Coming tomorrow: Blinkie the wandering rabbit. For Rosie!

She said, he said.

A salutary tale: reader make of this what you will.

She said "It's not like it used to be."

He said "That's because you're always critical so I tense up around you."

She said "Nobody else says I'm critical; maybe you just give me things to be critical about."

He said "And you're surprised I go quiet around you?"

She said "Well I didn't introduce the 'critical' thing; you're the one who brought it up."

Then he said "And your tone of voice is critical; you're always angry and irritated with me."

So she said "That's because you withdraw from me."

To which he said "We are going round in circles here."

So to change the subject and lighten the mood she said "And I'm really worried about the children. Do you think they are o.k.?"

Which elicited "They'll be more o.k. if you stop worrying about them."

Which prompted "Are you saying that I've caused them to behave like this?"

To which he rallied "I didn't say that, really."

To which rejoinder she added "What do you mean by really?"

So he said "I don't know: it's just a word."

Which she parodied as "Just a word; just a word."

Which he threw right back at her as "Sarcastic! Sarcastic!"

And she countered with "Words are important, you know. Modifiers; tags. Why do you have to be sloppy?"

Which caused the parrying of "I am not a child or some kind of linguistics student!"

To which she said "If you were a linguistics student maybe you would choose words and phrases more carefully? Some kind of linguistics student, for example?"

Well, they had a parrot in the room, these two. And to their shame, the parrot learned to, well, parrot what they said right back at them. It made them flinch and squirm and people would come into the house and say

"Oh - what an unpleasant parrot."

To which he said....

Picture of a blue hydrangea in autumn. Still beautiful stripped of its former vibrancy, I think.

The man in the mirror

This story is dedicated to Sophie. "If you were a president, you'd be Babebraham Lincoln."



Poor Rhea. She was a lovely girl who had fallen on hard times.She had lots of sisters and, of all of them, she was quite the jolliest. She told great stories. She was funny and vivacious and her laugh was contagious. Unfortunately, though, the mistress in whose service she lived was very cross with her. With her chatter, her jokes and her cheerful temperament, she had been deliberately employed to distract her mistress from the fact that her husband, shall we say, played away. Or sometimes just to distract her mistress from jealous musings and hot temper. When, one day, the mistress found out she had been duped, she mistress looked for revenge - although Rhea was, sadly, only the scapegoat.

I told you that Rhea loved to talk. Well, her punishment from her mistress -who had the devil and sorcery in her when she was in the worst of funks - was that she would be struck dumb. A song, a joke, a story might be for ever on her lips, but she could not share. Instead, the most tiresome thing ever: she would simply only be able to repeat the last words she had heard spoken. So, Rhea, while able to use her voice, could only imitate. She left her band of sisters and went, with a melancholy beyond words, to live all alone. She lived, I think, amongst the trees on the high slopes of the mountain.

One day, though, a fine looking man was hunting with his friends amongst these trees. he got separated from them and was disoriented and quite, quite lost. Rhea saw him and was spellbound: he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. She was spirited away; time stood still and nothing else mattered. And for a moment, she even forgot the wicked punishment meted out to her by her nasty former mistress.

Ah, but reader. The fine face can hide a cruel and self-interested interior. Where there is little kindess or admiration for the kindness, wit or imagination of others: only a delight in oneself.. Ascanius had grown up pleasing himself and, because he loved only himself, he had never felt what Rhea felt now. So Ascanius wandered and Rhea followed him at a distance. Eventually, he began to look a little unsettled:

"Where are you?" he shouted.

Of course, Rhea had no choice to but to copy him. He heard her, of course.

"Who are you?"

She echoes back

"Answer me!"

Oh, the painful irony of this. He could never answer her: never give what she would be able to give. Joy and life and..

"I told you: answer me!"

She could hear the anger in his voice. He accused her to her face of being a temptress and of mocking him. Rhea was in tears. His words came thick and fast, ever more cruel and Rhea - while she repeated these awful words back, bitter and repugnant to her - lay on the moss and cried.

