Stutter

I have a slight stutter.

I keep it under raps.


People I know won't know about it. My parents are long gone, along with any other family members who would remember. My brother will have forgotten. I never told anybody since.

I'd forgotten myself until a few years ago until my response to a neighbour, catching me by surprise when I was deep in thought walking down steps past his house one day, came out all funny and non-sensical, followed by the juddering, puttering, ungainly fluttering of the ensuing stream of my attempted undoing.

Unravelling.

That's what it feels like.

I should look it up really. Try and make some sense of it, because I know it's complex. It's not just about speech in a muscular sense, it's about brain processing.

My brain works very fast. Probably most peoples' do, it would be hard to compare rates, but I hazard a guess that most other peoples' work in a more orderly fashion than mine does. My brain absorbs stuff without my even knowing about it and it tends to scan the whole archive before it arrives at a thought. Or a sentence. All this at super fast broadband rate. I can feel it doing it. The chemicals have a heady effect.

But I digress, as usual.

My inner self has been scanning......






Back to stuttering.

Not to float my own boat, but just to give you the picture, I was a bright child. ( Or so I was told, frequently by doting family members. My Dad disapproved, kept his praise to the bare minimum, preferring to engage me in interesting conversations about science and meteorology, or activities like chess or gardening. He was a very wise man. )

So, an early talker and thinker was I by all accounts. I delighted my family when, at the tender age of 18 months, I had to stay in hospital for a bit and on visiting, a nurse told my mum that she'd been telling me to stop crying because there were poorly babies in there and I had replied that Lizzie was poorly too.

A sad little tale, trotted out ad-nauseum to demonstrate my brightness, but also, for my mother, tortured by not being able to stay with me, an illustration of the nurses' apparent lack of care for me. I became her little shadow for a long time after being released from hospital prison, worried by any slight separation from her and I know it caused her great pain.


Anyway.  My brain and speech were apparently functioning really well at that stage. It was going to school that seemed to initiate the havoc, probably partly as a follow on to that not wanting to be separated from my mother problem, but also because it was all too over-stimulating for me.

Everyone will have tales about what school felt like. Early school for me was about being bombarded with "learning opportunities" (it was in the sixties; there was a lot of experimentation). I could already read before I got there, thanks to my mum and other family members, so I was left on my own amongst the books for much of the day, which is where I felt most comfortable. Being dragged away to "play" with funny little bricks and sticks which I now understand as an early introduction to maths, was one of the myriad of things that had a stultifying effect on me. I felt very sorry to disappoint people, but I could not make the connection between these things and the strange hieroglyphics on the board that were apparently numbers. I quite liked the threading coloured wooden beads on a string game, although I was much more interested in the coloured patterns they made than attempting to count them and divide them up with the flimsy bits of paper marked with the same weird signs that I struggled to get much sense out of from the board. Counting was ok. Counting was a different form of labelling, it was sums I hated. They served no apparent purpose nor were they very entertaining. It drove me quite mad. I developed a recurring nightmare involving spinning, revolving numbers retreating from me then returning at high speed ominously and threateningly in a dark, soupy space that was probably the non-comprehending part of my brain. Some nights it was interspersed with the recurring nazi dream involving soldiers with guns looking for me whilst I hid in various small spaces. Being left to watch All our Yesterdays on my own and allowed to watch war films at 5 influenced my dreams.

Playing with sand didn't engage me either. We were taken to the sea-side a alot as kids, my brother and I. I enjoyed that. It was a whole experience, the anticipation, the arrival at the sudden vast expanse of space and sky, the air, the smells, the sounds, the light, the rituals; the kettle and the camping stove, the hunt for the best spot for the deckchairs, the journey down to the sea with a bucket to collect water with the stones and the shells bruising and cutting your feet, the hazards of slimy slippy seaweed and its black flies, the lurking lethal jellyfish, the snapping, chasing dogs who made you change your straight course and lose sight of where to return to .......

I digress again........

What to do with the unnaturally silky, dry sand in its tray, emptied of shells, or fag ends or bits of sanded glass or oil smears or discoveries of any other sort except for strange objects like aluminium funnels and plastic bottles so unnaturally placed on top of its sterile unfamiliar texture filled me with an anxiety that entangled itself with great boredom. It was beyond my ken. I remember a great urge to sleep. One day, I spied the rocking horse. Every day thereafter, I would hog that rocking horse. I could not be got off the rocking horse, not even for books. My mother was summoned.

