by Katie Munnik
‘No, it’s true. You think mushrooms would grow out here in the sand and wind elsewise? I tell you: cow.’
I found a flight feather from a goose – charcoal grey and tapered – and I handed it to Stanley.
‘Remarkable,’ he said, and winked. ‘The Celts were fond of geese. Did you know that? Carved them all over the place, they did. Excellent artistry.’
‘You have anything else to teach me, then?’
He laughed and took a notebook out of his pocket to slip the feather in.
Down at beach level, Stanley showed me Jovey’s well. More proof to the story, he said. It was a piped stream with an iron spout that poured out in a small pool on the shingle. He cupped his hands, the water clear, offered. I shrugged, and he said it was sweet.
‘The only fresh water you’ll find along this stretch of coast. It’s been a relief on a hot afternoon a hundred times. I wouldn’t fool you, you know.’ The corners of his eyes creased softly as he spoke, and I smiled. ‘It’s cold as January, mind, but deliciously fresh.’
I bent my head, my chin touching his palms as I drank. ‘It’s lovely.’
‘Yes.’ With a wet finger, he traced my jawline, the indent under my ear.
After we married, we crossed the bridge every day and walked the shore together. It was our own world, a little lonely and weatherworn, neglected now, perhaps. When Stanley’s parents had been courting, things were different. Lively, even. There were tennis courts out there and open golf courses. The young people used to come here from Aberlady and Gullane; further afield, too. In the winter, they curled on a flooded pond beside the Marl Loch. Hard to believe now. There was nothing here but rabbits, wild flowers, long grass and the ruins of the clubhouse scoured by the sandy wind. A rickle of stones, Stanley said, and I told him this was better than all the jolly tennis courts in Scotland.
We spent our days among the grasses and the flowers and he picked armfuls of meadowsweet. Loved by Queen Elizabeth, it was, and lovely still, all tall, dark stems and dainty cloudy clusters. She had it strewn on her floors and all who loved her called it Queen-of-the-Meadow. In Stanley’s hands, the flowers smelled of honey. I picked blueweed, its thick stalks rough, but its colour so like the sky, each flower an open throat. He told me blueweed is also viper’s bugloss. From the Greek for ox tongue, the leaves rough as flesh.
We invented new names for the flowers around us. Gingerleaf. Dawnwort. Crimson Karst Creeper. Stanley told me about karst landscapes, how limestone dissolved into underground channels, sinkholes and caves. ‘We’ll visit Canada,’ he said, ‘and see the limestone by the Great Lakes. There are caves there with stalactites that grow four inches every thousand years.’
I said that sounded like poetry – a millennium to span a child’s hand.
‘Or two thumbs touching,’ he said. Those were days for nonsense and poems, stories and stones and touching. Sitting on the shingle with the dunes behind us, I laughed as he wove stories of smugglers hiding in the old ironstone mines nearby. All their hidden loot long gone, still sought, and today just a song to sing in the wind. Tea, brandy, gin and aniseed. French salt. Currants and figs, sugar candy, coffee, chocolate, Dutch cotton, Indian handkerchiefs, gunpowder, snuff.
Another afternoon and we walked under grey skies with the city smudged from the horizon, only the sea before us. I wondered if the storm would blow inland, but Stanley thought it would stay out at sea.
‘It’s further away than it feels,’ he said. I shivered, and he wrapped an arm around me. Rollers broke at the mouth of the bay, showing white over the distant sandbar. There were white gannets, too, out at sea, white against the waves, their long beaks like spears, their heads yellowed like the grass. They don’t often come up as far as Aberlady, but there were hundreds of them that day, circling high, then with a plummeting crash, diving into the sea, hunting fish.
Then he told me the story of Sandy Gibb, who rambled this coast a century before. Maybe more. So many stories carry no dates. ‘Poor man believed he was made of glass. Rather precarious in the wind, don’t you think? But they say he loved to walk the shoreline. The trouble was, he would get stuck. Suddenly stopped stock-still by the fear of shattering. He would wait until someone came along, then call out, always the same thing: “I’ll thank you for a shunt, sir.” The locals understood and they’d give him a gentle push to start up again. Then, he’d go on his way.’