I hadn't told you how beautiful Rhea was.She would have taken away your breath. I have heard of people like that. Even wished that, one day, I could be like that for someone. Haven't you? Think about this old Urdu poem "In love there is no difference between life and death:/ We live by gazing on the face that takes away our breath" Yes, think about that for a while? You would have fallen in love with Rhea, even though you might have found a bit of a chatterbox sometimes. Ascanius, though, did not see her beauty. While she was dumb in her way; in his, he was blind. Because what happened next was this.

Eventually, Ascanius stopped insulting her. Not because he had no more mean things to say, but because he was worn out. So he lay down and, yes, his breath was taken. Because he looked into a clear mountain pool as he rested and saw what was for him the most beautiful face he had ever seen. And he fell immediately and hopelessly in love - not with Rhea, of course, but with the reflection that he had been yet to see: his own. He stretched out his arms to the face in the pool, spoke sweetly and, of course, the handsome reflection whispered back in the voice of Rhea, ending in an "I love you." How those words hurt Rhea. Ascanius tried time and time again to hold the figure in the pool, clasp him and bring him closer. He looked and looked, and cried and the figure cried back, giving back to him what he gave himself. They were now, he thought, inseparable. And, in time, Ascanius became desparate and threw himself into the pool to catch his loved one. In the depths there were only stones and choking weed and darkness and his own death.

So he was gone and Rhea, bound to him still, could not save him. I heard that she simply wasted away as she longed for him. We can see how futile this was and how unworthy he was, but we don't always make wise choices, we know. We might think with longing for others who can never return our love. Maybe you could go to that mountain and try to talk to Rhea; tell her that you are there and that you understand, maybe? She would answer you back, though, because while her body is gone, she is still doomed to wander and echo back what we say. But you would be company and understanding for her and, maybe, when the light is dappled and the shadows lengthen, you might just catch the shadow of a beautiful girl...

Nobody ever found the body of our vain and unkind man, who had fallen in love only with himself, but people from this part of the world say that flowers sprang up around the pool where he drowned and where Rhea mourns him -although only in her fleeting and shadowy self - to this day. It is a shame that sometimes love chooses us and we seem powerless. Most important, though: do not think yourself the centre of the known world but also do not, however swept away, think this of another. I promise you that it will not end well.



A retelling of the story of Echo and Narcissus. I won't say that again.

HIRAETH

In the Welsh language, the word hiraeth, is, he thought, most beautifully defined as longing. His whole family - at least those whom he knew or who wanted to know him - were from Wales, scattered from Kidwelly, to Neath, Cardiff and thereabouts, Aberdare, Newport and, beyond the Lanskaer line to the little England beyond Wales - which is what you say to annoy a Pembrokeshire native.

And it was longing. When you were there and most of all, when you were not. John had been brought up in Somerset, a little lonely, really - something missing; part of the puzzle. An introverted young man, he was thought a bit prudish by his contemporaries at teacher training college, but, in a a moment of uncharacteristic, boldness, he had proposed to the first woman he fell in love with. She, he thought, was the most beautiful girl he had ever clapped eyes on. They married just after leaving college, to the disgust of his family. Too hasty; she was pregnant, too. "If you want your furniture", said his mother, better come and get it sharpish because your father's having a clear out."

John didn't criticise. He did, however, feel a shift. That longing thing again. Time to go.

So, with Mary, his new wife, they shifted across the river Severn. John found a job in mid Wales and, eventually, in Pembrokeshire. Mary, in the bosom of her large and shambling family, had her baby and was able, with their help, to take her first teaching post at Wiston, in Pembrokeshire, when there was still a school there. It wasn't a complicated life, but he could see the Prescelli hills beyond the school, watch the mist come down all of a sudden and walk out to St David's Head and be alone and still.

