Salt (3 page)

That little glimpse of him up on the roof is my invention, I admit, but here my story goes along with my grandmother's: Hands
liked
looking at the horizon. Long-sighted, dreamy-expressioned, whatever you want to call it, she noticed it and didn't like it one bit.

She had a problem on her plate. She had a man in her suit and he was already looking into the distance. What to do? Well, her solution was to regard it as a fault in his eyesight. She made him work on things close at hand, made him hunt for pins on the floor, pointed out a speck of dust and asked him what it was, made him search for crumbs under the table, made him inspect the moles on her back. He peered closer each time, completely unaware that his lovely long sight was being reeled in from the horizon like a sleeping fish at the end of her line. Unaware that his world was becoming her cottage. Eventually, she made him thread needles, night after night, with candles placed further and further off, until he rubbed his eyes and massaged his temples to get rid of the headaches. And after several months she put on his nose a pair of glasses she'd apparently had ready for him since the start, sat him in his chair in the dark and told him he looked
a real turkey
.

She had him by the eyes and she had him by the belly. Early in the mornings he'd be rushing over to light the fire, to clean the skillet, to put two gleaming plates on the table. He'd get the block of porridge off the shelf and put a knife next to it. Oatmealy vapours overran his dreams. Hands would guide the marshwoman to the hearth while she was still practically asleep. He'd put the wooden splice in her hand and ease it through the softening lard. He'd flick the fat on to the hot skillet, and as the sizzle and smell rose, her drowsiness would evaporate. Perhaps here he'd get a whack with the splice for being so meddlesome. A pretty little routine, until one morning, when my grandmother decided to be sick on his clean white plate.

Staring down at the mess, his hard-working and super-efficient hands had for once not known what to do. They rose slightly in the air and his fingers stretched out to grasp the things he didn't understand.

‘Thass your fault filthy cud, stickin' me up you sly old devil. Thass what you deserve no less. And don't get no ideas about no runnin' off now you hair. Thar's no more porridge cake for you and no lordin' it round the house neither. I'll have a quilt to keep me warm and thar's a needle in that there box.'

That was how Hands discovered he was to be a father.

 

Soon after, he was sent out to fill the samphire pram - a ripped fisherman's gansey found on Blakeney Quay, a washed-up laundry sack with Property of His Majesty's Royal Navy on it, a trawlerman's shirt, a sou'wester tied across a duck coop. He robbed a scarecrow of its Anderson tartan scarf and unwrapped the dishcloth Goose had bound her drainpipe with. And, most importantly, he found the main part of a rust-red jib sail, which he quartered, boiled the starch out of and ironed flat. Like the best of dreamers he found pleasure in challenge and beauty in his task. Soon he was threading a gorgeous blanket stitch round his fabrics, marvelling in the design and, with special care, weaving the magic of the sail into the quilt's finery.

 

As her pregnancy matures, he adds more patches until the quilt reaches the floor on both sides of the narrow bed. Each night they spoon each other, then she falls asleep on her back and Hands watches her belly pushing the quilt higher so that his first task of the morning is to widen the material, now putting in all the scraps of cotton, flotsam and sacking he can find. The parachute is used as a lining - the lightness of the material brought down to earth by strips of blackout curtain he's cut off below the windowsill. Eventually, nimble-fingered Hands works so fast that the quilt begins to stretch over the floor faster than any belly can raise it. The quilt expands across the tiles, becoming a rug, a doormat, even an added layer to pin up over the windows.

 

Exceeding his duties yet again, Hands earned the right to have time off. He was allowed to visit the pub. That's him in his element, sauntering over the marsh on a balmy summer's evening, pockets filled with tern eggs, which he's been swapping for beer, pitch and caulking putty, humming a German tune. He's learned the best place to hide is to be in full view, sipping this strange warm soapy beer, allowing himself to be roped into a few hands of poker at the Map and Sail. He's got it all planned out. During the day he's taken to going out on the marsh, walking in strict grid pattern, establishing hypotenuse then figuring quadrants. He had no theodolite, and to my knowledge never made a map. The only thing he owned was a knife. Hands always carried a knife.

