The Wind in Our Eyes: And the Surf at Our Heels

By S.D. Gripton and Sally Dillon-Snape

Celine and Archie Manton; wife and daughter of Inspector James Manton, are killed in a terrorist explosion in an unnamed city in the North West of England. Manton is broken. He resigns from the Police Force, sells the family home, sells all the furniture, even his car.
He wants to go somewhere where people barely know him and where they speak a language he does not understand. He yearns for nothing but isolation as he awaits death from the rolling surf.
He moves to an isolated Welsh village named Llandrugg, where the predominate language is Welsh. He owns a holiday home there. He is known to villagers, but only as a detached, miserable individual; though his wife and daughter were much better known.He settle In and in his own way is surviving. Until, one day when he opens his door to step out onto the sand, a girl rolls in. She has been sleeping on his balcony, leaning against the door.
She is Molly Hardwick.
Manton totally rejects her, is angry at her.
Until he realises she has arrived in Llandrugg to die, too.
Unbeknown to Manton Molly Hardwick was the fiancée of Archie, his daughter, they were soon to be married.
She is in as much pain as Manton himself.
They learn how to survive together.
Until it is time to surrender to the surf

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.D. Gripton
• Release date: Mar 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215287583

S.D. Gripton

S.D. Gripton novels and real crime books are written by Dennis Snape, who is married to Sally who originate from North Wales and Manchester respectively and who met 18 years ago. I work very hard to make a reading experience a good one, with good plots and earthy language. I enjoy writing and hope readers enjoy what I have written. I thank everyone who has ever looked at at one of my books.

Book preview

The Wind In Our Eyes

And

The Surf At Our Heels

A North Wales Story

Of

Loss and Redemption

By

S.D. Gripton & Sally Dillon-Snape

© Sally Dillon-Snape & Dennis Snape (2024)

The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with The Copyright Act 1988

All characters and events in this publication other than those of fact and historical significance available in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living and dead is purely coincidental

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher

Cover by Snape

This novel is dedicated to

The country and people of Wales

***

Chapter One

The official line was that it was a failed attack.

The fanatical idiot’s intention was to blow up the whole shopping centre.

He failed.

He meant to kill hundreds.

He failed.

He blew out only an emergency exit, a clothes shop and himself.

We were very lucky.

The spokesman said.

Twelve hurt, two seriously, the others not life-threatening.

Only six killed.

We were very lucky.

Only six killed.

Detective Sergeant Manton was part of the several teams of police officers that were called to attend the scene. Like others in the emergency services, he rushed to the place of the incident, people streaming out of the centre when he arrived in a car with four others, uniformed officers already crowd-organising. Inside, it was chaos, smoke and fear being the overwhelming images that would remain in the Detective Sergeant’s mind.

With others, he worked through the rest of the afternoon and into the night, doing what he could, including guiding Scene Of Crime Officers to the site of the explosion. They ensured, along with fire officers, that the site was as safe as it could be, before they began to gather evidence. Six hours into the investigation, Detective Sergeant Manton took advantage of the food wagon that had been called to the scene to feed all those working on the incident. Whilst standing in the chill of the evening, sipping tea and munching on a burger, he pulled out his phone, called his wife to say he would be late home, there was no answer. He left a message.

He called his daughter.

Twenty feet away, a member of the SOCO team carrying a large plastic evidence bag containing items from the explosion was striding past when he heard a pink phone ring. It was inside the bag.

Detective Manton heard it ringing, too.

And he knew.

He knew.

***

The tragedies are mine to hold.

They are mine.

And only mine.

They are not yours.

If you whisper any syrupy words of comfort into my ear I will spit in your face; if you lay a comforting hand upon my shoulder, I will push you aside; if you bring me food, I will cast it to the floor.

You cannot share my pain; it cannot be shared.

You can pretend to share, but that just makes you a fantasist, an actor playing a role; you can say you know, when you don’t.

You have no idea how it feels.

You cannot imagine what it feels like to me, so keep your whispered words and your comforting hands to yourself; do something else with your time.

The tragedies are mine.

And mine alone.

If you attempt to interrupt my thoughts with your talk, expect to be walloped; for words are my nightmare, sounds dripping off the tongues of those who do not know how it feels, who cannot know.

The churchman at the Memorial Ceremony.

For example.

His words.

He spouted hundreds of bloody words that meant nothing; he did not understand; he didn’t even seem to care that much; tomorrow or next week he would have other dead bodies to sermonise over, he would be overseeing other services, he would write other sermons and sympathise with other families; it’s just a job to him. He came forward to sympathise with me before all the sermonising began, but one single glance into my eyes put him off; he backed away with wide eyes as if I were aiming a pistol at his head, as if, in me, he had seen the Devil.

