I often dream of islands because they seem to be festivals of coastlines; they are all coastline with a bit of middle, like the distorted opposite of a Polo mint. As a child I would make lists of islands in red Silvine exercise books that my mother brought from Jack Brooks the Newsagent; I thought he was a spy and that he got the books directly from the government because he was an agent of news. Those island names, like one-word poems: Raasay, Hoy, Yell, Unst, Benbecula, Wight, Man, written down the page in my messy hand like characters in a folk tale.
Two islands soak into my memory, although I admit they didn’t make my list even though both have resonant names: Skye and Caldy, one off the coast of North-West Scotland and one within touching distance of Tenby in South Wales. Although these two islands are very different, my memories of them are remarkably similar. They both involve vivid images of my parents running and waving, surrounded by insects that seem to scribble all over the air around them. To many people, Caldy and Skye are islands; to my family they were triggers for anecdotes about midges and wasps. Towards the end of his life, rendered immobile by a cruel stroke, my dad was sitting in his chair watching TV when a programme about Caldy Island came on and my dad began to wave his arms around his head in a way that alarmed Trevor the ponytailed carer until I explained about the wasps and we all laughed in that way that people thrown together in somebody’s twilight weeks often do. I could tell, by looking at his distorted face, that my dad was back there on that island in the early 1960s with the ice cream melting all over his waving hand.
We were staying in Tenby with my Auntie Mary and Uncle Jack, our constant holiday companions at that time. One day we decided, on the recommendation of a man we’d met in a café, to take a trip to Caldy Island to have a look at the monastery and sample some of the ice cream that the monks made. I remember vividly that the man said ‘That ice cream, it’s bloody good’ and my dad tutted at the word and my mam shook her head. Still, that didn’t put us off and we chugged over the water on a packed boat that bounced a little bit, which reminded my dad of his years at sea. In my head I kept saying ‘Bloody good, bloody good’ but of course I daren’t say it aloud. Especially not on a boat. No bloody chance.
We landed and wandered around the island; it didn’t take long and in my memory it was about as big as a giant vole. We kept seeing people licking ice creams and we knew, because my parents loved the idea of deferred gratification because they’d lived through the war, that our reward for the wander, in a kind of intense heat that brought a noisy storm later, would be an ice cream as big as a Christmas tree. Maybe we noticed people semaphoring a bit, their arms waving as though they were guiding passenger planes into Tenby International airport, but maybe that’s just a bit of false memory that’s melted and dripped down my mind’s sleeve.
The incidents of the late afternoon aren’t false memory, though. Not at all. Our wander ended and we queued for the ice cream. It was still and monks sweated by in thick robes. The sun shone, as Dylan Thomas might have said, in Welsh.
We got our ice creams, huge cumulonimbus numbers, and went to sit down around a picnic table on benches that had suddenly become free when a family moved away quickly, shrieking.
When a family moved away, shrieking. Maybe we should have taken more notice of that noisy egress but we were too busy thinking ice-cream thoughts. We sat down. Something buzzed. A wasp flew by. Then another, and another. They looked huge. Were they coming out of the sea? Were they some kind of mutant merwasp? One dived at my mother as though they were both cartoon characters and the messy exit that has been a mainstay of our family stories began.
Imagine this wasp-tale humming along in the background with a kind of split-screen effect while somewhere another similar story is happening many years later, when I am a teenager with a girlfriend who is now my wife of many years. We are with my mam and dad and we are on the Isle of Skye. It is the early evening and a blood-orange sun is sinking into the sea. We are sitting in the car drinking coffee from a flask and eating biscuits and my dad has put his waders on and his hat with fishing flies around the brim and he has wandered down to the edge of a loch that spills into the sea to do a bit of fishing.
In the car, as parents do, my mam is trying to embarrass me by telling tales of my childhood and she has begun the long and winding anecdote about the day the wasps came for the ice cream when suddenly my dad appears from down by the loch; it is as though runes are being visibly whispered around his head and he is waving frantically and actually hitting himself on the head like a self-trepanning novelty act. Despite his Scottish blood, the midges are going for him in a big way and he has admitted defeat. He runs, as best he can in waders, towards the car and makes the mistake (as my mother reminded him for decades after) of getting into the car and bringing the midges with him. Oh how they enjoyed our soft Yorkshire flesh! Oh how we wished that they were vegans!
Here the screen freezes; the midges in the car, the wasps with the monks in the background, the people who are simultaneously older and younger. From some angles the midges are landing in the ice cream, from some angles the wasps are invading the waders.
I remember now: memory is an eroding coastline.