The journey seemed to last a lifetime, but then of course it usually does and there really is only one end of the line for all of us. ‘It’s the journey not the destination’, he reminded himself, ‘and I’m changing route’. He dozed a little in the half-full train. There was a mere handful of fellow travellers in first class and he lacked the concentration to read, though he glanced at the headlines in the complimentary copy of the Times. He was on edge, easily startled and anxious but he felt a little calmer as the journey progressed. In that state between being awake and asleep when the mind makes patterns of unrelated events, he remembered seemingly unimportant scenes from a Penzance childhood and the day he left for university; his mother proudly waving him off at the station with tears in her eyes. He’d been so desperate to get away and ‘start’ his life. He’d never really gone back home; some flying visits, a few days at Christmas and of course the funeral. He’d lost touch with the town and the people he grew up with and it hadn’t seemed to matter at the time. He’d just been part of the Cornish diaspora but now, like the survivors of the peasants’ revolt, he was limping home. He knew he was in real trouble – in the middle of some kind of breakdown. It was no more than a week since he’d found himself sitting hunched in a corner of his bathroom, clasping his knees and sobbing like a child. Was he going ‘home’ to try and start over? His mother was dead, his father had abandoned the family when he was a child and the world had moved on, even in Penzance. There was no going back in life no matter how much he wished it but somewhere along the way he had made mistakes, chosen the wrong path and wasted his middle years. He would convalesce in his home town and, when he could think clearly again, he would make a plan, but not yet.

The journey took five and a half hours but, once over the bridge, he found the regular stops at familiar places somewhat comforting: Liskeard, Bodmin, Lostwithiel, Par, St Austell, Truro, Redruth, Camborne, Hayle, St Erth and then, finally, Penzance at 7.50 in the evening. The friend of his mother who cleaned his old home after holiday lets would have shopped for the basics and put the heating on for him; all he had to do was get there and rest up a while. Mask free after the journey, he walked from the station, slowly wheeling the single small suitcase he had bothered to pack. The sea was up but the night was mild and the sky clear. He was always surprised at the lambent light and the blue-green of the water and stopped several times to look out at the bay. He’d looked without seeing in the last few weeks, in a monochrome world of something like despair but he couldn’t be insensible to the vividness of the Cornish evening. A solitary beam trawler was moving steadily across the bay to Newlyn and a couple of people were swimming off Battery Rocks. Penzance was fairly busy and families and couples were strolling along the prom as if they were in Italy. Covid numbers were low in the county and renters and second-home owners had fled there but it felt safe, or safer at least.

The house was warm and welcoming after the journey. It had been decorated and modernised, with a new kitchen and bathroom, before he started letting it but the basics of the house he had grown up in were still there and, when he touched the wall in the hall with his hand as he entered, it was like grounding himself and reconnecting. There was a note on the kitchen table from his cleaner. She had thought he might be hungry and, unasked, had ‘plated up’ a meal for him to reheat in the microwave. He was home.

…………………………………………………………………..

Rifka’s great grand-daughter was a tall, slim redhead. In the early morning she jogged through to Newlyn and beyond it; a round distance of around three miles. Rifka, she knew, must have walked somewhat further. She cut a striking figure as she ran, dressed casually and running easily, with a relaxed style honed over a lifetime’s running from adolescence to the present day. In the summer she swam when the weather and the sea were right but had been unable to screw up the courage to try all-year round swimming; ‘Maybe this year’, she thought on an annual basis.

The rhythm of her running, the steady pace and pattern of her efforts when she was fit enough, let her lose focus on the present and process things lodged in the back of her mind, where she knew most of her creativity and reflection dwelt. When running easy, or hard and hurting, she often thought of her great grandmother’s struggle and what it had taken to survive. The first phase of the Armenian Genocide was the conscription of about 60,000 Armenian men into the Ottoman army where they were disarmed and murdered by their Turkish fellow soldiers. Then, on April 24, 1915 several hundred Armenian intellectuals and other prominent figures were arrested and put to death. The Ottoman government then embarked on a policy of forced deportation which could have been a model for Germany in the thirties. Women, children, and the elderly were

deported to the Syrian desert. On their way to exile hundreds of thousands of people were murdered by Turkish soldiers, police officers, and Kurdish bandits. Others died of epidemic diseases. Thousands of women and children were subjected to violence and tens of thousands were forced to convert to Islam. As they came to accept that the impossible nightmare really was happening, Rifka’s townspeople refused deportation and fell back upon the mountain redoubt of Musa Dagh. There they held off Turkish assaults for fifty-three days from July to September of 1915.

Just as ammunition and food were running out French and other allied warships sighted the survivors. Five French ships then evacuated 3004 women and children and over 1000 men from Musa to safety in Port Said. Turkey, ahead of its time in attributing ‘fake news’ to unpleasant truths, denied then and has continued to deny that these events ever took place. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYvDoJ__fLU

 

 

Sometimes, on a fine weather afternoon when she felt the need to escape her little studio in the back garden if a painting was not going well, she would stroll into Newlyn and buy a take-away coffee. There was a bench by Tom Leaper’s fishermen’s memorial overlooking the bay and it was a peaceful place to collect her thoughts.

She was working on a collage about Rifka and it was troubling her. She was unsure whether it was art or storyboard. She had resisted the steady pull of painting throughout her early adulthood; she’d grown up with art and rejected any involvement in it, perhaps as another act of rebellion against her parents. Now she found herself drawn to canvas. She was working with gouache and tempera on Rifka’s collage but was unsure of where it was going and whether it was Rifka’s story or the story of the Armenian massacres and diaspora. At the work’s centre was that sepia photograph of a young woman facing the camera and facing life, smiling but wary.

…………………………………………………………………………

For a day or so, apart from a short walk to the nearest supermarket, he stayed in and hunkered down. He was in a place where the smallest decisions and choices seemed impossible to make; large or medium eggs? He wasn’t sure. After a couple of days he walked into Newlyn and treated himself to fish and chips. And gradually the dead space within him contracted, slowly at first but still he felt it diminishing. He treated himself gently, like any convalescent. He took to strolling by the sea in good weather and people-watching. Sometimes it increased his sense of separation and loss because mostly he saw couples and family groups as he walked and it strengthened his sense of isolation and loneliness but he had decided that any feeling was better than no feeling – it meant he was alive and he felt now that that was a gift however painful. He was reading again too and felt that was a further sign that he was, in some sense, recovering. Sometimes he took his latest book, T G Farrell’s ‘The Siege of Krishnapur’, with him to read on a sea-front bench. He had decided to try and live by Maya Angelou’s words – hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and be unsurprised by anything in between; not bad advice. The end of ‘Siege’ struck a powerful chord with him too when he read the words, “one uses up so many options, so much energy, simply in trying to find out what life is all about. And as for being able to do anything about it, well……”. T G Farrell had drowned when only forty-four, just four months after moving to County Cork.

Oftentimes the environment does not reflect our inner life. He looked out into the bay as the light shimmered on a green blue sea and the gulls sang their discordant song and he thought of a gifted writer with the world at his feet; had Farrell wondered at the irony of facing an entirely unplanned, pointless and avoidable death when he realised what was happening? And as he looked out to sea he was disconcerted to feel tears running down his face. Embarrassed he wiped them away and looked around, anxious that people might see him making a fool of himself. He noticed the tall redhead jogging past but was relieved that she did not seem to have noticed.

She did not continue her run but stopped and bought takeaway coffee.

After a while he collected his thoughts and saw that someone had perched on the far end of his bench. He swept his eyes right, pretending to be looking at the view and saw the jogger sitting with her coffee. They did not speak. They didn’t even look at each other and after a few minutes she stood, looked around her and walked on, drinking her coffee as she walked. As she stood her left arm had extended a little but he stared fixedly out to sea, hoping his tears were over. Only when she had gone did he glance to the side. There on the bench was another coffee. On the napkin wrapped around it she had written: “This is for you. Good luck”.

He stared at the departure board and scratched his head. He always left London feeling sweaty, hot and grimy, having accreted a fine layer of dirt. If that was what the outside felt like what must his lungs look like? Still there was an energy about the place, manic but invigorating. Living there, well that was quite another thing. In his younger day it had been affordable, just; now a garden shed was beyond most people, even with the slow collapse of the City as the banks and money men moved their operations to Frankfurt and Dublin. Still, he was travelling first class and would lash out on a restaurant car meal. But first, some freebies in the first-class lounge. Paddington was still identifiably Victorian, the lounge even had some wallpaper from the days when the Queen herself used it. ‘What would she make of it now? Would she have liked the shiny chrome and plastic seats or favoured the leather Chesterfields in the original? How could it be that the Victorians could afford to build so much so splendidly when these days it seemed everything cost too much?’ He’d read somewhere that the country never made any money out of the Empire but Victorian wealth had come from somewhere. ‘A captive market of millions for British goods’ he supposed ‘plus cheap food and raw materials.’  He stepped to the side as a rubber tyred electric trolley came down behind him flashing its orange light and beeping anxiously.

He began to move slowly down the side of the station towards the lounge. There were worse places to kill an hour; free mags., nibbles and drinks. He was in his early sixties and alone, a slight, pale, blue-eyed man with thinning hair, hanging around, waiting without knowing what he was waiting for, or not wanting to face it.

When he got there the lounge was closed, ‘to ensure the safety of passengers and staff’. His glasses steamed up as he breathed out in exasperation. He’d known the Night Riviera sleeper had stopped running except for Sundays but hadn’t thought to check what else was off limits. He had a thought and headed off to Sainsbury’s for sandwiches; he had a bad feeling about Pullman dining. It surely would be off too and it was just too long a journey for crisps and coffee.

‘What did it matter in the scheme of things anyway? I can rough it this once’, he thought. Compared with the other changes in his life, making do with a sandwich was hardly life-changing. For, as the weeks of Covid had turned into months and the country’s loosest, most care-worn bricks had begun to tumble at an ever-increasing rate; as R numbers had been quoted then forgotten; as ‘following the science’, ‘world-class’ and ‘world-beating’ had been and gone while people’s lives were shattered or lost, he had decided to leave the city and move to what seemed to be the relative safety of his little holiday-let in the south-west. He could never be called a reckless man; he didn’t make life-changing decisions. He liked routine and familiar surroundings, or, at least he had. But something had happened to change his thinking, to change him. A neighbour in an adjoining flat had fallen ill. Mr Hussain had been a neighbour for ten years and more, living a quiet and calm life with his wife, sometimes having the grandchildren to stay and just toiling away doing harm to no-one. Then Mr Hussain sat in his driver’s seat one day when the air on his bus had been full of droplets and Mr Hussain had become ill. Then he had died. Grief had descended like endless rain from leaden skies. He had heard the crying during the day and during the night. Mrs Hussain, a friendly, smiling and compassionate woman, had seemed to diminish; she shrank and grew fearful; she lost all direction. And he thought, ‘What is the point of all this? There is no longer firm ground. I cannot bear the grief I see. I must leave. I must run away.’

