Kingstown

'Kingstown' is the provisional title for a novel I wrote some years ago.  It remains unpublished and was never submitted to a publisher as I frankly don't think it is much good.  But I've decided to reproduce extracts of it here.  

The story is set in Maine, USA, and is inspired by the writer Stephen King.  I suppose my story is a little dig at Stephen King - I don't much like him or his books, I'm afraid.  

My central character, Clifford King, is an aspiring writer who sees himself as somewhat above writing popular fiction.  Self-evidently, part of the name Clifford King is a reference to Stephen King; the 'Clifford' I think I must have come up with due to my admiration for Clifford Irving, a rather obscure but excellent American writer.  That was my 'writer's subconsciousness' [is there such a thing?] at work: the contrast between the fortunes of the real-life Stephen King and Clifford Irving reflects the themes of the story. Clifford Irving, while an excellent writer, wanted more than that for himself: he wanted to be 'great', but he lacked either the luck or the ability, or both.

Anyway, my character, Clifford, has written what he thinks is the next Great American Novel, but he can't get it published.  He also has another problem - everybody is confusing him with another Clifford King, a pulp fiction writer also from Maine!  Yes, yes, I know.  Improbable.  But one of my favourite writers is Wilkie Collins and I just like the Victorian-style melodramatic premise transplanted to a modern setting.

I'll start with part of the novel's opening chapter.  As I say, my writing isn't great, but it's OK - and I hope you enjoy the story!

KINGSTOWN

The course of my life was predicted.  When I was about eight or nine, I used to write long stories, knowing and involved, capturing everything about life around me.  I wrote about boys my age paddling in the ocean.  I wrote about trips with my father in his boat across the Sound.  I wrote about the fishermen, in their small precarious wooden vessels journeying for miles in their hunt for shark, marlin and cod.  I wrote about the beehive that my uncle maintained in his garden and the honey my aunt would prepare for us to take home and share.

"Clifford, you're going to be a writer", my teacher would say, and I thought he was right.  I didn't know then what a writer was, but I knew already that I would write.

It was settled.  Clifford King would be a writer.

Only, that's not what happened.  Clifford King did not become a writer.  As I grew up, I let my writing slip.  I excelled in academic work, and maybe it was a need to vindicate my parents' hopes for me, or maybe it was a need to fill some inadequacy, but what the tragic reason I had for wanting to go to college, I enrolled and majored in business and management.

I struggled through the course, through bouts of depression and self-loathing, repeating half of my exams and barely passing the others.  Eventually, four years later, I emerged into the sunlight, armed with a half-baked college degree, and looking for a job.  Thoughts of becoming a writer had completely receded from view and I dismissed that early ambition as youthful dreaming.

Eventually I found that job.  It was as a trainee manager in the South Bristol branch of the Eastern Atlantic Bank.  My days were filled with endless, pointless meetings about matters that seemed to be of no significance.  The most exciting part was counting money.  The Easter Atlantic Bank was the largest bank in that part of Maine, and the daily deliveries of newly-minted notes and coins and bonds were eagerly anticipated, almost an event in and of itself.  Behind the glass screen, the security guard would hand over large wedges of U.S. bank notes, usually arranged into wads of one hundred thousand dollars.  I was then responsible for depositing the hoard in the bank's giant vault, using a brass trolley that squeaked wherever it went.

By night, I would write.  I confess, I had fallen back into the habit.  I had also met someone at the bank - Matilda - and we would often go on trips to the local galleries together, as we shared an interest in art.

I first realised that I loved Matilda when I saw her in the coffee shop, across the street from the gallery.  She was with no-one.  I watched her lips move and her red cheeks under green eyes like pearls that seemed painted under eye-lashed that batted.  I saw the involuntary blushes as her face turned, first toward me, then away from me.  I fell in love with her then.

