Anna Vaught's Blog, page 14

Today I can’t write for I is CROSS

I am a mum of three so I am doing schooly stuff every day. I made up that adjective. If it’s good enough for Joyce…My background is in secondary teaching but these days I mostly work in a one to one and small group capacity with students who want help for all sorts of reasons. Because they benefit from just a bit of extra support and stimulation; are retaking exams, poorly, excluded, home ed; because they were bullied and were removed from school when the school could not manage it; because they are recovering from or managing mental health problems and just doing a few GCSEs as they go forward. Because they just want to do some extra work! Because (this is the one I find really uncomfortable) they self refer when the teaching they get doesn’t seem to cut it and they are desperate to be stretched because they’re passionate about the subject. I suppose I’m without portfolio; off grid. These days. You know, I was a kooky kid; weird kid. So much going on (and I have written about this widely elsewhere). I loathed school and do not remember a single sympathetic person in my time at secondary. Ah, but I had the books, a rich and deep imaginative life, mental health problems: used to come home and batter myself because of rage and loneliness. Who knew? But there were a couple of inspirational teachers who matter to me to this day – both of them English teachers. And I hope…well I hope I have been a better classroom teacher and am good at what I do now because of my own tricky experience. And, maybe, because I have held down more than one job. When I was teaching, I was also a volunteer support worker elsewhere, for example. Now, I run what I run and I am developing a writing career, but I also have a couple of discreet mentoring projects that mean the world to me.

But this isn’t about me; rather just a few observations on what irks. All about why, in schools, one should not reiterate things like this (in word or deed). Anyway…

1. There is something wrong with you or different about you, kid (and not in a good way).

2. I have been here a long time and I am therefore incapable of making a mistake. We KNOW we are a good school so it must therefore be you, young person.

3. You are a minor and it is therefore impossible that you might know more than me about a subject.

4. I am a teacher and therefore I am an expert (and cannot make those constant, stumbling, very human errors that we all make). I am an expert on SEN and on mental health too and may choose to disparage health professionals or people who burble on about self esteem.

5. I cannot laugh about that really shite piece of bureaucracy I’ve just had to uphold and which we both know is shite. I’m sorry if you leave this room feeling like screaming about such upholding, but there we are.

6. This summer – say between year 11 and 12 – is the best summer of your life!! What does this say to the person who has ingested no.1, struggles socially and definitely isn’t going to the prom/to Glastonbury for the post exam blow out etc? Also it implies that there is something idyllic about the state of childhood and that adulthood is death and taxes. Not so my brave hearts: please copy this to your offspring!

7. Everything is riding on this. This exam session. EVERYTHING. If you screw up your GCSEs you are fucked and will have no options and that will have dire consequences for the rest of your life and I have evidence for this.

8. Do as I say and not as I do (although I am not going to confirm that, because I am very human, I DO lose paperwork,DO forget things and DO misconstrue things because that would not happen, oh no no no: but you, kid, have no excuse).

9. We have no reason to doubt any of our staff. (I ask: why? We should doubt and reflect. It is healthy and intelligent. There is always reason to doubt – ourselves and others. Always reason to listen to a child or a parent.)

10. There is so much wonderful stuff out there; great schools, gifted insightful people who work enormously hard. But there are also people who need – we ALL do, don’t we?- to be less sure. Tentativity is a good thing, I think. Also, if a child does not like school, this does not mean there is something wrong with a child. DOES NOT.

What do you think? (She said tentatively…)

x

Passerines

Here she is again, the Honourable Violet Gibson. She’s feeding the birds in the garden of St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton. That’s where she ended her days. Because in 1926, Violet shot Mussolini. She wasn’t a great shot. She’d also previously tried to shoot herself and failed at that. She was beaten by the crowd, that day in Rome, when she shot Il Duce. She experienced prison, lunatic asylum, then deportation, not realising where she was going.

Home?

No. She was incarcerated for life.

But what if…

What if she had had help, that day in Rome? What if she had not missed, had not only grazed the nose of Mare Nostrum?

What of Lucia Joyce, similarly abandoned by her mother and brother, in the same psychiatric hospital? How would it have been if she got to do things differently; could go back and forward? Now, how would any of that be possible?

What has this to do with Anna O or Blanche? With Dr Freud, Dr Breuer, Dr Charcot? With Vienna, or the Salpetriere in Paris. And why did Violet’s father, Baron Ashbourne, meet James Joyce, Lucia’s father, before he left Dublin for Trieste? And if Violet shot and  didn’t miss, then history is changed, as well as the lives of women whose freedom was radically curtailed, whose madness was…questionable; who were abandoned,derided, or turned into exhibits.

I will publish a proper synopsis very soon, but it is one hell of a road trip, this – and what happens has much to do with the birds, the passerines…Some of this is true; some of it is imagined, but the latter for the sake of adventure and sweet liberty.

From the end of chapter one, where Violet speaks of Lucia,

‘I know that was a long sentence. I made like Joyce. Oh but Oh God and the snotgreen sea, I am determined. I’ve made her dance, just a little. And here’s a shorter sentence: so keep up.

“Come to us, passerines. Soon enough, we will come with you.” ‘

‘Where are Violet and Lucia, Nurse Archer? Are they accounted for? It’s not exactly scientific, but at my desk just now I thought…I sensed…a disturbance.’

‘They are in their rooms, doctor, and night medicines administered. Both seemed agitated; we have given extra, as per notes.’

Dr Griffith finds he cannot concentrate, takes up a bible. Remembers birds of childhood.

Let him see.

Remembers.

As a boy, turn of the century thereabouts, his father made him go to scripture memory competitions. Welsh Baptist family. Now his eyes are moist. He was good.

Psalms.

Even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest.

Proverbs.

Like a sparrow in its flitting, like a swallow in its flying, an undeserved curse goes nowhere.

Down the corridors of the asylum echoes a turbulent commotion and alarms fly. This was the bit the staff heard. They’d missed the whispers, glissando of the winged helpers no louder than a heartbeat through a greatcoat; rustles of paper and scratches of soft pencil; tremendous change: you couldn’t stop it now.

