Words on a Page

  Photo credit:  Amanda Slater  cc 2009 It's Sunday morning, and still the August Bank Holiday weekend. Jenny has spent the night at a B&B on the western edge of the Isle of Wight. She has just one more day to find Deborah, but is there, perhaps, something else she's looking for as well? ~ The old road from The Needles to Freshwater Bay rolls along in waves as if the land were a solid sea, cresting and falling with a frozen tide. The sea, itself, has turned a steely grey, whitecaps punctuating its surface as it churns in the wind. As she joins the A3055 again, following along the southern coast, she catches glimpses of the chalk cliffs crumbling into the waves. The whole island, it seems, is being consumed by the sea. She keeps to the edge of the road, squeezed between the grassy verge and the last of the summer holiday traffic. Now and then, as she climbs the long hill to the top of Military Road, moving slowly in her lowest gear, cars grow impatient and push past to...

  Photo credit: Dominic Alves cc 2011 It's the August Bank Holiday weekend, here in the UK, and in Portsmouth, the Victorious Music Festival is in full swing down on Southsea Common. Over on the island, it's the weekend of annual Isle of Wight International Scooter Rally, and yesterday hundreds of scooters made the ferry crossing from Old Portsmouth. On this very day, in 1984, Jenny crossed over with them - her last chance to find Deborah before the end of the month. ~ It is Saturday morning, the start of the bank holiday weekend, and this time she is taking the car ferry to Fishbourne, a few miles to the west of Ryde. A veil of fog hangs over the water, and the seam between sea and sky, crafted anew each morning, is stitched so finely that from the bow of the ship Jenny cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Everything is white and empty and thick with silence. Lost in the mist somewhere off to the right of the ship, a foghorn cries out. A moment later, a muffled ...

    Jenny’s life is at a crossroads. Her  marriage has grown silent since the sudden death of her youngest daughter, and now her eldest and only child has begun pushing her away. Nobody at home seems to need her anymore. At the Royal Mail sorting office where she is the only woman to have stuck with the job, her position is equally precarious. Though her boss can’t fault her work, he has made it clear he wants her out. Undermined at home and at work, Jenny is desperate for something to change.  So, when a postcard from Australia, begging the recipient for forgiveness, but with an incomplete address on the Isle of Wight lands on her sorting table, she does the unthinkable – she slips it up her sleeve and sets off on her bicycle to deliver it herself. If she can’t save her own faltering relationships, perhaps she can help someone else save theirs. Set in Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight during the turbulent summer of 1984,  Missing Words  captures Thatcher’s ...

  As the old year passed into the new, last night, I celebrated by cycling along the seafront. It was a warm, dry evening, and half the city, it seemed, had turned out for a giant, midnight beach party. There were bonfires on the shingle, and family groups of revelers stretched out along the prom. In the minutes coming up to midnight, faces glowed in the darkness in phonelight anticipation as people checked the time. Then, in an unsynchronised fashion, rockets began shooting skyward over the sea. Across the Solent, as if in response, the sky above the Isle of Wight was filled with bursting bouquets of light. And at the stroke of twelve the boats in the black water that divided us from them sounded their horns in a discordant and mournful drone. Were they crying out in celebration? Or were they grieving over another lost year? Once more, a new year has crept through the dark days of December and taken me by surprise. Only yesterday, it was Christmas. And a week before that it was Bo...