He was not just confused or saddened, he was adrift in a leaking boat. Like all sick animals he wanted to be at home, but home was not the place he had lived in for some thirty years; home was where he came from. Somehow he felt, felt not thought, that he would be alright if he went home. He had had a life of sorts, a career in the civil service after university, relationships, though none for longer than he cared to think about and no marriage and no children. Over the years he had grown, or more accurately, shrunk, into a calm, unambitious, unemotional man whose life was ordered and organised and safe. The bearded young graduate living with his girlfriend in a tacky bedsit in north London and then, when she left him, living alone in the same bedsit and telling himself everything was fine and things would work out, had in time grown a shell, isolated and alone and, yes, lonely too, he admitted to himself. Now as he looked back at the turns in the road he had taken and looked forward to nothing, he felt hollowed out. He was running away; ‘Like the coward I am’, he thought. He knew his neighbour’s death had been the trigger not the cause of his panic. He knew too he wasn’t escaping poverty or deprivation; he was comfortably off. He would rent his London flat and had been able to take redundancy when Cameron’s civil service culls had started. Work had filled the week but he hadn’t missed it. He hadn’t been able to commit more than his time to his work as austerity had become the slogan and mediocre politicians prioritised slash and burn over rational policy in order to climb the greasy pole. He had learned to keep his ideals securely locked away after a few years of post-graduate radicalism and, eventually, had lost the key and then forgotten all about the cupboard he kept his values in. That had been why she had left him; she hadn’t been ready to compromise beliefs that were part of who she was. He missed her still after all these years, like the part of him that made him whole.

They had lived in a first floor bed-sit in north London; a bedroom-cum-lounge, then down the corridor to a long room that took a single bed, a kitchenette and a bath with gas geyser over which showered limescale into the bath whenever it fired up. The shared loo was downstairs by the front door. They’d painted the walls orange, bought lots of scented candles, installed a fish tank and started to build a life together. Then, somehow, life had got in the way; it wasn’t their relative poverty in the early years, or the simplicity of their lives. It was, he knew now, his loss of faith. He had come to believe that they could not change the world and had become cynical about the value of trying. She had not and he had been a lead weight holding her back and stifling her spirit as he tried to persuade her that his career was more important than idealistic dreams.

One day when their huge and overweight Armenian landlord, sweating from the climb up a flight of stairs, had given his usual peremptory knock and burst in, he had found him crying, her note clutched in his hand. Having satisfied himself that the rent would still be paid, Mr Jack (not his name but as near as the English could get to Assadourian he had long ago decided) had shown, what was for him, unusual delicacy and left, clearly puzzled that a woman’s departure should seem so devastating. He had not cried since, having found another secure place to keep his feelings and again, so he had thought, forgotten them all together – until his neighbour had died, having lived a blameless and yes, a good, life.

……………………………………………………

‘Pots’, she thought and began clearing away the debris from cooking.

She heard the cat flap clatter and looked down and smiled. “Oh hello. Where have you been?” The cat yowled gently and looked at her expectently.

“Hungry are you? Well let’s see what we’ve got for you.” She measured out a helping of food from the tin, looked at it in the bowl, felt a stab of doubt. Was it was enough or too much? she pondered. She put some back in the can then changed her mind and put it back in the bowl. ‘What a thing to fret about’, she thought. The cat waited impatiently. It jumped up on the worktop and she gently put it down again. She did that a lot lately, hesitated, unable to make her mind up, usually about stupid little things. When she went out – if she went out these days – she locked the door, got half way to the gate and thought, ‘Did I lock the door?’, turned round and went back to check. Ridiculous really; part of growing older or being alone she supposed.

“There you are then, a perfectly measured portion….more or less.

Listen to this puss: It’s Boccaccio describing the time of the plague. He writes that a certain sector of society ran away from the sick and bonded together in small groups to entertain themselves with music and whatever other amusements they could devise to avoid the scenes of death in the city. Could be Bournemouth beach in 2020 not medieval Italy don’t you think?” The cat silently agreed.

Outside the birds were singing, plants and animals were hunkering down for winter and the world was turning. The moon dragged water across the globe, creatures were born and creatures died. Clouds formed, rain fell, plastic polluted and fat men with tattoos gave Nazi salutes and drank beer. Police were attacked and other police attacked. A virus spread and governments acted and postured.

What could she do about all that? What could anyone do? Well, this time she would do something, go to Greenham, bend the knee, protest, march, sing. Otherwise those fat, tattooed men with bellies would win. There ought at least to be a fight.

Trouble was, she didn’t have much fight left these days. Still, what she had she would put to good use. It had to be better than watching endless repeats on afternoon telly along with ads for stair lifts, funeral plans and equity release.

Later she sat down on the settee and thought about what on earth she could do to make some kind of difference. She was soon joined by the cat which settled on her lap, purring as she absently stroked its ear.

‘Politics won’t do’, she thought, ‘I don’t want to be on the inside of a broken system. Of course, there are some good people in politics but they don’t often prosper and some, like Jo Cox, lose far more than the chance of advancement. Most people don’t feel they have a voice, even if their lot are in power.’

“They’re right too,” she said out loud and the cat opened its eyes briefly and gave a half purr. “Remember the anti-Iraq War march puss? Don’t suppose you do – before your time. Over a million people saying to parliament, ‘Please don’t go to war’. Made no difference at all. And the million marchers were right. This time around we clapped the health workers and government offered them a badge but nothing else. Meanwhile, over the water, the ‘leader of the free world’ was sowing violence and division in the hope of stealing an election.

No puss, politics won’t do it.“

To follow: (Part 3): As for Doing Something about It

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This is a memoir for a lost race of men and women, lost in so many ways, to the sea, to a society that doesn’t need them, to a world that has moved on and now ignores wreckage of all kinds from refugee inflatables to struggling families and communities, a world sailing erratically to its own appointment with bad weather.

Today what fish there are are a poor sort; disease and pollution mark too many and, of course, they’ve absorbed plastic, just like us. Our deep sea fishing boats and fishermen have pretty well gone, just like the fish. The bottom has been trawled to a lifeless undersea desert in much of the world’s seas but, since we can’t see it, we don’t fret. Only the ghost fishing thrives; old gear cut loose but continuing to catch fish which weigh down the nets until they lie flat and the catch rots or is consumed by crabs; then the nets rise up to catch and kill again. Around 640,000 tonnes of ‘ghost gear’ is left in oceans each year and it can last, still catching fish, for up to 600 years. Some ghost nets are mechanised, opening and closing mechanically without human intervention across the years.

Soon it will be too hot for many living things, ourselves included, to live in a good deal of the world. But there was a time, not so long ago, when the cold was so cruel that, if an ungloved hand touched the rusting, riveted metal of a trawler’s side, it would stick and be held. Pull away and the skin would tear. That was in places like the White Sea where it could be twenty degrees below freezing and a boat that had looked so big and safe in the Royal Dock could feel like a toy; every fisherman was afraid in those conditions. When the weather turned, seas that were slate grey to black would heave themselves up and over a trawler running for cover; if a skipper stayed for one last cast of the nets the boat would buck and creak and sometimes roll so far over it seemed it would never right itself. Sometimes it didn’t.

Those fishermen though: tough and boozy, with calloused hands full of cuts that wouldn’t heal from handling fish skin and guts in the cold and wet – calloused lives too. They were brutal, sentimental and loyal. They went to sea, found or failed to find fish, came home, got drunk, had fights, got drunk some more and were dropped by taxi before a freezing winter’s dawn at the dock gates, or at the boat if they couldn’t walk. Most could stagger up the gang-plank; some had to be carried. Part of growing up in Grimsby was learning to avoid the figure weaving and rolling down the street looking for someone to hit, or to step round attempted haymakers that were hopelessly off-target. Deep sea fishermen were loud and coarse through shouting in the teeth of weather on an open deck or the noise of the boat as they gutted down below. They were argumentative. They wore their tattoos and their prejudices like badges of honour. They swept mines in two wars, or crewed the boats the navy wouldn’t take and carried on fishing through the wars at sea. They were a race apart, like miners, and, like miners, completely lost when their industry finally sank like so many boats.

Earnest’s story

I only had a few trips. I would’ve done a lot more if someone more important than a life at sea hadn’t come along. But she did. I was lucky, very, very lucky to find her and lucky too that my first skipper was her father; John Stroud I’ll call him for this tale. He was a fine man, and he looked after me when he had no cause. He must have seen something in me – God knows what; I wasn’t much good for anything in those days. He knew my dad; they’d crewed together – trawlers converted for mine-sweeping in the Second war when most of the fishing fleet was taken for that or chasing subs just like in the First. They took the best part of two hundred and fifty boats out of three hundred from Grimsby, just left the stuff that wasn’t fit to go out on a duckpond. Near enough to half of the men sweeping didn’t come back.

When John heard that the Guillemot had gone down off the Faroes with my dad on her he called on mam and offered me a place as deckie-learner on his boat. He’d known hard times himself; came to Grimsby an orphan apprentice with nowt and worked his way up to skipper. I don’t think it was that though – he was just a good ’un and I’d have been lucky just to sail with him but he did a lot more than that for me before he was through.

Why was he in an orphanage? It was as much a workhouse as an orphanage. The kind of place that used to be called up to scare the kids in the old days: ‘You’ll put me in the workhouse you will…..and then where will we be?’ His father died of drink, hard labour and cholera, and his mother was left destitute. They were evicted from their tied cottage and there was nothing else she could do. It was common enough in those days. John went back to look for his mother when he was fishing but he was too late and she was gone.

He was literate and had a love of learning that he passed on to me – without that I wouldn’t be writing now. I became what you might call a ‘late developer’, studying at night school and on day-release when I’d left the fishing and, eventually, changing direction and taking an English degree. I put all that down to him. Anyway the workhouse Superintendent soon learned that John could be trusted so he did well. It wasn’t a terrible place from all accounts. The presumption was that indigents were there because they deserved to be and it was a strict regime but the boys got an education of sorts and were often apprenticed to a trade that would give them a chance in life. Fishing was favourite – a booming industry that was making the east coast ports rich, or at least the east coast trawler owners.

By the time he was fourteen the boy who was to be my father-in-law was a monitor/teacher in the orphanage school. Dark wood inside, gloomy lighting, a strong smell of carbolic and windows high enough to let light in but too high for boys to look out of. And God everywhere with lots of admonition and guilt.

He told me of the day he was sent for by the Superintendent. He was teaching 4-7 year olds, forty or so after the second cholera epidemic in Gloucester in a year.

 “Right then we’ll just see which of you can finish these by the end of school shall we? Heads down and off you go.”

