“’The sun dropped Like Newton’s orange behind Chapel Carn Brea.’ She frowned into the sun streaming through the hotel windows and said, “I know it’s not very good. What do you think Matt?”
”Newton’s orange? Well it’s certainly interesting, not to say pithy.”
“Don’t pun with me….I should take it out shouldn’t I?”
“No leave it; they won’t know Chapel Carn Brea though will they?”
“They should – an ancient holy place and all.[1]”
“You’re an ancient holy place!”
“I’ll take that as well meant. C’mon let’s have a stroll – watch out for falling oranges.”
Matt was a rangy, dark-haired and often intense man of average height, Jenny blond, blue eyed and freckled; they loved each other and that was enough. They walked together, a thirty-something couple, across the marble-floored reception area of the hotel and out into a late afternoon in Tangier. The heat as they left the air-conditioned lobby made them pause, hairdryer-hot so that the air twisted and rippled as they looked across the square.
“Well it’s not Cleethorpes but I suppose it will do,” she said.
“Cleethorpes next time then,” he answered smiling.
It was their last day and they ate at a small restaurant in the Grand Socco, surrounded by the colours, smells and noises of Morocco. They’d strolled, explored, eaten, bathed at Achakar Beach and just unwound for a week. They wandered back to the hotel hand in hand, replete and a tad tipsy, avoiding the thought of around three hours in the air and then a second flight and drive home the next day.
“It’s been good hasn’t it?” he said, squeezing her hand as they approached the hotel.
“It’s been perfect,” she corrected him, “and where else would I have found the inspiration for Newton’s orange?”
“Probably not in Cleethorpes.”
“Probably not.”
A day later they were home, in the far south-west, via Gatwick and Newquay. The sea was as green and the water as clear as anywhere in the world but 10 degrees colder than Mediterranean Africa.
They were a young professional couple, she a copy editor and sometime writer and he a freelance graphic designer and sometime writer. Neither was from the south-west but Covid had triggered their relocation to Cornwall, part of the flight from London to a different life following a lock-down reassessment. They could work as well there as anywhere; London was an hour away from Newquay airport or a manageable overnight on the sleeper. The world had discovered remote working, zoom and work-life balance and, the clincher, they were thinking of starting a family. With some help from their families they had bought a smallish, terraced, granite cottage in a town which had once been a mining and fishing community. The mining was long gone, though the fishing survived despite the loss of European markets post-Brexit; covid lockdown had forced small boat owners to concentrate on local customers and deliveries but they had survived. The internet was passable, the community mixed and friendly and most things they needed were within walking distance. Tangier had been an impulse, and a good one. They had been listening to, ‘If you see her say hello’ from Blood on the Tracks and he had said, “Let’s go.”
“Go where? The pub?”
“No. Tangier.”
And, because they could, they did.
Buying, packing, moving, unpacking, renovating and decorating all while working and meeting deadlines had been harder than they had ever imagined and they had needed a break. They hadn’t bargained on a Cornish winter either – unremittingly grey and wet for days (was it really only days?) on end and the wettest rain ever driven by winds that relocated the wheelie bin and anything else they were careless enough to leave out in their small garden. There had been clues, like trees all growing with a lean in the same direction, but who looks for clues on a summer’s day in Cornwall?
Now all they had to do was make a life for themselves. And again, because they could, they did. Their cottage, two two-up two-down granite miners’ cottages knocked together, with inglenooks and damp, had enough room for a shared office, two good bedrooms and a small ‘bedroom’ which would take a single bed …..or a cot. They met and were welcomed by their closest neighbour and over time others – a mix of Cornish and ‘incomers’ who had also made the move at one time or another. Di lived next door on one side, a woman in her sixties with a warm smile. She offered them a cup of tea and slice of cake on their moving-in day and brightened noticeably once she realised they were not going to be itinerant owners. On the other side was a second home-cum holiday let. “They’re not often here, in fact I hardly see them. They sometimes come down at Christmas. I think they go abroad for the summer but plenty of people come and go. I never know who’s going to emerge if the door opens. It will be lovely to have a young couple for neighbours.”
