The Electric Michelangelo Read Online Free PDF Page B

withdrawn and mysterious and by nature turbid, like the rips and towing undercurrents of the water in the bay you always knew were there, writhing, even under a calm green-grey surface. Instinct told him it was likely wiser that he not expose his knowledge of his mother’s pointy midnight craft and so he never did.
    Regardless of new codes of conduct, the Bare Pool was seldom empty of suited bathers and there was no finer platform anywhere on the beach from which to hold the weekly piddling competitions.
     
     
    In the days of Cyril Parks’s childhood, the town was the scene of summer straw hats, Sunday-best attire and flagpoles clanking in the breeze, of bowling and boating competitions at Happy Mount Park and shows in the pavilions. There was punting, affordable dining and false recuperation for the blighted. Cy’s first memories were of laughter and crowds, the wind blowing through the fabric of the place so that everything moveable flapped, or rippled, or sashayed. Morecambe Bay in season housed the Yorkshire and Scottish masses, and the Bayview took its fair share, the former coming from May to August, the latter crossing the border in spring and September, and so many visited from Bolton and Bradford that Reeda jokingly referred to their home as Bradford-by-the-Sea. The town roomed its visitors in cheap hotels, provided them with entertainment and reasonably priced food and drink. Reeda would tell her small son that he was lucky, where he lived there was a never-ending holiday, rich with rewards for those who most deserved them. It seemed everywhere Cy went in summer there were seaside treats, seafood served along the pier, sugar rock, dripping ice-cream cones, quarter-sliced ham sandwiches, tea on the beach and a variety of sticky buns. The main attractions were the sea, the magnificent view over the bay to Grange and the air itself, which was infused with something vital, and Cyril Parks loved all three. Steamboats and paddlers jostled in the bay’s current alongside fishing boats, the skippers of the vessels arguing loudly about foreshore rights and landing stages, so the noise of the place went right out to sea and then came back, drifting in through the Bayview’s open windows. It was a place alive to his senses. Come July the smell along the promenade was sweet and salty with the warm suggestion of sewage at the back of it, and sometimes, in protest to unfair rental brackets which left the fishermen the worse off, catches were sorted in public shelters and gazebos, most often the ones located near to councillors’ residences, leaving piles of stinking fish heads and guts and shells for the pleasure of the public, and the town was swamped by an odour of rotting ocean fare. The Bayview’s residents, unwilling to do without their therapeutic air, rank or otherwise, would on these days take nosegays to their faces and handkerchiefs liberally sprinkled with lavender water provided by the pragmatic Reeda Parks, as they shuffled slowly along the seawalk. That forty to fifty tons of cockles alone, plus baskets full of whiting, cod and mussels came down gangplanks and up in carts every single day made for a serious argument with mighty leverage, Cy thought. And sure enough it was a trump card for the fishermen to play and rents always adjusted themselves accordingly.
    The music halls were always full. If Morecambe was the poor man’s Blackpool then poor men danced as well as rich. What little money there was in the hands of northerners come summer often ended up in Morecambe’s seafront pavilions, the Taj Mahal, the Crystal Palace, the Alhambra, each gave as many as three concerts a day in season. Often the Bayview’s guests would insist that Reeda and Cyril accompany them, purchasing tickets as thanks for another lovely week’s stay. Inside the pavilions there were orchestras with foreign, exotic sounding names, magicians and minstrels, dandies or local comedians, singing competitions. Nothing was too silly or