Salt

by Jeremy Page

  3

  The Sail (or the Map and Sail)

  The mud swelled and shrank round the house, dislodging the tiles on the roof and knocking the chimneypot on the huh, as they say in Norfolk. Inside, the floor buckled on imaginary tree roots. Damp soaked up the wall, making screws fall from the plaster like rotten teeth in the middle of the night, while my grandmother buried her head in the pillow. Soon there was no trace of Hands. Everything he’d touched, fixed, put right, he’d only halted on its path to eventual ruin.

  No sign, of course, apart from the ruddy-faced little madam down there in the cot. This unpromising bundle of wet nappies and watering eyes was my mother. It was an uneasy relationship from the start. The baby had screamed, starting from the moment the patchwork quilt was hoisted on the Pip, screamed louder when the little boat slipped down the Morston Channel, and louder still for the rest of the day. Exhausted and bloody-minded, Goose had struggled out late in the afternoon to scan the marshes, the Point and the open sea beyond. Where’s the bugger gone? Behind her, Blakeney’s church bells kept ringing, the occasional volley of a rifle went off, and an anti-aircraft gun blasted a ten-gun salute from the bank. Now some lunatic was down Blakeney Quay firing a musket into the sky. A small celebratory group had gathered while crows circled the town like vultures.

  Highly confused at the time, Goose may have thought the militia were out for Hands, had possibly caught the rascal, were at this minute dragging him back from the sandbanks after sinking his patchwork boat. It seemed the whole world - already gone crazy in the last few years - had entered a new state of insanity.

  Goose looked to the clouds for answers and saw extraordinary shapes in them. That morning there’d been cirrus, fine and ragged at the top of the sky. The wind had teased them into long flowing mare’s-tails hanging across the marsh with the spirit of wild horses in full gallop. But below them had arrived the solitary puffs of altocumulus, with ribbed bellies and candyfloss tops. They came slowly over the heath and down on to the saltmarsh, sluggish with the weight of so many images of war: refugee clouds filled with people afoot, long marches on blank landscapes, smouldering cities filled with fire, children playing ambush in the wastes of rubble. And there was Hands where she would always see him, fighting the waves in the sinking Pip, giant dogfish gnawing at the gunwale. He bashes one on the snout with the end of an oar, but it’s a losing battle. And squeezed between the clouds she sees glimpses of her daughter’s life to come. Flowers grown in weird patterns, wooden ducks painted in gaudy colours and peppered with lead shot, a boat painted like the sky itself.

  Some time late in the afternoon, Goose remembered the baby and went in to find it pink from yelling. The tiny fists were clenched with rage and an angry red tongue flicked in a mouth rimmed with white fury. She carried her daughter outside, pretending to abandon her in the hope it might encourage a fear so great that natural instinct would make it shut up. The baby was laid on the grass to yell at the sky while Goose went down the lane to continue her cloud-watching. There wasn’t much sky left. Some clouds were moving against the direction of the wind, jostling for space in the ever-crowding air. And it made sudden sense to her. The clouds weren’t about the man who’d just left her, but about that ridiculous war. It must be over.

  The clouds became so full of the nonsense babble of good wishes and hopes that the insights she was hoping to glean about the vanishing of the man or the arrival of the baby were totally obliterated. Through the hawthorn hedge she occasionally spied on her daughter, still lying on the lawn, screaming and punching at imaginary foes. The sounds of marsh, the creeks, the guns in Blakeney and the terrified birds had not stilled the child.

  Goose looked again at the glimpse of the open sea and knew the man was not coming back. Hands had stuck his dumb smile out from the mud and politely welcomed that mud-creature uprooting herself towards him; he’d fixed a few things, rubbed his stomach, won a few tricks in the Map and Sail, stitched a quilt, caulked and pitched a clinker boat, then sailed off into the sunset. Gone for good. But long tongues have the way of whipping up clean farewells into all sorts of complicated fictions. Norfolk claims all and confuses all issues. In the Map and Sail the men argued furiously about the stranger who used to fleece them every Friday night: - A poker whiz, yeah, sharp-shooter, reckon he come from Lou-ee-siana on one o’ them paddle yachts an’ all them furs an’ blokes with thin moustaches an’ gold teeth - He ain’t never been outta Norfolk, you prat! - So where’s he gone then, the Seagull? - Don’t you mention that place hair, you hair? - He got you too, Arthur, got you good an’ proper, hain’t he? - Don’t you come near me now, he got my watch on his wrist remember, I ain’t singin’ his praises, juss hope Annie don’t never stop believin’ that watch got dropped in the creek . . .