At night, I wrote about my own fears, about being trapped in a life I did not want.  And unconsciously, that drove me apart from Matilda.  My central character, a realtor frustrated with suburban life, could have been Matilda's husband, and probably is.  As I progressed the manuscript I found a title: 'The Vacant Flame'.  This seemed to sum up perfectly the realtor.  Inside him was a burning ambition to live.  Not to make money, not to have status, not to have prestige, but simply to live.  He could not fulfill that ambition where he was, on Main Street, USA.  He knew that to really live he would have to kick over the traces, give up all that he knew, give up the life he knew, renounce the value system that had been inculcated in him since birth.

It was during my second summer working at the Bank that things began to fall apart.  It was a season that began with such excitement.  I had all-but completed 'The Vacant Flame' and I was ready to send it to three publishing houses in New York.  McDonnell White in particular I knew would be interested in my work as they had already seen a sample chapter and commented favourably on it.  This was my very first piece of writing and in hindsight perhaps I approached the whole thing with naivety, but when I had typed the last of the manuscript and the novel was completed, I bundled the papers together and tied them in a parcel with a hastily-written covering letter addressed to the Literary Editor at McDonnell White.

Then I waited.

My relationship with Matilda had developed to the point that I felt ready to propose to her.  Outside of writing, she was my main activity.  We saw each other every day at the Bank as Mr Grimmond's office was just down the hallway from mine.  She would pop her head around the door at 12 sharp each day and we would take lunch together.  Things seemed perfect between us.  We had not slept together, but I felt that things were special between us.  I decided that we would go out to the lake and and there and then I would ask her to marry me.

It was a Sunday when we arrived at the boat house.  It was always tricky for me taking Matilda out, as I did not have, nor could I afford, an automobile.  As we rowed across the lake, we looked into each other's eyes.  On that day, the sun was at its height in the clear blue sky and yellow dancing pearls glittered and glistened across the water.  I looked deeply into her and she was full of glow, her cheeks red and her eyes like green marbles.  She was an autumn girl, but the summer caught her well.

I asked her to marry me.

"Cliff....there is something I need to tell you."

She paused and looked across the water back to the car park and boathouse.  A red Mustang crept slowly into view and stopped at the water's edge.  The driver appeared to be looking across at us, but I could only see shadow.

"What is it...?"

"It's about us..."

"Matilda, I..."

"No, let me finish.  You're a nice man, and we've been going out for a while now, but I just don't think we're right for each other."

"What do you mean?"

"Cliff, I don't know how to say this, so I'll just say it.  I've been seeing someone."

"What...?"

"His name is John Wineburg.  We met at the country club."

"You waitress there at weekends."

"Yeah, we met there.  His father is..."

"Is the lawyer Benjamin Wineburg, senior partner of Wineburg's.  Yeah, I know."

"Cliff...Oh Cliff, I'm so sorry, but this is why I came here today."

I felt empty.  We rowed back to the dock, then I helped her out of the boat.  She gave me a look that said 'goodbye', but there was no smile.  I saw her walk to the red Mustang.

The next day I returned to work as normal.  Things were awkward with Matilda, especially when I discovered she was to marry Wineburg.  On the way home, I stopped by the ABC on Sowell Street and bought a bottle of Scotch.

As I stepped through the apartment door, I realised I still had it in my pocket - the ring I had intended to offer Matilda was a small, brass off-cut, gold-plated, the type you see anywhere, but with a genuine diamond.  It had been used thirty years before by my father to propose to my mother and my mother asked me to use it when proposing to Matilda.  I knew that I would have to share the unhappy news with my mother sooner or later and decided I would call her there and then.  It was at that moment that I noticed it.  The small rectangular envelope lying unobtrusively on the mat.  I picked it up and noticed the McDonnell White stamp immediately.  I forgot my other problems and studied that envelope.  A hairy feeling of excitement overcame me and, unable to resist the urge, I tore open the envelope and quickly unfolded the letter.

Embossed at the top was the logo and name, McDonnell White, giving all the bearing of an august, respectable publishing house.  Underneath was a short and to the point letter that began 'Sir' and ended 'Faithfully yours'.  It was a rejection letter.  "Having perused your manuscript, we are sorry to inform you that this is not a proposal that would interest us."

