Mandy Baldwin's Blog, page 2

Earning A Crust In Cornwall

I was standing on a cliff-top in Bude, dressed in nothing but a silver skirt and flip-flops, only a set of bongo-drums between myself and indecency.  The previous night, I’d murdered a man in a jealous frenzy while travelling on a steam-train across Bodmin Moor.

As an ice-cream van careered across the cliff, chimes playing ‘Greensleeves’, and I joined six other half-naked women chasing it, I wondered: “What if I had a proper job?”

The stampede for work began in early spring.  The season was a jigsaw of jobs.  If enough work was lined up by mid-March then you could relax. You’d work a sixteen-hour day, seven day week for months, but you’d survive the winter on slim pickings. All-year-round jobs were gold dust.

About that murder.  I was in a troupe performing Christie-esque plays on the heritage railway by night. As folk enjoyed pasty and cider and the train steamed across the moor, we would go from carriage to carriage enacting the drama which led to me, “The Black Widow” (black of hair, dress and soul), shooting my unfaithful husband; he’d be found dead, with a blood-stained waistcoat. Diners would note clues, and there was a prize for correctly guessing who had done the deed.

Alas, out of several who wanted that man dead, nobody ever guessed I was the killer: probably because I’m five-foot-nothing and he was six-foot-four. Had I pulled the trigger, the bullet’s trajectory would have been up his nostril, not through his heart.

The same company was involved in the Bude cliff-top cavorting: we were extras in a BBC production, Nighty Night. By the time cameras rolled, our part was toned down. We were originally scripted as “writhing naked lesbians” but our spokeswoman, a Yorkshire woman still forthright despite partial undress, told the director: “If anyone comes near us with a strap-on, I’ll break her bloody jaw.”  He pleaded – literally on his knees carrying a case of wine – but we remained firm. At least, in our resolve.

Most days began with cycling along the Camel Trail to a hotel where every bedroom had to be cleaned while guests ate breakfast. I always found the guests intriguing – who would have thought the middle-aged couple with the lugubrious Birmingham accent who were so particular about toast, left their bed full of feathers and sequins each morning?

By lunchtime I was cooking in a holiday camp, alongside Jamie*, an old Etonian roughing it, and Mary*, a Padstow lady of eighty who’d sing to us as she prepared salad: ‘You an’ me, baby, aint nuthin’ but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel’.

The waitress, Kini*, a pretty Polish girl paid £2.50 per hour, cheerfully admitted one day that difficult customers were given ‘spit dressing’.

Manager Stan* was a diver who supplied the restaurant’s shellfish.  He spoke as if he’d swallowed a megaphone and communicated with employees from great distances.  His bellow of “Mary, come over ‘ere and dress my crabs!” was legendary.

He seemed to regret hiring Jamie: “You’m too posh!” he’d boom, stomping in to order a vast plate of Butterfly Chicken.

Jamie lost his ‘posh’ credentials after missing a society wedding due to having his eyebrows shaved and an enormous moustache drawn on him with permanent marker, while sleeping off a binge.

One summer was spent working mainly for the National Trust, and I had the pleasure of being in a 17th century gatehouse admiring a beautiful vista of oak trees.

Amy,* a journalist from New York, who’d been sent to cover a story in Cornwall and stayed, arrived daily with a bottle of wine and a novel, and on sunny days consumed both in the rose garden. On rainy days she’d bring cookies and coffee to the gatehouse, and we’d put the world to rights.

At that time the French government paid for delinquent teens to enjoy ‘cultural’ trips which generally involved loss or damage for hosts. They were accompanied by terrorised teachers who’d escape when the coach wheels stopped turning, thereafter only relocatable by plumes of cigarette smoke. Urgent radio warnings were sent from reception, ‘French kids!’ and we would form a line as Amy murmured ‘Once more into the breach, dear friends….”

At the weekends that summer I sold paintings from a cellar near a pub. Everything was there ‘on sale or return’. During the week, it was watched over by Derek* who also exhibited there, and was a Buddhist – a man so chilled he was almost comatose.

Nobody sold much, so I was thrilled when a Kenyan couple spent a long time admiring the paintings, then chose four of mine, and paid me £1600 in traveller’s cheques.

First thing Monday morning, I cashed them – I’d never held so much money at one time before.

First thing Tuesday morning, the police were on my doorstep – the cheques were forgeries.

After extensive questioning, I was declared an innocent idiot and allowed to keep the money. And somewhere in Kenya, four large Cornish seascapes presumably adorn the walls of Mr Big’s house.

We worked long, insecure hours while others played, and I doubt anything has changed, so take a good look at those who serve you, this holiday season. They all have a story. Tip well, and make their day. And be nice – or Kini might spit in your soup.

*all names have been changed except mine.

Child’s Night

They were faces of safety to think of in the nights when my blood pumped so hard in my ears I’d sit up and look at the moon sliding across the small high window, rather than put my head down on the pillow. On the top bunk my brother stayed sleeping, and if I called out that I was afraid, he’d laugh at me.

Mum and Dad had gone out – to the pictures, they said – and I imagined them in some hall full of old glass cases of stuffed fish, like the library in the High Street, examining fold-out boards with pictures from magazines pinned there. It didn’t seem much fun, but I thought, when I was grown up, I’d do it, too: go out after dark with my hair back-combed high and my face smelling softly of powder, heels tapping on the frosty pavement as I walked with a man who wore a suit and shaved his blue chin twice a day.

One of the Nans would sit with us and Mum and Dad would be back before morning. There was the Nan who looked like Dad. She didn’t like Mum and Mum didn’t like her (I knew that, despite their politeness over the tea-cups) and I wondered, sometimes, if she didn’t like me, too, because I had light-coloured eyes like Mum, but I knew she’d look after me anyway, because she was a Nan.

