My dad was a keen but sporadic amateur photographer; he took his cue from my aforementioned Uncle Charlie, who was a dedicated and not-sporadic amateur photographer and who was always encouraging my dad to take more photographs wherever he went. ‘Always have the camera ready, Jack,’ he would say, calling my dad Jack even though his name was John.
How do you end a book like this? How do I end this particular book that was born out of a desire to follow myself around the coast and has ended up being a following of my mind and memories around the coast, sometimes with the tide of detail in and sometimes with the tide of detail so far out that you can see the other side. The side with no details, just broad brushstrokes the colour of sand.
The idea for this book came in the before times, the pre-lockdown utopia when all we had to worry about was austerity and climate catastrophe. It continued with me climbing the stairs to the spare bedroom and fishing in my head for coast stories. Somehow by doing this I invented, or rather reinvented the coast for myself. The coast I wrote about was a solipsistic one, revolving around me and my memories. If the tide came in or went out it only did so because I was there. Somehow, as I wrote the book in one-thousand-word chunks, it became about making a life available for myth. It felt odd but satisfying as the country and the world locked down and opened up and locked down and opened up. We all have our own coasts, of course. We are, despite what the poem says, islands. This has been a map of mine.
One evening at Uncle Charlie’s in the mid-1960s, the light was fading and Auntie was putting the kettle on. It was almost time to look at the slides, the colour (often technicolour) photographs that Uncle Charlie had taken. He’d got the projector out ready and now he switched it on; it was like someone had switched on a moon rocket. The noise was deafening and I was surprised Mrs Beck next door, dozing after her early shift on the Yorkshire Traction buses, didn’t bang on the wall with her ticket machine. After a while it settled down to a low hum; above it, dust motes danced in the heat. Auntie turned the lights off and the projector defined a screen on the wall. My heart sank a little, but only a little, when Uncle Charlie fished out loads of boxes of slides. I might not get back home in time for Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
There we were on the beach in hand-knitted cardigans because there was a sneaky edge to the wind. There I was eating a pork pie. There was my dad asleep on a deckchair. There was my mam looking glamorous as she always did, even when serving plates of sandwiches in a tight caravan. There’s my brother in a fantastic pork-pie hat, the hat he called his Robin Hood Hat. Here are our memories of a recent holiday projected on a wall. It’s as though we’re at Wombwell Plaza and we’re being shown on the big screen. It’s as though our lives are important.
The door opens and we can hear Little Charlie coming in; he’s Uncle Charlie’s son and he’s also called Charlie so we call him Little Charlie. He’s been on days at the pit and it sounds like he’s called at the club on his way home. There’s an impression of stumbling, of being on a boat in a rocking sea. He opens the door and sashays across the room, walking straight into the blinding light of the projector. I am projected on to his face and his shirt. It is as though for a moment he is on holiday with us. Maybe that could be one place to think about ending the book; someone caught in the light, held in someone else’s narrative.