Songs of Journey, Songs of Home

After a while I sat with my legs over the edge. The view drew me in but after sitting for half an hour on a grassy hump near the treeline I felt comfortable. Large bodied insects hummed around me, dipping into the tightly folded petals of small pink alpine flowers, their wings a blur.

The grass underneath me was pale from two months of summer, but out of the sun the air was cold. Below my scuffling trainers, after a few hundred feet of scored and uneven grey stone cliff, the road leapt out of an overhang and curled away down the side of the valley, with thick pine on the slope above and loose scrubby, tenuous greenery on the scree below, as the country dropped again to the tiny stream at the bottom of the gorge. A ridge to the West was dark, sharp and jagged against the sky. Behind me the path rolled down to the edge of the village, winding through thick pine. Beyond that the land rose again, into another ridge, its crest rounded and bulbous and running off to the East, so high that the grass faded out and patches of snow clung to the rock in the shaded places.

After a month of travel, my hair was growing out of a tidy cut for the first time, and I liked the way I could feel the wind from the valley below in it. It was curling. This came as no surprise; it had been perpetually difficult to control when it was short and, supposedly, straight.

*

There was a bench in a small depression tucked into the side of the hill. For all of the times I had walked the many paths of the Downs, I had never seen the bench before. I sat down and pulled out my water bottle, blinking the sweat out of my eyes, looking out over fields of yellow and green and razed purple blue across the Island. The sun was high in the sky and a white, soundless shape took leave of the grassy surface of the airport in the distance and hung, rising slowly, against the backdrop of the hills above Brading. I was breathing heavily from the steepness of the path and the heat bothered me. A bee spiralled around my head briefly and disappeared into the thicket. The air was heavy with the dust of grass and earth, and the scent of summer.

With no job to tie my time to, there was no reason why I could not walk to my Monday morning appointment at the employment office in Shanklin, about five miles from the house in Ventnor. I walked the sea wall from Ventnor, up through the winding wooded paths of the Undercliff and the uneven landslip below Devil’s Chimney, past the old stone seat whose wish I have saved, along the estate driveway of old Dunnose Cottage, and finally down to the flat sands of the huge bay, which, when the tide is out, stretch from the unnamed chine near Dunnose to the far side of Sandown, and the foot of the chalk cliffs of Culver Down. I was returning the other way, up and over St. Boniface Down, above Ventnor; round the crook of the hill, past the bombed ruins of the radar station and off the hill into the old train station, which was now an industrial estate, above the house.
I was on my way home.

I had never sat in that place before. The familiar lines of the roads and the Downs and the spires in the towns were shown from a new perspective. The white pin of a monument on top of Culver had the shadow of the mainland behind it.

*

A seagull swung into the lee of the ferry, above the dissolving churn of the wake. The sky was a grey shade of blue and dusk was falling quickly. A thin rope barrier in front of a rusting and rickety concertina of painted red metal was all that separated me from the drop to the water. Across that water, and moving slowly away, was an island. A hand snaked into the pocket of my coat and curled cold fingers into my palm and I held them. Tall dark shapes on the island shrank downwards as we moved, and they began to light up gently. A soft dusting of stars on a lifted horizon.

With the release of a breath of air to the wind, the world changed. It and I changed in the twilight of that day and with her and with the unspoken, unhesitant giving of her city, her island.

I took my hand out of my coat pocket and put my arm around her. She nestled into me and did the same. The two of us, looking at the island, standing on the back of a ferry, not intent on its destination.