They had worried about how they might be received as the news increasingly featured house prices unaffordable to locals, not least because of the south-east diaspora. They needn’t have worried. They walked, they explored, they found pubs and restaurants unlike anything they were used to. They congratulated themselves on living a semi-rural life without commuting or having to live at a frantic pace. They slept like logs and agreed it was the clean air and healthy lifestyle.
Then, they got a kitten and, quite soon afterwards, the kitten got them. They were captivated. Black and white, with huge eyes and a terrible habit of climbing anything, including the curtains and their trouser legs, the kitten had a plaintiff meow and a fondness for and dependence on the two of them they were unable to resist; they were soon completely lost and agreed they had never liked the curtains anyway. They called the kitten Morvah, after its birthplace and spent much of their indoor life with the kitten draped over one or other’s shoulder, no longer caring about scratched furniture or hands and legs. She was particularly fond of draping herself around a neck, delicately teasing out locks of hair with her two front paws and carefully washing them. If they went for an evening stroll round the nearby field Morvah, as she grew, started to come with them and if they visited friends or in-laws she travelled in the car with them, perfectly content, as were they.
They lost her once. They had booked a coach and camping, ten-day package in Italy and left her in the care of Matt’s mother two hundred miles away. When they returned and drove ‘up-country’ to pick her up his mother confessed the young cat had disappeared on the first night and not been seen since. Not wanting to spoil their holiday his mother had waited, guilt-ridden, for their return. It was dark and siling with rain when they went out to look for her. They circled the estate calling her name but knowing it was hopeless. They heard her first, answering their calls and then she appeared, soaked through and trembling with cold and leapt into Matt’s arms. It was impossible to say which of three humans and a cat was the most pleased at the reunion.
But in that first year or so in Cornwall there were not many trips away. They found instead that friends and relatives came to them and it was too far to just pop-in; they came to stay.
After two years they agreed moving had been the best thing they had ever done and that west-Cornwall was the perfect place for a child, or children to grow up. They were making good money and decided that they would sell their London flat, rented out when they moved. The tenants were friends of theirs who had moved in when they left for Cornwall and were glad to buy at a below market price.
But even their idyllic life in an idyllic place could not but be touched by events in the world around them. They had met on the 2003 London anti-Iraq war demonstration, two protesters among over a million in London that day and 36 million world-wide. The war happened anyway, as wars do when politicians decide to take ‘tough’ decisions. Lower down the food chain those who survive the consequences of tough decisions get sacked for pretty minor screw-ups but then plebs don’t feel the hand of history on their shoulders, just the hand of the law. They didn’t stop the war but something good had come out of the protests – they had met, young and passionate, believing that if enough people protested they could change the world; they had been together ever since.
They invested all their energies in their new Cornish life, decorating, plumbing, gardening, befriending and being befriended and they did love it. But there were times when they looked at the lives of others near and far and the impact of decisions made by leaders of all persuasions, driven by ego, paranoia, greed or fear, all happening against a background of natural and human-made (mainly man-made) disasters, as the world tipped from equable to the edge of simmering and they felt something like survivor guilt or, at least, thriver guilt. They knew that living carried risks – one or other could sicken, could even die. They’d known that before Covid. Both had lost a parent prematurely and neither took their good fortune for granted. But there was a wider context they felt bearing down on them. The odds for so many people seemed loaded against any life where they could thrive. Why should their lives be, not just o.k. but good, when locally the only growth area was in the number of food banks and the chief preoccupation of ‘their’ government was keeping refugees out. The world seemed to have lost its moral direction. They talked about it more than once over an evening meal and glass (or two) of wine. They still wanted to start a family and could afford to do so, unlike many of their friends. But was it right to bring children into the world as it was and given its apparent direction of travel? They wanted to live ethical lives. They did what they could, from recycling and composting to donating to charities, including a monthly payment to the local food bank.