*********

Patrician Press Anthology of Refugees and Peacekeepers

‘We are all from an island or a foreign sun and every one of us uncertain; alone—

the human condition isolates us; our experience, our very world

blunted by language of a raggedy drum, our faith sharp and clear

or not so, as we cry out our unbelief, our refugee song,

but together.’

Tomorrow, a beautiful and timely book will be published: Anthology of Refugees and Peacekeepers from Patrician Press. Donations from any profits go to http://www.helprefugees.org and I am proud and delighted to be in it. The publisher has given me permission to include my offering, below.

I feel so passionately about the texts in the book – particularly because of the events of the last few days with the Trump administration pursuing (chaotically, I might add) its aggressive path and watching the egregious sight of our own Prime Minister appeasing Trump.

What unites us is strong; what separates – or rather what we choose to allow to separate us  – can embitter us and will degrade us – if that is the path we choose. Get on twitter: look at the protests, marches and campaigns going on; see what you can do. You may have seen the crowds at Dulles, JFK; watched the people turn out in Boston. Maybe you are going to be outside Downing Street tonight or at the Bristol event. Our family is Welsh-American; we are doing what we can, both sides of the Atlantic: it makes me cry to see how heartbroken my American mother in law is by what she sees. And yet: out we go here and out I know she will go, too. Don’t lose hope and let’s keep the momentum going.

Who is ‘Emigre’ below? Is he or she a refugee? Well, yes. But he or she is also you. You, Trump,  May, Bannon…

                                                            Émigré

I was far from home. I stood on the grey street corner.

I was far from home and stood at the mouth of the sea, ivory curls around my feet.

I was far from home. I stood outside the stores and restaurants at night;

sat in the hotel room, the train compartment, the gimcrack coffee shop;

watched the dark frontiers fade out as the yellow jack of the gas station made midday;

I traced the sad cars on the motorway and my eyes hurt from the strip light.

Memory seared and I drank sour coffee and ate a chocolate bar.

I was far from home; an outsider—tossed up as motes from some former life,

composed of Eros, intellect, memory and uncertain dust.

But I was you and I was me. Everyman; foreigner; flâneur; such longueur: étranger—

And did you care? Did you stare? But did you know?

We are all from an island or a foreign sun and every one of us uncertain; alone—

the human condition isolates us; our experience, our very world

blunted by language of a raggedy drum, our faith sharp and clear

or not so, as we cry out our unbelief, our refugee song,

but together. We beat our palms against the past, each a piece of the continent,

a part of the main: our love tremulous in our hands, like water that shall spill.

The book is a collection of poems and short stories from a wide range of writers. Robert McCrum described it as ‘A gripping, rare and brave collection of new work written in extremis, the classic source of truly original poetry and prose through the ages.’ It has a deeply moving afterword by the jazz musician, Ian Shaw, who volunteered for a year at the Jungle in Calais and two fine epigraphs; one by the poet George Szirtes, on seeing refugees camped in Keleti railway station in Budapest, and the other by The Bishop of Barking, on seeing the refugee children trapped in the Calais Jungle camp. (There is more on the plight of the children at this camp in Ian Shaw’s afterword; I struggled to read this but insisted I did: conscience dictates that we know.)

Do please comment and share. x

(So, you can order it here at Amazon, https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/099349456... or go here, to the press site http://patricianpress.com/ or to bookshops where it is on sale; if it is not, you can, of course, order it from them, its ISBN is 978-099349-456-7.)

A Tale Of Tripe (for Elizabeth David)

(Contains a swear word. There might be more than one.)  This is something I wrote for a food something a while ago. I had rather forgotten about it. But I am taking a little time to clear up old pieces as I wait on my second novel (novella, really) and finish my third.

So.

Elizabeth David. My favourite food writer ever. That’s her in the picture and here is something for her. If you have read my first novel, Killing Hapless Ally, you will have met some pretty scary food at Paternal Grandmother’s House at The Hill. Tripe, slapping and boiling; pickles in a dark store cupboard that frightened me with its eyeball pickled eggs. This was a house of morbid fascinations; of desolate proportions: they talked about terrible deaths over tea, I felt I knew so much more that I should about ways to die, horribly and publicly; on the wall there was a picture of Jesus and underneath that one of kittens: in the damp hallway outside, a terrifying dead great aunt with nasty rat teeth glared from a picture on the wall. But ah yes: the food. It was hearty, but I have not revisited it. Not quite. I feel compelled to gussy up its ingredients so it isn’t so redolent of…well, of horrible deaths. In came Elizabeth David with a blast of sunshine and a tray of tomatoes and sweet peppers. Obviously, this story and partial account of my formative years is not just about the food and not purely literal.

My grandfather taught all his cats – who were called mostly after Old Testament folk – to wipe their feet on the way in. It is true. I have no idea why he did this. My grandmother seemed to loathe everyone beyond The Hill (oh whoops – the book says it’s a work of fiction; well, some of it is, then…) and was good with a gun and at arm wrestling. She had big knuckles and terrifying elbows. I imagined that she killed people she didn’t like. She was full of curses and liked to frighten small kids by telling them that Jesus was looking at them with his beady eye. And not just from the wall.

The days, I will eat tripe, but only in a hot spiced Chinese dish, or with chorizo as a friend from Buenos Aires showed me how to do. Or in ‘E.D.’s’ recipe, below. it is actually rather lovely.

Anyway, my paternal grandmother was the inspiration for this story. Tripe, yes: but a fresh start. New day; new life; new love; new recipe.

They were as strange as all fuck, weren’t they – at The Hill?

A TALE OF TRIPE

Waking in the violet early morning, bathed in sweat and troubled by a night both eerie and vivid, Catherine searched her thoughts: ‘What must I have been dreaming about?’

