Lunar Module and the Call of The Sea (Part Two)

V

My parents did not like or approve of Science Fiction. It seemed odd to shun a single genre like that, especially as I was also a horror fan, but and despite its importance to me they told me, point blank, that they would not take me to the cinema to see Star Wars. In Tunbridge Wells, the nearest cinema was a short walk; maybe thirty minutes. In the wilds of North Yorkshire, where being snowed in for six weeks at a time is the norm during winter, the nearest cinema was a forty-five-minute car journey. They categorically stated that they did not want to sit through two hours of ‘childish rubbish’ and demanded to know why couldn’t I see something ‘based on the classics’ instead?

Salvation came in the form of our weird next-door neighbour. While talking to my Mum in the kitchen one day, Monica – known as Aki – made a reference to a Harry Harrison novel that I had read. It went over my Mum’s head, but I questioned Monica about whether it was a deliberate reference. She was delighted that I knew of The Stainless-Steel Rat. She showed me her entire collection of sci-fi books that took up most of her box room. It was a tiny room of heaven that I had free access to! She promised that when Star Wars finally made it to the local cinema, she would take me along with her kids.

Sure enough, Star Wars eventually came to Northallerton and Monica, her two kids, and I made the pilgrimage. I had been saving my pocket money up for ages as I had seen George Lucas on TV saying that every cinema showing Star Wars would have a merchandising stall. This turned out not to be true. That was not the only disappointment of the evening.¹

The big problem was that I had lived with this story for over a year. A day had not gone by when I hadn’t read it, looked at the comics and gazed in wonder at the posters. That movie – or at least my imaginings of what it was – was more real to me than anything else.

When I finally got to see it, it was a terrible disappointment. It simply did not match up to my imagination; parts of the story were missing, and characters that appeared in the book and comic weren’t in the film – I particularly missed Camie, Fixer, Deak, Windy and Biggs. I had hung out in the Tosche station with them for months. I had imagined adventures with these disaffected youths in tow. Where were my friends? Why wasn’t I seeing this with Liam?

I was dazzled by the effects, certainly, but it did not seem as rich as our imaginings.

My love of the comics and the novel, now joined by the first official sequel, ‘Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, ‘ wasn’t diminished at all, and I continued collecting the comics and books while waiting for the promised sequel ‘The Empire Strikes Back ‘. I did not allow myself the frenzy of collecting the merchandise before it turned up at the cinema, I was happy with the comics and novels I had. I didn’t really want to go through that crushing disappointment again, so curbed the excitement.

Of course, when the Empire Strikes Back was released, I was disappointed that neither Splinter of the Mind’s Eye nor my favourite character from the comics – Jaxxon, an eight-foot-tall, wisecracking green rabbit – were not even referenced.

As a movie experience, I much preferred The Empire Strikes Back, and I got over my disappointment pretty quickly, but I would still love a movie that featured Jaxxon, though.

VI

With the reality space travel now a distant dream, and Skywalker and friends taking up that space, I turn my attentions to the Sea. From the East Coast, with its miles-long low tide flats, to the clear, sparkling waters around the islands and skerries off the west coast of Scotland. The artificially warm seas of the south-east – temperature raised by the out-spill of water from coastal power stations, bringing unexpected alien species to the once chill and murky waters.

Then there’s surfer-friendly rollers of the west country and the silted beaches on the Humber estuary. There’s an old joke from the 80s that says, ‘You don’t swim at Cleethorpes, you just go through the motions.’ The beach remains muddy but mercifully the water is now much cleaner and a favourite place to stare at spit and horizon.

The shore constantly changes shape, size and texture. The sea smothers, then abandons it, twice a day with the tides. The sea is both eternal and fickle, nurturing and uncaring, stolid and capricious. It’s time and place uncertain, despite its regular- as-clockwork movement.

Each shoreline has a multitude of lives. It may be attainable or inaccessible. A place of joy and a place of loneliness. A place defined by the romance of the French Lieutenant’s Woman standing on the Cobb, waiting for her lover to return or the horror of the Normandy landings; of daytime exposure, both sun and flesh, or the ‘Carry On’ lasciviousness of the saucy seaside postcard; that quintessentially English culture, blue humour, now dying in an atmosphere of gender equality, Facetime and Zoom.

It is the rising fog muting the baleful cries of foghorns and the clandestine crimes of Kernow, committed under the cover of darkness. It is the knowledge that when you say, ‘I’m going to spend a day at the sea,’ these other lives are forgotten in favour of sandcastles, rockpools, arcade machines, a thin acid miasma misting hell-hot chips to accompany the catch-of-the-day. Fun palaces, slot machines, candy floss, sticks of rock, the smell of freshly fried doughnuts and the winey slap of seafood, just past it’s sell-by date, or of crabs crushed by beaks of their gull predators, remnants rotting on the beach.

It is surfing a tsunami of people ebbing and flowing on the shoreline, searching for that moment of freedom that the waves, the horizon, the blue fulfils, greeting the sea on a slo-mo human tide, mirroring the movement of the sea and consuming everything in their path like benevolent locusts. Despite the devastation and stripping of resources, they are providing the local inhabitants with the means of sustenance for the long winter months. 

But local landowners do not ‘own’ the seashore, they are merely licensed to regulate access to the beaches. This is because The Crown Estate, the Duchy of Lancaster, and the Duchy of Cornwall own almost all the land between high and low tides. The Crown itself owns 55% of the beaches around the United Kingdom.

The Crown Estate also owns the entire seabed between low tide and twelve nautical miles out to sea. Think about that for a second. Each tide, particularly an extremely low tide could, in theory, cause a diplomatic incident as international waters are temporarily occupied by an uncertain border. You could be trespassing, not by virtue of map reference number, but by the effect of a supermoon. 

Moreover, in theory at least, the Royal family could, at any time, make the sea inaccessible to the populace. 

That feeling of freedom you get at the seashore?

It is loaned to you by the Crown.

Even still, I dream of the majesty of the water, far greater than that of the ephemeral notions of outmoded feudalism; the fundamental, elemental power of being the womb of the world. It is the feeling of change, the comfort of the waves, the horror of the beasts that lurk below. It is the fossils frozen in terror on the Jurassic coast, viscerally illustrating the harsh lesson that life is short, death is forever. It’s the hope that something better is just beyond that thin cerulean kiss between sea and sky.

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1 Ultimately, this turned out well, as I spent the money on ‘Jeff Waynes musical version of The War of the Worlds.’ Strangely, my parents loved it, too. Science fiction but based on one of the classics. It was a confusing time for all of us.