And there was the Nan who smelled of butter and Fairy soap, and knew the Latin names of all the flowers in her garden, which sounded funny when she said them because she came from Gateshead. She had a long plait, dark like my hair at the bottom, growing greyer, until the hair which curled around her face was white.

She’d delivered me herself when the midwife didn’t turn up, and I knew she loved us all passionately, me, my brother, and all the cousins on that side. I don’t know how I knew, because she never had a fond word to say to any of us and the only time I hugged her, she kept her arms by her side, and when I looked at her face, tears were streaming down it. That Nan had scars on her back, glimpsed if we caught her in her petticoat, coiling her plait into a bun at the nape of her neck.

The Granddads were like different species. The Granddad belonging to the Nan who looked like Dad had been a soldier in two wars which he never talked about. He loped everywhere, an upright stride just short of a march, and he ate only once a day and drank endless brick-red sweet tea, which did no harm because a German had already knocked all his teeth out with a gun.

He could plant a whole garden of regimented rows in a morning, fuelled by nothing but a pint of milk from the door-step, and yet his hands were always busy rolling a cigarette to join the one behind each ear, and the one burning on his lip. He moved in sifting layers of blue smoke, sometimes without warning he’d put his head in his hands and rock, and although I remember his Buckinghamshire accent, he was mostly silent, so I only remember one thing he said, after watching a war film, the boy cousins and my brother at his feet.

“We won, didn’t we Granddad?” Robin said, gazing with pride at the old soldier.

“Nobody wins a war, sonny,” said Granddad.

The other Granddad – the one who belonged to Mum and the aunties – would take us out in rotation, just one of us alone, every Saturday. It could be to London, to see the lights on the huge Norwegian tree in Trafalgar Square, or it could be down to Seaford, where they’d had their short honeymoon. He carried our sandwiches in an old gas-mask case, taught me Cockney Rhyming Slang and the dozens of poems he knew by heart, and played the piano, his big, graceful hands stroking the music out of the keys.

He was domesticated when I knew him, but had once been wild, playing in jazz clubs and fighting Blackshirts, before he made an honest woman of a girl from Gateshead, and drove trains for love of her.

Mum and Dad met when they were fifteen and seventeen, which I thought was just as it should be. They kissed in the kitchen, and if I went wandering after bedtime I’d find them dancing slowly in the little front room with the orange walls and the electric fire. We weren’t welcome at night, although they belonged to us by day.

Mum was the prettiest Mum at the school gate, blonde hair bright among the woollen coats and paisley head-scarves, and Dad was the handsomest Dad, with his head of black curls I’d cling to when he carried me on his shoulders. She was always slightly hysterical, he was always slightly absent-minded, they were so humble for themselves, and so proud of us: and there hasn’t been a single thought, or feeling, or action which I’ve taken, in all my life, which wasn’t in some way because of them.

The little flat was always full of aunties and cousins, people who shared Christmases and family rows, and mattered greatly – but I don’t know where they are, now, and I don’t know why that is.

I still look for them all in the empty spaces. I’m poorer now that we ever were, so I’m sometimes afraid, and I long for my family, then.

Or maybe I just long to be as I was when they were faces of safety to think of in the nights when my blood pumped so hard in my ears I’d sit up and look at the moon sliding across the small high window, rather than put my head down on the pillow.

Al Fresco Dangling And The Bulgarian Fish Racket

There’s much written about the weirdness of the Celtic Fringe, but only rarely does anyone mention quite how gloriously bonkers we English can be, unleashed in the countryside where nobody can hear us scream.

As a regular camper, I’m used to a certain amount of oddity, but the last place had such a dreamlike quality, I’m glad my daughter was able to join me for a few days, or I’d think I’d imagined it all.

The weather was glorious. Picture the scene: a gently-sloping meadow backed by delightful shady woodland, and beyond, private fishing lakes, where club-members peacefully camp on the banks, cool-boxes of beer to hand.

OK, it’s slightly creepy when the site is full of apparently empty caravans, then one finds they are actually occupied but the occupants never leave, only stare in solemn silence through the windows, but hey, whatever floats their boat.

And it’s a little unnerving to discover that the site is owned and run by a family who look and sound like characters from ‘The Darling Buds Of May’ but whose glaring hatred of either sight or sound of the campers who keep them in pocket indicates they are the product of an unholy coupling between Ma Larkin and Hitler. But that’s OK, too – I’ve logged their details and I’ll put them in a book.

I had wondered about the angry voices I sometimes heard late at night from beyond the woods, but they seemed some way off.

It’s even acceptable that, to get a phone signal, it was necessary to stand by a particular tree, facing north.

But what makes this place unique is The Great Bulgarian Fish Racket. And we would never have discovered it if not for The Woodland Flasher.

There was a path leading past our tent to the woodland, and for the first couple of days it was a delightful place to take Hemingway (my dog) for a walk. And it was while waiting for a planned phone-call there, standing behind the Magic Tree which enables EE, that the only caravan-dweller I’d seen from below shoulder level joined me.

Boy, did I see him from below shoulder-level. No sooner had he arrived, than he unzipped his flies and – tackle out – wandered happily among the sun-dappled trees, apparently unaware that he was observed by a startled woman who was, on the one hand, dreading the ‘phone ringing in case it alerted him to my presence and he decided to cover his guilty secret by doing me in with a fallen tree branch and, on the other, wishing it would ring so that if the flasher did see me, and turned nasty, there would be someone to report hearing a thud and a muffled scream.

This is a man who, I suspect, had built a life based on appearing ‘normal’ (picture John Major in jelly sandals) and, if addicted to ‘al fresco dangling’, might not want others to know it – least of all his wife, back at the caravan staring out hopelessly as if chained to a wall.

The upshot was that, in future, when my daughter and I walked Hemingway, and her mini-Dachshund, we took the other path, down near the lakes.

And here it was that we met Gavin – name changed to protect his job – who was in charge of security at the fishing club.

