A long time ago, before cheap flights spread them throughout the world like summer pollen, people used to go on holidays by the sea. I was not around yet to witness this. Because my parents tell me stories, I know that the quiet Blackpool beaches before me were once crowded. There was a shining tower and long piers that pierced the ocean and bright lights and carnival rides and one-night-only acts. Now there are empty spaces designed for invisible crowds. The boardwalk paint is flaking, the wood rotting. I imagine that one day a hole will open up in the pier and those who still remain will silently fall through. A trapdoor will click shut above them and they will be left in the near-darkness, saltwater around their ankles, where they will wait for the light to come pouring in again.
My great-aunt’s boyfriend Steve starts a conversation with anyone he can find. He casts his hooked bait to the old men standing by the glassy ocean, whose fishing lines hover just beneath the waves. They are spread evenly across the waterfront, like sentries, guarding against the sunset. They are the final patrons of the Irish sea. Through Steve we glean the most vital tidbit: These fishermen will be eating from the chippy this evening. We feast on this—How ironic, how satisfying!
I imagine that the boardwalk arcade has to hum itself to sleep these days. Towers of pennies in coin-pusher machines slant lazily. Fog wipes the end of the pier from sight. Outdoor cafés are carpeted with flattened astroturf. Sticks of Blackpool rock are piled high on countertops in strange colours and sugary flavours. Haziness seeps into the body. Arcade lights flicker. Claw machines are out of order. Nobody mans the prize counter. You could take anything. The boardwalk no longer needs to swindle you, for it runs on pity now.
My cousin’s friend Jasmine is from Blackpool, although soon she’ll be moving to Leeds. Fresh start, she says. In Glasgow, everyone knows everyone, she says. She’s light blue all over—eyes, eyeshadow, skirt and shoes. While we’re in a pub, my cousin tells the story of the time he and a friend drove Jasmine home to Blackpool, and the friend fell so in love with her during the car ride he wrote her a song. She never spoke a word to him. Our heads shake; everyone is laughing. The third gin and tonic gives me vertigo. The rain pauses and begins again. My cousin’s girlfriend makes foosball players dribble the ball as if they’re the real thing.
One of my paintings hangs on the wall of my cousin’s bedroom, a portrait of two dogs. The one with perky ears is no longer with us. On the opposite side of the family—my mother’s side—I have a cousin who lives in a flat near Manchester’s Old Trafford. It has a beautiful view. Another one of my paintings hangs on the wall by the entrance to the kitchen. This is the only time my ability to create art feels like a gift.
My cousin’s apartment in Glasgow is filled with light. I draw the people wandering in the street below. My brother and I are starting to enjoy each other’s company. We’re visitors here, cousins from America, knowing just enough to fit in but not enough to assimilate. Jasmine asks us, in a voice light and sing-songy, what it’s like being American. Asks if we own lots of guns or hoard food. We say no, no, we aren’t American. We only live there.
On the turbulent road that leads into Blackpool, a biscuit factory is embedded in the razed earth. Burton’s Biscuits. The building is hemmed with barbed wire. Are they trying to keep intruders out, or the biscuits in? When I first arrived in Blackpool, a fight broke out in a pub across the road. Mid-morning. Men in the street, throwing punches. Barbed wire, boarded houses, demolition. The sea shines in the weak sunlight, but it is not enough.
My mother’s mother was born here. She moved away to a snoozing cul-de-sac in a bomb-stunted city, where not even cars carve craters in the quiet of the night. Coventry could have been the greatest British city, she says.
Both of my grandfathers were artists. I visit my mother’s childhood home, where her father’s art hangs on the walls. I never got to know him before he died. My mother’s mother struggles with her eyesight, and I find it eerie that these paintings go unseen for much of the year. Whenever I visit, I stare at them for long periods of time, trying to memorise them.
I sit to paint my father’s father, who chats to me about portraiture and glazing techniques. I miss my other grandfather deeply. He deserved to know, when he set aside the start of my education fund, that it would be going towards studying art. He can never sit for a portrait, but he is with me when I paint, and that will have to be enough.
