A Stitch in Time. Penelope Lively

thought that if you were a person who didn’t know about seaside holidays – a visitor from outer space, say, or a prehistoric person – you might be amazed to find that at certain times of the year everybody gathers on the edges of England (and Scotland, and Wales) and just sits on them, looking at the sea. It might seem a very odd thing to do.

      “All right?” said Mrs Foster.

      “All right,” said Maria. And then, after a moment or two, “I think I’ll go and explore.”

      “Mmn,” said Mrs Foster, opening her book.

      Maria began to climb the slopes at the back of the beach, the toes of the cliff. Grey, muddy toes they were, and looking up she saw that this dried grey mud had slid in long tongues down from the top, like pictures of glaciers in geography books. The mud had cracked into scaly patterns, and here and there, as you walked upon it, it quaked a little as though deep down its foundations were uncertain. A notice back at the car park had warned sternly that these cliffs were dangerous and might fall at any time. And Maria, looking up at the blasted slopes of Black Ven, thought with a shudder, I’m not going up there, I don’t fancy that at all.

      For it was an eerie place. It seemed both very old and very young – old and infertile as the moon, with its barren reaches of mud and rock, and yet young as last week in its impermanence. For this, she saw, was the landscape of collapse. The cliffs had slipped and slid – sometimes long, long ago, so that the place that had crumbled away was now clothed in scrub, grass, reeds and sapling trees – and sometimes so recently that nothing yet grew at all except a few valiant seedlings poking out from the mud to show what they could do, given time and a world that would stop moving.

      She followed a path that wound between bushes and over dried gullies lined with whispering reeds. It was a garden, this place, a wild garden over which the ashen cliffs presided like cathedral walls. There were flowers all around. Some of them she could recognise – the more ordinary ones. Vetch and ragwort and those little yellow things called eggs and bacon that are really birds’ foot trefoil, and clover. But there were plenty of others she did not know, including a most abundant green plant growing in forests like small pine trees, and something like a wild sweet-pea. She picked a piece of this and tucked it in her buttonhole, meaning to look it up in a book, if possible. She picked a dandelion head, and blew babyishly, and it erupted into the wind in a shower of shiny fragments that drifted uselessly away towards the sea. Where, thought Maria, they haven’t a hope of growing. Waste. You’re always being told not to waste things – time and electricity and left-over food – but things waste themselves much more. All that growing and flowering and making seeds for nothing. Dandelions and those millions and millions of seeds from elm trees in the spring. And tadpoles. And all those ammonites that got fossilised in the rock, there must have been millions and millions of them too. Seas full of them. All getting eaten by other things before they grew up. Talk about waste …

      “What?”

      She came round a large gorse bush to find herself face to face with someone who had been standing on the path, and realised with sudden shame that some at least of these thoughts had been said aloud. And the person, to make it worse, was the boy from the hotel next door.

      “You’ve done it again,” he said. “But I daresay you didn’t mean to.”

      “Done what?”

      “Frightened the birds away. There was a pair of linnets.” He looked at her with mild irritation, which turned to active exasperation as something about her caught his attention. “Where on earth did you get that?”

      “What?”

      “The grass vetchling,” said the boy crossly, “stupid.”

      Maria’s hand flew to the now wilting flowers in her buttonhole. “These? I didn’t know what they were.”

      “Only the rather rare grass vetchling,” said the boy. “That’s all. Don’t you know this is a nature reserve?”

      “No,” said Maria dolefully. The grass vetchling felt now as though it were burning a reproachful hole in her shirt.

      He looked down at her – he was at least a head taller – and apparently relented a little for he said more tolerantly, “Oh well, don’t do it again, anyway.” And then, looking at her hand, “Can I see your fossil?”