Copyright © Carmel Bird 2004. All rights reserved.
We roamed over a wide area. Sometimes my father drove us out to a
place such as the tessellated pavements and left us there, picking
us up later. I learnt the word ‘tessellated’ and I thought it
was beautiful. The natural pavement of stones lies like big blocks
of wet chocolate between the cliff and the sea. We found lost bits
of the primitive railway line that was used in the nineteenth
century to transport stones for building, the power driving the
wooden cars being not horses but humans.
The eeriest place was the
golden church that stood on the hill, its tower resembling – or
so I thought – a romantic little Norman castle. It had no roof,
and trees and blackberries grew inside it. We believed it had
never been consecrated because a murder had happened there. This
possibly is not true. The church had been burnt, hollowed out by
fire, as had the hospital and the penitentiary. There was a
terrible narrative of fire, a kind of purging of all the other
dark and hideous narratives that hung in the air, lay in the soil,
seeped into my imagination. It was so easy to people the desolate
landscape with brutal drunken jailers and starving abject
prisoners.
Our fathers went out
nearly every day in the boat, and different combinations of kids
went with them. We got very sunburnt and had to apply a horrible
combination of vinegar and castor oil to our skin after the event.
Why not just the oil? I don’t know. What we mostly caught on our
fishing trips were barracuda which the women cooked for dinner.
Loris and I talked the men into taking us to the Isle of the Dead
where the graves of members of the prison hierarchy were marked,
and the graves of the prisoners were not. We stood in awed horror
on the cliff at the peninsular of Point Puer where convicted boys
used to jump to their deaths.
At night we played cards.
Sometimes in the hot late afternoon we played cricket on our vast
green ground, the ball and our voices, I think I recall, echoing
in the empty quiet of the place. I was conscious always of the
presence of the ruins which were infested with blackberries, and
conscious also of the growling menace of the sea.
You can see that I lapped
all this up with a joyful teenage lust, fascination and greed.
And, to continue the narrative of greed, I have a recollection of
jugs of local cream and bowls of fragrant local strawberries. And
honey. We had Christmas cake and cold plum pudding and tins of ham
and sweet biscuits.
In an old public building
there was a bright octagonal room with a beautiful dance floor. We
believed this building had been a lunatic asylum. One Saturday
night there was a dance. I wore the only dress I had brought which
was green linen with little squares of orange and white scattered
across the fabric. It had a white collar with green embroidery. I
realize that my old dresses are often quite vivid in my memory. I
had white sandals. Pride of
I think I was right about
the blowhole. Wrong about the boy?
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