“I roll from job to job, hand to mouth, living in one of the few rentals left in my neighbourhood. It’s not really big enough for me and my two teenage boys but we manage. We wonder how long it will last until the landlord decides to cash in, maybe next month, maybe never, you just don’t know for sure. “

In this journal entry, Writer in Residence Alun Hughes writes with excoriating precision and tenderness about writing amidst the realities of a working life on the tools, the inequalities that both sustain and exclude working men in the Cotswolds and holding space for the grief of a son who has lost his best friend.

July’s journal.

I am grateful for deadlines. They are one of the great advantages of the collaborative processes, Dialect being one that I am involved with. They provide an anchor of sorts, a failsafe to my propensity for drifting. They often provide alternative and new ways of looking that can expand my experience of this work. In this instance, Dialect’s JLM Morton suggested that I approach this month’s post in the form of a journal entry. I am not entirely sure that is what has appeared, but everything starts somewhere.

In July, my second residency month at Lake 32, I had a poem to write. It is a wonder to me sometimes how a poem ekes its way into being, taking root in what can often appear unfertile and shaky ground. The conditions, here at the desk, can vary quite radically and some can prove more conducive than others. In those times, making writing can take centre stage and I relax into glimpses of a reality as a full-time writer. Lockdowns were particularly good for this and were what provided me the time to complete my MA at Bath Spa last year. Or time comes like the approaching few weeks, when work ‘on the tools’ is scarce and there’s just enough in the bank account to cover costs. Then, I can fully occupy my desk space, writing every morning until lunchtime, reading or working on in the afternoon. It warms me to simply write that last sentence. I should write it more often, if only to remind myself of my perfect workday, my aspiration for a writer’s life.

The more prevalent reality however, as it is for so many artists, is to try and make work in the fragile edges of the time that life’s circumstances allow. Times like this moment, where I set an alarm for 5am and have a couple of hours at my desk with coffee, writing to the sun’s rising. This has been my practice since starting the MA in the Autumn of 2019. By 7am, I’ll be running the Lurcher in the place I am working with for a forthcoming pamphlet, my notebook in hand, listening. Then it’s breakfast and on to another day working on the tools to keep it all afloat.

Today, it’s twenty-five metres of feather board fencing and a gate to make. In July, it was a new roof on a barn being converted for a holiday let and, before that, dressing lead and repointing a chimney stack for the estate agent’s pictures of a million plus house in the Slad Valley. Then there was lime pointing the fireplaces in a sprawling old pile in Eastcombe for a young family just arrived here from London. They, like many of the new arrivals, have bought the place cash and waved goodbye to the mortgage from the proceeds of selling their suburban semi in Twickenham. They still have that air of disbelief around their good fortune, not an uncommon air of late in these valleys. She remarks on the blessing of being able to raise their children here and he seems to be doing a good job of pretending that he had something personal to do with it beyond the inflated property market.

But that particular river still seems to be rising here, accelerating. I roll from job to job, hand to mouth, living in one of the few rentals left in my neighbourhood. It’s not really big enough for me and my two teenage boys but we manage. We wonder how long it will last until the landlord decides to cash in, maybe next month, maybe never, you just don’t know for sure. That is another edge of the time in which I write, caught in the dissonance of making a living being involved with the incessant property development that is also the source of my own housing insecurity.

In July, as the poem tried to find its life, other edges, unexpected liminal spaces particular to these times, found their way into being and it was these that made the time in which to write increasingly fragile as the month went on. It began with the tragic death of my younger son’s friend, North, who fell from Tricorn House, a derelict office block in town. It became a public event, with the story in the news and the site becoming a memorial, bristling with flowers and good wishes. There are calls for the demolition of the brutalist building. The councillors say they’re powerless, which is obvious.

The month begins, and continues, with parenting him through his shock, his anger, his emergent grief. It is day by day. There’s little I can do beyond holding, presence and attention. I witness him crossing a threshold into a different world, an initiatory passage for him and his friends. I find myself admiring their emotional literacy and mutual compassion. For all the negativity and despair, projected at them by older generations concerning the rise of social media, I see a group of young people supporting each other, day and night, through intense social communication. North’s funeral brings a fever to my son and, I hope, the release and changed perspective that childhood fevers so often brought when he was younger.