Never described as a difficult child, never even really confronted face to face for any of my "aberrations", it seems, on reflection, that I was generally left to go my own sweet way, that is, until things got too far out of hand. Of course, I refused to go to school if I was not allowed to go on the rocking horse. I was told I had to share it, but I knew no-one else was as obsessed with it in the way I was. And anyway, I knew that my sense of time was quite different to everyone elses'. What they deemed as "sufficient" or "enough" was entirely different to my perception.

I can't remember how that problem was resolved.

I can, however, remember how I resolved an eating problem.

Each day in the school canteen, we were expected to eat everything on our plates, including the pudding. To say I was a bit of a faddy eater would, as you might guess, be putting it at the far end of the scale away from my particular problem. I had no appetite whatsoever for food. Full stop. Mealtimes were an annoying interruption to playing in my world and so the school canteen was a battlefield for me. I ate so little, it became a concern to the dinner ladies. I was asigned my own dinner lady. She would cheerily encourage me to eat " just another spoonful " all through the meal, until, that is, unable to contain my revulsion for semolina pudding one day, I just vomited the whole meal up over the dinner table.

I apologise for that last digression. It's an indulgence to relate it and it's not strictly relevant but I like to remember it because I felt so wonderful afterwards. No-one ever bothered trying to get me to eat again, not even my own mother, who had, prior to that, done a similar thing at home, sitting by me for hours trying to encourage me to swallow some hideously healthy concoction from sheep's brain or pig's liver or some other nutritious part of an animal she had lovingly prepared specially for me.

I was a kind, thoughtful child. I didn't like upsetting people, but I did struggle to keep them happy.


So the stuttering. I can't really remember how old I was. Perhaps 8 or 9. It was in the Autumn term and there were preparations for the Christmas nativity. I was chosen to be the narrator. I was often chosen to read because of my "nice reading voice". I'd carefully toned down my Liverpudlian, not really Scouse, accent that marked me out as different in my "woollyback" school by then. I knew I had to if I wanted to avoid being dubbed "posh"and bullied in the toilets and on the way home from school.

My mum was thrilled, of course. It was quite a task because I was asked to learn the words off by heart rather than read them. We set to each night and I learned it. I was word perfect. I managed to reiterate it perfectly at a couple of rehearsals at school until one day, I'm not sure why, my memory skipped a few lines and jumped ahead. I could hear that the sense had gone out of what I was saying and  I heard a few titters. I can't remember why it was funny because I can't remember any of the words involved now, or even the theme of the play. They were usually obscure. It was a progressive school in many respects.

This jumping ahead, skipping the sense of the words, trying to pull out some sense from the remainder of the words which had become just sounds coming out of my mouth automatically, so perfectly had I learned them off by heart, caused some part of me to halt whilst my mouth ran on and performed its function totally unaided by memory or sense. I  wonder what it sounded like. I became very detached as I sallied forth, possibly partly telligible, but probably mostly nonsensical in the usual, recognisable sense. I had become a free agent, floating in some alien world where words were random things that existed entirely separately from meaning.

The teacher supervising was undeterred, unmoved even, if only outwardly, as I remember it. I told my mother I did not want to do it any more and after a certain amount of wrangling and arguing with me, then with the teacher in charge, I was allowed to play the recorder with a couple of other friends instead which was much more fun. I can't remember which poor child was given the task to do instead of me.

I wasn't unduly bothered by the incident, or I at least managed to forget it due to the relief of being releived of the task and so, when, some time afterwards, I was asked to read a passage from a book out loud in class and my eye kept running on ahead of my speech once more, so that I had to keep repeating sentences whose middle had been skipped, then repeat words that had not come out coherently, then emphasise the first letters of words that I found my voice not even uttering, I became aware of what it was to stutter and I was extremely startled by it. I began to pause heavily with anticipation at the beginning of reading, determined to form the first sound precisely, coherently, and the more determined I became, the more the memory of how to do that eluded me.

Somehow, my conscious and unconscious had swapped places. What had been involuntary became a task that required conscious effort. What my conscious brain used to take care of i.e. the pacing of the eye, the tracking of the words, had been delegated to my wandering, meandering, whole encompassing unconscious brain that wouldn't stay focussed on one point.


At home, I briefly became an elective mute. I think I even stopped reading books. Alarmed, my mother summoned her psychological guru; her older brother, my uncle; Wall.