My daughter is a dead-ringer for Holly Willoughby, so I am used to men walking into lamp-posts when she goes by, and Gavin was clearly smitten.

Does anyone reading this remember the old St Trinian films, where the Spiv played by George Cole would appear at random out of a hedge? Well, that’s what Gavin did, every time we passed.

Gavin explained to us what the arguments were, which we heard at night – it was a dedicated couple of Bulgarians, who creep in at night, throw stones at anglers and steal the contents of their keep nets. One of them claims to be an expert in local by-laws and, before stealing the fish, he threatens to report the anglers for fishing out of season.

Sometimes, Gavin said, they make off with two bin-liners full of fish.

What do they do with it? Who knows? (I imagine them going back to some over-crowded house after a sleepless night of fish-rustling, emptying the bags onto the table as ten compatriots gather, cackling in triumph: “Ah ha ha ha, Stanislav! Again we will dine upon Tench!” But maybe that’s just me.)

Disgraceful as their theft is – and it is – you’ve got to hand it to them in terms of physical courage because Gavin is the Ramsay Bolton of the Fishing Club world. He never sleeps. He does, however, grin incessantly – and carry a base-ball bat. And he’s winning the war, because one fisherman told me there used to be another gang – Poles, they said – who stole ducks, but these felt the wrath of Gavin and decided to check out Sainsburys for their dinner, instead.

When Frau Larkin reminded me daily, resentfully, that we were on their grass – yes, that happens, with tents, and we’re paying you – and when the Woodland Flasher shuffled past us on his way to, ahem, air his grievances under the trees, there was something comforting in knowing that a scary man with a baseball bat and an eye for a pretty blonde stood ready to defend something as placid and English as the right to sit quietly in the sun drinking beer, catching fish and then letting them live to spawn another day.

I was told that a large party of Wiccans would be arriving to celebrate the Summer Solstice. I would usually think that sounded a lot of fun, if all the members of the Hitler-Larkin family hadn’t gathered to tell me this, as a warning to get myself gone before they arrive.

In any case, I know when it’s time to leave. I’m naming no names – mostly because one person’s ‘What The Hell?” is another person’s “Piece Of Heaven” – but also because there were dark forces at work there and I wouldn’t be surprised if a wicker man and some cavorting druids might enter the equation to deal with adverse comment.

I left on Sunday. Thankfully they don’t know where I live.

Things People Think Will Never Happen To Them.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/homeless-ashes-feature-film-action-drama#/

Rural Homelessness Interview

Homelessness – think it will never happen to your or yours?

Think again. 60% of the population are one step from disaster:

1 pay-cheque

1 break-up

1 illness

1 bereavement

1 spiteful landlord

1 family argument

1 lost job

Please help fund the film – and be grateful if none of the above have happened to you…. yet.

Because if you think it can’t happen to you, then you are part of the problem.

 

 

 

Country Squire Contributions

Getting Real

The Common Sense of Kindness

For the Love of Dog

The Flower Presser

It’s an attractive place, Livesly Hall. I’d walked past it many times and glanced up at the tall draped windows reflecting the sky blankly, like eyes about to be closed for the last time. Not a big house, but full of it’s own importance, cream stone, solid, on three floors, with attic quarters above, so, three rows of those tall windows and then a row of smaller windows to show where servants had once been housed.

There’s a big front door, with a stained-glass window in it, and almost the whole front drive is taken up by a huge Monkey Puzzle tree.

I suppose – if I thought about it at all, back in the days when I wasn’t desperate – I’d have said I would quite like to see inside it. But not like this, being engaged as a – come on, Sally, you’re thinking it, so say it – as a servant.

It’s not that I’m a snob, or think anything’s beneath me. In fact, I was very keen to start work when I first arrived at the house. I’ve done worse jobs.

This would be just a few hours of light housework, preparing a couple of simple meals, keeping Mrs Livesly company to make sure she didn’t come to any harm. But by the end of the afternoon I was having to talk myself out of walking away fast.

Mrs Livesly was a sweet old lady, sitting all pink and white and smiling in her winged arm-chair. But the big selling point was the accommodation, the spacious room reached via the curved marble staircase, on the floor with the view over the garden, neatly painted in cream and fawn, with the big bed with scatter-cushions, TV, own bathroom. Not on the servant’s floor, either – that was up a turn of narrow stairs at the end of the corridor.

If you knew what I’d been through you’d understand how inviting it was to me. I stood in that bedroom, and I let all that comfort wash over me, and the nicest thing of all was, the room was empty.

Oh, yes, Young Mrs Livesly, the old lady’s daughter in law, was there with me, showing me around.

But there wasn’t that sense, which I’ve had in so many places, of having walked in on a party, when the air hums, and you can sense them falling silent, watching you, having the advantage because they can see you but you can’t see them, even though you know they are there. I’ve had to leave too many places, because of that.

In my last place – well, that was very bad. Let’s just say, there were a lot of us living there but I was the only one paying the rent, the only one visitors could see.

I’m a senser, not a seer, normally, although I catch glimpses, just out of the corner of my eye, of people doing something very dull over and over again – walking half-way across the room, for instance, turning the corner of the stairs, or appearing on the garden path for a few seconds.

Imagine doing that, forever, and ever, amen. It’s my idea of hell.

It’s not much of a life, the after-life, as far as I can tell, but then I’ve got a low boredom threshold. I’ve always had this horror of staying in one place or doing the same job for too long. Personally I’d prefer oblivion when the time comes, or to be set loose from my body like a balloon from a net, to drift up and away. Between now and then, though, I’d just like them to leave me alone.

Well, now you know about me and my problem.

So – to go back to that day – there we were, leaving that room I wanted so much. Young Mrs Livesly, who is actually all of 60 if she’s a day, had just offered me the job, and I’d just accepted it, and we were walking through the hall to talk to Old Mrs Livesly again. I was enjoying the total absence of them and the thought of sprawling on that bed with the wonderful view and watching films on that huge TV after a hot shower.

