Stranded

Hilbre’s my guilty secret, yeah? Nobody knows that I go there. How could I explain the attraction of the place to my mates or my screwed-up family? Three lumps of sandstone in the middle of the Dee Estuary, and you can only reach them at low tide by paddling across the sand and the mud, looking like some sort of twat. And once you’ve walked round Little Eye and over Middle Eye and you’re on the main island, what is there to do? You can watch the seals hauled out on a long sandbank towards Wales, or the huge flocks of birds that swoop and dive like a swarm of locusts, and that’s it. But it’s peaceful, and in our house and in my life there’s not much peace.

I don’t always have the place to myself. Sometimes the keeper’s there with his wife. They live in a low white house, and I think it must be the best job in the world. Until there’s the first sunny Sunday of the spring and hoards of trippers march across the sand like an invading army, with their sarnies and their suncream and their screaming kids. I never go to the island on days like that. And sometimes the loud-mouthed sailing types turn up. They hang out in a wooden hut, called the Canoe Club, which is nearly a hundred years old. The date is painted over the door. Occasionally they take out the canoes. They’re all curves, wide in the beam like modern sculptures – much too interesting for the loud men who push them into the water. But mostly the canoe-club members have the sort of parties you see in films set before the war, with cocktails and fat men smoking cigars, and sometimes they dance on the grass to music from a wind-up gramophone. I first saw Vicky at one of those parties.

My name’s Anthony Murphy and I live in Birkenhead and I’m not from a background where I’m supposed to like wildlife or walking across the shore early in the morning to get to Hilbre Island before the tide comes in. It’s 1978 and my mates are all punks. We hate the crap that’s prog rock, and our parents. I got a scholarship to the posh school, where the teachers wear gowns and think it’s good for poor boys to be humiliated. We wear blazers and learn Latin, and the lads on the estate take the piss every time they see me.

So here I am, Anthony Murphy, caught between two worlds. Bright charity-case born of a docker and a cleaner, one of five brothers and desperate for peace. A Tranmere Rovers supporter in a household of LFC fans. Perhaps that’s why I like Hilbre so much, because it’s caught between two worlds too. Halfway between England and Wales and stranded like a sandstone whale between the land and the sea. I’m fifteen years old and I don’t feel like a lad or a man.

When I first see Vicky it’s a weekend at the end of May. I leave the house early and get the first train to West Kirby. My mam thinks I go fishing with my mates. I never lied to her, but she saw the tide table in my room and jumped to that conclusion. She thinks I’m with lads from school and she loves that. ‘Our Anthony’s settled in ever so well there,’ she tells her friends.