My uncle Wall had been my best pal up until the age of 6. We'd shared a house with him, my nana and my other uncle until we moved away across the water from Liverpool to Runcorn. He'd taught me lots of things, mainly songs, which involved remembering words of course. So, responding to my mother's cry for help, he came to stay with us a while and showed me how to train our naughty dog, Prince, to sit and stay for biscuits, attempted to help cure my insomnia by teaching me to think about relaxing each and every little muscle in my body and finally got me to sing some of our favourite duets together, like On Top of Old Smokey and Yellow Submarine. Words seemed to come out easily if attached to tunes. What a discovery ! I began to say the odd word again, music running alongside in my head.

Well maybe Christmas or Summer came and I got over it, because I can't exactly remember it being a huge apparent problem to me after that. I say apparent because, ever since the incident of nonsense with the neighbour, I have been aware that actually, my spoken memory for words is quite bad. When I speak, I often feel that the correct word has eluded me. It so often feels as if it comes out all wrong. Can I try that again and not only that;

the correct word, the most salient one, if I do find it, is often one I cannot seem to pronounce, that is, summon to the lips. It slips away into the far distant regions of the mind and if I try to chase it, I get tremendously lost. I spend a lot of time mentally running after elusive words and trying to catch my meaning before it collapses through want of support,

if that's not too abstract a description of what it's like,

to feel lost,

in a sea of language,

and thoughts.


I sound fluent most days. I might talk nonsense that sounds like some kind of sense but isn't quite the sense I meant it to have. At best, I contradict myself a lot as I oscillate between words and meaning.

Sometimes I might flounder and hesitate. The right words have defected altogether. I might say a whole stream of things that seem to come from the ether and not my own mind at all. I get into deep water. I suppose I'm always bobbing in it, except when;

I occasionally dry up.


I was given to shaking when speaking for a short time. The muscles in my neck and head became so tense they would judder with the effort it entailed.

Of course, the beginnings of all this coincided with things happening in my life that caused me some distress.

It's my personal reaction to such things I suppose.

That phase passed, thank god.  And now, nearing 60, as my fingers fly over the keyboard effortlessly - I'm so glad I learned to touch type - I can free my mind to wander and wonder and summon all the words it ever forgot or stumbled over saying.

Because I'm writing, not speaking.  And you'll never know, or suspect, I have even the slightest hint o f a speech impediment.


Would you ?

Would you ?

Nurse Moon

She saved me.

I was born with the chord around my neck.

Nurse Moon's swift action with her scissors,

cutting the chord,

gave me breath.

I breathed,

but didn't cry.

The family, gathered downstairs,

waited anxiously

for some time,

it is said.

I didn't disturb the household

for many many days to come.

Except with my uncanny

quietness,

my emotions expressed

only by weak little gestures

my tiny, strangulated cry

audible only

if you held me

very very close.

Just Be You

Someone I respect has been encouraging me to just be myself, which is very empowering, to use an over-worked, but nontheless, stimulating phrase.

So, I've been kind of exploring this idea in a typically circumlocutory, tentative, exploratory way, because, even after reaching the advanced age of 58, I'm not quite sure who " myself " is.

And, I say " kind of " because, although I'm not American, I've started to use that phrase more and more, partly due to reading American tweets on twitter, but also because I imagine it reflects my uncertainty succinctly.

I'm not sure about anything at all for many reasons.

I know that you will understand this point of view, even if you are more sure.

To be sure means to be fixed and I want to be fluid.

To be sure means that you have an idea of what truth really is and if I have one fundamental belief, it is probably that truth is an ever-shifting notion that we must constantly pursue and never catch up with.

So, I've been tentatively trying to be myself, which entails a certain amount of trial and error. And recently, I've been thinking about clothes.

Clothes are tricky things. I could probably, along with everyone else, write a fat tome about clothes I have worn, clothes I haven't worn and clothes I wish I'd bought or items of clothing I've lost. These would all tell various stories about us, maybe portray little snapshots of us at significant points of our lives, all of which might serve as small building blocks in the picture of what we might be like now, at this point in time.

I've bought some new clothes and even tried wearing some of my daughter's clothes that she put out for the charity bag. Some of these I have kept. I'm beginning to look like my inner bag lady some days, if that's not too derogatory a phrase for a woman who lives on the street. I have some lovely going-out clothes now and, apart from being a tad too big since I seem to have lost weight recently, I do actually resemble an eighties version of myself sometimes which is nice because I remember feeling quite happy with myself in that era.

