Salt Read Free

recalls seeing it on a map, it must be Blakeney. He sees the first of the luggers there, assembled on the quay, deciding which mud pool to dig their bait. A dreadful living. Beyond them the saltmarsh stretches as far as he can see, making its own horizon in a raised bank, which must mean another river is behind it. The Glaven, he suddenly remembers - it’s the kind of thing a bomber can follow on moonlit nights. The river flows through a village called Cley next the Sea, an odd name in any language, past serene reed beds and a picture-postcard windmill. Not that serenity lasts long out here - the storm of 1953 will be sent that way fairly soon. They’ll be climbing the trees and smashing holes through the tiles before that night is through.
    The man knows that none of these channels, all of which point due north like a trident, actually reach the sea. They all drain into a four-mile-long lagoon called the Pit, and on the other side of the Pit is the Point: a low sweeping bank of sand, gravel, mud and dunes, which joins the land at Cley and stretches along the coast like a giant protective arm. Beyond that is the open water of the North Sea.
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    At this moment the sun rises miraculously, seemingly out of the distant mud of the saltmarsh, orange-yolked and unreal, and for a second my grandfather is illuminated like a film star, on set, in another man’s suit. Blond hair, thin-skinned, with the neat ordered smile of a calm man. Those eyes seem impossibly clear, their sky-blue colour almost doesn’t register in the light.
    He scans the marshes, passing the place near by where a boat will be wrecked in 1953, Bryn Pugh’s Thistle Dew . As he sweeps the marshes he lingers briefly on the spot where he was found buried in the mud, passes the oyster bed where I shall be locked in a cage and nearly drowned one day, over to the wreck that he spent all of yesterday morning looking at. Then, near the rising sun, he sees the silhouette of a pillbox, newly constructed. I’ll examine the way shrimp have been eaten after a picnic there. Near the pillbox he sees a small oak copse and an isolated huddle of buildings and outbuildings. Not much to look at. More outbuilding than building at first glance - just a cattle shed used in storms and floods. But it has a good chimney, which is why my uncle will choose to make his smokehouse there in a few years’ time. There’s the lawn where we will cure the hocks, the room where he will build his fireworks, and there’s the thick smokehouse door with its unreliable latch. Ah, yes, the latch. Looking at these buildings, you’ve really got to hand it to him. My uncle was a man of vision.
    My grandfather will never know any of this. He will know nothing about the mouthwatering smell of smoking fish, the massive door with smoke pulling through the cracks like nails being uncurled from the wood, or the fireworks being built in the Lab. But, for the moment, he’s happy, he’s alive and the sun is shining.
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    He puts his ear to the chimneypot and listens to the sounds of the cottage. Noises rise up at him like he’s listening to a well. A shuffle of shoes on the tiles and, suddenly loud, a spit landing in the fireplace right below him. She must be up. He begins to slide down the roof on his backside, is unable to stop the acceleration, so falls the last few feet to land roughly in the garden. She’s at the window glaring at him. Falling out the clouds again. Where’ve you bin! she mouths. He points to the sky. Thassit! she says, had enough of you. He smiles back, then brushes himself down - it’s not a bad suit after all - and opens the door as if he owns the place. She’s already turned her back on him.
    Once inside, and not knowing what to do, he finds an oilcan and greases the door’s hinges. He goes to the fireplace and closes a link in a chain which is giving way, he fixes the rattle on a window by hammering leather into the