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So, today, it is a very short story, because I am off to Wales today. To Cardiff, Penarth, Merthyr (I'm not just speaking of what is pretty, but also of what is there and of what is), then on to the Brecon Beacons, Ceredigion and into Pembrokeshire. In a church at Walton West, above Broad Haven and gazing out at the sea, are buried two uncles, a cousin, my grandmother, my great grandmother and various other more distant relatives - all Becketts and, allowing for variant spellings, LLewelyns. And I feel it -that sense of longing - too. I was not, unlike, my family, born to it. But there is something about Wales. It is brooding, mysterious and, somehow, it feels ancient in a way that England, to me, does not. It is affecting in a haunting and entirely visceral way. That, I think, is hiraeth for me. I may not have been born in it but I am and have always been, of it.


Reader: we have to have a pause in our stories here because I am without internet connection for a few days. Perhaps you were under the impression that the whole of the U.K. had broadband connection or WiFi? Not in one little corner of our family! When I can, a batch of children's stories for you -- featuring Bethany Bluebottle -- plus some vampire stuff for 16 plus!!!

Observations upon one's grandparents. For Kate

Flora's paternal grandmother lived in a wonderful late Georgian house on the edge of the Mendips. She was Elizabeth, a proud and private lady, who kept chickens and made copious preserves and pickles and Flora remembered the dark larder in which the eggs glowed in the malt vinegar in Grandma's huge preserving jars. There were jams and pickled red cabbage and the damsons and plums from the old trees around the house.

It was thought that Elizabeth didn't particularly care for folks outside the family; there was respect, then, though  perhaps not liking between Flora's mother and grandma. Conversation was always confined to cooking and cottage garden plants and then silence. Flora had no memory of her mother ever visiting grandma beyond her early childhood. And certainly no memory of Grandma ever visiting Flora in her own house. This made her sad. A sort of lingering, quiet sadness which there was no point at all in sharing. It was just the way things were.

Flora's grandfather, Reg, was a tall, handsome man. Big working hands, broad shoulders like Flora's father. A man, again, of few words, but with lots of jobs for  Flora. Pick the fruit, some dahlias - in his garden, all the plants stood to attention when he walked among them - check the chickens, go into the huge walled vegetable garden and pick peas and broad beans, climb the tree and get some prize plums. Don't want to waste them. 50p pressed into your hand wordlessly as you got into the car to go home.

She loved to visit this part of her family but, as an introspective child, knew there was little to say and that they liked to see her, but would never, ever dandle her on their knee. Just the way things were. There was silence around what Flora knew to be sad things in the family: of death and separation and cancer and blindness and things involving tempers and people not being able to get out of bed. This unsettled Flora as a child and teenager, but as an adult she respected its dignity. When, over an eight year period of losing both grandparents, her father, her godmothers (one, her father's beloved and gregarious sister - the unusual girl in the family) and her mother, her remaining aunts and uncles (there were six in all) gently told her that they would most likely not see her again, it didn't come as a shock. Just sad. Sad. She never saw any of them again.

And then, there was the other side of the family. The lively, bright clan from South Wales. As a child, Flora was never quite sure how many of them there were, but thought that her mother had more or less ten or eleven siblings, with some attrition and a grandmother's tale of a baby dying at the breast - the story of which always made Flora cry. Flora's grandmother was theatrical, really rather a good self-taught pianist, would have been at home in the music hall where - and she liked to remind her little granddaughter of this - she would have drawn crowds. Instead, she managed the tribe of children as they shifted through various farms across South Wales and into Pembrokeshire as tenant farmers and grandfather -whom Flora never met- came along, too. At least, that was the impression Flora had growing up. That grandfather was there, along with grandma and her mother, Nanny - who died in her own bed accompanied by a vision of the virgin Mary in the corner of the room.

Flora keeps even now a picture of  her maternal grandfather on a dresser. He -Roland - looks like a movie star and has an intense and steady gaze.She always wishes she had met him; Flora's father once told her that grandpa was an intensely clever man, a fine mathemetician. She knew from her aunts that there had been flashes of dangerous temper - but never at the children. She wanted so much to understand and know more. When the last child grew up, grandfather left and went to live alone in Tenby, Pembrokeshire. If he found someone to love, we'll never know.

