Sully Island Causeway, Bristol Channel (UK) and Kopu Bridge, Thames, Coromandel (NZ)

Sully Island Causeway. Photo by Anna Snow, as featured in the Glamorgan Star.

The bridge of tides

Hiraeth calls me…

A first girlfriend spun tales

of secret seamen meetings below deck.

Romance ebbs and flows.

Father’s roving eye delivered a half-brother

born to the German au pair.

Another ship passing in the night,

heading later for harbour overseas.

Mother died in Covid times, her memory

still awake to evacuation to Wales in wartime.

So on Sully Island reached by causeway,

revealed by receding tide,

we scattered her ashes,

carried home across the invisible bridge.

Those grey ashes burnt embers of memory,

that sunken bridge beneath the tide of time,

borne to my Welsh mother.

Hiraeth calls me.

by Paul Murphy

(Sully Island (Welsh: Ynys Sili) is a small, uninhabited, tidal island of 14.5 acres (5.9 ha), located 400 m (440 yd) off the northern coast of the Bristol Channel, midway between the towns of Penarth and Barry. Source: Wikipedia)

Kopu bridge from the Hauraki Rail Trail. Photo by Johnragla,

Abridged

Time is sliding so slowly. It’s excruciating.

Four hot bodies in a car that has not moved for 37 minutes.

Two of the hot bodies are in car seats.

Small and restless. Sweaty and cherubic.

The smallest travellers are excited for whatever comes next.

The adults are cursing the one-way bridge that is keeping them

from the beach, the ocean,

the chance to make memories.

The wait seems endless.

When will it be over?

And then, suddenly, it is.

The one-way bridge is replaced by a double-lane bridge.

The sweaty, cherubic travellers have grown up.

It’s excruciating. Time is sliding.

by Melanie Cooper

(Kopu Bridge spans the width of the Waihou River. This narrow, one-way bridge is New Zealand’s only surviving road bridge of the swing span type. No longer in use, these days it is viewed as a piece of history.)

Time and tide

Things can be flowing along, then life intervenes. Mel and Paul were randomly paired for this project, and they began exchanging thoughts. Then a serious kidney illness meant Paul could not complete his writing task in full; the centena here was completed from his notes by John Simmons. Extracts from the emails between Mel and Paul follow.

Mel:

Each summer, the journey to the Coromandel began not with the sea, but with a wait. The historic Kopu Bridge across the Waihou River was a narrow, one-way bridge requiring patience under testing conditions. Sometimes you had to wait an hour to cross, sometimes longer, the threshold of our holidays. First as backdrop to our university romance; then a feature in our summer holidays as a young family. Babies in car seats, toddlers with sticky fingers, each summer we queued, inching forward, impatience giving way to anticipation. Across we’d go, into the golden days. Years passed. The bridge, like our children, grew older; then came the new two-lane bridge. The old bridge lies quietly to the side, a relic of memory, a reminder of how fast and slow time moves.

Paul:

I was busy planning a family ceremony, five years on from my mother’s death. She’d been 92, it was Covid time and I was with her, shielding and looking after her, listening to her memories. Aged 12, she’d been evacuated in wartime from London to Wales, a village on the coast. Twice every day if the tides were right, she would skip over to Sully Island, a small abandoned treasure trove 400 yards offshore. When the tide was out, a secret causeway revealed itself and you could cross to the island. My mum wanted her ashes to be scattered there. My mum was very Welsh and the Welsh have a word that has no match in English. Hiraeth means home but also the deep longing for home when far away.