The Green of Swimming

By Sally Gander:

You slip into the water from the moss-wet shore, the slanted rocks sometimes sharp sometimes smooth beneath your palms as you edge your way deeper. The opening to the cove is white with surf but here the water is glass still and cold enough to make you gasp once, twice, three times, but then your lungs expand, the shiver over your skin rejuvenating against the humidity of the day. 

Your guide has brought you here from the village, trekking past a farm and through a verdant wooded valley where everything was some shade of green except for the dark earth of the path ahead of you, then up onto the cliff top and along and around and down a natural stairway created by layers of rock that have been folded and fractured into steps and gullies, small waterfalls and archways and the cave you swim towards now, the place known as the Witch’s Cauldron.

You want to swim inside but the gap between water and cave roof is too narrow and you imagine the clash of your head against the jagged rock, the witch hiding in the shadows to laugh at this fragile thing she has tempted into her lair.  Your guide beckons you closer to see the light beyond where a giant blow-hole resides and the witch keeps watch over the Cauldron itself.  We’ll be patient, your guide tells you, the tide is turning.

While you wait you touch the rock of the cave mouth, the browns and greens and yellows formed millions of years before humans were conceived, the world exploring its capability, playing with the potential chemistry and physics of the materials she was gifted. You run your fingers down a calcified vein that’s thick as a rope, formed by a rivulet of water, you suppose, but it is vein-like enough to be the back of the witch’s hand reaching over the cliff tops, her fingers deep in the water to find the things she needs for the cauldron, the seaweed and crustaceans and shingling pebbles and small silvery fish that bunch together in glittering camaraderie. 

As she works you lie back and float in the cradling stillness, letting your feet hang, only needing the smallest sweep of your hands to remain in place.  It won’t be long before the cold inches its way deeper into your body, numbing your fingers and toes and cooling your organs, but for now you rest on the rhythm of the tide, glimpsing the rocks and grassy cliff tops that frame the pale blue sky. 

Finally, the witch finishes her work and the tide retreats to her bidding. You return to the cave mouth to find your guide has already swum through, his face shadowed with the light beyond him. He reaches his hand out to you, Take your time, he says, take it slowly.

You touch the damp rock above you, kick your legs to move through the water, feeling the distance between the crown of your head and the cool cave roof, mere inches, sometimes less, and you are captivated by this sensation of buoyancy, of being drawn into the light of unknowingness and how quickly the cave opens up again, the roof now vast above your head and you within the glittering emerald green of the Witch’s Cauldron, smiling at the ease with which you can move into such a place.

You stop here and tread water, gazing at the witch’s creation and the power she has in those veined hands, and how, at other times when the volatile brews are composed and the tide is high, this cauldron becomes a broiling spitting turbulent fusion of white and dark, a culmination of everything the witch knows about the world, the actions and reactions, the people she has loved or been persecuted by, the centuries she has lived and endured and held faith regardless of her trials.

She knows the heat of chemistry that shapes the surface of this earth, the gravity that hugs things close, the movement of water and winds, of plants and trees and animals, of the animal humans who push beyond their natural realm.  She knows the power of the sea in which you swim and she has allowed you to be here.  Perhaps her new brew needed your human scent or the stirring kick of your tender legs, but you feel now that this emerald potion is complete and you are its ingredient as well as its recipient, held spellbound in the completeness of the universe — the sky, the rock, the water, the flesh — the witch holds it all in her palm and when she hands it to you the green glows bright, a green that whispers This is all you will ever need…

***

Sally Gander writes fiction and creative nonfiction.  Her work has appeared in Litro, The Real Story, The Blue Nib and A Word in Your Ear, and is forthcoming in Porridge.  She has also performed for Story Fridays in Bath.  For many years she taught Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and now teaches students from across the world at Advanced Studies in England. She is currently building a collection of personal essays.

At Ocean's Mercy

A short story by Audrey T. Carroll:

The hazy ash gray, like a sick snow, blended line of ocean with line of sky. Willow hugged her thigh-grazing cardigan around herself to guard against the pitiful sighs of the water’s surface. Her hair whipped her cheeks, alternating with the salt to batter her skin with pinprick stings like the jellyfish kisses when she was a girl collecting what she mistook for sea quartz washed ashore. Those years, losing herself in the collecting, that’s what she hoped to recite now in every rhythm of her body, to focus so intensely on the task that the context fell away, only leaving in its wake the digging and eroded minerals and the child-sized achievements of discovery.

The few other people walking the shoreline wore shades of slate and khaki, blending in nearly seamlessly with their surroundings, a chameleon smoothness. They seemed cold and distant, the grayscale and sepia tones of a long-worn photograph with facial features faded away. The albums in the basement that her mother had so carefully curated from a hundred year’s artifacts, dated, arranged, book after book until it seemed there was no end... Willow could not prod at her most tender places right now thinking of that word, end. Instead, she thought of the surface. In royal violet and denim, contrasting the others, she was practically a tropic fish out of place in Rhode Island’s Atlantic waters. No one noticed her. In summers so many would walk the shore and set up towels and garish rainbow umbrellas along the way. But the winter solstice was two days’ past, and it had been months since unfamiliar feet had trespassed here.

