An old, stout, confused woman, with jumbled memories, stands on the waterfront.
She mourns a boy she spent an April night with so long ago. A drunken proposal, after a tea-dance on the pier and illicit nips of brandy. Swaying in the wind on the edge of Bawley Bay like skinny reeds. In that place where General Gordon smiled, Pocahontas cried, and Lady Franklin once waved at two wooden ships that sailed off into the ice.
He’d called her “My pretty flutterby…like a fritillary!”. He was the only one who ever had.
“Oh you daft boy… but I’m no painted lady… more a plain cabbage white”, she’d teased. “Anyway we must love like mayflies now.”
Or something like that. For wishes and covenants were as slippery as fishes back then, and there was no time to waste. He flew off next day and, like so many, he never came back to her.
An old man with a burn-scarred face stands on a small patch of crumbling tarmac… to the south…on the high ground near Riverview. He stamps on those last remains of a once rumbling runway, with jumbled thoughts. All has changed, except that easterly chill. “We take off upwind to fly and we sail off upwind to die” he mused. “It’s always against us.”
He looks down towards the river with rushes of faded memories like hers. One reel is still so clear and sharp. That waitress he danced with in ’42, who took him back to The Royal Clarendon Hotel. You don’t forget your first… her smell… her skin… the hair down there. A prince that night alright.
She’d always assumed he’d died … so many did. He’d actually bailed out blazing over France and spent the rest of the war as a POW. …came back weary and glad at first, then skinny, ugly and bitter.
He spotted her just once… a few years after he returned … from a distance… one spring in the ’50’s, walking with husband and children… on the old Medway canal towpath that came to be called Peanut Road.
He’d turned away unseen. Would she have recognised him? Probably not.
Such things happen in wartime…and in its aftermath.
“We must love like mayflies now…”.
If
Only
They
Could
Sing