Miles away from Coventry, rain soaks the air above the Yorkshire moors. Down below, in the city that no longer bleeds soot, the masses sway to and fro like heather in the wind. I am happy to be from here, because they are awfully proud of their painter, a man who dutifully depicted the gruesome, banal, industrial reality of it all with brushstrokes. Here is your smokey, dirty city. Here are its tired people—but they are not tired anymore. They buzz. The city symbol is the bee. Old canal boats float beneath tall towers of blue glass and steel. Greenery grows all over the rusting pipes of the viaduct. The people of Manchester frame and display their painter’s work, as if to say: Look at how hard we have worked for this. Look at what we have created from our history.
L. S. Lowry, born and raised in Manchester, once said that he was most proud of his seascapes. They are blank expanses of ocean—no beach, no beachgoers, no blue skies, only a wavering grey horizon. He proclaimed them a reflection of his loneliness. How can a man be so lonely, when he has the voice and the image of his people inside of him? As well as the grimy haze of the workers and their machines, he captured the vital detail of their lives. Perhaps his seascapes are so excellent because he already knew the way crowds moved in waves, to and fro, mill to homes, like clockwork. The tides are relentless. Maybe Lowry saw the future in them. Nobody works in the mills anymore. Nobody goes on holiday to Blackpool. The sea remains, mute and steady, working.
In England, during the summer, the days feel like they never end. I play football in a backyard with my cousins. The makeshift goals and flat ball are familiar; my brother and I used to do this in people’s backyards and make all the adults join in. I’m part of the older crowd now, standing there with a pint of beer, chatting, watching the ball roll back and forth. My cousins say come on, come play, and the evening disintegrates. The ball slowly disappears out from under me, washed away by the growing darkness. I don’t even notice it’s happening. Suddenly there are no clearly defined shapes anymore, just the moving outlines of my family, the fuzzy glow of the football, the beer in my hand, my new old age, and the passing of time.
The darkness of Manchester’s suburbs is translucent, draped delicately over the river and fields. In pub doorways, I part ways with people I only half know. I have listened to their chatter, their catching-up. We all go different directions, into the night. Careful, now. These evenings are pearls, achieved through months of routine. School, homework, dinner, television, for months and months until I earn my reward. I hold the pearls in my palm, count them, remember them. Treasure from the sea and the land.
On the corner by the red-brick church, two girls hug goodbye and go their separate ways. They say, see you soon, see you next time. My next time is much different to theirs. My next time weighs me down in the street, invisible and heavy, while the girls float away from each other. Under the streetlamps, we are all briefly illuminated, and it starts to drizzle.
I walk the family dog around the block each night, pausing only to examine the shuttered storefronts. It is dark and quiet and the air is filled with a feeling that I do not care to discern, for I am just here to walk the dog. I am here to play musical houses and make cups of tea. I am here to visit a castle. I am here to climb the moorland paths.
Like the old industrial machines, my family rumbles on. Much has been generated in my long absences—new cousins, here and there—two dogs that merge into one. Thankfully, there are pubs that let you in no matter your age. Thankfully, there are old friends of your dad who turn up and say “I remember when you were this tall”, and ask what you’re up to these days. The answer is, usually, I’m here, and I’m walking the dog. I’m making cups of tea. I’m looking for myself in old photographs of my parents. I’m eating Sunday dinner. I’m on the train to Glasgow, watching the world widen before me. I’m painting my grandparents. Most importantly, I’m listening to the stories my little cousin invents about trains and fire trucks.
He asks to see me one last time before I leave, and paints me a picture as a gift. Maybe he will be an artist. We sit on the floor of my grandparents’ house and slot the wooden train tracks into place. I have been here before, three years old, playing in this same room with these same toys. My grandparents look on, smiling. It is not often I get to be here like this, quiet and peaceful with my family. I never get used to it. The train track is long and winding. The tiny wooden carriages take the invisible passengers home and back again, and home and back again.
Katherine McDonagh, ’27