Dying for a fag

After a trip to the highlands and too many months of fannying about and excuses, I have finally started this novel in earnest. I find myself with child and a much needed deadline to complete the first draft. I write 20,000 words I cut 5000 and so it goes, the number of words now needed each week being 3000. This is achievable I tell myself as I word count obsessively. The words come easily, it's finding the stretches of blissful uninterrupted time that evades me. I hate to admit it but Virginia woolf was right, that pram in the hallway does make it bloody difficult to get up those stairs to my Mac of make believe at the top.



And so every Tuesday I have an uninterrupted day to write and so far the words flow as intended. I don't have time to grimace and cringe at my own work and focus on the fact that Jon McGregor said it was 'all good stuff'. These little ego boosts are a lifeline when stuck in the attic room wondering if my time would be far better spent doing the washing up. The trouble with writing , and novel writing in particular, is that it is so bloody hard! You doubt your sanity. Why am I writing a story about a pensioner living in a Peabdy estate in Wandsworth? Its also technically very difficult, keeping track of what you've said, creating a consistent voice, remembering that it will be read as a whole and ensuring that the dramatic pace of the thing grips the reader. It's hellish but in a fantastic and exhilarating way. I have to keep remembering that lots of people could write a novel, they just don't. It is the doing that's the thing and I'm up to my neck in it now.



I am committed, I have invested time and have a room at the top. I have also diagnosed Lilian with a fatal lung disease and cannot simply leave her at the bus stop smoking a cigarette. I've mucked her about a bit too, her son died, he didn't die, she married, she didn't, she had sex with Frank then she didn't. I also have to write Burt for her, the geriatric Lothario with his Garibaldi biscuits. Lilian and Gwen will have such a giggle taking the mickey out of him whilst they eat their fish and chip supper and on that note I'd better ready the plates for mine....

Nobody would ever know that she was once a mother

The baby lie on the double bed, tiny on the sweat stained mattress. Lilian tried to feel something as she looked at him, his white fists flailing as his eyes stared out into the darkened room. She had only meant to pop her head around the door but now she stood overwhelmed by the sight of this tragic, human creature. He was raw with need and although he was only a few weeks old he frightened her. It struck her that he resembled a fledgling bird, his mouth rooting for food as he thrashed his head from side to side hoping to find her milky breast. She knew he was looking for her and that he could probably smell her too, but Lilian had never fed her baby and Edie would be furious if she gave in now. She was hoping that her milk would dry up soon as her breasts were hard and sore. Every time she heard his thin cries from the top of the house, her bra would fill with painful milk and each morning her mattress was soaked. She just wished the couple would come and take him away soon so that she no longer needed to feel his deep and angry hunger. Soon they would be shot of each other, Edie her landlady had arranged it all. She said it was common for young girls who had been caught out. Babies could be lost in a war, she had seen them being pulled out of the rubble all the time. Edie told her she was lucky they were at war. You could get away with all sorts during the war apparently. Fathers were being killed all over the shop, families were getting mixed up all over the place. For all its faults, war was good at keeping secrets.

Lilian crept into the room and turned on the lamp. The room was even filthier than the rest of the house. One of the previous lodgers had tried to make herself at home by pasting postcards of film stars to the mirror but those radiant faces couldn’t make up for the dirt and grime. The surface of the table was caked with rouge and sticky rims of gin left over from someone else’s good time. She wiped the mirror free of dust with a discarded headscarf and stood back to get a full length view. Despite the fact her son was only a few weeks old, her stomach was almost flat. Her breasts seemed fuller than before and her hips had widened, giving her shape a more womanly curve. Edie told her that she was a “catch” and that the “blokes would be queuing up round the block" to take her to the pictures. She helped her set her hair, bought her some stockings on the black market and painted her unlined face. Edie had told her that the milk would dry up in a few days if she didn’t feed him. Then she could get on with her life, find a new fella, nobody would be any the wiser. After the baby was born Edie took Lilian under her domineering wing. She taught her how to powder her face, apply rouge and more importantly, how to put on a front. One of the other lodgers had made her a dress from shot green silk, copied from a photograph in `Picturegoer’ magazine. Lilian had never owned a woman's dress before. Together the women of the house had fixed her up and pieced her together and as she looked at herself in the dark mirror, she had to admit that they had done a good job. Even she thought she looked beautiful in the soft light of the lamp. She had followed Edie’s advice and applied her make up like a film star, had set her hair in perfect curls and dabbed perfume behind her ears. She had dressed the lobes with clip on pearls and draped a delicate rope of beads around her neck. She looked straight into her own eyes and practiced a bold and brazen smile. Practicing with her new ladies’ mask she raised and lowered her powdered lids as she had seen Bette Davis do at the pictures. Edie had told her that that Bette Davis was the best person to teach you how to put on a front. Nobody laughed at Bette Davis and she wouldn’t care even if they did. Edie said that if she put up a good enough front nobody would ever know she was once a mother. Downstairs someone was playing her favourite tune and her heart raced with excitement as she imagined the dancing she would do in her new dress. She had been so swollen and heavy for so long that she couldn't wait to feel the lightness of herself in someone's arms. She had been the best dancer in her town but London was full of beautiful girls and she worried that her steps would seem old fashioned, that she would seem plain. Edie said that she would knock spots off of the brassy birds around Camberwell, but Lilian didn't want to knock any spots off anyone, she just wanted to be as good, to fit in. She was meeting Rex at the corner of the street at 8.00 and he was taking her dancing.

