Sensory deception?

I had only a three hour slot, and a lot of information to assimilate, so my attention was strictly divided between the hooded screen of the film-reader and the notebook on my left, eyes flicking between the two. As usual I was grateful for the deep-pile atmosphere of scholarly hush, knowing that in this inner sanctum the two librarians would say only what was necessary and relevant: exemplars of academic observance.

Consequently when I heard the door murmur open I anticipated no disturbance, and indeed there was none, my eyes remained focused, my left hand continued to write and my right hand wound on the film, scratched and grainy page by page. Nevertheless another of my senses – one not required for the task in hand - was instantly diverted: the person who entered, who quietly gave his name, briefly detailed his area of interest and confirmed that yes, he knew how to use the index, where to find the films he needed, had one of the most compelling voices I’d heard for a very long time.

His vowels were flat, confidently Calderdale, not harsh but modulated, rounded as a stream-smoothed pebble which had been washed every day of its life in soft, sky-dropped peat-brown hill water, his tones as smooth and as rich and as creamy as the toffee the town was famous for, and as he sat to use the reader on my right I changed my mind about the desirability of silence and would willingly have listened to him speak on any subject he chose for the rest of the morning, but he restricted himself to only the most occasional of occasional remarks to the librarian.

At twelve thirty I re-wound the film, turned the machine off and gathered up pencils and notebook, deliberately refraining from looking to my right until the last possible minute, whereupon I discovered that this aural distraction who had been sat beside me for the past two and a half hours was thin and faded, sixty-ish, tweed-jacketed and to all appearances totally unremarkable.

Action and reaction

Sanctuary lasted only as long as it took me to open my eyes, momentarily closed in relief as I shut the back door behind me. Through the inner door of the kitchen, across the narrow hall and through my open bedroom door, I saw that he had followed and was watching me, grey-jacketed elbows akimbo, blue striped shirt exposed, red face close to the glass as, eyes shaded, he peered in. Instinctively I ran and pulled the door shut to blot him out, then a silent shriek at my stupidity sent me back to turn the key in the door, by which time he’d moved to the adjoining window.

As he ran round the outside of the bungalow I closed the inner doors, my brother’s bedroom, the bathroom whose dimpled glass I knew he wouldn’t be able to see through (but was unprepared for the shock of my own open-mouthed, tear and mucus-stained face in the mirror), the lounge and my parents’ bedroom until I stood in the dark hall, hearing his raised voice at the back door above the blood-rushing heartbeat in my head.

He shouted to me for several minutes but what I presume was shame at my eventual capitulation has blotted out what exactly he said, how he eventually persuaded me to return to the kitchen, to unlock the door, to go back across the road with him to the place which, having reached the end of my endurance, I had run from, probably less than half an hour previously. Neither is the precise timescale of what happened next very clear, but as well as the awe with which I was greeted I remember that after delivering a lecture about the unacceptability of bullying he made the entire school, including me and the sharp-fingered tormentor behind me, sit in silence with hands on heads for a five full minutes.

Proper epic

Woken by an echoing conversation concerning a clothes prop I lay and contemplated the bareness of the new room whose strangeness – no curtains, no carpets - had delayed my getting to sleep the night before.

While Mum and Dad continued to talk in the shade beneath my window I climbed out of bed for my very first morning view, limited by the chest high windowsill. The high sky – much more of it than I had been used to - hummed with an immaculate blueness which failed to enhance the bare earth of the garden, rough with bricks and lumps of cement, a long rectangle meagrely delineated by three strands of wire threaded through stumpy, still-white concrete posts.

The voices stopped and I looked down and sideways as Dad came into view, monochrome in the black of hair and trousers and billowing white shirt, becoming vivid as he stepped from the shadow of the house across the sandy scrape of unmade road and into the flickering, swishing long grass, the green intensity of which was chalked by sunlight catching the ridged roughnesses. The trees where he was heading were a mass of dark slender trunks and I regretted that I had slept so late, wished that I was striding through the meadow with him, to find a strong branch of the right length, with a fork at the right height for propping up the newly-strung washing line.

Now, whenever I recall this, the memory is accompanied by a cliché soundtrack of big orchestra, silhouetted-man-walking-into-sunset film music – the ‘Good the Bad and the Ugly’ perhaps or ‘The Magnificent Seven’.

Five ‘don’ts’ and one ‘do’

I don’t taste food when I’m cooking in case it tastes horrible and I have to find something else to serve up.

I don’t research destinations before I visit so as to be able to discover them without prejudice once I arrive.

I don’t read the blurb on the cover of a book to remind myself of the story just before I start reading, knowing that it informed my decision to buy it in the first place.

If asked “have you any questions” when embarking on a new course I don’t ask about the content, on the assumption that if I’ve decided to apply it will be fine, and that the discovery will be part of the learning process.

I don’t – cannot – read guidelines and instructions on how, for example, to set up a blog page, because I don’t know what I need to know before I’ve found out what I don’t know.

