This was a pity, as godparents were important in Germany in my youth. They visited their charges and bought them nice presents. Especially my brother had a lovely one, Uncle Henning, who looked after him very well as far as gifts were concerned. Whether he also gave him any religious or spiritual advice, I have no idea.

From Sonja I never heard. Gisela visited us once, and I have a memory of her in a most beautiful apricot-pink dress. I also had a doll with a dress like that so my memory is probably a bit muddled, but I will always remember her looking just like that. She sent nice things from Canada for my birthdays, a seal fur purse one year and my first ever pair of very tan tights for my twelfths.

But it is Uncle Wolfgang I want to tell you about. I don’t know when and how it happened, but I thought he had died, too. As far as my parents were concerned, he did not seem to exist and I accepted my ersatz godmothers and didn’t ask. It wasn’t until I became a teenager and obsessively interested in the theatre that Uncle Wolfgang’s name was mentioned again. One day, when my father was annoyed at my idea of becoming an actress, he said: “The theatre is full of gays and perverts!” This was news to me. As far as I could tell, the theatre was full of the most interesting people I had ever seen, doing the most fascinating things. I dared to mention this to my father and he reminded me that Uncle Wolfgang had committed suicide because of the theatre. I tried to find out more and slowly it transpired that he had been a very successful young actor and gay. In those days, the 1950s, being gay was illegal and fraught with difficulties; he must have had a hard time. On the other hand, he was beloved by the audience. My father said they clapped when he first walked onto the stage during a play, that’s how much they adored him. They would clap just for him appearing. What a star he must have been. I pressed my father to tell me more but he refused.

In a very roundabout way, I ended up working at the theatre as director’s assistant and sometimes gave my dad tickets to come and see a show. He often enjoyed what I chose for him but always at some point during the evening would start his tirade about the state of mind of people who felt the need to play someone they weren’t and that only crazy people would choose such a profession. By this time I had become brave enough to contradict him saying that a) I wasn’t insane and b) lots of the people I worked with were perfectly decent citizens and just doing a job they enjoyed and had a talent for. He would only say that thank goodness I wasn’t an actress and apart from that stick to his guns, finally mentioning Uncle Wolfgang as the be all and end all of the acting profession. “You must have liked him at some point,” I said one day, “otherwise he would not be my godfather.” My dad refused to comment.

My brother, sister and I looked through old photographs our mother’s the other day and came upon a picture of their wedding. A group of people are standing on a step, the young couple in the centre, around them my aunts and their husbands and in the background a blonde blur of a young man – Uncle Wolfgang. We could not find any pictures of my christening with him in them.

My dad has an older sister who speaks to me on the phone sometimes. From her I heard the whole story last week. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me before to ask her about Uncle Wolfgang, but seeing that he had been at the wedding, I figured she must have known him and it turned out to be so.

My father Christian and his family had lived near Berlin until 1945 and had needed to flee from the Russians with no possessions but what they could carry on their bicycles that dreadful spring. When they arrived in safety in the West, they were as poor as church mice and Christian, who was then 14 years old, had to join a new school. The town they had ended up in was very rich and many of his classmates came from well established merchant families. They did not make him feel welcome, the piss poor refugee from the East. One boy though, befriended him and his name was Wolfgang. Both boys were blonde and tall; Christian was grateful and happy to have a friend. Soon Wolfgang visited the flat where they stayed and became part of the family, the boys spent a lot of time together. Christian’s older sister Rosemarie liked Wolfgang, too, because he had read a lot and liked music, art and the theatre.

Wolfgang knew that he was homosexual from an early age and he was in love with Christian. Christian had known little love as a child. His own father, a Prussian engineer, had died when he was only seven and his mother had had a very strict upbringing. She was taught to keep her hands to herself and when her babies were small had a nurse who looked after them full time. Cuddles were in short supply in Christian’s life, but he got his fair share of beatings, especially from his grandmother, in whose house they often stayed after their father’s death and who ruled them with an iron fist. So, when Wolfgang wanted to become Christian’s close friend, the young man hardly objected to the comradely arm around his shoulder and the gentle nudges he might have received from Wolfgang’s elbow or hip.

