The one beach pebble I have from my childhood is the one I call my Caister two-stone. It’s an amalgam of two different kinds of material, half grey and half brown.
My father took me to the Caister Lifeboat Station once. There was no boathouse like the one that’s there now, the boat, the Charles Burton, was on skeets on the sand. It had saved seven lives that year. One of the vessels the Caister men had helped was the Corn Rig of Buckie. ‘Rendered assistance’ was the expression used. ‘We rendered assistance to the Corn Rig of Buckie,’ said the brown-faced man my father was talking to. It had a gallant sound like a line in a narrative poem. My father said to me afterwards that Caister men never turn back. ‘They may die, they may drown, but they never turn back,’ he said wonderingly and shook his head. His words and the words of the other man have stayed together in my mind:
We rendered assistance to the Corn Rig of Buckie,
We may die, we may drown, but we never turn back.
As if to reprove the Caister men for their obstinate courage the Royal National Lifeboat Institution took away their boat and shut down the station several years ago, economizing the service. The Caister men of course got themselves another boat and carry on unofficially. The stone is on my desk and I handle it often.
This preoccupation with the turtles, this project that insists on forming itself in my mind, wants to be seen in its proper light. I have got to try to understand it a little better. Not perhaps entirely, I’m not given to examining too closely the actions that really matter. I can deliberate long over a dinner-party invitation, considering carefully every aspect of the occasion and what it will cost me in time and equilibrium but when the venture is crucial I simply trust to luck and plunge into the dark. And even now at the age of forty-three I still can’t say whether I’ve been lucky or unlucky. Sometimes it looks one way and sometimes the other.
On reflection I really don’t want to understand it better. It may be silly and wrong and useless, it may be anything at all but it seems to be a thing that I have to do before I can do whatever comes after it. That it seems to involve other people is inevitable, everything does in one way or another.
I went to the bookshop. The man and I said hello to each other and I went to the Natural History section where I turned the pages of books without looking at them. My heart was pounding somewhat and I found myself mentally rehearsing what I would say. I always do that, I can’t help it. Even when I go to the Post Office I say in my mind before I reach the window, ‘Twenty stamps at 3p, please.’ Then I say it aloud at the window. ‘I wonder if you too are thinking about the turtles?’ I would say. Or ‘Perhaps we had better discuss the turtles?’ I cursed him for not being man enough to speak up and broach the subject when it loomed so large and visible between us.
I became aware that he was standing near me emanating silence and in my mind I cursed him again. ‘The turtles …’ I blurted out.
‘The turtles …’ he mumbled at the same time. We both laughed.
‘It’s almost lunch-time,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we could talk about it then. Can you wait a few minutes?’
I nodded and went to the Poetry section, opened A. E. Housman at random and read:
The world is round, so travellers tell,
And straight though reach the track,
Trudge on, trudge on, ‘twill all be well,
The way will guide one back.
But ere the circle homeward hies
Far, far must it remove:
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.
It was James Haylett of Caister who first said that Caister men never turn back. He was a lifeboatman for fifty-nine years, and at the age of seventy-eight he went into the surf and pulled out his son-in-law and one of his grandsons from under the lifeboat Beauchamp the night it capsized in November, 1901. At the inquiry it was suggested that the Beauchamp, which had gone to the rescue of a Lowestoft fishing-smack on the Barber Sands, might have turned back because of the force of the gale and the heavy seas. That was when James Haylett said, ‘Caister men never turn back.’ Nine of the lifeboat crew were lost including two sons and a grandson of James Haylett. The fishing-smack had got herself off the sands, anchored safely in deep water, and knew nothing of the disaster until later. Rescuers and those to be rescued don’t always come back together.
Lunch-time came. We went to a little place near by where the take-away queue waited partly in the street and partly at the counter. There were no empty booths so we shared one with two fresh-faced young executives eating eggs and sausages and grease.
‘The brief is really quite clear,’ said the one next to me.
‘We’ve put in the think time,’ said the one next to the bookshop man. ‘We’re ready to move on it.’
‘And we’d jolly well better do it soon,’ said mine. ‘Those chaps in the City can’t be kept dangling indefinitely. Once we’ve separated the sheep from the goats we’ve got to make our bid.’
‘Precisely what I said in my report,’ said the other as he wiped up some grease with a bit of Mother’s Pride sliced bread. ‘When they get back from Stuttgart I want to see some action.’
Their faces were pink, their eyes were clear and bright, their shirts and ties what the adverts call coordinated I believe. Mine had dirty fingernails and his handkerchief was tucked into his jacket sleeve. The other had clean fingernails. Their voices were loud, they were eager to impart the dash and colour of their lives to the drabness about them.
I had a salad. If I were to say that today’s tomatoes are an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes. The bookshop man had fried eggs with sausages, chips, grease and Mother’s Pride sliced bread and butter. He put ketchup on the chips. No wonder he looks hopeless I thought.
‘I always bring a sandwich for lunch,’ he said. ‘But I can have it for tea.’
‘If the bananas aren’t unloaded soon they’ll spoil,’ I said. I felt like talking like a spy.
‘I’m waiting to hear from our friend at the docks,’ said the bookshop man, rising in my estimation. ‘I can’t arrange the haulage until he gives me a date.’
The two young executives raised their eyebrows at each other.
‘Have you booked them right the way through?’ I said. The waitress reached across us with sweets for the executives. Mine had trifle, the other fruit salad with cream.
‘Only tentatively,’ said the bookshop man. ‘Brighton’s close.’
‘I was thinking of Polperro,’ I said.
The bookshop man went very red in the face. ‘Polperro!’ he said. ‘Why in God’s name Polperro?’
I indicated the two executives with my eyes and busied myself with my salad. They were both having white coffee with a lot of sugar. Life mayn’t always be that sweet for you I thought.
There was a long silence during which the executives smoked a kingsize filter-tip cigarette and a little thin cheap cigar without asking me if I minded. The bookshop man took something from his pocket and began to play with it. It was a round beach pebble, a grey one.
‘Where’s it from?’ I said.
‘Antibes,’ he said. ‘I haven’t smoked all morning.’
The executives excused themselves. We had coffee, no sweets. On the wall two booths away from us was a circular blue fluorescent tube in a rectangular wire cage. It was probably some kind of air purifier but it looked like a Tantric moon or some other contemplation object. I contemplated it. The bookshop man looked into his coffee as if viewing the abyss.
‘Did I say anything wrong?’ I said. ‘About Polperro?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It just took me by surprise. Why Polperro?’
‘If I said that Polperro and the turtles together add up to something, would that mean anything to you?’ I said.
He looked at me strangely. ‘Yes,’ he said.
On the way out I went over to the Tantric moon and read the nameplate on it. INSECT-O-CUTOR, it said.
‘I’ll ring you up when I hear from George Fairbairn,’ said the bookshop man.
I gave him my name and telephone number.
‘Neaera,’ he read. ‘Eldest daughter?’
I nodded.
‘My name’s William G.,’ he said.
We shook hands and parted. Going home on the tube I was astonished at the number of paint- and ink-stains on the shirt I was wearing.