15. May, 2020

'The Whitby Girl'

Polly had gone ahead of the family group.  She was now hunkered down, sitting back on her heels as only young children can comfortably do, close by the wire mesh strung baggily between fence posts along the cliff path edge, even that pulled out of shape by the force of the winds coming off the sea.  Here and there it had holes in it and right at the top corner of the edge, above a drop down to the mighty boulders heaved across from Norway to staunch erosion, was tied a faded bunch of flowers - orange, white and yellow - drying out along with the smelly seaweed left on the beach sands by high tide.  She had seen the bouquet every day of the holiday, still clinging on with a ribbon to where it  had been tied on by someone.  Polly had never been allowed to go close enough to the edge to see it properly but now, out of her family’s sight, she did so.  She tried to read the card fastened to the flowers but it had been washed illegible by rain and salt winds, like the headstones in the old clifftop churchyard behind her.  A faint blue dribble was all that could be seen but it looked as if ‘dad’ might be one of the words, one she was able to read and recognise.

“You shouldn’t do that,” said a censorious voice from nearby.  “That’s like walking on someone’s grave.”

“Oh!” said Polly, standing up uncertainly.  

“I bet you do that all the time.  Stomp all over people's graves up here.  Don’t you?”

Polly felt uncomfortable because indeed she had walked through and on them, her whole family had and she and her little brother had played hide and seek among them.

“But it’s not a grave,” she said, trying to stand up for herself.

“It is. That’s why those flowers are there.  They jumped.  Killed themselves.  Splat all over the rocks down there. You know like if you stand on a snail?”  Polly nodded.  “Like that, all squished out.”

“Oh,” said Polly again.  “How do you know?”

“How do I know?  Are you stupid?”  (Polly blushed, a bit shocked).  “Anyway, you’ll get haunted now.” 

“Why will I?”

“For walking on graves.  I told you.”  The voice belonged to another girl not much older than Polly was, with a knowing kind of face to go with her assumed authority.  The girl got up now from the bench she had been sitting on.  Her still presence had been hidden by the shadow of a cloud passing over, so that Polly hadn’t noticed her until she spoke.  “Here. Look,” this other girl said, holding out her hand to Polly.  “These are mine.”  

Polly looked at a handful of worn shells -  little faded spirals with holes in, mussels pearly white inside, broken fragments of razor shell and a dull looking limpet cone or two.  Amongst them was a small polished cowrie shell not from this beach. 

 “That’s the best one,” the other girl said, nudging its shiny leopard spot surface with a thin, raggy nailed finger and turning it over to show the curled edges of its underneath.  “I keep them here.  Don’t you go touching them when I’ve gone, or I’ll know,” she told Polly, and bending, she tucked them into a pocket of sandy gravel below the fence post the flowers were tied to.

“I won’t," promised Polly, although the very knowledge that these were treasures to somebody else made them very tempting to have, of course.  She could picture putting the little cowrie shell in a matchbox lined with cotton wool and pretending it was a pet of hers.  It was the kind of thing she liked to do and it made her want it.  “I’ve got a sea urchin shell and a starfish,” she offered.

“Everyone’s got those,” said the girl scornfully.  “You just buy them from the shell shop.”

“Have they?” said Polly, feeling small again but she knew, although she didn’t dare to say so, that that’s where the cowrie must have come from, because she’d seen them in there in baskets, ranging from little ones to great big ones you could hear the sea in.

Maybe she’d be able to get her own cowrie shell from there, only, you weren’t allowed to have souvenirs bought for you until the end of the holiday and she wasn’t sure if she could wait that long to have one of them.  Besides, it wouldn’t be that special cowrie shell. 

“Have you found an ammonite yet?” asked the other girl.

“No. What’s that?”

“What’s that?” mocked the girl.  “It’s a fossil.  They only come from here.  I know where to find them.  There’s a special place, when the tide is right out.  They’re all curled up down there.”

She pointed below to the bottom of the cliff on the right of the huge boulders.  Flat, muddy looking rock stretches, as barren as the moon apart from stale looking pools crabs might scuttle in, were revealed as the tide was still going out.  Polly looked down, imagining the fossils, whatever they were called, rolled into balls like cute sleeping kittens but she couldn’t see anything.  She looked at the faded bouquet of flowers again.