I'm a bit of a horder, so although I like to give things away, there are just some odd things I can't bear to part with.

For example:

Each time I come across my wellies, my heart kind of melts.

I've had them since I was 15. They're black, one size or maybe just a half size too small for me now in my post-child bearing, past mid-life female form, but I still cram my feet into them when I need them and they are still quintessentially me.

I bought these wellies because my boyfriend at the time told me to. He was an interesting person, into  fishing and woodworking and other things I thought were nice when I was 15. I'd been fishing with him a few times. My Dad was an avid fisherman and I think I might have borrowed one of his rods. I didn't really want to catch a fish. I just liked the romance of the activity. This boyfriend, let's call him Wyn, was a true outdoorsman. He loved nothing better than to sit, in all weathers, on the bank of our local canal under a huge umbrella and fix his gaze on the float. He also thought it his duty to walk the canal towpath regularly to check for things thrown in the water that might poison the fish. He seemed to love fish. He had a keepnet, but I dont remember him using it. He didn't catch a fish often, but if he did he would handle it very carefully and skillfully, removing the hook from its mouth gently so as to not damage it, inspect it closely, then plop it back in the water.

When Wyn invited me to go night fishing, I was very excited. He advised me to get some good wellies and even told me where to buy them and so I did. They were expensive and I didn't have much spare cash at the time. I had a Saturday job at Littlewoods, a department store in Shopping City, but since working there, my Dad had stopped giving me pocket money and most of my wages went on going to see bands in Liverpool and Manchester.

So, I can remember being a little reluctant to spend a lot of money on wellies. They're made by Dunlop. Black, proper wellies that don't come up to your knees, and it's therefore not surprising that 43 years later, their linings are blackened by water and snow coming in over their tops.

I got the wellies and went night fishing. I don't remember catching fish, but I do remember the moon being bright and lighting the way and the water on the canal. I remember the metallic tang of the cheap beer we brought and drank from the can. I remember the fine rain and the dampening dew of the earliest morning and the smell and shuffling sound of our Belstaffs.

We didn't talk much at all. I had to listen to instruction because otherwise it would have been either dangerous or fruitless. Canals are potentially hazardous places and fish have good ears apparently.

So we spent the night together sitting near, but not next to each other.

We didn't think it brought us romantically together. We didn't talk about our shared experience or passion or communicating without talking if we ever referred to it afterwards. We didn't even kiss, except, as I remember, a little peck goodbye as our ways home parted and I went down the hill and he went off up another.

It was just night fishing.

We got engaged eventually.

Then we split up.

And I've still got the wellies.

Along with a couple of other beautiful things he made in wood.

I sometimes look at them and think, yes, they really do reflect a part of who I was and who I am still.

Perhaps I should just shove my feet into these wellies whenever I'm wondering just who am I.

Precipitation

Rain,

Snow,

Sleet,

dew,

a casting down

( of the evil angels from Heaven),

The separation of a solid substance

from a solution,

in alchemy.


Act of falling

headlong.

Unwise

haste.

Rash rapidity.

Friday Phrase

Each child born,

So fragile, yet,

The will to live within so strong.

Not all are nurtured,

They struggle to survive;

HANDLE WITH CARE

Female

We're not supposed to voice our differences,             ( Medusa's shadow is cast upon the wall behind                
                                                                                      us)
For fear of fixing each other in stone;                          as we exchange our gifts;

          those ideas and dreams that we struggle to transform into living, pulsing, moving entities,

All the time fearing their fragility,                                Worrying that they might fragment,

Their potential for being disfigured,                              Into rigidity.



The female power,                                                      The power that is female,

An energy we have labelled,                                       The imagined thing we feel we have identified,

All that it is,                                                                All that it is,

Which remains hidden deep,                                       Within the labyrinth,

It's transforming fire,                                                   Forever flickering,

Perpetual light,                                                            Through perpetual night.



             So here we stand together, shifting shadows on the wall of the cave,

And here is the fire,                                                    And here is my gift,

                                              
                      Feel its weight                     Feel its lightness


                                It leaves a space within me

                                Carry it with you forevermore

A Woman's Gift

We're not supposed to voice our differences,

For fear of fixing each other in stone;

Medusa's shadow is cast upon the wall behind us

as we exchange our gifts;

those ideas and dreams

that we struggle to transform into

living, pulsing, moving entities,

All the time fearing their fragility,

Worrying that they might fragment,

or be disfigured into rigidity.


