No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (11 page)

This story comes from a long time ago. I was a boy, so that shows how long ago it was. Part of it is from memory, and the rest is a reconstruction built up over the years through times when I’ve given it a lot of thought, filling in the gaps; for I wasn’t privy to everything that happened that time, which is perhaps as well. But I do know that I’m prone to nightmares, and I believe that this is where they have their roots, so maybe getting it down on paper is my rite of exorcism. I hope so.

The summers were good and hot in those days, and no use anyone telling me that that’s just an old man speaking, who only remembers the good things; they
were
better summers! I could, and did, go down to the beach at Harden every day. I’d get burned black by the time school came around again at the end of the holidays. The only black you’d get on that beach these days would be from the coal dust. In fact there isn’t a beach any more, just a sloping moonscape of slag from the pits, scarred by deep gulleys where polluted water gurgles down to a scummy, foaming black sea.

But at that time…men used to crab on the rocks when the tide was out, and cast for cod right off the sandbar where the small waves broke. And the receding sea would leave blue pools where we could swim in safety. Well, there’s probably still sand down there, but it’s ten foot deep under the strewn black guts of the mines, and the only pools now are pools of slurry.

It was summer when the gypsies came, the days were long and hot, and the beach was still a great drift of aching white sand.

Gypsies. They’ve changed, too, over the years. Now they travel in packs, motorized, in vehicles that shouldn’t even be on the roads: furtive and scruffy, long-haired thieves who nobody wants and who don’t much try to be wanted. Or perhaps I’m prejudiced. Anyway, they’re not the real thing any more. But in those days they were. Most of them, anyway…

Usually they’d come in packets of three or four families, small communities plodding the roads in their intricately painted, hand-carved horse-drawn caravans, some with canvas roofs and some wooden; all brass and black leather, varnished wood and lacquered chimney-stacks, wrinkled brown faces and shiny brown eyes; with clothes pegs and various gew-gaws, hammered trinkets and rings that would turn your fingers green, strange songs sung for halfpennies and fortunes told from the lines in your hand. And occasionally a curse if someone was bad to them and theirs.

My uncle was the local doctor. He’d lost his wife in the Great War and never remarried. She’d been a nurse and died somewhere on a battlefield in France. After the war he’d travelled a lot in Europe and beyond, spent years on the move, not wanting to settle. And when she was out of his system (not that she ever was, not really; her photographs were all over the house) then he had come home again to England, to the north-east where he’d been born. In the summers my parents would go down from Edinburgh to see him, and leave me there with him for company through the holidays.

This summer in question would be one of the last—of that sort, anyway—for the next war was already looming; of course, we didn’t know that then.

“Gypsies, Sandy!” he said that day, just home from the mine where there’d been an accident. He was smudged with coal dust, which turned his sweat black where it dripped off him, with a pale band across his eyes and a white dome to his balding head from the protection of a miner’s helmet.

“Gypsies?” I said, all eager. “Where?”

“Over in Slater’s copse. Seen ’em as I came over the viaduct. One caravan at least. Maybe there’ll be more later.”

That was it: I was supposed to run now, over the fields to the copse, to see the gypsies. That way I wouldn’t ask questions about the accident in the mine. Uncle Zachary didn’t much like to talk about his work, especially if the details were unpleasant or the resolution an unhappy one. But I wanted to know anyway. “Was it bad, down the mine?”

He nodded, the smile slipping from his grimy face as he saw that I’d seen through his ruse. “A bad one, aye,” he said. “A man’s lost his legs and probably his life. I did what I could.” Following which he hadn’t wanted to say any more. And so I went off to see the gypsies.

Before I actually left the house, though, I ran upstairs to my attic room. From there, through the binoculars Uncle Zachary had given me for my birthday, I could see a long, long way. And I could even see if he’d been telling the truth about the gypsies, or just pulling my leg as he sometimes did, a simple way of distracting my attention from the accident. I used to sit for hours up there, using those binoculars through my dormer window, scanning the land all about.