She knew what shoes she was wearing, she had picked them out whilst her ankles were still swollen and elephantine. She had borrowed Gwen’s hat and had fantasised about the way she would walk when she approached him. The way she would swing her hips as she pulled on a freshly lit cigarette. It had seemed quite exciting when Edie had suggested it. Rex was a friend of the family home on leave from somewhere in Europe. Edie said it would do her good to get out with young people and it had taken her mind off the baby for a while. If she’d known that she would still be bleeding and that she would feel so shaky and so strange, she wouldn’t have agreed to it. A date now seemed unimaginable. She was trying to put on a front like a proper woman but she felt as though she was just slipping.

The baby began to cry and she realised that she had been sitting simply staring into the damp room. She noticed that the wallpaper was peeling from the walls and how cold it was even though the night was hot and close outside. It was as though this room had its own place in time, as though part of her would be here forever. She had only meant to pop her head around the door before heading out to meet Rex and now the baby was crying again. She turned and looked at him wriggling on the bare mattress; his face was red and his flailing more desperate than before. She felt a surge of warmth in her bra and looked down to see that the milk had seeped out into the silk of her dress. She couldn't meet Rex like this. All this milk, all these tears would put him off, She couldn’t even bear to look at herself sometimes. Why did she think she could meet someone and that they might like her? She pulled at the zip on the side of the dress and began to sob before slumping on the bed.

The baby had stopped crying. He was not yet able to focus his eyes on her but he was listening, she knew that. Lilian crawled towards him and nestled her face into his cheek and simply smelt him. She took a deep breath and took the smell of him inside her. For a moment they lay still as though everything outside of them had faded away and for the first time since she had given birth to him she felt like his mother. Lillian picked him up gingerly. She unzipped her dress, pulled down the strap of her bra and held him in the cradle of her arm. Somehow they both knew what to do and she suckled him until he closed his eyes and his mouth slipped naturally away from her nipple.

She had been ready to go out dancing; she had been ready to begin her life. But like a chipped, china cup painted with roses she would always have a fault. Not good enough to serve high tea in, but pretty enough to hold if the dirty chip was moved away from the mouth before they sipped. She thought of her the mother and the rock cakes full of currants and her delicate tea service that she would bring out only when family visited. She missed her mother and began to wish that she could take him home to Wales but she may as well be Hitler to them. She would rather take a bomb than go back to her father. He had broken her mother’s precious cups one by one. Now every time Lilian thinks of roses, she thinks of her mother.

She had only meant to pop her head around the door to make sure they had come to collect him and now she wondered whether or not this lack of feeling for him would pass; that if she gave it time she could even grow to love him. Lilian wondered if she could really be his mother. Only for a moment could she imagine how it was possible. She pressed her nose against his fragile head and smelled him again. She didn't want to remember him here, on the stained bed with only a torn up towel for a blanket. She wanted to breathe him in, to remember the moment she felt like his mother. They were coming tonight and they would have a perfect white crib and a soft blanket to hold him in. The lady would take him for walks along the promenade in a posh perambulator with sparkling wheels. People would say that he looked like his father, handsome and bright. They would not pity his mother, they would not call him a bastard , he would not live in a room that was damp and sticky with the rims of gin. He would not be the mistake of someone's good time.