  As the years passed Hands became everything in turn from a conchy to a chappie sent down from Whitehall to check out Blakeney’s fighting spirit, to an agent from the brewery with a sensitive palate for tasting the water Arthur Quail added out back - Din’t you never think o’ that, Arthur? - On the run, came the answer from the publican. Learned his cards in the nick, din’t he. Kept his head down an’ din’t get pissed an’ din’t say nothin’ to no one, in case we’d blow the whistle on him. Bloke on the run from the MP. I seen his type in 1917. Hour square-bashin’ up at Catterick, two days hitchin’ rides to get away. You go on the run, where you gonna end up? - Blakeney being the obvious answer - And they’d not be let off the hook yet - you get a train till it come to the end of the line, bury yourself in a load of spuds and get a lift in a lorry, flag down a haycart an’ bum a lift in that a while, nick a bike, end up walking you name it till you get to the coast an’ can’t get no further without gettin’ wet. Thass right here. They listen to him, nursing their pints, thinking of the world’s cutthroats planning cosy evenings in the Map and Sail. We gotta be on our guard now, you lissen, ’cause I heard ’em talk, I have. I heard ’em in places you ain’t been an’ they all say this is a good place to hang low. I seen blokes sew ’emselves up in mailbags with a label got Blakeney Quay writ on it. I heard ’em up Norwich, I tell you. Go to Blakeney, they say, you get you a map an’ go to Blakeney. Bloke up there named Sammy Craske got a good watch on his wrist an’ he play a lousy hand o’ cards. Eye starts twitchin’ the moment he got him an ace . . .

  And causing a stir there’s a voice from the back of the room, a voice rising out of his drink like that of some half-drowned mariner. It’s the longshoreman, man of the marsh, folded into a pub chair and unafraid of the man behind the bar.

  ‘He got your map, Arthur Quail, don’t you forget he got your map.’

  It silences the pub.

  On 9 March 1945, two months before Hands vanished, Arthur Quail’s great map of the North Sea was taken from the Map and Sail. It had hung there for thirty years, becoming indistinct under a layer of smoke and dust. But it was a fine map, with a glorious compass rose in the German Bight, fathom contours, anchorages, wrecks, parallels and meridians. And though it needed updating with the hazards of several million tons of wreckage sunk in two world wars, it was still a working chart, and Hands wanted it, even though Germany was pockmarked with dart holes.

  It had probably been put up there in the first place so these Norfolk men would know where the German Empire was, but now, in the dying months of the Second World War, the map itself was causing trouble. Two months earlier, on a Saturday night, Captain Mayfield (retired) had downed his pint, wiped the smears of froth from the tips of a moustache limp with beer, and told Arthur Quail to take down the map. A threat to national security. Information in wrong hands. Helping Hun get to Norwich quick and all that.

  Arthur Quail had a problem with authority and a great liking for his map, so told the retired captain that if Herr Goering fell through the ceiling on the strings of a parachute the only direction he’d learn would be the way to Mayfield’s cottage. A showdown, which Quail - the pint puller - easily won, due to the weary cheer from the other men in the pub. Mayfield
stormed out to ‘inspect the sandbags’.

  Hands, my grandfather, had watched all this from his poker table. A man of few words, and with a clear reason to keep silent, he was a natural card player. Regulars at the Friday-night lock-in: Sammy Craske, oysterman, good with a low hand but liable to panic with a queen or ace - estranged relationship with his mother was said to be behind it; Albie Smee, a good liar, but too mean to capitalize on his natural skills; Soggy Brean, a ‘weeper’; and Will Langore, a wealthy farmer and authoritarian, whose two great-nephews - one of whom is my father - Hands will never know.

