Birdcage Walk

I did not know what breath meant until she died. It was everything that gave me quickness and life: it was thought, feeling, animation. Without it there was nothing.

Only a very few people leave traces in history, or even bequeath family documents to their descendants. Most have no money to memorialise themselves, and lack even a gravestone to mark their existence. Women's lives, in particular, remain largely unrecorded. But even so, did they not shape the future?

It seemed to me that there was a self-interest hidden in the core of all of us, which cooled us when we contemplated any fate which did not touch us directly.

Go back to your house then, and see what happiness you find there.’ ‘It has nothing to do with happiness.’ ‘It is true that marriage seems often to have little to do with happiness. But who am I to judge? I have never been married.

Mammie was out there in the dark and cold. No one would ever bring her in, to warm and dry and cherish her. There was rain seeping through the earth and into her coffin. Water gets everywhere. It finds a way, no matter how tight the carpenter dovetails his joints. When rain spattered on the windows I could never run to open the door for her, to take off her cloak to dry it by the fire, kneel to take off her boots. She was part of the cold darkness. She would never come in. And here I was, still putting food into my mouth and swallowing it. I lay bound, as heavy as if I too had the weight of six feet of earth above me.

It does not matter what happens now. There is no world: it has fallen away from us.

Ten times a day it stopped me like a bolt into my chest: that she was no longer here. That she would never be here. That I might walk and walk and yet I would never again come home to her.

I am not yet sure that I can live without her

We are living through such times that those yet born will look back in wonder

These two would never understand each other. I was the only link between them and each of them tugged on it hard in the hope that the other would let go.

Our houses are palaces to those who have none.