As Willow glided forward, her ballet flats cracked the packed wet sand, the fractures spider-webbing along the surface. It left behind clumps like in the boxes of light brown sugar that her mother used to bake with every autumn. The air hung heavy with brine, and Willow swore that she could smell the quahogs beneath the waves. The tourists were always trying to block that scent out, grilling animal flesh and smoothing on sun lotion like mortar over bricks; they never wanted the actual experiences beyond the sand and the sun and the view, something inoffensive and interchangeable that they could’ve experienced anywhere along the east coast. 

The sand here, closer to the water, was more densely pocked with bits of quartz and amethyst. Willow bent over, her cardigan greeting the sand. She clawed with an infant’s grasping fingers, piercing the wave-crashed sand in what would look to an outsider to be a mindless frenzy. Willow, however, was very mindful—she knew exactly the kinds of pieces she was looking for. Finally, she came across the pink underbelly of a ribbed half-shell, its jagged umbo evidence of the trauma of its split. When she excavated it from its dreary beige tomb, she found that it had been cracked not only at the joint but also vertically, as though the absent shell half had taken with it half of this piece as well.

An imperfect half-shell was of no use to Willow. She tossed it, underhand, back to the water. The water was more than water. Her waves curled toward the sky in an openhearted gesture, then reached down toward the shore with an eager curiosity. The ocean was filled up with life—sea stars and octopi and invasive green crabs. Her mother had been an ocean, once, in a way that had somehow through the generations been proclaimed unremarkable on account of its seemingly natural inevitability, but it remained mystifying to Willow. 

The waves, famished, gnawed at her ankles, disturbing her thoughts. It wasn’t until the water drained back to the ocean that Willow simultaneously remembered she was wearing cloth shoes and realized that they were ruined beyond repair. Willow hopped, her feet heavy with oversaturated sand clinging in its attempts to cement her to the ground. And so she hopped again, this time feet slipping from shoes. Her leap brought her forward the equivalent of two steps. The shoes were behind her.

It was behind her.

She was behind her.

And maybe, Willow dared in the deepest chambers of herself still nursing irrational hope, if she didn’t turn around then the pillar of salt would not be waiting for her.

We’re all pillars of salt she had told Willow as a child. Her mother had lost count of how many times she’d read Slaughterhouse Five long before Willow was born. The copy in her study, torn on almost every edge and kissed with coffee stains, folded on almost every corner and scribbled in like a love letter, was never to be touched. She quoted it constantly, so much so that by age five Willow had felt as though she had read it herself. That copy now sat in the two-bedroom beach home that Willow rented year-round, tucked away behind an antique doll with red ringlets of synthetic hair so that Willow could only barely be reminded of its love-roughed edges.

Willow coiled around and found her flats, abandoned, under threat of further attack from the encroaching waves. She scooped up the shoes. They smelled so harshly of salt—pillars of salt, pillars of salt, mocking her like a cruel and demented bird out of a Poe story. They smelled so harshly of the salt that she almost pitched them as far into the sea as she could manage. One shoe happened to tilt to its side in Willow’s hand. She glared at its rebellion. Inside, she realized, a hermit crab, deep red exoskeleton and iridescent pearl of a shell to call home, had taken shelter. Heartbroken at what she had almost done, Willow plucked the crab from the toe of her shoe. She nested the flats under her arm as the crab pinched at her cuticles. Willow forgave each sting instantly; she knew what it was to be hurting, to be afraid, and reach for any sense of command over what happened next—that resistance to being pushed and pulled as though by the unknowable will of the waves.

She positioned the crab with care in a safe spot in the sand; in turn, he gave her a gesture of his claw that, had he fingers, would have been profane. She stood upright again, careful to walk in the direction opposite the hermit crab so as not to cause him harm. Staring at her own two feet as she moved, the sand consumed and then regurgitated them, again and again. A cycle. Like the waves. Like the moons. Like the rest.

With a sudden change in direction, Willow sprinted toward the ocean, to feel closer to it, even if it felt nothing in return. But then Willow found that it needed to feel something in return, that if it didn’t she might suddenly transform into a starburst with no one to witness. She knelt in the sand, knees of her jeans be damned. She couldn’t think about such frivolous, shallow things. Not now. Not when she felt so close to a breakthrough. A breakthrough to what, she did not know. But it was there, just under the surface. If she could only tease it out…

Digging. Her nails became claws, built for nothing but digging in the sand. She was pushed forward by a compulsion not quite her own. Digging. Digging. Cracking sand and piling sand. She found one empty half-shell, two. Each was unceremoniously lobbed into one of her shoes for future use; she was not gentle. After five, six, seven shells found themselves torn from Earth where it invited ocean, Willow felt the compulsion lift and air reenter her lungs, expand them, the pungent water stinging her eyes, bringing warmth to their corners.

