2022 SHORT MEMOIR COMPETITION WINNER

Prize: £1,000

Finalists:

Creshea Hilton

Sue Lee

Susan Wigmore

Jan Sargeant

Rebecca María

James Roberts

Fhionna Mac

Honourable Mentions:

The following are writers who just missed out on being named a finalist!

Manuela Stoicescu

Sarah Sharp

Kathryn Martinez

Lisa Verdekal

Erica Ward

Ruth May

Gabrielle Josephine

Adele Marie Stewart

Kay Ederies

Grainne Armstrong

Mona Orban

Vanessa Giraud

Christine Light

Christopher Burkham

Rhea

Rebecca Adams

Megan Anderson

Cindy Bennett

Julie Bissell

Ruth Kardom

Jacqueline Schaalje

Sophia Young

Marie-Louise McGuinness

Emma Hartley

Julie McKiernan

Marie Martello Conway

Bobbie Allen

Adrianne Aron

Matthew Tett

Wally Suphap

Michael P. Aleman

Megan Geiger

Rhonda Zappelli

Liz Carroll

Armand Diab

Ijen Kim

Finnian Burnett

Judy Barnes

Meg Fargher

Debbie Wingate

Sandra Jackson-Opoku

Julie London

Josephine Andersen

Michelle Sinclair

Linda Burnett

Kathryn Clover

Stuart Gillespie

Inès Huerta

Judith Wilson

Travis Inglis

James Raymond Dunn

Kat Daniels

Ann Birch

Cheryl Kula

Elizabeth Willcox

Patricia Cammish

Kimberly Cooper Griffin

Emily Macdonald

Thom Brodkin

Jay McKenzie

Lanie Benison

Stuti Sinha

S. E. Law

Philip M Stuckey

Rimma Kranet

Nancy O’Rourke

Denarii Peters

Julian Broadway

Christopher Reed

Rain

Sue Leather

Theresa L. Prokowiew

Grace Godlin

Sonia Last

and the winner is…

Susan Wigmore

Flotsam and Jetsam

The Furniture Game

Into Dad’s pride and joy we bundle, and off to the smoke we trundle! His Austin Cambridge —snazzy chrome side stripes headlights like eyes on stalks — the first thing he’s driven since his national service days, and it’s all his. 

Ours! my sister and I shout from the back seat as we bounce along the A21 towards London, sucking the barley sugars Mum passes over her shoulder to quell travel sickness.

What’s the capital of Peru? Mum says.

Lima, we chant.

Where do you find oast houses?

Easy, we yell, pointing out of the window.

Where do budgies come from?

Mr Tattershall’s pet shop! we say, distracted from the jostling of the car by Mum’s cunning ploy.

The Furniture Game was another of her secret weapons. A mind-reading trick she called it to enhance its appeal and her magic. Try to guess who she was thinking of by asking what they would be if they were a piece of furniture. Or a drink. Or a vegetable. I know. Alice had no need to fall down a rabbit hole; she’d have been right at home in the back of our car. But it went like this: 

A meal? Chinese take-away: life without bother plus a touch of exoticism. 

A piece of furniture? Heavy desk with secret drawers: mysterious and hard to budge. 

A drink? Neat Jack Daniels: a quick shot of straight talking. 

A vegetable? A Jack-o’lantern turnip: thick skin and hard as nails.

It must be Uncle Mick! 

Except he wasn’t our uncle and by the time I find myself on an island off Africa forty years later standing on the terrace of his villa, our family wore the airs and graces of middle-class and he’d become Michael, my second cousin. Play the Furniture Game with islands and Lanzarote would be a dry biscuit in the desert; an empty bookcase; a parakeet and its one-note squeak. I had no expectations other than my path crossing with Lanzarote like bisecting vapour trails. But here I am, watching police tape stretched across patio doors flicker in the warm wind. Michael upped sticks years ago and left his wheeling-dealing London life for Lanzarote. It was his home until he died. One wife (divorced), no children, no will, one white villa overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. And this is where I wash up.

The Making of Skeletons

The scream of a mother who has lost a child is unimaginable but history barely utters a sound. A footnote in its pages if we’re lucky; a note in a church register. No grave, no name for the child, the only victim of six years of volcanic eruptions in eighteenth-century Lanzarote. Perhaps no body. A boy or a girl? Who knows. 

Michael’s body lay undetected in the heat of June for a week. A friend had noticed Michael’s absence from his usual haunts but not thought much of it. Then a day of phone calls and knocks on the door going unanswered before the police forced the patio door. A small, lonely death. There was no mystery for the authorities to solve, just the problem of establishing the existence or not of any family. Michael kept his cards as close to his chest in his adopted country as in England, which is why he was buried before we knew he had died.

