ellen bell

The starlings who roost under the pier begin their murmuration each morning at around 7.45am, just as I turn the corner from the harbour. An agitation of starlings. They swoop and swirl in a fantastic, fluttering, flapping, wave of a dance. I expect it but it always takes me by surprise. A chaos of birds, insect-like in their scary thousands. It both thrills and frightens me. Perhaps that is what being thrilled is all about - a shaking up of the ordinary. An ordinary life. An ordinary person. It seems that I have been fighting the taking on of this concept all my life.

I begin to think that the approach of one's fiftieth year is about acceptance, non-resistance, and that therein lies the grace and wisdom that ageing has the potential to deliver.

I find myself making my next home in an ordinary place. I have joined a doctor's surgery, a dentist's, and the town library. I carry their various cards in my wallet. And this morning I have put down a deposit on a flat. How will it be to live a life more ordinary? I return to the details. A flash of images I have caught up, saved, of a collie dog in a window, his nosed pressed against the window, louvered blinds pushed roughly to one side and a look of sad longing on his face, a somewhat haphazard line of men walking down from a station to a funeral, in black coats, anoraks and suit jackets an air of sunday self-consciousness to their movements and a male student, dressed in orange and white striped tights and a pink ra-ra skirt, striding past me with that post-party, slightly lobsided gait.

Walking the prom each morning brings a wildness, a startlingness that I hold onto with such force. The sky was a gentle stroking of pinks and blues. No snow reports here. I love the lights out to sea, mysterious and inexplicable to a landlubber like me. But their beam still touches me, I am part of their range, their scope, their blessed communication.

She was asleep when we arrived yesterday - a toothless wizened figure, curled up awkwardly in a semi-foetal position, with a tight, heavy breath. Not sleeping peacefully. We didn't wake her. Outside another resident took both my hands in his and talked to my eyes, full on, deep, penetrating.

'I'm Roy', he said.

I am. I exist. An ordinary existence.  

(image borrowed from: www.ceredigionbirds33.blogspot.com)

She had had her hair done and fluffed up with pleasure at our effusive, but nonetheless genuine, compliments. Her spirit had returned. Everybody seemed lifted somehow - lighter, happier. On our way out I glanced into the canteen to read the menu for that night's supper - buttered cod, sherry trifle and assorted cakes. The tables were laid with pink tablecloths. Apparently more and more residents are choosing to eat alone in their rooms. Small, warm rooms with a photograph of each inhabitee sellotaped to the door with their name, handwritten on a sticker, beneath. The photographs are snapshots, taken by family or friends, usually at a party or get together and generally feature the person in question wearing a paper hat and smiling, with a raised glass in hand, at the camera.

'The Chase' came on the TV as we sat with her and there was a question about the father of some old testament prophet.

'Adam!', he shouted at the TV.

"Adam and Eve and PinchMe went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drowned. Who do you think was saved?.." she sang, her little frame shaking with repressed giggles at our answering groans.

The bridge between childhood and adulthood narrows. Outside the entrance to the home are an array of garden ornaments, scattered amidst an assortment of plant pots. Just by the door stand plastic versions of the two old men from the Muppets sitting on a bench and Bill & Ben The Flower Pot men.

A sense of the possiblity of preserving one's own individual aesthetic is eroding, falling away into a world of loud cheerfulness, airless warmness, bed jackets and children's toys. Does it really matter? I just don't know. And sometimes I am made weary of carrying this not knowing.

I think, in the end kindness is enough. I think, it just has to be.

My landlord's house has a post-war, make-do-and-mend, aesthetic - a hotch-potch of chipped Victoriana, heavy dark oak furniture, fogged prints, tiled fireplaces with gas fires (that emit that muggy smell of hot dust when switched on) a haphazard scattering of plastic toys, fridge magnets, pens with fluffy tops and ticking clocks. I like it. It is a home.

I had forgotten how much I am comforted by the sound of ticking clocks. The grandfather clock belonged to his grandparents. Their pictures hang next to it. Serious faces - squared features in sepia tones. The clock chimes on the hour, every hour. I don't hear it when I sleep.

My present life finds its ground in the detail. An elderly woman in a health food cafe eating soup, a silk headscarf tied tightly in a neat bow under her chin, a pink transparent one on top of this, holding it fast. A seagull overhead, its white belly suddenly caught by the early morning sun - a shock of white. The clamouring, hissy chattering of the starlings under the pier just before they begin their wild dance in the sky. A large pebble on the pavement painted red. The girl, who like me who walks the prom every morning, shouting a greeting to me just a little too loud. The man jogging with his white standard poodle - the dog, like a Parisian mademoiselle, high-stepping, vain and aloof.