At the other end of the parenting spectrum, my mother turned ninety in July. Her memory, with the sensory deprivation of lockdown and progressive loss of sight, was beginning to deteriorate. This begins to manifest as the loss of a sentence’s key noun which leaves us playing a guessing game to get the conversation going again. I begin calling her every day.

When her eyesight was a little better, she began to write her life story. She got as far as her father dying when she was nine and then the writing stopped, her eyes too weak to continue. In my daily phone calls, I begin listening to her story and making notes. But I find that this becomes increasingly difficult emotionally as she shares her experiences of her mental health issues and details of the prescription drugs, the side effects of which dominated mine and my brothers’ childhoods and, to various extents, continue to affect our adult lives.

I understand the importance of the process of her story being told, if only to me at this stage. I find myself in another edge in time. The stories and dates feel like the tying up of time in the last chapter of her life, an act at the beginning of her end. I am witnessing her, which on the one hand is a privilege but, on the other, with everything else, begins pushing me into historic nets of grief and longing, loops of loss and regret which begin to overwhelm me. My own mental health takes a turn for the worse.

So many of us are struggling right now, trying to sustain our mental health in the times we’ve each faced since the pandemic arrived. Strange days indeed, how the current conditions clarify and amplify certain aspects of our lives and how we live them. In my case, it is particularly a profound loneliness and social isolation, with its accompanying depression, that was exacerbated by the confluence of all these different edges in time in July. It began to cascade, inundating me with its all too familiar rusted loops of remorse. I found it increasingly hard to hold fast, to carry on, to generate the energy to resource myself or to reach out.

Where was a poem to find a home in all this? What else was there but to try and write, to find myself again at my desk at sunrise, in front of a blank page, waiting at another edge of time? The liminal space of dawn is a certainty in time, a steadying centre. It reminds me that each day is a new world waking, a completely different life waiting to be born. That can be relied upon. Around the steady centre of dawn’s edge were these overlayed fragile edges of time, the transient conditions of a life in which I try to write. So, I waited, and waited, at the edge of imagination, like an angler, my line in the lake’s water.

A poem found its life on the page, eventually. It needed help but, then again, don’t we all?

See below for ‘Sought Communion,’ Alun’s poem for July.

*Sunset at Lake 32. Image credit: Dan Jones*

ALUN HUGHES

Sought Communion

I came for you yesterday, searching your threads

for an unbounded elsewhere. I’d filled myself

with Sunday’s temple, Sabbath notions.

I planned to pray with you, to disappear unsheathed

into unfished corners of your body,

to make a cold-water communion.

Unto this body I commend this man,

scanning the threshold between your molecules,

my peripheral blood rush, the skin’s ignition

releasing me from the binds that hold this loss,

my boy’s quiet grief, for his friend cast off

a derelict block in the town.

Coming closer I saw hay mown fields

filled with motorhomes and caravans.

A triathlete herd lined the lanes and verges,

exhausted water as muscle, pressed into neoprene,

raced on ultralight carbon fibre wheels.

Faces, flushed with fleet triumph, sucked on recovery,

settled in post euphoric glaze. Once waved across

the track, I gave up trying, hauled the truck round

and started back along the Spine Road.

I went listening for you today, sat with alder and willow

on a bench by the skid. Past the swim routes and the buoys

the digging carried on through the scrub fringe.

The machines protested in hoarse squawks, reverse warning,

hard bitten beasts of burden, throats thick with dust,

bent on extraction. Their buckets emptied out

like rattle bone birds shaking their water free.

Air streams on your skin appeared in vibrant discord,

ripples of force, scrape pit engines, traffic on the Ciren road.

I wanted time to ask you the first words to say

when my son returns from his friend’s funeral today and…

All around your shore, I saw more people living out time

in slices, gathered at the beach feeding, throned

in the sandbag wall, taking cover from the inevitable

floods to come. Yesterday’s crash barriers

were strapped in stacks, craned onto flat beds.

What was contained was gone, like skin

in the shape of a boy. The particles to memory

were beginning their change to forever,

forever and ever. A silver pleating in the sun

stretched again, over the cloud as you watched me, waiting.

Alun Hughes is Dialect’s writer in residence throughout the months of March, July and November 2021. You can follow him on Twitter @alunowl

Writing in the Fragile Edges of a Time

Code Red for Humanity

Sonnet Relay