Then a knock at the door and a young boy standing in the opening, hot and nervous. “Please Sir…”

“Yes James, what is it?”

“It’s the super…superintend…..superintending….”

A boy sniggered at his discomfort and stammer until silenced by a glance and one word, “Edward” But they liked him and knew he liked them and understood them too so a word was enough. “The superintendent James, Mr Locke, what about him?”

“He wants to, wants to, wants to…….. see you.”

““Wants to see me? now? are you sure James, you’ve not jumbled things up again?”

“Nnnnno. Right…right away he said.”

“Right. William, come out here. I’m putting you in charge. I’ll be back before the bell and I’ll expect to see you all hard at it – that includes you Edward, no slacking.”

And off they went, down the long corridor, walls lined with brown tiles, up the stone steps to the great man’s office. As they walked the steel caps of their boot soles clattered and echoed in the confined space and he wondered what could call him from a lesson before the end of school; he could think of nothing he had done or left undone. ‘Maybe’ he thought, his heart suddenly lurching, ‘maybe mother has come for me as she promised she would’. The boy alongside him struggled a little to keep up; he was halt and small.

Collecting himself he slowed his pace and looked down at him. “So James, you’re the runner today are you?”

The boy looked up gratefully and nodded.

‘Today and every day at a guess’, he thought.

“Well here we are. Thank you James.” He knocked and after a pause was summoned in. The odour of the room was the second thing he noticed; it smelt not of carbolic but of beeswax, vellum and pipe tobacco. The first thing he noticed though, was that there was no-one else in the room but the Superintendent. He would not be going home that day.

“Come and sit down John.”

“Thank you sir.” He walked across the carpeted floor and took the seat facing the Superintendent across the leather-topped desk.

The Superintendent had buried a boy that morning and was weary and low in spirits. But, at least here he could, perhaps, do something to lift a dismal day. “Well John, you must be wondering what all this is about.” He glanced at the boy – always difficult to read, like many in his care, but at least he was not seeing the frozen watchfulness that evidenced God-knew-what suffering and abuse in too many of his charges. “I won’t waste time.” He looked down from the boy’s steady gaze, shuffled his papers and tidied them into a neat pile. Papers he could organise and manage. Life and death he could not.

“You’ve done well here since you joined us some five years ago. You’ve been a diligent pupil and studied hard…….looked after the younger boys too and none of it has gone unnoticed. You’re fourteen now and the Board members think”, and then, more hurriedly and less truthfully, “and I think too, that you’re ready to take your next steps in life and….and move on.”

John listened to the words and understood them one by one but together they seemed difficult to make sense of. This was his home; happy was too strong a word for his life there but he was useful and …..he searched for the word….useful and safe. “You’re ready to take the values and knowledge you gained here and put them to use in the service of others as I know you will.” He paused and looked again into the boy’s face. His own boy had not lived to be John’s age before being taken. Now he was sending this lad away from the only place he could call home. “In short John, we have secured for you a position as an apprentice fisherman in Grimsby, one of the greatest ports in the country, in the world I dare say. What do you have to say about that?”

There was a longish pause as John struggled for an acceptable response. ‘next steps in life….Grimsby….apprentice fisherman, the words tumbled down around him like the foundation stones of his life.

“Well John?”

“I am grateful of course sir but…but I had thought to carry on here if my efforts were satisfactory and perhaps in time become a real teacher…….. I do not know how to fish and……….and I cannot swim.”

The Superintendent looked him in the eyes again and smiled sadly. “I must confess this was not the response I expected John. You need have no fear on either account; you have seven years of apprenticeship in which to learn the craft of fishing and you know very few fishermen can swim – they believe it to be bad luck and that they will drown because of it.” He cleared his throat, thinking that the boy would have made a fine teacher and, who knows, in time perhaps, his successor. He paused, sensing something of the distress the boy was trying to hide and then spoke more gently. ”We cannot always have what we desire John, not you and not I.” Then briskly, “Now, I have here a letter of introduction to your employer. The address is on the envelope. A cart will take you after breakfast in the morning to Gloucester station and from there you will proceed by train to your new home. Here John is ten shillings, more than sufficient to tide you over until your first pay as a fisherman; I may say that it is far more than we usually give to our departing charges.” That was true for the bulk of it had come from his own pocket. “Your employer will find you lodgings when you report to him. Keep God with you John and make us proud. Let me shake you by the hand and wish you God-speed on your great new journey.”

And that was it……the next morning a lad who’d never been further than a couple of miles from Gloucester was off to Grimsby.

His first skipper was Nathaniel Mitchell, ‘Stormy’ to those who sailed with him. In those days who you sailed with, especially the skipper and the mate, could mean the difference between good money and poverty or, even, life and death – not from the sea, that danger was always there, but from the brutality and sadism shown by some of them to the lads who joined the crew. But the orphanage took care where they placed their boys; there had been some scandals over the years, boys who never made it back to shore and murder trials as a result, so care was needed. Stormy was a tough one but he was fair enough.

The red-brick terraced house in Wharton Street was owned not rented and he was not a real drinking man. Mrs Wharton had no need to wait by the dock gates to head Stormy off before he made the nearest pub.

“Well now lad you get off to the Mission, at Riby Square – they’re expecting you – and I’ll see you down dock at five in the morning. Just show this to the gateman and ask for the Mary-Jane. You can make the acquaintance of the crew while we’re leaving dock, them that’s sober anyway. You’ll find wetgear at the mission and a kitbag, all paid for by your Mr Locke. It’s a fine boat you’re joining lad so mind you do right by her.”

“I will try to sir. “ He hesitated and then asked, “ Where are we sailing to sir?”

“Cape Wrath lad, where the fish are, we ‘ope. Leastwise that’s where they were last time we looked. Best call me skipper from now on; keep sir for the navy if you join.”

When Stormy packed in John was ready for his own boat. He came for me in ’57, just before the Cod War kicked off. He was skippering for Amalgamated by then.
They must have rated him because he got the Neptune, pride of their fleet, a nice, big diesel side-winder.

Mam never got over losing dad. Neither did I come to that; these things stay with you one way or the other; my mother had given up really and went to live with her sister in Manchester, well away from the sea. I can’t blame her for that. So she went and I ended up in the same Fishermen’s Mission he’d lived in; John sorted that for me too, or rather his missus did.

I checked into the Mission, dumped my bits and pieces, had a bit of a cry then went and had a cup of tea downstairs. They were kind enough and no doubt could see I was struggling so dished up egg and chips too but it all seemed like another world to me. I’d had chances to take a trip with dad or people he knew but I’d always said no. I knew it to be a hard life and I had some thoughts of getting an education; maybe it was really  in me from the start and John just encouraged me when I needed it. I’d seen enough of my dad’s comings and goings; weeks away and a few days ashore and docking with a good catch only to find other boats in before him and the price rock bottom.
But there I was – all set to sail and be a fisherman, like my dad before me. There was a note at the mission from John. I was to go to the Amalgamated Trawlers office on Riby Square the next morning. I killed time that night reading old magazines at the mission which was quiet enough of an evening during opening times, and beyond; there were plenty of clubs where men could drink on and pubs risking a lock-in too. That was one of the hard things about fishing. Men would be away a lot more than they were home and that didn’t make for easy courting or strong marriages. Too many lads would find themselves home for three or four days with money in their pocket and no home worth the name to go to. So they’d drink while they worked out what to do with their time ashore and before they knew it the time had gone.

I woke early, hearing the sound of the Lumpers trekking from the bus stop to the fish docks to shift the fish. They were checked in at the police box down Fish Dock Road, fags and banter burning through the morning chill.

There was a bath house across the way and I got myself cleaned up and then took the short walk to the office.

When I got to there I must have looked as scared on the outside as I was on the inside because Pudsey took pity on me.

He was with three or four other men hanging around and talking aimlessly outside the office. He looked me up and down and then said, “Now then nipper, you look lost. Who are you after?”

The tone was friendly enough and I garbled out an answer. “I’m looking for Mr Stroud Sir.”

The men exchanged glances and grinned. “None of your ‘sirs’….it’s Pudsey lad, Pudsey Bill, like Selsey Bill but dafter, and Skipper John’s up there. Hey up lads let the nipper past, he’s not likely to tek our jobs.”

They grinned again at the thought and one, Hash Harry I learned later, said “Got too much sense I reckon. You’re daft alright Pudsey, you got that right anyway.”

“If you ********* cooked as well as you talked Harry there’d be a lot less sickness at sea.”

“Bloody cheek – you’ll not turn your nose up when there’s three inches of ice on the bridge and you’re next for chipping. And mind your language in front of the lad.”

“Aye but that’s because your food’s more use than an axe for ’ackin’ ice.”

I risked a complicit grin as I eased past some of the men I came to know better when we were confined at sea together.

There was a door at the top of the stairs with a frosted glass window and Amalgamated Trawlers picked out in gold leaf. I knocked and waited.

“Come in lad. Take a seat. I’m John Stroud, skipper of the Neptune and out there’s my crew so you can see what I have to put up with. You’re Bill’s lad.”

I nodded.

“I knew him well. He was a fine man…a fine man.” He smiled and said, “But you would know that better than me. Your mothers gone to her sister’s I hear.”

I nodded again and finally said, “She wanted to get away. Too many memories.”

It was his turn to nod. “I know lad, I know. So, you’re coming to sea in the Neptune; how do you feel about that Earnest?”

He wasn’t a man you felt able to lie to somehow. “I’m not sure….I suppose I’ll know better when we get back.”

“You will that. We’ll be off to Bear Island in three days time. Keep that to yourself though.” He nodded to the door. “They’ll only start wittering if they find out. You’ve settled into the Mission? Good. Well then Earnest, I’d like you to fill in this form, here and here and sign it at the bottom there, next to your mother’s signature. You’ve already met some of the crew outside I think; Pudsey’s the mate, Harry’s the cook, Bristol Nobby third hand and Fred our winchman. They’re a good set of lads really. They’ll play the odd trick on you because you’re new so watch out for that. You’ll meet the rest of them when we sail, or when they sober up. Slip to the chandlers next door and tell Frank you’re off to sea and to put stuff on my account. That should do for now. Oh yes and Mrs Stroud was most particular that I invite you to tea this Sunday, about five o’clock. O.K.?”

But they didn’t give me the run around and I was grateful for that. I think John must have had a word and they knew why I was signed on.

So I turned up, scrubbed and wearing my Sunday best; I was a growing lad so the jacket was too tight and the trousers half-mast but I did what I could. It was another month and more before I could get my fisherman’s suit with its pleated jacket and bell bottoms. I was more scared that Sunday when I knocked on the door than I ever was chipping ice in a high sea and wondering would we turn turtle because every time a wave hit it froze and it was icing quicker than we could chip. What John hadn’t told me was that he had children – three daughters. Mebbe that was for the best; I doubt I’d have had the courage to go at all if I’d known. Three girls, Amy, Louise and my Amelia, all dressed up in their frocks and exchanging glances, giggling too.

