TIME can never be measured. You cannot hold it, squealing, over a desk and press a ruler on its beginning and on its end. It has no smell and no touch and it vanishes faster than a salesman’s smile – or more slowly than the final tremble of a butterfly’s wings.
Where does it go? Some of it passes briefly into our memories but they, too, are invisible.
One day on a wild beach, I set myself a little calculation about time. If all the boys in all the world bounced all the skimming stones against all the waves on every sea, would God still be a young man?
I have no certain answer to offer, but I think He would still be a lover, full of nervous hope, who shakes His head sadly at the ways of the people below.
Maybe that’s right, I don’t know. But I do know this. When he is skimming a stone into the ocean, the boy, on the brink of discovering girls, is as close to paradise as ever he will be on Earth.
On this Welsh beach, whose name defies the reach of English tongues, I walked with my eldest sister, her 12-year-old granddaughter and my son, who is 13 – ah, these human measurements of time, whose true comings and goings remain a complete mystery against the slipping grip of the tide over the patient sand.
My sister has seen much. She was watching the classroom clock in June, 1944, when the huge Allied armada began landing on the beaches of Normandy to free Europe from the Nazis. Now her granddaughter is about the same age.
And there she was on this beach, called Dinas Dinlle, walking with my boy, who was showing her the flat bottom of a smooth, slightly domed stone, which he held between his index finger and thumb, before leaning back to throw it at hip height into the sea.
Once, twice, thrice, four times, it leapt over the incoming waves and then it vanished from our view, again to join the countless pebbles under the sea.
Back at home, my wife was on her knees bedding plants and focusing her lovely turquoise eyes on our rabbits, Millie and Molly, who regard our garden as their larder. “The boys have gone camping in North Wales,” she said to them, cleaning the tip of a trowel with her dimpled glove.
And at that moment we were popping seaweed pods with our wellies, as the tide turned and the rinsing water “shisshhhed” into the sand, leaving a foam of detergent, whose bubbles shone with all the colours of the rainbow.
Gulls spread their wings in the sky, gliding over us, as the gusts blew them fast down the coast. Behind us were the mighty cliffs fringed by clumps of cordgrass.
In the Iron Age, a big fort stood on these cliffs, overlooking Caernarfon Bay, protecting the area from invasion. Its foundations can still be seen.
Inevitably the children began climbing and when they reached a sheer bit with only a narrow ledge to stand on, our son offered his hand to the girl, who squeezed it tight to hoist herself up.
Although they are family, they would not be able to do that quite so naturally in the months to come, I thought, sadly. Something will change. I must keep this moment, like the men on the beaches at Normandy have kept the moments they gave to us, forever.
Stepping briskly over the sharp stones behind was an old chap in a cap. They have an instinct that tells them you’re English. “It will be brighter tomorrow,” he said, in an accent more accustomed to double Ls and double Ds, while looking at the sun blinking behind the dark sacks of cloud groaning over the distant mountains.
We walked back to the cluster of souvenir shops and the takeaway, where we had parked the car. I bought chips only, thinking, in my parsimonious way, that cod at £4 each was too expensive.
But the chips were lovely and hot, lightly sprayed with salt and vinegar. They came with little plastic forks, but I preferred to eat mine with fingers in the old-fashioned way.
It had been a good day for us on the beach.
“What time is it?” asked our boy, scrunching his chip bag into a ball for the bin. “Time?” I said. “I have no idea. That is one thing you can never measure.”
LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk
