seem to have much to say neither. One bright spot was a Jamaican bus conductor from Manchester and his wife; she'd play songs and hymns on the piano evenings, and he'd sing, lovely baritone he had, and the usual thing would be when I left to say give us your address and we'll keep in touch, but the new me, more honest, thought no, we wouldn't really, so I didn't say it. I stayed there, I suppose, about another ten days./When physical energy came back I was thinking hard. What, after all this I've got to go back to the same routine, cooking bacon-and-eggs with fatbread every morning for not-noticeably-grateful Dave and Alf, and cleaning and tidying up for them all, and yes, madam! yes, madam! up Patel's shop, and watching every shilling careful, my own personal spending most of all, with the idea of squeezing out a week or two in a holiday place in the spring or autumn like we usually do?/Me, I've got meaning. I'm a person in my own right, and do I have to go back to everything so petty?/Yes, I did have to./I mean, I had got to. There was duty for one thing, I couldn't just jack it in, and practicality, course I've got to live somewhere and some how. Also, I thought I'd learned that what really matters is not so much what you do as how you do it, I mean, in what kind of mood or spirit./So I planned to go home the next Tuesday. And did. Quite cheerful too. Because there was one think I was certain-sure of (I think.) Home would feel all fresh and new as if it had all been spring-cleaned top to bottom. The whole atmosphere, the whole feel of the place. Hetty was gone; gone for ever as far as we was concerned. She wouldn't be there in our house no more ever.<< Easter Sunday, 2012.

D.H. Gamon

Monday, 6 July 2015

Nakedness (discreet version)

Saturday, 12 May 2012

Memory of an Extraordinary thing

Providence

Sunday, 20 November 2011

Second 'DOWN TWELVE' BLOG

Tuesday, 8 November 2011

And who are you? Don't puzzle me, said I.

Wednesday, 13 July 2011

Three moments in my twenties when my whole life afterwards might have changed, and didn't.

Sunday, 17 April 2011

A very very brief genealogy

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