Piece Four: Mothers and Daughters.

From A Life in Short Pieces: Piece Four:

Mothers and Daughters.

By mother died more than 20 years ago just about the time when my first children’s novel Theft was published. She read this novel in proof, staying up overnight to finish it. As the novel was substantially based on a fictionalised tale from her own youth - as I have said in Piece One (scoll down), she was always the heroine of her own stories - I was quite anxious about her reaction.

Always sparing in praise, she had to admit that she really liked the novel and couldn’t put it down. She didn’t refute any of the contextual facts and information which I had researched without any reference to her. I was only sorry that she didn’t see Theft between hard covers know that the world respected my fiction.

My mother has always been there alongside me,  not quite haunting me but standing at my shoulder when I moved up the professional ladder and when all the books emerged, when my children had their own challenges and achievements.

 Part of that process has been that I often dream of her, still seeking her approval as I did when I was a little girl. The piece below, however, did not come from a dream. I think I had a kind of vision of her there with their arms raised at the top of my stairs. A ghost? I felt it was a kind of visitation and was compelled to write about it in these terms.

Translucent Butter Muslin

I wake up trembling –

time – ringing,

nerves vibrating

invoking the Angelus.

I see you standing on my landing

Dressed in yellow, arms raised

back-lit in translucent butter muslin:

this vision of you  pulses

like the Evening Star

before my eyes.

I see you in another place all rusty hair and

red fluffy coat. I see you in a blue crêpe dress,

toggled at the neck in amber.

Then I see you standing smiling.

My father stoops and slings his arm

 around your shoulder.

Best of all I see you standing

straight and crisp, blue uniformed

and silver buckle belted. But now again

you come to me, standing there,

arms raised, wearing yellow -

radiant in translucent butter muslin.

Work in Progress: The Door

The desk in the window was making a difference. This was, she thought, down to the light streaming in and the grass and the trees. It was easy to sit there for three or four hours and concentrate on a book or a blank, naked page. It was not so intimidating as the other place.

The other space which was the back room with its big dark door. She had wanted this to be the perfect workroom with a living fire, space for shelves and tables for papers.  And, of course,  a desk for the big computer.

But there came a day when she could not pass the door without a shudder or enter that room and had to move into this room with the sunny window.

She began to think that her revulsion the back room had something to do with essence, spirit. In her life she had glimpsed and heard things that she knew where not there. She’d learned not to speak of this because of the knowing looks, the half-smiles. As a child she’d been accused more than once of being away with the gypsies.

Now she thought about this essence, spirit, Perhaps the feeling of dread came from the spirit of some eighteenth century maid or wife for whom the room was a much feared place. Or perhaps it was world flooding in through the firecracker gateway of the computer: a world which was too vast, packed with too many people, too many things, too much pain, staining the screen with cruelty,

Then she thought, perhaps this revulsion was to do with her own guilt about work undone, tasks untackled. Or perhaps it was the timid soul which knew was at her core.

The morning in the sunny window space she decided to pull herself together, to get out of the house and away from its essence, its spirit. It would be too easy, she thought, to  stay locked in and fall asleep yet again,

So she had fled the house and driven out through  trees to find a calm. strange space where she could attend  to her life, manufacturing order out of chaos and make decisions to move forward.

She thought this new strength was all about being away from the house, freeing her from the inner strings that pulled her away from herself. Away from the dull routine which made her dislike the person she had become. She knew she was not that person. She had manufactured that person to meet the low expectations of her partner. She knew she loved him in her own way, She knew they were woven into each other after so many years, love or no love. Caring for him was no different to caring for herself, Revolting against him was revolting against herself.

It was complicated.

And it was truly best to get away often from the house and its threatening back room with its dark door.  Then the rest could fall into place.

Dead People Walking

Currently I am thinking quite intensely about ghosts. My Auntie Lily was a medium - you know, one of those ladies who would stand in a church hall and bring messages from the dead to anxious people. She was a dramatic women, remarkable in some of her perceptions.

I have seen a few ghosts in my time and some of them have crept into my stories. Then there is the seeing through time, which happens now and then on ancient pathways and in old buildings.

There was the woman who wandered about my house for a few years before fading from sight and sense. She had large bosoms and folded her hands together across her stomach. She seemed to offer no harm. My sceptical friend B, who used to come for a glass of wine after our pottery class, saw this woman and thereafter never went on the back corridor by the toilet which seemed to be her territory.

Then there was the child standing mournfully at the end of the bed in the rented cottage. And even more dramatically there was the column of bright light at the end of another bed in an hotel by Lake Maggiore in Italy. I felt certain that this amazing light was an angel of some kind. I blinked my eyes hard and flapped my hands but the thing stayed far too long. Then there were boys from another age playing in the street where B was born. And there was my mother, two years dead, standing at the top of the staircase, arms open wide.

More generally, there are the shadowy presences in buildings, lurking at the edge of my eyeline, or hiding behind the shadows of the afternoon. This haunted feeling has pursued me in recent years even to the deep south west of France where sighting and feelings have come on very strong and buildings kept vanishing.

Talking with my writer friend P today we speculated whether all novelists, whether they know it or not, develop these gifts of seeing through time and intuiting dead people walking. When I think of Auntie Lily I sometimes wonder if it's all in the blood and bound up with stories. They were great storytellers too, Lily and her sisters. I do find that many of my odd visions can creep into my stories and inhabit my characters - even though I've never dealt with these ghostly themes 'front on'.

But now I'm thinking that it's time to do just this. I've decided to test these feelings to the limit and I'm off in May all the way to the Languedoc to write a story that has been brewing inside my head for more than two years. It will be called, I think, At The Villa d'Estella.

I already have some sketches. Here's one:

'...Now I see old men about their canal business in those times, steering loads of coal and steel, bales of cloth, racks of wine. And now they fade and there is only the limpid beauty of the water, silver green, slate grey, alternating between ladder shadows of the straight trees slicing into the bright blue sky,

One hour into the journey I notice the boy, orange haired and eyes too bright for life. He's leaning backward gazing up at the sky, his long hair dropping towards the water like strands of fire. Beside him sits a tall young man in a crew necked sweater; no shirt. He's reading a worn black book. Occasionally he puts out a hand to stop the boy falling.

They are an odd pair. Father and son? No. Brothers? I have to settle for brothers. Even so, there is no resemblance. None. The younger is fair and freckle faced, the older heavier set and dark, his narrow face sardonic.

I have this prickle of unease...

Can't wait to get there and get on with it...

Wendy