Selima Hill

My father was a tall man who approved of beating, but my mother, like a mother stone, preferred us to be sitting in a small room lined with damson-coloured velvet thinking quietly to ourselves, undisturbed; everything was slow and beautiful when we were being punished: all we had to do was watch the dark-red petals’ roses press against each other in a slight breeze on the window pane, and...

At the top of the bank a black airman is doing sit-ups in the tenderest of early-morning sun. I want to squash him flat. He’s like my Uncle Pat’s gold cigarette-case that flies open when you touch it.

You cruise along the fence with your elbow on the rolled-down window-edge. Everything you come near falls to bits.

The cattery sells bedding plants and...

I step into the autumn morning like a first Communicant and ride off down the lane, singing. Across the frosty fields someone is mending fences knock knock knock and a twig that’s caught in my bicycle spokes tinkles like a musical box. The village smells of wood-ash and warm horses. Shining crows rise into the sky like hymns ...

I have to pass the church where my father was buried....

‘Are you ready?’ calls the German archaeologist, standing with his back to the sun. ‘We need to see the tent behind you.’ Gertrude Bell steps over the guy-ropes. She’s got a horrible cold – caught by lying in a draughty hall drawing the plans of Ukheidir.

‘When I ask my men,’ she explains, ‘to help me...

1

What a picture! She has tucked her wild-looking chicken under her arm and stares out over what seems to be a mountain pass on a windy day. She is wearing a blue linen dress the colour of summer. She reminds me of Brünnhilde – alone, bronzed, unfamiliar. She doesn’t look like anybody’s mother.

2

She used to love dancing. She went to the Chelsea Ball dressed as a...