“If I can’t touch the grave, how come you can put your shells under it?” asked Polly, emboldened by these confidences to make a challenge in return.

“Of course I can!   What did it say on the card?”

“‘Dad’,” I think.”

“What’s your name?”

“Polly.  What’s yours?”

“Anna. I’m going now,” said the girl. “It was my dad, see, that jumped off.  Those are my flowers” she added with a return to truculence as, turning away, she went running lightly off round the path and disappeared from Polly’s view into the graveyard.  She hadn’t sounded at all upset, just a bit nasty, the same as she had most of the way through the brief exchange. 

Polly heard her family’s voices approaching, rather behind from holding back whilst Sam stumped his five year old legs determinedly up the one hundred and ninety nine steps leading up to the abbey, as he did every time they came up there, with rests in between.  To Polly, being seven, he was very little indeed compared with her.  Before they came up, on impulse she bent down, wickedly, to scrabble up the cowrie shell and pocket it but her mum was shouting,

“What are you doing?  Get away from the edge there!” so that she had to stand up and leave it where it was because you weren’t allowed to take things that you just found, as they belonged where they were; pebbles from the beach, creatures in rock pools and, she was sure, shells that someone else had buried, since they were not ones you had collected yourself.  

Polly had a finely tuned sense of honesty and wrongdoing, not least because any minor misdemeanour she attempted was either found out instantly or, burdened by guilt, she confessed to it and then cried.  Besides, Anna had said she would know.  She looked around guiltily now, as she walked on with the family to put a coin in the viewing telescope at the top end and to look through it for pirate ships.  There were always pirate ships going round, according to her own dad, who would point them out tacking along the horizon and make up stories about them.  The tales were mostly about ‘Black Jack’, who must, Polly thought, own a lot of pirate ships, because they nearly always saw one of them every day when they looked through the telescope.

They carried on their walk round through the graveyard, where Polly was now careful not to stand on the actual graves and she thought about the pretty cowrie shell left in the cold ground, when she, Polly, would look after it and polish it up every day in its little box.  Anna couldn’t really care about it, leaving it there like that with all the old broken ones, could she?  The pathos of the cowrie’s situation remained on her mind, even when they went down again  to see the whimsical blown glass animals on twisty legs in the Whitby Glass shop to start choosing one each to buy later.  It struck her even more closely than the terrible sounding demise of Anna’s dad, ‘squished’ on the rocks, all bloody like a run over hedgehog, she thought.  She’d seen those.

“Mum,” she told her mother, with whom she was next in a shop selecting pastries and Yorkshire curd tarts for a picnic lunch on the sands , “I met a girl who said her dad jumped off the cliff.”

“What?” said her mother distractedly, taking and paying for packages.  “What a horrible story!"  She didn’t sound as if she believed Polly at all. “What girl was this?” she asked as they turned to leave the shop.

Just in time, Polly realised that reminding her mother she had been near the cliff edge would call forth further rebuke, so she just said,

“Nobody, really” and her mother smiled as if to say, ah, we’re in make believe territory, saying,

“Sad things do happen and I suppose those flowers you keep asking about could be to do with something like that but let’s not think about it.”  She glanced round at Polly’s dad waiting with Sam by the door, so Polly knew that he’d be getting told off for telling the children stories firing up the imagination in the wrong direction.  In a way, Polly wished she had been making Anna up.  Then she wouldn’t have to be nervous about being haunted for walking on graves. “We don’t know what happened there so there’s no point worrying about it” her mother continued.  "It might have nothing to do with that. Your dad is definitely not going to jump off a cliff.  Silly billy.”

It was true that death had only recently entered Polly’s mind as a concept and her fears about it naturally centred around her nearest and dearest, making her apt to ask unexpected things.  She let her mum think that was what she had meant and instead began wondering about being haunted.  She knew what ghosts were, because she had a grandma far less matter of fact than her parents and had heard plenty of stories there cosied up in bed with her on mornings when they stayed for a visit.