Her lungs found rhythm again. Suddenly her toes felt pained from cold—and, in another instant, they went numb and she was forced to remember that she was in the heart of a New England winter. Willow flexed and wiggled her toes in attempt of shocking feeling back to skin and muscle and bone. She took the shell-filled shoes, cradling them to her chest as their contents clinked together like the dainty porcelain hands of China dolls. Her heart seemed to swell against her lungs and ribcage as she heard the music of the shells, the promise of the prayers that Willow would speak later lost against the steady lament of the waves that suddenly seemed so far away, nothing more than an echo.

***

Audrey T. Carroll is the author of Queen of Pentacles (Choose the Sword Press, 2016) and editor of Musing the Margins: Essays on Craft (Human/Kind Press, forthcoming). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Prismatica Magazine, peculiar, Glass Poetry, Vagabond City, So to Speak, and others. She is a bisexual and disabled/chronically ill writer who serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. 
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The Dangerous Beach

By Fiona M Jones:

This is the biggest beach I have ever seen. We have driven miles along narrow winding roads, pausing to squeeze past the occasional vehicle coming the other way. We have parked by Goswick Golf Club and followed a path over two lines of dunes, and suddenly we are on flat sand. 

Sand and sand and sand, miles of it, and somewhere in the distance the North Sea. We head towards it. If a piece had fallen off the coast of Norway a few hours ago, a tsunami would be on its way. We’d run and run and never make it. We would DIE, I tell my niece and nephew, widening my eyes to scare them, but their father assures them there’s no tsunami forecast. I try again as we walk uphill ever so slightly: this would be a sandbar we’re standing on now. When the tide sweeps in on a stormy day you can find yourself surrounded, cut off from land. You would DROWN in the swirling grey tide as you struggle for land and find yourself only going deeper. The tide is actually still going out, someone observes, and my nephew and niece settle down to digging drainage channels and river systems in the waterlogged sand near the water’s edge. One of my sons wades in the water, looking for jellyfish, but all he finds is a partially-deflated helium balloon dropped out of air, washed up by water. It looks like a Portuguese man-o’-war jellyfish. Which can, of course, KILL you, probably with fear, if you were listening to the wisdom of your Aunty Fii, but nobody is. 

In the sand I hollow out five oversized toe-holes and follow up with an enormous artificial sole-indentation: a giant’s footprint. An imaginary monster has walked out of the sea. It will probably EAT you. The longsuffering niece and nephew help to smooth the work of my hands until it looks almost plausible. My son takes out his phone to record the monstrous footprint. We build little hills of sand, mountains standing between mini-rivers running down to the sea. This sand we’re building mountains with is the accumulated product of eroded mountains, I tell the children, who are growing in skepticism by the minute. It’s time to head homeward, exploring driftwood and flotsam on the way. The nephew forms an emotional attachment to an abandoned buoy the size of a space-hopper. Can he take it home? Will it fit through the door of his home if he does? Will there be enough room to live there if he gets it indoors? In the end he must content himself with the scrap of rope that we cut off the buoy, fatally blunting Aunty Fii’s scissors in the process. 

On the way back between the dunes, somebody stops to read the sign we passed earlier, half-obscured by dune-grasses. QUICKSAND, it tells us. And don’t touch any metal objects left over from the military training operations of yesteryear. Because they’ll EXPLODE. 

Didn’t I tell you this was a dangerous place? 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. She writes short/flash/micro fiction, CNF and occasionally poetry. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Dawn

By Emily Oldfield: 

My relationship with the dawn. For a long time I have sought the quiet spaces, the unannounced areas, the moments ripe with the tension of possibility. That is the dawn, to me – a place uneasy with potential, strange and malleable edges, inviting experimentation before the day declares itself… and the usual routines and cycles with it.  

I have risen early for as long as I can remember, at least always early enough to still catch the last imprint of dawn like thumbmarks on the morning. But to be in dawn itself is a place altogether; perhaps the inevitable edgeland, twisted in its temporality - a map of furrowed brows in restless beds, the taste of dread deep in the palette, the futile attempts to re-enter dreams in the dead hour before the alarm. The time some wish they could sleep forever. 

When, aged 18, I lived in St Andrews on the Scottish East coast, I would enter dawn each morning with two trainer-strapped feet, an oversized hoodie and leggings. 18: the same  number of degrees the sun is below the horizon at astronomical dawn. At 5.30am, the sea was a sensation, not yet separate from the sky, the air stirred thick with the sting of salt. Light diffused as a kind of colour seepage against the thick black bulk of the sky, the tide all the time turning its rhythms like endless wands of chalk worked down a blackboard. Shhht, shhht, shhht.

I set myself to that rhythm – the surge of the sea and my own ticking compulsion to push… push onwards, beyond. The cold flex of the air flashed through my lungs as I lurched out of Albany Park – the pebble-dashed plot of university accommodation in a peculiar crater by East Sands – and along the shorefront. The blanket of blackness was a comfort, billowing at its edges into a yellowing, almost coppery bruise as the first spools of sunlight fought through. This marked nautical dawn. Here the sun sits at 12 degrees below the horizon, melting like a layer between land and water…and two different bodies are born. 