.......................................

In this next extract, we find Clifford King has started a new life in Jones' Cove, a fictitious town in a different part of Maine.  He is working as a creative writing teacher.

......................................

The first class of the autumn term convened on the 3rd. September, at quarter past seven in the evening, around my kitchen table.  There were four students, counting Mother George.  The others were an Irish immigrant accountant, Sean, a lady called Alison who ran the local antiques shop, and a college student called Adam.  It was Adam who admitted to us that he was a major horror fanatic.

"Are you THE Clifford King?" Adam asked me as the others began a writing task I had set them.

"Is there another?" I replied, in slight puzzlement.

"Well, yeah, so you're Clifford King the horror writer?"

"Well no.  I don't write horror.  In fact, to be honest, I don't write much of...."

"That's quite a coincidence..." Adam chuckled.  "I mean, to have two writers called Clifford King in the same state."

"Well, I'm not really a writer..."

"Were you born Clifford King?"

"What do you mean?"

"Did you have that name from birth?  Have you always been called Clifford King?"

Alison chimed in: "You know, it is funny, I was thinking that very same thing.  I read something by Clifford King once."

Sean joined in now: "Isn't that the writer from up at South Bristol?  You know, the one's who always in the mountains somewhere writing, never gives interviews."

"What was that book of his I read now all those years ago?  Oh yeah, The Hammer Under The Stairs...." There was laughter.

"Yeah, that's the one where the kid..."

"The kid finds a hammer under the stairs that gives evil, mystical powers to the holder", I jumped in.

"So you've read it?"

"Errrmmm.....No.....Well, I'm not sure...."

"You're sure you're not the real Clifford King?" Sean joked.

"Oh, he's the real Clifford King all right, just not THAT Clifford King." Mother George came to my rescue.

"So you were born with the name?"

"Huh...?"

"You really are a Clifford King.  That's your birth name?"

"Oh yeah."

"Cool.  What books have you written again....?"

"Oh well, I'm writing something at the moment.  It's called The Vacant Flame."

"Cool.  Is that horror?"

"No, like I said, I don't write horror."

"So what is it?"

"Well, it's hard to pigeon-hole.  It's sort of like an experience piece."

The Good American

'The Good American' is a part-completed novel I began writing during 2011/12.  I haven't touched it since.  The story is about an American Republican politician, John Mescher.   Mescher is from a poor background - having spent most of his childhood in an orphanage, before being fostered into an average blue collar family - but rises to become a serious presidential candidate.  Yet he is hiding a dark secret that, if discovered, will destroy him completely and even bring down the American system of government.  

It's quite a dramatic premise.  I let the reader in on Mescher's secret fairly early on.  It's then a case of standing in Mescher's shoes (albeit the prose is in the third person) and the suspense in the story is based around the question of whether he gets away with it and how he will avoid detection.

Anyway, here are two important extracts.  The first is right at the very beginning, where we find Mescher in the Catholic children's home and he meets his foster parents-to-be.

THE GOOD AMERICAN

At 14, Mary was too young to keep the child, so he became a ward of county.  In the ensuing five years, he was put through no less than ten foster homes, some of them abusive, until the Meschers saw him.

The child they saw was barely 10, but looked much older, and his mind and emotions were cynical beyond their years.  Cynical and knowing.  He knew things that a 10-year old child should not know, but he did not let on to others that he knew them.  In 18 months at the Three Rivers Catholic Home, the boy had learned the fine arts of hot-wiring, burglary, larceny, as well as achieving an advanced standard well beyond his years across math, English, science, geography and history.

When the Meschers arrived at Three Rivers, they were taken to see the Head Sister, who promised that she would show them no less than four boys.  It was a boy they wanted.  The Meschers were young, confident, affluent and blue collar.  John Mescher worked as a mechanic at a local garage.  Elizabeth Mescher was a secretary in a large law firm in downtown Springfield.  She was infertile, due to a childhood bout of Measles.  From German immigrant families, they wanted desperately for a child and had already adopted a baby boy and a baby girl.  Bitten by the fostering bug, they had taken in a seven-year old girl and thought it would be nice if she could have an older brother.  The Meschers were devout Methodists.  It had been their original intention to start a large family.