To the south lay the colliery: “Harden Pit”, as the locals called it. Its chimneys were like long, thin guns aimed at the sky; its skeletal towers with their huge spoked wheels turning, lifting or lowering the cages; and at night its angry red coke ovens roaring, discharging their yellow and white-blazing tonnage to be hosed down into mounds of foul-steaming coke.

Harden Pit lay beyond the viaduct with its twin lines of tracks glinting in the sunlight, shimmering in a heat haze. From here, on the knoll where Uncle Zachary’s house stood—especially from my attic window—I could actually look down on the viaduct a little, see the shining tracks receding toward the colliery. The massive brick structure that supported them had been built when the collieries first opened up, to provide transport for the black gold, one viaduct out of many spanning the becks and streams of the north-east where they ran to the sea. “Black gold”, they’d called coal even then, when it cost only a few shillings per hundredweight!

This side of the viaduct and towards the sea cliffs, there stood Slater’s Copse, a close-grown stand of oaks, rowans, hawthorns and hazelnuts. Old Slater was a farmer who had sold up to the coal industry, but he’d kept back small pockets of land for his and his family’s enjoyment, and for the enjoyment of everyone else in the colliery communities. Long after this whole area was laid to waste, Slater’s patches of green would still be here, shady oases in the grey and black desert.

And in the trees of Slater’s Copse…Uncle Zachary hadn’t been telling stories after all! I could glimpse the varnished wood, the young shire horse between his shafts, the curve of a spoked wheel behind a fence.

And so I left the house, ran down the shrub-grown slope of the knoll and along the front of the cemetery wall, then straight through the graveyard itself and the gate on the far side, and so into the fields with their paths leading to the new coast road on the one side and the viaduct on the other. Forsaking the paths, I forged through long grasses laden with pollen, leaving a smoky trail in my wake as I made for Slater’s Copse and the gypsies.

Now, you might wonder why I was so taken with gypsies and gypsy urchins. But the truth is that even old Zachary in his rambling house wasn’t nearly so lonely as me. He had his work, calls to make every day, and his surgery in Essingham five nights a week. But I had no one. With my ‘posh’ Edinburgh accent, I didn’t hit it off with the colliery boys. Them with their hard, swaggering ways, and their harsh north-eastern twang. They called themselves ‘Geordies’, though they weren’t from Newcastle at all; and me, I was an outsider. Oh, I could look after myself. But why fight them when I could avoid them? And so the gypsies and I had something in common: we didn’t belong here. I’d played with the gypsies before.

But not with this lot.

Approaching the copse, I saw a boy my own age and a woman, probably his mother, taking water from a spring. They heard me coming, even though the slight summer breeze off the sea favoured me, and looked up. I waved…but their faces were pale under their dark cloth hats, where their eyes were like blots on old parchment. They didn’t seem like my kind of gypsies at all. Or maybe they’d had trouble recently, or were perhaps expecting trouble. There was only one caravan and so they were one family on its own.

Then, out of the trees at the edge of the copse, the head of the family appeared. He was tall and thin, wore the same wide-brimmed cloth hat, looked out at me from its shade with eyes like golden triangular lamps. It could only have been a sunbeam, catching him where he stood with the top half of his body shaded; paradoxically, at the same time the sun had seemed to fade a little in the sky. But it was strange and I stopped moving forward, and he stood motionless, just looking. Behind him stood a girl, a shadow in the trees; and in the dappled gloom her eyes, too, were like candle-lit turnip eyes in October.

“Hallo!” I called from only fifty feet away. But they made no answer, turned their backs on me and melted back into the copse. So much for ‘playing’ with the gypsies! With this bunch, anyway. But…I could always try again later. When they’d settled in down here.

I went to the viaduct instead.