It is an addictive feeling, running at the edges. Dawn on one side, my own body at the other; underfed and overstretched, burning at the chords of muscle like a candle wick collapsing into itself, light leaching out into the battered bronze of a new day. 

Within five minutes of the run I would come to East Sands harbour, making a note to hold my balance across the wooden footbridge, its slats alternately swollen and withered through the warp of the water, like teeth time-swilled with soda. The stench of gutted fish and engine oil. 

I ran very much as routine and each morning the view would typically be the same on reaching the harbour. On the end of a block of dwellings closest to the water, three men would be hunched in a paraffin-lamp lit garage, looking out to sea… to the red smears settling on water, lights of caution, of warning. Bearded and booted, they regarded my bluster past them with apparent contempt at first, which settled uneasily into a kind of acknowledgement. Outside the garage, various blue-edged ropes spooled across stone like cut-off, dried-out plaits… the hair of some washed-up marine creature, now hard and lashed under salt crust.

Approaching civil dawn – the time when most objects start to become clear, the sun at just 6 degrees below the horizon - sometimes I would have to dodge the lobster pots, their pink-orange cages and little hinged doors turning them into a sparkling series of grottoes. Seaweed was scattered everywhere in its ragged carpeting, pustules of black and grey-green bladderwrack leaking into standing water. The occasional galled cry of a gull would puncture the air. 

I enjoyed the unspoken intimacy of seeing the fishermen each morning, the suspended questions of our occupation, assumptions hanging between us, but also a kind of confirmation; you proceed with your task, I proceed with mine. Rather than uncertainty, it fused a kind of communion - solid and salt webbed and somehow reassuring. I would pass them and then make my way up the side of the ruined cathedral, suspended high on the coast edge like a shell on a spit. The pathway would be peppered with the petroleum-sheen of standing lighting, the cathedral itself once one of the largest buildings in Scotland – consecrated in 1318. Another 18. There was the cartilage of the gable walls and a section of South Transept, the bulk and body of the place flayed away over time into sea foam. It was ransacked in 1559, abandoned by 1561. 

The rasp and slap of the sea simmered to kind of snore as I stumbled up steps, ran past the cathedral and angled towards the town of St Andrews itself, starting at the bottom end of Market Street, the cut of the cobbles blunt on the bottom of my feet.

I ran over West Sands, past the many-starred hotel by the golf links where I worked a couple of shifts as a waitress. Strangers gazes grasping at my ill-fitting uniform, my movements clumsy and awkward. Men with their flourishing gestures and uninvited hands, the view polished and mowed, even the beach opening up in an extended flank of white sand. I staggered with a tray of gourmet desserts… and ran from that. 

I ran to the public swimming baths for a hurried shower when the shared one broke. I ran into other students, their faces closed. I ran even when a childhood friend visited in the middle of winter. After seven hours on an overcrowded coach from Accrington, she shared my single bed whilst we watched Trainspotting on the smeared screen of an old laptop, the type that permanently needs to charge. I felt a little like that as I ran, leaving my friend in bed, picking up friction from the street in a kind of necessary energy. Repeated. 

I ran when the Northern Lights swirled through the sky, a mottled green like that of buds pulsing on the edge of blossom, plucky against the dark.

When people refer to running and places – it is typically in terms of the trajectory of a beginning and end, a start and destination, to and from. For me, running became an attempt of touch; to push myself, not only forwards, but into. The thickening thud of foot through stones, then sand, then surf. I craved to feel the absolution of everything, the timelessness of land-lock. 

I was even preparing my body for it, skimming down to the quick, coaxing the bone’s proximity to skin - and then to surrounds. A closeness created through how strongly limbs felt every lurch and lift, the wind chiselling cheeks and shoulders. As the weather grew colder, I pushed – in childhood shorts and a t-shirt – to take higher and higher routes. This, after all, seemed a place of straight lines, people knew their allegiances: onwards. I could feel my legs filing down precise points, the compass needle caught in the mind’s eye and fixed on N. Nada. Nothing. None.

Running was a place during those months, just as the dawn was - their combined woozy mixture of experimentation, intimacy, release. In lectures, my legs fizzed with friction, my tailbone scoring against the skin of my lower back until it bled beneath carefully-chosen clothes. I felt everything all over. 

It was all over as I aimed for one of the rockiest routes along the east coast path, a tide-bolstered breeze buffeting my knees, dawn still dappling the pelt of the sky approaching 6.30am. It was January and spangles of orange-edged sunlight were starting to cast themselves outwards, catching gorse on one side, sheer cliffs on the other.

Brown fur suddenly stood out against gritty, salt-studded textures. Stretched a little ahead on the rock-scrambled pathway was a young rabbit, laid on its side, back legs coiled like a comma, twitching. Coming closer, its eyes were swollen bulbous in its head like two live insects glistening, fizzing beneath partially open lids. An amber matter pooled beneath, sticky and strange. 