I take some Cava to the cemetery in Tias, white and still in the heat. The only sounds are the desultory strokes of a broom pushed by an elderly man. Bougainvillea flowers gather on the path at the whim of the wind like the sloughed skins of locusts, brittle and brown. I stop in front of a square of concrete in a wall with the initials M.R.G. scrawled as the concrete dried. And that’s all. A burial in a wall in a landscape of lava. I raise a glass to Uncle Mick, laconic and brooding, and oh so glamorous to the teenage me. With his marriage to a Littlewoods catalogue model, he stepped out of Holborn’s 1970s seediness into a life where Bollinger replaced Blue Nun, and black-market tickets to Frank Sinatra concerts changed hands for hundreds of pounds. Years went by when all I knew of him was overheard in whispered conversations between great-aunts in the kitchens of small flats with windows so high there were no views. 

There were skeletons in closets to rattle.

At the Mouth of the Underworld

I could never understand why my sister hid under the table with a pillow over her head during thunderstorms. There I’d be, stripping off my t-shirt in the rain, shouting to some god to do his worst, until Dad called me child of the devil (not always in jest), dragged me indoors and put a mop in my hand for the puddles I’d created on the kitchen floor. 

Perhaps this is why Lanzarote has wormed its way under my skin. What nature can unleash is all around: from grotesque gargoyles of basalt rock crowding small bays to collapsed craters of volcanoes along the LZ 56 heading north to the Timanfaya coastline. Its power. The weight of its indifference. I want to walk in the Fire Mountains, but not with camels and coach-loads of tourists. I wonder if this makes me a snob but then realise that I already see myself as something more than a tourist: like it or not, there’s something of me here, and not just because of Michael. 

The neat, sugar-cube houses of Tinajo give way to a dirt track. The western edge of the vast volcanic eruptions is the sea, wild, blue, pounding. Here the landscape is a fugue, endless variations of lava meeting the Atlantic: columns like organ pipes, black lacy spheres hollowed by popped bubbles, ropes like pulled toffee. Fused ribbed strands trapped in the act of cooling glint blue in the sunlight. Every step is a step on the Earth’s centre. People at the time must have thought their sins irredeemable to warrant such vengeance from God. 

I wonder if you saw beauty in this raw-boned island you made home. And what about that oil painting I find hidden in your wardrobe? Did you buy it as a small, quiet act of atonement for a life lived on the margins of London’s shady underworld? On the back is an inscription: A stream I remember well from my youth in Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Painted from memory. 1983. HMP Gartree. Perhaps the kindness of one friend to another down on his luck, both of whom found their way to this streamless island. You won’t know why your watch and wallet never appeared on the police inventory. After all, you were gone by then. But I suspect you would have an inkling of who took your address book and why, the desk with the secret drawers of our childhood game.

We didn’t do ocean currents or volcanoes at school. Glaciers, yes, but nothing that would be useful here on Playa la Cochino’s black sand where the Atlantic deposits flotsam and jetsam of all shapes and sizes. Currents might control mankind’s detritus in the sea, but once washed ashore local fishermen sculpt with it, turning rubbish into art, even a shack. The indomitable human spirit. Floating in a rock pool is a cheap souvenir lighter, blue fading to turquoise fading to pink. I let it dry in the sun. Later, it lights first time. Fire from the sea. Something from nothing.

There’s an Agatha Christie character I remember in And Then There were None who reckons you’ve come to the end of things on an island. He couldn’t have got it more wrong. 

Blind Crabs, Blind Faith

On a rise of granular rock next to Los Dolores Chapel in Mancha Blanca stands a wooden cross. It might have been constructed from driftwood such is its simple beauty. Here in 1735 is where villagers confronted the flow of lava with a statue of the Virgin Mary held high in defiance. The lava changed course. The village was spared.

At home in England, I shake my fists and howl at the sky at the time it is taking to reconcile English and Spanish inheritance law: I am Sisyphus forever pushing an immense boulder up a mountain. But on Lanzarote, I lean nonchalantly on that same boulder with a glass of El Grifo semidulce in one hand, pondering what mañana might bring. I like this me. 

She slides into the solictor’s office in Arrecife, this new me. Carlos is warm in his welcome; the woman in front of him is good business, and she has clearly acted on his advice. It’s a positive sign.

You look more local, he says. Not very local (he looks at her fair skin) but the dress is good and the shoes . . . much better.

She has ditched the old-lady walking sandals. The English her would bristle at his comments, but the local her knows there’s a game to play and she’s beginning to get the hang of it, is even having fun. She removes her sunglasses and flashes her blue eyes at his, the same blue, she notices, as his Ralph Lauren shirt. And, as it happens, the Atlantic beyond the window.

He studies the papers she’s brought from England, every so often making a clicking sound with his tongue.

