The Witch's Child - ROBERT ELDON

The piece below was entered into a flash-fiction competition in a magazine. The competition involved using an ‘ideas square’ to generate the characters and the situation. The entry didn’t win or get placed, but you might enjoy it anyway.

From the square:-

Character One: A witch Trait: Gentle
Character Two: A child Trait: Talkative
Conflict: Suffering a Loss
Location: Cave
Object: Sealed Envelope
Word Length: Max – 500 words

A grey-haired woman is standing in the kitchen of her cottage, when there’s a knock on the door.

She opens the door to find a man and a boy standing there.

‘You’ll have been expecting us,’ the man says.  
He hands the woman a manila envelope. ‘I think this covers everything,’ he says. He pauses, looks again at the child, ‘‘I hope we’re making the right decision’ he says, then walks away.

The boy runs into the cottage.  ‘They told me you lived in a cave. But this isn’t a cave, it’s just a house.’

‘Oh, there’s a cave right enough.’

I's it all dark and damp and spooky? Has it got bats? Can I see it? Can I see it now?’

‘You get into it through the cellar, it runs right back into the hillside. And it’s not spooky, there’s even electric light. Come on then, if you can’t wait, I’ll show you now.’

Moving through the house, through the cellar, and along a short passage, they reach an iron-bound wooden door. The woman unlocks the door and they enter. She switches on the lights.

‘Why is the gate locked, why are there iron bars? Is it to keep your victims in?’ He pauses, ‘Are you going to keep me a prisoner in this cave?’

’Why would I do that?’

‘Because you’re a witch. They told me you were a witch. Are you, really??’

‘People say so.’

 She sighs and sits down on an old chair and begins to open the sealed manila envelope.

‘I need to talk to you, child,’ she says.

‘My Mam told me she was a witch’s child. Dad would shout and tell her not to talk nonsense. He’d get really angry.’

The woman looks sad, ‘He never liked the old ways, that’s why he took your Mam away to the city, why you’ve never seen me before. Yes, your Mam was a witch’s child. Now, do you know who I am?’

‘Yes, you’re Mam’s Mam, my grandmother.’

‘Now, do you know what’s in this envelope?’

 ‘Is it a treasure map? Will we voyage to foreign lands and find gold and jewels?’

‘These are the papers that say you are to live with me, that I am to look after you, that no-one can take you away from me.’

‘I’m going to live here, in this house? Does that mean I’ll be a witch’s child too?’

‘I suppose you will.  Is that what you want?’

‘I want to have Mam back, to go home again. But the man said Mam and Dad are gone and I’ll never see them again. He said Mam will never come back.’

‘No, child, she won’t…….’

‘Can’t you bring her back? You’re a witch, don’t you have a spell?’

‘Not for that, child, not for that….’

‘What do you have spells for then?’

‘I can stop us being lonely, child, I can make us both laugh again.’

(486 words)

WHY I WRITE - DAVID JACKSON

           I’ll write, in the main, about my life, a life often lived out in hotel bedrooms and restaurants, in railway stations and airports, on trains and planes and motorways; in other people’s workplaces.

I’ll write about childhood journeys by train from Southport to Liverpool, with my Russian uncle to see the ships on the Mersey.

I'll write about being young, writing programs in Sweden when we worked in the office all through the night, so we could spend all day lying on the beach in the summer sun.

I’ll describe my study-bedroom at Ibadan University, with bright green geckoes on the ceiling’ I’ll tell of sweltering formal dinners in the dark panelled Senior Common Room at 90 degrees Fahrenheit. How I ate steak and kidney pudding and jam roly-poly with custard, while my Nigerian colleagues reminisced about their student days in England and argued the merits of Manchester United against Liverpool.

I’ll speak about the fear in finding myself in a hotel in a Lagos slum late one night, while gunshots rang out on the street below, and the body of a young black man lay on the pavement outside my window, a dark ominous stain spreading across his white shirt.

I’ll recall what it was like to stand, before breakfast, on the quayside in Stornoway on a bright January morning and watch a seal swimming in the Harbour only ten feet away.

I’ll describe how it felt working for the National Museum of Ireland at the Collins Barracks in Dublin and walking each morning, with the burden of imperial guilt on my shoulders, across the parade ground where my English great-grandfather once marched, whilst at the same time an exhibition in the Galleries depicted Irish women who married British soldiers, as my own great-grandmother did, as little better than whores and traitors. 

