MARCH 2020: THE LOST GLOVE AND THE HIGH WIND

Scarborough: proper Yorkshire seaside, tha knows. Like Blackpool with curd tart and parkin or like Barnsley overlaid with a beach. In early March 2020, as the virus seemed to be simultaneously very close and very far away, my wife and I took a trip to Scarborough to prepare ourselves for what we both thought would be a very memorable year. How right/wrong/right/wrong we were.

The train wasn’t very busy as it rolled into the station but yet in a sense it was because whenever you get out of your carriage at this particular end of the line you’re jostled and shoved aside and almost knocked over by the vast crowds of people who have visited the town over the years. There they are, in their Sunday best or their beachy worst, wielding buckets and spades like they are weapons in a kind of benevolent war. Their laughter is infectious and they’ve supped a couple and they’re ready to leave the pit and the factory and the mill behind and just have some fun of the kind that sprays itself all over the place and sings at inappropriate times, whatever they are. Of course there’s a gentle, broadsheet side to Scarborough too but the terrible racket invariably drowns it out and that’s part of its attraction.

When I was a younger man, I heard a tale about Scarborough that sums up part of its slapstick beauty; in the story (which may or may not be true but because it’s set at the seaside, who really cares? Was The Ancient Mariner true? I rest my case. On the guest-house steps.) a boy gets separated from his parents in the teeming sandopolis of the beach. We’ve all done it: one moment we are within the familiar orbit of the nurturing parental planet and the next we are at the edge of the universe moving among beings we don’t recognise as human. Especially with those Lancashire accents. The boy glances up and can’t see his mam or dad. He does what any reasonable human being would do: he wets himself and runs shouting across the sands. Then six legs begin to run towards him at once from the other end of the beach. Two belong to the boy’s father and four belong to an escaped donkey. I would like to believe that the donkey was called Bravo, but that’s just a detail of the story I’ve made up so that I can imagine people shouting Bravo! Bravo! to the donkey as it runs. The father looks as though he’s either chasing the donkey or competing with it in a Dads ’n’ Donkeys race at a summer fete.

The boy is running towards both the donkey and his dad and it looks for a moment as though there will be what sports commentators call a coming together. The boy is still damp and inconsolable and the donkey, perhaps sensing this, runs straight past him. In the distance, by the way, some elderly people are trying to catch the donkey too. Maybe they wanted a ride.

The dad catches up with the boy and whispers to him, that special kind of whispering that stops tears, lifting him up and pointing at the running donkey as if to say that donkey was lost too but soon it will find a friend. The boy smiles a fragile porcelain smile. The dad carries the child on his shoulders in triumph towards the donkey, which has donkey-blundered its way through a throng of people. It seems that the throng is growing and becoming raucous. People are pointing. Some are looking away.

The dad carries the boy to the front of the crowd; they part to let him through. Some of them are parting mischievously but the boy and his dad don’t know that yet.

Ah. Now they do. The donkey has found a friend. The donkey has found a close and very special friend and is showing affection in a very physical way. The bells around his head are jingling rhythmically. Perhaps, like the rest of us, the donkey was just running to find love. With bells on.

The beach will have to wait for another day for my wife and I because today we want to walk to the castle. I think I know a back way and it turns out that in a kind of ‘back way via the back way’ I do. We keep seeing the castle but we don’t seem to be getting any closer to it. The wind has got up, presumably after a late night. It begins to tug at my clothes like it wants something. The castle teases us, hiding behind trees and terraced streets. Eventually, blown by the wind, we find it. It is as though the wind is some kind of fussy relative we have brought with us, one of those relatives who is always nudging you to tell you something really, really interesting.

We go to the little hut to pay and the wind is rocking it. The English Heritage person warns us that parts of the castle are closed to visitors because of the high winds and she has to speak up because the winds are so high and she ends up speaking in harmony with the winds.

We step out of the hut and into the wind. Our shadows are blown away instantly. My wife reaches into her pocket to put her gloves on and discovers that they are not there. We walk out of the castle to retrace our steps and the woman from the hut asks where we’re going because, like disgruntled guests at a party, we’ve only just arrived.

We walk along, looking at the floor. I imagine the gloves far out at sea, waving and later drowning. It feels like the wind is laughing at us. It feels like this coastal day will be tarnished and rusty before it has really got going.

And then we find the gloves holding hands, one with a thumb up. They almost seem to move together in the gathering gale. And I think about the donkey. And I laugh.