The Boy and the Sea

I lived by the sea, in a town with a harbour and a bay. And even as a boy I knew that the water was no plaything. It demanded obedience to its rules; and in its grey-green winter form, it roared its fearful warnings, thundering against the land.

The ships in the war would lie, with their grey unpainted look, resting in the sheltered water. And once a black menacing submarine rubbed against the harbour piles, down where the perpetual mossy weed clung on. They said it was a German sub, captured. I asked, but nobody would say what had happened to the crew.

Then these ships went away and colours came back to the funnels in the harbour. I felt the wooden dock give with stiff creaking as the huge bulks eased up against their moorings. Ropes, too big to be possible, sang and dripped as they strained. Chains, whose very links were hard to lift, raced, rattling, to splash briefly down below.

And the dark-smelling oily water heard and glimpsed between the planks beneath my feet - where it covered and sheltered nameless, half-pictured horrors, and where the rats swam. It was easy to fear the water and the sea. Its mystery fermented ideas of fearful shape and size.

One ship was an especially big one - big for me as I saw even lorries and buses vanish easily inside.

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Like any boy, I had a good imagination: but I'd found that it can be a dangerous asset and I had learned to close it down sometimes in case it should attack me, which it often did.

One day when I was a little bigger, they said on the wireless that the big ship had sunk in the night, in a storm. They told the story of its last trip and counted all the people who had drowned. And many of them came from the town by the sea.

But I closed down my mind and wouldn't let the pictures start. Their claustrophobia, and gasping drowning, and freezing to death, and all the things too much to endure that couldn't be escaped; these things were too dangerous to think of.

Sympathy and sorrow were less inside me because of this. On the outside it was easy with a sad face, repeating emptily what others said; to go through the motions and no one suspected.

But I felt guilty about it.

Later, when a friend of the family showed the scars and mutilations where he had been crushed in the blind darkness against the sharp-shell-covered hull as it finally leaned over, the pictures came: The numbing cold of the water and the wind; the hard spray and the oily black waves; the panic and the fear; cursing and praying; the agony of facing death and all its terrors just at arm's length, well within reach.

I began then to be sorry inside.

But it was too late for my guilt had taken hold.

Biography

I have previously been published in Electric Acorn, No.11.
My poems appear regularly in Riposte.I have done some broadcasting on R.T.E., Radio One, on Northern Sound / Shannonside and on B.B.C., N.I.

Last year, a short story of mine, "Over Time", won first prize in the Golden Pen Competition, Ballinasloe. Apart from that, I spend some hours each day, Monday through Friday, teaching / lecturing.