There must have come a day, though, when Christian understood how Wolfgang felt. It happened, perhaps, when Christian expressed his ardent love for a beautiful girl in school and Wolfgang made it clear that he thought her quite uninteresting and a waste of time. Or even later, when Christian wanted to go out with a young woman and Wolfgang wouldn’t even consider asking out her friend for an evening together. Perhaps Wolfgang touched him, told him, made a pass at him, but Christian began to give up on their friendship.

In his sadness, Wolfgang turned to drink and to Christian’s sister Rosemarie. Through her, he hoped to stay close to his adored companion and she, unsuspecting as she was, was happy to stay friends. For Christian’s wedding, she told him that he must invite Wolfgang and he did, not wanting anyone to know the reasons why not. Wolfgang got ludicrously drunk in the cellar, where he had found a crate of wine and passed out there and then. Everyone but Christian thought it was very funny. A year later the first baby was born and again Rosemarie suggested mending fences with Wolfgang and making him a godparent. My godparent.

I haven’t been told whether anything untoward happened that day as well, but it was the last time, Uncle Wolfgang appeared in my family as far as anyone will tell me. My aunt said he became an alcoholic.

But here is the part that makes me saddest: he did not commit suicide. He did not die when I was a child but died when I was already twenty years old. So I did have a godparent, alive and probably unwell, living in a town not far away, who was working in the one place that interested me the most: the theatre. At the time that my father forbade me to join the profession I loved, Uncle Wolfgang was still alive and I could have met him and spoken to him, if I had only known.

He died in the end of cirrhosis of the liver. His mother, who remained friendly with my aunt, told her: One day she went to bring him flowers where he lay ailing in his bedroom at home. She put the flowers in a vase next to his bed and he looked at them and said: “How beautiful.” She turned away to tidy up for a minute and when she turned around again, he had died. My Uncle Wolfgang – I think I would have liked him very much.

The garden was bathed in the glow of big city light that never seemed to fade even at midnight. Somewhere music was playing, one of her neighbours must have tuned into a classical station. Molly heard the most beautiful voice, a man was singing a song so rivetingly lovely that she needed to get closer to hear it better. She stepped into the garden and walked quietly to the side from which the music came. It was just one voice all by itself, no orchestra or guitar and it was so gentle and sweet that it brought tears to Molly’s eyes.

The song ended and Molly sighed. “Thank you,” she said to no one in particular, “that was lovely.” “You are welcome,” came the answer from across the fence. In the yellow darkness she saw a young man standing under a tree. He had a white shirt on and longish dark curls and now he came closer and smiled at her. “I am Rinaldo,” he said with an Italian accent, “I have rented this flat a few days ago.”

“My name is Molly and I live here,” she said. “You sing beautifully.”

“I sing at the opera tomorrow,” Rinaldo replied, “I sing Rodolfo in La Boheme. It is my first time and I cannot sleep.”

“I can’t sleep either,” Molly said, “I have a job interview tomorrow. Come and have a glass of wine with me and tell me about the opera.” Rinaldo jumped over the fence and they went back inside. She lit a candle and poured two glasses. “Sing some more,” she asked him, and then, shocked at her own audacity, she added, “if you’d like to, I am sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, Moll-ee,” he said, putting the accent on the second syllable of her name and making it sound much more beautiful and mysterious that way. “I will sing for you about Rodolfo’s love for Mimi but not tonight – tomorrow! You will come to the opera and be there when I sing.” Then he paused and thought and then he said: “Bring a hand-ker-chief. Now tell me, Moll-ee, what are you?”

“I am an administration assistant. At least, I will be, if I finally get a job tomorrow.”

“What is this – admini-stration assis-tant??“ Rinaldo exclaimed. “That is not what you are! What is it that you do? That makes your soul sing like music does mine?”

Molly hesitated. Nobody had asked her this before and she had never thought that her secret hobby, sewing and embroidering dresses, would be of interest to anyone but her. She stood up and opened the door to the wardrobe where she kept her creations. “I make these,” she said, “but only for myself.”

Rinaldo went to the wardrobe and asked for more light. One after another he took out her dresses and held them up in front of her until he found the right one. “You will wear this tomorrow night for me,” he told her. “You are not an admini-stration assis-tant, you are an artiste! Now good night!” He kissed her gently on both cheeks and bounded back into the garden and over the fence.

