Through a strange set of circumstances, today I found myself sitting in the sun on my garden seat reading The Manor House School by Angela Brazil. Her name came up on a Radio 4 discussion programme and I recalled reading her books as a schoolgirl though it was news to me that she was a ‘rebel and a mould-breaker’. Apparently before Angela’s time girls’ school stories featured characters of an exemplary nature, embodying all the feminine virtues and acting as shining role models to young girls (not teenagers, please note, we didn’t have those until the late fifties).
 
Miss Brazil portrayed girls with a bit more spirit, iconoclastic tomboys – no wonder they appealed to me. Curious to know the kind of thing I was reading in my youth, I ordered a copy on ebay. It’s a surprisingly good story, a suspenseful mystery which would have had me on the edge of my seat in the 1940’s, but still able to hold my interest even today.
 
Spurred on by this experience, I began wondering what I would think of some of the books I devoured as a young adult. My father put me to work in a library and this considerably broadened my reading as all kinds of books came into my hands across the counter and each of us had our own drawer into which we could slip anything that took our fancy.
 
Frances Parkinson Keyes and her tales of plantations and slavery in the Southern states of America is my next choice and I have just bought Steamboat Gothic for about two and sixpence old money!

Ten years ago tomorrow, in Killarney, a brave soul perished. Blind from the age of 8, he held his own in the world of the sighted. He often said we who can see are at a disadvantage – we rely on sight alone and are blind to all the other senses. Once, cycling through France, I asked him what he was getting out of it. After all, he could not see the beautiful countryside we were passing through.
          “Oh, you’d be surprised!” he said. “I can feel the sun on my face so I know which direction we’re headed in. I know there’s a clump of trees over there because the wind from that direction smells different. We just passed a farm on the right and there’s dust on the road.” He was alive to everything and particularly perceptive about people. “It’s all in the voice,” he said. “Listen to that and you won’t go far wrong.”
          He said we’re distracted by the show people put on – their clothes, hair, expression are all designed to project the image they want us to see. But they can’t hide their true character if you listen to the voice. He was right. The Cuban email pal was a case in point. She was living in Miami when we met and the first time I heard her voice it sent a chill through me. She wanted to move here and we offered to help – she could stay with us until she found somewhere of her own. It took ten months to get her out. She went nowhere unless one of us went with her and she knew no one. Funded by her shaman healer husband she was quite content to laze around our house with all meals provided for the indefinite future! Still, it was an experience I wouldn’t have been without. Life isn’t all a bed of roses.
          He was full of advice and people often sought his help. But it was tough love with him. He was as hard on you as he was on himself and he was brought up without mercy in a German institution for the ‘severely hindered’ as they call it over there. Made to run, play games, do everything normal people do and to fold his clothes into such exact shapes that when I first met him I thought he sent his washing to a laundry.
          He had phenomenal hearing and his aural skills were unmatched. Local singers and musicians came to his front-room recording studio to record their work and declared it far superior to that produced by the professionals. It was lost on me. He would play me an ‘original’ sound clip and then his ‘improved’ version and I could not tell the difference. The muscians could, though.
          He had moved to Killarney only months before his death and the people in the church he joined had known him only seven weeks, yet the church was packed to the doors for his funeral. They all spoke to me of him and the help or insights he had given them and each one said he had told them that all he wanted was for the two of us to be together again.
          So in death he was given back to me over and over by these kind people. And that is why I love Killarney.
          “Good night, sweet prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
         He was 9 days away from his 51st birthday.

I’ve had a word in my head for days – Terpsichorean. Kept meaning to look it up, thought it might refer to turtles! Nothing could be further from the truth. I was astonished to find that it originated in the 18th century and was used to describe a female dancer doing something that resembled ‘The Twist’ – or Isadora Duncan - remember her? Further research into the word reveals that it springs from the Greek Goddess of Dance and Choral Song – Terpsikhore. She was one of Nine Muses of music, song and dance who gave inspiration to mortals.
After pestering me for many days with no result, this word came so strongly into my head as I logged into facebook today that I had to stop immediately and go look it up. Because the word was completely unknown to me  I must conclude that it contains a message for me. Now I am too old to dance, but I have been invited to a drumming group. I’ve not managed to make it to a meeting yet so I shall be sure to go to the next one.
I am reminded of a previous instance of this sort of message. The summer following my husband Wolfram’s death I was sitting in the garden in the sun, thinking about how he built it all for me -  the flagging, the shed, the landscaping and planting, nothing too much trouble or effort for him, thinking of the great gifts he gave me – when I heard the word: ‘Samsara’ whispered in my ear. It broke my train of thought but in a short while I began thinking about Killarney in Ireland where he went to live shortly before he died and how, if he had been alive, I would have been there with him for the summer, doing readings to pay my way. Again ‘Samsara’ was whispered in my ear so I went indoors to look it up.
This is what I found: Samsara is derived from "to flow together”, to go or pass through states, to wander. Mostly a great revolving door between life and death - a cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
If that isn’t a message of love and hope that life continues after death, I don’t know what it is.

A Passing in Killarney  

It seemed like days, if not weeks, till they came for him,
While I sat at his side and I talked to him,
While I played my drum and I sang for him,
And I placed the green boughs that I brought for him.   

It seemed like days, if not weeks, till they came for him,
Each day, like a bride, that I ran to him,
To sit by his side and honour him,
With the candles and incense I brought for him.   

Yet it was twenty-four hours that I had with him,
From my plane touching down till they came for him.
Over the green bower that my hands had made for him,
They nailed down the lid that they brought for him.   