I do like printmaking because I can proceed with blind optimism and imperfect remembrance and more often than not the results are a delightful surprise.

Unprotected

She’d spent the first week rehearsing lust, which didn’t go unnoticed by his wife who was also her aunt. Having been taken the same way, when only a couple of years older, this aunt smiled, understood and did her best to most tactfully warn.

In the second week, unheeding but alone and no less hungry, she bought a bikini in the sale and sunbathed, toasting her body along with her imagination as she read on the beach. Tall for her age, and the pre-formed bikini top promising far more than it could possibly fulfil, she caught the eye of a Triumph rider named Trevor. Before she clambered, still in her bikini, onto the back of his blue bike, she gave him directions to a beach she knew, secluded and well away from town.

She was just fourteen.

Premature

I didn’t exactly sprint down the hill - it wasn’t my style – and as well as the residue of self-protection was the painfully recent remembrance of the hard-eyed Malayan, her scalpel blade flashing and tweezers snatching around my most tender areas. A midday of blue and eye-screwed brightness, birdsong and a well-washed denim dress, smiling shoppers toiling bags towards me, returning from the town. I smiled too, full to the brim with joy: blissfully lacking anticipation of the crushing sense of responsibility which would later overwhelm us.

He wouldn’t be expecting me: he’d dropped me off before eight that morning and planned to pick me up after six, a third successive Saturday we’d spent apart. Hearing me rattle open the door, he came to the top of the stairs, paintbrush in hand, enquiring and concerned. I, a bit breathless: “They weighed her – they said her weight’s OK – we can fetch her now – we can bring Julia Kate home!”

Rose tinted Stillington

The locals called it ‘Stilly’ – a South Durham pit village where the pit was long gone but the community remained in the two-up two-down Victorian terraced houses.

And it was this sense of community that she pondered on as she sat surrounded by scattered children’s books and an appreciative crowd of mothers, their pyjama-ed children running in and out of the front door which opened directly onto the warm September evening.

The women mostly had grown up together, their mutual familiarity felt close and warm, their conversation easy and lacking the hidden agendas of the spiky-edged social sparring she encountered among the randomly assembled occupants of the new housing estates (more interested in the books too) and for a few minutes she was envious, recognising facets of sociability she knew was incapable of – a lack of nature far more than of nurture.

The book party was a good one – a genuine belief in the benefits of reading meant that money was more willingly spent there than in some areas, although as usual she’d not insisted on payment on the day, knowing that that would cause difficulties.

“Three weeks – I’ll phone you when the order comes” ... but as it happened she met the girl who’d hosted the party (the local stripper apparently – she was certainly an attractive lass) in town the day the order arrived.

“The money’s all got in, it’s in an envelope in the sideboard drawer ... but you’ll have to go and fetch it yourself because I took the kids and left him last week ... would you deliver my order to the Women’s Refuge.”

Identity crisis

The headline to the brief newspaper report was ’50 headless Vikings.'

An ancient burial pit had been found near the Dorset coast containing headless bodies of young men.

Expert archaeologists declared they had been decapitated.

Expert archaeologists thought the deed was probably done by Anglo Saxons.
Expert archaeologists identified the headless bodies as Scandinavian invaders.
Expert archaeologists came to this conclusion 'after examining teeth samples' ...

Misplaced confidence

A rare treat, just Dad and me going down to town on a Saturday morning, and wonderful too in that he was enjoying just me, a recognition which transformed the weekday familiar high street into a bright and newly fascinating bazaar.

‘I’ve got a good idea – we’ll go home a different way’ - a treat intended both for him and for me, but when he headed further into town I was sure he was mistaken and would get us both lost, but didn’t like to say so because I didn’t want to make him feel silly.

Dubiously I held his hand as he took a secret muddy path beside the station, ragged-edged with yellow-flowered weeds, a thin, bramble-wrapped hawthorn hedge the only barrier between us and the railway lines, beyond which the ground dropped out of sight down to the wide grey-green river.

On our left were the blank red brick backs of the high street shops and beyond them a steep, grime-grassed bank, strewn with a litter of rusty cans, chip-wrappings and slit, grey-stained mattresses, which had somehow been manhandled over the sagging, square-meshed fences strung between angled-iron poles.

These I noticed, but their ugliness had little impact since I was by then in a state of terror since it was obvious, from the frequent patches of burnt cinders every yard or so along the muddy path, that there was every likelihood that the path itself would at any moment bust into flames: I could not be certain that Dad had recognised this danger and was torn between wanting to warn him and not wanting to undermine his confidence.

After a mute twenty minutes, the path reached the rough cropped grass of a field which adjoined the spinney known as ‘The Hangings’ and I sighed with relief at danger passed, now fully confident that Dad would protect me from the next potential hazard: the man who lived in these woods who, as everybody knew, captured and ate children.

early March weekend

Long weekend away, partly for some catch-up time with husband - because we're both busy with at home interests we make sure to arrange the occasional trip together, and this was to check out some of his family's Leicestershire graveyards - and then to our granddaughters' birthday party - fascinating to see how their personalities are growing and changing.