The next day Molly’s interview went like all the ones before but she was barely aware of her words. A note on her doormat had told her to pick up a ticket at the opera house under the name of Moll-ee and Rinaldo and reminded her again to bring a hand-kerchief. She chose a little one that she had embroidered herself and put it into her handbag.

The opera was strange; Molly had not been to one before. It seemed to her very artificial at first, four men discussing their art and their poverty in Italian, that much she gleaned from the surtitles, but then Mimi appeared and with her came a tiny bit of music that touched Molly to the core. It was a flute and a harp playing together and it sounded even more beautiful that Rinaldo’s singing had in the dark garden. There he stood on stage, falling in love with his young girl and so did Molly, she fell in love with everything in an instance: the music, the story, the people and the theatre. And she cried and cried, drenching her lovely handkerchief with tears when the lovers fought and decided to part and when Mimi died in act four.

Rinaldo met her in the foyer. “You cried,” he said, “you have a lovely soul.” And he kissed her hand.

“How could I not, oh it was so beautiful,” Molly replied. “I have never seen or heard anything like it.”

“There is somebody I would like you to meet,” Rinaldo announced and took Molly back-stage where people were drinking champagne. “Maria, this is my friend Molly,” Rinaldo told a striking looking woman in a gypsy dress. “Molly, this is Maria, she designed the costumes. Maria, Molly makes dresses like this one, I think you two must talk.”

A week later Molly received a phone call offering her a job as administration assistant. She happily turned it down. She was now working at the opera house as Maria’s assistant.

 The Sussex Community Internet Project (SCIP) has been running since 1996 and offers free courses for all members of not-for-profit groups in the city.  In partnership with the Working Together Project and funded by the Lottery, David Guthrie is passionately involved in making sure everyone who wants to produce any writing for the community will know how to use IT to do so.

 It is not just word programmes that David introduces his students to. If you go on a course on presentation skills, he will come along and explain Power Point, if you want to learn about book-keeping, he can show you how to make use of spreadsheets and Excel.

 Do you need to set up a website for your charity? David can get you started on WordPress, a great place to get going for free and create your web presence by uploading text, pictures and even sound and films.

 Right now David’s new course is how to help local groups produce better newsletters. “IT by stealth” or “Embedded IT” he calls his task, getting even the most old-fashioned and hard liner glue-and-scissors newsletter writers to begin to see the light and use this amazing little newfangled machine called the computer.

 This course has many aspects to it: there are questions that need to be asked first of all. Who are you writing for? How do you talk to your audience? What is your budget? If you find that the people you are writing for all have regular access to the internet and like to read short articles about local issues but that your budget does not stretch to a printed 8-page newspaper, you might well consider an E-Newsletter.

 David Guthrie can teach how to create this document, how to make a template for future use, how to save it as a pdf and then send it off as an attachment or an email. There are many possibilities to make life easier using IT and with such a patient teacher, you are in good hands.

 How do I get on one of these free courses, you may well ask. If you are a member of a community or voluntary group or a charity, all you have to do is contact SCIP and see what there is on offer.  They will even tailor-make courses to your requirements. 

If you are not a member of one of these groups, you might want to go and find one. There are sure to be groups in your neighbourhood which would welcome new volunteers who want to help out, give their time, and learn new skills while they’re at it. Your first port of call to find a group that would fit your skills and interests would be the CVSF (Community and Voluntary Sector Forum) where all groups in Brighton & Hove are listed.

 His mother called him into the sitting room where the breakfast table was set specially for today. A candle was burning on a small cake and there were five presents, tidily wrapped and fastened with elastic bands. His mother was not one to waste anything and the paper had seen other presents before this day. She was a bookbinder by profession, nobody could wrap up things as well as she. Peter’s father had died when he was only nine years old and his stepfather was in the war. Last time they had heard from him, he was in Norway, but mother had not read the letter out loud. Bombs were falling on Berlin and the house he had grown up in was gone, but here in the village with his grandmother and great-auntie everything was safe and quiet.