It didn’t take long, of course: it was the tripe – that and the matriarchs who washed it, handled it with such vigour and presented it with an expectant, nasty gleam in their eyes. Such sweet, creative fiends: mother and grandmother. In Mother’s case, just dressing the tripe would have exhausted her for the day; sent her desperate to the fainting couch. In grandmother’s case, such dressing was simply a prompt to her killing another cow with the large-knuckled hands that terrified the grandchild so much.

Catherine winced: ‘Grandmother and her man hands; downy arms – all wicked with a rolling pin and guarding the old stove with a vicious possessiveness’, thus,

‘Let no man come near my domain: I will slaughter them – smother them under the blanket of the beautiful tripe.’

That was it. That was the most disquieting image in the nightmare: Grandmother like Moloch waiting for a sacrifice over the fire; Mother’s eyes dancing approval.

‘Yes yes yes! Feed it to her! Now, now, now!’

‘I’m so ashamed. I want a normal family and not to feel like this – waking, tripe-terrified.’

Mother and Grandmother were dead, but they found that no excuse. So they visited Catherine regularly, sleeves rolled up, ready to cook.

To rid herself of the present dreamscape, there was nothing for it: go downstairs and find a better image. Tea in a favourite mug was a good start, but Catherine found that her thoughts were leaping from vivid hue – the reddest of pickled cabbage – to dull, cloudy jars in which might have been preserved the innards of an unwanted relative. In grandmother’s pantry there was a hecatomb of conserves; the fruits of the season, incongruously presented in a chamber of horrors. There were pots of umber sludge, eyeball pickled eggs in heavily sedimented jars: damp flagstones underfoot; a smell of sour, crawling mould. There were aprons hanging up, the prettiness of their floral decoration gone to hell in this place of condiments, good housekeeping and no hope. This was a room revisited on other troubled nights for Catherine; she could not let its scents and shapes leave her head and the argot of this poky grey room whispered, ‘Grandmother knows – just as we all know – and she and Mother will come for you.’

Here was a place of extinction – of annihilation, the meaning of such things terrifying in a dream but still only faintly, inchoately understood.

‘This must be the worst combination: to know that someone is coming for you, but not to understand why, when or how. Or really what that has to do with pickles. Or tripe!’

Ah: the tripe – huge winding sheets of it. It smelled like death. When Catherine’s nights were not punctuated by morbid pickles, siren-calling her to embrace their victim in death, she had nightmares of being cosseted in its velvet crushing embrace. The silky surface was puckered and hollowed. Somewhere else and in some other time, it might have been pretty; like a creamy-white mosaic you would want to touch. But in the nights, and when grandmother or mother served it up as punishment so triumphantly, the tripe blinked at her and writhed in its nasty pool of white sauce, encircled by effulgent lumps of onion. On its surface – its face or was it its back? – were sucker pads like those on the arms of an octopus or some kind of strange sea plant that would caress and then swallow you whole, whispering of a lifetime of sin to you – just to compound the unpleasantness of this particular way to go.

Matriarchs hovering, the tripe came billowing clouds of vapour; it was cooked in a milky broth, all one at first, before you realised the unpleasantness of the discrete parts and sucky stomach-feet turned your (own) stomach. Between the two women, the silent challenge between mother and grandmother, it was a point of honour to make sure that the flour was never properly cooked off; thus, it lurked congealed in tiny mounds – but you didn’t see it in the unmapped viscosity of the sauce. Didn’t see the horrid little tumescence until you began to ingest it. Powder scattered in your mouth when the lump dissected. In a way, this was the worst horror:

‘And the dust in my mouth as I sat between Scylla and Charibdys. Oh, a fine supper.’

Catherine had always blamed herself for the meals – for why they fed her so. For the spiteful sheets of tripe, served up like victory in chintz.

‘My childhood looked so tidy from the outside; mother and grandmother were pillars of the community: first for cake in the village show; outstanding for a lemon curd; doyennes of the church flower rota. They prayed hard at the altar, shark eyes squeezed shut. I always thought it was me – it had to be me.’

‘Send her out to the pantry, in the semi darkness. Those eggs will frighten her a treat – make her more obedient. The mould on her hands! Ha!’

‘Mother – that’s the way to do it.’

‘But say these homes must have been full of spite, hurt and venom to make mother and grandmother cook like that? Say it was THEM and I didn’t deserve the tripe? Say it was wrong to shut me in there when I gagged on the tripe and onions and spat out the floury lumps without meaning to and they put me in the pantry like Jane Eyre in the Red Room?’

Catherine was not usually so bold: what was happening now that was different?

Something was coming from the bookshelf.

A small, dry but nonetheless beguiling voice: ‘Come here and open me up, Catherine.’

Now, Catherine was used to having a litter of imaginary friends. When your strange landlocked, emptied-out family surrounds you; when your nearest and dearest seem to close in on you with, “Bad, bad, bad – everyone knows about you” then don’t you need to tell someone? You can’t tell real people because no-one else seems to have a family as peculiar as yours.

‘And how would I ever explain cooking as a way of throttling or suffocating an unwanted child?’

In the bad dreams, Catherine tended to see her relatives, mother and grandmother predominant, amassed, like the preserves, in a hecatomb. They tumbled out curses at her at home; aligned in neat rows and pretty as pie when out in the cold world which welcomed their jam making, their manners and determined smiles. Who would believe Catherine about Mother and Grandmother? And how would she explain the chamber of soused horrors or the tripe? But here came a friend now; you might know her. To Catherine, she was ED; to the outside world, Elizabeth David.

ED wasn’t the warmest sort, but her books smelled of spice and sunshine; of lemons and emerald parsley. Catherine took French Provincial Cooking from her shelf; it was from this that ED had been speaking to her. Catherine adored ED and all her books; could tell you about the “pale rose pinks of the langoustines” which their author enjoyed, with a fresh and sparkling appetite, alongside a bottle of Muscadet by the Seine. ED relished good butter, radishes with their leaves left on as God had made them; saw the poetry and potency of a flat plate of Arles sausage and black olives.