They had a large rented house in Cleethorpes with gardens front and back. I walked about outside for a bit gearing up to the ordeal to come then plucked up courage and knocked. Amelia answered the door. She looked me up and down for a moment and then smiled and stepped aside for me to go in. I was done for as soon as I set eyes on her. I mostly blushed, stammered and sweated through it all.

Dorothy Stroud was a fine, elegant woman with kind blue eyes that missed nothing. I’d forgotten what being in company was about in the last couple of months; there’d not been too many Sunday teas. But Dorothy at least, and John too come to that, made it as easy as they could for me. We were in the front room sitting round a well-polished table and I concentrated on doing what everyone else did with plates, cutlery and food.

Once the sandwiches were on the plates Dorothy looked at me, smiled and said, “Well now Earnest, tell me all about yourself. John tells me your mum’s in Manchester now.”

I nodded and tried to think of something to say as five pairs of eyes looked on. Finally, having trawled for anything of interest in my life, I managed to come up with the profound remark, “ I’m afraid there’s not much to tell Mrs Stroud.”

She smiled again and said, “Let’s start at the beginning. Which school did you go to?”

I smiled back. Here was a question I knew the answer to. “Barcroft Street and then the Tech.”

“Elbows off the table Amy,” she diverted to say and then “and did you enjoy school Earnest?”

“Very much. I wish I could have stayed but after my father…..” and I found feelings welling up I had held back for months. It must have been because someone seemed genuinely interested in me I suppose. I was terrified that I might cry because boys just didn’t and fishermen certainly didn’t. I held back the tears but couldn’t finish the sentence. I did go back though in the end, back to a brand-new ‘tec’ offering HNCs and HNDs to second chancers like me.

She filled the space and said, “ I know, I know. I lost my own father when I was only a little older than you. It is a hard blow but we must bear it….”

Then she simply took over my life. She looked around the faces of her girls and then, getting some kind of signal too subtle for my eyes, looked at John and said, “Now then Mr Stroud, I do not think that the Fishermen’s Mission is a suitable place for Earnest to spend his time on shore. There is too much drinking and gambling and his father would not have wished it.”

John looked back at her and another unspoken message passed across the table. “Yet I survived its temptations well enough Mrs Stroud.”

She smiled back at him and said, “By a hair’s breadth I think John. I shudder to think girls, what kind of a monster your father might have become had I not rescued him from the pull of alcohol, gambling and worse.” I’d never heard this kind of gentle banter before. No-one spoke like that in any circles I had moved in and here was a family using language in ways I barely understood. Was this the language of Sunday tea?

Amelia spoke up and I realised that this was a family of equals and the three girls were anything but ‘seen but not heard’; they were independent spirits with plenty to say for themselves and many registers in which to say it.  “He is indeed a fortunate man mother to have you and his three girls to keep him on a righteous path.”

He gave a rueful smile and said, “You see Earnest in what straights I live when not at sea. What man could cope with four such women? However, you seem to have passed the test and Mrs Stroud’s tests are severe; I cannot gainsay her.”

‘Gainsay her!’ I wasn’t sure what the word meant and was pretty sure none of his crew did either. How could this man skipper the likes of Pudsey and the rest using words like ‘gainsay’.

“Though we should perhaps ascertain that what we are proposing meets with Earnest’s approval John?”

Then I realised this was a kind of gentle play, not done for my benefit or to make fun of me but just because they enjoyed language and the games they could play with it.

“Quite right my dear. Well Earnest, does Mrs Stroud’s proposal suit?”

I knew something had happened but not what and stammered, “I…I…do not fully understand what Mrs Stroud’s proposal is.”

“Why that you should leave the Mission as soon as is convenient for you and come here to live……… as part of the family.”

Dorothy looked at him with something like admiration and he looked back. “As part of the family – quite right John, as part of the family.”

And so I did. I’d never known what family meant before; there was so much love in that home when you went out or off on a trip it wrapped around you like a blanket warmed in the engine room. You felt safe somehow, even trying to get the trawl in with a force 10 blowing.

Living in that home changed my life but something changed it more. Amelia showed me out as she had showed me in. She caught hold of my hand in the hall as I was leaving. She looked me in the eyes in that way she had, still has come to that, her mother’s daughter in that respect, and said so that only I could hear, “My father came from nothing, never knew his father and was lost to his mother. He stayed true to himself and with mother’s help, rose to what he is today. You can do that too. You can do anything you want, be anything you want.” Her words crashed over me like a torrent. I felt then the real force of John’s words – what man could cope with such women? Not I thank God. So I sailed with John Stroud and lived with him too.

After a bad trip he would top up my wages from his own pocket; not that there were many bad trips on his boat, not compared with some. Many’s the lad I knew who ended fourteen days at sea owing the company and started the next with a sub from them. In some ways the good trips were as bad. Fishermen would come ashore after two or three weeks at sea with more cash than some people earned in three months and have maybe two days to spend it. There were always wives waiting at the dock gates to make sure they got their housekeeping before the men got to the pubs. Thirty-six hours or so later a taxi would deliver some of them back to the boat dead drunk and they’d be off again. I’d sailed with John for a year and more and was no longer a deckie learner but, for all Amelia’s vision, I could see no life beyond fishing for me and thought that would do us both if she would have me and maybe I could do as John had and work up to skipper one day.

I grew to love some of my time at sea. Hove to on a still night with a flat calm sea and a moon dropped from heaven shining over the water – it was a wonderful place to be. Nothing but water and a strange and moving quiet, broken only by a hum from below and an occasional fish rising. John joined me at the rail on one such night before I turned in. He looked up at the stars and said, “Someone’s left the lights on upstairs.” That was as near to an admission of faith as ever I heard from him. I don’t know what he believed in apart from his family and doing the right thing. I looked up at that amazing sky and out at the still sea and felt a kind of peace I had not known before.

“I could live like this,” I said.

He smiled and replied, “You are doing.”

There were not many times like that but I remember them. Then the first Cod War kicked off with Icelanders declaring a 12 mile limit and us having none of it. It sounds funny at a distance  – a war about fish, but to tell the truth we were all scared, outraged like, but frit too. There were near misses and collisions and the sea is no place to play dare. As far as we were concerned a jumped-up little place was stealing our fish. It seemed to make sense at the time. They had a couple of gun-boats and we had the navy. How could we lose?

Fourteen years later it was still going on; their patrol boats were cutting our nets and without sinking them there wasn’t a deal our navy could do about it. Their 12 miles in ’58 became 50 and then 200 miles by the 70’s and that finished everything.

---

Well, the time came for me to go to John and ask him could I marry his Amelia. I’d plucked up courage to ask her out and she’d said yes and sorted it with John and Dorothy. The whole house knew I was smitten but pretended not to. I took her to the Gaumont. I was in a right state just asking her but she made it easy; she’s made everything easy for me. I hadn’t even thought about where to take her I was so scared she’d say no, or worse, just laugh.

I caught her alone in the back garden and asked would she come out with me. “That’s if your mam and dad don’t mind; I know I’ve to ask them.”

“Best leave that bit to me”, she said, “I’ll speak to them.”

“Then you will come out with me?”

She laughed. “Course I will. There’s South Pacific on at the Gaumont. I’d even go out with Nobby, Freddy or Pudsey to see that and I have an idea you might be a slightly better prospect than the three of them put together.”

‘Prospect’ – I’d never thought of myself as a prospect, more an accident waiting to happen and here was someone thinking I might be a prospect. My heart stopped its pounding and I relaxed a little. “Flatterer. South Pacific it is. We can walk down; it’s a lovely day.”

“That would be nice; we’ll stroll down and you can tell me all about your plans, or…..” she hesitated and looked at me, “we could make a plan together.”

I wasn’t too quick on the uptake in those days but I knew the idea of making a plan together meant something had happened. “I’m not much of a one for planning Amelia…could you not plan for the two of us?”

She wasn’t having that though. She looked at me steadily for a moment and then said, “I could if you want it but it wouldn’t be as good would it?” She was right about that too.

I proposed on the way back from the Gaumont. ‘Why wait?’ I told myself. ‘You know what you want and we’re holding hands.’

All she said was, “You’d better ask me dad then hadn’t you?” Then she kissed me.

So I did. He was reading the Telegraph in the front room. The girls were out with Dorothy so I took my chance. I crept in and coughed. He looked up and said, “You’ll have to watch that cough Earnest; we’re back at sea in a couple of days; don’t want you going down with something do we.” And then, “Or have you already gone down with something?” he said thoughtfully, looking at me. I coloured of course and must have looked completely lost. He’d had his fun anyway and took pity on me.

“Well now young Earnest – what’s this all about.”

I had a go at getting the words out and they did come out but not really in the right order. I’d rehearsed alright, over and over but there’s a difference between being on a trawler in the Royal Dock and being on one in the middle of an Arctic storm. Not for the first time, I was all at sea. “I wondered John if you might consider, if you might agree, could see your way, not now of course but soon, well fairly soon would be good.” I tailed off under his bemused stare.

“You want my permission to marry Amelia.”

“I do. I do, yes I do.”

Then came the wave that smashed my hopes, unexpected and overwhelming.

“I can’t give it.” He paused and then continued, aware of what his words had done to me. “I can’t give it ………..not while you are at sea.”

This I had not foreseen. What had the sea to do with it? “But you took me to sea…and I’ve not let anyone down, I’ve not let you down. I don’t understand. Why, why must I stop the fishing?”

And then he told me why. He folded his paper, put it down and smiled. “Listen to me Earnest. Nothing would give me and Mrs Stroud greater pleasure than to have you as a son-in-law; you’re already like a son to me, you know that. But you’ve got to think beyond the next trip and pay packet, we all have.” He thought for a moment as if wondering how much I could understand and then continued, “People think the fishing will always be here and the fish too. But they’re wrong. I recall, when I was a lad seeing a field full of lapwings, like a green carpet; there must have been a thousand of them there, picking over the stubble in a sight to gladden any heart. Go there today and there are no birds; there is no field. The fish are going too, just like the birds. First we fished the rivers, then the coastal sea, then the distant sea, then the deep distant sea, thinking that the fish would always be there and all we had to do was find them. We build bigger and better boats, fish deeper, have bigger nets and catch ever more fish so everyone’s happy; we’ve all got money to burn or drink. But the fish we catch are harder to find now and smaller too; even in your time at sea you’ve seen that. The Icelanders are right, though it pains me to say it; we’re catching too many fish and it can’t last. Lapwings, cod, maybe even people cannot hold their ground. Anyway lad, even in the good times, and we’ve seen the best of them, fishing is no life for a married man. Six boats have gone down in the time I’ve skippered and men I knew well, like your own father, have died at sea or been maimed by a broken winch cable or lost fingers to the cold. You’ve seen what that kind of loss does to those left behind and I would not want that for Amelia[1]. What do you think will happen to the likes of Pudsey and Nobby with their tattoos of ’mam’ on their arms and ’love’ and ’hate’ across the knuckles, and worse tattoos too come to that in other places, their suits, their drinking, and cursing, what will they do when the fish have gone? What do you think will happen to the town? It lives on fish. Everyone knows someone at sea or on the pontoon. Dockers take their sandwiches to work in their bass[2] in the morning and cycle out with prime fish when they leave and all free, a perk of the job as far as they’re concerned. A hundred years of fish and fishing has bred hard men and women, used to what the sea can give and take away, fearing the knock at the door from the company man with his solemn face on. They’ll be gutted not the fish when the fishing dies. I think they’ll die too and the town with them[3]. So Earnest, I want you ashore if you’re to be my son-in-law.”