 Peter’s little brother Rudolph sat down at the piano and played the birthday song and everyone joined in: “We are so happy that it is your birthday today!” Now it was time to open the presents and it was a little book on wildlife stories that Peter had been hoping for the most. There it was, a book-shaped gift and sure enough, he took just enough time not to rip the paper, it was the right one. “Thank you, mother, just the one I wanted.” Some of the other gifts were useful, new socks, a shirt and some stationery as well as a very small bar of chocolate. His aunt and grandma had given him two more wagons for his train set and miniature houses for him to put together. Annie had knitted him a green tie and Rudolph written a composition which he was now playing. Peter was dying to get outside to sit and read for ten minutes before school, but first he had to eat breakfast and probably share out the chocolate.

They were eating when suddenly a neighbour came in, beckoning for mother to come outside urgently. A moment later everything changed. “Children, I am so sorry, we have to leave. Now. We will take a rucksack each and go on our bicycles. Peter, choose one present and pack sensible clothes only. Quickly now, I will explain later, we have no time to lose.” Peter felt icy cold. Leave? On his birthday? What about the tadpoles and the hare – what about his train set and the new houses he had yet to build? What about school, well, that might not be such a bad thing, to leave the bullies and the Hitler Youth, who were always telling him to join them, when he was just not interested in their shouting. Swallowing down the tears pricking his eyes he grabbed his new book from the table, ran to his room to start packing. Downstairs he could hear Rudolph howling: “My piano, and Hansie!”  Next door Annie was being terribly efficient. She had already got her rucksack ready and was now sorting out her little brother’s clothes. Toothbrush, comb, sandals, do they even still fit, it had not been warm enough this year to try them on yet, no probably not, wellie boots too big, only one pair of shoes then, the ones on his feet. More room in the rucksack for another pair of shorts and a jumper. Where were they going, how far would they travel? Rudolph was only little and his bike was too big for him, and why? Why so suddenly, so quickly and not on the train like when they visited Auntie Emma in Hannover?

Outside his mother was fastening a suitcase to the rack on the back of her bicycle. She had a rucksack ready and a smaller bag tied to her handlebar and his as well as Annie’s. But on Rudolph’s bike there was only one small box and in it Hansie, the guinea pig. “Peter, Annie, kiss your grandmother goodbye, we must go.” Grandmother hugged the children harder than she ever had and they were off. One hour ago Peter had opened his birthday presents and now he was leaving his home, perhaps for ever.

Forty-four years later Peter saw the house again. They had cycled for five days, always heading north-west, knowing the Russians were following close behind. Their home town had been declared a last bulwark against the Russian army and evacuated so it could be blown up in defence. It had not worked, the Russians won.  On the sixth day Peter and his family had arrived, exhausted and scared, in the town of Lübeck where his mother decided to stay. The town was overflowing with refugees, they shared a room with another family and had only the very few things which they had managed to carry with them. One day Peter broke his plate and then had to wait for one of the others to finish eating before he could have his portion. He learnt to beg and steal, helped carry horribly wounded soldiers from trains, fetch firewood from the forest and search for the last potatoes in the empty fields. He became thin and weedy, his little brother almost died of the whooping cough but at least they were safe. Safe from the Russians, the war was over; they could make a new start. A wall was built between this new place and the old home, a wall nobody was allowed cross. People died trying to get out, nobody tried to get in, but for Peter there was still a house in that forbidden place that was his family’s.

 And so it came to pass that the wall went down again, not on his birthday, but one autumn day when he was fifty-eight. And while everyone who could poured out to visit the West, Peter drove East: back to the house he had loved, back to the birthday table he had left on that unforgotten day in April. Another family lived there now, it was their home and they were frightened by and unwelcoming to this emotional stranger who knocked on their door unannounced. “My name is Peter,” he stammered, “And this is my house.”

 For his 75^th birthday Peter took his children and grandchildren to the village near Berlin. He wanted to show them where he had spent his youth. When they drove past the house, he averted his gaze. They saw the brook with the tadpoles and his old school playground where he had been beaten up by Carl. You would expect Peter to be working for a refugee organisation today, but he does not. He has a museum of treasures which he has collected over many years and still spends all his money acquiring more things. The trauma of his flight has not made him a better person but a mistrustful and bitter one.

