(first published in The Flash Fiction Press, January 5th, 2017)
(Ed note–We are ecstatic to welcome Mick Bloor back for another week; come back through this Saturday and we believe that you will like him as much!–LA)
A routine visit to the town library with my daughter. My pedagogic overtures rejected, I drift over to a display of new books. A shock: the photo on the dust-jacket of a book about the Channel Islands. It’s Fermain Bay, Guernsey. For years, I carried in my wallet just such a photo, taken from among the headland pines on a day of luminous light, looking down into the narrow sandy bay. On the dust-jacket, I can just make out tiny, scattered deck-chairs, once my summer-long responsibility.
The things you forget. The great Martello Tower, built to dominate the beach and deter Napoleon – forgotten. A mere stone obstacle to be skirted on journeys between my deck-chair store and Ginny’s beach café. An historic monument rubbed out and Ginny’s brown eyes and deft movements given Conservation Area status. The things you remember: our first kiss, when I couldn’t stop my knees trembling; how the smell of the pines gradually gave way to the smell of the sea on morning walks to work; the taste of fresh Guernsey milk. And there’s the bad stuff too: the café break-in when all the fags were stolen and the owner blamed me; my night at the police station – a brief episode, but a lasting after-taste of how it is to be the bewildered outsider, the stranger deemed suddenly to be the enemy. That summer was my passage into adulthood, backlit by the ‘vision splendid’ of childhood, but treading step-by-step into Man’s Estate.
Thirty-odd years have passed since that library visit, just as twenty-odd years had stretched between my Guernsey days and my discovery of the dust-jacket. A strange exercise, to sit and recall the time when the memory of Fermain Bay engulfed me like an incoming tide – the memory of a memory.
Biography:
Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).
Saragun Springs 
Good morning Mick
A wistful tale to begin the autumn (and for nearly as long as I’ve been typing, I again, transpose the m and n in autumn).
The sudden resurgence of memory in this is fantastic–the it temporarily eliminates the years between is something a person of any amount of years can relate to.
Thank you again for allowing these to appear again!
Leila
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Leila,
The thanks should be all mine. This piece (as well as those appearing in Saragun Springs over the rest of this week) was first published in an online mag which closed down, and its website disappeared. As the copyright owner, I’m very pleased that Saragun Springs is giving the piece another day in the sun.
bw, mick
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Mick – disappearing publications. I went down through my website a few months ago and counted 150 publications (note = story/publisher) gone before I quit. I’ve tried to get some insurance by publishing stories at least twice.
Ah, those summer jobs. Memories good and bad.
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Thanks, Doug. Yes, I remember an earlier LS post of yours on the great number of your online stories that have now vanished with their former publisher. Disheartening, I know.
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Dear Mick
Welcome back! “Fermain Bay” is nothing short of a prose poem in the way this piece creates a mood through a voice and contains multiple layers and levels within it. The way this tale combines public history with private history in such a seamless and subtle way is truly a sleight-of-hand writing trick the best part of which is it doesn’t feel like a “trick,” it feels natural and authentic. But to be expressed in words this well, there needs to be MUCH invisible skill involved. The words and the place and what happened there all feel connected at a deep level.
Thanks for your comments about my Jim Morrison/Blake piece yesterday as well.
Especially two things. First how you mentioned Swedenborg. You’re right, Blake is impossible without Swedenborg and the great mystic deserves to be called up whenever someone is discussing Blake. Johnny Appleseed, the American folk hero, was another such Swedenborgian disciple. Very few people ever take it as far as you did though, and actually read Swedenborg’s writings (even though everyone did so in the 19th century). I’ve dipped into the ocean myself and it can be both mystifying, consoling or wordy/overwhelming by turns, and yet his good Spirit is within all that he did. There’s a wonderful you tube show called Off the Left Eye. The whole thing is dedicated to exploring Swedenborg and his writings. Brilliant. Makes you feel like angels (and demons) are hovering above your head, which, according to Swedenborg, they are.
You were also right to point out more about the more optimistic side of Blake, that he believed things could get better and was willing to fight for it. There was that time he physically removed one of the king’s soldiers from his own back yard. Amazing that they let him get away with that; most other people would’ve been beaten, fined, or incarcerated, and he wasn’t famous or wealthy, either, it was simply his overwhelming presence that kept them at bay.
But mostly his eternal war against “them” was all spiritual.
Thanks again!
Dale
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Dale,
Thanks for your kind comments on the Fermain Bay piece.
But thank you very much for pointing me to the Off the Left Eye you tube discussions. It’s many, many years since I read those Swedenborg books in the uni library and I only remember bits and pieces. Yet I remain interested in him (not least because guys like Blake and Borges were interested in him) and I recently bought a copy of Swedenborg’s Dream Diary – his account of a continuous series of dreams in 1743-44, when he was apparently undergoing some kind of spiritual crisis. So I’ll be going back to you tube after I’ve posted this. bw mick
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