 Photo: Harmers Haven by Catherine Watson | This is Bernadette’s beach. She walked here every day. And this is Bernadette’s pool though she never swam in it. I wouldn’t swear she could tell a gull from a plover. She never said of a limpet “Oh, this is Sell-an-a tra-mos-er-ica!” I couldn’t say she knew the names of the fishes or her east from her west. She wasn’t that kind of person. But she knew the light that creeps over the dunes at dawn, the way it glances off the rocks and plunges in near the cape She knew the rock sculptures, the Henry Moore and the Rodin. She knew the sweep of the sand and the swoosh of the swell. She knew winter afternoons, when there is no horizon between the deep grey sea and the deep grey sky and how in a winter gale if you open your coat wide and lean out over the cliff the south westerly holds you. |