 People would dance around the elephants but then the big one would swing his trunk and gently lay it on a dancer’s shoulder and the couple would break apart and stand still, holding hands, with tears in their eyes. Or the baby elephant would lean against the legs of a woman chatting to a cousin and she would fall silent, again hands would seek other hands and eyes would start to glisten.

 The big elephant was dad, uncle George, grandpa, the oldest member of the tribe. The little one baby Joe and it was his parents whose wedding everyone was or wasn’t dancing at. George and Joe had barely met before one of them had gone on his way and the other almost returned from where he had only just arrived. Perhaps in leaving, George had given Joe that little push he needed to reel back from the brink upon which he stood. “Stay, little man”, George might have said, “It is my turn to go now, not yours. Not yours for a long time yet.”

 But no one at the wedding knew that for certain. The musicians on their narrow stage had not been informed of the presence of the two elephants, but they could sense their presence. The violinist had a soul which he poured into his instrument and so he felt more than saw the dancers falter and stop. He played more softly and more gently as the evening wore on.

 Finally a sweet lady mounted the stage. “Can you play a Greek Syrtaki?” she asked the violinist. He nodded. She took the microphone and spoke. “Dearest friends, let us all dance with George and Joe. We know that they are here.”

 Everyone gathered around the two elephants on the dance floor and linked arms in a big circle behind each other’s shoulders. Slowly the music began: ta-dum, click, dum, click, dum, click, dum, click, dum, click, ta-dum, click… and slowly the group of people began to walk first to the right and then to the left, all together in one smooth chain, while tears flowed freely. Tears of grief for George and happiness for the life he had lived and the music he had loved, tears for Joe, tiny Joe, who would be back and join in and live in the footsteps of his great-uncle who had only held him once and had given him so much.

 In the centre of the circle the two elephants joined trunks and swayed to the music. The sweet lady and the violinist were sure they felt them smile.

As soon as half of her tooth was visible, it could be clearly seen that it had a brown dent in the middle. All teeth that followed also showed the dent but otherwise came out straight and true. Isabelle enjoyed nursing her baby, those were tender, loving times. One day, though, when Sarah had four teeth each in her upper and lower jaw, it happened and she bit her mother as she finished feeding. After her next meal, Sarah was watching Isabelle’s face when she bit her again and when Isabelle screamed, Sarah smiled, which shocked her mother no end.

Isabelle was quite alone with her little baby and had no one she could talk to about what had happened. She could hardly believe it herself. She did not want to wean her daughter but became afraid of the next feed and the possibility of Sarah biting her again. At last the next feeding time could not possibly be postponed any longer and tentatively Isabelle let Sarah have her nipple. Sarah drank, Isabelle watched and at the merest hint of satiety, Isabelle whipped the nipple from her daughter’s mouth. From that day on every feed of the little beast became a time of fear. Isabelle would rest her finger near her nipple, ready to disturb the vacuum at a moment’s notice and unlatch her daughter. If Isabelle’s attention wavered, Sarah would bite. The tender and loving times were over and soon Isabelle’s milk dried up. Sarah was given bottles and dummies which she destroyed weekly. More expensive, thought Isabelle, but a lot less painful.

When Sarah was two years old, she fell off a climbing frame at the playground. She banged her chin hard on a metal bar and her upper front teeth were pushed back into her jaw. When they finally descended again, one fell out straight away and the rest stayed crooked. Other children, for whom the loss of the first tooth was a status symbol, envied Sarah terribly for having a gap long before her fifth birthday. Sarah could not remember the fall and the pain afterwards but what she did remember was that her beloved dummies suddenly “didn’t work anymore”. Instead of the dummies she started to suck her thumb, which pushed her crooked teeth even further out of alignment.

At nursery Sarah was not a popular child. Her mother was called in and told that Sarah was not an easy child and disliked by the others. It had taken a while to find out why but now it was clear – she bit. “Please talk to her quite seriously,” the mother was advised. “You might have to visit a child psychiatrist.”