I’ll write about Riga, about sitting in the rooftop bar of the Hotel Latvia, 20 storeys up, and gazing out over the city with its defaced Swedish Church and the babushkas begging on the streets. I’ll describe that amazing restaurant (Victor’s) that I went to with Sue and Jeff, that later featured in Michael Palin’s ‘New Europe’.

I’ll tell tales of phosphate mining in Morocco in the early 2000s, and about the day the mine roof fell in on us.

I’ll chronicle the people I met and the things that happened; Clive getting drunk that night on the Malone Road, the girls from Bulgarian State Security visiting the Comedy Store in London, that fraught night in the Hard Rock Cafe, when Pete waited anxiously to see if his new Spanish girlfriend would phone.

I’ll write a farce about trying to control a group of Lithuanian finance staff in Geneva during the European Football Championships.

I’ll speculate about Polish Simon and his ever-changing team of beautiful young female financial magicians.

And sometimes, I’ll take those stories and explore ‘what if’, what if something had been a little different, what might have happened.

I’ll write to recall a world that’s past, and a way of life from which I’m now exiled.

I’ll write to tell what once was, to celebrate what is, and, just sometimes, regret what might have been.

WHY I WRITE - Robert Eldon

Why do I write?

We were having our first project team meeting in an office in Queen Anne’s Gate. The Home Office official had spent over an hour describing the project in excruciating detail, and not just the project, but his own (in his view absolutely pivotal) part in originating, designing and placing that project, and indeed all the significant events of his life to date that so fitted him to be the leader of that project. He continued in microscopic detail to tell us exactly what the role and tasks of our Unit within that project were to be. Suddenly our Unit Director, Brian, began to speak over him.

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that there is a thriving export trade in used car tyres between the UK and West Africa? Over there they cut the rubber bits up and use them to make the soles of sandals. Isn’t that ingenious? And of course, in Eastern Europe they recycle the car tyres by putting them on horse drawn vehicles for use on the roads. You see it in all the rural areas, and in many cities come to that.’

There was a silence, Brian looked at our host and said, ‘You were saying ….’

I should clarify that our meeting and the project it concerned had absolutely nothing to do with used car tyres, trade with West Africa or sandals.

Later as we walked back to St James’ tube station, Phil asked Brian, ‘what was all that about tyres?’

Brian smiled, ‘well, you take so much in for so long and then you’ve just got to let something out.’

And I think that’s one reason I started writing short stories and poetry and now my first novel. I’d been taking in so much for so many years.

All those years of reading other people’s work, whether fiction or non-fiction.

I didn’t grow up in a book-ish household. My first reading memory is of trying to pronounce the words on the backs of cereal packets, ‘Riboflavin’, was an early favourite. From there I progressed by devouring the shelves of my local branch library – initially, inevitably, Enid Blyton but then W.E. Johns, Arthur Ransome, John Buchan, those yellow Gollancz Sci-Fi titles, then books on politics, books on history, and then later the humour, James Thurber and Giovanni Guareschi. It all went in, and somehow it got absorbed.

And it wasn’t just books, and it wasn’t all reading – there was radio, ‘Round the Horne’, ‘I’m Sorry I’ll Read that Again’, all contributing to my love of words and wordplay. There were films and there was television, and I started to think in ‘scenes’, to see stories as sequences of pictures.

Of course I did write. After University I joined the Civil Service and I was taught to write reports by my elders and betters. ‘Keep it balanced. Avoid any trace of passion or enthusiasm. Avoid expressing personal opinions. Moderate language at all times.’  They should have borrowed that line from Joe Friday in ‘Dragnet’ – ‘just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.’

I wrote articles for serious professional journals about topics such as public conveniences and solid waste incinerators. Once, an odd break, I got asked to draw a cartoon to accompany an article about toilets called ‘Ladies, Gentlemen and Vandals’, the fee for which made me, the odd one out in a family of visual artists, for a time the person making most money out of art.

And why did I write? To promote my research group and to promote my own career, an exercise in marketing. What was the term? – AIDA – make them Aware of you, Interest them in your material, make them Desire to learn more, encourage them to take the Action you want. A simple mantra but effective.

For a while, I was actually the editor of the journal of my professional body, in which capacity I also ‘ghost-wrote’ a series which purported to be written by an attractive, twenty-something female making her way in our profession, (her ‘photo appeared at the head of each quarter’s column) The first couple actually had been but she quickly bored of it, and so I took it on, becoming a kind of literary Grayson Perry, a transvestite of the columns. Hiding behind this ‘fictional’ persona gave me the freedom to comment on a range of topics and poke fun at a few very senior people. It was very liberating! All went well until we published a photo of the real young lady at the Institute’s Annual Ball in a low-cut (though perfectly decent) ball gown. We were accused of ‘lowering the tone’. Although I did receive a number of requests for copies of the photo from members!

