More Than A Glimpse

In 1987 I read a book called The Shell Seekers. The book was set in a village in Cornwall, England, called St. Mawes. I fell in love with the description of the village and decided to visit for the month of August. St Mawes was even more beautiful than I had imagined and not only that, I was welcomed. I spent twenty-seven summers in St. Mawes, renting a cottage for ten of those summers and then buying a tiny, uphill cottage overlooking the harbor. 

                                                    

Seated at a rickety wooden table on an equally rickety wooden chair, the window to my right in my small office overlooking the boat-filled harbor, I wrote stories about life in St Mawes. This is one of them.

More Than A Glimpse 

Besides a hooded Gortex jacket, one of the best things I own for my summers in Cornwall is my bus pass. This plastic card with my photo on it not only allows me to travel from village to village on the Roseland Peninsula for free, but also offers me a glimpse into local life that I treasure.

Recently I took the bus to Truro, the nearest large town, the county seat, in fact. The trip takes an hour, making four scheduled stops. Unscheduled stops also occur in order to pick up someone, anyone, standing beside the road in front of a farm and waving the bus down. This spontaneity is bewildering to a punctual, schedule-minded American, but it is easy to see that it is a practice well accepted by both the bus drivers and the local passengers. Everyone knows everyone on the bus: the atmosphere is friendly and cheerful.

The bus trip to Turo through the Cornish lanes is not for the faint-hearted. The bus hurtles through the lanes, swerving madly along curving roads so narrow that when a car is coming the other way, more often than not, the car driver has to nose the car into a hedgerow on the other side and stop. The bus is absolutely the alpha vehicle on the road, something, I think, that may be secretly empowering to the mostly senior citizens who are hanging onto the grab bars in front of their seats.

On this particular trip, the bus stopped at Tregony and a nice-looking, eighty-something woman boarded. She settled herself into a seat diagonally in front of me so I had an uninterrupted view of her. Her eyes were slightly puffy, but a clear blue. She was wearing pink lipstick and her still-thick, grey hair was curly and cut short. Neatly dressed in a blue skirt, comfortable beige shoes and pale stockings, I imagined the inevitable cardigan and blouse, beneath her tan mid-length raincoat. Round, filigreed gold earrings sparkled on her ears.

Just before we got to Tresillian—a scheduled stop—the woman stood up, smoothed her skirt and walked carefully, but with confidence, toward the front of the bus where she stood, holding the rail and waiting for the bus to stop. I thought she was planning to disembark. But no.

At the bus stop I could see out of my window a tweed-capped man, also in his eighties, his right arm fully extended to command the bus to stop. He was wearing brown trousers, a blue shirt, and a red tie beneath an open light tan rain jacket. With the hand that was not waving at the bus, he supported himself with a walking stick.

The waiting woman stepped back from the door as the man slowly but steadily mounted the steps into the bus. He had a fleshy, rather pink face, which lit up when her saw her.

Smiling, she led him to her seat. She slid in toward the window and then, turning, but not moving to assist him, she watched as he organized himself and his stick.

I could see only the back of his head, the sparse white hair curling below his checked cap. It was her face that I watched.

They began to softly chat, their heads leaning toward each other, her affection for him apparent in the glow of her eyes, in the upturn of her mouth and the lift of her brow. In just a few moments, they were so absorbed with one another that they seemed cocooned, completely insulated, oblivious to the rest of the passengers and the breath-taking machinations of the bus.

Where were they going on their day out in Truro, I wondered, these two octogenarians with their mutual affection?  To lunch and the afternoon cinema? To Marks and Spencers to buy food treats and maybe a new sweater?

Perhaps I was rude to have observed them so intently. More than a glimpse this was, to be sure, but I was so grateful and felt such joy to have witnessed this gentle love blooming as brightly and unexpectedly as the bravest yellow wild flower reaching toward the sun from between the stones of the hedgerows: This late-season love, fully thriving amidst the rattling, lurching of the bus through the winding lanes to Truro. It was irresistible.