“Sarah, why did you bite Paul today?“ her mother asked. “Don’t know,” said Sarah. “He was there.” “Biting hurts, Sarah,“ said her mother, “Why don’t you try and bite yourself one day and then you’ll see.“

Soon after, Sarah’s arms and legs were covered in self-inflicted love bites. It looked horrid but at least she had stopped biting the other children. Her grandfather said that if he ever saw another one of those bites on her arms, he would burn it out with his cigarette. From that time on, Sarah wore long sleeves and trousers if she had to visit him and he forgot what he had said. During bath times her mother would sadly count the red marks on Sarah’s arms and legs and ask her if they hurt. “No,” Sarah would say, “they’re nice.”

At school, a dentist looked into Sarah’s mouth for the first time. He suggested the extraction of eleven of her milk teeth as there was no saving them. Sarah was put under and the teeth were taken out after which she screamed for days. Nobody had explained to her what would be done, it had seemed unnecessary to scare her like that. She became a quiet girl who hardly ever contributed to the class, but then she usually had her thumb or her arm in her mouth. Many of the other children were noisy and disruptive, so the teachers were glad of every silent child. Sarah never wore short sleeves or shorts, not even to PE lessons.

When Sarah was fourteen, her teeth had all come in, even if they were slightly discoloured and rather crooked. The dentist urgently advocated braces. In order to make room for the teeth to be realigned, a molar had to be extracted, but this time Sarah was wise to what would happen. She locked herself into the toilet at the dentist’s and did not reappear until he had gone home and the cleaning woman arrived at the practise. Her mother finally managed to bribe Sarah with £20 to have the tooth taken out, but every night in bed Sarah lost her braces when she stuck her thumb into her mouth. Finally the dentist attached the braces and the love bites on her arms and legs became a lot worse due to the wires across Sarah’s teeth.

Sarah finished school at 16 and started work at a zoo. She felt a strong affinity to animals and devotedly cleaned their cages, fed them and showed no fear of lions, bears and tigers. When one day a leopard had to have his teeth cleaned, she helped anesthetize him and held him in her arms throughout the procedure, even though the vet assured her that the beast was completely out and would feel no pain. She stayed with him until he regained consciousness and left the cage almost a little too late.

One of the keepers thought Sarah was sweet and enjoyed telling her stories of his travels in Africa, the lions he had seen and what happened to the poachers who were caught, killing elephants only for their teeth. There were two elephant tusks on display at the zoo and Sarah made the director put up an information panel on the subject of the horrors of the ivory trade, which she had designed herself. She was shocked at what she had learnt and made it her mission to talk to anyone she saw wearing ivory or selling it about the sacrifices made to obtain the beautiful substance.

Her great love, though, was the predatory cats. She became close to them and they seemed to like her, too. A circus came to town and Sarah went to see it. Afterwards she had a fight with the lion tamer, as she was disgusted at the cruelty with which he had treated the noble creatures. She was not the only one who felt like that. In front of the circus, a group of people were holding up placards and chanting:”Do not visit this circus, don’t support cruelty to animals!” Sarah started talking to them and after the last show joined some of the group at a vegetarian restaurant. A young man called Martin was among them, who wanted to free the animals from the circus. When he found out that Sarah worked at the zoo, he persuaded her to join him and take the lions and tigers to a spare cage there. A few nights later, Sarah stole a truck from the zoo and with Martin liberated three lions and two tigers from the circus. They managed to put the animals into the cages but upon unloading them, one of the lions, made frantic by Martin’s nervousness, attacked Sarah and mauled her terribly. She survived but lost her right arm and after a long stay at the hospital was fired from her job at the zoo. The judge said she had been punished enough and gave her probation, but Martin had to go to prison for a year.

Sarah became very withdrawn. She had lost the job she enjoyed and was not allowed to join the demonstrators. She sat at home and chewed the skin on her remaining arm until it bled and if her mother tried to speak to her, she growled. Martin, who had written numerous unanswered letters from prison, came to see her upon his release. He had written to say how sorry he was and that the cause was still worth fighting for, but Sarah did not want to know. When he stood in front of her, she just stared at him full of despair, that here stood the man whose fault it was that one of her beloved cats had attacked her.

