Flux

Bitterly cold. It was the coldness which woke me up and, eventually, forced me out of bed. Everyone was scurrying about, cursing the freezing temperatures and trying to warm themselves on our electric fires.

Quite an idle day; little doing.

In the afternoon, Del took Barry, Pete and I out to in his car for something to eat in Watermouth. He treated us each to a meal of mixed grill and prawn cocktail with ice cream and fruit salad to finish . . . He owes the bank £400 and has been told he must not, on any account, write out another cheque. So between the four of us we totted up a £13 bill and Del wrote out another cheque . . . There was some hassle over the money and the ageing Greek waitress’s servile smiles vanished suddenly. So much for Christmas spirit. More and more I smell the stench of hypocrisy and greed at Christmas. It’s just one huge capitalist con trick.

We left feeling full, piled into Del’s Hillman Imp and he took us on a tour of Knoyldon and Woodside, where he spent the first nine years of his life. Knoyldon’s narrow winding streets and picture book facades look worthy of exploration; there’s a squat ancient church that, says Del, is linked with witchcraft at certain times of the year. It was a journey back through time for him as he was seeing these streets and schools of childhood and infancy for the first time in fourteen years. He got very quiet and sober and we could tell that the nostalgia of the moment had got to him.

As we drove he pointed out features he particularly remembered. “It’s odd how the salient memories are those concerned with death and tragedy” . . . The turn-off where Cilla Black’s niece was knocked down and killed . . . the stretch of road where a hunchback Hell’s Angel and companion collided head on with a car while overtaking a bus . . . the Ryvita factory on the hill in which a man was beheaded on his very first morning of work as he scooped to clean out a machine . . . These incidents, like marks in a book, have mapped out and particularised Del’s memories of his childhood, just as similar such events mark all our lives out as unique and special and individual to us.

There was something magical about that drive, the deepening dusk, the blue and pale world “fluxed in declining light,” something about the succession of street corners and pavements streaming past the car window, unthought of places next to lampposts and shop windows, all terribly alone and separate somehow, fragments of lives forgotten and never mattering to anyone, anywhere. So much desolation and striving. Words are just marks on a page. These things dwarf me. I’m lost for descriptions and none of it can ever be fully conveyed or captured by these cold constructions in ink. I don’t think in words and find it difficult to make them yield their meaning. But whatever their inaccuracy and shortcomings: I have to try, and have tried. These pages bear witness to the effort.

The car journey with its sudden confluence of so much memory and experience left me feeling thoughtful, thinking that maybe Nietszche is right and that history is one long retreat into nihilism, into unbelief and into blind struggle, that maybe we have to save ourselves from these numbing conclusions and useless thinking, but not by becoming blind again but by some other step maybe, into acceptance. But for me right now these are just so many words, and I feel them in the abstract if I feel them at all. One day perhaps . . ?

Pete wonders if when we’re old we’ll look back and hate ourselves because of how little we achieve. Maybe we’ll wake up in our late-‘40s, married with children and a home maybe, a lifetime of memories behind us . . . As soon as we got back Lee was walking up the road to greet us, in unrestrained and festive mood, and I plunged back into the present.

We played stud poker (for money) most of the evening and Barry and I ended the game heavily in debt, but were genially forgiven. Late we embarked on another reckless robbery attempt. We drove through steady rain to a boarded up house on Wickboure Road being used as a storehouse for Debenhams. While Del and I acted as look-outs, Lee and Barry whittled away at the putty around one of the windows with a penknife, getting most of the glass out but finding a wooden board beyond that was too much of a match, so we gave up.