Story

Anonymous was a Woman

Pandemic Memory

During the Pandemic, anxiety, naturally, ran very high. Our future suddenly became very uncertain. I can remember feeling very sobered by the knowledge that the whole world was united in suffering and anxiety. The pace of life slowed as movement and activity was curbed, it felt like living under water, everything was arduous, painstaking care had to be taken with everything; the notion of kindness arose, meaning consideration for the well being of others as well as one's own. This was good, but it heightened one's awareness to the point of fear and imbued every day with a sense of trepidation. Sleep was no longer as restful as it had been.

I read somewhere some time before about people dividing sleeping into two halves in Medieval times. The first sleep, around 9 o'clock, probably linked to natural tiredness, or exhaustion, according to your standing in society, lasted for a couple of hours, after which, there followed a period of wakefulness, called The Watch.

During this short interval, people would do all kinds of things, some rather surprising like visiting friends in other houses apparently, according to research by the historian Roger Ekirch, others nefarious, like stealing or even committing murders, though thankfully more commonly, people would spend it in much more productive ways like attending to bread making, beer brewing and other preparations for the following day, or simply having sex, which is probably the reason most of us are here.

I came across this rather lovely piece which I read as a poem but later discovered was an aire written by John Dowland, Court Musician to Elizabeth 1 and it evokes the care and worry one might have about someone one loves in wakeful, fretful dark hours of the night. An exquisite lullaby, a musical spell with the intention of bestowing restful sleep on the person in receipt of it. It can be read, I think, both as a gift from John Dowland to his beloved benefactor, in the certain knowledge that she was unwell and likely to die soon, ( for she did indeed die soon after he wrote it ), but also as something Queen Bess might want to gift someone who she knows would be missing in her absence;

Anonymous was a Woman

I reimagined it to be written by a woman, or at least, imagined a woman, ( perhaps Queen Bess ? ) lying awake, unable to sleep for worrying about her lover and how lost he will feel without her;

In 1603 she

wrote a poesy;

Anonymous, a woman awake

in the watches of the night,

worrying, wanting

comfort

for someone she's thinking of.

As the wolf time arrives,

she has dispelled the

uht-cearu

with her patch of a poem,

and perhaps her sunne rise

saw a secret smile upon

her lips.

-

Home - a lipogram

The sun fluttered on the leaves of the trees that formed the boundary of the garden. Name not known,
unnecessary to the beauty, Gustav's Beech Grove would not serve the memory well, yet the
bark of those ones she came upon much later would very well serve the memory.

The hours up to noon were spent at play when the house would become full of characters and
spaces to explore opened.

The afternoon was spent underneath the blackcurrant bushes or on the garden brush, a horse, of course.
Or, treasure was dug. Holes not too deep. The wash pole marked one spot. One shell marked another.

Each day revealed the colours there; the whole palette, the broadest bow that moves from place to place
the weather moves the spectrum the greyest shades belong to the densest cloud.

Those days when her sky was a flat grey, no sun to seek out depth on the pavement, or soften the rough
red walls of the houses, nor the sharp edged dark green hedges.

The black square of our front room looms as we push open the dark green gate. Only the faded
pastels of the Hydrangea's old flower heads lend a gentle tone to the suburban drab of our

late March afternoon.

Shouldn't

You shouldn't have

If you hadn't

I wouldn't have

I didn't

You did

I did not

Oh yes you did

I didn't mean

You did

not

did

not

did

you

DID

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE

YOU SHOULDN'T

YOU SHOULDN'T

DONT

DONT

NO MORE

🌈

The pandemic was a difficult time for everyone in the world. Very few escaped its consequences. Here in the UK during lockdowns, people in care homes, flats without outdoor spaces and those in prisons, including young offenders institutions, must have felt the restrictions particularly acutely. At its nadir, I think we were only allowed out once a day for exercise and were not allowed to sit on benches in the park or lie on the grass in the summer. Children's playgrounds were taped off.

It was a terrible thing to hear and read that domestic violence and in particular, violence against children, had increased.

Even those of us lucky enough to live in places where we had enough rooms to be separate and on our own should we need to, with an outdoor space or garden to go and breathe fresh air should we long to, got very sad, even depressed and the relentless daily reporting by the government on the daily death toll added to this general mood of depression I remember.