Myxomatosis; the words wondrous and warped on my tongue as I took in the moment, my face then turning back towards the direction of the town in a kind of helplessness. Dawn-darkness still pervading, but so too the dashes of light, the red pinpoints of potential warning – or reassurance – an assemblage at the end of docks, at the tops of buildings. A reminder; here. My tears smeared the light into a lingering red gleam, the gleam of something else against the skyline. 

Red lights remind us of our capacity to go too far. How we struggle to face up to the land beneath … and yet need to. 

It is now five years since those dawn runs in St Andrews, and I have written this, the words somehow leeching out during the Covid-19 lockdown, lines unfolding in a room of a shared house in Hulme. Inner city Manchester stirs. 

Here I sit and stare out of the window, facing the news that I need to stop running again, the old ghost at the edge of my mind with its grey fingers. The buildings burr with construction, expansion, bulk. 

And at the tops of the cranes there are red lights. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. She is the Editor of Haunt Manchester at Manchester Metropolitan University, explored Winter Hill for the Edgelandia project, and now is probably wandering somewhere in the South Pennines. Grit is her first poetry pamphlet - published by Poetry Salzburg (March 2020) - delving into histories of the Rossendale Valley and The River Irwell, which has continued its thread throughout her life. 

Unreal estate No.03: The Easternmost House

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the third of a series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to The Easternmost House Juliet Blaxland’s book of the same name. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Juliet herself.

“On a stormy night, sleeping at the Easternmost House is like sleeping in a boat.” - Juliet Blaxland, The Easternmost House, 2019

Juliet Blaxland, writer, architect and illustrator, had lived in a coastal house by the North Sea with her family for more than a decade, until the eve of 2020. The house is not there anymore, but continues to live in a book she wrote about it. “The Easternmost House is a portrait of place that soon will no longer exist,” Juliet writes in the introduction of The Easternmost House: A Year of Life on the Edge of England, not yet realising how very soon that will be. “It is a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has all gone.” 

The Easternmost House was published last April, when the house was still standing on the edge of the cliff in Suffolk, England, overlooking the sea. It was demolished this February, so it wouldn’t fall into the sea. 

“The erosion process is historic and ongoing, with years of stability followed by great crashes of land-loss in a single tide.” 

The House

“From the sea, it appears as a house from an old fashioned story book,” Juliet writes, a house located “east of London, east of Ipswich and east of all the rest of England”. The name of the house is also a nod to The Outermost House, a seminal book by American author Henry Beston and one of Juliet’s favorites. In both books the land runs out, a fact that Juliet writes you can even sense without seeing, when driving along the road about a mile away.

“It is a windblown house on the edge of an eroding clifftop at the easternmost end of a track which leads only into the sea,” she writes. “There used to be a village here and there used to be several hundred more acres of farmland.” There was a time when the Easternmost House wasn’t a house on the edge, there was another building, which was demolished a few years earlier because of erosion. “Here, the history of houses and farmland being lost to the sea reaches far away back into time, a known unknown.” 

It was originally a row of three estate cottages, built for farm labourers or similar around 1800. “Practical, solid, honest and well-proportioned, with fireplaces and original features intact, but also a bit butchered by ‘improvements’ over the years.” It was red brick, with dark pantiles, “referred to in Suffolk as ‘blue’ pantiles, but actually as dark grey-black, and very typical of the local vernacular.” The wall facing the sea was painted pink, also very typically Suffolk. 

The house had its original bead-and-butt doors with Suffolk latches, “and the old threshold timbers are worn into soft curves by the boots of farm labourers past, hinting that it might be older than it at first looks.” The defining feature of the house, that made it recognisable from afar across the fields and trees, or from some distant part of the beach, Juliet writes, was its chimneys. “Because of being originally three cottages, with two being mirror images of each other in plan, plus the one nearest the cliff-edge, the chimney line goes: chimney, space, space, chimney, space, chimney. “Something like this: I__I_I”.”

The book is organised by months: there are twelve chapters, from January to December. Each is filled with the author’s observations, memories and details that help to re-create a strong sense of place on the page. A coastal house is never just a building. It is a place with a huge view of the sea, ever-present, ever-changing, while Juliet sits at a “clifftop kitchen table” and watches it, day by day, season by season. 

And so the seaside window is married to weather and its dramas, as are the inhabitants of the house. But it is not just what you can see; there are also smells and sounds. “A common sound of life on a windblown cliff is that of hammering nails into timber after gales. Repairs.” 

To help the reader imagine what the Easternmost House feels like inside, Juliet Blaxland writes about her own vivid childhood memories, because she lived somewhere nearby, in a different house as a kid. “A curious aspect of my childhood was the complete absence of modernity about it, even though it was the 1970s.” 

She remembers how old everything was, and not just the big things like the house, furniture or pictures, but the small, everyday items as well; she recalls that even the soap seemed to smell of ‘oldness’. “We went to bed in old beds, with old sheets, old blankets, old pillows, and old eiderdowns with the feathers falling out.” And she still did, while she wrote the book, because the Easternmost House was furnished “with a distillation of those same ‘old things’, it being filled with all the ‘old things’ that other members of our families didn’t want. The house itself is a refugee from a larger estate and most of the contents are similarly refugees from a past life larger than ours is now.” 

