Many years ago I did a performance at the wonderful Alnwick Playhouse in Northumberland; I read my poems and told stories and it seemed to go down quite well. I noticed, on the front row, a woman a little bit older than me who kept nudging the young boy next to her to get him to at least look at me and stop gazing around the room. The boy was having none of it; he was at the stage of spectacular and performative boredom that children sometimes get to when they’re taken/dragged/cajoled along to an event that isn’t really suitable for them. Not that there’s any adult content at any of my gigs but sometimes the language might be a little over their heads. They often squirm as though they are the captain of the UK squirming team and their sighs are the subject of emergency calls to the Noise Abatement Society. In the end he just sat there eating a pillowcase-sized bag of crisps.
As the show carried on (because the show must go on), I began to realise that I vaguely recognised the woman but I couldn’t really place her. After the show I saw her in the foyer and she came up and introduced herself: ‘Do you remember?’ she said, as the boy tugged at her arm so that they could escape this strange place. ‘You and your family stayed on the upper floor of my house in Boulmer in the 1980s, and one night I saw you on the telly and I said to my husband “that’s the man upstairs” and so ever since then you’ve been the man upstairs.’ I did remember, then, and the years fell away like a tottering pile of cards. The boy had almost dragged her away by now but she turned at the door and said ‘And you had a helicopter at your picnic, remember?’
And I’d forgotten the helicopter, but then it came back, vivid as rotor blades in the sun. That night in a bland hotel room I dreamed of the helicopter and the beach and I woke up sweating and had to make a cup of tea and the kettle sounded too loud for the room’s tight geometry. Maybe the beaches and shorelines we visit when our children are small are always going to have a dream-like quality and they are going to be lit by sea-light. Maybe any rain that falls will be a kind of healing rain and the sunny moments will be the ones that imprint themselves in your mind forever, like sandal prints on sand that somehow never get washed away and that somehow are still there when you go back, no matter how long it is between visits.
It was 1987 and I remember that I was probably the only person in the UK who thought that Labour were going to win the election. It was held on 11 June, which was five days after my elder daughter’s fourth birthday and my younger daughter’s second birthday because they were twins, two years apart. That’s what they call family planning in Barnsley. I sat up all night drinking cheap red wine and hoping for a late surge from the Midlands that never quite appeared and the next morning, groggy and disappointed, my wife and I took the children for a picnic on the beach. I was the groggy one; they’d slept well.
We got to the beach at Boulmer and the drizzle was more or less invisible. More or less. I took the girls down to the water and we indulged in some synchronised splashing and pro-celebrity laughing while my wife spread a picnic blanket on the sand and filled it with hope and optimism and crisps. A buggy held down one corner of the blanket and stones secured the others. She waved at us and we wandered back to start the joyful ritual.
In the distance, like a surge in the Midlands, an item of punctuation resolved itself into a helicopter from nearby RAF Boulmer. The girls and I walked up the beach and I pointed out the helicopter and I told the girls to wave even though, somehow, I associated helicopters with the kind of military might that had helped the Conservatives to flatten everything in front of them in the election. Wheeling gulls were still, for a moment, bigger than the helicopter.
We got to the picnic and we sat down to start to eat. For a brief moment we didn’t know where the helicopter was, but we could still hear its droning song, which seemed to be all chorus and no verse. Suddenly, as though we were in a film about the Falklands War, we saw the helicopter racing at a height that experts would describe as ‘not very high’ down the beach towards our little group. The girls, innocently, still waved.
The helicopter, and time itself, seemed to stop. It hovered like a science fiction insect. It zoomed vertically, moved a little through the Northumberland air, and began to hover again, this time directly over our picnic. The picnic blanket began to shake and shiver, and then it took off. Crisps flew. Sandwiches tried to take cover. The buggy fell. I shook my stupid fist at the helicopter and after a while it buzzed away, eventually becoming a speck again.
I’m back in my hotel room in Alnwick and I’m drinking tea. It’s the middle of the night and an ambulance passes. After we’d tried to rescue our picnic it started to drizzle again and we walked back to the cottage where we met the woman who’d recognised me off the TV and we told her the story of what had just happened.
The boy she’d brought to my gig wasn’t born, of course, but maybe she’d told him the tale of the picnic blanket that flapped like a mainsail in a storm and me standing there like Captain Ahab shaking a feeble fist at something huge and scary. Maybe the lad expected my show to be just as exciting. Sorry.
Still, the memory’s there now, always hovering just above any picnic I’ll ever have.