Isabelle finally took Sarah to a psychiatrist who decided it was for the best if she was committed to a mental institution for a while. They gave her drugs that kept her quiet and made her too tired to eat her arm. His bad conscience made Martin visit her there a few times more, but as she never reacted to his words he eventually gave up.

One night, one of the carers decided to take advantage of Sarah’s apathy. He took her to an empty room and began to rape her. She let him do as he wanted without any reaction until he forced his penis into her mouth. She closed her jaw around it. His screams alerted other carers who found Sarah bleeding on the floor with a broken mandible and a few teeth missing. The man had fainted after punching Sarah in the face, a fat piece of his penis was missing which Sarah was almost choking on.

Sarah spent another long time in hospital, her jaw wired shut so it would heal. She could not suck her arm, she could not speak and in her frustration she learnt to write with her left hand. In the bed next to her resided a young anorexic woman called Lisa. She read Sarah’s first hungry sentence: “I need to get my teeth into something!” Lisa found this fascinating and the two became friends.

The young women were discharged on the same day. Lisa had learnt from Sarah that there are people who enjoy biting into things and chewing them and first out of pity and then out of friendship had begun to eat again. They found a flat together and Sarah taught Lisa how to bite. First they bit into hard bread crusts and tough steaks but soon into each other’s fervent kisses, and Lisa taught Sarah how to be gentle and how to nibble.

“Enjoy the sunshine” says a friendly man as he hands us our bus tickets to Waverley Station. On the way in we see the zoo and the kids exclaim with joy. Let’s go to the Zoo! Half heartedly I promise, but first we must find the youth hostel and get rid of all these bags. We drag along the streets, not knowing which way to go. It is hot, we are hungry but then we see people in pretty costumes, wigs and fancy make-up. Oh my god, the festival has started! All my life I’ve wanted to see the Edinburgh Festival and now here I am with two young kids who only want the zoo. 

 We find the youth hostel and can’t check in for three hours. “Let’s just go to the zoo,” my partner says. We leave our baggage and with a flimsy map are off again. The kids are ecstatic, I am sad. The one day we get in Edinburgh during the festival and we are heading for a zoo.

 By chance we get to the Royal Mile and there they are, three men, two of them emitting high pitched squeaks and one of them playing… “Your instrument, mummy, look!” Yes, an accordion. They are performing a play about penguins I think and opposite them are three other musicians, one with a cello and two bald guys playing violins and dancing the Can-Can. The kids are hooked. “Can we see their show? And theirs?” A group of beautifully made-up oriental women walk past swishing big red fans and another man covered on blood drags himself along the pavement with others who comfort the onlookers that he is merely a trained actor. A gorgeous vampire offers us Dracula on a bouncy castle “Can we go?” There are women in 50s clothes singing, two men in drag and everywhere – flyers. Thrust into our hands. The zoo is forgotten, we want to see the shows, all of them. Every time someone gives us a taste of what they have to offer, my little one tells me: “This is the one I want to see”. A magician bedazzles her with coins and elastic bands, five Chinese women drum and toss their hair and Cambridge students are performing a musical. Spoilt for choice and all on offer within the space of a few hours. In the end we go to a show called Aluminum (sic!) for which we are given free tickets by three lovely young people dressed head to toe in, you guessed it. We carry shiny bits away with us and are – all of us – thoroughly pleased at last.

 I don’t drive to ….that place…. very often because, well, never mind why, but sometimes I do, well, you can’t not, can’t let it go entirely, can you. And there is such a pretty view.

 We was coming up the hill before the long stretch down towards the bend in the road when I noticed the little white Ford Fiesta in front of me taking the corner much too fast. As soon as I drove around it as well I saw it barrel down the hill towards the rock and the bend and I did what I always do on that stretch of road, I turned my headlights on. And from the bottom of my heart I prayed – brake, you fool, brake! Then I braked for her and the red lights in front of me came on and in the distance the little Ford stopped about two inches from the rock.

 She sat slumped behind the steering wheel, sobs shaking her body, but when I opened her door and held out my hand, she got out softly and sat with me on the commemorative bench. She was pregnant, her thin shirt stretching over a round belly and suddenly there was a kick against my arm, where I was still holding her hand.