‘And the colour, ED: look at the colour of the things you ate and knew how to make! See the lovely creams and greys of shrimp; sunset-glow carrots. For you, even the dark things – the winkles and the cork stuck with pins; things that were muted or pebbly – those things became beautiful. Beautiful – flanking the colour; like a gentle relief. I want to eat like that and I’d like to live like that. Embracing the darkness, yet knowing of its loving, numinous companion.’

ED, not one for a hug, and not particularly fond of metaphor, said, ‘Well, do you have a sharp knife, a hot grill and a will of your own? I’m assuming you have a mandoline, some good bowls – and I will not share my kitchen with a garlic press: I must be firm about that.’

‘Of course not; I know your feelings on garlic presses. I’m not sure I have a mandoline, I do have plenty of bowls, but some of them are chipped.’ Catherine began to cry.

ED prodded her firmly in the back, coughed demonstratively and said, ‘Chipped is fine, as long as we have at least a few white-lined brown dishes.’

‘Why do we need these dishes – why must they be as you describe?’

Silence. A sigh. Then:

‘Fresh contrast. Now, it’s time you stopped thinking about tripe. We are going shopping.’

‘ED: I am dog tired.’

‘That is no excuse. Not when we are going to compose hors-d’oeuvres.’

Hurrying to dress, Catherine sighed disappointedly at the drawn face and sad clothes; shuddered at the lingering dreams. Still, ED at least knew about the tripe, so they wouldn’t be cooking that. They would grace a table with red tomatoes, yellow mayonnaise, sea salt and olive oil; a beautiful salad of grated carrot. And could it be celeriac that ED meant for the mandoline – all cut into the thinnest strips and highly seasoned with mustard, plenty of vinegar and a voluptuous thick mayonnaise?

Out they went, Catherine chatting silently to ED and now lighter of foot on their way to the wonderful market. But two shadowy figures watched her, curses dribbling from their lips with the last lappings of morning tea and vulgar gulps of toast with ochre marmalade. And inside Catherine’s house, gently, timorously now, was a faint smell of the sea, a distant grating of nutmeg and a fresh twist of black pepper.

‘Sacrilege. I smell no wash day smell! I hear no slap of tripe against the pot!’ cursed grey Grandmother and Mother.

Afloat, through thought, in Catherine’s house now was the peaceful aroma of potage bonne femme: of cream, chervil, softly cooked potatoes and leeks, bathed in sweet butter. The shadowy figures cursed more, spitting unkind crumbs.

‘Pain grillé aux anchois? Salade au chapon? Get the little bitch. Boil up the tripe, Mother. And bring out the ammunition from the pantry.’

Catherine and ED, silently communing over their purchases, bought a mandoline and the requisite dishes, great bunches of green things for the salade de saison, dimpled lemons, celery, celeriac, lumpy tomatoes – things that promised succour. And life.

But on returning to the house, dull wafts of tripe waited for her, as the shadowy figures took their joyful and vindictive hold of the kitchen. Garish red cabbage with a sweet, cloying smell sat with the cruel eggs on the worktop. Amuse-bouches of the sort you serve if you hate your guests; starters gussied up a little with hard bread, sea-foam milky tea and a cucumber cut into behemoth chunks. And the boiling tripe hissed milky sap.

‘No matter’ said ED, walking briskly right through the shadowy figures, rolling up her sleeves and assembling a work station next to the eyeball eggs.

The eggs leered as ED tasked Catherine with slicing the celeriac on the mandoline, concocting a highly seasoned dressing for its matchstick strips; Arles sausage was laid out on a large flat white plate, its fat coin slices overlapping; in the centre, a carefully built mound of black olives. Both glistened and invited. The tripe spat on, onions twisting and squirming round it, as ED and Catherine cut tomatoes and sprinkled them with gently snipped chervil – the dressing to be added “absolutely” said ED “only when the diner wants to eat.” Catherine could feel on her pulse the metallic, penny-tasting lure of a proper, fine misshapen tomato. They grated carrots almost, “Almost I said!” to a purée, seasoning them carefully; made a wobbling heap of mayonnaise with fresh eggs and olive oil from the first pressing. There was bread with a shiny, crackling crust, butter and some best quality anchovies.

‘It is no shame to leave them in their tins if they are high class brands’, barked ED. Catherine hurried to place back those she had already decanted.

The table of hors d’oeuvres, for a twelve o’ clock lunch, was almost set. Almost. ED revealed a surprise. Out from a white plastic bag, secreted in the depths of ED’s basket, came a single slithering sheet of tripe. ‘For you.’

Tears pricked Catherine’s eyes. ‘No, not you too – please not you Elizabeth. Don’t make me cook it!’

From the room and the world all around came the laughter; the delighted grey shapes of mother and grandmother.

‘Boil up the tripe, there’s a good girl! Choke choke choke on the nuggets of flour!’

So ED was one with them, then.

‘It had to be me, didn’t it? I deserved what I got: a lock up in the pantry; a stifling sheet of tripe and the unlovely curlicues of onions; gallons of white sauce and curses.’

The spectres grinned; the jarred eggs hummed, if ever a jarred egg could.

‘Now do be quiet. Our lunch à deux first, then I shall teach you something new. You will have to boil the tripe briefly, but then you will grill it to a sizzling crispness, with a coating of egg and breadcrumbs and serve it with a sauce tartare. A revelation, I think, It is called tablier de sapeur – or fireman’s apron.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You will.’

Lunch. The fierce, seductive rasp of the anchovy, crunch of good bread and the delicacy of finely cut celeriac, There were draughts of wine; ED passed knife and salad servers through the spectres of matriarchs: it was a celebration. Then lost sleep came and took her pupil. On waking, ED had gone, but Catherine obligingly boiled the slice of tripe, cutting it with a certain passion into a neater rectangle. She basted it with egg, coated it with crumbs and grilled it until it was golden and the edges had caught on the flame. She ate the robust little apron with the sauce tartare that ED must have made for her, left with an uncommonly sweet note nearby:

‘See off the spectres; try something new – tablier de sapeur: adieu; adieu.’

