Short Story 2nd Place

                       

                 

    

Last Thursday something great happened; I came second in a writing award. I say great and not fantastic, simply because i didn't win and far from being bitter, I will save the more extravagant words for when they are truely deserved. I am actually overwhelmingly chuffed and grateful that I got second place; I did not expect it.

As part of Falmouth university's CreatED exhibition, a showcase and competition for GCSE and Post 16 work, my writing, a piece of fiction, entitled Barnebarn, was displayed at our college exhibition area down in Falmouth. It sounds foolish, but I didn't even think about the competition aspect because our teacher hadn't really mentioned it - maybe she didn't want us to get our hopes up.

After travelling down to Falmouth and arriving early, we got to mooch about and look at the best photography, art, design and writing work from across Cornwall and Devon schools and colleges. An award ceremony followed, where only the first place winners for each category were revealed, and then coming out again I was struck by shock as I found my name written under the second place title on a piece of paper, pinned to one of the walls. I couldn't comprehend it. I never expected my writing piece would get an award, so coming second left me open mouthed and looking like this when I was told the piece of paper really was telling the truth...

                                      

In my piece of writing, Barnebarn, the region of Norway and an image from a place I had visited there stimulated my desire to include the beguiling landscape as the back-drop to a story. My love for author’s nostalgic depictions of home and character, including Laurie Lee inspired me to create a story which held the warmth and nostalgia of family, but alluded to a darker undercurrent to relationships.

Along with the story I have included images I took in Norway which inspired me to write. Sat at home in England, these picture of Norway provided the greatest escapism to a sublime land of beauty. My way of dealing with the tantalizing daydreams? Write a story. The story you can read if you scroll downwards... All thoughts are welcome in the comments box.

Fjord Life

 Barnebarn

It was 5'o clock on a Wednesday when I came home to find Granddad crying. I can remember the scene down to every detail: the cinnamon scent tip-toeing from the freshly baked cookies to my nose, the feeling of light headed heat and the hammering of wind against wood, which broke the silence between my granddad's sniffs. Framed between the great wooden pillars that separate our kitchen and living room, he was sitting, legs outstretched, staring into his thoughts. His feet pointed inwards, giving him the distinct look of a rag doll that's been left alone in its toy box, all floppy and limp; it was as if he had been stitched together using the wrong parts. The crumpled form in front of me was bad enough, but it was the way he cried that got me. I can’t stand crying, I mean, I just don’t understand how drops of water can come pouring out of your eyes without any control. It’s strange and I don’t like it. When he lifted his glistening eyes to me and attempted a smile I felt like I was falling through quick sand. I hung there in the doorway, letting the howling wind knock its way through the calm of our cabin. I wanted to go back, to sit on the ferry next to the boy slurping Julmust. Even the spluttering sounds when he choked on the fizzing bubbles seemed mildly appealing compared to this. To listening to the slow, painful sniffs of an old man. I wanted to run away, go sit in the mountains by myself and just let the wind freeze me still.

It still gives me a twisting kind of sickness when I think of that night. Sometimes I cycle home with supplies from Fjuohn's emporium and a black cloak sweeps over the mountains. Carried in a gusty breath from Nordfjorden, the rain bursts free from the bank of clouds above, dark tinged thoughts shading the sun from us. The mist our region is cursed with obscures most of the path ahead and I can barely see more than the rain sliding down the hairy green roofs of the villagers' huts. It's then that I see my Grandfather crying again. I see his vacant eyes and the tears tumbling across the peaks and crevices of his face. I remember how they raced one another: sitting on the edge of his chin where they would hang still for a moment or two and then drop into his palms which lay on his lap. It's like he was collecting them for another day. Or maybe he just didn't want soggy trousers. I don't know. I just know it was strange seeing him like that: Granddad's aren'to cry. Not mine anyway, not the man who hums 'It's a wonderful world' under his breath and takes me outside when it's raining to dance and leap about like fools: 'the falling sorrows of the sky, were made for you and I to dance in'. He would say this every time it rained and I tried to hide away in a dark corner of my room, huddled up with blankets and a frown. I never understood why I felt like this, but the rain unsettles me. I feels like the sky is crying, tortured by something. I could see how it was a jaunt for my Granddad, playing music from the kitchen out into the vast expanse of green desolation and swaying water around us, but I always felt it was reckless to act like this. It seemed as if we were interrupting nature's big speech, ignoring its thunderous groans and instead dancing a light-footed pixie jig on its forehead.

