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Crows are nesting now, not in the elms you knew, they died years ago long after you, but the caw, caw, you would recognize, and the scent of the box hedge, small dark green leaves clipped close, each damp with overnight dew, each catching the sun’s light. A new day, one of hundreds you have not seen yet this was your home. Days came for you here, asking you out to play.
We seldom played, but you had begun to find your son company, pillioned against that black mac that you wore, the roar of the two-fifty drowning words shouted over you shoulder. The Lodge still stands in the low, rising sunlight, but the sawing horse has gone, sawdust long sifted back into the earth. You are here at my shoulder, these are your words, my inheritance. I have cared for them, been carried by them into paths that you would have loved to travel, and you do. In all that I do with them, these words hold your breathing, your voice over your shoulder.
It is easy to see now, parked by the roadside, slow tide rising like mercury among grasses, silvering tarmac, how such silent encroachment might listen to a King’s word.
Across the harbour, shingle spire corn-coloured among red roofs riding at anchor, the church contains Cnut’s daughter. Dust of an eight year old in a stone coffin.
It is easy to see now the King, his throne, the panoply at the sea’s edge, his people trusting like children from a safe distance, his hands raised and the tide declining to notice.
Yet here I could believe I had the power, tide on the turn. No pause, no sense of achievement; one second swilled to my feet the next receding, continuing to recede.
With it my heart goes out to a King without choice, unable to stop the tide rising nor the life of his daughter draining too quickly.
Long before names, before we thought of naming, seas roared through, dividing Sussex Downs from what is France: carving through millennia of laid down life – this chalk, these flints, the land we came to know as home. Long before that the cosmos dreamed of consciousness, filled space with elements that one day would lead to us.
Now every grain of soil, each artefact, the air we breathe, the sweep of shadowed grass, directly links us to our common birth, and every crafted work, each photograph, each stone we gather from a storm-washed beach, points always back, reminds us of the time it took to get here, step by step.
Black leather, well-worn, the cuffs wide and gleaming as though air still streamed over them, and over the handle-bars of his first machine, a Royal Enfield.
Gauntlets, beret and goggles, held him, retained him, though long discarded: cracks in the leather, stains from oil, their smell, calling through years of absence.
Riding pillion, behind his heavy black coat, clinging….’Grip with your knees. Lean with the bike.’ Dipping into a corner, frightened at first, shifting to remain upright. ‘Lean!’ Shouted above engine, wind.
Gripping tight there came, with exhilaration, praise. ‘He rides like part of it now.’ But she frowned. The machine was taking them from her. One day it would kill; a windshield splinter become her son’s singular relic,
a sharp defiance like his refusal to cry. Until then she would wave goodbye, envy their maleness, feed baby, dust the house, long for a daughter.
But she would know fear when, from sunlight, the engine cold, beret too big, with goggles propped on his nose, her son stepped in, grinning, his hands lost in gauntlets.
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