I am no Devil.

I just don’t want to share.

Not with anybody.

Not with vicars who preach; not with Police Officers who searched and brought the investigation to a successful conclusion; not with social workers who were about as social as concrete; and certainly not with therapists, those experts with words that meant, and mean, nothing to me.

Nothing at all.

I want no one.

If I want to talk, I know how to do that; I have been doing that for almost as long as I have been alive; I do not want to talk.

If I want to pray, I know how to do that, too, though I did not practice it for as long as I could talk.

I can meditate; but I am not very practised at that; I was never very good at meditating even during those times when I did meditate.

Nobody can be good at everything.

I am not good at a lot.

Loving my wife?

I think.

I was good at that.

Loving my daughter?

I was good at that, too.

I think she thought I was good at that.

Protecting them from evil?

I was shit at that, obviously.

And the sense of failure leans upon me like a heavy ton weight; I failed to protect my wife and daughter.

How horrendous is that thought to a father?

Only I can know.

You cannot know.

Bringing them home to bury?

I was atrociously bad at that; there was not enough left of them to bury; a Memorial Service is what they got, not a funeral, a Memorial Service during which I never spoke; I never said any beautiful words about my wonderful wife and my fantastic daughter; I couldn’t bring any words to mind, beautiful or otherwise.

People stared.

I didn’t care; they could stare all they liked.

And why, I asked myself, were they all there, packing the church, singing bloody hymns, listening to the bollocks being spoken by the many; why?

WHY?

The pain, the loss, are mine alone.

It should have been just me with my wife and daughter; just the three of us; we could have said goodbye properly, I could have said my own words; I may even have been able to make them laugh.

I could always make them laugh.

Celine and Archie.

Wife and daughter.

But a Memorial Service?

In a packed church?

What the hell was that all about; everybody dressed in black, including me; and I had to be forced into wearing it; when my wife hated black; my daughter quite liked it; being the rebellious sort; but, in general, black was not usually worn by any of us.

We were a family of bright colour.

Inside and out.

Now, we aren’t even a family.

We are a family of grey ghosts only, both dead and alive.

I am a ghost.

I can’t see myself in a mirror; I don’t want to see myself. I learned how to shave without using a mirror, like a soldier in the deep trenches; fighting a war, except I am not fighting one; I am being buried by it. I learned how to brush and comb my hair without reflection; and it helped me that there was only one mirror in the house after they’d gone; my wife and daughter; only one mirror; the one in my daughter’s bedroom. She used to spend long hours sitting and lying on her bed in front of it whilst she spoke on her phone; a phone that was silent now; all her friends silenced with it. Many of them at the Memorial Service.

None spoke to me.

Which was good of them.

They knew, the youngsters, they knew the pain was all mine to bear; it did not belong to any other and I did not want to share. All of Archie’s teenage friends, to whom my daughter spoke so frequently, they stayed away.

They stayed away from me.

The older ones should have noticed what the younger ones were doing, they should have followed their example, they should have stayed away.

It ended badly, the Service.

I walked out before all the words and songs were finished.

I’d heard enough bollocks for one day.

And I was in the front row.

It was a long walk to the door but I took it anyway, my footsteps echoing loudly, interrupting words from a mouth I no longer wanted to listen to. I passed familiar and unfamiliar faces; rows of Archie’s friends from her telephone; those from the legal profession who worked with Celine; Police Officers who worked on the case and with me.

Colleagues.

But colleagues no longer.

When I walked out of the church, I just kept going. I walked away from a Police Force I had served with almost religious fervour for over twenty-five-years; I walked away from Celine’s elderly parents; the only other people in the world who were allowed to feel any pain; I sympathised, but I still walked away from them; I walked away from the house we owned and from all its contents; I walked away from the car parked on the driveway.

And that was me

Gone.

Gone like a ghost; walking away and disappearing in the middle of a damp and dismal July afternoon to live alone with my grief.

With my pain.

Pain that was mine alone.

I wanted nobody around; I wanted to go somewhere where they spoke a language I didn’t understand.

I wanted a foreign and unspeakable language.

Something a person had to be born into to understand.

I ended up in Llanddrugg.

In Wales.