🌈

Skeleton tree

At art college, I made a skeleton out of fallen twigs of Ash. They were just the right shape and size
and weight for gluing together with a gun. I had fun. Now I could put my knowledge of anatomy into
good use and I completed the whole thing and hung it in a wire bower. I suppose it may have looked
a tad macabre, maybe even jarring in that jaunty way skeletons have, their slightly humorous appearance -
why is that ? -
sometimes feeling like an afront when we present them at the wrong time.
I suppose I shouldn't have left the dear thing in the wardrobe of the flat I flitted from without paying
the last months' rent because it was outrageous.

Bumpy Ride

Here we are,

You and me,

Going along together,

It's so very bumpy.

I didn't mean to jerk you so,

It was a daft idea to take this ride,

When you were so comfortable inside.

Epilogue, a Ghost Story

How many stories begin at the end ?

She used to read all the beginnings of stories, then the ends, just to see how intention worked.

Life is loss,

Time is loss.

We have this feeling of going forwards, but, it's really a question of undoing.

What we have at our end is nothing.

Water and Stone

We're water and stone,

Rising up against each other,

Inclement weather regardless,

The violent drops of sharp rain

melt upon our surface.

The Heft of You and who came before

Your head in the crook of my neck,

How you tried to hold it up,

My hand on your back,

The softness of your hair,

The weight of you transferred from within,

To where I would carry you

Until your own legs would

along the rocky ways,

Where stumbling stones

always impede your path.

When you were born,

The snow lay deep,

Up to the tops of our bins,

No doubt even higher,

If you went higher up.

Full moon bright,

The Midwives expected lots of births that night.

The sound of the hum of the helicopters,

Soft as the murmered concern amongst us,

Safe in our beds with our newborns,

Grateful not to be arriving by air.

In praise of my breasts

I never had the kind of breasts that I could hoik up and squeeze together to form a pleasing cleavage.

My oldest friend once described my body shape as Maori, which I've relished ever since.

When I was young, the thing was to be thin and that preoccupied most of my girlfriends, though most of them never achieved that aim, loving food too much and probably not being so convinced of the goal itself deep inside. Not enough to forgo the food they were so justified in loving; chocolate, cake, chips and all kinds of other calorific things.

Me, I got into the idea of abstinence. I learned to love the empty feeling in my belly. It felt triumphant, defiant. It possibly echoed the emptiness I felt deep within that part of ourselves we tend to label soul.

I'd seen alot of things on tv. War generally. The documentaries about concentration camps in the War and news reports on the famine in Biafra in particular. I couldn't understand the spectral figures of the children walking on their sticks for legs. They looked like some conception of an alien to me and my heart hovered between broken and astonished at how we are sculpted by what we are allowed to consume and what we are denied.

I never wept. I never do at the things that affect me most. It goes too deep.

Like when my Mum kept watching the terrible disaster when the coal slag heap fell upon the little school in Aberfan. I watched in silence as the village kept vigil and brought the childrens' tiny bodies up so tenderly from under the rubble. My mother sobbed. It was probably the release she needed desperately from all the troubles she had endured herself as a child.

I learned to fast and control my intake.

I learned to take tablets to give me diarrhoea if I wanted to get rid of things I felt I shouldn't have ingested. And they were many.

One day, dragging myself up a hill to my hovel of a bedsit squat, I felt as if I couldn't go on. I went to the doctor and I suppose he misdiagnosed me, for want of accurate information.

There were years ahead of me in which I would allow myself, if not to fully understand, then to come to some arrangement with myself in which, my Maori-like breasts would feel beautiful to me.

Our lives, the film and the colours it would be,

from white to vivid technicolor and the whole palette

in-between.

Those days when the sky was a flat grey,

no lights to seek out depth in pavement

or highlight the grains of variation in the red

and orange brick behind

the sharp edged privet hedges.

Our window looms,;

a black square as we push the gate open on it's tight spring.

Only the faded pastels of the Hydrangea's dried out flower heads

lend a gentle tone to soften the suburban chill

of a late November afternoon.

Cake

I baked a cake for if you come,

but if you don't I won't be sad,

As long as you are truly glad,

Your happiness engenders mine,

As long as you're good,

Then I feel fine.

A mother's love runs long and deep,

It doesn't always show.

She tries to let you live your life,

And he tries to let you go.

She tries to let you go

much sooner than you'd know,

you know,

that's the way she works,

this love that's not on show.

Anonymous was a Woman

Home - a lipogram

Shouldn't

Skeleton tree

Bumpy Ride

Epilogue, a Ghost Story

Water and Stone

The Heft of You and who came before

In praise of my breasts

Cake

At Home

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