I am sorry to be the one to tell Organ readers that the Wiltshire writer Millicent Lydiard, who showed promise of being a regular correspondent here from Middle England (see INDIAN SUMMER IN MIDDLE ENGLAND), put an end to her own life last week. I have traced her to the place where a lady walking her dog last saw her in the near dark down at the coast, Weymouth way. This is an obituary and explanation.
Millie L. was a puzzling commodity. I thought she was indefatigably upbeat. She did little paintings and she did martial arts and I know she read lots of books, but perhaps she was always somewhere else in her mind. I thought she was a good mum, but those kids were giving her nothing but grief. Just the usual: taking cars, racing them in country lanes, defiling bus shelters.
"What you bin doing then, Matt?" you'd ask.
"Oh nothin' much. Hangin' abou'... takin' caars... shaggin' birds..." Dopeheads with scrambled brains. And Millie standing there in her little beamy kitchen making them veggie soup and darning their socks. Do you know people that darn socks these days? I could tell you about this because I once firmed up her little darning mushroom.
I brought her beech logs from Savernake Forest where I have permission to cut, calling in on her at her cottage by the scrapyard, and we'd chat and sometimes she'd give me a cup of tea and something of whatever she'd been baking. There was no funny business. She kind of kept you at arm's length, but dead nice with it, and anyway I wasn't thinking that way. Made a refreshing change I can tell you. She had a big thing, I reckon, about male on female friendship. She was so good at it. I seriously liked her for that, for I'm no oil painting and what woman wants a loner logman? I reckon really that she was my best friend and I was hers. But we never even went one place together. Just chatted on. I was the one who turned her on to the elegiac beauty of sci-fi, and she gave me brilliant things to read like poems and The Blackwater Lightship, and even showed me that thing she wrote for www.themightyorgan.com before she sent it: just her diary. And I thought it was so like everything that goes on round here. Real old Wilts. We're a lot of bodgers but we have this milky ancient downland and three thousand tumuli. You have to know it to love it. Who else has sarcen stones? Millie even had her own stone circle of them. A little Avebury all in the long grass in her garden.
She was very into her logs. Had to be small for her Rayburn, and not too dry. If they were dry she'd have them all bobbing in her water butt. That's something I'll always remember about her. People round here must've thought she was a right barmy old bat. But I don't know. She looked a bit like Susie Quatro only not so tough. I think that gave her some cred. I hope it did anyway, because now that she's dead with a big police inquiry underway and her boys are tearing each other and her place up (in their grief I suppose it is) and digging their heels in about going to live with their gran, I have something to tell your readers, and it isn't very literary, for I'm just the logman. But I took her diary (which I knew was this humungous black file) out of the cottage and hid it in the back of my van. I just couldn't let those little bastards read it, or burn it, or whatever. And stone me if it wasn't things like sodding George Ogbourne that started it off. I'll smash his lights out. And the frigging noise everywhere, and the Front Garden of course, and the fucking council of course, and the arsehole government, and you know...
And the first thing I read in that diary was that she'd gone to meet Poll at the Cybercaff in Bassett, and no one was around, and she got onto 'Ask Jeeves', or whatever it's called, for news about how to get some mark or stain out, and instead she found herself typing, 'How do I kill myself?' Yes, readers. This is the same Millicent Lydiard who looks like a groovy old doll, is cool and nice and kind and the best woman out if you asked me, but no one did ask me. But she surprised even herself, because this is what she typed -- just sitting there in that little caff in Bassett. She was busy researching Walter Raleigh -- that's what it was. Or was it Cain and Abel? Anyway, I do know that she was into old Raleigh being such a brave geezer, and then, as with that thing she wrote for the organ, about hearing her voice say, "All I really care about is poetry", out came this question to Mr Jeeves: "How do I kill myself?" I think I'd better let you read her diary at this point. Can't see that it is of any harm. Someone right out there in the world, like in Ohio or Nyirbator might do a hollow laugh, because fucking Jeeves wasn't any frigging use. Here it is then:
Wednesday
...and all you get is a great load of messages from the Samaritans, and "please take two minutes to read this", and such like. And the STUPID thing is, that if they really had gone into all the ways you can kill yourself I would have got dead interested. Pills, hanging, exhaust, all that. I can just see myself: my head getting nearer and nearer to the screen and my face getting more and more interested, and nice. Because I am just such an interested girl in everything. And I then might have thought, "Now what?" And surfed on. But the despair at the utterly boring utterly unimaginative, poey response was probably just the last straw. Oh how easily I despair. That total zerosville gets to me. Stupid me, in fact. What you have to do is think about someone like Pollini and try and be bigger than all that. In fact be so busy doing your scales... except I was doing my best: trying to find out how to get that chewing gum mess off Matt's blazer. What a waste of my Cyber money. I would be better off in bed with a book. You never get too suicidal in bed. It's just the thought of getting up that does it for you.
