It was a train ride to Gladstone Library which began with a complicated shifting of luggage and repacking awkwardly in the back of my car in an echoey London NCP where always something is dribbling over the concrete floor and wafts of urine meet the sense that a car chase or attack is imminent. They are look-over-your-shoulder scary, city carparks, especially the ones underground. From there, suitcase artfully repacked leaving pinstripe trousers and gold boots and taking my heavy blanket (we’d been told it would be cold) I walked to Euston past city tents and felt regret, and foolish that I could have, that morning, written a post about stress. This is stress I thought passing the flapping tarpaulin rigged up on high pavement wall and had the urge to edit my post and then thought, No, why do I need to tell the world I’m embarrassed at my loss of perspective? Why not just correct it internally? Which I did.
Waiting for trains, watching the faces craned to the board is one of my favourite theatres; I love the coffee in hands, the suitcases each has carefully arranged, the muted conversations and loud. A pair of women to my left, familiar, comfortable, off hiking. A father dragging a daughter across my vision, he, harried and looking for something, she, dragging her feet, pink raincoat, brown curls, more interested in her hands. I thought, where’s her mother? in that automatic way for which I chastised myself; maybe she didn’t have one, maybe this was divorced dad’s weekend, but minutes later dad and daughter washed up beside me with mum and brother, Spanish, talking rapidly, mispronouncing Tring and repeating platform numbers until they left in a hurry, children continuing to drag.
I got travel sick during the two hours to Chester, I realise now it was probably this bug coming on, but the swaying of the high speed and my attempts at working made the carriage swim and the drowning fields outside become my anchor. All was wet and glistening mud as the south became the midlands, horses up to their fetlocks, heads dropped, hedges scarred with winter, ploughed acres of flood plains and one lonely chestnut leaning for its friends in the distance. I am against postwar crop farming methods. I am saying that for the record. There’s no need to till the soil or rip oaks away from each other. As we sped towards Crewe and Churchill’s cry to dig for your country laid out a tattered land of fences and fertiliser I wondered how long it would take for human’s to recognise en masse that we can talk to trees.
Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, and yes that’s THE Gladstone, who lobbied repeatedly during his four terms at the top and sixty years in politics for Welsh home-rule. Who read so many books that, broken down into timescale, would have meant he’d have had to have read a book a day from the day he was born to the day he died. So we’re talking multiple books started and finished in a day. While being Prime Minister. I realise there was no BBC iPlayer in the 19th century, but still.
I won’t break the privacy of the writers who gathered for our inaugural meeting, this was Day One of Kit de Waal ‘s 6 month writing course, but I will say that it was a joy to connect, loving and inspiring and wholly heartwarming, and yet again I experienced the truth that everyone carries with them stories of complexity and fascination, and humanity, these strange animals we are, is impressive in its drive to see the light and make something beautiful of it.
I walked in the graveyard before we all met, searching for the earliest grave and found it, a child, 9 months, in 1733, her headstone a cracked carved slab leaning brokenly against church wall, wet with moss and dragging leaves, her brother lying flat at her feet, 18 months, no name. Within the church as usual the urge to also lie flat overtook me. I breathed. Empty churches never stop telling stories.
An early walk in the rain to the castle, primroses and slipping banks. Breakfast. The last to arrive with L having got talking and forgotten the time. We worked, we learnt, we said goodbye and shared taxis to the station, me and M & W, I sat facing the retreating road and again, travel sickness snaked up my gut and made me hot with dizziness, Chester station arriving just in time. W & I talked all the way to London, the journey delivered in an easy chattering share of our lives, what joy. Some lads in the seats behind us called out, has anyone got scissors? I’ve gum in my ear, at least that’s what I thought he said, and had visions of poking and blood, until he called out again, I’ve gum in my hair. This, I could deal with. Of course I had scissors, tiny gold embroidery ones carved with fishscales that belonged to a friend of long ago and have resolutely slept in an inside pocket of my bag, ready for this moment. No one was more surprised than the boy when I stood up with them in my hands. He leaned his head toward me, this young lad, his friends laughing, the clump of his chewing gum hair held out for me to cut. Don’t cut too much as if this was a hairdressing salon on the high street and not a north western railway hurtling south. Hold still as the carriage lurched. His friends thought it hilarious. He retreated with the hair gum strands in his hands and I watched him feel for the hole in his neat haircut, imagining the mirror and going out tonight and girls.
My journey didn’t end in London. Back to the car and scary underground carpark, onto the road for the farm. It was no wonder Saturday was a blur and Sunday the sick bug came and took me. I think I rode on Monday. I definitely dragged my feet about the kitchen and repeated I don’t feel well as if this would override the stuff and nonsense approach to illness that I have been brought up with. I cancelled lunch with F on Tuesday, making it to zoom for therapy in which I cried and ranted and raged and felt an inch better until I had to muster myself for London again when I wondered what what would happen if I threw up on the 13:21 to Waterloo.
Amongst this, with the full moon, Margaret’s four-legged girl died and Samson and I lit a candle. To the Happy Hunting Grounds, with love.
Moronic tendencies kicked off another round of such world madness it’s a wonder straight jackets are not flying; this I was shielded from until I finally looked at the news and spoke to A who told me her brother in Dubai is sleeping in his car in the basement.
Meetings, unavoidable, and more chattel collecting at the Tall White House. A discovery that no one had claimed the whizzy-whizzy chair on which I spent so many hours spinning. A discovery of the triple disc Womble Album. Help packing the pheasant crockery, my new flat will have echoes of the past in it after all. Coffee with A and a quick cup of tea with K. And last night, in preparation for my conversation with Essie Fox: TALKING THE GOTHIC , Queen of the Gothic tomorrow on Substack LIVE, I took myself off to the Electric for an immersion in Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights. I’ve a feeling Essie will have quite a lot to say about this. It’s rich and theatrical and plays roaringly fast and loose with the text. It’s a feast and I loved it, loving Emerald Fennel’s eye already. It’s as sexy as it should be, as sexy as the book and just as tempestuously windswept and epic as the moors. The sound track is great.
In a packed auditorium set with sofas and armchairs and coloured glass table lamps I ate popcorn, feet up, awash with Cathy and Heathcliffe. Around me Young People put their phones away. A girl in silver trousers got one last selfie in with boyfriend directed to kiss her. The girls beside me in identical glasses and baseballs caps took off their hats and settled in with pints of Stella and chips. When the movie closed, I was the first one to stand. Outside, a group clustered, eyes wiped, It’s going to take you a long time to be all right, said one to another. Grief and rage continue.
Eleanor
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