Hmmm. She almost liked the fireman’s apron.

‘It’s not my favourite thing, but then neither is it the stuff of nightmares, thrust back to the sound of laughter into the dark pantry. Ha! “Grill to a sizzling crispness” ED had said. A dynamic phrase; a confident one.’

Catherine threw wide the curtains, welcomed in the vestiges of the day and scattered the grey tripe boilers and pickle hoarders into pieces.

‘Try something new. Mother; Grandmother. Keep being dead now. Adieu; adieu!’

That night, Catherine dreamed only of the next chapters in her life: ‘Soups and Eggs, cheese dishes and hot hors-d’oeuvre.’

The Life of Almost,a breathless Killing Hapless Ally and choosing your ending.

I have written a strange little second book. I suspect I will always write strange books. Big ones and little ones. The first, Killing Hapless Ally, was placed with a small press. As such, it is not, naturally, going to fall into so many hands. And yet and yet…I cannot tell you how rewarding it has been to discuss the book with its readers.

I know it is a challenging book; it is busy and breathless and constantly allusive. It is a work of fiction, but this rush through a history, through a mind, was deliberate. Its publisher understood and supported this; loved its density and fragmenting quality: its form was part of the effect, you might say. But to other readers it will be too busy, appear too dense and poorly edited. I took a risk – and my hope with Killing Hapless Ally was always that this was a long game. What I wanted was to write at least a book a year; to establish a catalogue and, gradually, for more and more people to find it.

But back to the discussion with readers. It has been read by people suffering from mental health problems and those who seek to understand what they might look like – as such, I have had many raw and challenging conversations about the book. It has been read by psychologists and academics – very recently, one who feels it will be instructive in their work, in addition to finding it entertaining. It is, after all, a black comedy! But at the moment the thing I really like is that some of my older students are reading it, which has meant that I felt I should mention to parents the book’s graphic content. It does not flinch in its illustration of depression, anxiety, self harm, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. I am laying myself bare here, aren’t I? But you see, there is a foreword to the book which reads rather like a mission statement. The book is based on episodes in my own life; to my mind it reads like a memoir, rather than a novel (again, this hybrid will irritate some readers because they do not recognise the novel form in it – more on which another day) and, in telling a/my story, I said that if I were not upfront about the mental health problems I have suffered from repeatedly since childhood, then that would be “to do a disservice to those who are yet to recover or find appropriate help.”

Now, back to that second book. The Life of Almost. Who is he and what is he? Is he alive or dead? What is his purpose? Well I like ambiguity and grey areas. If a book promises a twist at the end, you can bet I’ll have guessed it on page three; I’m that sucky person who shouts out the answers not long after it starts, which is why I am bound to silence when watching films  or telly with my husband. Like a kid at panto. “It’s binary and he’s the ghost!” (Interstellar.) “It’s his sister and I bet Moriarty’s helping her!” (Sherlock Holmes). I’m happy to know the ending or not to have things promised to me. Anyway, The Life of Almost has, at present, two different endings. Casuistry. Pick one. “What do you want? What do you expect?”, to quote Owl Eyes in the library in The Great Gatsby. And also, because the book is also a reworking of Dickens’s Great Expectations, the two ending recall what happened with that book, a note of explanation being underneath. I think I can get away with setting text out here. If the book gets commissioned, this bit of the blog post might have to go!

But you know – this is relevant, I promise! –  I am struggling at the moment: depression, sadness, they have the better of me; I wake, frightened, at night; I start at noise: my mind races, thoughts collide and crash and back come the hauntings of early experience. I cannot bear bright light or loud sound; sometimes, I hear sounds when they are not there, a constant auditory disturbance; sometimes music, often quotation. This has always been a feature. No-one’s experience of depression or mental health problems is quite the same. Mine is jangling and mult-coloured; fast fast slow. But I can do this. I CAN. There is no miracle. I rebuild my mind with books and thought and friends.

I have to say that I can choose an ending here because an ending is also a beginning, isn’t it? As Dorothy Rowe would tell you, “Even the worst day does not last forever.”

Casuistry. Which ending, for Seren and Almost, would you rather? The other person in the text is Catherine, who begins the book. And it is Catherine who begins summer 2016 in a state of welling despair. That is why Almost appears, from the sea-coast, off-world, whatever you like (as I said, I like ambiguity) to begin a bitter magic.

Here.

Pick.

‘The two endings, Catherine. Listen and choose. I begin with a poem. For her. Everything is for her.

If I should fall, then say to me the reason clouds form as they are,

Why ice should seed along a scratch, why I should love my six point star.

I do not know or care to see the smiles that fall in brazen line,

But innocence and clearest eye embolden me to make her mine.

I speak of love and quiet worlds, the county town on winter nights:

The sweets of honey bees, a view of ruby sky and amber lights—

A mermaid Terpsichore, sand-snow, auroras made of rosy glow,

My Borealis blood-red sheen—if I should fall, then make me know.

When I am not and you are here, beholden to this dusty room,

Be gentle with the tenuous forms of memory; do not grieve too soon.

Consider this—why should we be, ephemeral and urgent? How?

And speak to me with confidence, declaim for me on cliff or prow.

In nature’s fragile frame I see a world that lives beyond the hill,

Beyond the log pile, salt and shed; behind our eyes when we lie still.

And when I fall, then say to me you read its language, pure and keen—

And set my records on my desk and light my lamp: make them be seen.

I met her out there. I felt her, thoughts carry: I always knew where she was. I walked beyond St David’s to look at the Blue Lagoon, turned back and walked and walked to Abereidy, then through the bluebell wood, by the mud and stream to the fierce mouth, Abermawr. Skimming stones into the sea, she was. Oh God, aflame. I could hardly stand her beauty. She saw me and walked slowly my way as I cupped a pebble and steadied my thoughts and tried to control my tears.

Seren. Star. Always her. A mermaid I trapped on land and who never forgave me.

She said this: ‘Boy. Always boy.’

I said, “Age does not wither her” though I knew I was lying and I saw I was fresher and new, still.