Old Mrs Livesly was so delighted I’d be moving in at the end of the week, she held my hand tightly in both her little hands with the big swollen knuckles from the arthritis which made it so hard for her to hold a cup.

I felt like a heroine, really proud of saving the day and all that (at least, that’s what it seemed like, from their happiness at me accepting the job) but also a bit ashamed because more than anything, I just wanted that room and to be out of the hostel.

Having secured my services, Old Mrs Livesly murmured to Young Mrs Livesly and the two left the room. I walked to a window to look at what would soon be my view, of the front drive with that huge Monkey Puzzle tree. There were vases of flowers on each windowsill. And it was as I was admiring a display of mixed daffodils glowing in the spring sunshine, that I saw her.

She was in a far corner of the big graceful drawing room, sitting at a table in front of one of those tall windows, but no sun lit her gray dress which was buttoned tightly to her throat. Dark lank hair was combed flat to her head then looped around her ears, and the plaited loops trembled as she worked busily stripping flowers from a wreath.

In her corner – in her time I suppose – it was dull and raining, I could see that; I could see, not just her but the window behind her, as if she was part of a jerky scene being shown on an old projector, silent, fading then strengthening then fading again.

The table, as monochrome as she was, was piled high with the broken wreath, a fat book from which protruded the shriveled stems of flowers, and a large framed photograph of a child, a girl no more than four or five years old, hair in fat sausage-like curls, propped in a chair on cushions.

The little face was pale and unsmiling, the lips pinched around the small teeth, the dulled eyes hollow and hooded, sunk back into the delicately-boned head as if prematurely aged.

Did you know that many bereaved Victorians had photographs taken of their dead loved ones before burying them? Grim, I know – but that’s Victorians, for you!

The woman reached her hand to stroke the image of the wizened little face, then lifted the picture from the frame in one movement, putting the photograph inside the fat book, and a few flowers from the wreath with it. She closed the book and pressed down hard on it and as she did, she looked up and past me, from across a hundred years or more.

The face of the woman was indistinct, features blurring and shifting, the framework of skull and long exposed teeth sometimes visible, sometimes hidden by a shadow of flesh.

I thought the eyes were dead and dull, huge in their sockets, until they turned to the light and I saw that far from being empty, the eyes were simply a reflection of the child in the photograph. To look into them was to see that tiny shriveled face twice over.

In a life-time of being afraid of things no-one else could sense, I had never been so terrified.

The woman in the corner seemed to shimmer and shift, and turned her head, smiling at something so that the shrunken lips lifted against the long teeth in the fleshless jaw. By her side, I saw the child from the photograph now nestled against her arm, and the contents of the table had changed.

The wreath was gone, and in it’s place was a monochrome image of the flower arrangement I had admired in the window. In the frame there was a new picture: and I recognized Old Mrs Livesly smiling out at me, the pink and white of her dulled to the same gray as the flowers.

I could hear faint sounds from the hall-way, of the Mrs Livesleys returning. As the door opened the gray woman raised those huge eyes in that skeletal face. I saw that she looked at Old Mrs Livesly with a sort of eagerness to possess, and reflected in those dark mirrored sockets, was the double image of the old lady’s face.

For a moment those eyes were all I saw then the image of the woman – the whole scene, of the table, and the child – all collapsed, as if they had been dust held in the air, and the drawing room was empty.

What I wanted to do, as the Mrs Liveslys fluttered and smiled and gave me a key to the front door, was to simply walk away, or, even better, to run.

But where to? There was nowhere left.

All my money had gone, and the few friends I’d had who would offer me a couch to sleep on had gone too. There aren’t many friendships which survive being told that the knocking and creaking and things that get moved in the night aren’t imagination after all.

The only place to run to was the hostel, and I was desperate to get out of there because there may have only been ten beds being slept in, but there were at least a hundred inhabitants playing out their suicides and fits of despair on an endless loop, sensed or glimpsed by me alone as I tried to rest or shower or read or look for work.

If the Mrs Liveslys reported that I’d turned down an offer of work and accommodation I wouldn’t be allowed back there anyway. And here – two flights of stairs and several large rooms from the flower-presser – was warmth, space, comfort, privacy, backed by a regular income.

I thought about the implications of that look, those reflected images of Old Mrs Livesly, and I suppose I realized then – as much as I was in a fit state to realize anything – that this job wouldn’t last long and should be appreciated while it lasted. I moved in three days later.

We slipped into a routine easily, Old Mrs Livesly and I. She wasn’t a demanding person at all. She was there alone – my guess is the family wanted to sell the hall when she died. A cleaner came in three times a week to do heavy work, and my housework was of the feather-duster-flicking and cushion-plumping kind.

Remembering the flower-presser I was nervous of leaving Mrs Livesly alone for long. I would hurry to complete my tidying and dusting, so I could be within ear-shot of her. The old lady loved her flowers and each day we would go into the garden at the back of the house and cut big bunches of them for her to arrange.

I would wash the vases, make tea for us both, and read to her as she carefully trimmed the stems and buds, her hand trembling, and barely able to hold the scissors. As she finished each arrangement I would put it in the place she chose, and at first I would avoid looking at the corner of the drawing room.

But as the weeks went by and I saw nothing else, I began to relax. The house seemed so wonderfully empty, there was no sense of anyone else there with us. Maybe, after all, it had been imagination – or illness, some emotional crisis, the strain of past months catching up with me.

I grew really attached to Old Mrs Livesly – or Mary as she asked me to call her. She is a completely gentle soul, and it was touching, how grateful she was for any help I gave her. I would lie in the big snug bedroom at night and be so glad I’d accepted the job. I imagined where I’d be if I hadn’t – on the streets, for sure.