So, what have we left? Flora had thought it odd, when she married into a family from Georgia, in the Southern United States, that such interest was taken in family history, in genealogy and who was kin to whom. But of course, it makes sense. Kin is what you are. Not the whole of what you are, though. Experience, bitter and otherwise, teaches us that blood is not always thicker than water; that family is, frankly, a flexible construct. But, as Flora raises her own children, meets and is partially assimilated into other families -which is how it should be, she might say- she does think back two generations and has come to the conclusion that brooding of this nature is born of someone thrust into adulthood early by loss.

The painting is 'Grandmother's cheese dish'. 2010 in oils by Anna Vaught.

Down by the old Fogle house (Georgia....)

In a small town in Georgia, the Spanish moss cascades from the live oaks, the red earth is soft and warm and the benches are white. At this time of year, though, the grass had begun to parch and, by midday, the frames of the branches were hot to the touch. So it was good to be in the park with your Kool-Aid, sheltering in what less scorching enclaves you could find and catching the occasional spray from the fountain when a breeze came in your direction. And you want to be there rather than at the strip, with its hot tarmac and its huge Piggly-Wiggly and CVS stores; but even more, you would maybe not want to be on the other side of the town, away from the pretty centre, where green gave way to swamp and the fetid smell caught your nostrils in the summer. At least that's what the ladies who lived on the best street said.

Down by the swamp lived old John Fogle; he had, children said, the gift of second sight and, along with his cold, hostile wife and his unfriendly brood of  female offspring, did not like people to stray their way. The children were at school but chose to play together, shunning the company or Missy or Mary Lee or Claudia. Did well in school, though. Top of the class. Certainly, the other girls in the class tried hard to be friendly -- the ones, that is, whose mothers had not warned them away from the Fogle girls. The ones with the kinder, more broad minded mothers or those who wanted to rebel aganist their mothers -- for this was also a town in which mean mindedness and snobbishness tended to run rife.

Today, one young girl was determined. Betty was kind, but also intent on one day getting down to the house and looking more closely at the swamp. And she persisted.

"Can't I come home and play with y'all? Ma says it's o.k."

"No. Pa wouldn't allow it."

"Why not? I'd be real good."

"Don't matter."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. Sump'n. Nothing. Can't tell."

This enigmatic last answer was all she needed. So she told her mother that she has been invited home -and her mother allowed her because she, too, was kind and kind of curious to know about this family and, essentially, believed that they would treat right if treated right. So Betty followed.

"Go away. Pa don't like it.!

"Oh go on. You yella?"

"No. Well, if you'll go away after."

To the girls' surprise, John Fogle, who had stood up in what felt like a menacing way (Betty shuddered and regretted coming along), said that it would o.k. as long as she did not stay long. And in went Betty.

Sure, the area around the house was close to the swamp; you could smell the heavy air. But, it was also somehow exotic and beautiful and a breath of fresh air after the tight little corner of town where Betty lived. And the house was tatty, but oddly welcoming and, well, fun. Yes, fun. Like anything could happen. And Betty liked it. Gradually, the girls began to play with Betty, too. Chase and hide and go seek and, well, anything that took their fancy. And Betty met their mother who, in a startling and untidy way, was also unexpectedly beautiful.

She stayed for the evening meal, too. Basic and old fashioned, but substantial, too. And, while no-one said much, Betty realised that she had been accepted. Maybe she would be able to go back.

Next day in school, the Fogle girls continued to play together only, but they looked sideways at her even with a hint of a smile. She felt happy. It was, in its way, all rather mysterious. She wondered, too, why John Fogle looked so old: more like a grandfather or even a great grandfather than a father.

I expect you, reader, would like to know a few answers, wouldn't you? Well, the writer Carson McCullers, who came from Columbus, Georgia, wrote that she needed to return to the South from time to time to renew her sense of horror. It's not that I generalise here, you know, but do you think she had a point? Because John Fogle was not the girls' father and he did have the gift of second sight. He was the girls' great grandfather and he had, for reasons and by folks we cannot name, been preserved for his gifts. Father and grandfather? Gone. To the swamp one day. John Fogle saw what they would become. Told you that old brackish water was fetid. Not just that: it lived and breathed and did what it would do. And John Fogle was its custodian, being no murdering sort himself, exactly. Betty would be just fine because, as I told you, she was kind and looked without arrogance - only with spirit, love and curiosity at the world, in the way child and adult should. And those hoity toity mothers who lived on the best street on the other side of the park? Well, better not go the Fogle way. Swamp gonna get you.

