By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
28) Picnic
On the yellow-grey block sits a yellow grey woman holding a hollow crown. On the steps, that run round the base, is where wax poppy wreaths are laid in wet Novembers. On the steps now Paul, Alice, Michael and Julie all sit in a line. Each has an ice cream cornet.
The tree shade in Kings Square is palpable. So too the sunshine holes in it. The trees are high and dark.
Paul likes being here. Around the square are high old buildings with small squared windows. Some of the buildings have ivy. Narrow roads lead off the square. It has a cosy, closed in and comfortable feeling that somewhere like Sydenham, no matter how old it becomes, will never have.
Two fat men with black beards and white tee-shirts go swaying slowly past. Their trousers are baggy around their backsides. From the path beyond them comes a tall timid man crouching in self-effacement. He quickly goes out of the Square.
These buildings are used mostly by solicitors. One is a psychiatric day hospital. The patients passing obliquely through the little park, and the besuited solicitors skirting its edges, give the place an air of prosperity and eccentricity which Paul thinks of as being uniquely English.
That this square should exist in the same town an the stench-making factories, as regimented Sydenham, as featureless Hamp, as the new rabbit hutch estates, as the wide open docks.... The housing developments around the docks are trying to emulate this place, to give themselves the same quiet air of peace and prosperity. But the buildings there are all too self-conscious and too far apart; and the wind sends the cement dust zinging around their clapboard sides; and that dust comes floating over the scuffed playing green to turn to cinders in the noses of breathing Bridgwater folk....
Paul prefers being here among the high tilted roofs of red and black speckled tiles. Yet this place too has been deliberately made. An area roughly triangular, bordered by the river and the shopping precincts, it has been town-planned to retain its narrow streets, statues and doric doorways. Intentionally olde worlde, its little shops are self-consciously designed to entice. Yet, despite being aware of its worked-at artifice, Paul finds it, with its hanging baskets of trumpeting flowers, pleasant.
Paul is not alone in his preference. All the metal benches are occupied. A couple of old women with lumpy white carrier bags on one, on another sit two fat old men with a nostalgia for hard times. Listening a moment to them Paul feels that their comparisons are being directed at him — he being there in the middle of the day obviously unemployed and visibly bruised. A moment's anger has him feeling cursed to live among people who talk only of jobs and children and who never question the concept of eternity.
Gone the anger.
He used to enjoy coming here to see his solicitor, walking out from the doors as if he belonged. It was like being another species on another planet, another being from another time.... That something so old should still be standing in demolition-minded Bridgwater.... To sit on a bench here, head back and looking up out of Bridgwater through the branches. Here even the constant noise of the traffic is far away.
The choice today was to come here or to wander down to Blake Gardens, where the traffic is visibly present and the deep grey river is just over the other side of a low wall; and where they'd also have had to keep a watchful eye out for the alkies, the sniffers and the sorry queens hanging around the lavatories. Here are only the tall smooth trees.
Such, though, is Bridgwater's geography that but a hundred meters from here, 15 hours ago, in the light of the moon he was punching a man's head. The bones of his hands still hurt, the skin is still torn, the scabs black and nobbled. And, frightened of what his knowing eyes might find, he has no wish to walk the 100 meters to see where it happened.
Alice's ice cream has melted and dribbled down the side of her cornet and over her fingers. Paul takes if from her and licks the soft ice cream from the cornet's edge. Alice sucks all her fingers at once, then one by one. Paul holds her ice cream out to her.
"Look," she points a wet finger.
A four year old boy is stood behind his mother's bench. He has a blue tube of bubble mixture. His red lips purse behind the blue dipper and lines of bubbles float away from him. As they pass through the tilted sunbeams each bubble becomes a rainbow.
True Stories
On Saturday afternoon May 20th 1989, the former Kraft Products factory in Cornborough Place caught fire. Eleven fire fighting vehicles and 45 firemen were in attendance for five hours. A CEGB spokesman said that the nearby nuclear flask dispersal point had not been threatened by the blaze, and that anyway the flasks were built to withstand exceedingly high temperatures.
In May 1989 three ex-Cellophane employees, who were among the 340 made redundant the previous year, were awarded large cash settlements after negotiations between BCL and the TGWU. The industrial tribunal found that the three men had been unfairly dismissed. Brian Toomey, Cellophane's personnel director, said, "We were going to appeal, but the whole matter was dragging on. We decided the best thing was to settle the matter outside the tribunal."
In November 1989, when PC David Cooke and PC David Pither went to the Bristol Road home of 51 year old Annie Elizabeth May to arrest her son, she set one of her alsatians onto PC David Cooke, who had his leg bitten. Annie Elizabeth May then pulled PC David Pither's handcuffs from him and locked PC David Cooke in the garden shed. When PC David Cooke kicked the shed door open Annie Elizabeth May hit him over the head. Annie Elizabeth May has osteo-arthritis and had a heart attack in 1984.