I had twenty-four hours till they came for him,
And that was the last time I looked on him.
As Husband and Friend I remember him,
As Half of my Soul I remember him.
Each day of my life I remember him.  

It was February when my husband left; the day before Valentine’s to be precise. He walked out and went to another woman. I tried to be positive about it and to get over it as fast as I could. Look on it as an opportunity to change, I said, and what a good thing he left me at this time of year, I said, when we’re moving forward into spring and summer, and not at the onset of winter, when I’d have the dark nights to face. 

I spent all the time I could down at the allotment, so that I wouldn’t have to think. I was there early in the morning and stayed until the light went, sometimes later than that. Sometimes in the night when I couldn’t sleep I returned to sit under the stars and nurse my broken heart. 

I tried to widen my circle – I joined a gym and wore myself out on the treadmills. I visited friends’ gardens and marvelled at how early everything was coming out. 

As the year wore on I thought I was healing and in June I booked a cycling holiday. Wanting to spend time with an old friend in Norfolk, I arranged to join the tour bus there. But once out of my comfort zone, my support system broke down. I went to pieces and couldn’t stop crying. I returned home and cancelled the trip. 

In August I was showing some people round the allotment, advising them on what it was possible to grow. 

“Of course there’s nothing growing now,” I said, “because it’s winter. But in the summer it’s a different picture.” As I spoke I became aware of something wrong as gradually, imperceptibly, the black, white and grey landscape of February that filled my mind faded away and bright sunlight crept slowly in at the edges of my vision, lighting up the colourful flowers, fruits and vegetables that surrounded us. 

What could I say to explain my remark? They would think I was mad. I walked away, leaving them to think what they liked. I knew what it meant. My world had stopped on February 13 when I ended up on an emotional ice floe, far out at sea, separated from the living world.

I’ve often asked myself why it is that I can’t write fiction? Is it because I was taught as a child that lying is wrong? No, because when I was at school I wrote lots of stories purely from imagination. So what went wrong along the way? Why did I lose this ability? I drew a complete blank – until today.  

I saw the ad as a pop-up on facebook – a course in Creative Writing at Craven College. This might interest my son, I thought. He has had to give up work through ill health and has begun writing in earnest. I passed the link to him, then the Voice in my Head said – Why don’t you do it? The Voice is right. I am always passing on information that might help other people, yet I never do it for myself.

It turned out not to be a simple course, but a full-blown University degree – BA (Hons) in English and Creative Writing, taken over three years. Well why not? I never got a degree and though I definitely don’t need one now, it would be interesting. The main attraction though was the mental stimulation it would provide. No harm in applying: I filled in the application form.  

Today I went for interview. I saw a lady called Jane. She told me a) the course probably will not run as only three of us have applied; b) she did not know what else they could teach me that I did not already know, and that I would probably end up teaching them; but that c) she loved my application and wanted to meet me!  

Like the Walrus and the Carpenter we talked of many things (of shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings – and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings) and I told her that I do not know why I cannot write fiction but that I hoped to learn.  

On the way home I thought of a strange set of circumstances that has recently occurred and how it would make an ideal beginning for a spooky story. Three people I met in the last two weeks, on completely unconnected occasions, turned out to be involved with each other in a web of intrigue. Sitting on the bus I tried to imagine how this story might develop – and I could not. I asked why not - and the answer was: because if I start doing that, the things I invent may come true – and this makes me afraid. And at the same time I was whisked back to when, in my twenties and trapped in an unhappy marriage, I was faced with a one-year wait before my youngest would be old enough to go to Nursery School and I could leave. I decided to spend that year in writing a novel. I enjoyed doing it and my imagination worked perfectly. Then the things I invented started to happen in real life. One or two minor incidents and then the big one: my father worked in a foundry and I had one of my characters fall to his death in the furnace. It was when Dad came home ashen-faced and reported that this had happened to one of his workers that I gave up writing my novel. This had completely vanished from my conscious mind until today, when I pushed my imagination to do its work – and it informed me why it could not.

Now I have identified the problem maybe I can start writing fiction again.

In 1992, while fully immersed in the allotments and writing my 'Muck & Magic' column in the Nelson Leader, I received an enquiry from a gentleman named William Bell. Having reached the age of 91, he felt it was time to write his memoirs and he thought I might be able to guide his pen, so to speak. Always up for a challenge I went to meet him at his home in Hibson Road. I found him a most entertaining gentleman, with a great gift for story-telling. I drank tea with him once a week from then on, he spouted his yarns and I returned home to write them down. At first I took a tape recorder with me but this inhibited him so I came to rely on my memory and the notes I made while he talked. William was a perfectionist and was always concerned that his stories should be completely accurate. I took a more liberal view - "There can't be many people as old as you William." I would say. "No one's going to be arguing about it."
    After a time, this obsession of his became a problem and instead of acting the part of the engaging storyteller he undoubtedly was, he began writing down his stories, resulting in something that lacked the sparkle of his narrative style. Luckily I could usually get him to begin reminiscing after we had dissected his efforts, and that was what went down on paper. Given my respect for his age, I was not strict enough in enforcing what I knew to be best and in the end the sessions became too onerous and I gracefully bowed out.
    I have kept William's stories in a file with the intention of publishing them one day and that time has now come. I have written a letter to the Nelson Leader to try and contact his relatives in the hope they can provide some photographs and perhaps some stories of their own they remember William telling.

William Bell was born on 25 April 1901 and had vivid recollections of his childhood in Skerton, a suburb of Lancaster. I would ge grateful to hear from anyone who knew him and can provide more information about him and the stories he told.