Stories and Articles

Awakening ...

by Ean Lawrence

The town, its ancient, grey and enveloping walls intact, looked out to the sea; in former times, the sea had been the source of the town’s prosperity. The buildings within the walls reflected the town’s former glory and status, and although the decline was evident, the sea was still there and the tides continued to ebb and flow.

The easterly breeze, whose ambition fell just short of aspiring to be a wind, brought a refreshing oriental coolness and, notwithstanding its timidity, managed to coerce flappable flags into a rigid stupor of rectitude; the weather was an answer to a yachtsman’s prayers. The body of water enclosed within the shielding breakwater was speckled with colourful supplicants sharing amongst themselves such grace as the wind had granted to them; half wings fluttered in the manoeuvres of transition from up wind to down wind to sailing close to the wind. This bullying was mimicked in the more capricious movement of hollow-cheeked bags, sweet wrappers and other detritus agitated in the eddies created between parked cars and the internal angles of buildings and other contrived geometrical acuities. The strength and consistency of the breeze gave the surface of the sea a regularity like that of a mechanically etched pane of glass. The only disfigurement to the uniformity of the surface was caused by the hairline scratches made by the yachts and sailing dinghies whose crews pitted their wits and skills against each other and the prevailing conditions, with motorboats and buzzing zodiacs incising broader wounds. Yet these blemishes were soon, as if by the intervention of a supernatural agent, repaired and the serenity of the water’s face was once more restored without there being a trace of a scar.

In contrast, moving away from the seafront towards the centre of the maritime port the vibrant colours faded to uniformly drab tones of grey, the greyness originating from the ready availability of the building material – granite: the buildings – even the most humble - were, almost without exception, constructed of granite; many of the streets retained their granite cobbles; and great delight was felt by the town fathers that all the civic buildings were constructed of granite and aggrandized with all manner of decorative adornment, hard-won from the obdurate material. The great and the good that held municipal office took pride in the solidity and dullness of their town and, with an inevitable complacency, equated it with a puritanical wholesomeness. There was, however, a subversive undercurrent of feeling that flowed through the town’s population that found expression in a most gratifying way.

The disenfranchised citizens considered that there was no good reason for there not being some colour in their town – in their lives – as there was without the town’s walls and in the roads. Yet no one seemed to have the courage to speak out against the continued imposition of greyness over the townscape; they lived and worked next to the sea that was, at times, shades of blue and green - and, yes, all right, sometimes shades of grey – so why shouldn’t colour be let into the town and into their lives and into their hearts. Many revolutions start with a small act of defiance. The transformation of the town began in a small way.

In the cracks at the edges of pavements, in the places where the odd cobblestone had been dislodged, in the open spaces tramped on by boot and clog, there began to appear flowers. At first, they appeared in twos and threes; a small start, and many of the town fathers thought it was an insignificant one; but, like the plants, the movement grew and grew until, eventually, there wasn’t an area of the town that was not blooming, bursting, into colour, with, after the first green shoots, tubs, pots and baskets featuring prominently in the vanguard. Attempts were made to remove this unofficial enrichment, but within a few days the gaps were refilled and further areas were found to be occupied by colour.

Searches were made and citizens questioned, but the source of the flora was never discovered. Even the Mr Pooters of this world were inspired to commit individual acts of rebellion: seeds and cuttings of plants that were kept clandestinely within the inner sanctum of the home were propagated and the offspring taken into their place of business – some openly, some more furtively - and placed on display in some anonymous corner, or on top of a filing cabinet, or on a windowsill for all to see. Despite the efforts of the authorities to root out this subversive activity, it became apparent that the suppression of the new belief was pointless when trees began to appear in courtyards and the concrete in back gardens was replaced with lawns and vegetable plots and flower beds.

Word spread of what was happening within the walls and the gardeners and plantsmen and women from outside the town offered their support in the cause of spreading colour in this drab corner of the world; and so, in one small town, an idea took root and thrived, and there was no longer any fear of the old orthodoxy.