“Roland is dead. I am…I am different, Almost.”

Oh she wept and howled into and out of a fierce mouth and hurled the rocks across the breakers and I went to her and held her while she told me of her life with him; of the spite that held, the jokes that cracked and broke; resentments, brutal, scorning others just because they had a better boat; a finer cast of house or leg or anything. He hated the world and everyone in it, handsome damned man who had fooled her. I said, ‘I will find him dead and flay him for you, Seren, for you, my love’ and I meant it, brute like daddy, down under the sand in another sea and time. My howl was elemental; perverse. We clung to each other.

He, Roland, touched her wrong; he did not cradle her at night, not understand that her own beautiful scorn was from her pain, sea girl trapped, and if he had, what would it have mattered? He had her to set on his arm and place where he should and that was enough. He used her roughly; cursed her barren; not a mother, nor a soft gentle thing. He cast her out, within her home. I could not stand to hear it all and howled again and she clung and my God I cannot tell you how beautiful she was because it would be like…it would be like trying to beat the heart of a star with a warped broom; like lifting up prayers with dirty hands and biting mouths. That is something like it was.

We walked out through the woods and I gathered bluebells, pressed them upon her in a fever.

“Forgive me, Almost.”

“I already have” I said; I fell on my knees in the stream and mud and the bluebells were crushed with I and her and us together, tremendous.

Her heart was opened then. I saw it.

Afterwards, I took her hand and I knew that there would be no shadow of another parting from her. I thought, also, that one day we might find her garb, as for Derian out at Oystermouth; as for Miss Davies, somewhere in her wild garden, under the fingers of creeping moss and the care of the kind willow. There might, yet, be a way back to the sea. For her and, in growing magic or the charms of the englynion, because poems carry, for me.’

Chapter 17. Or a star dies

‘But then again, is this how it was? Catherine, do you prefer this ending?

I begin, as I often do, with a poem. This one is about endings, when we come to recognise they have arrived, that is.

So,

We climbed the downward spiral of the trail

To best the shedding fingers of the cliff;

I’d promised you, oh love, I could not fail—

I’d prove to you against our childish tiff

That there was treasure to be found that day—

Albescent moons to cradle in your hand—

Sea urchins fine, a little world to say:

Echinocardium, wanting to be grand.

But my world was not yours, you did not care

To hold the little lanterns in your palm—

The hollow globe within the greatest fair,

You did not care if such should come to harm.

So cracked the sea potato on the tide:

I knew, although I smiled, my love had died.

I knew where she was. I felt her. I walked there, out beyond St David’s, the lovely harbour at Abereiddy, turquoise of the Blue Lagoon, then through the bluebell woods to Abermawr. She knew I would find her, of course. Out there, hurling stones across the breakers and howling her pain. She did not stop me taking her in my arms, drawing time-stopping kisses from her. Too late, too late, though, Catherine.

For this is what happened.

Everything I said of Roland was true, but when he died, consumed by his own acid and pride, Seren married a quiet local man. Not rich, but comfortable, like, and they lived in a house looking out across Ramsey Sound. This is the road she had taken, my beautiful mermaid girl. And she had a child, too: how could I claim her now? Oh Catherine, do not laugh: she called the boy ‘Nearly’ and he was her joy. I could see that. How could I claim her now? She seemed old, though she was not, and greatly changed and sad.

What could I do? My heart was broken.

I reached down and picked up an auger shell, she cupped it in her hand with tears in her eyes and then she turned, picking her way across the pebble beach to the bluebell wood and she was gone.

And that is the ending, almost. Which ending did you prefer? Which shall we have? And really, all I want to ask you, Catherine is this: did any of this happen? Was any of it true? And am I really here, June two thousand and sixteen, in your kitchen. Now, what do you think?’

Then I wept, cried until I was dry, not comprehending the world. I felt his fingers brush my arm: electric. Then he was gone, too, and had ended his story.

An explanation of the two endings.

‘Because of the mystery and ambiguity of the book, the uncertainty of its endings, or rather that Catherine should have some choice in how it ends (including, I would say, in what she does about her own sorrow after Almost has passed on elsewhere), seemed fitting to me. But there is another reason. Great Expectations is very important to this book for The Life of Almost is at least a partial reworking of it and that book had its ending changed at the last moment. Edward Bulwer Foster, Dickens’s friend and a fellow novelist, had been keen that Pip and Estella were united at the end of the story. The account goes that Dickens felt his friend argued such a good case that he subsequently agreed to make a change. “I resolved…to make the change…I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.” George Bernard Shaw published an edition of Great Expectations in a limited edition run with his preferred ending: the one Dickens had written first and which he argued was, in fact, “the truly happy ending.” Some have argued that this was a perverse argument, but I prefer the sobriety of the original and find it more fitting for the brooding, disillusioned narrative tone through the book. So,

“I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

OR, the former, when Pip, walking along Picadilly, is told a lady in a carriage wishes to speak to him: it is Estella:

“…I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.”

But now, if you wouldn’t mind making tea and trimming up some Welshcakes but without a recipe and with one hand only, I shall offer you my last. Do you know that, sometimes, stories have two endings? Of course you do. In old books, sometimes the author wrote an ending that was too sad and his publisher demanded it more palatable; a triumph. Triumph is sometimes untrue, of course, but what would you like? What do you expect and how may I help?

Almost Derian Llewhellin, all time a room in which to roam.’

Anna Vaught, Wiltshire, two thousand and sixteen.

THINGS THAT…

Dulled and devastated by The Donald, I turn to trivia and pedantry. But funnily enough, with third novel in the making, second out on subs and waiting…waiting….and all writing about (well okay with plenty of black humour) mental illness and incarceration and the role of the storyteller in preserving our sanity in a mordant world and a Welsh reworking of Great Expectations, with lots of dead people and mermaids, well I thought I might quickly write a little book – just a trifle; a frivolous thing – and call it,

THINGS THAT GET ON MY TITS

Ergo (I bet you’re thinking, ‘Something that really gets on my tits is when someone begins a sentence with Latin’), here we go but don’t take it too seriously.

