Out and Along and Over

Here is the 22nd of 24 stained glass window designs on the Palace Pier which AI and I are using as inspiration for some of these BrightonBeach365 daily posts - see Stained Glass Window 1 for background Thi image shows three people riding in a small, bright red-trimmed speedboat skimming over rough stylised blue and green waves. The boat’s wooden decking is sharply angled, two passengers sit at the back, with a helmsman at the front. The sea curves beneath them in bold, flowing bands, and above them a wide expanse of blue sky is broken by big, rounded white clouds. Off to the left, a red sail or distant vessel adds a point of contrast on the horizon.

Limerick

A day-tripping trio left shore

In a boat that was really quite poor;

When it smacked through a swell

They all yelled, ‘Bloody hell!’

‘That’s an oath,’ they added, ‘not a port we’d aim for.’

Out and Along and Over (loosely inspired by the rhythms of James Joyce)

They shot out from the shingle as if the whole beach had given them a shove. A jerk, a cough of the engine, and then the little red prow lifting, nosing, finding its run along the bright-slap water. Tom felt it under him, the shudder and lift, the hard rattle in his knees, and he thought, yes, this is it now, this is the going, the real going, and not the standing and watching and saying one day, one day. Behind him the pier stretched its legs into the sea, iron and timber, rattling with music and gulls and the clank of rides starting up, and all along the shore the people like shells scattered, small and safe and stayed.

His father had both hands on the wheel, knuckles yellow, grinning into the wind that peeled his cheeks back, and every now and then he’d glance to the side, to the left where the open ran out to France, to everything else, and to the right where Brighton curled round on itself with its terraces and hotels and its white-faced houses pretending not to look at the water. The boy watched his father’s eyes and thought of how they looked at the kitchen table, grey then, and how they looked now, lit from below by the jump of the waves and the fat high sun.

‘Hold on there, Tommy boy,’ he shouted, and the sound was whipped away, cut to bits by the speed and the salt. Tom laughed but the laugh stayed in his chest, a rising bubble, and he dug his fingers into the warm rail, feeling every bolt, every scar where the paint had run or been scraped back by someone else’s summer.

Beside him Mum sat forward, one hand on the side, one hand in the air pointing at nothing in particular - a buoy, a line of foam, a flash of glass in the west where the drowned pier lay flat as a drawing on the water. Her hair flew back and slapped her face and she pushed it away and laughed, a proper laugh, not the small kitchen laugh, and in her eyes he saw the beach as it had been before him, before Dad, Brighton before Brighton, a strip of stones and a strip of sea and the old idea of going, always going, out and along and over.

And the boat ran on, skimming the chopped blue, throwing its own white script behind it, a long curling sentence on the water that said: we were here, we passed, we were going, we went.