To mark Spread the Word’s 30th Anniversary, three London-based deaf and disabled writers have been commissioned to create a short original piece of work. These Deaf and Disabled Writer Commissions showcase new work by three London-based deaf and disabled writers, and provide a developmental and profile-raising opportunity. Three London-based emerging writers have also been commissioned for our Emerging Writer Commissions.
The Deaf and Disabled Writer commissions, alongside Emerging Writer Commissions and Borough of Literature Commissions, were printed in the Deptford Literature Fesitval Anthology.
To my Great Aunty Beryl who didn’t speak at first by Ellie Spirrett
Beryl, did you know what would happen
to your name when you died? I am still hanging
halfway out of my school uniform when mum
drops it into her cereal bowl.
You know my Aunty Beryl, the one
who moved to Australia, she’s
dead. Then she pins the morning
down into her hair and lets the day
carry on like a shopping trolley
down a hill.
When I’m just outside the corner of her eye
I see the text from her sister. It bears your name
like skin after a ripped-off plaster
and pads it with cotton. How’s it going
busy over here, don’t know if you’ve heard.
Grandma buries you in her loft on the other side
of the world from your body, Beryl. Sometimes
on gin-soaked afternoons she rolls your name
across her mouth like a cough sweet
she wasn’t supposed to eat.
I paste myself like wallpaper around the living room
with my sister, making space for the silence that chokes
the air. When everyone is asleep, we try
to paint it into a picture of the lady
we never met that sits on everybody’s chest.
No one can afford the plane ticket to your funeral.
I learn of the men who gathered around your body
like mice in the bin, and toasted to you for keeping
their shoes tied and their beards full of mash
and gravy. Then they dragged their tails to the pub
and left your name in the tip jar for the staff to split
between them.
Nobody tells me your favourite colour,
or how hot you liked your semolina.
I know you through questions
that I’ve collected over the years like the old dolls
in the shed. Grandma says the two of you would lie,
ankles forming speech marks around each other’s heads.
letting the night gather in the gaps between you.
She’d say, Beryl, why don’t you talk?
and you’d answer by rolling your chin against the ball
of her heel. She kept her palms clean for you to touch.
She warned you about boys who pull hair in school.
She told you not to scream.
Grandma used to say I remind her of you, the way
my arms shake like the colours of a firework
and how my eyes never meet hers.
I remember how it feels to exist like that before
you are pulled down from the sky
by people who want you to be still.
So, I chuck out the image of your lonely funeral
and I make some space to build you a world
big enough to hold every explosion
that your body can think to form.
I give you a dinner table that doesn’t snap
you up when you say the wrong thing.
In school, the kids never cut names
out of their workbooks
and tuck them into your joints.
Beryl, could anyone hear the pain in your walk
from those rules that sat in the ground
and detonated when you stepped too close?
Did anyone see where the shrapnel settled
in your ribs and sprouted into your bones?
I know that a body like this is easy to give away.
that muscles who are too busy trying to crawl
out of your arms don’t usually fight back.
Grandma asks why you climbed onto a plane
with a man that ripped you out of your family
and stuffed you in his pocket.
She spits his name out like she’s just managed
to dislodge it from her throat.
She says he knew how to make a bin liner of your voice
and fill it with his own. He knew how to overcook it
with just enough loves and darlings
that you would not stop eating it.
It would form a skin on your tongue
and clump in the back of your mouth like a fist.
She never asked you
if you had worked out which door
in your house would close the quietest.
Which neighbour would be most likely
to let you in, and not hand you back to him
like borrowed sugar.
I think of the photos bloating
inside envelopes in Grandma’s loft
of your lips pinched into frowns.
You, embedding into your house
like a stomach ache.
No one asking about your favourite colour,
or how hot you like your semolina,
and I wonder at what point you forgot.
I try to clear more space, enough space
to give you another side of the world
with no men with pockets,
or recipes. But I still don’t believe
in that side of the world.
So instead, I give you one room
where you can find yourself again.
You rip open the night with your arms
like you used to in your childhood bed
and the walls keep your secrets.
You pull out all of the dirt in your joints
like hair from a shower drain, taking
his voice with it until you only have your own.
In this room, you never die. Or when you do
it is loud and sharp and huge.
The last thing I have to give you is a new funeral.
My head becomes a church, dripping
in stained glass windows that stream sunbeams
across the hemispheres. The pews are stuffed
like meat into sausages with women who love you.
Their stories pile on your coffin
until we can’t see it anymore. Everyone
holds a photo of you on their laps,
and your smile pierces their guts.
We spray each other with your perfume
until our wrists are full.
And afterwards we spill onto
the street like thick semolina,
smearing your name on every road sign.
About Ellie Spirrett
Ellie is a poet, originally from Leeds, who started performing in Leicester and now lives in Greenwich. Ellie was a member of the Roundhouse collective in 2023/2024 and is now part of the Spread the Word Young Writers Collective. She writes about disability and ableism, chronic illness and the loneliness epidemic.