Free Edge of the Orison by Iain Sinclair Page B

migrate always.’ Fear was the contract, the price of this privilege, French beach, rundown villa, coastal strip with its fascinating detritus of war.
    On the day of their departure, bags packed, the children were marched to the beach to dive from a raft and collect weed from the seabed. Previous attempts had failed. Another spluttering return, empty-handed to the surface, and they'd be abandoned in France. Refusal was never an option. Pleasure was programmatic. A solitary dish of ice-cream you taste for the rest of your life. The triumphant child licks and luxuriates, the others are confined to quarters.
    But they look happy in the yellowing photographs, the sexagenarian Hadmans who were naked kids on the French Riviera (protected from the sun by a quick dab of Nivea on the shoulders). Photographs have wrinkled, taking the blight that should have distressed their overexposed subjects. Older prints trap the family dead in eternal wedding parties. They grin or frown from sidecars and wingless planes. Large adults clambering into the scaled-down transport of Blackpool's Pleasure Beach. Revellers with drunken hats on flights that never leave the ground.
    Black albums, interleaved with grey tissue, have a potent smell: sometimes camphor and closed bedrooms, sometimes a bonfire of autumn leaves. Dust of pressed flowers. Pages marked with faded ribbons. Sticky corners that have worked loose. Inscriptions in

    white ink on brown paper. Anna in Antibes. Sitting on the sand, clutching her knees. Salt-sticky hair curled to the scalp. She is glossy and dark; a grave child with a private agenda (the look of Evonne Goolagong). Whooping cough defeated. Unexploded shells planted in terracotta pots. Beakers of pink Grenadine waiting on the terrace.
    Around this time, before school or knowing children other than her immediate family, Anna flew with her father from Squire'sGate, across England, to the Hadman farm in Glinton: a summer field, a bumpy landing like one of those French Resistance films with Virginia McKenna. Wings on struts; single prop loud enough to leave passengers, shaky from vibrations, deaf. ‘Everyone who talked to you was very far away.’ The soothing cup of tea on arrival rattles in your hand. Lips move but you can't hear what they say. Is this the same country? No passport control. No radio. Register your flight plan, follow major roads; when in doubt drop down to read the signs.
    A flight recovered from a child's dream. Memories retained by a woman revisiting a place that is no longer there. She is confused, not by the parts that have disappeared, but by the buildings that are almost as they were: Auntie Mary's Balcony House, Uncle Lawrie's Red House, the post office, the school. Anna wants this to be what she wants, a slow life under pressing skies, a village organised around church and the passage of the seasons. Paths walked with cousins and aunts. With dogs.
    Her father flew back. She stayed in Glinton. She wrote a letter to her brother William. ‘I am going to treasure island on Saterday, it is a play… You will be able to rite in ink one day… With very much love, Anna.’ Now she understands the distance between Blackpool and Glinton, she has witnessed it. The lurch, the vibration, the forward momentum of the Auster hauling itself over hedges and huts. She has never been on a commercial flight. Fields, she remembers, the pattern of them. But it's not the landscape, looking out on miniature farms and cars, it's reverie. Infiltrating that old dream of a life that is always there. Roads are white arms, rivers glitter. She is with her father, they can't speak. She's too deep in the seat, the leathery smell, to see out. It's not alarming. It takes a few days for the noise to fade.
    She finds herself in a mirror country where, for the first time, other girls have her colouring, shape of eyes, generous mouth; sweet natures that snap, on the instant, flare and forgive. Photographs. Anna and her cousin Judy as