‘Counting the Benches’ by Karen Storey

I can see France, Cap Blanc Nez a cliff-edged speck of white touching the grey-green waters at the horizon.  As I walk, I wonder whether the French have memorial benches like the ones that edge the seafront here. Somehow I doubt it. They seem a peculiarly British commemoration of love and loss, lined up like Chelsea Pensioners on Remembrance Day, their unyielding masks belying their emotions.

Do you remember how the children used to count them on our Sunday outings? How we’d speculate about the people in the inscriptions?  Charles Freeborn, undoubtedly a man of upright stature and crisply pressed trousers, who probably marched past here every day; Maureen Johnson, wonderful wife, mother, gran and Scrabble player, a game old bird, you said. 

I saw Jack Dyson down here last week, on one of those dismal days when only a ghost of the pier hovers in the sea fret. He’s hardly ever in The Port Arms any more, Phil says, not since it happened. I suppose it must be a year now because he was tying a bunch of flowers to Jenny’s bench.

There are sixty-two benches between the pitch & putt and the bandstand, or at least there were yesterday.  Today there’s one more. In my mind’s eye its dedication is To Robbie, my love, my life, but I hope you will forgive your very British wife, my darling, that to everyone else this bench is, no less truly, For Robert, who loved this place.