The female power,

The power that is female,

An energy we have labelled,

Imagining we have identified

All that it is,

Remains hidden deep,

Within the labyrinth,

It's transforming fire

Perpetual light,

Forever flickering,

Through perpetual night.


So here we stand together,

Shifting shadows

on the wall of the cave,

And here is the fire.

And here is my gift.

Feel its weight,

Feel its lightness.

It leaves a space within me,

Carry it with you ever more.

Out of time - a twitter Haiku

Walking alongside,

watching your moves,

feeling like Ginger,

but looking like Harpo.

Out of step.

Out   of
 time.


Success in failure.

Me in a Hat

Picture this; I’m leaning across a pile of clothes in a boutique,

feeling the brim of a hat.  A middle-aged lady, out of place

though not caring,  

so thrilled by the appearance  

in actuality

the re-appearance,

of a hat.

Look again.

I’m on the cusp of old age

I’m familiar with these things

Styles come and go

and come again.

They’re usually in different materials, 

which adds to the effect that

this is not real.

Style as an affectation

It’s an illusion

But this hat,

with its black, slightly wavy brim, silk ridged ribbon round its crown

is the same hat

made of the same soft felt.

Hat incarnate

that I wore throughout my early teens

which collided with the early seventies

(a sepia-toned time when Laura Ashley was queen.

May she rest in peace)

Transported,

I felt its felt 

and thought about the time I travelled

on the train with my friend in the day

to dirty Manchester in the rain.

Me in that hat.

We arrived in the pub

Incongruous in our precarious

Silly elegance

Our two lads so sheepish and cocky in their scruffy best.

I kept looking across to the spartan houses 

with their small high windows,

and their dearth of gardens,

(we were wealthy in gardens),

then across to the drinking men,

mainly men, in the middle of the 

Saturday on the outskirts of grainy Manchester.

We were young, in love with life

A rich tapestry we were told,

To keep us going.

I am nearly old now, 

but I still

get a thrill

out of wearing that hat,

in my garden,

or, occasionally,

On a Saturday,
And usually

in the rain. 

If I ever get a tattoo

If I ever get a tattoo,

It would be the symbol of a heart,

Cut in two,

An empty outline,

Drawn in red,

Or maybe blue,

Divided in half,

One for each shoulder.

Yes, you felt it coming;

Two teardrops,

To remind me of you.

Trilogy - Encounter No2

No. 2  Resolution of a kind

Some time later. Maybe a year. Stella will sit in the designated waiting area, watching people and trying not to look as if she is. A young woman will park her bicycle outside, come through the double glass doors and sit down opposite her with one leg under, then take out a book. Stella will discretely study her and think that she looks posh. There are certain clues to indicate this. A smart shortish dress with blue stripes, short, chic haircut will be the main ones. These, along with the bicycle which she will have noted has a basket on the front. Stella will wonder about the bike. Is it common to ride bikes round here ? Like Cambridge ? The girl will start chatting to one of the girls on the reception desk. Stella will wonder why she has come into this place since it is currently being used for interviewing prospective students. It is obvious that she is already a student or employee at the university by the way she knows the girl on the reception desk. She will wonder if she's going to take over her job at some point.

The relentless drone of the video advertising the success of the university will annoy Stella to the point of her nearly going outside for a break, but she will resist, knowing that her daughter will notice if she leaves and this may unsettle her.

Her daughter will be involved in an interview. It will be conducted in an open, group session far down at the other end of the room and Stella will be able to watch how the lady with the very short grey hair looks up admiringly at her daughter who is much taller than the lady and she will notice how the lady looks particularly at the delicate expanding tattoo style choker that her daughter will have put around her neck for the occasion.

Then, a couple will come noisily through the double doors, struggling with a large portfolio, several files and a giant unidentifiable structure made out of what will appear to be paper mache and chicken wire. Stella will presume this is a piece of art that one of them has created and she will think, disparagingly and unkindly, that it looks hideous. She will watch as they wrestle with it all and they try to explain their business to the friendly and courteous receptionist. Stella will decide that the female is about 17 and the bloke about 30 odd. Stella will take in the dishevelled shoulder length badly dyed pink hair, tight drain pipe jeans, old pumps and revealing skimpy top of the young woman. She will notice and raise an eyebrow at the way the bloke keeps running his hand up and down the girl's back, side and bottom and how he keeps chipping in and interrupting when the young woman tries to answer the receptionist's questions. She will also take note of the fact that the young woman doesn't seem to care about these two facts, which will be indicated by the way she keeps nodding and smiling at the bloke.

