Appledore
by R L Tilley
We went down
into the town, stood on the quay, and listened to
the sheets slapping against the masts of yachts
in the breeze, a loudly tinkling music. The pool
glittered, choppy, on the high tide, as a trawler
steamed into the mouth of the estuary. Spectral
puffs of diesel steam drifted from the funnel,
vanishing in the wind. We watched her until she
tied up alongside the quay and the people who
wanted to buy some of her catch clamoured with
bags for the fresh fish and a young fisherman
sold mackerel and herring fresh from the Atlantic
waters as gulls wheeled overhead.
Walking from
the quay along Myrtle Street, into Odun Road,
down Bude Street, along Market Street we passed
the butcher’s shop, the chandler’s, the
junk shop, the studios, and walked out onto
Meeting Street to what was once Gribble’s
Point. From there we looked across the Pool to
Instow. The tide was on the ebb, the water was
still choppy, and a boatload of scrawny children
pushed off from a slipway. A tall, skinny youth
in a navy blue Guernsey operated the outboard
motor and the tiller. He yelled at the company in
the dinghy to be quiet and to sit still. Some of
them were and some of them did. A black dog
barked at the wind from the bows. The boat was
low in the water and rocking against the current.
When a little girl leaned over to trail a finger
in the water the dinghy tipped to the starboard.
I was sure it would capsize, but no, they tacked
along the edge of the wind and we watched them
across the estuary, zigzagging, their laughter
and the barking of the dog borne back to us upon
that same wind, until they beached at Instow in
the golden October sunlight.
Along Irsha
Street we passed the cottages and courtyards of
yesteryear. A greybearded cobbler hammered at
shoes watched by a white bull terrier with a
fleck of black upon its tail. The front door was
open and watery sunlight illumined the
cobbler’s back. He sat on a stool which
projected slightly out of the doorway of his
workshop. The courtyard walls were a tangled mass
of dried autumnal vines.
The sun was
low in the sky, and before the light should go
and the day end, gulls wheeled and mewed over the
exposed sand and mud of the low tide estuary.
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