A Natural Moment

This is from the Abbotsleigh school’s 2022 Mod C assessment, which said: In response to an aspect of the image compose an imaginative moment that captures the wonder of the natural world. (12 marks)

This is where Everything would end, he thought. Where it all began. Land and water and sky becoming light. He wondered what it would be like, to become light. Would it be a flash of blue, like the nuclear laboratory accidents? Would it be a shadow, like the ones on the steps of Hiroshima? Would it be curtains of green in the sky, like the ones over Pripyat?

Light, although mysterious, was essentially a true thing. And in these huge skies it seemed that the truth was laid out like words on a page, telling clear and inexorable things.

Some things were true only at some times. For instance, it was true that these were the Essex marshes, and that beyond them, beneath the tower-piled clouds, was the English Channel. And beyond that was Holland. And you could keep going beyond and beyond until you came back round on yourself and were in the marshes again, among the mudflats like the grooves and swirls of a fingerprint, and everything was water and salt and silence. But all that was only true sometimes.

This way of looking at things was true in the classroom, and four times a day, for the Shipping Forecast. And it was true in his father’s ordnance survey maps (Explorer 175 and Landranger 178). It was true to the Fisheries agent, and the RSPB, and the police, who occasionally had to dredge out the bodies of drowned refugees.

The rest of the time, though, none of that was true. Here, the separation of land and water had not fully finished. Things of light still brooded over the waters and a filmy brightness filled the whole sky instead of being gathered into greater and lesser lights. Here, there was yet no thought of men, and there was no making, measuring power pouring over it all wondering whether It was Good.

There was only an extreme flatness, light, and reflections so clear you were unsure what was real, image, up, or down. There was only this and no good or evil, no knowledge of them, no sound, no names.

We were a flash, he thought. The waorld was like this, then we briefly existed, and soon it will return to this. That seemed right.

His father disliked him spending time in the marshes.

What do you do? It’s not safe outside at the moment.

You come back so quiet.

Remember to hose everything off really well.

What’s there, anyway, except mud and wind. You don’t want to be in the wind right now.

You want to get some friends your own age, you do. Especially now.

What do you say I come with you, when all this is over, and we’ll go fishing?

When all this is over, obviously. When we’ve got the all-clear. If we haven’t grown two heads.

God, this world. I’m telling you.

His father used a lot of words, he thought. Everyone did. He left the house and went back to the silence and the high skies. In the kitchen, the radio chattered on about Chernobyl.