Nicola Barker - Burley Cross Postbox Theft

What confuses me the most (and forgive me for this, because I know I can be a little slow on the uptake, sometimes), is your apparent determination to make the whole thing ‘a matter of principle’. Which principle? I don’t understand! There is no principle at stake here! The house is yours, Donovan, both by warrant and by right!

As you are well aware, Rhona and I had already consulted a lawyer (and at considerable expense) to begin the process of handing it over. That process is now in abeyance. If it were down to me, this would not be so, but it is not down to me. Rhona must also have her say in the matter.

To put it plainly, Donovan, Rhona’s feelings have been hurt — her pride has been deeply injured — and when Rhona feels something strongly, experience has taught me that there is only so much that I can do to guide and counsel her. It may help you to understand the apparent severity of her reactions to your accusations when you discover that, far from ‘sitting on a nice nest-egg’, Glenys had been under increasing financial stress over the last few years.

In the autumn of 2005, for example, her boiler stopped functioning and Rhona cashed in a portion of her own pension to fund a replacement for her. We paid Glenys’s phone bill on countless occasions. We had Glenys’s roof insulated when our own was done. For the final five or so years of her life, we fed Glenys at least two of her daily meals.

Wherever Glenys needed to go, we drove her. We arranged incontinence care (which she rejected, for the most part). Whenever Glenys came over to visit us in Threadbare (which was most days), we had to wash/clean/disinfect the upholstery (although we always tried to ‘guide’ her into a particular chair).

These are small things, silly things, things that shouldn’t need to be mentioned, but I am saying them here, Donovan, I am writing them down, in my silly green ink, even though I feel humiliated by it, belittled by it, because I want you to understand that the only crime we have ever knowingly committed against your mother was the crime of kindness.

Sometimes I sit and I wonder why it was that Glenys made the decision that she did. Was it out of gratitude? (She was never very big on saying thank you, but then nothing we ever did for her was predicated on that.) Or was it simply to cause mischief? To break your poor heart? To forge a rift between us? Was it a final, cruel way of making it plain that she had never truly forgiven me for the breach I had (unwittingly) caused, all those years ago, between you and her?

I don’t know. I don’t want to know (I’m just so sad, so worn, so exhausted by the whole affair). What I do know, though, is that all this procrastination over the will and its outcome is costing Rhona and me dearly (and not just emotionally). Camberwell Cottage is presently being sold. Rhona and I had no choice in the matter (we are currently liable to pay death duties and under threat of losing our own home).

I also think it only fair to warn you that two days ago Rhona told me that she was withdrawing £3,500 from Glenys’s account (last May Glenys’s depleted finances received a much needed injection of cash after an old insurance policy came into fruition. Up to that point she was over £5,000 in the red, a debt we were liable for. I’m not entirely sure of all the exact details, but I can find them out, soon enough, if you want).

I have no idea what the money is for. I presume that it is to cover legal fees and other debts incurring to us as a result of this impossible situation (Rhona had sworn that ‘nothing on God’s good earth’ would impel her to touch a penny of the money. I can only guess that something important has changed her mind).

I am unhappy about the withdrawal, and I felt that it was only right to let you know about it. Can I assure you, though (for my own part, at least), that my determination not to access Glenys’s account remains as strong now as it ever was.

So there you have it. I’m not sure there’s anything left to add. If you still are resolved to pursue the case against us, then all I can do is wish you well. I think it only fair to tell you, though, that both our lawyer, and Mr Baquir, seem to think your hopes of achieving anything by this course are not good.

Please see sense, Donovan! Don’t let foolish pride get in the way of a happy outcome. Stop this mess while it can still be stopped. We are your dear friends. We love you deeply. You are always in our thoughts and in our prayers,

Tilly

PS On a slightly lighter note: someone bought us a duck! He’s a Muscovy and very fine! Rhona sank a bath for him in the back garden, but he still persists in following me up on to the moor for a swim in the ghyll each morning. He had befriended a lone swan up there who unfortunately died after swallowing a load of fishing twine. By rights we should clip his wings (we’ve had complaints about him — he’s quite a beast!) but we’ve yet to catch the little devil!

Do take care.

XX

1, The Old Cavalry Yard

The High Street

Burley Cross

Wharfedale

WD3 4NW

20/12/2006

Dear Mr Vesper Scott-Jones,

I am writing to you, care of your publishers, because I have contacted you via your website www.sky-turns-black.com on three separate occasions and have received no direct answer to my enquiries. Instead my questions (and my email) have ended up — in bastardized form — on a ‘fans’ forum’ to be chewed over and debated by other ‘fans’, which isn’t at all what I’d had in mind (and, to put it bluntly, their various contributions have, by and large, been nothing short of asinine).

If I had wanted to know what Joe Bloggs thought on a variety of issues relating to your ‘oeuvre’ I suppose I could always have strolled out on to the High Street, right here in Burley Cross (West Yorkshire), and conducted a small random poll myself (I don’t doubt that it would have taken me considerably less time and been infinitely more illuminating!).

It might interest you to know — by the by — that you have an Australian fan who haunts your site called AUSSIEHARDASS (I’m guessing he’s an Australian — of course this can’t be definitively proven) whose provocative views and coarse language I find especially difficult to stomach, as do many other contributors (I believe he answers to the general description of what they like to call ‘a troll’ in the lingo). I would suggest that his presence on the site is counter-productive and that all traces of him should be expunged from it as a matter of some urgency.

Perhaps this letter may serve to draw your attention to some of the other problems with the website: it’s slow to download, the graphics seem a little amateurish — far too much lime green for ‘average tastes’ — and there’s an irritating, somewhat gratuitous home-page which you need to double-click — several times, in my case — to gain proper access to the contents (I am presuming that you have some flunkey from your publishers running the show, or — worse still — that you are actually paying some wet-behind-the-ears graduate a living wage out of your own pocket to take care of it. I don’t know. But either way… etc.).

May I now just say — to start my letter, proper — that I enjoyed the four books in your ‘Sky Turns Black’ series a great deal, although I thought the last book, Chute to Kill , took some of the ideas and themes explored in the earlier novels a stage too far — into the realms of the surreal in some instances, e.g. the girl, Lola, who dressed and acted like a circus poodle (to try and exorcize her experiences of childhood abuse at the hands of her dog-breeder uncle) was stretching a point, I felt, but the boy who spoke only in garbled rhyme? Way too much! I realize that he served as a kind of modern-day Greek Oracle figure, but I found both his use of the vernacular and his ability to conveniently pop up (muttering a tired, little ‘rap’ — apparently to order) whenever a new corpse was unearthed from one of the various high-rise blocks’ many rubbish chutes a tad unconvincing, to say the least.