Canvey Island (33 page)

‘Are you all right, treasure?' Dave called as we headed out into the estuary.

‘As long as you keep calling me that,' I said.

Nobody asks me for my opinion any more. That's another thing no one tells you about old age. People talk about the weather or the telly, and sometimes they ask a little bit about how you are keeping, but they don't stay long for an answer. Everything has to go on in your head because there's so little life left in the world outside. I think that's why so many old people go crackers. If the dementia doesn't get you then the loneliness will.

When I look back over my life, it's not always the big events that I can remember. It's mostly silly little things: a laugh at a party, Len taking my hand or George flying a kite that Christmas after the flood. Sometimes I'm not so sure that any of them happened at all.
Was I actually there?
I wonder. It's like I'm looking at a photograph of myself and thinking that the woman in it could be almost anyone. It certainly never seems to be me.

Of course I can't acknowledge how much of my life has gone and that there's so little of it left. I can't accept that Martin is no longer a child, that the men who mattered to me are dead, or that I am old. How many springtimes will I see? How many birthdays? And who will be with me to celebrate them?

Celebrate: well, there's a funny word for it.

I was a different person in the past, always up for a bit of larking. Now I'm more serious. I suppose it's because there's so much less to be larky about. And it's all gone so fast; that's what Mother always said:
gone so quick
. I never believed her when she told me. I thought I had ages and that she'd just wasted her life. I even thought that she was somehow to blame for her old age, and that perhaps if
she'd lived differently and appreciated everything more then she wouldn't have found herself in such a state at the end. I thought it was all her fault. And yet, of course it wasn't. I know that now.

When you're old and alone you sometimes have to stop yourself thinking too much. You have to give yourself a good talking to, or have a chat with an old photograph. Imagine he's there with you for a cup of tea and a bit of a laugh. People might think it a bit mad but sometimes it's the sanest thing you can do. If you can't do that then you have to find things to look forward to and get on with it. No one likes a moaner.

Sometimes I think,
Oh, why bother? Can't I take a pill or something?
but then I hear Len's voice coming back to me all over again:
Come on, old girl. The last battle
.

And that's what it is. And I'm fighting it in every way I can. Mostly it's the small things, having nice soap and making myself presentable, but they all add up. I can still cook and I like to keep everything clean. It may be a bit vain but I think it's only common courtesy. You don't want other people seeing you when you're not at your best or without your make-up.

I do think about dying, of course I do, but I can't ever quite imagine it happening to me. George had the right idea. He must have known, walking off the jetty like that. And for Len to die with a chuckle thinking the whole thing was a joke, well, you have to hand it to him. Both of them knew how to go, whereas I haven't the foggiest.

When I do get scared I think of all the things my friends have said to me in the past. I hear their voices. I see their smiles. I remember the way they laughed and I try to imagine they're still with me.

It's the voices that matter most because when I hear them I can make myself believe that they haven't died at all. They keep talking, and laughing, and dancing, and they won't fall silent, I know they won't, because I am keeping their memory safe for them and they're always close by.

And in the end it doesn't really matter whether they are alive or dead because they are still with me and with all who remember them.

And then I think of the things I've learnt in life, and how you
have to keep living through it as best you can, and that death is simply the last thing you have to get through.

I try to picture myself dancing towards it with everyone I've ever known in an endless reel, all of us changing hands, one and then another, each in turn, past all our memories and our fears towards a future we cannot ever quite grasp. The orchestra is playing and we have forgiven each other everything and we keep moving, dancing towards the light, and I can't ever imagine it ending because we are together at last and for ever, it's as simple as that, and no one is ever going to ask us to stop.

I tried to imagine Dad was still with me.
You're never bored by the sea
, I remembered him saying as Mum waved to us from a distance. I was a child then and her arm was raised high above her head. Her gesture swept across the sky, a rainbow arc touching the horizon to her right, the cliffs to her left. She was describing the world, waving hello and goodbye at the same time.

I walked along the coast to Holehaven. The pebbles underfoot were mottled like birds' eggs: pink-white, blue-black, dove-grey. I remembered my childish curiosity about such stones; how they could be sharpened by the tide to flint axe-heads, or used to light fires or become counters in a children's game:

One-ery, two-ery, tickery, seven
Hallibo, crackibo, ten and eleven,
Spin, span, muskidan,
Twiddle-um, twaddle-um, twenty-one
.

A ship's horn sounded in the distance. There would be a summer storm tonight: violent thunder, cracked shards of lightning cutting through the sky. I thought of the walks I had known along the strandline, watching the sand turn to mud, the visitors departing, the end of the season.