“We’d like a boy who is well-behaved.”

“Well, we keep them all in here, Mrs Mescher”, the Sister replied nervously.

“It’s important to us that we’re able to bring him up in a godly way”, Mr Mescher chimed in.  We attend chapel each Sunday.”

“I’m pleased to hear that….Well, here we are.”

They were shown into a small room in which sat a boy, alone.  The floor was a blue linoleum while the walls were a light green, covered here and there with children’s paintings, drawings and murals.

The boy was sat at a hard wooden desk, which seemed to be chained to the floor.  He was hand-painting and covered in red and yellow paint.  His head was shaven.  He looked up at his visitors with wide-eyed bemusement before returning to his work.

“Whattya paintin’?” Elizabeth Mescher chanced, bending forward over the desk and catching the boy’s eye with a smile.

“Jesus”, he replied.

“We encourage the boys to paint images based on what they have learnt from the Bible”, the Sister chimed in.

“What’s Jesus doin’?”

“Nothin’, just on a donkey.”

.............................................................

The next extract fast-forwards to John Mescher (re-named after his foster father) now as a successful adult man in his late 30s on the verge of securing the Republican nomination for President of the United States, an astonishing feat for someone so young.  Yet Mescher is already 'old' and cynical in his mindset and attitudes.  

Here Mescher goes through an internal dialogue with himself.  Despite being successful, he is troubled by what he is doing.  Somewhere deep within him he has a conscience and he is racked by it, but he will still play the game anyway....

.............................................................

He knew that behind the picket fences and the factory gates, the ‘folks’ held him in nothing less than contempt.  But they would still vote for him.  In their millions.  It was their suburban lives that imprisoned them, that shielded them and prevented them from actualising a full humanity.  John had not been a prisoner.  He had already seen the other side, in the Catholic Home at Three Rivers.  He knew that the system was make-believe, and that the morals and values of the fools who elected him were against their own interests.  He held them in contempt and he derived his thrills from the fact that he could express his contempt and scorn openly to them, in speech after speech after speech. 

He blamed their old, he blamed their young, their sick.  And when he had exhausted the scapegoats close to home, he picked on the aliens, the criminals, the welfare dependents.  And when he couldn’t find any more scapegoats in Americaland, he looked abroad – even to the Chinese.

God that was funny!  The speech he made about The Traitors In Our Midst made him crack up every time.  Sometimes he struggled to maintain a straight face while he delivered it, and afterward, when the Secret Service agents, the press people, the campaign workers, the advisers, the groupies and the all the hangers-on were out of sight and he was safely ensconced in his hotel room, he would collapse, sometimes in fits of laughter, at the sincerity of these fools.  They didn’t know what living is.  Their suburbanised lives had trapped them in a facsimile of living.  They were trapped by the 9 to 5, the mortgage, the wife, the kids, by the neighbours, by themselves, by their own feeble minds.

And John was there to justify it all, to act as the realtor agent for society’s hell. By distracting attention and filling their stupid heads with propaganda.

At the same time, John also felt alone.  The trickery he pulled did not convince him or make him the remotest bit happy.  He knew that his life was a facsimile as well.  He knew that, even if elected to the White House, a president has no real transformative power or influence.  Even the greatest presidents could not eradicate the world’s problems.  These problems were the product of a bankrupt social system.

It was in the people that the answer could be found, but not in the sense that the propagandists supposed.  It was that tiny bit of contempt that the man in the mill, the woman in the office, felt for John Mescher that was the last hope.  In that contempt was a small beacon of light to a new system, a democratic system in which men and women would take control of their own lives and at last be fully human.  The contradiction in John Mescher was that he knew this but at the same time he cared little for it.  His job was to propagandise and sell the existing America Dream, not replace it with a better reality. 