While all this is taking place, a huddle of young people will shuffle out through some kind of exit barrier which is situated at the opposite end of the interview section and seems to be the entrance to the college facilities. They will all be dressed in an interesting and arty way and will be laughing and talking to each other confidently as they move through the waiting area together and leave through the glass entrance doors. Stella will think how affluent and posh they all look and sound, despite their apparent scruffiness and will sigh a little sigh to herself. As a wave of anxiety washes over her, she will take a surreptitious side-long glance at the interview end of the room to see if she can still see her daughter. She will have to scan around, however, before she will find her now sitting at a round table with some other young people, apparently taking part in a discussion. Her expression will be pleasant and smiling, but Stella will know that she feels intimidated by this situation and another wave of anxiety will wash over her.

The young woman opposite will get up suddenly and, stuffing her book into her little leather backpack, rush out of the exit doors, smiling a brief farewell to her friend on reception. Stella will see her through the glass doors, rapidly unlocking her bike and wheeling it quickly across the road in the same direction as the group of young people. The bloke's voice suddenly will then draw her attention back as he fires questions at the receptionist about some course that the girl he is with seems to be applying for. She will strain her ears to try to understand the situation being described and although she knows her imagination and prejudices are filling in the gaps, she will deduce that the young girl is trying to get onto a course that she is not really qualified for and that the bloke accompanying her thinks he can assist by being bullish and pushy. Stella will see the receptionist ask them to take a seat and then she will go through a door located in the wall behind Stella and be gone for some time, leaving the reception desk unattended.

Stella will scan the end of the room again to see how her daughter looks. She will catch her smiling and nodding as someone else speaks and then laughing at some remark another person makes. Stella will wonder if her daughter is really as relaxed as she looks and will decide to ask her as few questions as possible afterwards. Slightly to the right and over the other side of the waiting area, Stella will catch sight of the couple kissing and manhandling each other as they wait for the return of the secretary. Stella's stomach will churn in response to this.

Some few minutes later, the secretary will emerge from the room behind her and go towards the canoodling couple. Simultaneously, the group interview session that Stella's daughter is involved in will end and the students will stand, draw back their chairs and move back towards the interview area where they will have laid all their art work out at the beginning of the interview some half an hour ago. Stella will watch as her daughter, still listening to another student who is looking up at her and talking, shifts her tall frame elegantly as they negotiate the obstacle course that is composed of chairs and tables. Out of the corner of her right eye, Stella will notice the girl return to her reception desk and the bloke get up after kissing his girl. She will not have any difficulty hearing his booming voice explain to the receptionist that he has to leave now to attend an interview himself for a job in the area and will leave through the glass doors, waving at his girl who will now be hunched over herself, chewing her thumb nail. Stella's stomach will churn once more at the sight of this.

After some indiscernible amount of time, Stella will see her daughter walking rapidly towards her, carrying her portfolio and the carrier bag full of sketchbooks. She will wear what Stella will recognise as a frozen smile on her face and Stella's stomach will churn for the umpteenth time. Stella will rise and hold her hand out as if to take the bag of sketchbooks from her daughter, but her daughter will say no it's ok she can manage and will lead the way out through the glass doors, barely stopping to say a brief thank you to the girl on reception.

Stella will follow suit and have to almost run to catch up with her daughter as she makes her rapid exit and heads off across the street, hardly looking for oncoming traffic. Once by her side, Stella will look side-long up at her daughter's face and see the tears welling in her eyes. Come on, get me out of here, her daughter will say quietly and, Stella recognises, with suppressed anger.

These things take time to anatomise. As a parent you learn not to pry or to react too quickly. Well if you don't, you'll never get to understand anything at all. During the 180 mile drive home, Stella will talk about everything in the world except the interview. Her daughter will remain quiet and look out at the passing relentless monotony of the East Anglian countryside as they drive along the only road out of Norwich which is the endless A47. By the time they get to Sheffield, she might start talking about how posh and intimidating she found the woman who interviewed her. Stella will remember how admiringly the woman had gazed up at her tall and elegant daughter, but, of course, won't reveal this memory to her daughter. And so the gradual unravelling of experience in parallel will unfold on the long journey home.