Salvaged

Brighton beach 2002

IT BEGAN LIKE THIS

He was sixteen, maybe seventeen, and determined to go to sea, sail across the Atlantic to see his brother in Chicago. But his parents said, ‘No, stay here with us. Work, bring in some extra money and help with the housekeeping.’

Still, he wants to go to sea. 
Biding his time, waiting for the right moment, one that will come soon enough, of that he’s sure.
Then one day his father asks him to nip around the corner for a packet of cigarettes. He’s gone a long time, long enough to worry his mother who eventually goes looking for him.
She meets some of his friends and wants to know if they’ve seen Joe.
‘He’s away off to Whitehaven,’ they say.
Someone had told him there was a boat bound for America taking on hands, and so he’d gone.
He came back seventeen or so years later and his dad, my granddad, apparently said,
‘By lad, I’ve been waiting a long time for those fags.’

Memories are fluid, they change over time in the telling and retelling of a tale.
Perhaps the story consolidates around a clearly defined framework but the details shift, change, become chameleon like.
Preserved in records somewhere will be a name, departure date, port of entry, duration of stay, purpose of visit. These facts will serve to support or question the time contained in the story; look it was like this after all, you see I did remember. But these facts also deflect attention from the textures of memory, of the lived experience.

I grew up with this story, sometimes told with warmth and affection, at other times hurled in anger into the tense space between them.
Time in the story was elastic but the central structure remained constant, its use swinging between the romantic and the wilful. The story would be used as a weapon during times of conflict in the house. When arguments erupted and stalemate seemed inevitable, the story would be presented as irrefutable evidence of his shiftless character.

But for me the story would always have the opposite effect, a tale I never tired of hearing.
And in the telling he would evoke a special place. A place at once removed and familiar. Sometimes details would change; small forgotten episodes and events remembered which subtly altered the story, allowing it to become something both known and new; not fixed but living.  

Whitley Bay, 1950s