But that conflict bit at him.  His conscience had not been corroded by law, business and politics, but it had been tranquilised by the money, security and prestige.  He knew the truth deep down, and he knew that when he spoke to the crowds, their smiles betrayed not joy but contempt, a contempt that would one day turn to action.  He knew that America was fake and finished, and that is why he turned to Chen.

Chen was a wholesale stationery agent working out of a lock-up two miles from downtown San Francisco.  He was a major donor to the Republican Party in Oakland County and had met John at a social function a year earlier, held in an effort to persuade local business of the merits of the failing governor.  Simpson was a terrible governor for small business people, that was the truth.  He was the type of Republican the California party had a habit of inflicting on the nation - i.e. Democratic in habit, culture, mind and spirit, metropolitan in politics and outlook, Republican by affiliation, but probably a pothead and a draft dodger in college.  Simpson certainly was all these things, and worse.

The Australian

'The Australian' is a short story I wrote about an inheritance dispute.  Here's an extract.  I hope you like it!

THE AUSTRALIAN

"So what do you call yourselves...New South Welsh?"

"Errr.....No.....Not exactly", the nice man was starting to get irritating, as nice men sometimes do on ten-hour flights.  She turned in the direction of the stewardess and requested another napkin for her daughter, who was struggling through the complimentary meal of cardboard chicken and chips.  They had already stopped at Dubai and the captain had announced that there was not long to go now - only two hours - but the last minutes felt like time eeking out.  Outside the window, there was nothing to see except cloud and sky.  She did not know where they were exactly - just very vaguely somewhere over southern England.  Manchester could not be far away.

This was their first journey out of Australia.  They had travelled to the other side of the world and into a world that was darker, colder.

When they arrived, the first thing she looked for was the sea.  Until England, all she had seen was clear, blue ocean.  Her father told her that in England she would encounter windswept cliffs that would chill her to the bone and leave her hands numb, and wide cheery seaside promenades drawn like a stage across a brown and green drink.  She did not believe him until she saw it with her own eyes.

The North Sea seemed to stretch from cliff-to-cliff as far as shadow ships that snuck across the horizon through mists and fogs.  The waters were murky - the ocean she remembered back home was bluer, clearer and seemed to flow outward as far as the eye could see from flatlands near shore.

Blood Red

This is the beginning of a short story about a serial killer.

BLOOD RED

On a pitch black night in the dead of winter, a young man made his way to the tavern.  It was the same tavern he had always frequented since he came of age, The Tavern On The Hill.  The young man ordered the same half-pint of bitter that he usually ordered.  The beer was warm and served in a half-pint glass.  He sat at his usual bar stool, and waited.

That night, there were several new customers, Strangers.  The young man had no desire for chatter, and he was not one for gossip. In fact, he despised the people in The Tavern On The Hill.  Their seediness, nastiness, and pettiness, that reflected the seediness, nastiness and pettiness of people in general.

In the corner, two men played darts.  It looked as if they were betting on the outcome of each throw.  Women huddled together in the corners, and old men sat at small tables smoking tobacco in choking clouds of smoke and dust.

Colorado, Colorado

This is the beginning of an attempt at a fun 'filmic' story I wrote maybe 10 years ago - a vampire Western which I called 'Colorado, Colorado'.  The hero, Jack, is a film director whose horrific art becomes reality.

COLORADO, COLORADO

I'd seen all the vampire Westerns and knew the script by then.  Frankly, that whole sub-genre had become something of a cliche.  Regular Jack finds himself out in the middle of nowhere.  Fights the nasty vicious vampires who, coincidentally, find themselves out in the middle of nowhere and wake up at about the same time that Regular Jack is doing his thing.  Jack fights the vampires, gets the girl and everyone lives happily ever after.  I'd seen it, done it, starred in it.  Now I was directing one.  

The Bibliophile

'The Bibliophile' is an attempt at a short story with a twist, in which I draw a character called 'Willard', a confused man who is going through a mid-life crisis.  I won't reproduce the whole story here, just an extract.

THE BIBLIOPHILE

Willard took the call from McKay at 9 sharp.  It was the early hours of the morning in Kingston, but McKay was concerned.

