I spent most of last week in a caregiving situation, which I found emotionally distressing because of the receiver’s inability to comprehend the extra care she needed. Most clients I care for are at least twenty years older than me. Some I have known for many years, others only a short while. But their fear and vulnerability is eye-opening. How will I feel when I have to give up driving. Will I give up willingly, or will I be forced to do so? There seemed to be no glimmer of joy until this Monday. We went for lunch after an appointment; she wanted her favorite shop-bought snack, Calzones. We sat at a table in the grocery cafe and ate greasy, cheesy pepperoni calzones. It was a new experience for me. But it was a lovely time because it made her smile. She talked about the dogs she had in the past. As a teenager, she worked in a telephone exchange in Germany. At first, she had to learn to make the tea–the correct way for her supervisors, and there were no concessions for not getting it right. My client also talked about meeting her husband through the telephone exchange. We talked about books, her sisters, her father, and my children. For an hour, she was the person I knew twenty years ago, animated and cheerful.  

It is the small things that make me smile and melt my heart. It restores my empathy after a period of stress. The way Daisy, my little dog, tucks her head into my neck when I pick her up, still sleepy from her bed, to take her outside. The way Henry bounces and twists when the wind catches his fur. Yesterday, I met a lady at the beach, and we chatted about dogs or rocks. She gave me a cute red bean spider, which I will hang off something in the garden. Life felt good. It was time to put fingers on the keys and start writing on the computer. 

Because of my busy week, it took some work to gear up for our Sunday writing group. We are now a group of eight, which is exciting. The stories for The Blue Bottles Writing Studio are varied and extraordinary and make a difference to my week. Here are a couple of excerpts from our writing prompt, “There was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife.” 

Elizabeth Jane Pryce 

A HAND HELD A KNIFE IN THE DARK

A true story

The date: March 1991

The place: Plashet Girls School

Subject: Shakespeare

Moral: To be heroes of their own stories

I was the student teacher in Plashet Girls School in East Ham, London for three months from the beginning of 1991. The 120 children I was responsible for in the English classes were Asian girls. Most of them were Muslim. They ranged in age from thirteen to fifteen/sixteen. These girls lived in two worlds: one from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. A world of arranged marriages and prayer, and from 7:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in academic studies of British subjects. In between was a small world of racial and sexual harassment to avoid in the streets, from home to school and back.

I loved them all. They were a pleasure to teach because most of them still had the joy of life in their eyes. They were not crushed, as I had been told happened to children once they turned five or six and entered the world of academia. Our relationship with each other was like a love story: tentative, wary, and very joyful. There were ups and downs, new discoveries, and a development of understanding. I wrote in a school diary, “It is like having a family of 120 children. They were by no means perfect. Some were a complete pain, some of the time, but by the end of my time with the class, we achieved a positive attitude through our experience. They accepted me for who I was. They thought it funny that I couldn’t spell very well. In fact, it often made them look up the words in a dictionary; a good lesson for both of us.” Those girls loved that I asked them about themselves and listened to how I could help them achieve their best before they might be pulled from school into an arranged marriage. The school was where they created a dream world full of excitement and differences.

My thirteen-year-old girls read the play privately and in class. We watched a couple of different movies on Macbeth. The first was staid and respectable, with the famous Judi Dench playing Lady Macbeth. These quiet, subdued, religious girls at home loved the blood and gore of the Roman Polanski version. Their shrieks of horror and delight at the bloodthirsty gore and naked dribbling witches scene fascinated me. They requested that I replay some of those gory scenes more than once.

For their final written assignment, I gave them a picture with the caption:

“You are returning home late at night. Walking along a street in East Ham, you glance upward and see a silhouette of a person in a window with a raised knife in their hand. Tell the story.”

 Some girls retold the story of Macbeth, but some were creative and wrote stories of mysteries, murder and mayhem. My favourite was one with a final twist. 

Jane Hilleary — An Uninvited Guest

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife…but, thankfully, not a gun, for with a knife, there is a chance, but with a gun there is no chance…

In the town of Bardot Beach on the island of Barkanubia, Ms. Bardot was having a party. The guests were dressed in their finest, the ladies in skirts and high heels, the gentlemen in suits and ties and their best shoes, for Ms. Bardot was someone to dress up for, and she rarely gave a party.

A waiter in a white coat was serving tasty tidbits on a silver tray, when the guests noticed a large face looking in the window. It was watching the waiter and the tasty tidbits, but mostly the tasty tidbits. The face looked like…well, what did it look like? The startled guests tried to decide.  Not exactly a giant beaver face, not an enormous guinea pig face, but something like that. They couldn’t decide. And it was one thing, trying to determine what kind of animal it was from a face in the window, but quite another to see the whole animal suddenly in the room, for that’s what happened. Someone left the door open.

The face belonged to an enormous rodent-like creature, larger even than Ms. Bardot’s springer spaniel, and everyone ran for the door, including the springer spaniel. The last one out was the waiter. He set his tray of tasty tidbits on the coffee table and rushed out behind the dog. Only Henry remained–Ms. Bardot’s son, Henry–‘Nerdy’ Henry, he was sometimes called at school. Animals were his thing, and he was intrigued by this strange-looking creature. He poked his glasses up on his nose and looked it over. The animal was selecting a tidbit from the tray.  It popped it into its mouth and selected another. 

Henry went to the bookshelf and pulled out a volume on mammals. He thumbed through it until he found a match. “You’re a capybara!” he announced, and the animal, who most likely knew this already, popped another tidbit into its mouth. “Where did you come from?” Henry asked. As far as we know, no capybara has ever actually talked, so we assume it was a rhetorical question, and Henry was not really expecting an answer. But the capybara looked up at Henry and made a sad grunting sound. His mouth was full, for he had discovered the tray held a bowl of potato chips, and he was crunching noisily.

Henry sat down in front of him, crossed his legs and read from his mammals book. The capybara watched and munched. “It says here, capybaras like the water—so you’re a swimmer, Capy! And you capybaras are social animals–you travel in large groups.” He looked up and smiled sympathetically. “Where’s your large group, Capy? You’re lost, aren’t you?” And sad eyes looked back at him. 

While outside, Ms. Bardot and her guests took turns looking through the window at this strange and dangerous-looking animal. 

“It’s some kind of giant rodent,” said one guest.

“Like an enormous rat,” said another, with wrinkled noise distaste.         

If it didn’t turn on one of them, they all agreed, it could attack their pets—Mrs. Bardot’s springer spaniel, for instance. No question, that animal must be gotten rid of…