Bournemouth was the last time Harry had been happy.
He remembered every hour of it, every minute of it. The war had just finished and they did what his mother had always promised they would do as soon as it was over. They took the train from London down to Bournemouth to spend a week by the sea. All his life he’d wanted to see where the trains went to that steamed past the church and under the bridge beyond the allotments. And now, gazing out of the window, he’d seen the steeple and the graveyard flash past before they thundered under the bridge and were away. His mother sat beside him in her best brown suit, serene in the noise and the smoke of the carriage with the soldiers in their great boots and gaiters laughing their way home, the war done with.
‘Your old man in the Air Force, is he?’ one of them asked noticing the winged brooch Harry’s mother always wore on her brown suit.
‘He was,’ she said and left it at that. The soldiers quietened, looking at each other and wincing at their own awkwardness, and Harry felt that surge of pride as he always did whenever his father was spoken of. He smiled up at his mother and she held his hand and squeezed it. There was no grief left, not after four years, only a sense of shared loss that bound them together. Harry hardly remembered his father but his photo was on the mantelpiece in the sitting room, the medal lying beside it.
‘Fine boy you’ve got there,’ said the soldier, taking a bar of chocolate out of his breast pocket.
‘I think so,’ said Harry’s mother, smiling.
‘Do you eat chocolate, son?’
‘Ask a silly question,’ Harry’s mother said, and the carriage laughed again and rocked rhythmically as everyone ate chocolate all the way to Bournemouth.
To a great leaping cheer, Harry’s team scored a goal against the lavatory wall, but it was hotly disputed because the goalkeeper said it had hit the guttering above his head. He held up a piece of the gutter as evidence and a long wrangle ensued before the goal was finally allowed.
Harry smiled and thought of Bournemouth, of number twenty-two Seaview Terrace; of Mrs Coleman, the landlady – ‘Call me Aunty Ivy,’ she had said – and the little room he had shared with his mother. He remembered the stories his mother had read him in bed, the smell of clean sheets, and the sparrows squabbling outside their window. Then there was the day they had built the sandcastle with its ramparts and towers, with its great cuttleshell walls – hundreds of them they had collected – so that it should be forever impregnable against the sea. He could see now the great moat they had engineered and the driftwood plank that served as a drawbridge. He had stood on the drawbridge and watched the sea surge up the beach and into the moat under his feet only to be held at bay by the cuttleshell walls. Then with the darkness falling and the swifts screaming low over the beach, they had planted a flag in the tower and left the beach behind them, their sandcastle an island now but still standing. And then came the two black dogs with wildly whirling tails, cavorting through the shallows. They stopped by the castle to investigate and decided this was just the place to dig. Perhaps it was the only soft sand they could find. No shrieks, no yells could shift them as they dug in the sand with crazed abandon. Within seconds the castle was reduced to a formless pile of sand. ‘Perhaps they were after sea rabbits,’ Harry’s mother said, as they walked home happy with laughter.
Home was Aunty Ivy’s white-painted villa with the green balconies all around, where the food always filled your plate to the edges and where there always seemed to be more. ‘Haven’t you heard of rationing?’ Harry’s mother asked.
‘Rationing, dear? Never heard of it,’ laughed Aunty Ivy, and she tapped her nose conspiratorially. ‘We have our ways,’ she said, ‘and that’s all I’m saying.’
It was Aunty Ivy that made up the picnic baskets they took with them each day to the sea or to the cliffs. Harry’s mother preferred to eat lunch away from the sand of the beach, so they walked the cliffs searching for the right spot. They would spread out the red-checked cloth, feast themselves on sausage rolls and digestive biscuits, and look down at the gulls and fulmars floating below them on the air.
They were on their way back from the beach one evening when his mother stopped to watch the very last of the sun disappear into the sea. ‘That’s where your father’s plane went down, Harry,’ she said. ‘He’s out there somewhere. Still, no one could have a better grave, could they?’ She put her arm round him and pulled him close. ‘We mustn’t ever forget him, Harry.’
‘Harry!’ The cry came in unison, a cry of dismay and anger. Harry never even saw the ball. He heard it crashing against the wire mesh above his head and felt the crumbs of rust fall on his neck as he ducked. Recriminations were sharp but mercifully brief, because everyone knew there were only a few short minutes left until the end of break. He conjured up Bournemouth again, although he didn’t really want to, not any more. It was like a recurring dream that you have to finish even though you know it ends badly.
The day on the pier was the day it all went wrong for Harry. A fierce gale was whipping the beach into angry sand squalls so that no one could stay there for long that morning. The cliffs were shrouded in cloud so they ate their picnic in a bus shelter and then, tucking the cloth back into the basket, they made for the pier. Harry said he wanted to walk all the way to the end, and so they did, hanging onto the rail and to each other to save themselves from being blown across to the other side. They laughed aloud in the wind and the spray as the waves seethed below them and crashed against the pier. They had reached the end and were breathless with the wildness of it all when the cloth from the picnic basket was whipped out by the wind and flew off down the pier wrapping itself around the rails some fifty yards away. Harry went racing after it but someone was there before him. A tall man he was, with glasses. He had the cloth in his hands. ‘Not sure you should be out here on your own,’ he said as Harry took the cloth from him, and his mother came running up.
‘He’s not on his own,’ said Harry’s mother, ‘he’s with me.’
‘Even so I think it’s a bit risky, don’t you? Here, let me help you.’ He took the basket. ‘Come on, take an arm each and hang on.’
They did not need his help and Harry knew it; and what was worse, Harry knew his mother knew it, but she took his arm just the same. Harry had no choice. He followed her example and clung to the man’s arm all the way back down the shuddering pier as the waves broke over it, showering them with sea-spray so cold that it took the breath from their bodies. In the shelter of a tearoom the man took off his glasses, shook out his coat, and introduced himself. ‘I’m Bill Wesley,’ he said, holding out his hand to Harry’s mother, and she was smiling at him as she took his hand.
In the days that followed Harry hardly saw his mother. It was Aunty Ivy who built sandcastles with him now and pushed him on the swing in the front garden. ‘If I’d had a little boy I’d have wanted him to be just like you, pet,’ she told him, ‘but Mr Coleman and me, we weren’t blessed.’ Harry wasn’t sure what she meant by that. It was Aunty Ivy and not his mother who read bedtime stories to him, kissed him goodnight and tucked him up leaving the door open for the light. He heard her tell his mother one morning out in the passage, ‘I’ll look after the boy for you, it’ll be a treat for me. I’ve always wanted one of my own, you know. You go and enjoy yourself with your young man. You’re only young once.’ And so every morning after breakfast Bill Wesley would come, and his mother would say to Harry, ‘You don’t mind, do you, dear? Aunty Ivy will look after you. I’ll be back before bedtime.’ But she never was.
On the last day at breakfast his mother said that Billy – she called him ‘Billy’ now – wanted to take them both on a boat trip. ‘He wants to get to know you a bit,’ she said. Harry told her he wasn’t feeling very well – he was sure she wouldn’t go if he wasn’t well. But his ruse backfired on him. Aunty Ivy put her warm hand on his forehead and said she thought he might well have a fever coming on and that perhaps he ought not to go out, that she would be quite happy to look after him. So his mother went out with Bill Wesley on the boat without him.
Harry watched them from his bed through Aunty