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On Good Friday I went for a walk, taking the route Joe and I used to take, and I have to say I missed him. Marjory’s house on the village outskirts, the start of our walk, was sold and closed up. Life for Marjory was intolerably lonely without Joe, as she’d always predicted it would be, and she’s put herself into a nursing home. Beyond the house I went down the muddy path Joe and I came to know intimately, in all weathers, that descends the cliff to the car park at the bottom. Empty since October, today the car park was filled with cars and camper vans, and a stream of visitors was to-ing and fro-ing to the beach.
Beside the entrance to the car park is a concrete plinth with two steps leading up to it. A wooden hut used to stand here during the summer months. And once upon a time, standing in this hut, or leaning against it, would be my father, smartly turned out in the uniform of a council car-park attendant, complete with peaked cap and epaulettes. Easter, with its influx of visitors, sometimes calling for deployment of his ‘car park full’ sign, was always an exciting and sociable time for my father. Then he died and the council removed his homely hut and replaced him with a ticket machine. They planted the machine on the exact spot where he used to stand to keep any confusion caused to a minimum. It’s been ten years since he was there and I can no longer remember his face. But today being Good Friday, and with visitors here once more in numbers, I pictured a figure in a council uniform leaning against the door of his hut, and thought how he would have been at the top of his game, given the myriad opportunities for exercising his talent for conversational wit.
I continued for a mile along the crest of the shingle ridge, the sea on my left, then I crossed the road and took the path that skirts the freshwater lake. Out on the windblown shingle ridge, the people you meet invariably say hallo as they go by. But the footpath beside the lake belongs to a carefully managed nature reserve, and there are signs saying you must do this and you mustn’t do that, and the people are more careful about who they talk to.
There is a wooden shelter beside the lake and on the wall of the shelter is a blackboard and chalk on which members of the public are invited to list the birds and animals they have seen. We always used to rest here, Joe and I, before heading homewards. I would read the board and Joe would spray urine against an upturned rowing boat and then maybe stand at the water’s edge and antagonise the swans.
Today on the blackboard some clever-dick bird watcher had listed a black-necked grebe, short-eared owl, lesser whitethroat, ruddy duck and a Cetti’s warbler. Under this, someone in a different frame of mind altogether had written ‘I love Sam’. And beside that I wrote: ‘Remembering Joe — a great chap’.
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