English law! he says. Unbelieveable. But . . . this is okay. Hopeful. If we can get the judge in Court No 3, well, we might do it. I know him. He owes me a favour.

Fingers crossed, she says, and smiles in what she hopes is a conspiratorial way, happy to damn the legal system in her own country.

His brows furrow, and she explains.

Ah yes, fingers crossed. I like it. I’ll be in touch. He stands up to say goodbye, pulling his shoulders back, straightening his spine at his correct use of this idiom. 

She nods encouragingly. There she is, following the rules of the game.

His parting advice this time is to visit the underground saltwater lake at Los Jameos del Agua if she’s interested in volcanoes. Not about her or the inadequacies her country, she thinks. Until he tells her about the tiny, blind white crabs and how wonderfully well they have adapted to living there from their natural deep-sea-trenches home. 

Then it’s his turn to smile and flash his eyes. But as she walks towards the seafront, where old men play chess in outdoor cafés, she can’t help but think that battles are won in different ways. Lava flows do change course. And she’s sure her boulder is wedged a little further up the mountain than where it started that morning.

Volcanic Fusion

The man in the photograph knows perspective. His right hand, paintbrush balanced on thumb and fingers, reaches out to the camera dwarfing both the painting he’s working on and his face. And in that face, dark eyes are alert like a wild animal, and on that face, a smile that probably isn’t a smile but the mouth captured at the tail end of a single utterance. Perhaps a word like ‘free’. And in that hand, the vision and imagination of César Manrique, artist, sculptor, architect. 

My sister and I don’t argue over Manrique, at least not directly. It’s Michael’s old wooden bench on the terrace that does it. It goes something like this:

ME: But it belongs there. Like Cinderella’s glass slipper. Made just for her.

MY SISTER: By a short-sighted carpenter not a fairy godmother.

ME: Unique, you mean. Full of character. 

MY SISTER: Crap, I mean. Full of mis-measured joints and odd angles. Anyway, I thought nice, new patio furniture. Wicker-effect. Polyethylene, easy to look after.

And this on an island where trees are as rare as hen’s teeth. The bench would need stripping and varnishing, and my sister doesn’t want the bother. Perhaps Michael and the carpenter were friends, I say, and its dark wood, rich in colour against the smooth, matte shine of the white wall, is written into the history of the house. Just like the wooden window frames she wants to replace with aluminium. 

Finding beauty and possibilities in objects and landscapes that cross your path. Manrique could do it. At Los Jameos del Agua, anchor chains strung with wire creels hang from ceilings like regalia for Neptune. The entrance to the loos was once a ship’s rudder. There are wooden ribs of boats and long rusty nails adorning pristine white walls, added to as little as possible because nature has already done its best work with wind, sun, sand and stone. The eruption of the Volcán de La Corona made the cave system of Los Jameos de Agua, but so too did César Manrique. Just as he did for the whole of Lanzarote: keeping an island above water with love and understanding. And the drive and energy of a volcano.

I pay what I hope will be my last visit to Carlos. He greets me in Spanish.

Muy bien, gracias, I manage. Y usted? He tells me I should use the tú form but his voice is as warm as honey rum. I describe the headstone we’ve ordered for Michael’s grave.

It’s good, he says, nodding seriously. He pauses. Did I know he met Michael? Something to do with the purchase and sale of a plot of land. No. I didn’t. Always one with a sharp eye for business, my Uncle Mick. There is no sign of Michael’s address book, but Carlos hands documents to me one by one: the coroner and police reports, an inventory of the contents of Michael’s safe and, finally, the deeds to the house. 

Worth celebrating, no? he says, one hand resting lightly on the other on his desk.

Then there’s a plastic bag, the sort you wrap your packed lunch in. I take out a locket belonging to Michael’s mother, his father’s half hunter pocket watch, and I remember my great-aunt and uncle with roll-out-the-barrel songs on their lips and glasses in their hands. They always loved a good knees-up, my London family. Amongst bankcards and euros is a 100-pesetas banknote dated 1970. On impulse, I give it to Carlos. I have no idea of its significance if any.

For me? he says.

It seems right. It’s a piece of your history.

And yours.

Perhaps. But not in the same way. Please have it, I say, suddenly depleted. I have pushed a great basalt boulder up a mountain, glass of chilled El Grifo in one hand. And it looks as if it might just stay there.

* * * *

If Lanzarote were a piece of furniture, it would be an old Spanish chest made from the finest Castillian oak, richly carved with suns, fruit-laden vines and arcane emblems, owned by a conquistador sailing with Cortés to South America. Or a Barbary corsair draped in flowing fabric, or a wealthy merchant, perhaps, with a fleet of caravels in Cadiz. There would be secret compartments with treasure maps and jewels and escudos, discovered only by those with imagination enough to find them. It would wear its history with great bravura. Just like this small, resilient island.