And what else did I tell him on those windy afternoons? That I loved him. That all this would remain – the sand, the shore – and he would return. That there would be time for stories, for children. I never said enough, I’m sure of that.
The bridge feels longer when I cross it alone. Stanley and I counted the steps – when? Two hundred days ago. Two hundred paces. It is only one yard wide, so we never managed to walk side by side, though we did try.
The dog-leg in the middle of the bridge makes me smile. Crooked as the Aberlady high street, which feels as if the builders failed to agree, but Stanley said that the bend on the bridge was meant to counter the action of the waves.
I take the path to the left so that I might walk close to the sea. There are ducks on the Marl Loch, and a light breeze stirs the surface until it shines like fish scales. I’ve brought one of Mrs Hambleton’s books with me and there is an old map printed there. The footbridge is marked and the Marl Loch, which looks longer on paper. There are rabbit warrens, and old fences marked too, old quarries and standing stones. Celtic, perhaps. Stanley hadn’t mentioned those; I could try to find them and send sketches in my next letter. The books said stone pillars like these represented a link between heaven and earth. I wonder what Jehovah Grey would make of that. On the map, the Point is labelled Jophie’s Neuk, so there’s another telling of that story, too.
Down at the beach, the tide has pulled away, the saltings stretching wide before me and the sands are silver with light. Some beaches are good for seashells. If the currents are kind and strong in the right places, they are carried up unbroken to the sand. Here, you only find small shells and fragments. Broken mussels, razor clams and periwinkles. On a very lucky day, you might find cowries, white as teeth, small as children’s fingernails.
I scan the beach for driftwood and sea coal, which would make a nice change from having to buy. The papers said that they are drafting Welsh boys to the coalfields now that the French and Belgian mines are gone. I wonder if they might do that over in Fife, too. A funny way to spend the war, though underground might be as good as up in an aeroplane, or better. Safer. And you could go home for tea. I wish Stanley could.
Out on the Forth, a few large ships sit heavy in the water. Regular visitors now, patrolling the coast to keep the bridge and Grangemouth safe. Even the ocean is crowded and almost as bad as Haddington’s streets or North Berwick. Nothing solitary left. Everything is being done to keep us safe.
A crowd of rooks flies out over the waves, their wings shadowed and level against the level sea. More stand together on the sand, pacing and picking through the seaweed that lies stretched and drying in the sun. They look solemn in black robes, but their over-long beaks give them a funny dignity, not quite grim as they turn the seaweed over, looking for the soft bodies of stranded fish.
Beyond the wrack, a white stone sits on the sand, as round as a fist, and I think it might look rather nice on the window sill. Pleasing. As I step closer, I see that it isn’t a stone at all, but a teacup. A perfect, unchipped teacup sitting impossible among the broken seashells, a blue Cunard stamp on the side. A crowned lion holding the globe. How strange to think of passenger ships in these military days. How long was the teacup out at sea? Or has it been buried here in the sand and only just surfaced? The glaze is not sanded or grit-roughened, but smooth to the touch, and it fits neatly into my cardigan pocket. I’ll take it home and wash it out, rinsing away the sand and the salt, and set it on the shelf, one cup mismatched, saucerless.
Further around the shore, the ground is muddy, and my shoes grow heavy before I make it as far as Jovey’s Neuk.
I wonder about walking barefoot, but instead, I turn inland to walk through the dune hills.
Then I spot the soldiers. Their lorries are parked on the flat land between the hawthorn trees and a tall machine crawls across the grass on caterpillar treads. The soldiers stand with shovels and binoculars. Two of them notice me and the taller one waves to get my attention, his pale hair like the grass. I wave back, keep walking, and they must pick up their pace because they are beside me faster than I anticipate, stopping in front of me so I stop, too.
‘You can’t go on. You’ll have to go back, miss,’ the taller one says. He speaks with an accent and I wonder where he was born.
‘I hadn’t realized the coast was closed.’
‘You could put it that way.’
The other man speaks with a deeper, local voice, an older, slower manner that isn’t used to contradiction.