‘Up’ prefix. We’ve had upselling, upcycling and upskilling but I just encountered -KILL ME NOW- ‘upreading’. From a school. Because I am down with the kids in the work I do, I am aware of ‘up’ being used as a suffix in phrasal verbs. For some reason, this does not bother me at all. SEARCH IT UP! But the prefix annoys me. It seems to mangle a perfectly good word, or stop you using a nicer one. Anyway, it’s the parents you have to worry about. If we’d let teenagers vote in Brexit, we wouldn’t be in this almighty mess right now. But I digress.

Core values. I sniff out a tautology here. You see this all over. But what ARE core values? Are they, like, the important values as opposed to satellite value fuckery that you don’t regularly take to your heart? If I can be bothered values?

Apostrophes. Yes, again. Splashed all over, wherever there’s an ‘s’. There used to be a local shop called ‘Butterfly’s and bee’s’. It’s possible I misunderstood it, but the sign put me off going in. To this day, I couldn’t tell you what that shop sold. Now I feel horrible. I am churlish. AND YET AND YET. And what about hers, its, theirs, ours, whose (which I saw as who’s -indicating possession- in both Harper Collins and Ebury books – I’ll hide this bit later because you never know; I’m already a poor commercial prospect)? No apostrophe, man.

Swearing. I love swearing. I always have. I like learning about invective in different languages. Knowing its history and context. There are limits. Racist; misogynist: get your coat. But something that evokes a sort of rebellious joy, curse on. I’ve wondered if the meanest people I’ve met are those who consider the well chosen swear word beneath them. Maybe. What do you think?

Literal and physical. ‘I can literally do that for you right now.’ Do you usually perform only through an intricate web of the figurative, then? ‘I cannot physically help you.’ Why? Were you gored by a bull just now?’ I realise this does not reflect well on me.

‘I am a good listener’ generally means to me, ‘I might like listening but I am actually a bit of a twat who isn’t really very self aware and I am going to give you a shit load of unsolicited advice.’

‘I am an empath’ (which makes me snort) or ‘I am so empathic’. See above and, also, this sounds like bragging, doesn’t it? I’ve noticed that sometimes people who say such things cry when Bambi’s mother gets shot but don’t bewail a hideous case of social injustice. Perhaps those who are most observant of the delicacies of others tend not to broadcast – at least not on this frequency?

Better get on with some actual work.

Anna xxxx

Passerines: some epigraphs for a new book

I find I vary how I write. With this book – Passerines, a series of interlinked stories about Violet Gibson, Lucia Joyce, Marie (‘Blanche’) Wittmann and Bertha (‘Anna O’) Pappenheim  and of psychiatry – I have tinkered with the beginning because it began life as a short story – and have now lunged into what is sometimes known as the ‘Frankendraft’! So I have 50,000 words to write and I will not read the book back now until it is all done. Then I will attack it with some vehemence.

BUT I have allowed myself two things to help me think. (In addition to the ongoing reading for research).

Although I have a rough plan sketched out, I have decided to write a proper synopsis, even if this is chucked out later – inspiration invariably striking not before but while one is writing. And also, it helps me to look at other books. That is, dipping into things, beyond what I might read for pleasure or research. I read all the time…but it is like magic.

There are lots of books in our house; the house is heaving with them; only yesterday, a cat was almost squished by a tumbling tower of books yet to shelve (or rather as we are waiting for Pete The Shelves to come and shelve for us). But as I was saying, I have been reading Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. It is magnificent; its beauty makes me cry – and this rarely happens – that I will find a book so affecting. And there it was: the description of boy Eugene, who is Wolfe himself, bounded in by his imagination, knowingly so, and living lonely in its country. And projecting what is required onto the world. I copied it. This is a key theme in Passerines. When you are someone else’s subject or subject to someone else, what might happen to your interior life?

Then…my hand brushed against William Empson’s Collected Poems. I’m sorry if this makes me sound like an utter tosser (‘Ooooh – my hand brushed against a book and it was the very book I needed…’), but this is exactly what happened. I was getting Some Varieties of Pastoral down because I need it for an A Level class on genre. And I suddenly thought of ‘Reflections on Anita Loos’ and its startling pairing of the girl who ‘can’t go on laughing all the time’ with the image of the tortured Christ after this mischievous villanelle. And you see, Passerines has both spirited girls and women and those same people encaged by madness and circumstance – in two cases incarcerated for life and in one almost erased from records  – and a study of both faith and imagination. It begins with Violet Gibson, the Irish aristocrat who shot Mussolini, was almost lynched, then pardoned by Mussolini (who himself drew his life as if it were the Passion of Christ and spoke of the prefuguration of his death) and then sent to St Andrew’s Asylum (as it would have been known) until the end of her life. The one picture we have there of Violet is unbearably touching: in her greatcoat in the grounds, feeding the birds, her stance reminding us of Giotto’s St Francis.

So, I realise this will not make total sense. Bear with me. I am fleshing things out. I know this is a rather a WTF sort of post. (Very literary, along with ‘tosser’: apologies.)

As I write, I’m still doing bits and pieces on mental health connected with my first novel, Killing Hapless Ally, and that has only been out eight months. I have sent my second book, a novella, The Life of Almost, out on subs to a small selection of presses and agents. Has it had rejections? Well, of course. Interest? Oh yeah. So I am a bit tense. And while this is happening, I am writing a third book, a novel, using the ‘Prolifiko’ app and setting my target to 3,000 words a day. I am told this is a lot, but if I don’t make it, the app is at least a prompt and very encouraging: a little cheerleader for me. In other news, I am thinking about applying to pitch at the London Book Fair (dependent on what happens in the next week or so, I think – as deadline’s approaching), I’ve applied for Womentoring  ( a fine free mentoring service, where an established author guides one at an earlier stage) and asked for Antonia Honeywell (am I allowed to say that?) because I feel passionately that I will find nurturing in such a project and she seems utterly delightful, a wonderful writer and frankly, I thought she might ‘get’ me, also managing a large family! Does that sound odd? And up ahead, Essex Book Festival in March to read my work in Refugees and Peacekeepers (a Patrician Press Anthology) and there’s a Birkbeck day I’d like to go to in May…

Back to the epigraphs. Synopsis follows soon: did you know there’s good money in Mills and Boon? More on which another day…I write well on hospitals, sex, Horlicks from the trolley and death. You’d be amazed at the categories extant in M&B!

