by Tom Morris
OLD GEORGE
A Short Story
by
Tom Morris
Copyright 2012, Tom Morris
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Old George was almost as much of a landmark as the long wooden pier that jutted out from the white stucco Penny Arcade in the middle of the bay. Actually he wasn't all that old, no more than early middle age, but his portly figure, tightly encased in a black three-piece suit, his weather-beaten wrinkled face and the dirty iron-grey hair curling from beneath a disreputable bowler hat, pulled low to shade his eyes from the sun, all combined to earn him his nickname. George's world was the beach. He was one of a dying race of beachcombers, a leftover from a previous era. The trophies of his profession hung from the brass watch chain that looped from pocket to pocket across the vast expanse of his waistcoat. A gold sovereign of the old queen, worn but still legible, rubbed against a silver elephant, late of some unknown charm bracelet. A shark's tooth was jostled by a small penknife bearing the legend, 'A Souvenir of Clacton.' In the middle hung the showpiece of the collection, a German Iron Cross, second class, washed ashore in 1943, still pinned to a fragment of rotting tunic, grisly relic of an unsuccessful bomber raid.
He was taciturn to an extreme, his speech ponderous and laboured. Although often derided and sometimes the butt of thoughtless childish pranks, he was not as simple as some imagined. It was rather as though, some parts of his mind having never grown past childhood, the remainder had compensated by selecting the life of a recluse, more comfortable in the company of the waves and the gulls than in the presence of his fellow men. He lived a solitary life in the small ill-kept bungalow which had housed his parents and in which he had grown up. Pebble-dashed and slate-tiled it stood slovenly in the middle of a row of neat and trim neighbours at the southern end of the promenade. The garden, if so it could be called, was an ill-assorted accumulation of flotsam and jetsam. Tattered fishnets, broken crab pots, a few ancient and tenantless chicken coops, could be identified in the general morass of debris, its squalor softened by the long strands of couch-grass growing through the rubbish. Around the back door was piled the summer's gathering of driftwood, used to eke out the meagre ration of coal which was all he could afford in the winter months when the cold north-easterlies whined through the cracked window frames and rattled the warped doors. Inside it was much as might be expected; an untidy hotchpotch of old furniture, tatty curtains and worn greasy carpets. Once or twice a year his only sister made her way down from Lowestoft and for a few days she sorted and washed and scrubbed and generally made life a misery for George. After she had returned to the bosom of her family, having done her duty by her brother, he would bring back inside all the things she had thrown out and resume his quiet old ways. Apart from this brief contact, George shunned human company. While he was prepared to make some attempt to get on with his neighbours and those he recognised as locals, he considered the holidaymakers who descended on the little seaside town during the summer to be unmitigated nuisances. They sprawled their gaily-coloured council deckchairs across his beach, chattering and shrieking as they splashed in the shallows, blocking his way with unending moated sandcastles and leaving behind at the end of the day a dismal carpet of discarded crisp packets, cigarette ends and half-eaten sandwiches. However, he appreciated only too well that it was these same people who dropped the shillings and half crowns that the sea sorted out with the shingle, so that those who knew the secret could go almost to the very spot and pick them up.
George knew all the secrets. He knew that lost coins would finish up in the pebbles piled next to the weed-coated breakwaters and that rings could be found yards further down the beach, just at the junction of fine shingle and coarse sand, a few inches below the surface. He knew where to look for amber and could recognise the dull shine of a carnelian at five paces. Make no mistake, George never found the riches that fond imagination credited him with. Had it not been for the pittance of unemployment benefit which he collected once a week he would have been hard put to exist at all. Indeed quite often, when his beachcombing had yielded only paltry returns, he got out the old battered pram which stood in his hallway and pushing it down past the RAF camp made his way onto the council tip. There, in the company of small boys scavenging abandoned radios or tossing milk bottles into the surrounding marshy pools, he collected copper wire, old aluminium pans and discarded brass fittings which he later exchanged for a few shillings at the premises of the local rag and bone man.
George was very much a child of nature. It was not just that his life was interwoven with the seasons and the tides, but more an inner conviction, sensed rather than rationalised, that he was one with his environment, intimately linked with the beach, the sea and the elemental forces of wind and water, In a very basic way he felt a kinship with the small creatures that lived along the shore line. With them he depended on it for his existence. He believed deep down, that he had his own niche to fill, a role to play and a destiny, even if only an insignificant one, to fulfil. It was perhaps for this reason that spring was George's favourite time of year. Closely attuned as he was to nature's ways, the annual miracle of regeneration re-affirmed for him his purpose in life, told him that somehow he fitted into the endlessly intertwined pattern of the universe. It gave him a warm, comfortable feeling that all was well; summer was coming with its careless crowds. After the holiday months were over he tried to carry on his activities for as long as he could, a thick woollen scarf, mittens and an ancient overcoat giving some protection against the blustering winds that raked in from the North Sea. Then, as winter closed in and it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between grey sky and greyer sea, George hibernated beside his driftwood fire, emerging only once a week to claim his due from the Labour exchange.
It was in the warm blissful months from May to early September, when the whole stretch of the bay and beyond lay within his compass, that George plied his trade to the utmost. Having eaten a solitary breakfast of toast and marmalade he would leave the dirty dishes on the kitchen table, put on his coat, adjust his bowler low over his eyes and make an unhurried exit. On reaching the beach it was his custom to turn northwards and, on a falling tide, follow the high tide mark, watery blue eyes probing the shingle, big black boots kicking aside the clumps of mouldering bladder-wrack. He would slowly trudge past the guesthouses and the old folks homes that lined the road along the sea front, past the Yacht Pond and the Miniature Putting Green, until eventually he came to the Pier, jutting seaward from the amusement arcade straddling its shoreward end, echoing unceasingly with the noise of its numberless penny machines gobbling the offerings of their eager clientele. Underneath, in the cool, cathedral dimness, George foraged in the vast forest of timber piles, crowded with barnacles and the shrunken humps of tide-stranded anemones, seeking the occasional coin which had dropped through the gaps in the thick plank floor high above his head. From here, approximately halfway around the curve of the bay, he carried on northwards, skirting the great wheeled landing stages which followed the receding sea down the beach and from which the local fishermen, crab pots harvested and rebaited, were cajoling the strolling holidaymakers with promises of "Trips round the bay in the motorboat, leaving any minute now." At the Spa Pavilion he generally turned aside and, perching on his favourite seat, high on the path up the red sandy cliffs, he gazed out over the twinkling waves to where the light-ship, a tiny dot in the far distance, guarded the Harwich shipping lanes. Extracting a newspaper-wrapped bundle from his coat pocket, he made a lunch of cheese sandwiches or similar delicacies washed down with cold tea quaffed from an old whiskey bottle. It was this unfortunate habit
which had given rise to the popular fancy that he was an alcoholic. In fact this was completely untrue. George was teetotal, abstaining from both drink and women on the firm recommendation of his parents, who had given him to understand that to indulge in either would assuredly result in the rapid decay of his material body and the eternal damnation of his immortal soul. Meal finished, George would make his way down to the Dripping Well and feed a few leftover crusts, carefully shredded, to the fat, lazy goldfish turning languidly under the green water. Filled with contentment he then walked the further half-mile along the shingle until he reached the end of the promenade, where the beach jutted out in a small promontory beneath the craggy headland on which stood the high school for girls; fee-paying, inviolate, isolated from the work-a-day life of the town.
From here, in the long summer days, when time, tide and light permitted, George wandered on as far as the Golf Course, its abandoned Martello tower still standing lonely sentinel watch