Outside the sirens sounded and doors opened and closed all over the boarding house. Lilian stood up and straightened her dress. Pulling her stomach in she fastened the zip and checked her hair in the mirror. The dress was not too badly stained. With a little scrub and a carefully placed brooch Rex would never notice. She kissed the top of her son's head and turned off the lamp. In the cinema this would be the end of the scene where she played mother. Bette Davis would throw back her head, light a cigarette and walk down those stairs as though she was the Queen herself. Lilian knew this was the end of her scene but the music had stopped and London was in blackout, there was no audience for her descent. She walked out of the room without looking back at the sleeping baby and down the three flights of darkened stairs. The night was balmy so she didn’t need a coat and she slipped on the high heeled shoes that she had left in the pile of women’s shoes at the front door. She walked out of house and into the bombs. A man called out to her but she heard nothing, her tears fell too hard and her high heels scraped on the pavement. In the darkness, Lilian had put on somebody else’s shoes.

For Emily and Dilys

© Michelle Porter 2009

Evie Humphries

As Lilian sits in her chair by the window, the blank white sky almost sends her to sleep. Her eyes glaze as though she has lost her mind but inside her head the film of Evie is becoming sharper, her footage of Evie always starts in the bath.

It was dark and as Lilian climbed the stairs she imagined that the carpet was thick with fleas. At the top she could hear the slopping of water, the clatter of metal slow and menacing. Edie always bathed with the door open and when Lilian reached the top she was confronted by the most terrifying woman she had ever seen. Her face was hard and housed eyes that looked as though they had never flinched. The raw directness of that look shocked Lilian more than the image of Edie, huge and naked wearing only a collection of heavy gold rings on her grubby fingers and chains of pearls dirty about her throat. She continued to soap herself, not oblivious to Lilian's stare but impervious to it. Edie had no modesty or shame. This was her house and she behaved as she pleased, barking orders from the bathtub like a theatrical director .Lilian could never remember what Edie said to her that day, she can only see her cold eyes and her thin lips moving above her square jaw. The enduring image of Edie Humphrey's was that of a woman soaping her body with fingers still clad in her entire collection of solid gold rings. Of a woman who smoked in the bath and applied lipstick layer upon layer like wallpaper upon a parlour wall, a woman who never seemed to be clean. Edie was not beautiful or even attractive, she was formidible.

Lilian and Gwen

In the words of Stephen Fry on the words of Oscar Wilde.

"Oscar Wilde, and there have been few greater and more complete lords of language in the past thousand years, once included with a manuscript he was delivering to his publishers a compliment slip in which he had scribbled the injunction: “I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whiches &c.”

I was once told by Mother Superior that I ought to be shot for my spelling. My grammar is not much better but I call myself a writer. I'm simply telling you a story and the purpose of this blog is to discover whether or not people want to hear this tale of Lilian and Gwen, of a lost child and a bitter end. Any comments on the standard of my English will be treated with contempt. I am no longer seven and i assume you are not wearing a habit. Comments on tone, pace and character are welcomed as are excitement, joy and publishing deals. Here's another snippet to whet your appetite. Enjoy!

Lilian watched at the window as the rain pelted the glass and the wind blew the skinny trees on the green below. It was only 4.30 but it was beginning to get dark and she wondered where Gwen had got to. She came every Friday to set her hair in rollers, it was a routine they had established during the war when money was tight and D.I.Y beauty treatments were all the rage. They'd have their fish and chip supper and watch the television. Sometimes they reminisced but mostly they just enjoyed having a bit of company. Lilian had run out of milk and so had opened the sherry she had been saving for Christmas. She had turned on the Christmas tree lights earlier than usual and was feeling in an unusually jolly mood. It was not long before Gwen's mauve coat became apparent and Lilian lit a cigarette wondering if she would cut across the grass as she always did, even though the rain would splatter mud on her pale shoes..............