As spring turned to the beginning of summer I thought I finally had a chance to get my life back on track. The only thing troubling me was the memory of those eyes, those dead eyes reflecting the little old lady, and taking her away.

At the end of June, the weather, which had been hot and bright, turned suddenly chilly and damp. The skies were so clouded that it was almost as if the nights were drawing in again. Deprived of her daily walk in the garden, Mary began to droop – I could almost see her fading, like a toy with the battery running down, and I was really worried about her.

I mentioned it to Young Mrs Livesly one evening, when she was visiting.

“She needs an interest,” she said. “Don’t worry. Leave it with me.”

And she turned on her smart heel and went into Mary’s bedroom. I heard their soft conversation, and went up the marble stairs to my room.

In the morning, Mary was smiling again, although the rain was still pouring down the windows.

“I’ve decided what I’ll do until the weather improves,” she said, “but I’ll need your help. I want you to go up to the attic and look in the first room you come to. There’s a big cupboard, and inside, it is full of photographs. I want you to bring them down. We’ll organize them, you and I.” And she smiled and gave me a key.

Call it premonition, but as I felt that key, cold in my hand, I felt as miserable and gray as the rain that streaked the tall windows. Mary sat down in her winged chair and looked up at me expectantly and I wanted to refuse to go. But what could I say?

“Well, go on, then, Sally,” Mary said. “Off you go.” The house was so very quiet, that morning. The cleaner had come and gone, there were no deliveries due, and even the traffic outside seemed slow and muffled. I could hear my own soft footsteps on the marble stairway.

At the top of the stairs, on the first floor where Mary had her room, I looked along the corridor, which was dark because all the doors to the bedrooms were closed, shutting out the gray light from their windows. My back felt naked and exposed, vulnerable as I climbed to the next floor.

My room was the last in this corridor, and at the end there was a door which led to the attic. Again the daylight had been shut out, and here I could feel a hum of expectancy, the lift of hair at the back of my neck which meant I wasn’t alone. From the perfect peace of the past weeks, now something was waiting, watching. I reached for the light-switch which should turn on the ceiling lights all along the corridor, but nothing happened.

The little key was damp in my hand, and the door it would open was only a vague outline in the gray gloom. My heart was pumping hard with fear and the knowledge that I was not alone. I thought of those eyes, the mirrored eyes which had terrified me.

With a small clicking sound, the light directly above my head came on. And as I walked, each light turned on above me until the corridor was brightly lit.

At the door to the attic I fumbled with the key, my hand shaking so it wouldn’t slot easily into the keyhole. As it finally slipped in and turned, and the door opened with a slow, soft creak of age, every light in the corridor turned out.

The stairs to the attic were narrow and wooden, covered only with old matting. I hurried up to the tiny landing, sensing all the time that someone or something was just behind me, and opened the first door there as Mary had told me. The room was small and square, empty except for one wall which was lined with cupboards.

A waxed blind covered the small window and let in a filtered, sepia light. Everywhere was a furring of dust; obviously the room hadn’t been disturbed for a very long time.

A soft sound came from the cupboard nearest the door, something collapsing with a sigh of paper on paper: the door slowly opened, and an album with an embossed cardboard cover slid onto the floor.

Flower stems had dried to fragile sticks and were protruding from the covers. I picked it up automatically, but recognizing it I was filled with revulsion. In my hands the cover opened, and there she was – the first picture, the flower-presser, the gray lady – a death pose, propped against the winged arm-chair Mary loved, dark, lank hair in plaited loops around her ears, dress buttoned to her throat.

I heard a thin call and thought of Mary, helpless and alone, three flights of stairs away. I wouldn’t leave the album behind; ahead of me I caught the flick of a gray skirt, not hurrying, but always just out of reach, and I hurried, almost falling on the stairs: not afraid of long dead people now, or things I couldn’t see, but only afraid for Mary, small and frail and unprotected.

At the bottom of the stairs, the hem of the skirt again, disappearing through the door onto the second floor landing, but when I was through the door there was nothing there.

All the lights were on, all along the corridor – and as I passed, they went out, so by the time I reached the staircase, I was in darkness again. There was no sign of the flower-presser again until I reached the bottom of the curved marble stair-case and saw something gray pass through the closed door of the drawing room.

I ran the last few paces, and found Mary in the winged arm chair, her pink and white face greyish under her fine white hair. Taking her hand in mine I could feel her pulse fluttering under my fingers. She opened her eyes and looked at me with trust. With my free hand I felt in the pocket of my jeans for my ‘phone, and dialed for an ambulance, trying to give details calmly, wanting to panic. Mary’s pulse grew fainter under my fingers, blood dancing delicately in her veins like a moth.

I knew what I would see if I took my attention from Mary’s face; I could see the shimmer of the scene – window, table, flower-presser, child, flowers – from the corner of my eye. Only when Mary’s pulse stopped flickering, and I knew she was gone, did I look. And there she was, sitting at the table with the gray woman, the child between them, the book open on the table, the empty photograph frame and a vase of her favorite flowers there, too, and the flower-presser took a stem of blooms from the vase and put them into the book.

There was a hammering on the front door and lights through the rain as the ambulance arrived and, as before, the scene with the flower-presser, and the child – and Mary – dropped again like dust and was gone, and it was just me, crying with shock, and Mary, blue eyes wide and vacant, waiting to be closed.

Young Mrs Livesly – the only Mrs Livesly when Mary had gone – told me it was all right for me to stay on for a little while; she said it would be a help to the family, too, to have someone in the house until it was sold. I stayed because I had nowhere else to go, but every moment of every day, I wanted to leave.

I’d saved every penny I earned, but realized, it was no good having the deposit for a flat, if I had no job again. And so I stayed; but I went for long walks every morning, spending hours every day walking the streets so I didn’t have to be in Livesly Hall. At night I would go back and the tall blank windows watched me as I crossed the drive under the Monkey Puzzle tree and I knew I was not alone as I climbed the curved marble staircase and went to my room.

