Equinox, Issue 10
Coffee House Poetry, Issue 9
Envoi, issue 144
Giving Up Architecture
extract
…arms linked, Fern elegant in cast-offs with the sleeves rolled up. Oyster catchers called and ringed plovers flitted ahead of them over the pebbly patch. Back in the adult world their mothers were preoccupied with queuing and caring for second cousins who turned up with nowhere else to go. No-one had time to keep a watchful eye on girls who said their prayers and spent Sunday at meeting. They staved off the moment of return to the world of blackout cloth and saying grace over the rations on the Morrison shelter top, ignoring the chill as the sun’s warmth ebbed from the sand. Fern flipped her thick black plaits free of her overcoat and shook her head; even in the wind she was hatless. Lou pulled up her collar and shrugged down deeper into the coat, her brown school beret cocked to one side.
Wind whipped the backs of the dunes and spat bitter wasps of sand around their shins. This place was borrowed from the sea; a place to skim stones into the foam before the next bomb dropped. But even here the wireless voices could sometimes invade. Last night it was the Möhne Dam. Someone had invented bombs that skipped over the water, then sank and exploded under the surface bursting a dam and forming a tidal wave that would ‘carry all before it’. The voice sounded like a preacher on Revelations, “The sheer force and power of water will carry all before it.” The thought of drowning had flashed through Lou’s mind; how easily your wick might be snuffed.
She stopped short. “I refuse to be suffocated in a gas mask and if I live to have children, I swear I’ll never make them wear one.” She blinked away the thought of gas drill at school.
“Even to save their lives?” asked Fern.
Lou turned and sat on the edge of the table of rock, “What world is worth living in if someone is forever trying to put out your light?”
Fern wormed the toe of her boot into the soft muddy silt. After a while she asked, “What did you think of the thing Miss Spark said before Precious Bane the other day?” She crouched to inspect a child’s spinning top, rusted and half-buried in the muddy sand.
“You mean about how we must read as many books as we can so that we have them under our belts and are armed for better times to come?”
When they walked out onto the mud the smell was not salt but subtler; bleach or ammonia or perhaps some gas which could send you to sleep, thought Lou. Their lives were slipping away like gas into air.
“Yes and not to rush into marriage and let our lives slip by in unending days of soaping collars and cuffs,”
“Mmm.” Lou thought about the young men she had known; older boys they had idolised, like Stephen Berard whose parents were also officers in the Mission and who had come to her father for advice about his poetry. If men like Stephen were dying in the mud what hope was there for her or Fern?
“If we weren’t growing up in the middle of a war perhaps we could believe in the future more easily.”
The tide was coming in; waters sculpting the sand into ridges. They retraced their steps, making for home as thistle seeds blew over the pasture by the sea…
Fern balanced step by step along the metal edge of the sunken bridge...a bridge that, seen from a short distance away, pointed a warning finger upward. They had named it ‘Pointless.’ At the apex of the incline Fern gravely stretched out a long leg and flexed her booted toe, holding her arms to the sky and revelling in her defiance of gravity while Lou caught her breath for a dizzying moment. When Fern climbed the leaning oak Lou would sit below, hugging her knees and studiously avoiding the lurch looking up would give her. Perhaps it was because of her fall from the sea wall years ago that she sometimes felt unsteady, even with both feet planted firmly on the ground.
Lou watched Fern slither down, gathering rust on her trousers. They kept a pair of boy’s trousers from the jumble in their school bags and changed in the outside toilets before they left school. Fern picked her way across sand scattered with grains of coal or shale, side-stepping the remnants of planking and wooden crates along the tide line. There were broken things everywhere; broken houses, broken ships... Lou perched on the groyne and worried at a patch of barnacles with a piece of driftwood. It was warmer and her beret hung from the post next to her.
“It’s a relief to say things here. Our words will be carried away by the wind and no-one will be any the wiser,” she said.
Aunty Cilla and the cousins had only the clothes they stood up in when their house was bombed flat. “Just as though our time there never happened,” Cousin Cissy said. It was lucky they were out collecting firewood in the old pram. No one knew whose turn would be next. “There, but for the Grace of God…” her mother repeated.
“Out here we can shout and sing and not a soul to hear us,” replied Fern.
“My cousins shout every moment of the day. They don’t notice other people minding about it. But I mustn’t think bad thoughts about them because they’ve lost their father and now their home and livelihood.”
