by Xan Brooks
In the months since it was first discovered, the lorry has become a plaything of the children who live on either side of this heath. It has doubled as a pirate galleon and a Sopwith Camel. It spent a week as an Antarctic base camp and has latterly served as the cave of a fearsome grizzly bear. The intrepid hunters approach the lair on their bellies, taking great care not to alert the beast. Then they rise up from the grass in a riot of noise and furiously set about the truck with their sticks.
Time flies like an arrow and accelerates as we age. But in infancy, on the heath, its movement is more leisurely. The passage of a week can feel like a month, while a month might as well be an eternity. And already some of these children have forgotten their first sight of the Maudslay one chill autumn morning when it had looked for all the world as though it were merely passing through. They had loitered beside it, casting anxiously all around until one brave youth had taken it upon himself to pull open the door. Inside on the seat he found a tan leather mask and a horned pendant on a chain. The mask would later be confiscated by the history master at school and now resides inside a locked desk in the staffroom. Nobody can recall what became of the pendant. It slipped from a pocket or was trodden on and broken. Either way, it has gone and few remember it now.
Two miles south, the land shelves away. The traveller steps off the plateau and is spilled through a swatch of pink-flushed farmland to the town; he can smell the salt and hear the gulls. Whitewashed cottages crowd the cobbled streets and triangular pennants snap on the overhead lines. The shops sell croquet sets and tennis balls. There is a queue to get at the ice-cream stall.
Now here at last is the quay itself where the fishing boats scrape against wooden jetties and the children load crabs into buckets of seawater. The crabs clamber listlessly over and across one another. They appear in no particular hurry to escape.
The public house on the quay is called the Hope and Anchor. It contains a taproom and restaurant and a number of well-appointed guest chambers which look out on green water. Business is brisk and the pub employs three full-time barmaids whose duties extend to waiting on tables and preparing the beds. Two of the barmaids are local; the third previously worked at a public house up in London. They all share a room in the one-storey staff annex, although the London girl has explained that she will be moving out soon. She has been setting money aside and plans to rent a small flat of her own. Each week she writes to her brother back home. She says that once she has a flat, he can come out and join her.
Dear Tom, the girl writes. Please come out in the summer, that’s only three months away. I am going to send you the money to buy a single rail ticket. You won’t need a return because you will be staying with me. The seaside is lovely. There are seagulls and ducks. I am saving up money, more and more every week. Waitressing is the best because I often get given tips, but being a housemaid is not so bad either because some of the guests leave tips there as well and one day I walked in and found a five-shilling note on the bedside table. So please come out when it’s summer and we will live by the sea.
On days off, mindful of the importance of not spending her wages, the girl makes a habit of talking long walks up the shore. Once away from the inn, the concrete quay points across the Solent and through a thicket of masts to where she can see open water. The Isle of Wight ferry departs from here every day and beyond that is France and the warm folds of Europe, a whole world of foreignness upon the horizon.
She packs sandwiches for her lunch and a book to read while she eats and then walks up the coast until her legs start to tire. Ahead is a small shingled bay where she likes to break her journey. When the tide is high, the little beach is submerged, but when it goes out she can take off her shoes and walk upon it barefoot. Nobody else is around. Few people venture this far and this suits the girl, who enjoys her own company.
On each of these visits at low tide, the retreating sea exposes a man’s canvas kit bag. The bag, it seems, has made itself a home in the shingle. It has been stiffened by salt water; its creases and strap turned as rigid as driftwood. Time and again the tide drags in and drags out. But it leaves the bag fixed securely in place, so that the girl has grown used to its presence until she walks up one April morning and discovers it gone. Some loosening of the shingle, some overnight swell of cold water has carried it quietly, invisibly away to the depths. The girl smoothes her dress and sits down and stares out at the sea. She finds herself reassured by the tide’s ebb and flow. She decides that they very nearly make sense, all of the choices it makes. The things it elects to leave be, the things it comes in to collect.
Acknowledgements
Writing is such an inherently lonesome trudge that one comes to treasure the people who point the way forward or lend a hand when you fall. Thanks, in the first instance, to Victoria Hobbs and Sam Edenborough, Eloise Millar, Sam Jordison and Max Porter, who offered valuable input and guidance as to where the manuscript might be placed, as and when I got around to completing the thing.
I know nothing about jazz but my dad is an expert. So thanks to Michael Brooks for his advice on the composition of the Long Boys and the songs they might play. Any inaccuracies are mine and not his.
I wrote large portions of this book upstairs at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank; sat at a small table with a fabulous view of the Thames. The staff were unfailingly courteous and discreet. Nobody asked what on earth I was doing. No one was obviously bemused by my presence. This is a public space to be cherished. The people who work there are to be cherished too.
Like Lucy Marsh, this book was an orphan. Unlike her, it was lucky enough to find a loving and nurturing home. My thanks to Jen and Chris and the team at Salt for their generosity, passionate support and astute, graceful editing. This book is better because of them. It could not have been raised by a finer family.
Finally thanks, above all, to my beloved wife Sarah, who basically held my hand throughout the entire undertaking. Perfect reader, best editor, life collaborator. We walked though these woods together and came out the other side.