But the hours I spent outside the house simply made whatever resided there more confident; that’s how it is, with a haunted house. You have to outface them, dominate them. Left empty, a house is soon taken over. From being sensed, soon, noises began; footsteps in the empty corridor above my room; doors softly opening and closing; lights turning on and off, playfully.

I would lie, head covered in fear like a child, while they enjoyed the night; and eventually I would fall asleep through sheer exhaustion.

And then, after a month of this I woke, just as it was getting light, to a sensation of heat, and the sound of rushing water. The taps of my bath had been turned on full, the bathroom was full of steam, and water had already soaked the soft bedroom carpet and spread out into the corridor.

I turned the taps off, but as soon as I stepped away from the bath, they turned slowly again, and the flood continued.

All I wanted now was to get away – to run as I’ve run so often – back to the hostel if need be, and they would have to take me in again, now my employer was dead. But even if they wouldn’t, I would have rather slept on a park bench than stay a moment longer in Livesly Hall.

I threw everything that was mine in the old wheeled case I’d brought with me, left the water running, and hurried down the stairs to the corridor leading to what had been Mary’s room. At the top of the marble stairs I paused. The sun was just rising, and the stained-glass panes in the big front door threw red and green patterns on the walls. It really was a beautiful house, and I knew, within seconds, I would be out of it and never see it again.

“Goodbye, Mary,” I said, wondering if she would hear me – and as I spoke the words out loud there was a sudden calm, a hush, as if everyone who had clamored to frighten me had suddenly left.

Only the rush of water carried on, and now it dripped through the ceiling a little. I would have to explain somehow, why I had left in the early dawn, and left such damage behind me.

But for now, I was free. I would deal with tomorrow when it came. Free. I imagined walking out of the door. Free.

I tucked my hair behind my ears and lifted my suitcase to carry it downstairs. The glowing stained-glass door and the future lay ahead. I reached for the curving stair-rail to support myself. Then something moved, below me in the hallway, and before I could stop myself I looked: into dark, mirrored eyes in a skeletal face, eyes full of possessiveness, and a reflection of me. Shocked, I flinched in horror and my hand missed the stair-rail.

I felt myself fall, clutch at air, my suitcase tumbling and striking the back of my legs, so my knees buckled and I fell down the cold, curving marble stairs, and as my head struck the broad step at the bottom I could see through the drawing-room door the flower-presser at her table with the child, and Mary.

There was the photo-frame again, and a picture in the frame, of a woman with long brown hair and I screamed because it was me, and because of a terrible pain, but I heard no sound, not even the water rushing and dripping on the stairs.

The pain went quite quickly, and they don’t trouble me now, Mary, and the flower-presser, and the child. Our paths hardly cross.

After all, I am a servant, so I don’t sit at their table. Every day, every hour, every moment, I am walking down the stairs to freedom. I haven’t reached the bottom step yet – somehow I always find myself back at the top again.

But I keep on trying, I keep on walking down the marble steps, and I never give up.

And one day, I know I will be able to get out of that door, that big, glowing door with the stained glass windows.

Family

They were faces of safety to think of in the nights when my blood pumped so hard in my ears I would sit up and look at the moon sliding across the small high window, rather than put my head on the pillow. Above me on the top bunk my brother slept on, and if I called out he’d laugh at me.

Mum and Dad were out – at the pictures, they said – and I could imagine them in some old wooden hall full of glass cases of stuffed fish, like the library in the town, examining fold-out boards with pictures from magazines pinned there. It didn’t seem much fun, but I thought, one day, when I was grown up, I’d do it, too: go out after dark with my hair piled high, and my face smelling softly of powder, heels tapping as I walked next to a man who wore a suit and shaved his blue chin twice a day. So one of the Nan’s would sit with us and Mum and Dad would be back before morning.

There was the Nan who looked like Dad, and seemed to belong to my cousins. She didn’t like Mum and Mum didn’t like her (I knew that, despite their polite chats over the tea-cups) and I wondered, sometimes, if she didn’t like me, too, because I had eyes like Mum, but she’d still look after me, because she was a Nan.  And there was the one who smelled of butter and Fairy soap, and knew the Latin names of all the flowers in her garden, which sounded funny when she recited them because she came from Gateshead. She had a long plait, dark like my hair at the bottom, growing greyer, until the hair which curled around her face was nearly white. I knew she loved us all equally, me, my brother, and all the cousins on that side. I don’t know how I knew it, because she never had a good word to say to any of us, and the only time I hugged her, she kept her arms by her side, and when I looked at her face, the tears were streaming down it. That Nan had scars on her back, glimpsed sometimes if we caught her in her petticoats, coiling her plait into a bun at the nape of her neck.

The Grandads were opposites, different species. The Grandad belonging to the Nan who looked like Dad had been a soldier in two big wars, and was very damaged, I know that now. He loped everywhere, an upright stride just short of a march, and he ate only once a day and drank endless sweet tea, which did no harm because a German had already knocked all his teeth out. His hands were always busy rolling a cigarette to join the one he kept behind each ear, and the one already burning on his lip. He moved in sifting layers of blue smoke, and although I can recognise his Buckinghamshire accent if I hear it, I only remember one thing he said, once, when he’d watched a war film, with the boy cousins and my brother at his feet.

“But we won, didn’t we Grandad?” Robin said, gazing with pride at the old soldier.

“Nobody ever wins a war, sonny,” said Grandad.