“When will our real lives begin?” asked Fern.
“Perhaps these are our real lives, only we don’t know it yet,” said Lou.
Fern threw herself onto the sand, “Over my dead body,” she groaned, rolling onto her back with a mock stab at her heart.
Lou scooped up a handful of gravelly stones and let them slip through her fingers. The cousins were the last straw. When she was at home the house was always full of other people’s children, ones whose parents were in Mission meetings with her’s. And she was expected to look after the whole brood.
This part of the shore was formed in long, dune-like ridges from the slag of an old blast furnace long gone. Carline thistles gripped the cracks, presenting a ruff of dried golden rays around a silvery centre.
“Sometimes I’ve had enough of doing my duty, though I know I shouldn’t say so in wartime.” She sighed. “Will there ever be a moment to spare for us to live our own lives? Do you think I’m a bad person to say such a thing, Fern?”
“Of course not. I whisper much worse to myself.” Fern jumped up, coaxed Lou to stand and dragged her along the shingle until they were out of breath and laughing.
“But listen, Lou, you reminded me of a story our Scottish lodger told me.” Fern settled herself to lie propped on her elbow along the edge of a knotty clump of sand grass. Lou checked for stones and dried sheep dottle before sitting down.
“Ready? It’s called, ‘The man who had no story to tell’.”
They retold stories in their own way, leaving out certain details and embellishing others to suit themselves. They rehearsed to themselves during the preaching on Sundays or lying in bed before they fell asleep. Sometimes they made up long sagas or romances that continued in episodes from week to week. Fern stretched her legs along the spiky fescue and began.
“There was a man who sat at the table on the day of the feast and story telling. When the Master of the Black Arts stood on one leg and fixed him with a gaze, he stuttered, ’I have no story to tell.’ The Master pointed to the door and the man rose. All eyes were upon him as he walked outside. Snow was falling. It wasn’t long before he saw ahead of him four men carrying a coffin. He joined them at the back to make a fifth. After a while they came to a churchyard. They unshouldered the coffin and slowly lowered it into the earth. As they threw on soil the man heard the priest utter his own name.
He walked on until he reached a lake with a small boat by its shore. He stepped in and began to row. Halfway across he rested the oars, looked over the side and saw a woman’s face gazing at him out of the water. She rowed to the other shore of the lake where there stood a cottage in a pasture. In the cottage lived a fisherman. He took her in and gave her food and a bed for the night. They were married, lived happily for many years and were blessed with two children.
Time passed and although she loved her children, the woman felt restless. One day she climbed into the boat that was always moored near the cottage and set off back across the lake. She peered into the water and saw that the reflection staring back at her was a man’s again. He retraced his steps past the place where he had seen his burial and on to the hall where the feast had been held. When he took his place at the table, the Master was still glowering at him and the people expectant. How should he begin to tell his tale?”
Lou grasped a handful of the tiny pebbles she had swept into a pile and sprayed them bouncing over the flat rocks nearby.
“Ugh. That sends shivers down your spine,” she said. “I’d like to make my own future happen rather than have the ‘Master of the Black Arts’ make it for me.”
The tide was out, almost as far as the shipping lanes. Darker streaks marked the channels that filled up first in a rush as the tide hissed back across the mud. Fern got up and stretched her legs. They made for the inshore track. They had strayed further than usual and late afternoon was turning into early evening.
“If you took a stand in life,” Lou persisted, “like being a Conchy, you would be making it happen wouldn’t you?”
They studied the ground as they walked. Last year Fern had almost trodden on a little black oyster catcher chick like a cotton ball peering unsteadily from a reedy patch. Their nests were little hollows in the stones out in the open.
“Or perhaps it would be the saving of us to get married and away after all,” Lou finished.
Fern tossed her plaits. “I’m going to marry for love which is the best possible reason,” she said.
“Anyway, you feel wicked wishing for something special for yourself when everyone has to make sacrifices,” Lou said. She pictured the room her mother had taken her to see, where the Czech refugees were living. They had painted it white: walls, furniture, everything. “Have you ever spoken to Marenka Vrana at school?” she asked. “One day I heard her humming a tune under her breath. I said, ‘You must be happy, humming like that.’ And she said, ‘Oh no. It’s not true. I am humming to try and make myself happy’.”
