Dialogue Cues and the Isle of Eels

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Waiting for the snow.

Kinda like waiting for the atomic bomb.

Yesterday, I made a bit of money, shopped for provisions, dealt with financial crap (reminding me that I need to make more money) and scribbled a little on the Work in Progress.

Lucius, the modestly Famous Writer I knew best, always used to write with the television blaring loudly, which is something I never could get. I have to write in absolute silence. I can’t even listen to music; it’s too distracting.

Now I’m realizing that Lucius probably left the TV on for the same reason he worked the phone so avidly whenever he had a looming deadline—he was looking for dialogue cues. It is awfully hard to construct convincing dialogue from scratch! Much, much easier to recycle dialogue from conversations overheard on TV or in real life. I had a fairly social last couple of days, so my head should be filled with dialogue cues. Unfortunately, nobody I was hanging out with was talking about blowjobs, obscure 19th century word games, or the Teapot Dome scandal—which are the subjects of Henry and June’s most recent conversations.

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I’ve been reading Bernard Cornwall’s Saxon Chronicles, which are quite excellent and a wonderful resource for early English history.

For some reason, I’ve always been fixated on the Anglian fens. I want to write that I was heartbroken in the 17th century when they began draining them again—but, of course, I wasn’t around in the 17th century.

The summer I was 18, I took the money I’d earned modeling and set off on a bicycle tour of the U.K. Ely was on my list because fens! and it was there in the Ely Cathedral that I had my first experience with a ghost.

I’d met up with some people as one does when one is young and on the road, and I remember having to do some extra wheedling to get them to the Cathedral. It’s amazing to me that people can be so uninterested in their own history. These people were actually Cambridge students!

Anyway, we were standing among the pews when I saw this old, old man in a weird black smock, feeling his way toward the chancel with what looked like the branch of a tree. He met my gaze, and his eyes were completely white. Weird!

I poked one of my companions with my elbow and gestured toward the old, old man with my chin.

“What?” he asked.

“That old man. He looks like he just climbed out of the marsh.”

“What old man?”

And after a couple of back and forths like this, I realized my companions were not having me on: they simply did not see something I saw quite clearly.

Was I hallucinating?

I didn’t think so.

When I turned back again, the old, old man was gone.

Of course, I did some research when I got back to the States.

Ely was still an island—“The Isle of Eels”!—when construction of the present cathedral commenced. It was built on the site of the Anglo Saxon church where the last Anglo Saxon king staged the last resistance to the Norman invasion of 1066. That church was demolished.

The chapel we’d been staring at had been built in the 1300s. Priests did wear black smocks, but I couldn’t find a picture that looked anything like the outfit the old, old man had been wearing.

What did I see exactly?

Since then, I’ve seen many things that other people around me don’t appear to be registering. Sometimes, I see those things in company, and sometimes, I see them alone. The most recent sighting was the Former Democratic Candidate riding through the grounds of the Vanderbilt estate in what appeared to be a black Victoria on the day that she died. This is how I knew she was dead before I was told.

Cornwall’s description of Alfred the Great wandering ghostlike through the Fens are really wonderful.

And made me hope I get the chance to see Ely and the fens again. One day! Sigh…