The other Grandad – the one who had no hair, and wore glasses, and belonged to Mum – would take us out in rotation, just one of us, alone, every Saturday, somewhere special for the day. It could be London, to see the lights turned on on the huge Norwegian tree in Trafalgar square, or it could be the other way, down to the sea at Seaford, where they’d had their short honeymoon. He carried our sandwiches in an old gas-mask case, and he smelt of mint and played the piano, his big, graceful hands stroking the music out of the keys as I watched and learned. He was a domesticated figure, when I knew him, but had once been more lively: playing in jazz clubs, and fighting Blackshirts, before he made an honest woman of a girl from Gateshead, and had to keep himself safe for his daughters.

Mum and Dad were together when they were sixteen, which I thought was how it should be. They kissed in the kitchen, and if I came downstairs at night I might find them dancing slowly in the little front room with the orange walls and the gas fire. We weren’t welcome at night, although they belonged to us by day. Mum was the prettiest twenty-five year old when I knew her, and Dad was the handsomest Dad. She was always slightly hysterical, he was always slightly absent-minded, they were so humble for themselves, and so proud of us: and there has not been a single thought, or feeling, or action which I have taken, in all my life, which hasn’t in some way been because of them.

Their time alone was precious, because their little flat was always full of younger sisters, and their boyfriends and then cousins, my cousins, people who look like me and share my genes, and took part in terrible family rows, and mattered greatly – but I don’t know where they are, now. They own my past, and I own theirs. I would like them to share some of the future, but I don’t know how to arrange that.

It’s far more peaceful, now we’ve all dispersed, but I still look for them sometimes in the empty spaces. I know I am far poorer, now, that we ever were, and so I’m often afraid, and I long for my family, then. Or is it that I long to be as I was when they were faces of safety to think of in the nights when my blood pumped so hard in my ears I would sit up and look at the moon sliding across the small high window, rather than put my head on the pillow?

A View Of The Sea

The couple at the next table were arguing - anyone could see that. Not

that they raised their voices, but the woman had the bleached look and

tense mouth of one under chronic strain, and her eyes, although

carefully made up, looked slightly puffy and reddened, as if she had

recently cried. The man had his back to Rachel, so she could only see

longish, slightly graying light-brown hair over the collar of a red, tartan

jacket, but the shoulders were hunched with belligerence and he

seemed to loom over his companion. The woman flinched at something

he said, then lifted her coffee-cup, but her hand trembled and she

replaced it in the saucer. Attempting to seem normal, she glanced round

the café, briefly caught Rachel’s eye, then looked away. Not that there

was anything much to look at. Someone, a long time ago, had tried to

give the premises a jaunty, nautical atmosphere. The rough plaster walls

were hung with bad paintings of galleons and scooners in full sail, glass

floats festooned the wooden panelling, and plastic lobsters trailed

dejectedly from decorative nylon nets. Rain streamed down the two

small windows, and as the tables emptied, nobody came to clear the

dirty cups, although a woman buttoned tightly into an overall was leaning

on the counter looking out at the wet cobbles.

Sarah would be here in  half an hour. They should have arrived at the same time,

so that they  could go to the cottage together, but as usual Sarah was running

late. Rachel wanted to go, but having been drenched once, didn’t want

to be drenched again; when Sarah arrived they could go

there together in her car. The last of her fellow customers left,

putting umbrellas up against the downpour, leaving Rachel alone with

the unhappy couple. She ordered tea and cake, killing time, and wishing

she had brought a book. The angry hunched shoulders and the woman’s

distressed face were between her and what view there was of the street

outside; to avoid appearing to watch them she must crane her neck and

feign interest in the terrible selection of ship-paintings.

After a few moments she turned back to her tea and cake but found

the woman now staring at her with unsettling intensity, her face ashen.

Rachel couldn't help but look back; the woman seemed to want to tell

her something. The man in the red jacket turned in his chair suddenly,

meeting Rachel's gaze, and clearly furious. He shoved his chair back,

slammed some money on the counter, and took the woman by one arm,

almost pulling her out of her chair. The door slammed behind them, and

they left Rachel feeling shaken by the enounter: the fear on the woman's

face, the rage on the man's. She closed her eyes and took a few deep

breaths, then heard the little bell tinkle over the cafe door again as Sarah

came in.

"I'm so sorry!" she said, hugging Rachel. "I let Chips out for a run in the

park and he wandered off. Shall we go?"

Then the sisters stood back from each other, and looked each other up

and down.

"Did you copy me, or did I copy you?" asked Sarah, and Rachel grinned back.

Both women were wearing longish dark-blue coats with fur collars, tan

leather boots, and a white scarf.

"We've done it again!" Rachel laughed.

Chips, Sarah's ancient dog of uncertain breed, was asleep on the back

seat of Sarah's car, and the sisters drove a mile out of the village to

where their cottage clung to the rocks above the pebbly beach. As

children, their parents had rented this cottage for two weeks each

summer, and now, every year at the beginning of October, the sisters

returned for what Rachel's husband, Nick, called their 'annual chat-fest.'

It had become a tradition ever since both sisters married, and moved to

opposite ends of the country. For all their startling similarities and

closeness, they now led very different lives: Rachel with her part-time

jobs, three demanding teenagers, and her husband struggling to keep

his engineering business afloat; Sarah, describing herself as "childfree",

with her charity work and her adoring husband who did something

involving IT which Rachel didn't understand but which seemed to bring in

more money in a month than she and Nick made in a year. The men

didn't get on. And Sarah had Chips, who was jealous and snappy around

Rachel's boisterous children. So now, the sisters packed all their talking

and laughing at private jokes into one off-season week each year, not

caring that the weather was unpredictable, each returning to her own life

recharged, having made contact with her roots once more.

Unpacking was the first thing which made them laugh - every year they

would find that they had each brought a case full of clothes which were

the same designs and colours, the main difference being that Rachel's

were the budget version of her sister's expensive holiday wardrobe.

Rachel had always loved the view from her bedroom here.

