Short story: The Drowning Sands

An artist remembers…

Harry sets up his easel in the usual spot, planting the tripod legs on the muddy margins of the strand. He lays out his paints. The sky is bleak and huge, widening over the Isle, the beach littered with chalk and dumps of seaweed, the water ever-changing grey, green, and blue. His palette matches it: loose colour, diluted earth, liquid sky. On the near horizon white-tipped waves foam along Goodwin Sands. Harry senses the tide turning, ready to race in and cover the sand bank, the graveyard for ships and Spitfires. He mixes a deeper shade to reflect the shadows on the water.

He took up painting in his seventies, as something to fill his widowered hours. Watercolours of the Channel, the view from this shore - where Roman footprints fell, where Saxons landed, and the Stour opens its mouth into the sea - are his speciality. The mercurial presence of the treacherous sand bank ebbs and flows through his work. He mixes colours, dashes painterly strokes, using his muse to help him forget. And yet, he has come to learn, it is no help at all.

Harry was ten years old when his father hauled the body of the pilot, weighted by his lifejacket, over the side of the lifeboat, and his deceased head rested against Harry’s boot. The young man’s mouth fell open, as if he had one last thing to say, and a tiny crab crawled out.

‘Should have stayed at home,’ said Harry’s father, leaving Harry unsure whether he meant him, or the pilot. Harry’s father called to his helmsman. ‘Anyone else there, do you think, Jim? Where’s the Messerschmitt?’

Jim the helmsman surveyed the narrow island of sand where the fuselage of the crashed Spitfire burned, spewing putrid smoke. Breakers rolled over the broken wings, licking at the red, white, and blue disc. ‘No sign of it, Skip. Sunk without a trace.’ The smell of scorched fuel hung in salty air. ‘Should we go round once more, Skip, and check? They both came down around here.’

‘I don’t trust the look of it,’ said Harry’s father. ‘And we need to watch the current. Best get clear. Could go up at any moment. We’ll report in as soon as we reach harbour.’

Harry watched the crab make its escape over the pilot’s shoulder. The sodden head felt heavy, the dark hair matted, eyes closed. Something about the way the lids sat made Harry know in the deepest part of him, that the man was not sleeping. Even so, Harry did not want to move his foot, to disturb him, to draw attention to himself. 

‘Don’t look at him, lad,’ said his father, with a crack of kindness in his voice. He gave his command: ‘Let’s get going, Jim. It’s too dangerous for us, and the lad.’ His stare fixed onto Harry, pinning him. ‘And, you lad, you don’t tell a soul about this. About you being here, right? It’s not allowed, understand? Don’t say a word.’

Harry had been enjoying a jaunt in his father’s lifeboat around Ramsgate harbour, strictly against the rules but all was quiet, and his father had given in to his pleads. When the call came in, there had been no time to jettison him. 

Jim turned the helm for port, putting on some speed, and Harry did his father’s bidding and looked away from the pilot’s dead face. He watched the Sands retreat, the wake of the lifeboat forcing water over the stricken plane. Glancing up, he spotted traces of another dogfight further west, the streams of vapour playing out like a silent ballet against a sky the colour of summer. He found it hard to believe that inside each plane squatted a man like the one whose head rested against his foot, drawing lines through the sky with their machines, effortless, beautiful, invincible.

He stared back at the ditched Spitfire becoming small and defenceless as the lifeboat chugged away. Around the sand bank and the wreck of human life, stretched the Channel, looking as polished and as placid and as familiar as it had been that morning when the pilot had first taken to the skies, and Harry had asked his father to let him have a ride in the boat.

Something broke the surface and bobbed like a cork. Harry opened his mouth to shout ‘hey’ but his father’s instruction, still booming through his head, snuffed out the word. Harry wouldn’t have been able to vocalise anyway; he would not have been able to explain, for whatever it was, floating out beyond the Sands, didn’t look real. Watching from the stern as the lifeboat streamed back to port, Harry convinced himself of this, even when the object turned and thrashed a little, even when an arm stretched up and started to wave.

The lifeboat bumped against Ramsgate harbour wall and Jim killed the engine. Harry’s father reached down, trapped the little crab between his fingers, threw it over the side and told Harry to go home for his tea.

These days, when Harry paints from his spot on the beach, he tries to capture the same quality the water had that day, sixty odd years ago: living, breathing liquid that looks like light radiates from its depths. On some days he merely dabs in a suggestion of Goodwin Sands, with white crests breaking softly, sky and sea merging. Other times, he creates a storm with immense glowering clouds and a menacing surge lashing the bank. And always, at the last moment, when he thinks his work is complete, he adds the figure, sometimes floating inside a wave, arm raised, or standing quite still on the Goodwin Sands and staring towards the shore. Always too far away to see clearly, to see the face. For Harry, as untrained as he is, knows that good artists paint not only what they can see, but also what is felt.

This story first appeared in Seaside Gothic issue two: Tidal Echo (April 2022)

For more tales, non fiction and poetry from the water’s edge, click here https://seasidegothic.com/

Image: Michael Shannon/Unsplash