‘The prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled completely by the esymplastic power of his imagination – he had learned by now to project mechanically, before the world, an acceptable counterfeit of himself which would protect him from intrusion.’

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel, 1929, chapter fifteen.

‘Love rules the world but is it rude, or slime?

All nasty things are sure to be disgraced.

A girl can’t go on laughing all the time.

Christ stinks of torture, who was slaked in lime.

No star he aimed at is entirely waste.

No man is sure he does not need to climb.’

From William Empson, ‘Reflections on Anita Loos’, 1937.

‘The bird could also be seen as a symbol of the Resurrection of Christ. A non-Biblical legend popular in the Middle Ages related how the child Jesus, when playing with some clay birds that his friends had given to him, bought them to life. Medieval theologians saw this as an allegory of his own coming back from the dead. In another legend, when Christ was carrying the cross to Calvary a small bird – sometimes a goldfinch, sometimes a robin – flew down and plucked one of the thorns from the crown around his head. Some of Christ’s blood splashed onto the bird as it drew the thorn out, and to this day goldfinches and robins have spots of red on their plumage. Like the cross that Christ wears around his neck, therefore, the goldfinch might be read as a prefiguration of his Passion.’

From ‘The Goldfinch.Signs and Symbols’, notes in web text from the Ftizwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

A New Writers’ Group (Bath area) NOTE NEW DATE!

A NEW WRITERS’ GROUP!

Okay then. New Writers’ group – meeting at Vaught Towers initially. Bath area and DM me for details!

Friday the 17th of February,

7.30.

Do you write or want to write fiction? It may be that you have already had a book or books published; it may be that you are just starting out and aiming to work towards publication. And by publication, I mean with a publisher, agented with a publisher or working as a self publisher. The aim of this group is that, in a supportive environment, we share ideas on one anothers’ work, offer constructive criticism and help each other along.You’d need, I think, to be happy to read your work aloud and to circulate it and to have the confidence (or fake it; I do) to offer comment and to receive it. And you’d need a ms in its initial stages or a slew of ideas for the best use of everyone’s time. I’m not thinking that there is any particular genre for us, but that this group might be best suited to writers of fiction for adults, as opposed to early readers, MG and YA.

Would you like to come along? Might be just the prompt you need to carry on carrying on and I am sure it would help me. Although I have been doing the odd bit of freelance journalism for some years, I didn’t start writing full length fiction until 2014 and then my first novel was published by a small press in March of last year. My second novel is currently under consideration with an agent (I think I may be a hybrid author) and I have begun my third (and fourth: I do know this sounds a bit mad) in addition to a poetry pamphlet and a non fiction book; I’ve also published various articles and poems over the past ten months. I am just starting out and gradually getting over feeling like an imposter. Writing is not my day job! Here’s what I read over 2016, too.

https://annavaughtwrites.com/…/…/01/my-2016-in-books-so-far/

Tea; cake; cosy chairs: writing, sharing information and opinion and encouraging each other in what can be a lonely pursuit sometimes.

Like to come? We could aim for once a month or so.

Anna.

@bookwormvaught on twitter

annavaughttuition@gmail.com

(PS – the pink and purple picture: insprired by Flickr and Instagram I once colour-coordinated my books – and there are thousands of them. Don’t do it. Led to a very ugly mutiny in our household and I couldn’t find a thing.)

A New Writers’ Group (Bath area)

 

A NEW WRITERS’ GROUP!

Okay then. New Writers’ group – meeting at Vaught Towers initially. Bath area and DM me for details!

Friday the 27th of January,

7.30.

Do you write fiction? It may be that you have already had a book or books published; it may be that you are just starting out and aiming to work towards publication. And by publication, I mean with a publisher, agented with a publisher or working as a self publisher. The aim of this group is that, in a supportive environment, we share ideas on one anothers’ work, offer constructive criticism and help each other along.You’d need, I think, to be happy to read your work aloud and to circulate it and to have the confidence (or fake it; I do) to offer comment and to receive it. And you’d need a ms in its initial stages or a slew of ideas for the best use of everyone’s time. I’m not thinking that there is any particular genre for us, but that this group might be best suited for writers of fiction for adults, as opposed to early readers, MG and YA.

Would you like to come along? Might be just the prompt you need to carry on carrying on and I am sure it would help me. Although I have been doing the odd bit of freelance journalism for some years, I didn’t start writing full length fiction until 2014 and then my first novel was published by a small press in March of last year. My second novel is currently under consideration with an agent (I think I may be a hybrid author) and I have begun my third (and fourth: I do know this sounds a bit mad) in addition to a poetry pamphlet and a non fiction book; I’ve also published various articles and poems over the past ten months. I am just starting out and gradually getting over feeling like an imposter. Writing is not my day job! Here’s what I read over 2016, too.

https://annavaughtwrites.com/…/…/01/my-2016-in-books-so-far/

Tea; cake; cosy chairs: writing, sharing information and opinion and encouraging each other in what can be a lonely pursuit sometimes.

Like to come? We could aim for once a month or so.

Anna.

@bookwormvaught on twitter

annavaughttuition@gmail.com

 

(PS – the pink and purple picture: insprired by Flickr and Instagram I once colour-coordinated my books – and there are thousands of them. Don’t do it. Led to a very ugly mutiny in our household and I couldn’t find a thing.)

My 2016 in books so far…

Updated. I think that’s probably it for 2016 with the books I’ve just ordered or bought… A sixth form student asked me which books I’d read so far this year and could I list…

Source: My 2016 in books so far…