OLD GEORGE
A Short Story
by
Tom Morris
Published by Tom Morris at Smashwords
Copyright 2012, Tom Morris
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Old George was almost as much of a landmark as the long wooden pier that jutted out from the white stucco Penny Arcade in the middle of the bay. Actually he wasn't all that old, no more than early middle age, but his portly figure, tightly encased in a black three-piece suit, his weather-beaten wrinkled face and the dirty iron-grey hair curling from beneath a disreputable bowler hat, pulled low to shade his eyes from the sun, all combined to earn him his nickname. George's world was the beach. He was one of a dying race of beachcombers, a leftover from a previous era. The trophies of his profession hung from the brass watch chain that looped from pocket to pocket across the vast expanse of his waistcoat. A gold sovereign of the old queen, worn but still legible, rubbed against a silver elephant, late of some unknown charm bracelet. A shark's tooth was jostled by a small penknife bearing the legend, 'A Souvenir of Clacton.' In the middle hung the showpiece of the collection, a German Iron Cross, second class, washed ashore in 1943, still pinned to a fragment of rotting tunic, grisly relic of an unsuccessful bomber raid.
He was taciturn to an extreme, his speech ponderous and laboured. Although often derided and sometimes the butt of thoughtless childish pranks, he was not as simple as some imagined. It was rather as though, some parts of his mind having never grown past childhood, the remainder had compensated by selecting the life of a recluse, more comfortable in the company of the waves and the gulls than in the presence of his fellow men. He lived a solitary life in the small ill-kept bungalow which had housed his parents and in which he had grown up. Pebble-dashed and slate-tiled it stood slovenly in the middle of a row of neat and trim neighbours at the southern end of the promenade. The garden, if so it could be called, was an ill-assorted accumulation of flotsam and jetsam. Tattered fishnets, broken crab pots, a few ancient and tenantless chicken coops, could be identified in the general morass of debris, its squalor softened by the long strands of couch-grass growing through the rubbish. Around the back door was piled the summer's gathering of driftwood, used to eke out the meagre ration of coal which was all he could afford in the winter months when the cold north-easterlies whined through the cracked window frames and rattled the warped doors. Inside it was much as might be expected; an untidy hotchpotch of old furniture, tatty curtains and worn greasy carpets. Once or twice a year his only sister made her way down from Lowestoft and for a few days she sorted and washed and scrubbed and generally made life a misery for George. After she had returned to the bosom of her family, having done her duty by her brother, he would bring back inside all the things she had thrown out and resume his quiet old ways. Apart from this brief contact, George shunned human company. While he was prepared to make some attempt to get on with his neighbours and those he recognised as locals, he considered the holidaymakers who descended on the little seaside town during the summer to be unmitigated nuisances. They sprawled their gaily-coloured council deckchairs across his beach, chattering and shrieking as they splashed in the shallows, blocking his way with unending moated sandcastles and leaving behind at the end of the day a dismal carpet of discarded crisp packets, cigarette ends and half-eaten sandwiches. However, he appreciated only too well that it was these same people who dropped the shillings and half crowns that the sea sorted out with the shingle, so that those who knew the secret could go almost to the very spot and pick them up.