#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.

#3 (July 15th 1938)

July 15th 1938

As evening ground its way through the town like a slow crawl of a southern glacier, the light seemed as intense as earlier, but lower and more silent. Silent like a dream, no sounds seemed to emanate from the streets, a tea-time lull that only appears after an extremely hot day.

Far out to sea the little trawlers glinted in the low evening light, like roofs catching the sun across a Venetian scene. Red – brown sails and the lazy smoke that seemed only to escape a little from the boilers down below.

The rows of tiny houses that lined this port, hummed in the heat of the day, old but well scrubbed like the varnish worn tables that lay hidden behind the uniform net curtains. Humanity was obvious and plentiful.

The steam rose from a hundred thousand teacups, reflecting the low light and catching the dust, only in summer these moments of peace descend, waiting to be shattered by the noises of the night. A pause, as if the world has let out a sigh, a flux of an eddy that has momentarily become steady before a change of direction.

These moments can be counted over a lifetime. They will be remembered only when another arises, a constant recall of nostalgia brought about by nostalgia, a spiralling, if not quite cyclic rhythm.


******


My first journey was upon my fathers bicycle. A small wooden seat with metal foot pegs that stuck out from the side. I was positioned between the handle bars and my father; the other children had those tartan seats that went at the back of the bike.

I can’t remember much about the journey, probably to Nanny Webster’s house but the bike was a large, black roadster, my recent knowledge of this bike would suggest a 40’s rod brake machine, probably a Raleigh or a Hercules.

The worn, grey grips smoothed by my father’s rough hands.

Those summer winds that cut across the sands, exhuming the marram grasses to their tired roots, it wasn’t always like this.

In youth the sun is kinder, slow to burn and age your spirit. You soar like the sea birds, higher on their twisting thermals.

The wind can pick its pace, from furled up doldrums to the centre of the gale, eyes looking coastward, panic on the sweet breath of broken youth, forgotten pleasures now mixed with the angst of reason.

If only you can reach the shore, you will be a better man; you will work harder, pray more often, drink less and love sincerely.

Amidst the groynes the crabs forage, deep in holes to retain their moist lungs, they feast on the washed up bodies of sailors and soldiers, lovers and fathers all but washed away by a rain of metal.

A tangle of geometric objects, carefully conceived into existence by men and with rivets. We are not silent creatures like those armoured crabs, apple snap snaps, to wait under foot with brass and the bayonets.

Rusty hulks now, left in the foam, buried to waist in sand. Along the roads that take us inland, away from the sea and the soothing motion of the tide. Spent men and vehicles and a will to survive.

Star shells over a forlorn beachhead. Some localised showers, slowing progress and delaying spirit. You have only seen the sea in its more intimate moments, pretending to be fragile like a lost calf on a winter’s day.

Now it shows you itself, raging like a madman as the sun slopes away, embarrassed. Scenes from a day in hell happening in slow motion, deaf to the cries of the men and gulls.

You can see the logic in most of the machinations but this time you are lost. No careful explanation written in your textbook, no phone call to let you in to the on the secret. All you gain is an arrival, a door flung open and a kick in the face.

At home the ledgers and the planners re-schedule times and locations, across a rolling sea, behind the safety of chalk.

It is amazing that in the middle of a tumult those soft thoughts break through the glaze of horror. The colour of your mother’s lips, the freckles on her careworn hands, the sound of the hinges to the outside lavatory, birds singing, competing with the rooks, over the unkempt grass, in the alders of the graveyard. The cough of your father and smell of damp coal before the fire is lit; these things have little meaning now, as then but are the compounded signature of peace and pretty ambivalence.

Heading homeward, North, like a fleet of swans ahead of a swirling tide. A spiteful sunset behind our backs.


******


The trees look different now along the avenues and beneath the glass facades of the new town. The tram lines remain, slowly wearing under heavy traffic that stops and starts in a pretence of progress.