Juliet Blaxland keeps returning to scale in her book. The house appeared as a tiny dark rectangle in an enormous skyscape, she writes, “like a little matchbox placed on the mantelpiece in front of one of the larger of Turner’s most abstracted weather-inspired canvasses, sometimes all dark blues and steely greys, sometimes the wildest fires of unnaturally loud pinks and oranges, dazzling vast and bright and all-encompassing.” 

Juliet is an architect and is used to playing with scale in her work, drawing a building 1:50, “each line one-fiftieth of its real size, drawing a site plan at 1:500, making a model.” But it is more than just making models, it has become a mindset for her, and partly because of the place where she lives. “Living on a crumbling cliff with a dark night sky and a view of a sea horizon which hints at the curvature of the Earth, encourages consideration of scale on a grand scale, a universal scale, and the effects of thinking about a scale in this way can be mesmerising and amusing.” 

Time is a scale, a dimension that opens a more philosophical pocket in the book. It is also the time of tides, a clock of coastal erosion, inevitably ticking if you live in a house by the sea. “Living in a place where the church fell into the sea three hundred years ago makes it quite easy to imagine life in the future: not just a decade hence, but fifty years, a century, or three centuries hence. What will be exactly here, at X? What will the world be like?” 

One of the more peaceful passages in the book is when Juliet describes a warm June night spent outside with her family. “For a night on the dune we need no camping kit, no cutlery, no rucksack, no map, no whistling kettle, no nothing. Just an old wool rug and the billy-kid sausages and the rosemary twigs.” Juliet imagines for a moment what would be left if a freak wave would suddenly wash them away: just buttons of their shirts and soles of their sun-bleached canvas shoes, while wool, cotton and wood is biodegradable and would leave no trace. “We lie out on the dune, in silence under the vast universe, as the waves shush us to a state of half-watchful near-sleep, then just the waves and breathing, and then the sleep itself.”

The house has disappeared now, leaving no trace in the landscape. In early March Juliet Blaxland published a photo on her Twitter account. It was the familiar scenery of land, of sea and sky, but now without the tiny matchbox of the Easternmost House.

***

About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website

Memories of Elsewhere: New Quay, by Charlotte Wührer

Painting by David Hughes Jones

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… 

By Charlotte Wührer: 

Elsewhere is a beach. Elsewhere is the beach on which I was buried alive up to the neck, given a tail of sand, a mermaid for a minute until the dog came.

Antonia’s fingers went deathly white after a swim, and back then we couldn’t imagine how miserable it might feel to be so cold while everyone else sweated. Ten years later, we’re sorry we didn’t take her seriously until the rest of her body turned blue.

One year, we squirmed into wetsuits, the old neoprene of some a little cracked, and went out in the kayaks to watch the late afternoon sun. A family of dolphins circled us as my kayak slowly but surely began to sink. The sea teemed with jellyfish.

Another year we drank gin from the bottle sitting on the pier, and it got messy. Perhaps it was that summer we also downed endless pints of ale brewed in whisky casks at a pub quiz before rolling all the way down the hill. From Dylan Thomas’s favourite watering hole into the sea. The bats and stars were more visible there than in any other place. We felt very small, and sobered by the dizziness of not knowing where was under water and where was the night sky.

By day we ate crab meat with lemon juice and black pepper from the shell on the porch bench overlooking the sea. Sometimes we wore straw hats. Sometimes we read books. Sometimes we played games. Sometimes we walked along the clifftops. A lot of the time, we were pretty sunburnt and pretty hungover. Late morning, someone would make the first cup of tea and we’d all get into each other’s beds.

Another year: recovered from the mess, we - the same constellation but with a few additions and a couple of gaping absences - let the seagulls circle the mackerel we’d gutted on the hot September tarmac before the house. Rivers of blood ran downhill past the porches of the other terraced houses, down the patchwork slope of the visitors’ car park, past the tourist knick-knack shop and Annie’s fruit and veg store, down the sand and past our barbecued fish and sandy burger baps, until it was reclaimed by the sea. (Do fish drink the water they swim in?)

The sea that comes after this beach can be seen and heard from the house, which belongs to Sophie’s parents. They were teenagers when they met here in the town, probably on the beach. Now they live both in Swansea and in this little house in New Quay, and I’ve been once a year almost every year since I turned eighteen.

If you know the town, the house stands in the middle of the second row of houses on the north side. It’s not hard to find on googlemaps. Find in street view the purple house with the stained glass porch door. The sash windows are old enough for the glass to have suddenly shattered one windy morning as we slept. The key is in a special place not many people would think to ever look. The house feels a little damp even at the height of the hottest summers.

No one wears shoes in the house or on the short walk down to the beach. City codes of acceptable dress are suspended. The dog wears a superman cape that is also a towel over her eyes. Sophie and I drove down once from Bristol, maybe last year, and it took three hours longer than it should have because there was a swan on one lane of the motorway. Police men wearing fluorescent warning vests stood around it scratching their heads. At the Swansea service station, Sophie’s parents pulled up in their car, handed over a large bag of still-warm welsh cakes, Sophie briefly held the family dog like a baby, and then we drove on belting Savage Garden, more excited to arrive than kids going on a family holiday.