And snapshots from Radio 4: my company in the cold, stone-tiled back kitchen. A ex-street dweller being interviewed, the shame of it still cutting, still bleeding.

'Homelessness begins inside you.'

And reading an article about Jeremy Deller in the Guardian.

'Artists aren't special people', he states. He doesn't want to make things - there are too many things. He tried working in an office. I remember reading about another artist, who didn't want a job and it was this imperative that drove him to make work. So singular. So sure of themselves.

I am applying for work in offices. I watch the process at a distance. How will it feel? How does it feel? I try to squeeze the last 49 years of my odd little life into the kind of shape that will fit, that will suffice. My soft, tender little life. Is it purely ego that compels artists, writers, poets to make work? Is such creativity merely fuelled by a compunction to test their existence, to claim attention, to find a presence in another person's space?

I watch her dying. Her life is now wholly contained in that bed, that pink, too warm, room. I bring her travel brochures of the Gower, the Mumbles and Swansea Bay. She pours over them, pointing at the pictures, soundlessly mouthing the names of the beaches - that lost landscape of her childhood.

We ask her too many questions. She cannot remember. Songs come easily enough as do the names of those places. What is left but a hollow carcass, a frame that holds a barely beating heart and organs that are failing? Her stories will soon be lost. He revisits them with her, daily. Her face, sometimes teethless sometimes not, lifts itself into a beaming smile at his gentle prodding -his slow retelling of those endless episodes of nostalgic lightness. Such a kind sharing. A reigniting of what she is, the best of her. He doesn't want to let her go.

We are just stories. Our stories. Mostly small, inconsequential stories.

He hadn't realised I was still upstairs. We both agree we need a system in place that lets him know when I am out. A green rubber duck on the top shelf of his desk in the hall. The duck moved to the lower shelf means I am not in. Not within, without. Out. Out in that fresh, wild air.

I was meant to fly back to Oslo on Saturday at 1pm. I am still here. I thought about my other self, my other part, my other heart, on that plane heading back to the chill sharpness, that crisp, unforgiving cold. I wasn't there. Did someone else sit in my seat? I felt cut in half, severed, not quite in my body.

An intense weekend - brilliant with shining, almost unbearable, clarity. A nude christmas tree in an upper window. The lights of Battersea Bridge in the late afternoon gloom. Holding a little blue boy, feeling his month-old-weight - so impossibly perfect. He snuffled and snored and we watched transfixed, breathing in his every blessed breath. We had walked into a bubble of love and I inhaled it hungrily. And the next day, friends. No ceremony. Tea in blue and white striped cups. A cottage, snowdrops and that rich, sweet odour of cows.

Back in Wales and visiting the home. A shrunken grey-bearded man in a wheelchair, Roy. A faded tattoo of a cutter on his forearm.

'It used to be an oil painting....he was a real artist...two shillings it cost me...an oil painting....'

A warm corridor, two women wheeling a trolley with duralex cups of tea and a large plate of buttered bara brith and welsh cakes.

She sits in a chair watching a programme about penguins. She laughs, delighted by their land-based clumsiness. She is beautiful in a mauve top and polka dot skirt. Gnarled hands pat at her chest, distractedly finding the gold buttons of her cardigan. A reprieve. I stoke the embers of his relief.

No crying today.

(image courtesy of www.graciejewellery.blogspot.com )

'Everything hurts'.

She couldn't get comfortable. Her face contracted with the pain of something, everything as she shifted her tiny frame to and fro in her bed. A carer came in talking too loud, too cheerfully. She drew the sheet back and I saw her shrunken form, winceyette nightie rucked to reveal thighs, calves emptied of fat, of flesh, just bones. Just bones: straight, angular, without. Without the soft, curving of womanness, of sexuality, of vitality, of life. She was falling into the mattress, lost, being lost in its too bigness.

'I'm wetting myself.'

The carer returned bringing two paracetamols and a plastic beaker of diluted cranberry juice. She succumbed to it all as a child.

'I'll throw these two out soon and then we'll give you a shower in the chair and clean your bottom. That'll be nice won't it?'

A kind woman but too loud. I understand. A coping mechanism against so much dying, so much muteness, so much sleeping in those warm, airless rooms. The carers are good women. They bang and clatter, fighting the silence that threatens to descend even with the shouting TV in each and every room. They talk as if to children with words like 'bottom', that land clumsily, awkwardly in our presence. And she acquieses, too tired to demand a privacy, a dignity that was her right when she was strong, independent and herself.