"Please don't leave me financially embarrassed, Willard.  You know how much it costs to maintain Easy Rider."

Willard said little.  His legendary booming voice had long departed into the ether of dirty tricks, false hopes and lost confidences.  He wilted back into his large, comfortable leather chair and searched skyward.  A short, pathetic man, it would be easy to lose Willard in that visage.  There seemed no escape, soon he would be bankrupt.  The books were all the valuables he had left.

Willard collected books.  He was obsessed with them.  You might say Willard was a bibliophile.  Books consumed his life, but now that life - a carefully-crafted pretense of acuity and success, honed over many years in business - was about to collapse.  

Things had really started to go downhill on the death of Mother.  She was the rock among willows.  She was the steer and the dominating spirit of Willard's life.  

It was Mother who had told him not to marry Maria.  He had met Maria at the Rock Dance Hall, their favourite place in the village, but Mother had disapproved of her, said she was not good enough for my Willard, and so the love dream had gone and to Mother Willard capitulated.  Today, without Mother, Willard was lost.

Looking At Stars

I thought I'd like to try and convey what I think about stars - the importance of them, the inherent puzzle and mystery they represent to me.  This is my imperfect attempt.

LOOKING AT STARS

I love the star,

But I can’t reach it,

It’s fire, nuclear explosions,

A massive filament,

That I cannot touch,

And never will,

The star won’t last forever,

It will dwarf to red,

And a new star will be born in its place,

The cycle continues,

The star is life,

But what sort of life?

Beyond my reach,

Beyond my time,

Lighting worlds I will never see,

Heat dissipating life,

Forged in hells of fire and gas,

Sending rock and iron,

Across endless space,

That brutal crucible,

The star,

The root of all that is and will be,

A formulary that Promethean Man has sought to emulate,

With steel, but he never will,

Man will perish, the stars will shine on,

Man depends on the stars,

The stars will never need Man,

Why should these stars not be gods?

Why should not this star be God?

A star is as good an avatar as any,

Once, incalculable moons ago, we did not know fire,

We invented ideals instead,

But now we know what fire is,

And we know the stars are fires,

They seem to loop together,

Like a circuit of light, hanging in the sky,

Like the ancients,

I am trapped here,

I cannot express myself,

I can only look up in awe,

At fires hanging in the sky,

The real creators,

The ancients asked ‘What?’

I ask ‘Why?’

Mother Wit

This is adapted from a scene in the novel 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' by Maya Angelou.  

MOTHER WIT

“Marguerite, I’m going to share with you some mother wit”, she said while whisking the eggs in the large old teak bowl that was always brought out on Sundays.

“Mother wit?  What is that?”

“It’s the most important thing in life: wisdom.  Marguerite, don’t be intimidated by people who put on fancy airs.  They have bits of paper, like a sterile Shorthorn dressed up in frills and bells.”  Before continuing, she looked towards me and I nodded vacantly to indicate my assent.

“People with lots of credentials, like college professors, aren’t always superior.  The wisest people can be those who can’t read or go to school.  They have something no school can give you: experience.”  She glared at me sternly as she said this, tilting her head slightly in that way I recognized.  I made myself straighter in the Windsor high back and stared back up at her evenly, feeling like I was being interrogated.  She stopped whisking, and lowered to a stage whisper: “People who can’t read can be more educated, even more intelligent, than college professors.”

“You mean like Old Man Cumbernickle.  He can fix anything, but I’ve never seen him read.”

“Yes, a bit like him.  Now, how long have the Cumbernickles been around these parts?”

“Since the War?” I shot back with hope.

“Indeed.  Since Grand Old General Lee rode through here on a white horse.”

“That reminds me, you were going to tell me about great-grandpa and the other black Confederates who fought with Lee.  I promised I would write something for a school project.”

She ignored me.  “Think back all those generations that the Cumbernickles have farmed here.  They even owned slaves at one point, the only blacks to do so that anybody can remember.”

“But owning slaves is terrible.”