Following the Morston Creek from Lane End, Hands would walk to the small shore near the spot where he was first found. Perhaps he would squat down there in the mud, pluck a young stem of samphire and chew it while he stared across the Pit. Military fashion, then, he would take off his boots, tuck in the laces, then put them next to each other in order to make a platform. His trousers, shirt, cotton neckscarf and socks would be folded and neatly arranged on top of the boots so that nothing but his feet would touch the Morston mud. In only his underwear, he would walk into the Pit and, knife clenched between his teeth, he would start to swim. Heading for what? Freedom? Not yet.

 

Five minutes later he would haul himself from the water on the other side of the Pit, sinking all the while into deep folds of wet sand until he could grasp the rail. This was his goal - the wreck he'd seen, when his eyes were just a few inches above the mud. The
Hansa
. In Norfolk, ‘hansa' means ‘heron', but to Hands it must have seemed magical that the wreck which might have been his last sight on earth was practically named after him.

He stands there, dripping on the weather-blackened planks of the wreck. It's a thirty-two-foot North Sea trawler with a long foredeck and two staved-in hatches to the hold. A double hull and a heavy beam, built in the Nordic design. The deck is at a crazy angle, sinking to starboard, where a hole wide enough to swim into has shattered the hull. At high tide the sea pours in, sloshing about inside the wreck with a lethal black inkiness, while at low tide, looking though the hatches, it seems the cargo has never been anything but the weed-smeared mud of North Norfolk. In the wheelhouse, the glass has long vanished. Gulls have peppered the wheel with their shit and clawed the paint down to bare wood. At other places, the paint has blistered away from the iron like psoriasis. A mizzenmast rises behind the wheelhouse, though there's no gaff or boom, and the rudder has been snapped off by the mud. It sticks out of the marsh, about twenty feet away, wrecked itself, totally without direction.

 

That summer, Hands would spend his day sitting on the jagged prow of the
Hansa
. He would sit, like myself nearly forty years later, with his naked legs dangling either side of the rotten bowsprit, prising limpets from the wood with the flat of his knife, gouging them from their glistening sockets before putting them in his mouth to chew. Soon all the limpets that had survived the knife would be welded to the hull like rivets. And so my grandfather would take his knife to the gunwale, deck, hatches and hawsepipe of the
Hansa
, and there he'd begin to carve the wood.

The mizzenmast becomes a rudimentary totem pole. The lowest animal is a large grinning whale, although it has more than a passing resemblance to the lesser weever which will nearly sting my mother as she reaches out to pull it off her crabline at exactly the same place seventeen years later. The first and only fish she ever caught. Above that, a beak and then the cruel cold eye of a gull like the one my father extricated from my mother's hair. Then carved wooden waves, then higher still and the waves begin to look like flames, the strange blue glow of St Elmo's fire that grips the mast head before the onset of a storm. Finally, at the top, the carving of a boat with a solitary figure clinging to the shattered prow as it sinks.

 

Goose didn't like all this time spent on the
Hansa
. Days on the wreck were not a good sign; so, late in her pregnancy, she'd walked down to the Pit and shouted his name. She saw his hands worrying at the salt-withered wood and she watched him cracking his lunch against the windlass heads. When her voice reached him over the calm water, she saw him look back at her with his distant, dreamy gaze. He didn't wave, and he didn't come back.

 

On 8 May 1945, an unusually strong nor'westerly wind blew over the Morston Marshes, bending the marram and arrow-grass and forcing the terns to sit on their nests. In her cottage, my grandmother sniffed the air and decided she wouldn't go out on the marsh that day. On the way back to her bed, she abruptly went into labour.