And now I’m in retirement, I no longer have to devote my time and energy to earning a living. If I write now it’s no longer to meet the expectations and strictures of others but to satisfy my own desire to say certain things, whether that’s through a letter to a magazine or an article in a journal or a poem read out at a writing group or a short story entered in a competition.

And finally I’ve begun work on a novel, that, in a way, links some of my earliest reading such as (Buchan’s ‘Island of Sheep’) with things I’m reading now like the Icelandic novels of Arnaldur Indridasson.

And why am I writing now? I don’t need to impress some employer. I’m not writing to make a living, I have enough. I’m not even writing to gain the approval or acclaim of others, though that is always a bonus and gratefully received as confirmation I’m treading the right road, a necessary boost to sometimes flagging self-confidence.

No, I’m writing for me. There’s a phrase in management theory, ‘Intrinsic Rewards’, the things that you receive internally, that you give to yourself. It’s the reward that comes from improving your skills, from growing as a writer. It’s that feeling of having achieved something of importance to yourself, and of having done it well, having done it to the best of your ability. And in the end, that’s why I write.

THE RAVEN - David Jackson

The Raven

High in the valley of the Harthope Burn

In a solitary rowan, the raven,

Guardian of memory and thought

Mythic messenger, summoner of souls,

Seeker of the slain, hunter of the hanged  

Sits alone, in the wolf-months of the year

Waiting to see which way the world will turn

Angered by our impudent intrusion

He hauls his black-clad body aloft

And uttering his strident ‘pruk, pruk’ cry

Flies from rowan to rock, rock to rowan

Criss-crossing the steep sided valley,

As we wait to see which way the world will turn

Beneath his rowan roost

On grass white as frost with droppings

We stoop to gather the feathers he has shed

Black as the night, black as the pit

Together, in a place that has abandoned time

We wait to see which way the world will turn

Now, as life returns again to the frozen land

And the adders stir from their winter sleep,

To slither over the ancient graves

The raven tumbles in his Spring flight, and

We climb once again the remembered track,

Unsure where our destination lies, still

Wondering which way the world has turned

Ideas

We noticed that our first poem sounded a bit bitter! We're looking for something more cheerful to go on next. Unfortunately most Robert poetry (such as 'I am not you') makes the Vogons' verse in 'Hitchhiker' seem light and cheerful. So we'll probably put another of David's up - probably Raven.

About Allotted 2016

We forgot to give you the blog address for the allotted 2016 project

It's www.allotted2016.blogspot.co.uk

The blog gives an account of the progress of the allotted project and its participants

First Poem

#2: ZEN AND THE ART OF REJECTION MANAGEMENT

David Jackson

Your carefully crafted letter

Is scanned by some minimum wage slave,

With a check list that won’t let her

Grant you the interview you crave.

But she hopes that this decision,

Won’t in any way deter

You, from applying for other positions

That in the future might occur.

And those monthly competitions

Where your efforts seem pre-doomed

Where the winners and the short-lists

Seem just aimed at Mills and Boon

And that first time you submitted

Your novel to critical gaze

Though for months you’ve had no answer

They cashed your entry cheque in days

And it all tests your ability,

As rejection follows rejection,

To maintain an inner stability,

To keep calm, not succumb to depression.

And always remember, what you learned in CBT*,

Each time you get rejected, just apply your ABC.*

Footnotes/Glossary:

CBT – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – a popular counselling technique  ABC – principal tool of CBT – Action, Belief, Consequences – when an action happens (e.g. being rejected), what do you believe it means, and what therefore are the consequences for your feelings and behaviour

Welcome

Hello

This blog will largely carry material from David Jackson and Robert Eldon.

At present both are heavily involved (along with Ros Davis) in the production of "Allotted" - Essays, prose and poems inspired by Allotments. "Allotted" will be published in conjunction with the "Allotted" exhibition to be held in the neo:gallery27 in Bolton's Market Place from June 30th to August 7th.

In the meantime, we are hoping to publish at least one piece (prose or poetry) each week from the writers.

David is a member of Horwich Writers who meet in Horwich (there's a surprise!) each Thursday morning from 10.00 - 12.00 at the Brewed Coffee Café on Lee Lane. New members are always welcome.