8 pm. A chink of light outs through the corner of the oblong window, intense and sharply defined against the patterned glass cupboard fronts. Reflections of a summer evening giving an illusionary cold heat that defies logic. Above is the soft murmur of our sleeping child, then silence. The electric hum of kitchen appliance.


******


A room laid out as if for a symposium, questions fired and answered slowly, stuttering eyes searching upward, mouth open, an intake of air. Questions that become leading are no longer valid.

The old building has been empty for only one week, it already has the familiar smell of vacated school or institution – summers reel back, painting for the council, covered with dust, eating stale bread, scorn, hatred and punishment for something not yet specified. In the back of your mind a future waiting to engage, like the gears of a giant machine, oily like the sea – smelling of brine.


******


Mid July, the dusty windows along the rows of old Great Yarmouth, filled with bottles and brown, dried flowers, boot black, cobwebs, bottles, books and ships biscuits. The dirty pigeons combine with the tangle of wires that are punctuated with ceramic spacers and electrical gadgetry. Under feet cobbles, flagstones and broken slate.


******

#2 (A Stream in Ireland)

The water runs down the side of the hill,
a stream in Ireland, on rocks, brown,
peat stained livelihoods.

A rowing boat out in the sound,
full of coal in the misty morning light.

Down the lanes amongst the green, a police officer cycles in his cycle clips and waves hello to someone.

I was young when I first propped my bicycle against your window, the fruit it turned by the time I got home.

A mother’s harsh tongue would scare you to Sunday, wind before bedtime and a moan about he war.

Work was always left until the night before incept. Your grey eyes danced by the fire and the television football match roar.

Blue capped in boiler houses, cricket crawled and sorrowful, the ache in your side never went and your books saved your life.

Construct a song for me now, over the water and safe from destiny, write a song and sing for the remainder of your life.

Faded the photograph, gene pool recommended, the morning is coming and you’re far away.

As if looking for someone the sailors kept their watch, over the ice floes in this huge, enormous North.

A calm morning saw the seals return, sleeping in the water below the stern of the ship.

The captain was in his cabin, bunked and probably still drunk from the night before.


Drank on Tuesday night:

Cask of rum

Bottle of French brandy, best quality

Absinthe and a quart of sugar

Some peculiar old shit the Inuit brought aboard

Whisky from Galway

Twenty two pints of porter

A lot of tobacco

One bottle of chartreuse and a glass of gin.

A trickle of water ran its course down through the rocks and peat, cutting its time and pleasure through the shapes that jut and pierce the land.

A drunk mans path that leads to the inevitable path, home.

No knowledge of its trials, tomorrow you will wake again, the world shinning like a golden orb, for you.

Lake sided and dived amongst the water plants and ducks, the morning creatures watch as you dump your bodies.

A genocide in Technicolor, remembered only in the monochrome of history.

Sligo

Cork

Dublin

Donegal

Bristol

Lowestoft

Newcastle

Upon Tyne.

#1 (The Coracle)

The coracle is a small craft, made from a framework that is covered in skin or a canvas material, this could be jute. The material is then covered with a waterproof substance, this could be pitch or its modern equivalent bitumen.

The coracle is favoured by the fen man, eel bobber and general stilt waking member, it is designed to be carried when the water runs out and becomes the shore.

Its light weight build makes it an ideal flatland vessel, being popular with the fisherman, poacher and the ladies.

The eel bobber will use his coracle in conjunction with a bobbing pole, this consists of a wooden pole with a length of Worsted wool attached.

In the Fens where the land becomes as bread and soup, this small craft becomes as indispensable as the punt.

All along the long drains the shadow of the wind pumps falling,
Three Bridges
Guyhurn
Welney
Stump
Orwell
Nene
Limpenhoe Spong.


******


Across the sound three boats are sailing, in hulls wet, tired sailors’ burn their fingers on the primus stoves.

First watch and second watch, then sleep in damp bags with a weevil and reindeer hair.

