Home life
Splitting hairs
Alice Thomas Ellis
Gladys Mary is tearing her golden curls in a towering passion. Not only were the contents of her airing cupboard burned to a crisp by some malignant force in the electric wiring, but another gremlin took hold of the printer and did a dreadful thing. Kenneth Baker included in his anthology, in a section on Charles I, one of her poems, which now reads thus: 'Dry leaves relinquish their hold on twigs. A hair sits motionless, watching, listening to last groans forever in the wind.' This does notably impair the spirit of the thing. You can just see this ridiculous hair divorced from its fellows, sort of quivering there on a draughty hillside. As Gladys Mary says, she's the only living author in this section. It could matter not to Milton and Marvell and Lovelace if the printer had reduced them all to gibberish. The dead are secure from, amongst other things, the barbs of the printer. It's the quick who suffer.
She tells me that the title of one of Mary Webb's books, Precious Bane, was once rendered as Previous Bones — though come to think of it, that's not a bad title in itself. I'll file it in my 'possible titles' section, together with The Buttered Side and The Sparks Fly Upward. I often think of good titles but I can never think of the books to go with them. My brother-in-law has long proposed to write a book called No Drums, No Trumpets because it won't have any drums or trumpets in it. A most reasonable conception. To return to the gremlins. They are active in many other spheres as well. The daughter stood on the balcony yesterday whining that everywhere she turned she could smell dead chickens, and every time anybody says 'poll tax' I hear 'poltergeist'. This olfactory and aural malfunctioning is, I feel sure, a symptom of the presence of alien spirits; and when they're not confus- ing us in that way they're slinking round hiding the tin-opener which is my favourite piece of equipment at the moment, since I am myself compiling an anthology, and domestic matters have receded into second — or possibly ninth — place. I did plan to cook a delicious dinner for my dentist and all his team because I have conceived a great fondness for them — an interesting sidelight on the progress of dentistry: I was once nearly as bad as Beryl, who has to be anaesthetised in order to get to the surgery — but they rang up to cancel because the gremlins had caused them to eat a bit of dodgy fish and they were all suffering from food poisoning. Many a time in the past have I cancelled a dental appointment, so this was different.
Lacking the excuse of guests, I had to continue battling with the hideous masses of books and papers which characterise the compilation of anthologies, and I ask myself why I ever ventured on this exercise when one of the prerequisites of the task is an orderly mind and I haven't got one. Gladys Mary has done nearly everything so far but this doesn't prevent me from tearing out my own hair as the gremlins whisk away the neat quote from Giraldus Cambrensig and secrete it under the bread board. Yesterday I lost the poems of R.S. Thomas until I found the cat was sitting on them, and I wasted hours searching through my 'study' for the Anglesey Trans- actions which the gremlins have definitely removed. I did find No Other Tiger which I'd been looking for for months, but that's unfortunate because now I'll read it when I should be scissors-and-pasting. And I'll tell you now that when my anthology does appear you can bet your boots that some- where, tucked away between H.V. Morton and George Borrow, will be found my income tax returns and a list of possible titles, for the gremlins like nothing better than to capitalise on the promiscuous nature of papers and encourage them to mingle in such a fashion that even the orderly mind cannot separate them.
Now the kitchen where I'm working has filled up with jabbering people, and I'm almost sure that among them I can discern more little green ones with evil smiles on their faces and Welsh books hidden behind their backs. I think I'll shoot myself.
P.S. If the printer of The Spectator was invaded by alien forces he would doubtless correct 'hair' to 'hare' and all the point of the above would be lost.
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