Recently I’ve been going through my photos in an attempt to catalogue their contents. Coincidentally I’ve also discovered some unpublished literary things I’ve written. Among these are novels and short stories.
Let’s start with this one. I gave it no title but remember that it was written during a stay in mid-Wales. However, I have absolutely no idea what this novel is about or whether it was ever completed, let alone revised.
CHAPTER ONE
The forest was all around him. Tall pines protected him with their dark needles. Silence. The late afternoon sun filtered greenly, tinged with gold down to the circular clearing he had marked for himself. The motorcycle had been placed by one tree, the road left quite behind, the sound of cars abandoned to this sylvan calm. Reaching this spot he had driven through half-timbered villages bathed in the reddening sun, their eaves speckled with gold. The ancient countryside seemed quite devoid of inhabitants. Once he had stopped to let a woman cross to the village church. He had smiled at her through his visor and she smiled back at him. Contact had been made. That was enough. Apart from her he had been by himself the whole day.
It was a large forest, very large forest. Abandoning the winding secondary B road, which appeared to have been traced by tipsy mediaeval surveyors, the confident purr of the motorcycle’s twin cylinders took James into long dark avenues of sentinel-like fir trees, plantations covering over what once was a vast heath land. They marched on relentlessly towards the end of the dying summer day.
It was becoming noticeably cooler now. The sun still burned on his face but his toes were beginning to feel the drop in temperature. ‘Time to get ready for sleep’. Laying out a groundsheet and a sleeping bag James prepared himself for the short night. High above a nightingale began to pour out its tiny soul in virtuoso trills and cadences.
The passage between awakedness and dreaming: strange thoughts began to flicker on his mind’s screen. The great escape, the feeling, perhaps the knowledge, that he was being pursued, the relief that he had managed to get so far away from the institution. The hurried preparations, the knowledge that he had both nowhere and everywhere to go. Slowly the physical tiredness overcame him. He fell asleep in the immense darkness of the forest.
The following morning was clear and bright. But the forest was cold after the night. The sun’s light could be seen but not felt. James had to imagine its warmth on his shivering, body. He was now quite hungry. Slowly he took a chocolate bar from his pocket; a bar which had melted then reformed itself into a fantastical shape, unwrapped it and slowly began to savour it: it would have to last a long time. Where exactly was he? Where was the nearest settlement? Would it have a shop which was open? And, anyway, did he have enough money to spare?
One thing James was certain about: he was not too far from the sea. Judging from his mileometer and the direction of the rising sun he knew that if he carried on further into the same horizon he could soon hear the sound of the waves on an unknown shore. A perceptible salt smell in his nostrils and the swooping of a flock of gulls above him proved him right. Half-an hour outside the forest his motorcycle landed him at the top of a high heavily eroded sandy cliff. Below he gazed upon a gently curving strand, all that remained of a once great mediaeval port.
The sea both led him on and halted James. The curving horizon fading into an imperceptible turquoise strip teased him into fantasies of exotic kingdoms peopled by seductive houris and kindly princes. Yet, if he stepped just once forward he would tumble down the cliff and if not bruising himself badly would still be prevented from moving forwards into the foaming undulations of this grey-blue sea. O for an amphibious motorcycle, one with wings that would let his imagination perform the leap it so much desired:
Yes, this was far enough. Far enough to leave the events of the past two days far behind him. James at least felt himself free, if he knew deep down that he would never really be in that state of sublime consciousness in which everything is possible because impossibility is finally realised, the impossibility of all things. James suddenly had the certain feeling that he had been to this place before. The strange crumbling fabric of the cliffs, the memory of a submerged city, the song of the skylark high, invisibly high above the flowering heath, all these sensations rushed into his blood with that certainty that he had been here before, that he knew where he was standing. He cast his mind back; to a time when he was half the height he was now. James remembered a holiday on an English farm. He had stayed with his parents and his brother in an ancient half-timbered cottage in the high street of a straggling village; in Suffolk it may have been. The cottage was so ancient it did not even have electricity. Going to bed up the crooked staircase had been an adventure with unknown giants as the flickering oil lamp cast immense shadows onto the whitened wattle-and-daub passages. Across the lane from the cottage was the entrance to a farm. How he had loved to take in the succulent farmyard smells and be surrounded by the hens and ducks demanding aggressively the feed he had been given by the farmer and which he now kept secure in his tightly-shut hand. There had even been rides on the combine harvester through ripened august cornfields. How he loved to see the swathes the mechanical monster cut into the fields and how he was astonished to see the neat square bundles of hay left in its wake Yes, this had truly been the best holiday of his life. The holiday in which he had become sure that there was such a thing called the countryside, without which no town or city could hope to be ever understood. The holiday in which he had realised that friendships could be made with others than relatives. Those interminable holidays, so-called, with relatives, jarring on each other, so often at each others throats. Holidays were meant to get away from them, not to survive in the hothouses which these stifling relations created for each other, to imprison each other.
Freedom, total non-attachment, to people, to money: freedom to realise oneself. These thoughts crowded into his mind as he sat on the cliff edge observing the play of waves, clouds and birds. Strange that the same place could remember to impart the same thoughts of that delicious freedom. Perhaps not so strange, after all. For he had gazed upon this beach before. But the thriving port had already been swallowed by the destroying, creating sea.