She had the room she had used when she was a child, facing directly

over the rock-strewn beach and the old broken stone jetty. While she put

her clothes away, she looked out, saw a flash of red, and was depressed

to see that the couple from the café were walking on the beach, the man

still in his red tartan jacket. Rachel could see that the door to the old

motor-home parked  beyond the jetty was open, spilling a little light into

the gloomy afternoon. So that was where they were staying.

The isolation of the cottage was what had attracted the sister's parents to this

place so long ago; most people chose to go to the caravan park on the

cliff above the long stretch of sandy beach, and left this little rocky corner

undisturbed. Rachel hoped the couple would move on soon. Even

through the closed window, above the sound of the waves, she could

hear the man shouting, and although she couldn't make out the words,

she could see the woman cringing beneath the verbal assault, like a

whipped dog. She thought of Nick, so tolerant and gentle with his family

no matter how stressed and tired he was, and of Sarah's Liam, who

adored his wife, and thought how lucky they had been. Then Sarah

came in to ask if Rachel remembered how to turn the heating on, and

Rachel put the unhappy couple out of her mind.

As they always did, the sisters slipped comfortably into a routine; each

morning, before breakfast, Rachel would drive into the village to buy

their food for the day, while Sarah took Chips for a short walk along the

beach. For the first two mornings, Rachel found herself reluctantly face

to face with the couple, who were never apart despite their obvious

unhappiness. Trapped in the queue at the corner-shop, she was unable

to move away, despite feeling the woman's eyes on her face, the

pleading and tension palpable, seemingly at breaking-point, so that

Rachel felt guilty for not helping her. But how could she say or do

anything? The woman never spoke, just stared in recognition, as if being

ignored by an old friend, and at some point, the man, a look of

suppressed fury on his face, would turn his glare on Rachel, as if

accusing her of interfering. She couldn't even tell Sarah about the

couple; Sarah had never seen them, and, unlike Rachel, whose impulse

was always to avoid confrontation, Sarah would undoubtedly have felt it

was her duty to do all she could to defend a woman who was clearly

being abused. But Rachel was acutely aware of how isolated the cottage

was; if they provoked the man in any way, he may come there, and he

was obviously unhinged. If he attacked them, they couldn't call the

police, because, so close to the sea, their mobile phones had no signal.

So Rachel simply started going to the shop half an hour earlier, leaving

Sarah pottering around in the kitchen making coffee, and kept a wary

eye open for the flash of the red jacket.

For two days, to her relief, she didn't see the couple, although the

motorhome remained on the strip of land close by the jetty. The sisters

spent their days slowly, visiting remembered childhood haunts, and

talking. The stony beach was uninviting because the weather remained

grey and cold, so only Sarah walked by the sea, when the elderly Chips

needed his few minutes of exercise before slumping exhausted onto his

bed by the radiator. But before going to bed, Rachel would turn out her

bedroom light and look out at the motor-home, it's windows lit, and

shiver, wondering what private hell the woman was enduring in that

confined space.

On the fifth morning, she was returning from buying the day's groceries,

and heard a brief shout, quickly muffled. She had almost reached the top

of the dune of bleached seashells which were washed up by each high

tide, and she saw the couple standing on the old jetty. The woman was

holding something up high, and as if in slow motion, Rachel saw her

bring her arm down, and the man fall onto the half-covered stones in the

water below. Paralysed, Rachel saw him, face down, unmoving rather

than struggling to stand up again. The woman hurried down to his side

as if to help, but instead, she glanced furtively all around the empty bay,

and even at a distance Rachel could see that the expression on her face

was one of pure triumph. In her hand, she still clutched the rock she had

struck him with. And then, as so often before, her eyes met Rachel's,

and Rachel knew she had been seen and recognised. The woman, no

longer cringing, but standing tall with determination, stepped toward

Rachel while the body of her tormentor moved gently among the green

rocks and the seaweed.

Rachel knew she had to reach the cottage, to stop Sarah from going out,

to keep her sister safe. She dropped down below the level of the bank of shells so

she couldn't be seen, left the bags of shopping and ran,

sliding and losing her footing in the shells, her ankles twisting on the

pebbles, heading for the path to the cottage, and safety.

She ran upstairs heart bursting, hoping to find Sarah still waiting for her to return, but

found the note by her bedroom door, saying Sarah had taken Chips for

his walk.

And through the bedroom window Rachel could see her sister

who was more than a sister, more than a friend: the other half of herself,

her identical twin, making for the jetty with the old dog trotting behind

her, and turning, smiling, to greet the woman intent on keeping the

secret of a man's death, who was walking toward her, still clutching the

rock in her hand.

Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside!

So this is now at what I think of as “join the dots” stage – where I can just tell myself the story.  I think of it as my “English Seaside” saga.  It’s a series of novels set along the English coast.  Each tells a story set in the present, but referring to the past, and each one is linked to the next in some way. There are five novels planned – each set in a different place along the coast, each containing drama, and a hint of mystery.

Our Lady Of The Harbour

The Saxon Way

Lost Road To Meandering

A Game Of Consequences At The Driftwood Club

Down Sparrow’s Ridge To Cockleshells

Their Garden

When I was a child, the garden burst with marigolds.

Pungent tomatoes climbed the walls in the dusty sun

And new-cut grass with daisies lying slaughtered

And ponds with drowning fan-tails and proud peonies

Spoke of a love that showed itself in growing

Days in the sun that I knew before I was knowing.

 

When you were older you tended the wild Valerian

And the African daisies that spilled across the lawn and path

And birthday Irises, July’s gift to Julia

Baby’s-breath that misted the pots you made for her

Slower you were, but still the seeds were sowing

Gifts of your heart to a love who would soon be going.

 

Now on the unmarked place where the earth has claimed her

Drowsing beneath the beds of rose and freesia

Warmed by the blanket of blooms with which you cover her

Stone would be far too cold for your blue-eyed Julia.

Seasons marked by the buds unfurling and showing

Love of your life, in the garden you are still growing.