***

Llandrugg was one of those half-forgotten, abandoned villages at the Eastern end of North Wales, where real Welsh people can still be found, not the false English-pretend-Welsh who moved into cheap homes and wrecked towns in the West. Almost all the residents in the village of Llanddrugg spoke Welsh; a language I had no feel for, no knowledge of.

We owned a holiday cottage on the outskirts of the village.

We, being my wife and me.

Archie never owned anything in her short life; her phone maybe; a Christmas gift from mother and me and costing the earth. She never lived long enough to rush into debt with a wedding or with a mortgage or with anything else come to that. She was wiped from this earth as if she had never existed.

Sometime after she’d gone, she received a letter from her bank saying she owed them £1:37 pence and if she didn’t pay, they would add a penalty of £10. I ripped the letter into so many pieces I could have used the remains as confetti.

The bank took the debt and the penalty.

The world is shit.

And I used to be a Police Officer, I know how shit it really is.

More shit than most people know.

It would give normal people nightmares if they knew; if they had seen what I had seen.

And it had all been for nothing.

Because I was done with all that.

No friendly goodbyes, no farewell parties, no gifts for the years served, nothing. I was just done with it all.

Done with living in a sprawling city, where crime was rife and Police Officers could have worked thirty-hours a day and still not made any significant dent in it. Police Officers were gainfully employed in the city. It was mostly fine during daylight hours, drunks and drug-pushers and users normally being the only problem during daylight hours; shoplifters; and shoppers tend not to notice them; we even entertained a fair number of tourists who thought the city exciting. At night though, it was exciting in the way of the sound of a ricocheting bullet, the bang of a gun, the scream of a victim, the dying breath of a murder victim. During daylight, legal deals could be done, people could travel easily from one side of it to the other, from the bottom to the top, but at night, evil crept in, drug dealers became serious and moved like shadows, weapons came, rape came, assault came, it was the people of the night living their dreams. Any innocents caught out in the dark, literally, took their lives in their hands. It was a Police Officers’ nightmare, people like me; for over twenty-five years.

I never made the slightest difference.

We were just holding back filthy, polluted water and every time we moved, it swamped us, drowned us and washed us away.

We could do good work one day.

The next, it would all be washed away in another tide of evil.

Police Officers never made a spit of difference, neither me nor any others.

Day and night.

City life.

Most cities in the world being the same.

Most cities where Police Officers hold back the water; the stinking tide of pollution that is crime; and crime is never-ending. It is said that prostitution is the oldest illegal profession in the world, but remember, the pimp was already there, the madam, the house of ill-repute. The criminals were first in, the prostitutes only followed later.

I was done with crime.

I was done with thinking about it.

I was done with the city, too.

Because I was here now, in my old holiday cottage, upon which we built a balcony across the front some years ago, to sit and gaze at the sea, on the outskirts of the village of Llanddrugg, where nobody trusts me or speaks to me and where they feel they can do that for two reasons. First of all. they knew from previous visits, times when we used to take occasional drinks in the pub, my wife, my child and me, that I was a policeman; they didn’t yet know that I was an ex- policeman; why would I explain myself to a village full of Welsh people, they were nothing to do with me; and secondly, I took no bloody interest in their language. I had never even learned the basics of good morning, good evening or good night or leave me alone. I never learned how to say any of those things in Welsh; the language was as dead to me as it was to most of the rest of the world. We would all be speaking Chinese before I spoke Welsh.

But Llanddrugg understood me, to a degree.

They knew, collectively, that I wanted to be left alone, that I had no interest in conversation with any of them. They could speak English when it suited their mood, though I did not want them to do it just for me; and that was the direction I wanted my life to take.

To be alone.

I walked, sometimes jogged, on the beach almost every morning, with my head down, a hood over it whether it is warm or chilled, windy or wet, although I had not yet reached my first Christmas without them; my wife and daughter. I had no idea how I was going to react to that. I was putting off reactions; I was just living instead.

And I’d found moderate survival happiness in being alone.

I didn’t think of much.

I was just alone with the sea and the sand, and sometimes the wind got into my eyes and made tears stream from them.

I blamed the wind; I always blamed the wind.

Even indoors.

And the days and weeks passed.

And the pain did not lessen.

Time did not make it better, as the pontificators say it does.

More useless words.

From those who had not been pained.

The know-everything’s.

And I was becoming used to being on my own.

I was living as I wanted to live; without words or comments or hugs or pats on the shoulder or anything else.

I was, as they say; whoever they are: getting on with it.

Moderately successfully.

Then Molly Hardwick crashed into my life.

***

Chapter Two

To be fair to her, she didn’t actually crash in; she more or less rolled in;