Young Writers Society

I had let myself out, after tea and cake and some inconsequential chit-chat, into the garden. As I walked I glanced back and saw my mother's face, wrinkled and smiling, looking out of the bay window; laughing at my sailor’s gait, no doubt. Six months at sea had changed me in more ways than that. Six months; it seemed longer.

I came to the edge of the small island of clipped grass, to the encroaching waves of weeds - topped with a fluffy white spray of elderflower blossom - that continually broke against the shore. As I waded in the smell of crushed nettles and sodden mud, distinct and evocative, greeted and surrounded me. I pushed on further, ducking beneath a branch I once leapt to touch, and clambering over a fallen tree that I had crawled under. My feet grew steadily surer and faster, until, tucked away in the corner of the garden, I found what I had been looking for.

A thick covering of ivy hid it, like a frozen waterfall, or the tentacles of a jelly fish, undulating and intertwined, but dried out and hard, and rough with fibrous hair. I put out a hand to one side of the ivy, to pull it back as I had done before, but in my absence it had fused, and I couldn’t brush it aside like I used to. Some of the branches, dead now, snapped, so that dust rained down, and insects, which squirmed on the ground before righting themselves and scurrying away.

I looked up, and saw inside. Everything was as I had left it. There was the stool I had made from a stump, and the place where I used to pretend to have a stove. In the corner was the small table I had snuck from inside, with my shell collection on it, beside it the place where I had imagined my bunk was, and, on the floor, the telescope I had used to scour the horizon for pirates. I shivered as a younger me turned in response to the call for dinner, dropped it, ran out, through me, and galloped away across the nettles.