The sun was out and windbreaks were installed around deck chairs like small fortresses guarding one family from another.  Polly got cross and upset when Sam stamped down her sandcastle, which she had just set up her flags in, red lions on a yellow background.  So, it being deemed that lunch had gone down far enough, she was allowed to go and paddle in the shallows while Sam was buried up to his delighted chest in a sand boat.  Polly half wanted to whine that it wasn’t fair he was being given a special treat when he’d been naughty but she wanted to go paddling, so didn’t.  She took her shrimping net with her, in case there was anything in the rock pools by the pier, which were warm, if a bit muddily whiffy, whilst the sea was always so cold.  She was allowed to look at things, bring them in a seawater filled plastic bucket to be admired and then put them back but there was rarely much in them except the pale little baby crabs whose pincers and legs you could find floating around on their own sometimes.  Disappointingly, so far Polly had not found any actual shrimps and you had to mind the barnacles on the rocks didn’t scrape your feet.

It had been windy the previous night and a flotilla of jellyfish, big and round with purple centres, were stranded on the wet sands nearby, cast up.  She crouched down to look at them and prodded one with the stick of her net.  Its tendrils were strung out like a heap of transparent spaghetti, stuck with sand.  A shadow fell across her.

“If you touch them, they’ll sting you to death,” said a voice and she looked up to see Anna beside her, with bare feet and her dress tucked up in her knickers.  “Do you know what else?  There’s killer fish buried in the sand.  See that flag up there?”  Polly followed where Anna’s finger was pointing.  “Weever fish warning.  They stick in your feet and you can’t get the spines out.  They’re full of poison and  your feet turn all black and fall off.  Then you die.”

Polly looked gratefully at her own red plastic sandals and then at Anna’s bare toes.

“What about your feet?” she asked.

“Oh, they can’t get me,” said Anna.  “I know where they are.  Come on.  I’ll race you.”

The two girls ran giggling down to the surf, arriving breathless, Polly’s lime green shrimp net fluttering like a kite.  Dirty froth washed over their feet, curdled up with sand and salt.  Further out, clean white crested waves rose up.  They looked huge, as tall as Polly.  From a safe distance, the girls jumped the tamer ones curling over to come in near the shore.  After this, they went back to the rock pools and Anna took the net to waft it through the water, bringing up a very small starfish which they dropped in Polly’s bucket and crouched down together to look in at. 

“I’m going to show Mum and Dad!” said Polly, excited.  

They had been here for five days and she’d never caught one of those before,

“Where are they?” asked Anna.

“Over there, see, with my little brother.”

“I haven’t got a brother.  I did have but I pushed him off the pier.”

Polly stared.

“What happened to him?.”

“He drowned, of course.  That’s why my dad jumped off the cliff,”  Anna added for good measure, saying as she had before, “I’m going now.” 

Polly ran back to her parents with her bucket.

“Mum, dad!  Look what I’ve found.  I saw that girl again.  She says she pushed her brother off the pier and that’s why her dad jumped off the cliff, because he drowned!”

“Did she now?” said her mum, frowning but laughing at the same time.  “Maybe you shouldn’t believe all you hear, Polly.  Where is she, then, this little girl?”

“I don’t know, she’s gone.  Look at my starfish!”

Her father and mother looked.

“I didn’t see you playing with anyone, “ said her dad.  “I was keeping an eye on you.”

“I’m going to have a word with your mother next time we go,” said Polly’s mum to Polly’s dad.  “She’s giving Polly a very ghoulish imagination.”

“And there’s poison fish in the sand that have stingers!” Polly went on.

“I know, that’s why you have to wear your sandals.  Don’t you remember us telling you, you had to be careful?"

“No,” said Polly, who didn’t.

When they went up the abbey climb again later to walk on back to the caravan park for tea, she decided that she wouldn’t try to take the cowrie shell today after all.  That way, maybe Anna’s dad wouldn’t come to haunt her in the night, Polly reckoned and anyway, they were all four of them in the caravan sleeping together, she and Sam in their bunk beds and mum and dad just opposite in the pull down bed, so she didn’t see how he could do, even if he tried it.  Still, perhaps she shouldn’t walk on his grave again, she thought, glancing across to where the flowers were fastened on the fence and where the shells were buried.  The day had passed and the intensity of her longing for the special cowrie shell had faded with it.  There was no sign of Anna this time, wherever it was that Anna herself lived.