“Marguerite, do you remember Mr Kent, the judge whom your father got into trouble with?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he was ignorant.  There is no excuse for ignorance, it should never be tolerated.  But remember, people who are illiterate deserve understanding.  More than understanding.  Like Cumbernickle, they bear the wisdom of generations.”

Lost in the Forest

This is a self-reflective piece that I wrote recently.  It looks back to a period of my life when I lived in a town in the Ruhr Valley, Germany.

LOST IN THE FOREST

I lived in a coal city where derricks and pit heads dotted the landscape.  I worked in that place, among the dirt, dark and fog.  Then there were the in-between places, those green spaces that stood out, where you could walk and experience peace and fresh air.

I liked trees best and loved the forest that curled around the city like a protective hug.  The forest went on for miles and miles.  Tens of miles.  It was dark, wet, cold and the trees were tall and the trunks huge, the thick dark brown edifices of Nature towering into the green carpet above, the yellow and blue glistening and reflecting through, blinding me as I stared up at it.

One day I decided that I would be lost in the forest.  Not lost as in not knowing the way or where I am, but lost as in not knowing the way I want to go or where I want to be.  This wasn’t anything pretentious.  I wasn’t a seeker searching for The Way.

But I was lost.  Or I wanted to escape.  What did I want to escape?  Life, the world.  To where I wanted to be.  ‘Lost’ would be how they defined my situation, but I would be found.

I reached a muddy knoll a few feet into the forest and I turned back towards civilization and thought about going back.  I saw the red slate roofs, the industry, the cars, the tiny figures moving around.  I did not want to return to that world.  I wanted to find my own world, where I would be home.

The Beachcombers

This is part of the opening chapter of a novel I will probably never finish, provisionally titled 'The Beachcombers'.  I started it some seven years ago now and haven't touched it since.  The setting is the east coast of England.  The planned story mixes a shipwreck tale with undersea treasure, espionage and adventure, and reflects a mix of influences - Erskine Childers, John Buchan (especially), Hergé and Enid Blyton.  I have in mind a story that will appeal to anybody who likes a good adventure, but especially older teenagers and young adults.

The manuscript was written back in 2012 and is a bit naive, with lots of over-description, but I hope you enjoy it.

THE BEACHCOMBERS

Chapter One

It was bitter cold that morning, but this did not deter Tom and Alice.  With Benji they strolled out of Edgecliff Villas towards the North Beach at 7 a.m.  The streets that greeted them were not the carnival of noise and seedy commerce of the previous evening, but an eerie quietude, broken only by the whirr of a milk float and the occasional barking of a neighbourhood dog.  This was a Northern seaside town in the late Autumn.  Benji, always excited to be walked, strained at the leash and panted, his tongue flapping and his head lurching left and right, like a shadow boxer, determined to make contact with any sign of pavement life.  Now and then another dog-walker would appear, and Benji would quickly go into attack mode, barking and yelping furiously at the opposing dog before Tom could calm him. 

From the distance, the sea was a dark blue, and at its deepest like black.  Where it touched the sky, it deposed into a band of orange and yellow that signalled the Sun but the sky was still grey and purple, only now just breaking into the paler blue that meant dawn.  As they walked closer to the seafront, grey outlines of distant ships were discernible and they saw the first fishing vessels leave the harbour and venture out to water.  The beach itself was reached from the Promenade via a series of steep steps that were only revealed at low tide.  The stone was greased with green-coloured slime and galls that made each step precarious.  Tom carried Benji down the steps while Alice trailed carefully behind them.  Below, waves crashed and rolled, and pounded the shore line.  The old man stood and watched them from behind the sea wall under the shelter of the cliffs that towered toward the sky.  The beach itself seemed to stretch along the coastline as far as the eye could see.  To the north stood the steepest cliffs they had ever seen pocked by mysterious caves and coves, and in the far distance a headland that could be reached only across dangerous shingle-laden sands that would be deluged in high tide.  To the south the beaches were populated by shore fishermen, and beyond them lay the marshes and flatlands that lined the bay and marked the rough, windswept coast for many miles down to the spurn.