I knew John was an intelligent man and a deep thinker. He read widely too but I’d not heard this from him before. He taught me to see what was coming, like reading a sea and turning into a wave that would otherwise swamp a boat. I learned that we will only regret it if we put off looking ahead and thinking about the consequences of what we do, individually and collectively. Sometimes living for today means tomorrow may not come. It is not only the cod that are threatened.

I didn’t believe him. The sea had me by then. I loved the life. Whether we were hove to on a millpond sea mendin’ nets with the sun warming the world and fish jumping just for the pleasure of living or hauling nets and running for shelter before a force ten with the bridge glass smashed around us. Only thing I didn’t like was hacking ice at minus twenty as wave after wave froze on us. I thought the world of him and he was the most thoughtful man I ever met but how could the fish disappear? I’d seen what the fishing did to men, aye and what it did to the women too. Men were reckless, scarred and battered but scared of nothing, in public anyway, except maybe showing their feelings. The women, they were scared alright, of their man not coming home or sometimes of him coming home, but they made nets in their front room so there was some money even after a bad trip, held their heads high and pretended everything was fine.

John was right though, he always was. He was right about it all. By the time the Russians were hoovering up what was left of the fish off the bottom in their factory ships and our waters were being fished by every common market country, we all knew it. Now there’s no fishing out of this town and no fishermen neither. The sea had me caught alright but Amelia had me firmer. So I did leave the sea though it never left me. John got me a job in the office and I ended up managing a factory processing fish caught by Norwegians and Spaniards not Grimsby men. I remember a time when you could walk across the Royal Dock from boat to boat hundreds of ’em but John was right, I see that now; the fish and the boats have gone, all but, anyroad, and the men are going – they’ve no compass; they don’t know what to do with themselves[4].

It took a very long time and ceaseless campaigning by women of the fishing towns and Labour MPs to obtain a little compensation for the loss of lives and the loss of an industry. Lillian Bilocca (née Marshall; 26 May 1929 – 3 August 1988) was a British fisheries worker and campaigner for improved safety in the fishing fleet as leader of the “headscarf revolutionaries” – a group of fishermen’s family members. Spurred into action by the Hull triple trawler tragedy of 1968 which claimed 58 lives, she led a direct action campaign to prevent undermanned trawlers from putting to sea and gathered 10,000 signatures for a petition (the Fishermen’s Charter) to Harold Wilson‘s government to strengthen safety legislation. She threatened to picket Wilson’s house if he did not take action. Government ministers later implemented all of the measures outlined in the charter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Bilocca

It was near Christmas in ’74 when we heard the news. Amelia and I were having a drink in the Fisherman’s Rest in Freeman Street. The pub was dressed in tinsel and streamers; Cleethorpes even had an illuminated bus trundling around. The whole town was getting ready, lit up and with late opening shops. The pub hadn’t changed much over the years; a bit less sawdust on the floor and the windows got broken less often than they had done. In the old days chairs went through one of them so often it was boarded up most of the time. There was no song from Old Peg when they chucked out any more either; back then there would always be a hymn as the pub was shutting, usually ‘For those in Peril’.

The landlord had just called last orders.

We were looking forward to Christmas and enjoying the evening so I said, “One for the road love?” Funny how sometimes you remember every detail, even the inconsequential ones.

“Why not – we don’t get out that often and all I’m doing tomorrow is popping in on mum to see how she is and if she’s heard from father.”

The Sally Army had been in with the ‘Warcry’ and we’d stumped up some change. Then a cockleseller came in “Cockles, fresh cockles….Cockles love – help the beer go down.”

Amelia nodded. Nether of us was that fond of cockles but it was a cold night and the old lady looked chilled through. “ Aye go on then.”

She handed over the bag, half-turned to go, then said, “’Ave you heard? the Titan’s gone missing.”

And time stopped as a cold surge of fear swept over me. “I’m sorry, I thought you said the Titan….you didn’t say the Titan love, you didn’t did you?” said Amelia.

The old lady in her darned shawl hesitated, her face taking on the colour gone from our own. “Aye, they’re saying she’s gone down but that can’t be can it? She’s practically brand new and a big boat too. Boats like that don’t sink do they? ….I’m sorry love I didn’t mean to upset you. ’Ave you someone on board.”

“My dad…my dad’s on board. He’s the skipper.”

I stood up and my legs nearly went from under me. “It might not be what you think love, it could be a radio problem or they’ll be in the lee of land stopping the signal. Don’t think the worst till we know for certain,” I gabbled, knowing it was no good.

“We must go to mother; she won’t have heard.” was all she said and I thought of the fishermen’s hymn, the words sung so often in pubs, in churches and in chapels over the years.
“O hear us when we cry to Thee, For those in peril on the sea!”

Dorothy did know though. No-one had told her but she knew. I learned then that when people use words like ’broken-hearted’ or ’heart-sick’, or say something like their ’heart’s not in it’, it’s a real thing, a pain like no other. The pain you carry, just below the ribs, is an ache like nothing you’ve ever felt before and it stays with you, like a lead weight, always there, pulling you down so deep you think you’ll never right yourself again. The only thing that keeps you going is the sense that others are in more pain and you must tend their hurt if you can. Any ship can sink. Thirty-six men were lost. They say she wasn’t just fishing…they say she was doing navy work too, spying on the Russians and that’s why she went down. There was talk of a Russian submarine but there were no Russian submarines where they were fishing, just American. If a boat is dragged under when its nets foul a subsubmarine I don’t suppose it matters overmuch whether it’s ours or theirs though does it? I doubt we’ll ever know now what happened. Weather was bad alright and boats had run for shelter. Normally he’d have done the same; he had a lot to live for and he cared for his crew so maybe the navy wanted him out there, who knows? Dorothy said later that he was aiming to quit, wasn’t happy any more at sea and didn’t like what he was having to do.

---

[1] In 1968, over a three week period three Hull trawlers sank and 58 men lost their lives.
[2] A bass was a copious hessian bag favoured by dock workers for its practicality and capacity (to conceal).
[3] Grimsby didn’t die when the fishing did. It still has a huge fish market, though the fish comes in by road. But the town, like Hull and others, was badly hurt and then neglected by successive governments.

Mr. Alan Johnson (Hull, West and Hessle)
Almost 23 years ago, promises were made in this House to distant water trawlermen who were being made redundant by the Government’s agreement with Iceland which ended the so-called cod wars by setting a 200-mile fishing limit around the Icelandic coast.
Promises were made and they were nothing less than the men concerned deserved. They were courageous; they went out in the most difficult conditions, and distant water fishing was the most dangerous of occupations. They worked in Arctic conditions beyond the north cape bank, and the mortality rate was 14 times that for coal mining.
….we have learned the extent to which distant water trawlermen were used by the intelligence services during the cold war. Despite such service to their country and their perilous occupation, none of the promises made by the Minister were kept. The men were wrongly classified as casuals—casual war heroes, casual cold war heroes. Men who had spent their working lives at sea were dismissed as being unworthy of any help. They received no retraining, no resettlement, and not a penny of compensation.
Hansard extract 08 March 1999

Scientists say we need to protect 30% of our oceans by 2030 to mitigate the impacts of climate change and safeguard wildlife. Next year, there is a big chance to make this ambition a reality when governments meet to agree the world’s first Global Oceans Treaty.”

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.

“Quite right; we get to say and do all the things we wanted to when we were young and responsible.”

“Like joining a reading group you mean…..”

Molly, the waitress ‘sauntering around with nothing on’,  is home from the restaurant, home being a comfortable terraced house with distant (very) sea views.

“Hi mum, I’m home. God what a day! My feet are killing me.”

“Hello love.  Come and sit down and I’ll pop the kettle on.  I was just having five minutes in the chair and thinking about that last summer holiday we had before your father got poorly.”

“You stay there mum; I’ll put the kettle on. That was a great holiday. Dad in his silly baggy shorts and cap. The Englishman abroad; he might as well have had a knotted hanky on his head.”

“I think he’d have preferred to. Daft as a brush your Dad.”

Molly goes through to the compact kitchen she has known all her life, fills the kettle and flicks the switch. She goes back into the living room and slumps into a chair. “How is he today? He looked a bit washed out yesterday.”

“He’s having a little lie-down upstairs. It takes it out of him – more than he lets on I think.” Molly sees her mother’s eyes well as she tries not to cry. She pulls out a handkerchief and snuffles into it. “It must be a high pollen count of something; I’ve been blocked up all day. I don’t think he wants to worry us.” She looks up, smiles and says briskly, “How’s that kettle doing? Would you like some cake with your tea?”

“No mum, tea will be fine. You stay there. Dad’s not the only one who’s looking a bit washed out. I’ll pop up and see him in a sec., when I’ve had my tea. Will he want a cup do you think?”

“Ask him when you go up. No sense in waking him now if he’s nodded off.”

The two women hold their fears in check as Molly rattles crockery and takes the milk from the fridge.

“I don’t know! what a state we’re all in. I’ll be glad when your father’s treatment is finished and he can think about getting back to work. I can go back to full-time and we can chip away at a few bills and start planning another holiday.”

“So Dad can embarrass us all again. Here you are, this will cheer you up. He’s only got a couple more sessions hasn’t he?”

“Two more, then he sees the consultant again and then we’ll know if it’s gone.”

“It will have done; you know dad, he’s not going to let something like this stop him.”

“Course not….Anyway, what are you up to this evening?”

“Well, I’ve got an open invite to go and get lashed and laid with Tony or I can stay in, curl up with a book and get an early night…….No contest really.”

“A good book then?”

Molly laughs. “Any book, thank you very much. Where have all the decent men gone?”

“There’s one upstairs but I’ve not come across many.”

