Sennen Cove
by Tris Kerslake
An artless place of mine, my sunny younger games were played out here. It was my box of dress-me-ups, where different shoes could make me fisherman or keeper of the coast. I spread my childhood on its steeper hills, among the fragrant hedges and along the paths.
I knew the fields then, knew the cut of barley and the stacking days. The garnished general shop containing bags of candles, aromatic hessian and cheese, was just a shortcut for digression and for sherbet-dips.
And there were days when I would roam the cliffs and call the ancients from their rocky holes, and lay beside the stiff sea-pinks.
And up the road there was the only local church that claimed eight bells. Guiltless, I would tow the chords and vanish as the doors began to close, but even then, I was not always saved.
Beyond the fields again, passing tractors on the run right down the hill, where tracks of sand dragged by lazy wheels brought up the beach, and dark-eyed empty chalets of the foreign rich made photographs.
From this place I met the sea each day to add the nodding heads of gulls and tourists come to pick the shells. My eyes could count the black-tar lines of ships whose names were painted on the shore by accident and lifeboat yells.
And I would leap from rock to rounded rock stained by oil and weather, and call them mine.
My school sat on the topmost point, a craggy box of solid stone, bequeathing stoic glances to the summer trade, quickly passed by adults fearing echoes. I skipped through endless rhymes and sat on walls forbidden by their height. The scars of growing showed beneath the monkey bars.
By swinging wrongly on the educated iron gate the council houses just creaked into sight, but only just. With one eye closed I saw enough, and then the bell would let me run.
And down beside the bluestone water’s break I’d haul the frilly ropes of wrack and kelp, discovering the homes of hermits and of sunken treasure, urchin-case and opaque glass.
Then up upon the cliff once more, to fit my feet in rabbit holes and spy the tiny tracks of evening rambled in the summer earth. I knew each one by name and walked their roads with cautious joy. And in a bowl of light a viper coiled, asleep or dead, made me copper warnings.
And the dusk of empires gave me fantasy, silent purples of the heather and the sky, above the heat of salted grass.
In the final dark, the light of Longships echoed back and forth across the blank of waves. My father’s light was often lost by me as I would shun the man-made for the matchless, listened to the turmoil of the rocks below, Atlantic fingers washing me away.
And I promised all the winds that I would stay making pacts between the clifftop and cove, never dreaming that the choice was not my own.