Lucy's Locker

It appeared as the tide receded, like the rib cage of a long dead sea-creature. By late morning the wreck lay partially submerged in the sand like it had been there all along. And it had. Wrath of waves and shifting sands brought the splinter to the surface from deeper below where it stung unseen and unknown.

Enclosed within the barnacled carcass of a hull, Lucy sat watching the ghosts of drenched fishermen going about their work as grey swells of water from the jealous sea toyed with their vessel.

Since the first summer Lucy was sent back to the bay, she spent her days gathering articles of mysterious provenance abandoned by the sea on the strandline of the beach. Driftwood she modelled into miniature fishing boats to sell in the beach shop ran by her grandfather - himself a man from a long line of Cornish wreckers, though not the kind made infamous by du Maurier. He made the sign above the window from a piece of washed-up pine; Lucy's Locker - Secrets from the Sea!

She had walked over this stretch of sand for twenty-three summers seeking closure for a tragedy which had pierced her in utero. Mum tried to outrun her grief as far as the deathly grey council estates in the city.

Both parents lost in grey.

Lucy was lost in blue - the bay, her little piece of heaven, while the ignorant holiday makers greedily took snap shots of her father's last resting place.