 “Hello Baby”, I said, “My name is Gregory Morris Junior.” The girl looked at me, wiping her face with the sleeve of her other arm. “Sarah”, she said. “This one hasn’t got a name yet.” The baby kicked against my arm again and Sarah took a deep breath. “I think I’m alright now”, she said, “Thank you for turning on your headlights.”

 “You were going too fast,” but I always turn on my headlights on this stretch of road.

 “I wasn’t going to stop.”

 “No.”

 I got up from the bench and touched the rock. She came with me, I had not let go of her hand. “No”, I said again.  Her reply sounded like a line from a song to me “I was driving with my belly to the bend in the road. You came to hold my hand.”

 “Go home, Jane”, I said, “You are alright now.”

 “My name is Sarah”, she said and before she could ask, she read the plaque on the bench. Jane 1958 – 1985.

 We sat down again and now it was Sarah holding my hand. “Gregory is a good name, if it’s a boy”, she said. “Gregory Minor”.

We were walking on the downs; that bit where you come up and suddenly you see the sea in front of you and he was holding my hand in his pocket like a little bird. I was cold. I felt him looking at me from the side but I kept my face straight ahead. He once said how slim I looked in profile and how vulnerable and I wanted him to see me like that again. I lifted my chin to make it look thinner, “You are quite fragile, really”, he had said. I thought he loved me.

Then we came over the crest and there was that beautiful view and I said:” Ah!” – only that, nothing else, and suddenly he burst out with all this vitriol about how I was so boring and predictable and pedestrian and only cared about bourgeois things like views and lists and teacups and how he had met somebody else and was going to spend his time with him – and how gender wasn’t an issue.

My hand was still in his pocket. I was freezing in my cocktail dress and combat boots which I was wearing specially for him and the lizard brooch he had given me at my throat and my big handbag full of stuff.

I took the dead bird out of his pocket. He walked away from me back to the car so quickly that for a horrible moment I thought he was just going to drive away and leave me on the cold hill. But he drove me home. We spoke no more.

Now he is gone I can dress warmly again and stop pretending to be that other woman he wanted me to be.  She would not have liked views and floral teacups and star signs and those amazing patterns in daily life that I always notice and now I can stop biting my tongue. I have given him back the lizard – it was not me.

You know you have come to the right address when Lisa Ducie opens the door. She is a work of art in her own right: hair up in a wild black spray, a serious pair of glasses on her nose, plus the killer detail – a tape measure round her neck! She is of course working on something exciting in her studio space or actually her dining room.

Lisa was born in Lichfield in the Midlands in 1964 and trained in fine arts at Leeds achieving her BA in 1989. Her first ambition was to be a gallery painter but she soon expanded into 3-D installation works as “I wanted my paintings to exist in the real world rather than be an illusion. The audience is always important and active within the piece.”

It was only a question of time before Lisa “fell into theatre. I was offered a job making props for the West Yorkshire Playhouse and more work followed taking me into designing sets and costumes. This was my true apprenticeship, working at Opera North with other artists, researching and creating one production after the other and soon travelling all over Europe.”

Lisa moved into production management and masterminded such large scale outdoor events as the 2001 Shrewsbury Castle ‘King of Fools’ based on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, creating a huge metal horse on a milk-float which could seat 2 people and at one point raced along the motorway at 30mph, happily without the people on top.

But the artist was brought down to earth with the premature birth of her daughter Belle in 2000. As the “two-pounds-of-sugar” came home out of her incubator at last, Lisa needed a calmer and cleaner living space and found it in a sweet little terrace in Portslade. Here she fast-tracked to become a teacher and now directs the fashion shows at Sussex Coast College in Hastings and is about to start as artist in residence at the Orpheus Centre in Godstone, Surrey. She still designs amazing pieces and in Brighton you can see her Jules Verne inspired Rocket at The Glasshouse on Old Steine, a symbol of the aspiration to acquire knowledge. Lisa Ducie’s own aspiration is to be an illustrator, and inspired by her daughter she is writing and drawing the stories of little Bryndis, whose epic adventures like ‘getting a special dress’ and ‘mummy’s car not starting’ all happen in a slightly strange and otherworldly place.

Bryndis in a Dress illustration copyright Lisa Ducie 2010