In the fading light of an English summer sun, on a quiet beach located on our southern coast, I watched the tide break upon the shore and surge back towards the deep. Its roar drew me to the water's edge where I cooled my bare feet, like I had done in 1927 when I visited the sea for the first time. Then, I was a bairn of just four on a bank holiday outing to Southport with my parents and older sister Alberta.
It was the first and last vacation I would have with my parents because two years later, the crash of 1929 destroyed Britain. It ruined us along with millions of other families who were caught in the violent buckling of the world’s financial tectonic plates that reduced Britain’s working class to beggary.
Above me, a lonely gull rode slips of air like Icarus and mournfully screeched out across the empty ether as if calling for absent friends, lovers and mates. I understood the bird's melancholy because in the wind I heard death whisper that he was coming for me.
My life is at eventide, and the curtain of night is closing in upon my time on this earth. I am almost one hundred years old. I know death is waiting for me but I have still some thing's that must be done before my life’s journey is complete. I must set before my grandchildren and others the story of my early life before our country was civilised by the Welfare State. I must let them know about my struggles and that of my generation to build a more equal country for all and how that relates to today’s politics. I must remind them to be vigilant against demagogues because the ugly specter of fascism has started to stir again across the globe. It was contained once behind the think walls of a functioning welfare state but as that has now begun to crumble all past evils are running out like mice through rotting floor boards. There is so much I must say because I do not wish to suffer the torment my mother endured before she died because she had kept her tongue still about many regrets in her life.
Ah poor mum, her guilt was great, it was bigger than the cancerous tumor killing her, for sins she thought she’d done to my dad, me and her other children, during the Great Depression era. She begged for my forgiveness, for the harm; she may have caused me, during the 1930s. “I was trying to keep thee alive and thy sister but it was so bloody hard.”
Like my mother, many years ago, I am nearing the end of my sojourn on this earth. Before I am no more, I too must start to prepare my final reckoning. For those who will come after me, I must make my testament of those tumultuous times because the moments left to me are short.
Whether its summer or winter, my body is always cold now. It’s because I am so very old that I can feel, in my bones, that same chill I felt as a lad when the icy winds came down off the Yorkshire moors in late autumn. During those days when winter was at our windowsill, my mum would lament, “Fetch, some coal for your mam, and I’ll light a fire that will warm our blood. I’ll tell you tales of your ancestors, who lived in Yorkshire for as long as there has been history written about our land.”
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