Smuts so black, grease hangs in the air, the blubber stove lets out its heat and tender little hiss.

A berg in view with the promise of some water, stick your ribs pudding and morning bear goo.

The motion of the sea taints the thought of many, days go by in the open topped spree.


******


Black great coat
Pale, worn denim work trouser
Black boots, rubber soled
Pipe and tobacco, bottle of Lambs Navy Rum
Woodbine for the wife
Cap with stains and a short wool scarf
A watch of your father and a book of your life.
As the fleet pulled into the harbour no women allowed to meet you, two weeks away at sea and a staggered walk home.

The skipper would have killed me for bringing the monkey on board, a whole fishing trip was forfeit ‘we might as well go home’. Being chased around the boiler room, waving the wrench around his head, smoke curling through the hatches and the sky full of northern stars and breeze as nice as nip.

The following days as things calmed down, the fishing was good, if not cold above deck. The skipper was less uneasy about the jinx of animals on board and he even spoke to me at lunch, as a storm rattled the cutlery and knocked the cooking pots together on their butcher’s hooks.

The next five days were choppy and blowy, the spume lashed the deck and washed my naive puke between the planks and spars. There was not time to bear on the monkey incident, as we pulled together to secure the catch.

My pipe smoking caused me much sickness, so I threw it overboard, tobacco shared out and then a fish scale in the eye. The ships cook got it out for me and gave me a tot of rum, even the skipper seemed concerned and lightened his attitude towards me.

With holds full of the silver darlings we headed home, with a promise of a night on the tiles, I would finally become a man. Into the mouth we returned and to disembark.

Mother was there to meet me, breaking all the codes, so home instead of drinking,
I was secretly pleased.


******


October 1934, the rain was falling heavily, running down the cobbles and tipping over the blocked, lead rain chutes that lined the rows of old Great Yarmouth.

Edward was preparing himself for a long trip, buying the last of his personal store that would accompany him on a voyage that would take at least three years.

Late that evening he would catch a train that would journey to London Liverpool Street. then an overground train to East India Docks.

It was here that the voyage would begin, a ship bearing nothing but ballast would return to the Plimsoll line with goods from another hemisphere.

Edward had one more task to perform before his departure from Blighty.

Alice worked preparing fish that reached this port, a strong dark haired woman, beautiful of temperament and quick with the gutting knife.

Without ceremony Edward asked Alice to be his wife, She had until evening tide to give her response.

Her answer was ‘Yes’.
Edward sailed away from her for three years, coming home early due to the scarlet fever.

The sea is vast yet intimate with its crews, the song of the sea bird sounds lonely because it is a lonely voice above a crowd. There is no malice in the sea but an uneasy carelessness. As a gardener may forget to water his stock, so the sea will deny land, calm, wind, rain, glare and the night at an ill conceived moment. This fickle body called the sea or an ocean, or a waterway, can deliver or damn the men that ride upon its back like a blue monkey.

The desperate sounds of the sailor, lost at sea with past life for company, Loreli waits for him in her splendid grey, blue robes and does not care whether he loves her or another.

Tides raise and fall like the movement of your breast, there in the morning light before my departure. The heat of the night dispersed through the grey of the dawn light, the movement in the street of the early morning troops.

Goodbye my love, stay true in my absence, do not be jealous of my love of the sea, for she will be true to both you and to me.


******


What a sailor needs for three years at sea

As a sailor you will need:
A strong disposition in the stomach region
Good dentistry or nonchalance to pain
Books, maybe three
The Holy Bible (by God)
Three Men in a Boat (by Jerome K Jerome)
The Gospels in Brief (by Leo Tolstoy)
You may take others but you will never read them.

One or two of your favourite pipes
At least a year of tobacco
A needle and thread
The photo of your sweet heart, mother, bairn, etc
A shirt and tie for going ashore, in all the ports you’re likely to call
Soap, One bar of (big), soda for the teeth

Vestas or flints, lighter of the trench variety. Under garments and spare trouser, vests and woollen garb, snow shoes for the colder climes and sweat rags for the tropics.