***

Charlotte Wührer is a Berlin-based writer and translator from Newcastle-under-Lyme, England. Her writing appears in numerous online and print publications, including SAND Journal, Ellipsis Zine, and Daddy Magazine. She was shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Cambridge Short Story Prize, and is currently working on a flash fiction novella about place and desire.

David Hughes Jones paints mainly seascapes and landscapes around New Quay in Ceridigion in West Wales and the occasional shipwreck from the past. His subjects are inspired by many years of sailing and messing about in boats, and walking the coastal path. David Hughes Jones Art on Facebook.

Marseille, port city: sails and sunlight

By Anna Evans:

I am waiting to take the bus from Cassis to Marseille. Leaving behind the little streets of the town of Cassis and the cafes with their terraces, where artists came to paint the colourful fishing boats and its perfect bay; to sit by the lighthouse surrounded by waves. The rocks on the beach where I sat and watched the sun set across the rooftops of the town, to the lights of the harbour and the illuminated castle in the darkness. In the little square by the church I read in the warm shade of trees, with cats sunbathing, and the singing cicadas rising, while patterns of sunlight form on the page.

As I wait, I am thinking about travel and new places, of my first visit to the south of France and how it captured my imagination. The flickering colours of the train journey along the coast, where we stood for the whole journey immersed in the scenery passing by. There is always the sense of what lies around the next corner, the changing view that comes from moving on. The excitement of the journey to new, unknown places needs the sense of apprehension to make it more real. I fell for Marseille and for the feeling that travel brings, even then; for the feeling of being away.

The ride is breathtaking. The winding road ascends to the rocky plateau, crossing the Massif des Calanques. Across the rocks, the city stretches out white towards a blue and sparkling sea. From here I glimpse panoramas of the city, the harbour, and the Frioul islands. The descent is exhilarating; spectacular at the bottom of the hill lies Marseille by the water, recognizable by the silhouette of the Notre-Dame church, and a series of high-rise white tower blocks.

Marseille is a city with a certain reputation, a city apart. Perhaps it is for the lure of ports, and stories of voyages and arrivals, that I am drawn to it. A point of departure I return to constantly as an anchor. It is not for a feeling of belonging, of being at home, that I like it. Not for a sense of recognition but for its displacing effects.

Arriving in Marseille and stepping out into the sunlight from the train station, the sensation of heat, of warmth on my skin, surrounding me. Undeniable the feeling of arrival and scattered impressions of the city. If I close my eyes there it is again. Stepping out and feeling the heat as my first and abiding impression. From St Charles station you can stand and look down a hundred steps to a long street pulling you onwards and into the city.

I am interested in this idea of a return, of exploring the memories contained in a place, even if they are not definitive. Later I developed a captivation with the city and for years I imagined moving to Marseille, but I never did it. Something always held me back; this never became my city. The apprehension stronger than the desire to leave. Held back by the idea that there would be time, always time stretching ahead. Not expecting, not realizing that growing older would bring a sense of narrowing horizons, of enclosure, and that I would need to keep wandering inwardly; that settling was for me a myth.  

Then here are two selves, the one that returns, who looks back, and the one who embarked from a train one day stepping out into a feeling of intense heat. I could call myself a writer then. It didn’t matter so much whether I was one. There was always time, time ahead. 

Imagining a small balcony looking out to the street below, to where the street opens out and people gather as the sun begins to set. They draw up chairs to sit and talk, or to sit and look at nothing but the street itself. The sun in the afternoon, the day ending. 

I am careless, the thrill of being away sinks into my bones, as if I were fleeing something, as if I were running away. Drinking small, strong black coffee each morning and wandering the picturesque streets. I abandon myself to swimming in the sea, to the all-encompassing waves, warm, azure and enfolding. There is something intoxicating about being somewhere hot; having lived in cold places all my life, I can understand how a lack of heat could feel like a loss. The heat is alluring to me as the city is; it pervades everything, is inescapable and all-surrounding. 

I remember looking out towards the castle on the rock and out to sea. Walking the streets of the panier, of old Marseille. The buildings, white with shutters and balconies, the sloping, rundown streets and the intense blue of the sky where boats depart for Algiers, signifying another direction. The shape of the buildings, solid and definite next to the perfect clarity of the sky.

There is something about the blue of the sky that cannot be argued with, that gives it a certainty. 

Now I follow the Rue de Rome towards the old port. Everywhere the buildings with shutters, white and pastel, as if the sun has drained and turned everything a faded white. The harbour lined with boats, their sails blue and white; in lines they point upwards, their forms definite and leaving shadow. The reflections in the water are gentle ripples which turn them back to trees, they are branches bending gently with the movement of water. There is a big wheel circling slowly and up into the blue. I take photographs into the sun to see how they are drenched by light, as though the sun has pulled all the colours out and left only reflected lights. 