‘We will be mining this coastline. It won’t be safe for civilians to walk here henceforth. Defences, you understand.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘That is unfortunate. It’s a pleasant walk.’ Ahead, the shoreline looks churned up, muddy and dangerous.
‘Don’t you worry. There aren’t any mines in yet.’
‘You will need to stop here, however,’ the fair-haired soldier says.
‘Stop?’ I say. ‘I’m not sure I understand what you mean.’
‘Turn around or head inland.’
‘Ah, yes. I see.’
‘Public safety. Not a place now for civilians. Would you like to be shown the way?’
‘No, no. I am perfectly all right on my own.’ I stride out with straight shoulders and don’t give them time to disagree. One of them coughs and I imagine a comment, and I don’t turn to grace either of them with a look. Courtesy, even here.
That night, there is an air raid. The warden comes along the street with his whistle, a siren cutting the sky. Through the wall, I hear Miss Baxter’s chair scrape and the cupboard door bangs closed. I collect my gas mask from the hallway, a folded cardigan, my framed wedding photo. Then every door on the street opens and out we all go, methodical rabbits emerging in the dark, hunch-shouldered whatever the weather and scuttling to the shelter in the yard at the end of the row. It is set back from the houses, a simple corrugated steel hut, dug away into the ground in among the gardens, covered with a thick layer of soil and turf.
Miss Baxter has trouble closing her front door, so I pause and help her along, the two of us the last through the door of the shelter. If the houses had all been occupied or the men home, there never would have been space for us all in the shelter, but as it is, we fill the benches, sitting squeezed together and listening to the planes and the siren. Beside me, Miss Baxter holds a handkerchief between her fingers, and she speaks into my ear, her breath warm and worried in the dark. ‘Maybe I should go away. My sister might have space. She lives out past Dumfries. It’s the other sea there, you know. Not that it will be any the safer there, mind. Though perhaps I can help. Her grandchildren are there from Glasgow, and rations might stretch further when we group together.’ She pats my hand, kindly enough, the handkerchief damp against my skin. She says she would return, in the spring, or after Hogmanay, depending on the weather and the war.
She said all this, just the same way, last week during the last raid. We sit in the shelter and wait for the all-clear. I close my eyes, imagining onions and potatoes growing in the gardens behind the row. Maybe it is the cool, dank air, or the smell of the earth. They fill my mind, their hidden skins and whiskery roots loosely gripping the soil, their flesh white and waxy under the earth, vulnerable.
When the world ends, I do not want to be huddled in a garden shelter, waiting to breathe brick-dust, or the slosh of spilled life around me. I want to be out in the wind. Where the birds catch and hold the air currents above the water. I want that space between the mud and the sky as my own. It is only hope that keeps them apart, isn’t it? Only blind, ignorant hope. But most days, it works.
4
August 1940
Our Dear Silly Rental House,
Aberlady
Dear Stanley,
We must be on the same wavelength, don’t you think? Me about to send you poems and you already writing that you’ve got your mitts on some Lawrence. It would be interesting to hear just how an American edition ended up at Padgate. The tides wash in all sorts, even down south in military old England.
I thought poetry might be a good distraction for you, and Lawrence isn’t rocks, he’s earthy, so it seemed the logical choice. (Yes, I also remember you mentioned him, so there.) And yes, of course, my dear I hear why that passage spoke to you. Direct utterance from the instant and the soul and the mind and the body singing at once – that’s you through and through. That’s how we all should be and so few, so very few of us are; still, you are, my dear, sweet husband. I wonder how long that word will sound strange. Husband. Such an old-fashioned word, all cultivating and tilling the soil, but fitting and perhaps that’s because you look after me well. And I, you, I hope, even at a distance. My love is strong and will enfold you. Oh goodness, why do all these words look so trite when I write them down? I am not becoming a sap in your absence. Nor a frustrated poet. I promise you that. Maybe it is just that I do so little talking alone in the house that I’m forgetting how to put words in a natural order.
But now that you have a copy of the poems, I can save a few more pennies and keep my edition here at home. Look at that, a thrifty-housewife thought. There will be salvation after all.