NOTES: thanks to Ned Vaught (from Georgia and on my mind -sorry). 
Piggly Wiggly is the name of a Southern chain of supermarkets.
cdsessum has piblished a number of portraits of the South at www.flickr.com Thank you to him for his generosity in making them available under creative commons at www.flickr.com

Feasting and fasting at the Great House

Another creepy story -- as I've been teaching Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, Gothic novels and re-reading The Turn of the Screw and The Castle of Otranto (the latter of which didn't really bear re-reading, but that's another matter). Let us begin.

The old house, in the sleepy French village, is tall and dusty looking. Once, it must have been vibrant, but now, bindweed curls around it and ivy reclaims the windows and the stone of the house. It must be hard for the quiet inhabitants to see out.

Sometimes, there is post for the house and the postboy makes a swift passage towards the door because the house alarms him. There is a housekeeper, an old crone who will not give you the time of day and, curiously, a gardener - though he never tends to the front gardens, so fallen into disrepair they must be. The villagers wonder whether there are beautiful and well tended gardens to the rear of the house.

It is said that a lady lives at the house, some say two sisters, and that they never need company. But that this is a house of shadowy presences; a place where melancholy hangs thick in the air. And at night, sometimes -in summer when the top windows of the house are opened - one hears music, from a curious assortment of instruments: flute, cello, but also mandolin and dulcimer. And an inhabitantof the village making his way home could be stopped in his tracks because the music is so extraordinarily beautiful. And even so it sends a shiver up the spine which is not so pleasant.

But today is different. People do not come and go readily in this village, but a new person has come, from the city, and he wants to enquire about the tall, great house. He thinks he might like to buy it: a retreat. It has great potential and he knows excellent architects and designers in Paris, where he lives now. He is bold, so he knocks at the door and it is answered. The rumour held true. Two women come to the door, so similar facially it is immediately clear that they are sisters. They are not beautiful, but they are arresting: striking and sensual women, with poise and grace and exquisite manners. They seem pleased to see him and -he is surprised to entertain this peculiar thought for a moment- as if they knew he were coming.

Over tea and dainty little cakes, he explains to them what it is he is looking for. They are clearly amused by something but do not elaborate. And to his delight, they indicate quite clearly that, indeed, they were thinking of it, of perhaps finding somewhere smaller because the great house is too much to manage and they realise parts of it are in a poor state of repair. They tell him that they will be in touch, that they have a solicitor in Paris who attends to matters of estate and finance for them - and so the visitor takes his leave.

So he waits and, sure enough, within weeks he hears from them again. A sum is agreed and the solicitors are instructed. Within two months, he is in the house, removing dust and grime and revealing the lovely house under the crumbling plaster and neglect. He has a lady in Paris and she becomes his wife. So taken with the house is he that he decides to move from Paris; it is a fair trip but he thinks he can make the journey once or twice a week to conduct his business. And during these times, his new wife is left lonely at home. The dream becomes more to his liking than to hers and, eventually, resentment begins to settle in the house.

And so they come to her. The two sisters who are still there for, of course, they did not move out - just retreated into the deeper recesses of darkness until they saw a purpose. The housekeeper and gardener are there, too. They will never leave because the house is alive: it is a living breathing organism and they, hungry for blood and for dim, mysterious life, are part of its darkness. The house may be trimmed and tidied and made pretty but, underneath, it will not change. And so the young wife is taken to be with them. And when her husband, upstart from Paris, comes back, he will not find her. Eventually the house and its inhabitants will claim him too. Except that his will not be a quiet taking - for the sin of presuming to buy what belonged for ever to somebody else. Something that was never for sale. And all those who live in the wings of the house and in the fine rear garden will play their music, jangle the gold of our upstart, do what cruel things they must to survive and laugh. You could hear them if you went to this village on a summer night when the music is played. But keep your pride in check.