Thursday
No the last straw was that thieving slug, George Ogbourne, from Cricklade, Saxon town. Wouldn't you think such a string of Wiltshire would make a good nice man.? No. It's too 'o'ey. Now Ogbourne St Andrew: there's a nice name. It's on the ley line. Or Crooked Soley: that's a lovely ring on the vowels.
Poor Cliff wasn't allowed in the forest because of foot-and-mouth and so he's doing hedging and nearly starving. Creepy putrid Ogbourne and his nasty brother took the money off me for two trailers of leylandii logs (burns vile anyway) and wouldn't bring the second load. Just laughed. Heard them down the phone, with their moustaches and all. What kind of a mother must they have had? And what can I do? If I go and kick their heads in they'll just come in the night. If I go to the Small Claims Court it'll cost me ten times the trailer of logs, and I might lose. The police don't deal with that sort of thing. I am alone and helpless (in this regard) and they think they've got one over on me. No wonder women who didn't have private armies resorted to putting on an evil curse. I may have to kill them somehow. That must be why people do killings. So there can't be any come-back. Fancy me taking all this time to work that out. But I guess some bad cursing would do. Advanced piles would surely be bad enough.
Talking of the army, oh, I am getting ground down by these Apocalypse choppers. You think they are dead overhead and go out to have a look, but not even a very nice look, just a look as if to say, "Is this Apocalypse Now?" or "What evil things are you up to?" and they are still in the distance, just coming right towards you and you knowing it's going to get louder and louder. Now really I wouldn't mind if I thought an intellectual with a flat stomach and a name like General Sir John Chastelain was my intellectual superior and really does know what's best and is in charge. In my old age I have come to consider that if I ever do have another man then only a soldier would do. Yes, Lydiard, you are known to turn your head to see who's driving the jeeps on the M4 aren't you? But I have a mistrust that it's goons in charge and the military version of Stephen Byers and Jo Moore, or spookie Archie Andrews' manikins like Tony Blair.
Thursday
No, this was the pits. This is what really did it: two ladies in gilets or whatever they wear, always with those shirts or blouses, like Delia, or is it? Why do they have that sort of hair even? Is there something imperceptible in the cut, even when it's quite long, that makes them county? Marlborough was always mud and jodpurs. You don't mind that. Made our Waitrose a distinctive one. But now it's long wooses looking oh so sad and self-conscious in their humungous brown Barbour hats and coats. And they are always waiting for the biggish woman in the waistcoat, or gilet, or with the shopping basket, or the four by four. So here we all are, waiting at the deli. And gilet was on in firm tones about her horse while the other sidekicked. It was all getting too much for her, going out to it twice a day, and poor old Lyard was getting on anyway.
"Be pushing up the daisies soon", she said.
"Oh do bury him under a tree," said sidekickess. She was the romantic one under her tight green Barbour. Visions of eglantine and violets perhaps.
I know what it's like to bury a horse. Big job. Big white horse. Big moon daisies surely.
"No, actually, I thought he might go to the hunt dogs," said gilet. They are highly pragmatic barbarians, and I wonder what is wrong with me.
Saturday
Sorry Diary. None of this is what did it. It was the muzak at the pool. Where once the over-45s went up and down nice and quietly smiling to one another as we passed (that's the ladies, of course; men do have no sense of the other, but you can always boff them hard when they are charging at you in backstroke) and making our Saturday swim our meditation, as one does, now we have Great Western Radio blaring 'Lies tell me lies, tell me sweet-talking lies'. Well, perhaps it was a tape, for it seemed to be on repeat. Muzak in the loos, in the changing rooms, and now in the pool which is now, I see, run by a bunch of children. I despair to the depth of every cell of my being, and I am having to be out of here. I have tried and tried all my life to carve out a little good existence for myself, and now there is a movement afoot to destroy it. Loveday are selling yet more land after boasting on the internet that they sold all those green fields over by Coate Water. Where do the slowworms go? -- is what I want to know, and what Richard Jefferies might have wanted to know. And the Great Midland Forest, or whatever it is they call themselves, are asking us to send in a picture of a favourite tree. I was going to send in a photo of a young oak lifting its arms to the sky in the Front Garden, the beautiful flat clay plain of Swindon. Even the high court is now happy for us to have three thousand houses built on it. So what kind of people are they? We've lost. I've lost everywhere. I'm defeated. What has defeated me most: the Front Garden or the musak? They have it in the doctor's surgery now so that I could cry. And I played bass guitar in a band once and am up on my feet at rock concerts. And if you take your child to casualty and are pacing the corridors waiting to hear if it will live or die you hear someone like Tina Turner screaming over the loudspeakers about her sex life.
I know just what I am going to do now. I always wanted a sea funeral anyway. It won't be drowning, it'll be gentle sea-washed hypothermia. And where are those bloody kids?
I am sorry to have to be telling you this, bang on midnight of the New Year. The fireworks are going off; the whole of Swindon exploding away over there. Money to burn. I thought I'd be in bed before now, but I've been reading this diary of hers.