Molly makes a conscious attempt to lift the conversation. “You should have been at work with me today mum. Some of the families that came in, honestly, kids driving their parents mad, mother-in-laws with pursed lips…God it was busy though.” Molly sips her tea, trying to think of the right way into the next conversation; nothing comes to mind and she decides just to say it. “Mum I’ve been thinking.”

Her mum glances up and says, in the tone of voice that suggests she distrusts thinking, “Oh yes?”

“I might not go back to uni. It’s not so great and I’m flat broke, we all are. I could probably get a permanent job at the restaurant; they like me and they know we’re in a bit of a fix. I’d probably be as well off as if I graduated anyway and the course isn’t brilliant to be honest. I’d be around a bit more too, to help out until Dad’s back on his feet.”

Molly’s mum smiles and shakes her head. ”No love. Of course we’re going through a sticky patch but if there’s one thing that would break your father’s heart it would be that, mine too come to that. You worked so hard to get there and I’ll not have you throwing it all away now just because money’s tight. And if, God forbid, your father doesn’t get better……”

Molly rushes to fill the space, the chasm really, left by her mother’s unfinished sentence. “Right away…..”

“What?” Her mother looks around the room, unable to follow this line of thinking. She panics. Every part of this room has something of him in it. Wherever she looks he is there, pictures he’s put up, carpet he’s laid, photo’s., his keys. She is so, so frightened.

“If dad doesn’t get better right away.”

She gathers herself and says, “Oh yes, of course, right away, if he doesn’t get better right away, the last thing he would want is for your future to be ruined because of his illness. Your graduation will be a tonic for all of us but especially for your dad. Besides, someone in this family’s got to use the brains they were born with.”

“But mum…”

“No buts. Your great grandmother was a Molly too you know. I can only just remember her; she must have died quite young, like a lot of them. She left school at fourteen and went straight into service. And that was it for her – the end of her ambitions. The war liberated her for a bit and she married of course…… eventually. Worked hard all her life and when she died she had two shillings in her purse and nothing else in the world. I’m not having you live a life of regrets. …..Now then, you pop upstairs and see if your Dad wants that cuppa and I’ll sort tea out and start saving for a new knotted hankie for him to wear at your graduation.

“Something a bit racy…red with blue spots. something like that.”

“I’m not so sure, I don’t want other women throwing themselves at him. He might take off with one of them.”

“Chance would be a fine thing.”

And for some reason the tick tock of the clock on the wall seems to get louder in the quiet of the room as the two women get on with life.

Don’t think you ever forget anything. When we do something several times it forms a habit. Continue with that habit for a long time, and it becomes your character. Continue with that character and eventually, perhaps in another life, it comes up as instinct. 
― Sri S. Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras

“Would you settle for boom and bust? It’s a bit less portentous.”

And they left the cove and drove a little way to the first and last hill, parked, opened the gate  and began the stroll to the summit. John had been there many times but still felt its strangeness as they followed earlier footfalls.

As they walked up the hill, past grazing horses which looked up idly and went back to the business of grazing, an elderly couple and a small terrier were coming down towards them.

Bonnie said, “I spy dog walkers.”

“It’s a popular spot; watch what you put your feet, people seem to think it’s not worth picking up what their pets leave behind if horses don’t and there’s no bin in the car park.

As they reached the ancient ditch and vestigial rampart the terrier reached them and stopped to be fussed. They both obliged as the couple’s conversation hung in the still air.

The woman, grey haired and tanned from an out-door life said, “But it was so sudden, that’s what shocks me.”

The man nodded. “Well we don’t know how long they’ve known do we?”

It was her turn to nod. “No I suppose not. I suppose when you get to a certain age?”

“Younger than me by a year or two anyway….” He broke off and smiled at them: “Hello there, lovely day for it. Now where’s that dog got to?”

They smiled back and Bonnie responded. “Hello.  It is indeed.  I think he went that-a-way.” A half-hearted bark came from the track to the left of the main path.

“Honestly, he gets into everything”, the woman said smiling. As the couple moved on she resumed their previous conversation. ”Do you have any regrets? I mean if I went tomorrow or you did…”

And they loitered, pretending to take in the view but much more interested in overhearing a little more. Half a mile away a toy airplane taxied across a ribbon runway backed by sea.

“Do I have any regrets?…..Only one.  I wish I’d married you a lot sooner than I did.”

“Get away with you.”

“What about you?”

“What?”, she asked, concentration lost as she scanned the hill-side for her dog.

“Any regrets?”

She turned and looked him in the eye. “You never got me that Aga.”

“It’s not too late.”

“I couldn’t be doing with all that bending now anyroad.” And then she said resignedly, “We shall have to go up for it though; it’ll be expected.”

“It’s a hell of a drive.  Still you’re right, we’ll have to show our respects.  I don’t know, it seems like only yesterday he was a twenty year-old who couldn’t afford a decent wedding ring and now this.”

“We’ve been there for him every other time something has gone off, we’d better be there for this.”

“Aye.“ And he brightened and said, “ Oh well, at least he can afford a decent wedding reception this time, champagne instead of rough cider!”

She smiled and then pointed, “There he is. Oh look at him, he’s covered in mud and worse; it’ll be all over the car.” And they were gone, voices fading as they wandered and wondered down the hill.

John and Bonnie looked at each other and she said, with a smile on her face, “I thought they were talking about a wake not a wedding. It seems you can’t keep some old dogs down.”

“Going round again. Age and stage is a tricky one though. Do you think we’ll know when ‘Last Tango in Paris’ becomes….’Last Teadance in Eastbourne’?”

“Perhaps it already has”, she responded, “and ‘Escape to the Country’ needs to be ‘Escape to That Nice Residential Home just around the Corner from Waitrose’. ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ would be ‘I Know What you Weren’t Well Enough to Do Last Summer’. Do you think maybe they show the same programmes time and time again so there’s a slight chance we’ll remember the plot?”

Then they had reached the hill-top and looked around them at fields and hamlets in an ancient patchwork braceleted with a blue band of sea.

John said, “Here we are; it looks like a steep climb from the bottom but it’s actually no more than a gentle stroll, especially on a day like this. Belerion, laid out below you like a carpet. This hill had a history long before the first Roman soldier stood here – the highest point around and a fortress and holy place from the very beginning. I sometimes wonder how many fighting or trading men  stood here over the centuries and whether they saw and thought the same things. There would be Americans in the 1940s, cavaliers and roundheads before that, Saxons under Athelstan, Celts, Vikings, an Irish saint or warlord or two, Phoenicians come for the tin and before them all, the ancient ones.”

“More ancient even than us? It’s surprising there’s no church here,” she said. “Christians generally stuck one wherever there was a pagan holy place. It is an amazing view; you really can see the for miles.”

“There was a chapel, he said. “and hermits kept a beacon lit for the boats. They built an observation post here in the war and concreted over some things. Needs must I guess.  We are our history though, as well as our present and our future.”

“Stop it you’re spooking me. What’s that over there?”

“It’s not me, it’s the place”, he protested. “That over there, well it depends who’s looking. It’s Lyonesse, the Western Isles, the Cassiterides, the Fortunate Isles or perhaps Avalon, where Arthur found healing or died after the Battle of Camlann? Nowadays it’s the Isles of Scilly but down here nothing is quite what it seems. It’s such an old place that it’s sometimes easy to believe in magic. What’s left here, the standing stones, foggous and dolmens are what was left when most of it had been pillaged for building-stone for a house or a church or destroyed in the mining boom. There must have been so much of it that newer buildings looked out of place.

Looking at it now it’s hard to imagine an industrial landscape. This was the centre of the first industrial revolution, with mine chimneys, spoil heaps and streams green with industrial effluent. Tin was the big one but there was copper, arsenic, lead. Early on it was just streamed, pan-handled from the stream beds, and washed out of the surface deposits and shallow diggings. Early photographs show hundreds of engine house chimneys, mine shafts and tips. Mining and engineering made fortunes for owners and investors and then…”

“Then?”

“After the boom, the bust and a bit more pestilence and famine. The price of tin dropped as lodes were discovered elsewhere and the miners left for the new world and the colonies in a great diaspora. They’re are mining again now though, working through the old spoil heaps too, for elements they didn’t even know existed then. They didn’t know what they were throwing away. But then do any of us?”

“Plus ca change.”

“Indeed. You see over there, once the whole of that side of the peninsula was owned by one man, every farm from the quarry to the Cape.  He was another relic of a bygone age; Chairman of the Bench and Lord of the Manor in what was, before the war, a pretty feudal place. He was an eccentric and paternal landlord who did pretty much as he pleased but looked after his tenants and carried on the great tradition of droit de seigneur – some things have changed for the better. Unfortunately, when he died, his only and very spoilt daughter married the ‘wrong sort’ and he and she sold off farms one by one to maintain their life-style. People got to own the land they worked and I think she died alone in a tiny flat in town.  The house is still there though.  It must have been a fantastic place during the war.  Mary Wesley was a permanent house guest on the run from a failed marriage and the condemnation of society, not to mention the blitz, and the house was a refuge for agents and officers in need of some R&R – which I believe they got in full measure. In those days anything went; rules didn’t really count. Nothing lasts though does it?

“Ozymandeous rules, o.k.?”

“But not for ever. Come on, let’s head back to the car.”

And they made their way back down as the lowering sun shimmered on a cut-glass sea working its timeless magic.

“You know a few years ago I used to run up hills like this for fun. Ageing isn’t all beer and skittles is it?”

“Still we can be grumpy and a bit daft: that’s got to be a bonus.”

“Quite right; we get to say and do all the things we wanted to when we were young and responsible.”

“Like joining a reading group you mean…..”

“You would wind up as a cat, I told her. They don’t need anyone else.
I need you, she replied.
Well, I said. Maybe I’ll come back as catnip.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

John looked at her quickly. “Where do you live, Miracle Corner? OK I’ll bite. Tell me about both.”

Bonnie screwed her eyes against the sun as she looked out to sea and began at the beginning. “Well, D’s death was just a copycat event. First to die was actually Lisa’s cat. Before D’s, admittedly dramatic but ultimately derivative, attempt, it was dead, buried and then born again.”

“So Lisa’s cat was a reincarnation of Schrödinger’s cat?”

“Don’t bring foreign cats into the conversation; we’re taking back control of our borders remember.”

“I think that particular cat’s coming out of the bag now don’t you? The Border Agency’s role will shift to stopping people leaving once Brexit hits the fan. I hear the European Research Group are thinking of relocating to warmer climes now they’ve cleaned up on the dead cat’s bounce. Perhaps the Agency could turn a blind eye and let them go.  Anyway, forget quantum mechanics, I’m sure Lisa’s cat is more interesting, do go on.”

“Well Lisa had got religion…”

“As all eight year-olds do.”

