In my case it was not cold, but hot; not spruce, but olive and cork; and there was no island, just the endless openness of the Mediterranean. I was younger than your 5th-Year kids, only age 7. I had been in a ship, but never before in a boat.
My mother and I had vacated for August, along with the rest of Paris, and headed south, by train and autobus, further than other vacationers, beyond the tourists, ending in a tiny, very old village at the sea’s edge, still unaware of the modernity of 1964. Someone had left, left behind their house and furniture, and we took up residence. We walked the old walls and swam in the Mediterranean and ate paella and eavesdropped on almost-comprehensible Catalan when the Green Coats weren’t around.
The brightly painted wooden boats were small, crewed by one or two men, propelled by the smelly pop-pop of one-cylinder inboard motors and by oars when those quit. They went out very early each morning, returned midday, the men joined together, working the ropes by hand to haul the boats, one by one, onto the beach as each arrived with the catch. In the afternoons they sat in groups on the sand, drinking from wineskins and smoking brown tobacco and talking as they mended their nets with quick shuttles in their hands.
It was only just this past March that I finally returned, 51 years later, driving the hours south from my home near Bergerac, on an impulse not unlike my mother’s. I knew that I would not find the village I remembered, and perhaps that is what had kept me away so long. Perhaps I harboured some kind of magical notion that the village would live on so long as I didn’t tarnish the memory with inevitable change. But I’d always intended to return, and so at last I did.
I found him, very old now, living in old stone in the shadow of the tourist hotels. I was remembered. He misremembered us as being German, but he remembered clearly the day he and his father had taken a little foreign girl with strawberry blonde hair out in their boat. He remembered her wide green eyes and her excitement and the shrimp they had caught that day.
Who I am is different to who I would have been without that boat.
I suppose my mother had intended only to spend a holiday month, but something captivated her, and we stayed six, returning home at the tail end of winter. Maybe it was the old ways of the place, embedded in the old stone walls. Maybe it was the scent of heated olive oil, which filled the narrow street each day at six o’clock. Whichever, that’s how she was. Accustomed to her impulsive, itinerant ways, I thought nothing of it. That’s how I was.
Who I am now is different. Whatever had captivated my mother into those six months is no longer there, and I stayed only the weekend. It was good to find him and be remembered. And remember.
Benjamin, thank you for taking me back.
❤ Allison