  I have a photo from one of these nights in 1945. The bar looks empty, but in the corner beneath the stuffed pike that brought Hands his luck sit the six men. It’s a bad picture, scratched on the journey from pocket to pocket over the years, smudged by each finger that has smoothed it flat, surviving under grease and dust, turning the shadowy men into the ghosts they became. It’s been passed around a good deal. My grandfather - if that’s him - possibly sensed the scrutiny of coming years, so has turned his back to the lens.

  There’s Arthur Quail’s great map of the North Sea hanging over the bar. It’s been hung upside down to spite Captain Mayfield, so the photo must have been taken in the first few months of 1945.

  And here’s Hands, sitting on a royal flush in the Map and Sail. Over the baize, Arthur Quail’s sweating, defeated, too broke to carry on, but too weak to walk away. He calls. What with? the others join in. You ain’t got nothin’ leff, Arthur. Shut it! Go on, as a mate, show us, he implores Hands. The man’s silence has him riled. You got an ace an’ king, ain’t you? - It’s too late - I said shut it, Sammy! Juss let me know, eh? And that’s the moment my grandfather points to his prize - the map that has hung above the bar for thirty years.

  The longshoreman looks hard at Arthur Quail, glad that his comment about the map has brought back all these painful memories. The others in the bar stare into their pints. They know each time the bloody map is mentioned it’ll end in tears. The longshoreman lights his pipe and gazes into the smoke, as if practising the cloud skills Goose has been teaching him.

  From beyond the horizon Hands pulls a final volte-face. May 1949, and an article appears in the Eastern Daily Press titled ‘We Just Love Them German Tunes’:

  What is better now the evenings are drawing out than to take a hearty stroll across the wild marshes of the North Norfolk coast before retiring to the gentle old-world charm of the local pub for a warm pint of beer and a singsong to anti-English wartime German songs.

  Alerted to this phenomenon by Captain Mayfield, resident of Gunner Creek Cottage in Blakeney, we dispatched our reporter to the Map and Sail dressed in deer-stalker and binoculars. True enough, as the evening wore on, and tongues became loosened, regulars collected round the piano at the far end of the bar with Mrs Balls at the keys. An instrument probably not tuned since the turn of the century - and hammered ever since - the music began with local favourites of ‘The Bold Young Sailor’ and ‘Shoo Arlo Birds’, before ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’ broke out, during which Mrs Balls strained her right hand in the difficult chorus section. Mrs Balls returned to the keys after receiving the appropriate treatment to perform a tune closely resembling ‘Jawohl, meine Herren’, a cheeky propaganda song of the German National Socialist party.

  Our reporter threw off his disguise to confront Mr Arthur Quail, patron, who seemed to express genuine surprise that he had been singing German propaganda tunes of the last war. In his defence he maintained that ‘Jawohl, meine Herren’ was in fact the lesser known, if not entirely unknown, ‘She Were a Blakeney Marvel’. He denied any accusations that Blakeney offers, or had ever offered, clandestine support for the German National Socialist Party, and with short shrift showed our reporter the door.

  Outside, Mr Albie Smee claimed the scandalous tunes had been taught to those who frequented the Map and Sail by a vagrant card shark who had holed out there during the war, before disappearing one night after conducting many thefts in the area. Sightings have continued unverified over the last few years. His residence is not known.

  Captain Mayfield saw active service at Modder River and Bloemfontein in the Boer War, and was a discipline instructor during the Great War, though sadly too old to see active service in any foreign theatre.

  German tunes were never heard in the Map and Sail again, and Hands was dropped as a topic of conversation. To cover up the truth, it became general knowledge that Arthur Quail’s great map of the North Sea had not, in fact, disappeared in the back pocket of the man with the royal flush, but had been eaten by Sambo, an overweight black Labrador famed for his appetite for anything paper and, in particular, the beer-soaked cardboard mats at the Map and Sail.

  ‘Thassit,’ Arthur Quail finally answers the longshoreman, ‘this pub ain’t called the Map ’n’ Sail no more. Now on it’s the Albatross Inn. Soggy - you get some paint and do the sign, should’ve done it years back.’

  Later that day Soggy’s paint covered up the Map and Sail’s history under the wings of an albatross, which became popular with birdwatchers because the picture was so clearly of a black-backed gull. But Arthur Quail had made his point all right, he was rewriting the story, in the same way that my family, right back to their origins in the mud of North Norfolk, went silent, went missing, erased and reinvented themselves in times of trouble.