“As this eight year-old did. Our neighbours at number 42 were 7^th or possibly even 8^th day Alpinists or something and always praying and frowning. They liked Lisa though, no kids of their own, and she was always round there, absorbing religion. If you recall, I said I was normal not my off-spring. She was into saying her prayers before bed for ever-increasing lengths of time on successive nights and she was always talking about miracles and what she called the holy spill-it.”

“Close enough, I guess”, said John.

“Anyway she’d got religion and I’d got a decorator…”

“Both saved then.”

“Shush. I’d got a decorator, patching and painting the outside of the house.  He was very good and used to be there at 7 in the morning and work through.  I just used to go off to work and leave him.  It was a bit chaotic but o.k., then half-way through the week Lisa can’t find Madonna, who is always there for breakfast.”

John frowned. “I’m sorry, I was listening but I must have missed something. When did Madonna start having breakfast with you?”

“Very funny. As you know, Madonna was/is Lisa’s cat: keep up.  A big, fluffy, black and white, she-cat, very placid; generally she just eats and sleeps.”

“Sounds like a life.”

“Well, we searched the house, searched the garden, went up and down the street and couldn’t find Madonna – and you do feel a bit daft walking around shouting Madonna as kids are being piled into cars for the school run. The decorator, kind soul that he was, joined in but still there was no Madonna. I got Lisa to school, assuring her that I’d keep looking until we found her. We put a postcard in the corner-shop window, pestered the neighbours, posted on Facebook, Lisa asked for special prayers in assembly and prayed her way through the school day, and, when she got home even I pretended to, but still no cat. Lisa was distraught by night-time and I was beginning to drop hints about baby Jesus wanting a pet. It was upsetting though and I couldn’t think what to do. Then the next morning the decorator caught me when Lisa was out of the room and quietly asked if he could have a word. I though he was going to put his bill up or something. He took me outside and pointed to a sack on the path. He’d found a big, fluffy, black and white, she-cat dead in the road and put two and two together; she’d been hit by a car I suppose. Well Lisa knew something was up and I had to tell her God had taken her feline friend away. That was the signal for the big funeral. She got so excited organising the burial that that she wasn’t actually all that upset about the cat being dead. We had a little wooden box that the decorator found for a coffin, lined with one of my silk scarves (I liked that scarf). The decorator dug a grave in the back garden and Lisa gave the peroration then we, the decorator and I and the neighbours, had to sing ‘What a Friend we have in Jesus’.”

“It sounds very moving….in its own way.”

“Have you heard me sing? and the decorator was worse! As for the neighbours…you’d think with all that practice they’d be able to make a fist of it, but no – they were pretty poor mourners. That night, of course, the prayers were even longer but the funeral seemed to have done the trick and Lisa wasn’t too upset.”

“Job done then – cat dead and buried…………and the second coming?”

“That was the next morning. Lisa needed to check something in the bible. Amazingly, we did have one but it was in the spare room. Normally it was kept shut because we never went in there, it was more a communal tip than a room as such. If someone came to stay it was a week’s work to get the room ready. But I had been in at the weekend hiding D’s birthday present. Anyway, in she went and there was Madonna fast asleep on the bed.  God (to coin a phrase) knows whose cat we’d buried. Still, at least we gave it a good send-off. Lisa, of course, was ecstatic and I mean ecstatic: she came running in shouting, ‘It’s a miracle. She’s come back, she’s come back. God has sent Madonna back to us. It’s a miracle.’ and we had to kneel down and thank baby Jesus for bringing Madonna back from the dead.”

“Hard not to believe in the holy spill-it after that”, said John thoughtfully.

To be continued

“Until we find out who was born this time around, it seems irrelevant to seek earlier identities. Let’s take one life at a time.”
Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last

“For the afterlife, press one, for an out-of-body experience press two, for ‘it’s all been a dream’, press three…… Maybe not. Go on then, tell me what really happened, from the beginning.”

As Bonnie drew breath a heavy-set man approached looking holiday harrassed. His white T-shirt and shorts contrasted with the vivid red of exposed arms, legs and face and he was perspiring as he baked. “Excuse me”, he said apologetically, “are those seats spare? we need a couple more for our party.”

At the next table sat a woman who looked to be in her mid-sixties and a girl in her early teens. Two younger boys with a couple of years between them, perhaps eight and ten or so, stood by them. Glancing at his sister the older boy said, “Gran, Sophie’s got a boyfriend.”

“Shut up you worm”, was Sophie’s response.

Drawn irresistibly into the force-field of sibling love and loathing their elder and better responded with, “Sophie! that’s no way to speak to your little brother.”

Encouraged, the boy tried another gambit. “She hits me as well Gran., when you’re not looking.”

Instantly out of her depth Gran tried to redress the balance. “I’m sure she doesn’t, do you Sophie?”

“Not as hard as he deserves”, Sophie responded.

As the tableaux unfolded John felt a stab of pity, well a pin-prick anyway. “Sure, help yourself” and then smiling affiliatively (he hoped), “it looks as if you’ve got your hands full.”

“Three kids and the mother-in-law; could be worse”, he said and then, quietly, “though I can’t think how. Thanks. There we are Muriel, seats all round.”

After some manoeuvring, the party seated themselves and Muriel regained her composure. “Well I must say the service here is a bit slow Michael; they’re hardly in a hurry to get round to people. Look at her, sauntering around with next to nothing on.”

Michael looked. “They are quite busy Muriel; I expect someone will be along in a minute.  What are you having anyway?”

“Oh I don’t know; don’t rush me”, she said, sensing that she might lose a popularity contest with a waitress with ‘next to nothing on’. ‘But once, not that long ago, I was every bit as attractive as that young woman’, she thought as she fretted gently under the afternoon sun.

Michael wondered to himself whether she had ever been other than a misery and pushed the thought away. “Now kids what would you like? What about chips and a Coke?”

The younger boy forgot his brother and sister in the excitement of the moment. “Yes please.”

And his older brother said, “I feel sick!”

Sophie didn’t have to forget her brothers since she seldom thought about them. They were just there, like freckles or a life-long dose of flu. “Chips! I hardly think so Daddy; perhaps a light Caesar salad and a latte.” And she returned to the world of her phone and more meaningful communication than she would find around the table.

Dad felt a moment of panic; a combination of anxiety about the potential bill and a sense that his daughter, his little girl, would soon be gone. She was probably already embarrassed by him. “But your mum will have a meal ready when we get back Sophie. How sick Bill?  What about a piece of cake instead Sophie? You’re not actually going to be sick are you?”

His daughter glanced up, irritated and looked at him with something like pity in her eyes. “I’m on a diet Daddy!”

Muriel decided to assist her son-in-law. “Of course he’s not,  are you William?  Just think about something nice and it will go away.”

William though, was already thinking of something nice. “I do, I feel sick and it will all come out all over the floor and things.”

“Oh bloody hell. Too much sun I expect. Right Muriel you order for us all, I’ll have a very large dry white wine and sardines on toast, and I’ll take Bill to the bathroom. Come on young man.”

“But I don’t know what…”, Muriel protested weakly.

“If in doubt get chips”, he responded as he turned to head for the toilet, holding firmly onto his son’s hand.

“Daddy…”, said Sophie plaintively.

“and a salad for Sophie, but you’d better eat your meal tonight or I’ll be in the dog-house with your mum.  Right, come on Bill, we’ll cool down in the loo.”

Gran, left with responsibility but no power, like local government wilting under a Tory sun,  could only sigh, “Well really.”

The younger boy then said helpfully, “I’ve changed my mind granma, I don’t want chips.”

On familiar ground at last, Muriel resorted to reflex. “You’ll get what you’re given young man, and don’t call me granma!”

“Why not granma? After all you are my granma granma”

“Because, that’s why. You’ve got too much backchat all three of you; I blame your father, he’s much too easy going with you.  Where is that waitress? For two pins I get up and leave. Now stop fidgeting young man, look at that lovely sea view.”

Bonnie and John exchanged glances. She said, quietly, “Ah happy holidays….” and then got back on track. “It’s funny, that was the second death and resurrection that month.

John looked at her quickly. “Where do you live, Miracle Corner? OK I’ll bite. Tell me about both.”

To be continued

As a child, did you have a recurrent nightmare? I did, night after night after night, it seems to me now. Reading this now I can’t recall the intense fear of childhood or capture it in writing but I wish I had taken the fears of my own children more seriously; they were surely as real as anything else in life.

Safe at Home

Our living room is a warm, safe room; I play there when I’m not outside. It’s not like the best front room. The front room should really be called the back room; it’s down the hall at the back of the house. It’s always cold. It’s only used at Christmas or when special visitors come, or when I’m ill but not in bed and the doctor is coming. No matter how ill I am my mum makes sure I have a wash and my hair is combed if the doctor’s coming. I don’t like the front room or the long dark hall I have to go down to get to it. Even at Christmas when all my toys are spread out I don’t like being in there on my own. But the living room, with the curtains drawn against the dark, the centre light shining bright, the back-boiler fire lit and warming every corner, I like the living room then. Best of all I like it when my mother and elder brother are there with me, as they are now.

The radio is on and ‘Journey into Space’ has just finished; tomorrow it’s ‘Riders of the Range’ I think. The wallpaper is shabby, the carpet is worn but I don’t notice or care. My mother is sitting listening to the radio, my brother is seated at the dark-wood table in the corner and I’m just playing on the floor and on Mars.

I feel warm and safe playing and talking to my soldiers. I don’t really listen to the radio except now and again when it gets really exciting. I don’t listen to the words my mother and brother exchange either but a tiny bit of me is always listening, not to the words but to the mood. Even in this room, sometimes, the mood isn’t nice; sometimes it’s angry and I get frightened. Tonight though it’s alright; no-one’s angry tonight.

Then everything changes and I feel funny inside. I think I hear something, very faint at first, a sound coming from the back of the house, a kind of thumping/clumping noise. I look up. My mother and brother don’t seem to have heard anything. Reassured, I go back to my game.

But then I hear another thump, louder this time and another sound, as if….. as if something is being dragged down the stairs. I look again at the two of them. This time they have heard it too and are listening. They glance at each other.

“I thought I heard something.” my big brother says quietly, trying to sound unconcerned. But he’d looked at me quickly as he spoke and I’m not fooled.

They both look at me and at each other.  They look worried, almost…….. frightened. What could hurt us, here at home with doors locked against the night? Nothing outside can hurt us. Perhaps it’s not outside…perhaps it’s here, in the house?

I look at them and know that they are nervous, no not nervous, frightened, more than frightened…….they are terrified. My mother seems to shrink into herself. She grips the arms of her chair and says, “It’s him. He’s coming.”

They look at me and I know that he is coming……… for me.

“Turn the radio off and get him under the table”, says my mother, ashen-faced, her hand to her throat, fear and desperation in her voice.

