The Love of the Loveless (Chapter 5) (1)
By HarryC
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Next morning, I got up early and went for a short run - just up to the end of the promenade and back. A couple of miles that included a brief stop at the pier. Or what was left of it, anyway. Most of it was swept away in storms in the seventies. It used to be one of the longest piers in England at just over two-thirds of a mile. Now, all that remained was the two hundred-yard boardwalk stub still attached to the land. That and the head. The land part was still a main attraction for the town, with a few funfair rides and a double-row of large retail cabins: a couple of cafés, a beachwear shop, a jewellers, a burger stall, a palmist, a candles and incense shop, an ice cream parlour, a micro-pub. There was a small canopied stage, too, for bands. 'Shed City' I called it. It had a carnival atmosphere in summer. At that time in the morning, though, with everything still closed up, there were just a couple of people mooching around. Taking the early air, like myself. I jogged along the outside walkway to the end, where I stopped and leaned against the railings to stretch my calf muscles. The tide was out. A spring tide, too - almost all the way to the old pier head and landing stage. Alone out there it stood, like the marooned wreck of an old battleship - its deck-rails lined with seabirds, like pegs on a line. Through binoculars, the pavilion was a caved-in ruin - like a broken skull. I preferred to see it at the distance, though - the outline of its former glory still there. The silver cupola resting on top like a ceremonial helmet, as if to protect it from further onslaught - the early sun glinting off its surfaces.
Further out still, the turbines were turning - their arms like the limbs of gymnasts doing cartwheels and back walkovers. Beyond them a container ship headed for Norway or somewhere. I could make out derricks and cargo bulks, and the bridge tower, like a block of flats rising above the decks. With the distance, it hardly seemed to be moving. I held up my thumb and finger, pincer-like, to measure the gap between it and the fixed point of a turbine. Slowly, I watched it disappear behind my thumb. I wondered if there was someone up there, on the bridge, with a pair of high-powered binoculars, checking our coastline.
What might they be seeing?
The seafront buildings, cluttered together like ornaments on a shelf. The Christmas tree lights of the arcades. The odd shapes and lines and corners and edges. The stubby finger of the clock tower. The steeple-points of the churches. The water tower up on the hill, like a huge concrete mushroom. A broken jaw-full of teeth and fillings.
Maybe they might even spot me, standing there at the rail, stretching my legs, looking across. They might be wondering who I was. Where, in the seven-billion piece jigsaw puzzle of human life, did I fit in? Was I an edge piece? Was I a corner? Was I a part of the sky, or the trees, or the grass, or the earth? Was I one of those blank colours that could fit in any of a dozen different places? Was I the missing piece, under the sofa? Or was I part of a different puzzle altogether - not quite fitting in anywhere, but getting pushed into place anyway, after a bit of snipping at the edges? Was I a bit with wording on it? Was I a bit with a face?
The tower clock began chiming the eight, breaking my reverie. I sprinted the walkway back to the prom, then jogged the final bit home.
*
After breakfast, I sat down with a mug of coffee and checked the photos I'd done for mum - making final adjustments if needed. Then I saved them to a memory stick and transferred them to the digital frame. There was a good assortment. Mum's parents, as young people and older. Then mum and dad growing up. Their wedding and their lives together. Their children at various stages, too - me, Karen, Michael. Babies. Children. Adults. I flicked through them one by one, pausing over a few of the more cherished ones to look again. I had an ambivalent attitude to old photographs. These tiny frozen moments of time and memory; of people and things gone. Sometimes, the emotions they evoked were so complex that I couldn't pin them down.
I had an old photograph myself of mum, taken with a Polaroid camera when I was a teenager. We were on holiday in Devon. Mum and I had gone for a walk one Sunday afternoon around a local lane. We stopped by a low stone wall, near a farm gate, and I took the photo there. It was an overcast day, and the light wasn't good, and the image was blurred where I must have moved the camera. You could just about make out that it was mum, though her expression wasn't clear. I remember that she'd been smiling, though. And I knew at the time, with all the much better photos of her that I had, that I would always keep that one. And I had. Every once in a while, I would take it out and look at it - and relive again that moment over forty years ago, on that walk on that dull late summer afternoon, with mum standing by that wall smiling, and the sky behind her stretching off over the distant hills.
I only knew one grandparent - mum's mum. The others all passed away before I was born. Mum was pregnant with me when her father died. He missed seeing me by just five months. Throughout my life, I'd heard stories about him. His kindness and generosity. His patience with children (he doted on Michael). I could see it in his face in the photo now - even as a young man, in his regimental uniform, just before leaving for France. The soldier was there in the stance, the buttoned-up smartness, the peaked cap set straight over the brow, the proud round features, the waxed moustache. But there was a softness there, too, in the expression - a hint of laughter lines around the eyes. He must have been in his mid-twenties, but the face was already set in a way that showed through even in much later photos. Here he was, off to war, a fighter for his country. But this man was a nurturer, not a killer. Someone for whom love was the first and most natural impulse. He was gassed on the Somme, and though he lived until his seventies his health was never the same. But he came home, and married, and raised his family, and passed to them the qualities for which he was known. It was there in mum, I knew.
The photo I had of nan was quite different in tone. It had always been a family favourite, usually bringing a laugh. It was taken of her in, I would guess, her fifties. She was wearing a Sunday-smart knee-length dress with matching jacket, buttoned to the top, a small dark pillbox hat on her head, her handbag clutched under her arm. She was walking along a busy city road - most likely in London. Her determination was evident in her stride, the set of her jaw, the steely fix of her eyes. She was going somewhere and was going to get there. A candid shot, clearly. But one that showed her as a not much younger version of the woman I remember - in character as well as appearance: firm, forceful and determined. Not, though, because she was cold and hard by nature. They were qualities borne of her sparse country upbringing, with the need to be strong and hard-working to survive. She took no prisoners in life. But she looked after her own. She held that course until the day she died, when I was seventeen.
(continued)
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Comments
great descriptive prose. some
great descriptive prose. some editors would say too much text without dialogue, but I really like it. gulls like pegs. yeh. bird biy bird.
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There isn't dialogue, but
There isn't dialogue, but there are several ideas going on - the zooming out to hypothetical invisible far away strangers watching,. and the turning in to grandparents, parents,, the ones who made the narrator in the present. And the jigsaw idea. Are you out of place because you are a piece that can only fix into one particular place, unlike so many bits which can fill gaps anywhere
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I liked your puzzle idea,
I liked your puzzle idea, makes you realize that we're all part of this earth and have our place in it somewhere.
Jenny.
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