Her eyes go their different ways. One is still sharp. It watches me and smiles. The other is lost, it falls to the side, sorrowing.

Last night there was a call. She had thrown a tantrum and then fainted. Anger, defiance sparks up - she is not herself. What is herself? That tiny-ness, those eyes, those hands, that pain.

'She has never been stoic'. He tells me. No, perhaps, not. Are any of us? This is endurance. Each breath felt. Will it all stop soon? Will this particular life stop soon? An ordinary life in so many ways. And yet, the family stories are too large to contain. So much love.

What can I say? Ease her pain.

Being waxed - unwanted hair removed. Strip, strap - wince, contract.

'Everyone has a different pain threshold, we have to be sensitive to that.' The beautician retorted, a little too brightly, to my pass-the-time-of-day questions. A round, curvy girl, thighs rubbing noisily against each other. So full of expectancy.

We walked out of the strip light, too yellow, cheerfulness of the home into the late afternoon dark. Tears came more quietly this time.

Life, I suppose.

(image courtesy of www.guardian.co.uk)

The forest has gone. I now have the sea. I walk the whole length of the prom each morning at 7am. I kick the bar, three times for luck. The rain was unrelentant this morning. My impossibly expensive artic coat was not waterproof. It hangs in my hotel room smelling like a wet dog. I am back. Not home but safe. Safe, and yet not knowing what is next. What is coming? If I stop moving, planning, shifting will something come anyway?

I visit my dear friend's mother in the old people's home. She is a tiny bird, eyes darting cautious, sharp, uncertain, guarded. Her hands worry away at the custard yellow blanket. We bring little cellophane-packed victoria sponge cakes, green seedless grapes, marie biscuits, photographs of the Mumbles, anything to spark a momentary delight, an appetite, a memory. Her hands are skinless, deep red, blue with veins. Her legs are a shock, the muscles atrophied, wasted, they are sticks. The TV is a constant mumbling noise, snooker, Emmerdale, Coronation Street, Deal or No Deal.

'His hair is a mess.'  'Those men in orange are beginning to really irritate me.' She spits out barbs at the screen and then laughs, tittering to herself, her little frame shaking with the sudden joy of being able to be as rude as she pleases.

I draw her: sunken into a chair, hands darting out to grasp at a grape, a cake, a tissue. Crumbs scatter down the front of dark blue dressing grown, tumbling down her chest, bosomless and hollow.

He holds himself together, cosseting her, plumping cushions, prompting songs, voice a little shrill, too cheerful.

We leave the little room, pink and echo-ey, too warm.

He weeps later, in the car, a clumsy low howling.

A dying in the rain.

(image courtesy of www.flickr.com)

I spent the day going from cafe to cafe. I sat and watched mothers and babies, friends chatting, old men reading papers, lovers with lap dogs. I sketched the old men, wrote of my sadness and day dreamed of other people's lives.

Here I am nursing my melancholy with milky coffee in a cafe in Oslo and at just the same moment my dear, dear friend in Wales is anticipating the death of his mother with a hollowing despair, while other friends in a little village just outside Bath are feeling something like real joy with the advent of their marriage next month and my sister in Surrey is glowing with love as she feeds her new baby boy. Life in all its potency. The difference a day makes. There is no room for complacency. Life will take over.

'Live' she said to me last night. 'Live'. I wish I knew what she meant.

I was to meet my great aunt for lunch today and decided to take an early bus into Oslo. I wanted to sit in a certain cafe in Frogner, to draw, read and think.

It was a cold morning and I drank the hot, milky coffee gratefully. The cafe was busy: the door continually opening and closing, letting in the sharp, bitter air. I had taken a small book with me - Ted Hughes' Poetry in the Making. A slim volume, written for a young audience, in which Hughes' shares his thoughts on writing poetry. He writes clearly and openly without a trace of condescension.

I have been thinking much about what it is to live a creative life. How it can be done? How one can live authentically but well? In her book Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 (Penguin, 2003) Virginia Nicholson wrote:

'Fifty years on we may judge that Dylan Thomas' poverty was noble.....but a minor artist with no money goes as hungry as a genius. What drove them to do it? I believe that such people were not only choosing art they were choosing the life of the artist. Art offered them a different way of living, one that they believed more than compensated for the loss of comfort and respectability.'

