10. The Summer Photo

 

There’s a large photograph above Peter's bed. His room has undergone several metamorphoses over the years, but that photo has always remained. I often look at it. Sometimes, when I was doing the rooms, I would sit down on one of the small chairs and stare at the picture, remembering that wonderful holiday. Nowadays, Peter often sits there himself, gaming behind his desk, his gaze fixed on the screen. I know he doesn't like it much when I'm there. He's afraid I'll nag. That he shouldn’t be gaming so often. That it's not healthy. That he could become addicted. But now Sam is abroad and I know he misses him. So I let him.

 

We went to Denmark. The boys were four and seven and Ingeborg just two. We had rented an old farmhouse with a huge garden surrounding it. The house was not by the road but at the end of a dirt track. We enjoyed a wonderful freedom there. Behind the house, there was a farm track through the cornfields to a typical Danish beach. Danish beaches on the Baltic Sea side of Jutland are generally small, sheltered, always full of stones and dried-up or rotting water plants, and there are plenty of little beetles, shellfish and crabs to be found. It is a paradise for children with buckets, spades and fishing nets. After a few days in this remote enchanted place, there was little distinction between the beach and the kitchen table. There were snails, ladybirds, and once a large dung beetle with its many protrusions crawling through the kitchen and over the counter.

 

I took the photo in Peter's bedroom during an outing. We had driven to a harbour because Jan wanted to look at boats. Nyborg. In itself not the most charming of towns, but for a sailor there is plenty to see. Moreover, the bridge across the Great Belt starts at Nyborg and had been completed only a few years earlier. An impressively high structure. We looked it up for the boys in a leaflet that we fished out of a rack at the Danish tourist office. The bridge is 18 kilometres long and the highest clearance is 65 metres. But the poles from which the bridge is suspended are 254 metres high.

For the boys, however, this feat of Danish engineering paled into insignificance when we visited a Dutch sailing ship moored in the harbour. Jan got talking to the skipper, knowing well how to ask a few sensible questions, and before we knew it we were invited on board. Sam and Peter were ecstatic and immediately disappeared through a hole in the deckhouse. Jan started an animated conversation about masts and ropes with the friendly bearded skipper. I felt very displaced, I remember, even though I am not really a nervous mother. 'Where are the boys Jan? Can’t they come to any harm?' 'Not at all,' said the skipper, 'as long as they're inside there's nothing to worry about. On deck they have to wear a life jacket.’

A life jacket, ah yes. I stood with Ingeborg on my hip listening to a conversation that might as well have been conducted in Greek, not understanding a word of it. Suddenly a nice young lady who seemed to have risen from the deck said to me: 'What wonderful sons you have. That little one ... that's Peter, isn't it? Such clever questions! They already know how to start the engine, where the bilge pump is and what a life raft is. Soon they’ll be able to start working here!’

Jan and the skipper laughed heartily. ‘What is a life raft?’ I asked. I remember thinking: are those kept inside?

‘They are the white round things on the foredeck.’

‘On the foredeck? Where are the boys then?’

Oh, they've already seen the whole ship and climbed up the front hatch. There's someone with them though,' she added, seeing my alarmed expression.

The skipper nodded understandingly and took a pair of life jackets from a chest.

I was already on my way in the direction the girl had pointed out to me, with Ingeborg on my hip. The poor child became entangled in all kinds of ropes as I stressfully made my way through the narrow gangway. I found no children on the foredeck. ‘Jan!’ my heart was in my throat. The kind girl guided my gaze in the right direction. It took my breath away. There the boys were, sitting on a pole sticking a long way out of the bow of the ship. The bowsprit, they taught me later. Someone was sitting next to them. And although there was a sort of fishing net stretched out under the pole, I think Peter would have fitted through the meshes.

Jan told me to stay calm and simply stepped into the net, clambering forward with the life jackets in his hand. Together with the crew member he put the life jackets on the boys. And then he sat there too, on the pole, next to the sails with the water beneath them. Peter sat between his legs and Sam hung against his back with his arms around his neck. The crew member modestly withdrew and climbed on deck. ‘Cool guys', he said to me, grinning broadly.

And I looked at them. My men, sitting there, backlighted by the sun, peering out over the glistening water that gently rippled and reflected the sunlight sparkling on the bow, on the sails, on Peter's trainers. No doubt they dreamt of sailing across oceans. Jan explained something to them. He pointed upwards and the boys looked up at the masthead, and then I took the picture. It became a dream photo. Soft and mysterious, the boys partly in backlight, but their faces just out of the shadows. Everything about the picture is warm and summery and yet veiled. Just as our life was back then. Beautiful, warm and full of expectation. Not a cloud in the sky.

 

When I look at that photo I smell the fresh summer air, the typical smell of the ship, I feel Ingeborg's little arm around my leg as I take the picture.

Over the years this photo has changed from a beautiful memory into a wistful longing, a reason for crying. Crying for what is gone, for despair, for the elusive nature of the events that relentlessly sent us in a direction no one wanted to go.