Read
the winning story by Robert Fenner, of Rochester, Kent.
I've been a resident of this little seaside town for many years now. More
years than I can really remember. I don't really notice the time passing any
more. In the summer, there are the holidaymakers and the children, carrying
buckets and spades and laughing and shouting and demanding ice-creams. In
the winter it's quieter with no-one about except for the occasional
resident, like me, taking a constitutional on the beach or along the path at
the top of the cliffs. When the weather's bad or when a storm is approaching
over the sea, they all stay indoors and I have the cliffs to myself. The bad
weather doesn't bother me. I rather look forward to the storms. When I see
the clouds quicken and darken, something quickens in me too. A sense of
expectation that something majestic and very important is about to happen.
I haven't lived here all my life. I came here during the war. Don't ask me
which war. There were wars before, and there have been wars since but they
didn't involve me, so I didn't take much notice of them. The war I'm talking
about was my war. The one I fought in.
They thought the enemy would come by sea, so they fortified the town. The pier
and the beach were closed and covered in barbed wire. The people were moved
back from the seafront and the army, my army, took over. Throughout that
summer we were the only ones on the beach with buckets and spades, but
instead of sandcastles we built tank traps and minefields. We laid platforms
for guns on the esplanade and we mixed concrete for pill-boxes on the cliff
tops.
I passed my war in one of those pill-boxes. It was a cushy number. We hardly
ever fired a shot in anger, and then it was only at the odd passing
aeroplane. We were billeted in the town, in what had been a boarding house
before the war, and off-duty we had comfortable beds, easy chairs and
endless cups of tea. Every day, we took the little funicular up the cliffs
to our pill-box. We watched the sea through field glasses, scanning back and
forth hour after hour. Waiting for the black dots of the invasion fleet to
appear on the horizon.
To see those pill-boxes now, they look bleak places. All rotting concrete and
damp and litter. But we made ours very comfy. We had a couple of deck-chairs
from the beach, a primus to make tea, and a latrine and a couple of slit
trenches in case of air raids out the back. It was an easy life. That's what
makes it so strange. I didn't have a bad war, but somehow it changed me,
made me different.
I've heard people in the town remembering the end of the war. How they heard
the news on the wireless. How they took two days off work and partied in the
streets. How they restarted their lives. It's not so clear for me. Some
things I can remember, some I can't. The war affected me badly. Something
changed in me. I've become remote and inward looking, more distant, more cut
off from the rest. Things happen and I don't really notice them. I watch
rather than take part.
The war was a turning point for me. There's before the war and after the war.
Two times, almost two places. Very odd.
The war affected me in other ways as well. Like the passage of time. I know
which season it is by the light from the sun and the people on the beach.
But I couldn't tell you what year it is, or how long I've been here. The
days seem to pass in a haze. I wander up and down the esplanade and out onto
the beach, but most of all I like to be up here on the cliffs, looking down
on the town and the sea. I'm happier up here. I feel at home.
I do go down into the town sometimes, especially in summer. I move amongst the
crowds listening to their conversations. I don't join in. They don't seem to
notice me, or if they do they just pull their cardies a little closer,
shiver and walk away. I don't mind really. I feel different from them the
same way they feel different from me. The war changed me while they stayed
the same.
The war also left me with a sort of fear of going too far from home. There's a
word for it, but I can't remember what it is. I don't know how to describe
it. It's not fear really. It's more like an attachment of some sort, like
elastic. I can go down the esplanade with no trouble, even a little way up
the side streets into the town. But the further I go the stronger the urge
to turn back.
A few months, or maybe years, ago I tried to leave. I thought I should try to
go back to may old home. My before the war home. I had come by train and I
knew there were still trains. I could hear them when the wind was blowing
off the land. I'd come by train. Surely, I could leave the same way?
It was a sunny morning when I set out. The sun always makes me feel stronger,
more resolute. It's not the warmth. I think it's something to do with the
light. I went down to the esplanade and rested on one of the benches for a
while to gather my strength. You can't imagine what it feels like to be so
weak. So insubstantial. I turned into the main road leading to the station.
It's not a long road. When we arrived, we marched along its entire length in
ten minutes, singing a song. But now, it seemed to stretch away for ever,
disappearing over the horizon. I tried to see the station, to hear the
trains, but all I could see were the parallel lines of shop windows, the
pavements, the gutters and the tarmac, all meeting at a point far in the
distance.
I tried to move down the street. I really tried. I moved past shops, passed
through the crowds of people. But all the time, the end of the street and
the station were just getting further away. The more I struggled, the harder
it became until, almost weeping with despair, I gave up and turned back
towards the sea.
The sea front was just a few yards away.
I went back along the esplanade and took the funicular up to the top of the
cliff. The old pill-box was still there, lying at a crazy angle now with the
concrete cracked and flaking exposing the iron wires inside. It calmed me to
be back up there again. The despair left me, and the old resignation and
lethargy returned.
I remember the day it happened. It was an ordinary day. Sunny, like today. I
was out the back making a brew on the primus when they came over. Bombers!
And in the daylight too! We watched them head up the coast towards the docks
and the oil refineries. We heard the dull, distant explosions of the bombs.
And we cheered as the fighters, our boys, appeared high in the sky and dived
into the attack.
Then one lone bomber came low over the cliffs towards us, smoke trailing from
one engine and the propeller on the other turning slowly, uselessly. I could
see the pilot at the controls, straining to find a safe spot to crash land.
The bomber hit the ground about three hundred yards away from us, throwing up
a plume of earth and grass and hedges and fence posts like the wake of a
ship at sea.
Time seemed to slow right down. I dropped the kettle, kicked over the primus
and ran slowly, so slowly, towards the slit trench, all the time watching
the aeroplane slide closer and closer along the ground. My only thought was
to get safely into the trench before it blew up.
I dropped into the trench and the sky darkened as the fuselage of the bomber
slid over me. The tip of one wing clipped the pill-box and the bomber slewed
round towards the edge of the cliff. The walls of the trench collapsed onto
me as the bomber toppled over the edge of the cliff and fell, exploding on
the beach below.
I don't know how I got out of the trench. I came to on the grass, not far from
the pill-box where my two mates were scrambling out of the doorway which was
now four feet in the air. They were looking for me, but they didn't see me.
They ran around the pill-box, calling my name. Then they looked over the
cliff edge at the blazing wreckage of the bomber on the beach below.
That was the end of my war. Since then, I've been a little strange, a little
vague about things. I like to spend most of my time up here on the cliffs.
I'm happier up here. I feel at home.
There was a big storm last night. One of the biggest I've ever known. The
waves came right over the esplanade and the wind drove the spray against the
hotels and arcades on the sea front. I was the only one to venture out. But
I like storms. I look forward to them.
I went down onto the beach this morning to see what the sea had done. The line
of rubbish at the high-tide mark had been flung against the base of the
cliffs, and the cliffs themselves had lost a little more land to the sea.
The early morning sunlight caught something white near the top of the cliff.
Something sticking out like a piece of driftwood. I couldn't see it clearly.
It was too far away. But I knew what it was.
I was alone on the beach then, but soon the dog walkers will be out, and then
the fossil hunters will come at the weekend, as they always do after a
storm. Someone is going to look up and see what I saw. They'll send men up
to the top of the cliffs and they'll come back for spades and start to dig.
Soon, they'll find what they are looking for. Then they'll fetch a priest or
a vicar to say the necessary words.
I won't be a resident here much longer. I'll be going away soon. Far away.
Don't ask me how I know. I just know.
I can feel it in my bones.
