Worthing Flash

It is twelve years since the fall of Singapore. On the air strip, the tarmac has darkened under the torrent of the rain, black water rising, a growing lake, the heavy bellied Argonauts standing like unwieldly wading birds. An RAF jeep rises on muddy water wings, veers aside, broaching the rim of the monsoon ditch, wheel deep, and stalls. It is Christmas Eve, 1954. Beyond the ditch, and a flooding field, in a pink bungalow, a flash bulb explodes. The men in bow ties and white shirt sleeves, lean over the women, in their green and gold dresses, peacocky shining. Creme de Menthe. Cheese and pineapple. Silver bells and lametta on the artificial, snow stippled Christmas tree. A watch chain glints. On the gramophone, Winifred Atwell,  "Let's Have a Party." Christmas morning, and the ditch yields up its dead - a drowned dog, a stumbling drunk, and the memory of soldiers crouching in the humid sweep of the rain, feet suppurating, dengue fever and malarial bowel, cramps, ...

Surprise! I drove through a fog made denser by the smoke from the bonfires. There was something about this particular year which seemed to have brought out in people an insane urge for pyrotechnics, filling-dislodging bonfire toffee and quaint nostalgic penny for the guy stuff. Or maybe it was because I hadn’t been back home for a while. I'd deliberately booked something at the Royal Exchange so that I could escape. It was my last night in the old country, and would be my last trip home. My shock, in the aftermath of the pile up ahead, was partly owing to the smash itself and partly to what I saw when I left the car and walked the few yards to the scene of the accident. There was horror, mingled with a desperate urge to laugh my head off, when I saw the blood streaked face of the driver of the car at the end of the pile up, by which time I ...

Revenant. Yesterday, I found out that Gibbs' Emporium, up on High Wynd, in the town, our only decent shop, with its beautiful curvaceous facade and art deco windows, was closing at Christmas. Not that I live there any longer. I left to spend a year in France as an au pair in my late teens, studied in Paris, and only now go back for holidays, but as soon as I read that news on Facebook, I felt something fall in me, a sudden lack, and a growing grief. What is a ghost, I asked my mother, when I was eight. My deeply religious mother. She wasn't happy with the word ghost, but conceded that there might be spirits. Perhaps they had left something undone on this earth, and had come back, fruitlessly searching for a way of making amends for a sin of omission. I stayed awake that night, trying to lay my own ghost, wandering the basement, and the three upper floo...

The train slowed, then stopped, as the smell of burning became stronger. We heard the cooling system shutting off, as power was cut. It was a hot, still day, early June, but this was not Adlestrop, no branch line idyll. A house was on fire trackside, and whilst people phoned airlines and cancelled hospital appointments, the guard told us that everything within the house had been destroyed. After five sweltering hours, we moved, passing the smouldering ruin. I pondered, if this happened to my house, and I had the chance, what would I save?  Everything which I have ever written.    by Marie Hartley

My granddaughter came to see me yesterday, here in the care facility where I live. She's twenty and doing a creative writing degree. "What do you remember from when you were twenty, grandma?" she asked. She's doing a piece about older people's recollections of being her age. There was the Blitz of course, but everyone over ninety talks about that. There was painting the fake seam down the back of your bare leg, using Bisto, so that it looked as if you were wearing nylons, but that's a cliche too.   In the nurses' home one night, I was sitting in a friend's room. She was elsewhere in the building. I can't remember why. Beside the sofa there was a book; it was an exercise book, but with marbled covers. I picked it up to have a look. "My Poems," she had written on the cover. They were all dedicated to "Davy," all a...

 I knew who they were as I watched them come up the path and ring the doorbell. Horrors! She had a notebook and a fussy little pencil. He was holding a leaking bag of doughnuts.  Both were smiling jauntily. They sat down. Alec began on a doughnut.  "We want a sequel."  "I'm not writing one."  "We deserve further development. Like in Jane Austen." "Sorry. Had enough of you."  I looked at Alec. Sleazy. At Laura . Conceited. As the cliche goes, I had created monsters.  "All right. I'll compromise. A hundred words and no more."   They looked dubious. I felt smug.