Shore Shell

It was the best holiday I’d ever had until the inevitable. Even the inevitable can be a shock when it knocks on your door, and all the more shocking when violence visits your idyll.

It’s all that keeps me going now in this room with no view, with nothing except what is inside me, everything.

I have everything I need. I only wish I could tell you. You who with me those idyllic days, days you weren’t to know would be our last, the only thing I never told you.

The blank brutal walls are alive with my projections. I had hoped one day to take you to an Odeon or Gaumont, so many things I had hoped, now all we have is the past.

The winding lane where you stopped to pick summer fruits, the lark overhead, how you lost your hat in the breeze and it landed on a scarecrow. The picnic you made, sandwiches and apples, elderflower juice and yet more apples, as if we’d raided every tree in Kent. The day we cycled down the lane to the pebble beach, you laughing so merrily I feared you’d forget to peddle and the bicycle with no forward motion would simply fall to one side. I laughed as well as I could, by that time the summons was already in my pocket, I knew the day would come when you would fall and I wouldn’t be there.

Even on the Kentish beach your laughter didn’t drown the sound of the canons from across the water. Sometimes at night I wonder what is most pointless, the war, or me, a pebble, who made a stand, a pebble washed up on the beach who wouldn’t go back in. As long as you think I’m brave I can stand everything else.

The lads here are rough to me, I make them so, I know, I have to be made an example of or the world, their world will stop. Conchie they say, I’ll spare your delicate ears the other words they use, conchie.

Perhaps those should be my last words to you, not conchie, the word they think most insulting, but conch, the beautiful shell we found on what I knew was our last day together. I hope you will understand that I wanted that holiday to go on forever, that it really wasn’t me who stopped the peace.