The viaduct both fascinated and frightened me at one and the same time. Originally constructed solely to accommodate the railway, with the addition of a wooden walkway it also provided miners who lived in one village but worked in the other with a shortcut to their respective collieries. On this side, a mile to the north, stood Essingham; on the other, lying beyond the colliery itself and inland a half-mile or so toward the metalled so-called ‘coast road’, Harden. The viaduct fascinated me because of the trains, shuddering and rumbling over its three towering arches, and scared me because of its vertiginous walkway.

The walkway had been built on the ocean-facing side of the viaduct, level with the railway tracks but separated from them by the viaduct’s wall. It was of wooden planks protected on the otherwise open side by a fence of staves five feet high. Upward-curving iron arms fixed in brackets underneath held the walkway aloft, alone sustaining it against gravity’s unending exertions. But they always looked dreadfully thin and rusty to me, those metal supports, and the vertical distance between them and the valley’s floor seemed a terribly great one. In fact it was about one hundred and fifty feet. Not a
terrific
height, really, but it only takes a fifth of that to kill or maim a man if he falls.

I had an ambition: to walk across it from one end to the other. So far my best attempt had taken me a quarterway across before being forced back. The trouble was the trains. The whistle of a distant train was always sufficient to send me flying, heart hammering, racing to get off the walkway before the train got onto the viaduct! But this time I didn’t even make it that far. A miner, hurrying towards me from the other side, recognized me and called: “Here, lad! Are you the young ’un stayin’ with Zach Gardner?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered as he stamped closer. He was in his ‘pit black’, streaked with sweat, his boots clattering on the wooden boards.

“Here,” he said again, groping in a grimy pocket. “A threepenny bit!” He pressed the coin into my hand. “Now
run
! God knows you can go faster than me! Tell your uncle he’s to come at once to Joe Anderson’s. The ambulance men won’t move him. Joe won’t let them! He’s delirious but he’s hangin’ on. We diven’t think for long, though.”

“The accident man?”

“Aye, that’s him. Joe’s at home. He says he can feel his legs but not the rest of his body. It’d be reet funny, that, if it wasn’t so tragic. Bloody cages! He’ll not be the last they trap! Now scramble, lad, d’you hear?”

I scrambled, glad of any excuse to turn away yet again from the challenge of the walkway.

Nowadays…a simple telephone call. And in those days, too, we had the phone; some of us. But Zachary Gardner hated them. Likewise cars, though he did keep a motorcycle and sidecar for making his rounds. Across the fields and by the copse I sped, aware of faces in the trees but not wasting time looking at them, and through the graveyard and up the cobbled track to the flat crest of the knoll, to where my uncle stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, all scrubbed clean again. And I gasped out my message.

Without a word, nodding, he went to the lean-to and started up the bike, and I climbed slowly and dizzily to my attic room, panting my lungs out. I took up my binoculars and watched the shining ribbon of road to the west, until Uncle Zachary’s bike and sidecar came spurting into view, the banging of its pistons unheard at this distance; and I continued to watch him until he disappeared out of sight toward Harden, where a lone spire stood up, half-hidden by a low hill. He came home again at dusk, very quiet, and we heard the next day how Joe Anderson had died that night.

The funeral was five days later at two in the afternoon; I watched for a while, but the bowed heads and the slim, sagging frame of the miner’s widow distressed me and made me feel like a voyeur. So I watched the gypsies picnicking instead.

They were in the field next to the graveyard, but separated from it by a high stone wall. The field had lain fallow for several years and was deep in grasses, thick with clovers and wild flowers. And up in my attic room, I was the only one who knew the gypsies were there at all. They had arrived as the ceremony was finishing and the first handful of dirt went into the new grave. They sat on their coloured blanket in the bright sunlight, faces shaded by their huge hats, and I thought:
how odd
! For while they had picnic baskets with them, they didn’t appear to be eating. Maybe they were saying some sort of gypsy grace first. Long, silent prayers for the provision of their food. Their bowed heads told me that must be it. Anyway, their inactivity was such that I quickly grew bored and turned my attention elsewhere…