And yet, I never doubted the crooked smile my Granddad would give at the merest sign of adventure. Hikes up the mountain after tea, using a lantern to light our way, midnight feasts of cheese, biscuits and grape juice in his boat if he couldn’t sleep. Before that night he had been building a sculpture out of all the leaves he could forage, twisting them together and gluing them with a sticky sap he collected in a silver jar. There was always a sticky layer of sap on our kitchen table after this and it never seemed to leave the wood completely: however hard you scrubbed. My grandfather might have been bazaar, but he always seemed to have things figured out and I never doubted that as long as he was there things would be just fine. Even the night I found him crying, when I felt lost and dazed by everything I could see and hear, he worked his worked his ways of calm into my ears when he spoke. A rustle of reassuring words made me believe his 'everything will be fine' as if there wasn't another possibility. Maybe it was the smell of ginger weaved into his woolly waistcoat from a day's baking that made me believe him, or the smell of pine that always followed him, his signature perfume. Maybe it was the warmth, the soft ignorant bliss that nothing could go wrong in our lamp-lit hut. Our corner of the world. Whatever it was, I believed him fully and unquestionably but he disappointed me. What can you do when someone disappoints you so much? It's like when my mum took the stabilisers off my bike, but promised she would hold on as she ran along with me. She didn't hold on. I remember falling and it hurt. A lot. I had a sharp graze imprinted on my knee like a stamp for weeks after and everyone at school laughed at me trying to run with my wound. Grandfather always cheered me up though, made me his 'mount splendid' hot chocolate and sat opposite me painting, sticking or putting something together. He would pause between tales of Valemon - the white bear king Little Freddie and His Fiddle to push a tray of ginger biscuits towards me and say, 'have a biscuit, before they're all gone'. He told me to dip my ginger biscuit in my drink and listened to me talk about my day, a fixed concentration in his eyes. He would link his fingers together, rest his chin on his hands and say, 'Don't go worrying about them my little Beluga, they are silly bottleheads' if I told him about the kids at school and how they looked at me strangely and laughed at me. We had lived here for almost five years, having uplifted the contents of our life in Ohio to move to a ‘cleaner space’. This was how my Grandfather put it to me when driving past all my childhood landmarks, which pricked a flurry of tears in my eyes, for what I swore would be the final time I let myself cry. I never understood why we left mum at the clinic where she lived, in the white box with no windows or colour. She didn’t even have a mirror in there. I thought she would like the place we were going: the animals and the outdoors. But it wasn’t allowed. Even now it made my Grandfather twitch when I mentioned her and he was quick to dispel the subject: not least when we were actually leaving for the fjords and I asked and asked again why she couldn’t come with us.

The day I came home to find him crying began perfectly normally. He had thrown me a smile and a goodbye from behind his work bench in the morning, where he was already set up with a pile of ferns, tree sap and a gooseberry juice. I had done the usual dash about the kitchen, crammed some brown bananas into my rucksack and made it to the ferry drop off point just in time. I only knew something was wrong when I stepped onto the deck of the ferry later that day and saw no stooped figure in the box of light waving to me. No protruding chin framing his face. Yellow eyes in the monstrous landscape our hut was always glowing with light, and he was always there waving. But this time the yellow box was just that. I looked out on the scene, puzzled. The hermit thrush colony that live in the treetops were playing their flute-like tune and there was a quiet sound of munching from the two boys eating Brunost and berries in plastic green pots. You could walk the length or width of our house in five large strides, but it towered up as if trying to mimic one of the mountain. We had a room on each floor, two small ones on the first. It had been my Granddad's grand adventure since retirement: if he couldn't climb mountains anymore, he was going to climb his house to them. He had just built the 6th floor when Mayor Ranfruhgh had arrived on his boat one day to wobble his cheeks at us and declare it 'unsafe and improbable'. My Granddad had replied with a quip that, 'What is now proved was once impossible my friend', offering one of his valley-famous ginger biscuits and his twinkling eyes to the mayor. Apparently ginger upset his stomach and was far too 'exotic' for the mayor, so he brandished instead a sheet of paper in my Granddad's sinking face and clipped his heels across the front door. 'I'm sorry, but nothing can be done' he had said, giving a curt nod and stumping outside. Of course, Grandfather hadn’t believed him. At least, not until the letter came through that made it quite plain: we had to stop building our house and we had to leave.

                     Words & Images © Daniella Golden © Exeter College (Top two photos)