E is for … Eleutherophobia

      It’s a strange thing to come from where the sea should be. I have this theory that it leaves you with an odd sense of impermanence, nothing between you and the ocean but a dozen or so miles of moorland and the few hunks of Ham stone that make up the sea defences. I have this recurring dream. I think it might be racial memory. I’m standing on a shingle beach with the sea piling up in a high grey wall and dropping down dead in front of me.

      I’m bred to the bone in this town. My mother’s family goes back six generations. I’ve lived most of my life here. Still I’m convinced most of the time the place doesn’t suit me, in particular the moors, which are just too damn low, too damn brooding. As a kid I’d be scared, waking up to a lake where the fields used to be with just the tops of the gates poking up and the spiky willow branches like clutches of drowning fingers. I dislike the rhines too (pronounce them reens); distrust them. They may look harmless enough, just innocent ditches with their covering of irises and marsh orchids, but they can swallow a car whole. One did, when I was a kid, taking with it a mother and her two children.

      They unsettle me, the moors that surround my home town, that’s the truth of it. I always think that, walking to the office window, looking out at them. I feel the weight of history from those old trackways, the featherlight dust of the bones of a thousand dead Monmouth rebels, the more so driving across them. I don’t care for the low roads. I feel like I’m always looking over my shoulder, expecting the sea to come back, just to take a notion one day to crash through those paltry sea defences, or the river to suddenly breach, bursting through the banks that rise higher than the car roof, pouring down on top of me.

      ‘This place. It’s just so damn ancient, that’s the trouble,’ I said to Sophie one day, staring out through her cottage window. ‘I mean, when you think about it, prehistoric creatures once roamed those moors.’

      ‘Well, you should know,’ she said. ‘You went out with most of them.’

      A word about Sophie now.

      Sometimes people I haven’t seen for a long time or who don’t really know me will say, ‘Are you still friends with Sophie?’ and I won’t know what to say. It’s like the words don’t make sense to me. Like they’ve got their syntax wrong or they’re speaking a foreign language.

      I mumble something usually. ‘Sure … yes … of course. Naturally …’

      What I really want to say is: Am I still standing here? Am I still breathing?

      Sophie Aitchison and I met over the old green baize desks in the newsroom of the Free Press, our local weekly newspaper. Until I left at twenty-two to travel – hence her knowledge of my prehistoric sex life – we also shared a flat together.

      As with so many things in my life – jobs, affairs – I fell into journalism. I’m an aspiration-less bastard, if you want to know the truth of it. In addition I’m lazy, bone idle. I see myself as a sort of Friday afternoon person, juddering along that old Assembly Line of Life. Suddenly someone calls out and the Angel Assistant turns. And, hey presto, there I go, juddering on past and out into the world minus that vital component of ambition.

      Unlike Cass, whose name, even to this day, is emblazoned in gold in the hall of the distinguished old girls’ grammar school we both attended, I failed miserably at everything, exiting with barely an O level. In the local careers office they went through a thick book of career options from nuclear physicist at the front (not enough O levels) to Stand and Tan assistant at the back. (I lie. Stand and Tan had yet to be invented.) They said, ‘Is there nothing you want to do?’ and I didn’t feel it was appropriate to say that was exactly it, that the only thing I really wanted to do was nothing. Luckily butterflies were even at that moment beating their wings. Not on the other side of the world either but slap-bang outside my father’s garage.

      It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a man stuck with a daughter around the house who shows no sign of getting a job will grab the first opportunity to do something about it. George Gordon was no exception. He moved swiftly the day that old khaki Ford Pop puttered to a halt. He knew that car and more importantly he knew its owner. Head bent beneath that upraised bonnet that day, he gave the sort of horror-struck intake of breath that would have won him Best Actor from the Academy of Motor Engineers if only the judges had been there to hear it. Its owner, with four children to support and a too substantial mortgage, blanched at the sound and at the mournful shake of the head that accompanied it.

      Thus it was that Harry Oates, editor of the Free Press, got his car mended for free and I got a job on this paper.

      My current incarnation here is my second. It’s a nice irony, although not by any means an accident, that that same Sophie Aitchison is now my editor.

      Sophie and I have now spent a considerable part of our lives working together. Not long after I left to travel, she also departed, to a down-table sub’s job on the Bristol evening paper. She was still there, although rising up the table, when I returned from my travels. No sooner had I set foot in my home town, than certain circumstances necessitated a flight from it (all will be explained), so that for a while – for the second time in our lives – we lived together. Her position with the paper meant she was able to put in a good word for me when a job came up and I subsequently spent the best part of seven years there in the end, first on news and then as a features writer. I left for what would prove to be an unhappy spell in freelance public relations, something which at least had the advantage of propelling me into that English degree at the university. It was here that I started to write, producing the first of the ‘Aunts’ books for which I am now (mildly) famous.

      After some success I was able to give up the day job (I had moved the twenty-five miles back to my home town by then; bought this cottage). Over the years the media group that owned Sophie’s paper had acquired various weeklies, one of them being the Free Press. When the job of editor came up she applied for and got the position, which proved to be a godsend for me, since by this time my life, for various reasons, no one reason, had fallen into financial disrepair and I was in dire need of some extra income. Treating accusations of nepotism with the contempt they deserved, she offered me a job so that today my life has come full circle. I’m back where I started, something which no longer worries me.

      Thus now I work three days a week at the Free Press (Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays should you wish to contact me). This helps cover the bills and at the same time leaves me plenty of time for my writing. Lest you should think I am the subject of any favouritism from my editor, given our previous association, I can assure you this is not the case. I get the same treatment, the same bum jobs as everyone else in the newsroom, something confirmed one Wednesday a couple of weeks after the Fleur episode when I found myself marked down to cover the latest example of New Age lunacy in my home town – the opening of Bad Ponytail Peter’s new phobia clinic.

OK: some facts about my home town. First off, I won’t be naming it because there’s a pair of genuine olde worlde sixteenth-century stocks at the bottom of our High Street and I don’t want find myself sitting in them.* And while I don’t believe in all this witchcraft crap, still, with a coven on every street corner (each with accompanying website) you can’t be too careful.

You see it’s Flake City, my home town, the Wacko Capital of the Kingdom. Other places have the Town Band, the Soroptomists, the Gardeners’ Club. We have the