“Let's go north, to the headland”, Tom said. 

“What, all that way...?  Nooo...it's miles” shouted Alice.

“Come on....”, Tom insisted.

They struggled through the soft sandy bank by the sea wall but soon reached the harder low foreshore.  Beyond it, the water seemed like the azore of a clear October sky, green, dark and a little murky in places, bright in others, and it shimmered with the fledgling yellow light of the morning.  Tom marched on, determined to make progress, while Benji and Alice playfully ran in and out of the sea as the waves crept up the shoreline.  Benji yelped whenever he was caught by the water and, running higher up the beach, shook himself dry before chasing Alice again.  Soon it started to rain, but the wind took care of most of it, blowing the droplets into the blueish-green drink before it could lash their faces.  Eventually the beach started to narrow and became only pebble and rock.  They saw huge concrete slabs submerged in the mud and leaning into the cliffs.  They appeared to have been part of some man-made structure.  The sea had made fissures in them and where it had eroded the rocks there were cracks and crevices, hiding places for crab and lobster.

Tom first saw the old man talking to Alice.  Benji was running around the stranger frantically, yapping and jumping up at him.  Tom walked back towards them.  “Hello...”, he shouted.

“Aye, mornin'...”, the old man replied, nodding his head slightly in acknowledgement and quickly letting out two puffs of smoke as he re-breathed and bit into his pipe.  “Goin' to the headland, are yee?”, he peered down at the eldest one knowingly.  “That's what the young lassie here tells me.”

Tom nodded back.  The old man had what seemed like a funny voice.  It sounded like an Irish accent, but he couldn't quite place it. 

 “That's right.  Up to the headland”.

“Arrr....well, yees, yer wanting to be careful.  Out here, the weather's getting' bad and the tide'll be in before yer know it.”

The old man had a full head of grey hair that was dark at the roots and was combed rightwards from a side parting, making it look like a pleasant wave rolling across his pink scalp.  His bright green eyes were scrunched-up and seemed to evince an almost permanent state of curiosity.  His face appeared weathered and he was unshaven, but his manner was somehow keen and penetrating.  Every now and then, he would gently lift his tobacco pipe out of his mouth to speak, and at the end of each sentence he would plonk it back there with a flourish, taking a quick breath before lifting it out and speaking again.

“Where do you live then?” Alice asked, in a slightly impertinent tone.

“Oh, over there, in the chalet.” The old man pointed back to a row of brightly-coloured beach huts near the sea wall. 

“You live in one of those huts!” cried Alice in astonishment.

“Yes, it does fine for me.”

“But why….?”

“Alice, stop it….” interrupted Tom, but the old man seemed unembarrassed.

“Oh well, I own the Sands Café, you see, and in my case I stay nice and warm there.”  He bit the pipe again and this time Tom noticed the smoke emitting from the bowl was a blueish colour.  Tom made a mental note of this but decided not to ask the old man what it was.

“Anyhow”, the old man continued, “if yer goin’ up to the headland, be sure yer back down here ‘fore noon.  Tide’ll get yer otherwise.  If you come back this way, stop by the café.  I’ll have a mug of cocoa for each of yer.”  And at that, the old man walked off.

Cnotta

A poem I wrote recently.  The title is for one of the Saxon chieftains of Old England.

CNOTTA

In the North,

By a winding river, bounded by thick reeds and trees,

Where swans sing across misted ings,

And fly over gentle, fertile fields,

Stands a plain, vale green,

Where Saxon Man founded his farms,

Under the Pale of Cnotta,

Across the northern sea he had come,

To conquer an Island Race,

Who lived on the edge of the World,

Wild, blue-skinned and savage,

Dancing sexily to the drums they swayed,

Hunting, fighting and mating,

Their children fierce and bold,

Kaw-calling as they went,

Taking what they wanted, living in Nature,

But they were civilised by Rome,

And that was the end,

Of Pretanic Man,

Weakened, he gave way to the Saxon,

Farmer, explorer, adventurer,

War lord, law-giver,

He created England.