Discovery

It would be odd if at my age I discovered that I was capable of writing stories, stories which would interest other people other than my own immediate family.

Like most people who have lived sixty or seventy years I have made lots of discoveries, some happy ones, some sad and others just disillusioning.

Perhaps the one I remember best happened when I was just fifteen, and though it was kind of half expected it came on me suddenly, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye you might say.

To say I remember it best is hardly true either, because I have striven so many times to recapture that moment of, what? Joy, Happiness, Godliness, Holiness? No none of these things, and yet all of these things, and more than these. I must just tell you of its happening and leave the rest to your imagination. There will I'm sure in the innermost depths of your heart something very similar, would that we could talk about it just you and I.

Fifteen is a wonderful age, growing into manhood or womanhood, a time of wanting and yearning, a time to do things and see things, things in the big cities or over the hill and far away depending where you are living at the time.

It is an unsettled time too this waiting for something you know not what.

There are some things in our hearts or memories which we never tell to anyone, and I think perhaps this is one of them. And here am I trying to write about it.

It's like laying bare my soul, opening it out like a book for all the world to see.

You see people might laugh, and say whoever wrote that must be queer, and you know, I have heard it said that we are all a bit queer. That would be another discovery after nearly seventy years.

When God asks about these things, He won't laugh or jest, and when I try to tell Him, and He sees that it is quite beyond me, He will perhaps tell me just when, and how, and why it happened like it did, and at last I'll know. That is going to be one of the things which will make it easier to cross the dividing line when the time comes, and I'm quite sure that if He doesn't tell me then there is no one on this earth who can.

Now if I were a Gray, or a Shakespeare, or a Matthew Arnold, I could write it in poetry and call it Byegones, for to me it is the greatest byegone of them all, and there have been an awful lot.

Poets can say things things in a few words which it would take me thousands of words to say, and then it wouldn't be said half as well as the poet who said it.

If you read Gray's Elegy or The Scholar Gipsy or one of the hundreds of other poems you will find they tell you what life is all about. Your life, my life or anyone's life and tell it so clearly that it could be your life they were writing about. All you have ever thought or felt, the highest peak of your happiness, the lowest depth of your sadness. Grand stuff poetry, I'd love to be a poet and write something which would last as long as the world is.

I have been back to that place once, the place where I shone the Great Light so many years ago and I stood on the very spot, foolishly trying to recapture a little of that elusive past.

The place has not changed at all, it is now as it was on that September evening fifty odd years ago. The beck runs as quietly and untroubled almost at the end of its journey to the sea. The stile and the narrow footbridge are as they were then, the murmur of the restless sea surging and retreating, whispering its mystery.

Only the two young people are missing, the girl completely and the boy only a shadow of the past.

It was like walking on hallowed ground. Put off thy shoes from off thy feet for the place whereon you thou treadest is holy ground. Just like that, there was no burning bush but the miracle was just as shattering and sobering.

I stood a while, looking as it were through sightless eyes, only my mind's eye seeing and it seeing each little detail, it was as well that I was alone with my emotion.

Overcome I turned and hurried away across the little footbridge, my footsteps echoing as they must have done that evening. I will never return to that place again.

We were both very young and and for both of us it was our first love, each striving for something we knew not what, only knowing there was a something. I could only be happy when we were together, just two or three hours each week.

Her voice I remember was soft and low, like the voice of the turtle dove as it sits beside its mate on the nest, and her eyes were the same grey as the bird, or were they the lightest blue? I never could be sure.

We had walked from her home that evening on the path which meanders along the side of the small beck, not touching each other, but keeping as close as may be. Our shadows had lengthened and had at last disappeared as the light faded and the warm sun dipped below the horizon of the Solway.

We came to the end of the pathway and to the stile on the shore. We stood by the side of the beck looking down into its darkening water not speaking, it almost seemed that we knew something was happening.

The only sounds, the soft babble of the water flowing to meet the sea at the end of it's journey, the music of the not far distant sea like myriads of voices whispering.

The warm soft air of that northern twilight casting its romantic spell on two young hearts ripe for the great awakening, of which they as yet knew nothing.

We stood side by side happy in the silence and solitude, thinking each our own thoughts, I grasping my happiness with both hands savouring each moment. Our hands touched, and I leaned closer and looked into her eyes as she too looked into mine. Our lips met lightly, gently in our first kiss, and in that moment we grew up.

How long that moment lasted who can tell? It may have been a thousand years, we may have died and been born again. It only happens once in a lifetime to each of us. We had found that which I had tried to recapture and lost a part of my being in the capture.

We were children no longer, we were launched on life's journey, the great mystery was solved.

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