I imagined my father's voice. ‘Things keep coming at you and then one day it's all gone from you, son. The tide stays out and you know that you won't ever see it back.'

I remembered my mother still alive, and the house filled with
laundry and baking, and how the shirts left to dry on the rack above the stove sometimes smelt of bacon when you put them on. She was always busy, my mother, washing, cooking and cleaning, never still. Nothing was ever wasted: not food, not time, not life.

I remembered her dusting the flour from her hands and coming in to sing me a bedtime song:
I'm a little butterfly born in a bower, christened in a teapot, died in half an hour
. I could still see her smiling down upon me, her hair falling across her eyes and her brushing it back, turning away, bidding me goodnight from the doorway.

I could hear her singing.
Ickle ockle, blue bockle, fishes in the sea, if you want a pretty maid, please choose me
.

Then I heard my father's voice.
Don't you worry, son. We'll be watching you
.

But you can't
, I thought.

I can, son. I'm here. Always will be
.

And I heard Claire's voice and the sound of Lucy calling:
Come back, come back
.

I walked away from the jetty, up on to the sea wall, and looked out over the sweep of the island. There, amidst the coastguard cottages and mobile homes, the gas cylinders and the oil refineries, were new buildings and new futures; homes as ours had been fifty years ago.

I tried to imagine what the island had been like when the Dutch had first reclaimed it: a meeting of river and land, the mist lifting from patches of earth, rock and inlet; water draining away through the sluices and creeks.

‘We're special, Canvey people,' Dad said to me, ‘and don't you forget it. We're islanders. We look out for each other.'

‘We like simple things,' said Mum. ‘A little bit of love and a little bit of family.'

I walked back along the seafront and watched the last of the swallows gather over the swing of the sea. The smell of the island hit me once more, of sugar and sewage, petrol and salt winds. River barges carried the detritus of the city on the ebbing Thames tide, out into the estuary where my life had begun. I waited for the silvered surface of the sea to darken with the last of the light; its turbulence calmed, the moon rising.

For a documentary account of the floods of 1953 I have drawn on Hilda Grieve's survey written in the aftermath of the event for Essex County Council and published in her book
The Great Tide
. I am also indebted to Geoff Barsby for his book
1953 Remembered – Canvey Floods
and for his photographic collection and advice. Patrick Wright took me, memorably, to Canvey for the first time and I am particularly grateful to him.

The water experiment in Chapter Three is taken, in part, from Fiona Dow, Gilson Gaston, Ling Li and Gerhard Masselink's
Variations of Hydraulic Conductivity in the Intertidal Zone of a Sandy Beach
. I am also indebted to Andrew D. Short's
Handbook of Beach and Shoreface Morphodynamics
(Chichester, 1999).

For the sections on Greenham Common I have been aided by Barbara Harford and Sarah Hopkins's important book
Greenham Common: Women at the Wire
(The Women's Press, 1984), by the film
Carry Greenham Home
, directed by Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson, and by Julia Foot's Timeshift Programme for BBC Four.

I am grateful for the stories, advice, ideas, anecdotes and opinions of Diane Atkinson, Georgina Brown, Nici Dahrendorf, Brenda and Gerald Davies, Louise Dew, Fiona Dow, Sarah-Jane Forder, Rachel Foster, Gaby Hornsby, Anne-Louise Jennings, Rosie Kellagher, Ian Kennedy, Mary Loudon, Joanna MacGregor, Juliette Mead, Susan Meiklejohn, Jamie Muir, Marion Nancarrow, Siobhàn Redmond, Lady Runcie, Charlotte Runcie, Lareine Shea, Mary Taylor and to Pip Torrens – early reader and true friend.

Special thanks to Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury, to Anna Ledgard, and to David Godwin – for faith.

James Runcie is the author of two novels,
The Discovery of Chocolate
and
The Colour of Heaven
. He is also an award-winning filmmaker and theatre director and has scripted several films for BBC Television. James Runcie lives in St Albans with his wife and two daughters.

The Discovery of Chocolate

The Colour of Heaven

First published in Great Britain in 2006

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 2006 by James Runcie

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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‘Gilly, Gilly Ossenfeffer' Words and music by Al Hoffman and Dick Manning © 1954 Beaver Music Publishing Corp. for the World (administered by H & B Webman & Co. Ltd) ‘You're A Pink Toothbrush' Lyrics reproduced with kind permission of Dejamus Limited
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ISBN: 9781408833612

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