#4 (So Soft is the Skin of the eel)

 So soft is the skin of the eel, a long slender serpent that wriggles on the bank.

The boat of an angler ends this morning’s dance, home a pot waits, a poverty pot, a meal like no other, waiting with the lid off. Butter melted in pools upon the boiling water.

Flat, warm, British beer, the perfect compliment, a nail in the post, the skin and bones.

Held as if by a curse in this particular life, a high tide, an ebb, a low tide, a week of work that leaves us drained. Work or poetry but never both, inspiration ignored or void, comes out all at once like a sluice sprung open.

Home across the fen, beneath the grey-blue horizon.


******


A street raised, a terraced garden from ancient East. Slate and stone, a flight of steps that wind up from the beach, foot worn, ages of fishermen bringing home their catch. A haven of life just above the poverty level now becomes the playground of the pointless upper-class. The sea is not for toying with, it is not for pleasure sailing or mucking around on a windsurf or dinghy. The sea is for toil, dragging its haul into the slavery of the tide.

The summer season brings its loss, two boys swept away while playing on the rocks, capsized dinghy in a freak squall, a town washed away in a Cornish flash flood, cars washed onto their roofs like cardboard boxes in a duck pond. The indiscriminate sea takes its victims regardless of age and profession; it is not just sailors that perish at sea.

The weather forecast suggests gales, disaster caused by the wrong kind of harbour,
the wrong swell of tide, the direction of wind, time of year, precipitation, rain from the hills mixing with the brine of the world. Threatening to destroy when it desires, no commitment or predictability.


******


August 10th 1948, a Mediterranean port:
Buff stone, slowly rebuilt.
Italy, post Mussolini.


******


Late evening - night, Edward arrives. He is wearing a blue serge suit, Oxford cut trousers and a cloth cap. Under his jacket he has a charcoal roll-neck, the back of his head is newly shaved – short back and sides, leaving the whiteness that a summer haircut reveals. Face cleanly razored – waxy complexion, thanks to the coal tar in the municipal baths. The evening begins with beer and ends in rum.

August 11th 1948, Great Yarmouth had changed, thanks to Hitler and over zealous bomb re-developers. New buildings sprang from tired rubble and demented slum, the rows disappearing, leaving only hints behind for moral good or worse. The type of change happening that can’t be stopped.

Pub interior, now 1948, pubs were very much of a kind, the low entrance door, the step down into a smoky room, bar at the back, dominoes and hushed tones, not nostalgic but function and wear – purge – scrub down and more function. No room for the frippery of a softer age, tip-less cigarettes and the pipes of the old men, making this environment an impenetrable male domain. The topics fell on the catch, the economy and the change that came wholesale, an exhalation of post-war wind, a sigh as a nation came to terms with its singular identity. No more blanket of war altogether, personal cares left on the back burner, the excitement of explosive interludes that freed you from social commitment. Back to bringing home the bacon and time is money, higher purchase and dodging the landlord.

The smell of gas from the stove peculates with the tea and steam of Saturday morning kitchen. White tiles reflecting the sunlight, Autumnal and sprightly breezes creating this timeless vacuum surrounding our lives. No more decades, units of times, there becomes one solid timescale, things happening in a slow chain of immobile events.


******


The summer slows to its end.