The most important item is the hat, this may take some time to decide upon.

Retourschepen (Prologue)

‘Every wind is bad for a sinking ship’
Quote from La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948)


Ernest Shackleton led an ill fated expedition to walk across the Antarctic Continent. 1914, the world was on the brink of war and the suffering that was to unfold across Western Europe would be in some way expressed on a personal level in the vast tundra of the South.

The Endurance of Shackleton and his men was eventually rewarded with a rescue. Elephant Island was once again a desolate spot, made home for a while after adrift on the floes and sea sprayed at the bottom of small boats.

Shackleton now rests in peace on a lonely spot in South Georgia.

In the years that Shacklton led his expeditions, he never lost a soul, from cooks to carpenters.


******


I was born in 1969 and have never had to endure the hardships of my grandfather, a man who was drafted into the merchant navy to sweep the whale road of mines. The skipper of his trawler, much honoured with a bar, white haired with malarial sweats and never talk of the war.

In the left hand pocket of my going-a-shore coat are the ticket stubs and bar flyers from a thousand ports of call, if left in situ they will remain there forever.


******


A story that my father once recounted: It was one Christmas morning, I was given the job to go and find my father.

It wasn’t unheard of for my father to stop off on his way home in one of the many taverns that lined the wharves and helped to make up the flat vista that was Great Yarmouth.

It was a cold and wintery scene as I made my way past the old smoke houses that were part of the city walls, Charles Street was awakening to Christmas morning.

After a trawl around some likely haunts I found my father asleep under a blanket of snow, upon a tomb in the Fisherman’s Graveyard. There with his collar turned up and his flat cap pulled over his ears, clutching the bottle of rum from the night before.

The sun shone like so many other Christmas mornings from my childhood, the grey sky bleached with snow was pierced by the penetrating sun, silhouetting flakes that fell on the monuments.

All along the docks the taverns and seafarers clubs were resting in the morning gloom, quiet now but tinged by the smell of tip-less smoke that rose from the social pipes.

The ocean rose between us and like your eyes, smiled.


******


OPORTO
LISBON
AMSTERDAM
HAMBURG
DOVER
SLIGO
DUBLIN
CORK

SUEZ
TASMANIA
OFF THE SHETLANDS IN FOG
DREAMING OF HOME.


******


The sea will follow you through the small days of our lives, leaving only the songs of our forefathers to guide us in a moot landfill.

As eyes fall ground ward in this incandescent dream, you always left your white hair on the plastic rug that was Eastern raffia in a designers mind.

A shipwreck lies on a reef far out in the Indian Ocean, it leaves little to the imagination with its smashed skulls and chests pinned down by brass canon.

Alone on that shore you would be safe, if it wasn’t for the madman with a grin and a stab.

At last the trial reaches us, death with hands or without, makes no bones when the flesh has gone.

1600’s house…
Catalpa
Batavia
VOC
Retourschepen
Again and again to Pelsart Island.


******


The walk to the quay, jetty, legs lost in the morning mist. Line of black walkers, hands pressed in reefer coats as they file to maritime occupation.

The man becomes the work that holds him in his mission, the wooden and steel hulls that rise and fall in the oily harbour. Each nail and bolt cared for at some stage, time drinking capsules that will impress our children.

Open mouth, a gaping harbour, reflects the sky and fast clouds, screams of gulls that line the wire covered streets and high wheeling above the pubs and bingo halls.

Red row of non-descript building, 1890, 1800, 1780. A sea view, grey vista, slim difference from ground to brine.

Where once stood gluts, now stand car parks, a change from need to speed, one strained motion left us cold and bleeding, the television war will never end.

We are blessed to become our fathers, to mend our nets with a shuttling stick. The lights have gone from across the harbour and a winter wind whips up the sand.