Since your last letter, I’ve been rereading Lawrence myself and finding it such fitting stuff for this windswept place. The wild common is here, isn’t it? The rabbits like handfuls of brown earth, and all the gorse, too. I love how Lawrence compares them to flame. Of course they are. How could they be anything but flame, now that he’s given us the image. And then in the ending with all that is right, all that is good, all that is God takes substance. It is such a happy accident that God and good sound so much the same in English, a fact that must have led a great many into prayer. Everyone rejoices in the good, and it could be there is gospel in that.
With no book to include and no more poetic or theological thoughts, I can only send these poor words and all my love and more. Think of me tonight and always and know you are loved.
Your
Jane
Sometimes, I finish a letter and I can’t hear myself in it at all. As though someone else has written it and it couldn’t possibly be fair to Stanley to post it. How can we be connecting if I can’t set my own words on the paper, just silly well-behaved, expected ones? Looking back over it, I might sound sweeter than I am, more literate – or trying to be. It isn’t me.
I would like to speak with him about the other poems, the ones that haunt me. The young wife and the grey-haired mother and damn it, Lawrence found words for all that and if Stanley were here, we could talk about it all and find a way through. It is only ever the talking that helps. Nothing else is spontaneous enough. No, that’s false. Touch helps when the talking is there, too. If it wasn’t, touch could never be enough. What would it be? Indulgent? Mute. Perhaps whatever it is that the minister calls sin. I wonder if he and Connie can talk things through properly. The doilies make me doubt it, but I shouldn’t judge. My mum has given me doilies, too. Ancient family things the aunts passed her way, packed between sheets of tissue paper like old leaves, their colour bleached away, their skeletons preserved as lace.
Doilies be damned. Stanley should have stayed at home.
We didn’t ever try to concoct a reason or an excuse to keep him here, even a little bit longer. Surely, his mother might have been that reason, but he spoke of duty. Duty be damned, too. There’s murder in it all, and I can’t see anything properly. The haar has been rolling in from the sea these days, death-white and wet. It hides the laneway behind the house, the trees by the kirk and all along the road and all the fields will be filled with white and the streets feel cluttered with fear. East Lothian seems to be filling
up with fog and foreign men. So many troops here these days and always more Allied aeroplanes overhead. Hurricanes and Spitfires, dreadful names all. Even the Mosquitoes are unpleasant. And every day, more news on the wireless to listen to all alone.
That’s not quite true, is it? It’s hard to be alone with Miss Baxter through the wall. I listen to her cough. My mother worried about the other noises coming through the paper-thin walls but it’s not the involuntaries that concern me. It is the deliberate, subtle, mid-afternoon throat clearing. The thought. The pause. The second cough. Enough to get me on my feet whatever the weather and beat it outdoors. Which is better than staying at home and worrying.
I put on my cardigan, and tie a scarf neatly around my hair. I should do the neighbourly thing and go round to see Miss Baxter, but then I remember Connie mentioned afternoon tea in the manse. ‘Just a wee gathering for the ladies. Better than knitting at home, perhaps.’ She said to bring along whatever I was working on, then sensed the thin pause before I nodded, and kindly mentioned that there would be needles and service woollies patterns there, too, with suitable victory wool. ‘It will be mainly mothers and widows, I’m afraid. Don’t worry, though. They’ll like you. They keep a friendly eye open for young wives.’
That was the hat to wear, of course. Young wife. How strange. From grand passion, all hands and mouths in secret, however much we tried to be good, and all that longing for even our fingers to touch, but didn’t I long for more? And didn’t we teach each other? Everything. And now, to be a wife. Sitting in a well-behaved circle of mothers and widows. Knitting damned socks.
I don’t know if Stanley would laugh or weep to see me.
At the manse, I can’t fathom why they painted the parlour green. The ladies’ faces catch the colour like a smell. It is all rather grim, but I smile and make an effort. Connie looks so young and well tucked in, her yellow housedress crisp, the skirt sensibly calf length and her shoes polished. Square toes for youthful swagger, as the papers say. ‘If you like, you can sit beside me and I’ll get you started.’ Tact, thy name is manse-wife. I smile again thankfully.