Memorable Moment at Mwnt

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FranktheFrank
Posts: 1983
Joined: 02 Mar 2016, 18:07
Location: Between the mountains and the sea

Memorable Moment at Mwnt

#1 Post by FranktheFrank » 28 Sep 2021, 14:27

In the vein of Holden Caulfield

I'm looking out of the public bar window at a mountain that’s moving
like Birnam Wood in that play which name must not be spoken of.
I know it’s the drink. My buddy, Jack O’Leary, is as tight as a cork
in a bottle of merlot. We sit opposite in the Angel Hotel,
only it ain’t no hotel, just a public house tucked into the side
of a hill. I’ve been sailing around the seaports of Asia, the Middle East,
Indian Ocean, the Pacific, and the Coast of North America.

He wants to know why I’ve given up the job. In his eyes,
a dream job on a passenger liner, fed at the company’s expense
and paid to swan around doing little.

Jack wanted to know why, why did I finish.
‘Were there plenty of women on board?’
‘Sure, says I, it being a liner an’ all. Plenty, oodles of women young women
and horny’. And that sort of talk turns Jack on and he’s egging me on,
to spill the beans but I don’t want to tell him anything because I’m so fed-up
with the sea. I’m fed-up with the cocktail parties, cummerbunds,
and starched whites. Whites stiff as a virgin jack tar on his first visit to a bagnio.
I’m tired of paying out of my own pay for overalls, and uniforms and tired
of eating first-class when all I want is a boiled egg with a sprinkling of salt.

‘You had it made, why pack it in?’ He couldn’t understand one gets fed up of being
a stuffed shirt when all we did was watchkeeping hundreds of gauges and dials
and shutting off alarms. Sometimes you can’t put your feelings into the words
not the way you want to. It was a summer evening and our mates were out
with girl friends or getting married and the bar was dead and the air hung on our faces
as if you stayed too long you would get as musty and dry as the cellar. He couldn’t
understand, him training to be a teacher and all. He wouldn’t understand the heat
down there in the engine room, the scream of turbines, the hiss of superheated
steam that could burst a flange-joint at any time and cut a man in two, the stink
of crude oil running in the bilges that hung on your skin for days. How to explain
to a trainee teacher the biting desire to sleep more than seven hours at a time
when it is four on and eight off seven days a week for a whole voyage
and when them-upstairs condescend to give one a half-day off, when you’d rather
sleep that half-day off than go on a date with a smashing Canadian girl
who for all I know is still waiting for her beau outside the cinema as arranged.
What sort of life is that.

‘I’m fed-up, says Jack. Sick of this place.’
‘Do you know, Jack, what I miss? I miss camping.’
And a look comes over old Jack, something clicks,
and he says,
‘Yes, sure, I would like to go camping.’
He tells me about this beach called Mwnt
in Ceredigion.
'Let’s go,' he says, when I tell him I’ve got a tent.

We hike and hitch-hike and get picked up by different, and odd kinds of people.
Jack is a big guy and looks good in shorts and some of those guys who pick us up
they take to him in his shorts, you know, looking so manly and get him to sit in the front
and they hang on his every word and old Jack is getting embarrassed and I’m chuckling
in the back seat cos, Jack ain’t like that you know, he’s straight down the middle kind
of guy. But give him a girl and boy he’s all over that girl like a bee on a blossomed flower.

Well, we get to Ceredigion and Jack says, 'It ain’t far we can walk in a couple of hours.'
We camp on the headland. Jack ain’t no camper nor hiker and he’s dead to life as
soon as he lays his head down on the groundsheet. So early morning I knocks at the farm
door and a young woman takes to me and sells me eggs, bread, butter, and milk
for our tea and she’s really nice but something tells me about her worn look
that she’s married. When I say worn, I mean familiar, at ease, she’s at ease with herself
and she knows who she is and she likes men and if it was a different time, if the tide
was coming in, you know, things could be different. And we do nothing because
there is nothing we can do but to look and like each other and that’s enough,
but if the tide was different, you know . . .

We spend the week at Mwnt just doing absolutely nothing, sunning, eating, and swimming
to get cool and basking like iguanas to get warm again. We were bronzed and clean, no alcohol.
It was glorious and then this German girl turns up with a family working as an au pair and Jack says,
‘Go chat her up, ask her out.’ And I goes over and says,
‘What’s a nice girl doing in a hole like this?’ And it works, because she probably doesn’t understand
a word I say. But Jack laughs his socks off cos it’s such a corny line, but more so cos she was digging
a hole in the sand for the kids at the time.

We run out of money and split up to hike back home. An American lady picks me up in her little
British car, a Morris Minor, and drives me back all the way home which was kind of her.
A middle-class American, educated, maybe a teacher, neatly dressed and we speak hardly a word
all the way back. She ain’t looking for action. For her, the thrill is in just picking up a handsome,
slim and bronzed guy and sitting in close for a few hours hours, that’s all the excitement
she’s banking on and I understand because my thoughts are with the German girl, how the sun shone
and sparkled in her blond hair, and I loved that she's taller than me and spoke with such cute
English mixed in with her her German accent and that she'd want to go out with a foreigner like me
on such a gloriously bright and sunny day.

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: Mwnt

#2 Post by BobBradshaw » 28 Sep 2021, 20:44

I enjoyed this very much. Beautifully written. I would say the genre isn't poetry but maybe flash fiction? I'm not going to defend definitions of poetry...so if you see it as poetry, fine. The point is, send it off as fiction somewhere. That's my advice. This piece is a virtuoso of your strengths--colloquialism, characterization, down to earth details....

FranktheFrank
Posts: 1983
Joined: 02 Mar 2016, 18:07
Location: Between the mountains and the sea

Re: Mwnt

#3 Post by FranktheFrank » 28 Sep 2021, 21:05

Thanks Bob. Yes, I agree, flash fiction seems the genre.
I think that might be acceptable as an entry here, maybe Michael can clarify.

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: Mwnt

#4 Post by BobBradshaw » 28 Sep 2021, 22:09

Fiction or not, I'm glad you posted it. I enjoyed it.

Michael (MV)
Posts: 2154
Joined: 18 Apr 2005, 04:57

Re: Mwnt

#5 Post by Michael (MV) » 29 Sep 2021, 03:39

 
Hi Frank,

Strong narrative mode: Fiction

Reminds me of Jack Kerouac's On the Road


8)

Michael (MV)

 
 
 

FranktheFrank
Posts: 1983
Joined: 02 Mar 2016, 18:07
Location: Between the mountains and the sea

Re: Memorable Moment at Mwnt [Final edit 2nd Oct]

#6 Post by FranktheFrank » 02 Oct 2021, 22:11

Thanks Michael.

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