“Could we do more?” she asked one evening, offering her glass for a refill. “I know we give money but should we be doing something?”
“What kind of something?” he asked, concerned and interested in equal measure.
“I don’t know Matt….driving an ambulance to Ukraine or working for a disaster relief charity or some kind of volunteering. Anything must be better than nothing, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, maybe. Whatever we do won’t be enough to make a difference will it? We could give everything to charity or nothing and only we would notice.” He knew it was a feeble response.
“That’s just an excuse for doing nothing though isn’t it?” she said earnestly.
“It is, I know it is but how much is enough? I know we’re lucky just to be alive let alone free and able to pay our way.”
She smiled. “Bill Byson agrees with you. He says that it’s a miracle that for a few billion years every ancestor of ours lived long enough to mate and breed. One failure along the way and we wouldn’t be here.”
He smiled back and said, “I just have to look at you to feel lucky.” And that was how most of their conversations ended. They were in that strange crossing place between youth and middle age, at the peak of their powers, confident and hopeful, attractive, generous spirited and easily liked and liking. Still, they fretted and chafed at what they might do that they weren’t doing.
One late spring Saturday morning their dainty black and white cat was hit by a passing car on the road outside. The car didn’t stop. Morvah dragged herself inside and died cradled in Matt’s arms as Jenny stroked and soothed her. The colour in the dainty cat’s irises suddenly froze like crystal as life left her. And then she was gone.
They were not prepared for the waves of sorrow that washed over and through them and cried in each other’s arms, utterly disconsolate. It was a loss of innocence in more than one way. It seemed quite wrong that a creature so loving and so loved should die. They buried her in a corner of the back garden and still for many weeks would listen for the cat flap and Morvah’s greeting when they came home. The cottage felt empty even when they were both home – a piece of their life together had been taken and left a wound that did not heal without scarring.
They were not naive; they understood that Ukraine was about geopolitics as well as right and wrong, a tyrant, independence and sovereignty, war crimes and international law. They knew there were no angels to be on the side of. They understood that the schism in the US between right and centre with its money driven encouragement of extremism and vitriol was no more than an outlier of the way their own place was moving. But they were not cut out, or meant, to be martyrs (no-one is though some have martyrdom not fame thrust upon them) or to dedicate their lives to a cause, sacrificing personal happiness for the greater good. The UK was still, for them at least, an o.k. place for all its faults and its accelerating economic and political decline.
And so, like the white liberals they were, they did what they could, aligned with like-minded people on social media, and lived their lives. They sacrificed a little of their sufficiency in the hope that it would help, did what they could in their community and cared for their families and friends. They could have done more. We could almost all do more. Born in a less comfortable time or place they would have done more – wouldn’t we all?
Instead, they had two children, Morwenna and Jack. They wrapped them in love and hoped that they would have a future. From the moment their first child was born they had no choice but to hope and live accordingly, knowing that, for their time at least, the sun would still sink over Chapel Carn Brea, as it would over Tangier, Mar-a-Lago and Kherson Oblast, over inflatable boats on unfriendly seas and in parched lands and flooded lands where living had become impossible. Because “The sun also rises[2].”
[1] Chapel Carn Brea is often described as the first hill in Cornwall (from a westerly perspective) and rises 198 metres (650 ft) above sea level…..The hill is an important historical site showing evidence of neolithic and early Bronze Age activity, as well as the remains of the thirteenth century chapel from which it is named. On the summit is a 9 metres (30 ft) diameter entrance grave (also known as chambered cairn) which had a south-facing entrance and was built in the late neolithic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapel_Carn_Brea
[2] ‘The Sun Also Rises’ is a 1926 novel by Ernest Hemingway