I am not completely convinced by her argument - particularly as I now approach my fiftieth year. I think most creatives would be more than happy to welcome in wealth, abundance and security as part of the deal - after all, in our society such things are measurable symbols of success and appreciation, and ones that are recognised by even the most philistinic of us to be so. Poverty is only noble in the abstract. Those discomforting pricks of shame that accompany the artistic practice that goes unrecognised and unpaid for grow more and more distinct as time moves on, those family comments about 'proper jobs', 'real world' and 'being realistic' becoming ever more strident. Financial success becomes the only thing that will hush the clamour.

My aunt was an opera singer. She gave up singing in her forties and became a doctor's secretary. She wasn't strong enough, she told me today, to stand up to her family's resistance. She was lauded for her voice by the Head of Covent Garden, and yet her father only went to see her perform once, her brothers, never. There is no bitterness. She is proud of what she achieved and retells the stories over and over again and with each retelling a flame ignites somewhere behind her eyes.

No, poverty is not noble. Nor, do I believe it is ever consciously chosen over abundance (unless part of a religious quest, I suppose). There are many stories: the science fiction writer Philip K Dick who at times didn't even have the money for the 'late fees' for a library book, or Edgar Allan Poe's wife who, at her death only had his old army coat and their cat for warmth, the artist Gwen John eking out a meagre living posing for Rodin and of course Van Gogh, infamously only selling one painting throughout his lifetime. We live vicarously through these myth-ridden creatives. There is no glory in such scrabbling.

Hughes writes about the 'nobility' of the process - though he doesn't use that word. It is all and it is nothing. Such is life. To write, to create, is to announce that one is alive, one has a voice and wishes to connect, to communicate with another. I am. I exist. I feel this, I have seen this, listen to my story. Tarry awhile with me. To Hughes it was 'vital'. To keep this 'vitality' breathing when one's time is taken up with 'a proper job' is a tough thing. Some can do it - T. S. Eliot worked as a teacher and a banker before becoming the editor at Faber and Faber, Philip Larkin worked as a librarian, whereas others, like Gaugin, who gave up his life as a tax inspector, need to throw off the outer skirts of respectability.

I don't think that there is a right or wrong answer. We are more often than not at the mercy of our histories, our own inner romances. I certainly am. Maybe it is about managing the constant see-sawing - the up and down, the flying and the clunking down (I still have such a vivid memory of the smell of metal on my palms after playing on the see-saws in Knutsford playground). Artists, I think, most want time. Time is so precious and it is that which we battle with - to give up time to something, to work, that is not using the best of us well, that is a sacrifice indeed.

The Norwegians are such a practical race. The forest has street lights and I so wanted to experience it in moonlight.

I am fearful of the dark outside. And entering the forest at night was, in the abstract, a big deal. Fears magnify in the abstract. Moving into the reality of them, more often than not, reduces their potency.

It was magical. I lingered, walked slowly, not wanting to go home. But my senses were none the less alert. Pricking. I saw something red, heard a rustle. Two people walking a dog. A mother and a child. Was it a child? I walked ahead and my heart leapt in alarm as someone suddenly ran past me. It was the child, a girl. She ran into my space, too near. Her running was chaotic, clumsy and flailing. She clearly had learning difficulties. A powerful body, singing to herself, stopping a dead stop and then jerkily running forward again, arms flapping. Her mother, or carer, trailed behind, calling to her now and again to slow down. Had she chosen this time of the day on purpose, to let her run free, unhampered by the need to behave appropriately?

Fairy-tale interpreters see forests as motifs of the wild pysche, a place in which we meet our feral selves. As we left the forest (my fellow walkers and me) the child slowed down, stopped running and began to drag her feet along the road. The large breath of freedom gone.

(Image courtesy of www.storytellersunplugged.com )

The other evening I watched a film called 'Frozen River'. It had been another random choice from Sandvika Library; for some reason the title resonated with me.

I had put off watching it, sensing a bleak story. And indeed, I wasn't mistaken, but bleak can be potent and this was. A mother of two boys is abandoned by her husband who absconds with the money she had saved for the delivery of a new mobile home. Set in Canada, this is real winter and the new house offers warmth and insulation. Poverty is real and survival a question of ingenuity and courage. Necessity forces her to begin assisting a mohawk girl smuggling illegal immigrants across the border. They drive across the frozen river.

The movie is taught with held breath, suspended judgement and memories of trying to sleep comfortless and cold. A remarkable narrative. And so little conversation. The silence of what is trapped, held, under those brittle layers of solidified wateryness.

(image courtesy of www.randalitt.wordpress.com )