The Summer Post
In the evenings, I often take my dogs for a walk beside the reservoir. It is a drive for me, but it is quiet and still and peaceful and in these last days of summer a good way to ease into autumn, reflections on the water, the trees, the turn of the leaves as each day that bit closer to dusk.
The path runs narrow with an inlet stream on the right. Walking this path, I have seen two young lads, mates, going out as I came back. They struck me as odd, these two, thirteen or fourteen years old, not sure why odd – then yes I was – odd hair. And one had a case on his back which I thought had held a gun.
I used to shoot at that age too, in the woods, me and my mate, killing birds. But not with hair like that.
The other evening I was later than usual. Suddenly, my saluki-greyhound's ears pricked up - he has good ears - hunts with his ears and his eyes - and there was this 'click click click', the sound of metal on metal, coming from up ahead.
Further along, on the narrow path beside the reservoir, with the inlet on the right, there is a bridge, where the overflow enters the reservoir. The two lads were on the bridge, the case leant up against the railings, except it wasn't a gun case at all it had held two foils. These two boys were fencing.
The combatants stopped as they stood aside, polite, deferential, dealing patiently with the intrusion.
And suddenly their hair made sense, medieval, foppish, like extras from a costume drama. With swords in their hands. They were on their way to a fencing class, a short-cut on the path beside the reservoir, with the inlet on the right.
My saluki-grey loped up to one of these lads and stood beside him and this boy's face lit with delight, fresh-faced and scrubbed and as yet unshaven beneath that peculiar bob of hair, that affectation, that thumbing of the i-pod, this running dog, this hunting hound, this noble dog, this white ghost-hound of courts and kings suddenly found his home beside this young knight, flushed and panting from battle still, the foil flexed in his hand. In the fading light beside the reservoir. In the beginning of evening.
They were there again last night. Click click click. They wore none of the protective clothing - no face mask, no padding - and as they swung and cut and thrust, higher now, up from the chest, their joyous eyes spat danger like fat. They battled on, intense, without safety, testing themselves.
On this narrow path beside the reservoir, with the inlet on the right.
On this bridge, where the overflow enters the reservoir.
Click click click.
A breeze on the water, metal-flat. The ruffle of a heron's wing, hunched, concerned, this fisher-king now a Mother's voice: “Oh do be careful! You'll put out an eye! Don't you come running to me....” but they won't, Oh no not these two, they're running away, these two knights, these vagabonds, they're leaving home on this whirling, dangerous dance with steel.
And I was suddenly taken by an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. Not for myself, but on their behalf, nostalgia once removed. For I knew that these two boys were forging memories here, in this beautiful summer, this wet summer, this dangerous summer, this summer they took up fencing summer, this beautiful summer of friendship summer, freezing moments in the stream of their time summer, defining the key beats in their own heart-story summer, this summer they will never forget summer, this summer that will never die.
Old men now, nodding by fires, chin-spittled piss-stink, trying to lust after nurses.
A sly eye.
A whisper over the corridor, metal-flat.
“Hey – you remember the summer of seven? It was wet but strangely beautiful? And we fenced on that bridge in our twilight? And that big, white ghost-dog? And we wore odd hair?”
“Yeah - hey, we nearly put out an eye there..... didn't we?”
Andrew Griffiths
September, 2007
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