Then there were influences more subtle than either clouds or men. There
were the influences of the places that we had ourselves seen in our
summer holidays--Rafiel and St. Lowe, Marion Bay or Borhaze--and, on
the other coast, Newbock with its vast stretch of yellow sand, St. Borse
with its wild seas and giant Borse Head, or St. Nails-in-Cove with its
coloured rocks and sparkling shells. Every child had his own place; my
place was, like Jeremy's, Rafiel, and a better, more beautiful place, in
the whole world you will not find. And each place has its own legend:
at Rafiel the Gold lured Pirates, and the Turnip-Field; at Polwint the
Giant Excise Man; at Borhaze the Smugglers of Trezent Rock; at St. Borse
the wreck of “The Golden Galleon” in the year 1563, with its wonderful
treasure; and at St. Maitsin Cove the famous Witch of St. Maitsin Church
Town who turned men's bones into water and filled St. Maitsin Church
with snakes. Back from one summer holiday, treasuring these stories
together with our collections of shells and seaweed and dried flowers,
we came, and so the tales settled in Polchester streets and crept into
the heart of the Polchester cobbles and haunted the Polchester corners
by the fire, and even invaded with their romantic, peering, mischievous
faces the solemn aisles of the Cathedral itself.
The sea was at the heart of all of them, and whenever a sea-breeze
blew down the street carrying with it wisps of straw from the field, or
dandelion seeds, or smell of sea-pinks, we children lifted our noses
and sniffed and sniffed and saw the waves curl in across the shore,
or breakers burst upon the rock, and whispered to one another of the
Smugglers of Trezent or the Gold-laced Pirates of Rafiel.
But I think that none of us adored the sea as Jeremy did. From that
first moment when, as a small baby, he had been held up in Rafiel Cove
to see the tops of the waves catch the morning light as they rolled over
to shore, he had adored it. He had never felt any fear of it; he had
been able to swim since he could remember, and he simply lived for those
days at the end of July when they would all, in a frantic hurry and
confusion, take the train for Rafiel and arrive at Cow Farm in the
evening, with the roar of the sea coming across the quiet fields to
mingle with the lowing of the cows and the bleating of the sheep. He had
in his bedroom a wonderful collection of dusty and sticky sea-shells,
and these he would turn over and over, letting them run through his
fingers as a miner counts his gold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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