Picnic preparation

Sunlight through the open doorway laying milk chocolate rectangles across the plain of the Marley-tiled floor, hinged with warm cream up the wall beyond which, black hair and white shirt silhouetted against the bright garden, Dad fold-wraps sandwiches and slices of home made fruit cake in waxy paper.

My brother and I, eager to speed the departure, unusually harmonious in our shared anticipation, running, giggling, bumping in doorways, bizarrely trying to disperse our overload of excitement by taking it in turns to sniff the revolting odour of some sort of purple yellow seaweed fern on the table in the hall.

Disbelieving, jigging frustration because Mum is sitting in the little-used, cold-from-no-sun front room sewing - hurriedly hemming the red spotted white skirt she has almost finished – she tells me it’s ‘circular’ in a way that makes that fact rare and important and I understand that part of the pleasure of the day for her will be wearing that skirt (but wonder why she didn’t finish it last night so we could be on our way.)

We sit on separate saddles fixed to Dad’s crossbar, my brother in front because he’s smaller and wriggles against me, Dad behind, his arms either side, his breath blowing my hair as he pedals, legs up and down, knees bumping feet if we don’t keep them still on the black, flat - barred footrests.

Mum carries the food in the big loose-woven wicker basket on the front of her bike, towels and buckets and spades and cardigans piled above the scalloped edge, smiling and pleased with her skirt and in anticipation of the day.

But here my picture ends – was that the day I got lost in the dunes? was scared by a giant green crab lurking under the wet wooden groyne? cut my foot and was so overwhelmed with contrariness that I screamed as she tried to put a plaster on, knowing that I was behaving badly? – I cannot remember, but I wonder how she managed to cycle in a circular skirt, smiling.

Late Spring Spawn

March: in normal years the pond is full.
All twenty plus frogs mated and spawned.
Rarely is the surface empty, rarely are the evenings quiet.
Carousing, calling, froggies come lately. Pond-side stage-door johnnies panting.
Hoping against hope for even later females.

Much Abbreviated Resumé of Character of Husband

Motorbikes are my husband’s raison d’être.
Although he says he couldn’t live without me.
Realistically, he’d be unhappier without them.
Cooking and shopping, he already does it.
He’d maybe miss my alien (lack of) humour, my stay-at-home inclination, my weight on the pillion seat (when adjusting the chain) and the music I play that he doesn’t like. He definitely would miss me making his bed.

Not of time but of perception

March was the month my status changed forever.
Although I’d done absolutely nothing to cause such an alteration, I found myself suddenly aged.
Regular exercise, eating healthily – five a day fruit, four a week gym – made not a jot of difference.
Cheese and wine six times a week (and occasionally chocolate) while not ideal, were not responsible either.
Henceforth, whether I was caught shoplifting, knocked down by a rampaging elephant, or climbed Everest stark naked things would be different. From the day that phone call came – the 3rd - whatever I did, however well I did it, I would inevitably be described as “Grandmother.”

In December, in vain, is strange

Imagine, if you would, that you are stood in the doorway looking into a room of about fifteen feet square; the room itself is dark, but light from behind you illuminates it to some extent.

And imagine that this light is reflected back at you from what seems to be hundreds of strands of that shiny narrow ribbon used to tie birthday presents suspended from the ceiling; (I haven’t done an accurate calculation, but you should assume that each ribbon is hung no more than a few inches from its neighbours). The ribbons (silver? red? blue? – you can choose) differ in length, their ends between one and three feet from the floor, and tied to each is a tiny, shiny CD, each scribble-patterned surface glinting. Diagonally across the room, on the opposite wall, is another doorway; there is no light beyond but you are able to pick out its somewhat indistinct outline.

Your task (of course there’s a task!) is to make your way across the room through the hanging ribbons, as directly or indirectly as you please, to the other doorway, and on your way you must randomly collect at least six and no more than ten of these CDs, which you cut from the ribbons with the scissors provided (warning: scissors are a sharp pointed instrument).

On reaching the far doorway it becomes possible to read the words that are written on your CDs, whereupon you discover that common to each is the word ‘love’, the other words - song titles or phrases from songs – will, when taken together, give as good and authoritative a definition of love as you are likely to find anywhere.

[Successful submission to Love6S]

6S Truth, daring and developing ideas

While knowing that I could write, in the manner of 'can't everyone?' since I inevitably assume that if I can do it must be easy, I hadn't really considered myself to be 'a writer' as such, not quite considering the writing up of research in the same category. 6S, mentioned by Julia, looked interesting, became addictive and once I'd joined inspired me to try different voices. Now writing is taking over. My first post on 6S, Truth or Dare, referred to my 'boringly pedantic' style and expressed the hope that I would 'circumvent my instincts, dare to escape from the bounds of the proven, and colour in some of the monochrome facts which beg to be illuminated.' Not straying too far from reality was important but by adding 'a little bit of fantasy icing to the rich historical cake' of resource material - especially Tom's photo albums - has been truly satisfying for me.