Looking down over the port from its vantage point, the basilica of Notre-Dame, again pure white in the heat of the sun. White buildings and shutters, the terracotta of their roofs and balconies. I climb the sloping streets that fan outwards and upwards from the harbour.

In the café near the old port, a young man sits outside a pavement café, gently strumming a ukulele.  He is relaxed, apart from everything, living in the moment. I wonder what his story is. The waitress minding the tables with ease reminds me of the waitress we admired on that first trip, for the art and grace with which she moved around the tables. 

In the morning light, the harbour bears traces of the football match that has taken place the evening before in the stadium across the city. The bars and cafes have spilled into morning as the smell of stale beer across pavements. The early morning brings the setting up of the market, the arrival of fishing boats to sell their catch; and the fisher men and women collide with the departure of stragglers in the cafes, holding on to the last part of night. 

A bus out to the city beach and at the back music playing loudly, the kind that saturates the atmosphere like the sunlight covering everything, transcendent and dreamy music. While the sun beats down outside, around us, we are bathed in music for a few moments, cinematic and ethereal. Trying to work out what song it is, somehow joyous and uplifting, it saturates our eyes in a timeless sound, we smile at each other; this is what we wanted.

Now I take the boat out to an island, passing the Chateau d’If, the legendary prison fortress. On the island, I walk paths across the rocky coves and inlets, pirate beaches. Where craggy rocks create places to climb, secret coves looking down to where the water beckons, the sheltered and secluded azure green of the water.

The boat back towards the city frames another view, the harbour as the jeweled centerpiece of the city, white and blue; sails and strong sunlight. I take a photo and it looks like a painting in oils from a time of ships and sunsets. Turquoise blue and burned terracotta orange like an antique map. 

As the city beckons me back again, to winding streets and afternoon shadow. The wheel turning towards the sun. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Memories of Elsewhere: The White Arch by Paul Scraton

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… first up, our editor in chief Paul Scraton:

Above my desk, taped to the wall, are a series of photographs and postcards. There is an illustration of the Cow and Calf Rocks on Ilkley Moor, not far from my mother’s house. There are photographs from the Baltic coast, taken during the writing of Ghosts on the Shore. There is a picture of myself and my daughter Lotte, on the night train that was taking us from Paris to Berlin. And there is a small painting of a rugged coastline in Wales, waves breaking beneath a white arch and the faint outline of a rocky outcrop, swathed in clouds, in the distance. 

Like the books on my shelves, these postcards and pictures are triggers of memory. Of journeys taken and the places along the way. Some of them are places visited but once while others are more familiar, locations that have acted as stage sets for many moments at different times of our lives. They are places we return to physically and we return to in our imagination. We remember and, now more than ever, we look forward to when we will see them again.

The small painting of the Welsh coastline has at its heart Bwa Gwyn – the white arch of the Rhoscolyn headland. Since I was a child, the white arch has been a destination. It is not far, perhaps a forty-five minute walk from the house where my Uncle and Aunt live, depending on which route you take and how much time you spend exploring the coves and the beach along the way, or admiring the view from the coastguard lookout point from where, when the weather is right, it feels as if you can make out the walkers on the ridges of Snowdonia right across Anglesey on the Welsh mainland.

It’s a walk I’ve made so many times I cannot remember. But I can picture moments, still hear snippets of conversation; I can remember the first time I ever dared to walk the narrow path above the arch, the sea on either side of me as kayakers rocked and rolled in the swell, waiting their turn to pass beneath. This stretch of coastline, like all stretches of coastline, has its share of stories and legends, the mythology of Saints and the tragedies of the open water. They mingle with the personal stories, those we experienced and those we heard second hand, from family members and friends. The stories pile up on top of each other, adding texture to the place like the heather and gorse on either side of the worn footpath, soundtracked by the waves, the distinctive call of choughs by the cliff-edge and the whirring blades of a sea rescue helicopter. 

I look at the painting of the white arch above my desk, along with the postcards from Prague and Gdansk, the photographs of Rannoch Moor and the Baltic coast, and I think about what it is about certain places that means they remain with you even after you’ve left. It is, I think, about how they make you feel, from the people you meet or those who travel with you, the atmosphere of the cliff-top path, the wide city street or the narrow alleyway, and the stories you hear and the ones that you write for yourself. 

I look at the painting and I am walking again, out from the house and across the fields, around the headland and skirting the beach. Through the houses on the far side, the path rises up to the lookout point and from there I can see the mountains and the islands, the ferry leaving Holyhead and the route of our walk. Bwa Gwyn is not far away now. The path drops down and swings round. Past the place where we once saw the wild goats, clinging to the grassy slope. A little bit further and the white arch will appear before us. The sea is rough. The sea is calm. The white arch stands above it. The white arch is waiting. We’ll be there again. Soon.

***

Paul Scraton is the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His first book to be published in German (translation by Ulrike Kretschmer) is Am Rand, about a long walk around the edge of Berlin. It is out this month from Matthes & Seitz.