Turtle Diary

33 William G

The sky was clearing, a full moon appeared in a ragged opening in the clouds. There’d be a spring tide then, would it be in or out? I felt as if I knew about tides, felt as if I remembered them.

‘I’ve never told you that Polperro is the place where I was born,’ I said to Neaera.

‘Good God,’ she said. ‘But when you were a child surely it wasn’t how it is now?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We left when I was a year old and I’ve never been back since. My mother never talked about it much. Why’d you choose it?’

‘It was real once but it isn’t any more,’ said Neaera. ‘It’s souvenirs and cream teas and a box with a slot for money to preserve the character of the old Cornish fishing village. The turtles may be headed for extinction but they’re real, they work. When we put them in the sea they’ll do real turtle work.’

‘We can’t magic the whole world with three turtles,’ I said.

‘We’d need more?’ said Neaera. ‘Would a dozen do it?’ We both laughed.

My mother never had said much about Polperro. She had no stories of the pilchard fishery, the huers signalling from the shore to the seine boats and that sort of thing. She was born in Calstock where her father worked at an arsenic factory until he died of it. In those days the only protection they had was lint to cover the nostrils and a handkerchief over that. My mother remembered the trees all grey and blighted near the works and the way it smelled on foggy days. She was living at home and teaching in a school but when her father died she left Calstock. Her two younger brothers were working by then, her mother had died earlier. She came to Polperro because she liked the sound of the name and she wanted to be near the sea. She used to remember the jackdaws walking on the quay among the gulls and the fishermen, how they looked as if they might speak.

She became a waitress at a tea-shop. She used to say that was the year she gave up school-teaching, Methodism and arsenic all at once. She met my father soon after and in two years she was a widow living in London with a year-old son. She bought a tobacconist-newsagent business in Fulham and then she used to get books out of the library and read about Cornwall. She liked legends and folklore. I remember her telling me about the spirit of Tregeagle who howled when the hounds of the Devil were after him and was finally sent away to weave ropes of sand by the edge of the sea. I remember how she used to say that part: ‘Forever weaving ropes of sand that crumbled in his hands and the wind blew them away.’

When I think of her seeing the jackdaws walking on the quay I seem to see them with her eyes and I can see the rest of the scene as well, the grey sky over the sea and the headlands, the white-and-black-and-grey gulls with yellow beaks and yellow staring eyes, the fisherman solid and heavy in the grey light with scales and barrows, the boats rocking at their moorings or standing on their legs. I never see it sunny, always grey. I’ve never told anyone about my mother’s jackdaws. My three uncles are dead, I have cousins in Cornwall I’ve never looked up. The house in Fulham where we lived over the shop until my mother died was close to where I live now but it’s been pulled down, there’s a block of flats there now. The road where my father went over the cliff was on the other side of Polperro, we’d not be seeing it this trip.

Near Glastonbury there was a self-service petrol station open. I put a pound note into the machine and the tank took 96p worth. 4p worth of petrol left for whoever might come along next.

The van hummed along swallowing up the little crab-shaped reflectors with their little crab eyes. The moon disappeared, reappeared as broken clouds hurried past. Oh yes, I thought, feeling something good just round the corner of my mind: just be all the way in it and you’re all right. Just let go of everything like a falling star. The far-away ones, when you see their light it’s already happened millions of years ago. This too, my brief light, maybe it had flashed across the darkness long long ago. Not my light, just a light. Now I was the one to be it, to flash across the darkness with it. Somebody else’s turn next. Nothing to be selfish about, be it while it’s you and then let go. The van rushed ahead but I let my mind be where it was.