My heart hammering against my ribs seems loud enough for the world to hear. I crawl under the table, pressing myself into the corner of the room and, shaking, hide my face against the wall. I realise that they cannot save me; not from this.

The steady thud and drag grows louder; someone with the heavy tread and drag of a limping man, trailing a leg behind him is coming for me.

Outside the door the footsteps halt and there is a pause – he’s listening. The handle slowly turns and my nightmare comes into the room. No-one speaks. The only sounds are my beating heart and the whoosh of blood pounding in my head. Then I hear him drag his maimed leg into the middle of the room, feel him look in turn at my mother and brother, asking silently, “Where is he?” They cower in his gaze but do not betray me…not yet at least. Finally he turns and drags his way out, leaving the door open and I hear his heavy footfall down the hall and slowly, so slowly, back up the stairs.

And it’s all over, as if nothing has happened. My brother hurries to close the door and mother and brother relax and smile as I emerge from under the table. The radio goes back on and I am safe again. It is as if nothing had happened or it had all been a terrible dream. Perhaps, perhaps it has been just a dream, not real, not real at all. What else explains the easy way everything is back to the way it was? If that horror had been real they will talk, will plan, will do something about the thing at the top of the stairs. So I too slowly relax as the palette of our family life is painted over my fears. I go back to playing on the floor and my mother and brother exchange looks and smiles at things I don’t understand.

As the programme ends my mother straightens up, looks at me and says, “Right young man, time for bed.”

I don’t want to go upstairs but can’t tell them I’m afraid because they are pretending it didn’t happen. I protest, of course I protest. ‘I’m not tired’, ‘It’s early’, and finally, I cry. Down here I’m safe but not up there in the dark with ‘him’. My tears are brushed aside. ‘Don’t be silly’ and ‘Stop all this childish nonsense’. Patience and good humour give way to irritation and I am bustled, sobbing and hysterical up to bed. Teeth brushed, hands and face given a cursory wipe and I’m tucked in. “Goodnight” she says as the light switch clicks and I’m left in the dark. I hear her retreating footsteps on the stairs and then listen so intently to the quiet that it seems to have a noise of its own. I can hear nothing from downstairs which surely means they can’t hear me from upstairs either. Slowly, oh so slowly, I begin to wind down and steady. It didn’t happen…I made it all up, there’s no-one here.

And then a faint sound from somewhere near the landing and then silence. I listen in the velvet dark and hear…..nothing…..and then, quietly at first but getting ever louder, the terrible sound of a leg being dragged slowly up the stairs. It’s happening again, except, this time I’m alone and there is no table to hide under. I can’t make a sound, daren’t call for help – he’s between me and them and they won’t come, would be too frightened to come even if they heard me. They were brave enough to hide me once but not to save me. Instead they have sent me to him. I am alone, in the dark and he is coming for me. He has been waiting, knowing that in time I would be given up; that had been the unspoken agreement reached as I cowered under the table.

Again I hear the blood whooshing through my head and the clamour of a thudding heart. I‘m too frightened to breathe, too frightened to move, too frightened to scream…and there really is no-one to scream to, no-one to scream for. No help will come.

Then, with a start I do wake up and……. I am alone. He’s not here. He’s not anywhere. There is no him. It was a nightmare, just a silly dream. It wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen. Silly to think they would be afraid, silly to think they wouldn’t protect me. Relief floods through me. I am safe and nothing has happened. He hasn’t come for me and there is nothing to be afraid of except……I am alone, in bed in the dark, and I can hear no sound from below. I listen and I hear something, some sound, faint but definite coming from outside my room.

Afterthought

Adults have different nightmares to deal with…….

Like my mamma and grandma before me I was born and brought up on a farm on the Potomac river. Our house looks down the meadow to the river heading on down towards Arlington. To watch the sun set over the river of an evening is to a beautiful thing. I used to love being by that river, just like mamma, and, as soon as I could swim, I was allowed down on my own and would sit and play in the dying light of a summer’s day. I’d have long conversations with make-believe friends as the fish rose in the gloaming. Then mamma would call down to me to come and get supper and bring my ‘friend’ if I wanted to. Mamma used to say it was an ancient and special place, where this and other worlds came together. She used to tell me how the spirit of the land and the people who lived there met for those who were open. We’d sit by that river and she’d talk about stuff like that. She’d tell how we didn’t really own the land. The Necostin people and others had lived there long before we came along and ‘settled’. She believed, as they did, that we had no right to do anything but tend it and make sure it was in a better state when we left than when we came. “It isn’t enough to do no harm,” she’d say, “we have to make things better.”

Papa farmed and worked as a handyman. He wasn’t any old sodbuster though. He had a Berkeley PhD and had worked as a systems analyst and in New York finance. He was kind of a high flier and gearing up to make a whole lot of money. Then he met mamma on a trip to Washington and that was it. He said to me when I was a little girl, “A man would have to be crazy to choose money over a life with your mother.” So he became a farmer. Mamma wouldn’t leave the farm – she use to say it was in her blood. She was no simple country girl mind; she’d graduated and travelled a while, she just knew what was important, what people needed to be happy. Mostwhiles they both just needed each other…and me I guess when I came along.

Mamma died when I was fourteen. She was ill for a while and finally couldn’t get out of bed. Papa moved her bed near the window so, propped up on her pillows she could look out of the window and watch the river and me playing or reading down by it. I remember sitting on her bed a week or so before she died; she looked out of the window and then at me and said, “God Susie, I love this place. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to leave it…or you come to that.” Then she just smiled that smile of hers and gave me a hug.

Daddy took it real hard when mamma died but she’d given him strict instructions. He wasn’t to cave in and he wasn’t to give up….not just because of me but because he still had a life to live and a job to do. So he did as he was told, though it must have been so hard for him; I see that now. He taught himself to cook properly and worked harder than ever on the farm and he tried as hard as he knew how, not to show me his pain.

Mamma didn’t leave me any instructions and I kind of went off the rails. I couldn’t think about anyone else, not even papa…to tell the truth, I couldn’t think at all. I drew in on myself, still talked to my imaginary friend down by the river, but not to anyone else, not even papa. Then, about a year after mamma had gone, I was standing on the porch watching the sun go down and there by the river was a girl. She was just standing there looking up at the house. Our neighbours lived a way off but I just thought maybe they had a girl staying with them or something. I didn’t like the idea of some stranger being in my place by the river so I just stood and stared. She stood for a while, staring back, then looked around her and walked away. Papa called me for supper and I went in.

As we ate I said, “Papa.”

He was kind of surprised because I hadn’t started a conversation worth mentioning for quite a while.

“Yes Honey?”

“Who’s that girl?”

“What girl’s that?”

“The one down by the river.”

“You’ve seen a girl down by the river? When was that?”

“Just now…she was down there just staring up at our place and I don’t think she should be there.”

He went pale, and was quiet for a while, just thinking. Then he said, “You know who that is just like I do. Should she be there? I don’t know Susie but it surely is a comfort to me that she is.”

Like I said, I had lost my way and I couldn’t believe in all that stuff. My momma was dead and gone and that was cruel but it was true. I told him so too and we had a falling out. I couldn’t settle after that. I didn’t see her again and I didn’t want to. I just wanted to get away. So, as soon as I was old enough I joined the military, just about the time women were allowed to take on combat roles. I served for ten years. I loved the life for most of those ten years too. There was structure and there were friends….more than friends and I had enough hurt in me to want to give some back. Being the US military there were plenty of chances to fight and to hurt people I didn’t know. I got promoted a few times too. I didn’t go home much. I wrote; stuff about the life and the promotions, that kind of thing. The last time I did go home it wasn’t good. Papa had aged some of course and I sensed he didn’t really like what I was doing. He was kinda proud too but worried for me I guess and something else, worried about me, about who I’d become. We were both walkin’ on eggshells for the few days I was home. On my last night he came out with it. We’d been talking about nothing in particular as usual, travel arrangements and stuff. Then, towards the end of supper, I guess he screwed up his courage. He looked at me and said, “So Susie, is the world in a better state for the life you’re living? Are you in a better state for the life you’re living?”

I came back at him of course because he’d touched a real tender nerve. I said, sure it was better because of what I was doing and I was just fine doing it. There were bad people out there who had to be stopped anyway we could. I told him he was old enough to have outgrown all that Berkeley crap about peace and love and joined the real world.

Then I stormed out and headed for the river. It was cool autumn night with mist along the water but, as I walked down, angry and upset and not really seeing anything, I glanced up and there she was again. I was ready to take her on too and ran down towards her. The look in her eyes stopped me dead. She looked so hurt and so bewildered I reached out. But she was gone.

I was gone too; I knew papa was right. Hurting other people hadn’t made my hurt go away. I cried then for my loss, just sat in a heap and cried until there was nothing left inside. Then I went back up to the house and I told my father I was sorry and he was right and that I was resigning the service as soon as I got back.

He gave me a hug and said, “That’s real good Susie; I could do with some help around here…” Then he frowned and said, “if you’re coming home I mean.”

I said sure I was; women had run the place for a hundred years and men surely couldn’t do it on their own. Then we cried together for the first time since mamma had left us.

So I left the service. It was quicker than I thought. We had one more combat patrol and I was finished. I didn’t have to go out; once they knew I was leaving they offered me work around the base till it was time to go home. It wouldn’t have felt right though and what if whoever had taken my place didn’t make it? How would I have felt then? It was a bad patrol to end on. My squad lost three in a fire fight lasting maybe a minute, good men, two of them.

So I headed home. As I finally walked up the track to the house a car came fast the other way and would have hit me if I hadn’t moved. There were two military men inside and a driver. I stepped to the side and saluted and they just blanked me, looked right through me. ‘Officers!’ I thought, only I put a couple of stronger words in front, but I was too concerned about brushing the dust off and reaching the house to pay it any real mind. Whatever they wanted I surely wasn’t going back.

I’d timed it well and the sun was setting over the water as I reached the house. I was torn between going down to the river and going in the house but I wanted to see papa and tell him I was back.

I went and stood at the open porch door.

“Papa, I’m home”, I said, “home for good.”

He was sitting at the table, looking out and down to the river and there were tears in his eyes. He balled his fist and rubbed his eyes.

“It’s alright papa”, I said. “Don’t be sad. I’m not going away again, not ever.”

He rubbed his eyes hard again and said, real quiet, “Well Susie, you really are coming home at last. I guess there’ll be two of you down by the river now.”

I turned to follow his gaze. The sun was low and the light seemed brighter than ever, so bright at first I couldn’t make anything out. Then I saw her, halfway between the house and the water. She was looking right at me and smiling. This time she waited for me as I walked on down and held out her hand. She led me to the river bank and we were just two girls standing by the timeless water together. We didn’t have to talk; we just stood there the way we used to and watched the river and the river flowed on.