  So Hands used the map to navigate his way back to Germany. Wrong. Let my mother describe how she found it when she was a young girl: Yeah, in an old pot, hidden in an old pot well away from prying eyes. Took me half an hour getting that cork out, she says, if there han’t been a cork I shoun’t have bothered looking in there. She told me that when she’d unrolled Arthur Quail’s missing map she’d seen a large round island drawn in the middle of the North Sea, ‘big and beautiful with mountains and fjords like old Norway, marshes and creeks and wide empty beaches like Norfolk’. A proper little Atlantis. She did what any naughty girl would do, she hid the map and held her tongue. She thought constantly about that mysterious island. And little by little, her eyes began to resemble those of her father: distant and dreamy and lingering on the horizon. When she was on the saltmarsh with her mother, following mud gullies and clinging to Goose’s back as the woman waded over to the Point, there, among the nesting colonies of the birds that blew up into the sky as they approached, my mother scanned the horizon in vain, thinking she’d see those snow-capped peaks of the island in the mouths of the white horses: I never saw it. Not never. Back in the cottage she’d spend the winter evenings dreaming in front of the fire, looking as the burning logs changed into the wave-battered coast of her strange imaginary island. Next to her, my grandmother, possibly staring into the same fire and wondering what goblin of the marsh had cast a spell over her daughter.

  Finding the island becomes an obsession. Satchel in hand, there she is, lonely and ostracized on Blakeney Quay, in a raggy grey cloth dress, rubbing her raw scalp after her hair has been tugged hard by the local kids, quietly muttering about her mysterious island until she has a reputation for being strange in the head, like her mother. The kids already have a name for her. ‘Lil’ Mardler’. The little girl who told tales. Eventually she grasped the nettle. A long evening, rain beating at the window, a plain meal of herring and potatoes on a cold plate - my mother could take it no more. She ran - startling my grumpy, dozing grandmother - to the earthenware jar, rolled the map on to the table and put four small jars of pickled samphire on it to keep it flat.

  ‘I ain’t no Lil’ Mardler, am I? See. The island.’

  In her own twisted way, my grandmother must have been proud of her daughter’s nickname, but this map meant trouble. According to her version, it was meant to have gone to sea with Hands. She rolled it up.

  ‘Don’t you go peepin’ no more, you hair.’

  No. It’s not so easy to brush off Lil’ Mardler. The little girl’s standing her ground till her mother explains.

  ‘Thass Dogger Bank, thass is. Now don’t you go talkin’ n
o more about it.’ And before she put an end to it her mother added, ‘Thass where your father’s gone.’

  Murky untruths. Lil’ Mardler imagines her mysterious father in a playful mood, his pockets jangling with coins as he crosses the marsh early one Saturday morning, the rolled-up map sticking out of his back pocket. He stops for a minute on the high flood bank overlooking the Pit and the Point and the North Sea. In the pre-dawn silence he’s watching strange vapours rising from the saltmarsh. He’s thinking about the horizon and what lies beyond. That night he unrolls the map in front of Goose. He tells her how he’d won the map with the last wager of the night before, the one that finally broke Arthur Quail’s nerve and then his heart, forcing him to unpin the possession he so loved from above the bar. Hands’s fine fingers point out the jagged cruel Norwegian coast, the golden-ripe beaches of Denmark and the Baltic glittering with amber, then the silent brooding mass of Germany so pockmarked with the darts of the Map and Sail. Moving my grandmother’s elbows, he shows her the lonely curve of the Norfolk coast, like a great sad eye cast mournfully over the water. Then his finger moves out to the North Sea, sailing smoothly over fathom marks, sandbanks and gullies until he reaches the mischievous shape of his phantom island. What’s that, he asks, do you know, you voman of zhe marsh, you zea zalt, you creek-hopper? Got you stumped, haven’t I. Made you feel a lemon. What’s that island zhere? And my grandmother, furious the buried man was gaining the upper hand, furious that her sea might have an island where she knew it to be water, furious that the first bit of rock out there might not be Scandinavia, in short, furious - sucks and chews her finger and finally, desperately, shouts it out:

  ‘Thass Dogger Bank, thass is!’