Hands, out in the garden, heard the first ugly shape of her screams. He sat in the garden under the quilt - which was getting an airing - while the cries and curses came in fits and bursts. From inside the cottage, all she could see through the open door was a corner of the quilt hanging on the line, swaying in the breeze. She stared at it while the time passed, then saw it being slowly pulled along the line out of her sight, until it was gone completely. There was no sign of the man. Her contractions returned with new intensity, the pain forcing her head back on the pillow and silencing her tongue for once. And as Hands raised his brightly coloured quilted sail on the mended mast of the
Pip
, her waters broke, and she called out for the man even though she could hear him slipping the boat down the muddy bank into the creek that led him to the Pit, the North Sea and a newly backing wind, which took him away for good.

And as my grandfather sailed his rickety craft into the choppy water of the North Sea, the bells rang from the flint churches in the flat country behind him. I imagine him craning his neck anxiously, pulling the sail closer to the wind so that warm air would billow into the patches of grass, marsh, corn, wood and heath sewn into the quilt, hoisted on his mast, rich and beautiful, filling with power and urging him away, telling him to leave, to escape, to stop turning back to a land rippling with the sound of bells like the wind now filling his sail. The bells rang until his boat was a dot on the horizon he so adored. Ringing and ringing, and then the first cries of his child, catching on the wind and following him out to sea. My mother was born and the war was over.

3

The mud swelled and shrank round the house, dislodging the tiles on the roof and knocking the chimneypot
on the huh
, as they say in Norfolk. Inside, the floor buckled on imaginary tree roots. Damp soaked up the wall, making screws fall from the plaster like rotten teeth in the middle of the night, while my grandmother buried her head in the pillow. Soon there was no trace of Hands. Everything he'd touched, fixed, put right, he'd only halted on its path to eventual ruin.

No sign, of course, apart from the ruddy-faced little madam down there in the cot. This unpromising bundle of wet nappies and watering eyes was my mother. It was an uneasy relationship from the start. The baby had screamed, starting from the moment the patchwork quilt was hoisted on the
Pip
, screamed louder when the little boat slipped down the Morston Channel, and louder still for the rest of the day. Exhausted and bloody-minded, Goose had struggled out late in the afternoon to scan the marshes, the Point and the open sea beyond. Where's the bugger gone? Behind her, Blakeney's church bells kept ringing, the occasional volley of a rifle went off, and an anti-aircraft gun blasted a ten-gun salute from the bank. Now some lunatic was down Blakeney Quay firing a musket into the sky. A small celebratory group had gathered while crows circled the town like vultures.

Highly confused at the time, Goose may have thought the militia were out for Hands, had possibly caught the rascal, were at this minute dragging him back from the sandbanks after sinking his patchwork boat. It seemed the whole world - already gone crazy in the last few years - had entered a new state of insanity.

Goose looked to the clouds for answers and saw extraordinary shapes in them. That morning there'd been cirrus, fine and ragged at the top of the sky. The wind had teased them into long flowing mare's-tails hanging across the marsh with the spirit of wild horses in full gallop. But below them had arrived the solitary puffs of altocumulus, with ribbed bellies and candyfloss tops. They came slowly over the heath and down on to the saltmarsh, sluggish with the weight of so many images of war: refugee clouds filled with people afoot, long marches on blank landscapes, smouldering cities filled with fire, children playing ambush in the wastes of rubble. And there was Hands where she would always see him, fighting the waves in the sinking
Pip
, giant dogfish gnawing at the gunwale. He bashes one on the snout with the end of an oar, but it's a losing battle. And squeezed between the clouds she sees glimpses of her daughter's life to come. Flowers grown in weird patterns, wooden ducks painted in gaudy colours and peppered with lead shot, a boat painted like the sky itself.

Some time late in the afternoon, Goose remembered the baby and went in to find it pink from yelling. The tiny fists were clenched with rage and an angry red tongue flicked in a mouth rimmed with white fury. She carried her daughter outside, pretending to abandon her in the hope it might encourage a fear so great that natural instinct would make it shut up. The baby was laid on the grass to yell at the sky while Goose went down the lane to continue her cloud-watching. There wasn't much sky left. Some clouds were moving against the direction of the wind, jostling for space in the ever-crowding air. And it made sudden sense to her. The clouds weren't about the man who'd just left her, but about that ridiculous war. It must be over.