Lilian sat on the kitchen chair in front of the television as Gwen twisted her thinning black hair into the small, pink rollers. The smell of their fish and chip supper still hung in the air as they watched 'Strictly Come Dancing' .Her hands were deft for such a solid woman and Lilian's hair was rolled in no time. She began to apply the perming lotion as they watched the celebrities floating across the dance floor in hot pink chiffon , hair slicked into place and cheekbones powdered with glitter. Lilian marvelled at the timing of a pause, the turn of an ankle and at the eyelashes tipped with diamante beads. Gwen shook the last of the lotion onto her scalp and sat down at the table with a sigh. Her swollen ankles were making this job difficult but there was no way she was letting her friend know that. She poured herself another Sherry and lit one of Lilian's cigarettes. Lilian hadn't even noticed that her friend was smoking, she was transfixed, her tiny frame bolt upright in the hard kitchen chair. Her excitement was palpable and she squealed like a child as the handsome cricketer took to the floor and began to shake his hips to the Rumba.
"Look at him move Gwen... oh that smile. He's got come to bed eyes that one."
But Gwen was not looking at the television she was looking at her friend. Her frail and tiny friend who was an old lady and young girl to her all at once. A vain and selfish woman who had never accepted life as it was, a girl that had lost her baby and had never fully recovered. Gwen looked with tenderness at Lilian's tiny feet in her black fluffy slippers and felt an unexpected surge of affection. How could she tell her that he had survived the bomb, she'd missed his life, how could she tell her that. The dance finished and Lilian spun around to share her joy, but Gwen had tears in her eyes....

Snow

I have been reading about disengagement theory and how elderly people withdraw from society to prepare for the final disengagement: Death. It reminded me that I have left Lilian alone in her flat for several weeks, that I have been unable to engage with the creative process. It was only this morning whilst admiring the snow on the downs from the train window that I wondered what Lilian would think of the recent influx of snow that has hit London. She would certainly have a good view from her flat watching the children make snowmen, teenagers hurling snowballs at the passing cars. The snow like the bombs is bringing people together, finally she has something in common with her neighbours. It would remind her of her boyfriend Frank and how the icy cold of the snowball he had thrown trickled down her neck. How the chase had excited her and how warm his kiss had felt, his cheeks ruddy and fresh. I began to see Frank more clearly, tweedy in his dress sense, gangly yet handsome with clear honest eyes. She has a photograph of him from that day still zipped into the pocket of her handbag. I wondered how Lilian would get her fags. What with the buses being cancelled would Gwen be able to get all the way from Clapham Junction. Perhaps her new neighbours would invite her over to listen to Samba and eat some Brazilian feijoada instead of her Friday night chip supper. Are there still adventures to be had at 75? All it takes is snow on the downs and I can imagine Lilian laughing. They are dressing her hair with Pink ostrich feathers now. Time to get those keys tapping....

The Sequinned Bodice

It was hot inside the giant Faberge egg. Being the smallest member of the cast they had cajoled her into it with promises of a fancy white feather headpiece and diamonte accessories. She crouched backstage in this bizarre prop for what seemed like hours, her face pressed close to the side of the egg hoping that her make up would not smudge and that the trail of feathers attached to her bottom would not snag as she made her grand escape. Her breath was calm and steady as she waited for her music to start. The sound of the band and crowd intimidated her, protected as she was by only a thin wall of lacquered papier mache. The silver sequinned bodice scratched her arms and the matching sandals cut into her feet as she crouched . Lilian couldn’t imagine how she was going to pull this off. The music stopped and the lights dimmed and as she waited in the dark egg ,the chattering and clinking of glasses became unbearable. Eventually her music filled the room and she hatched with effortless elegance onto the stage and outstretched her slender arms . The unsteadiness she felt in the high heels, the sctratchiness of the bodice and the butterflies in her stomach ceased to exist as she bloomed in an incredible and sublime moment. She held still like a magnificent star on a cold night, a point of precise and dazzling light. It was a moment of perfection as she stood proud in her quivering ostrich feathers white as hard snow, the sequins singing and winking in the lights. For a second she lowered her eyes and slowly caressed her raised, poised arm. The theatre was still. She could only hear the sound of her own breath. She had entranced them. Slowly she raised her eyes and paused before the lights became warmer and the sudden notes of the brassy jazz blasted out a cue for the dancing girls to join her on the stage.

She performed that routine from theatre to theatre for a whole season. The bodice began to smell of her sweat and became stained with powder. The sequins cracked and the occasional one hung loose on a thread dropping onto the stage as she shimmied. After a season of wear it was good for nothing but trimmings yet she packed it away with care as though it was brand new. Tonight as she held it close to her cheek it no longer smelt of her but of age and dust. As she lifted it to the light it fell apart in her hands, the silver sequins cascading onto her lap. She felt ashamed, ashamed of her pride and of the fact that even her special thing was no longer special, just rotting and useless like herself. She brushed the sequins off in a huff and stuffed the garment into a plastic bag filled with cigarette butts and last night's dinner and unceremoniously threw it into the rubbish shute.