by Michael Bloor
first published in Literally Stories, May 19th, 2025
Alan had a presentiment of a Nelson Rockefeller Moment in Dorothy’s shower, so he chose the healthy granola option for breakfast, rather than a bacon roll. It was a rare, cold, bright, windless, January day. After he’d loaded the dishwasher, he decided to take a walk down to the shore.
He stood on the scrunchy pebble beach, looking out over the Firth to the Isle of Arran, with snow-white Goat Fell gleaming in the low sun. The Firth was so calm that he took a notion to try the child’s game of skimming a pebble across the water. There were plenty of small flat pebbles, but he found he’d lost the trick of it – the best he could manage was a stone that merely skipped twice across the sea before sinking.
Last night, watching the dolorous television news, he’d said to Dorothy, ‘Grandad had to go and fight in World War I. And then Dad had to go and fight in World War II. I was bloody lucky that mass warfare then skipped a generation in the UK.’ That thought came back to him now. He dropped his latest flat pebble back onto the beach. Yesterday’s throw-away comment on the news was quite true: looking back at his life, he had been a fortunate man…
Mid-afternoon, Friday May 12th, 1967. Radio London, a pirate radio station based in an ex-US Navy Minesweeper, moored 12 miles offshore from the Essex coast, had secured and begun broadcasting a pre-release copy of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Listening to it on a tinny transistor radio in a thunder storm, Alan knew that, in some way, the wide world had changed just a wee bit. And he was a witness.
Summer 1965, with The Byrds ‘ Mr Tambourine Man playing somewhere in the middle distance, holding his girl close in the velvet darkness, her skin like warm silk. April 1967, paying to watch Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal, two nights in a row in a decrepit cinema in Cambridge. Summer 1967, hitch-hiking to Venice, enduring shimmering queen of the seas. Christmas Time 1968, breaking into the deserted football stadium one starry night and scoring an imagined wonder goal at The Normanton End.
Bugger the Moon Landing – Alan’s litany swept on regardless. In a past year now uncertain, standing on the pilgrim-worn front steps of the great Cathedral of Chartres. The glory of The Middle Ages, and to this day, no-one knows the name of a single one of those (prince or peasant) who laboured so long to build it – a seraphic hymn in stone. Another summer, also difficult now to place, when a Swiss Border Guard at the Italian-Swiss frontier had turned him back from Switzerland (as an itinerant with insufficient funds), but once the border post was out-of-sight, he’d climbed and scrambled into Switzerland, crested a ridge, and strolled down through Alpine pastures full of flowers, with cowbells in the dim distance. Another summer, again undated: barrelling along Highway 101, with The Allman Brothers’ Ramblin’ Man on the am/fm radio (that last one might possibly be better termed a retro-adolescent event).
The wisdom of lovers, friends and family – some of them now long past. He recalled his Grandad: his gentle patience with Alan’s childish attempts at fashioning wooden furniture in the shed; his skillfull green fingers with vegetables, fruits and herbs; his sturdy independence – cursing Winston Churchill every time he appeared on Grandad’s black-and-white TV. Alan felt that he was almost a custodian of the memory of his Grandad: he was surely now the last person alive who had known intimately that vigourous, quirky, cheery old man.
The tide was on the ebb and Alan turned way – tasks awaited him. He turned away, also, from those memories, his Lost Domain. He knew it was perilous to dwell too much on the past. A great French writer had written a fine book about his obsessive struggle to return to the new-minted world of adolescence and had then gone off to die in very first weeks of World War I, charging a German machine gun with a revolver*.
To recall the past was like the comfort of a warm blanket on a cold morning. To seek out what was past was folly. Alan’s knew his own Lost Domain should be a cherished remembrance, but there must be no attempted return.
*Alain-Fourier (1966) Le Grand Meaulnes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Modern Classics.