Doctor Who_ Rip Tide - Louise Cooper [0]
Louise Cooper
First published in England in 2003 by
Telos Publishing Ltd
61 Elgar Avenue, Tolworth, Surrey KT5 9JP, England
www.telos.co.uk
ISBN: 1-903889-12-X (standard hardback)
Rip Tide © 2003 Andrew Cartmel
Foreword © 2003 Stephen Gallagher
Wave motif © 2003 Nathan Skreslet
ISBN: 1-903889-12-X (standard hardback)
Rip Tide © 2003 Andrew Cartmel
Foreword © 2003 Stephen Gallagher
Wave motif © 2003 Nathan Skreslet
Frontispiece © 2003 Fred Gambino
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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FOREWORD by STEPHEN GALLAGHER
I'm a sucker for the English seaside, and that's a fact.
I'm not talking about golden sands, golden days, deckchairs and sunshine. I actually mean the reality of it, the cold winds and the tacky arcades and lonely beach cafés that feel like outposts of the lost. Ghosts and faded glories. Cliff paths and promenades and wooden chalets with the paint peeling off.
Just thinking about it makes me want to abandon all my deadlines, throw the dog in the back of the car, and head for the coast. It's a cold October day and there's a light rain on the skylight above my head.
Perfect.
Those golden days must have existed sometime. Such a charged present-day atmosphere has to have its origin at some point in the past; ghosts only walk where living people walked before. In my imagination that origin was in the 'thirties, when the Grand Hotels were still grand and the motor vehicles were works of art, when a man was embarrassed to be seen in public without his jacket and tie and everyone wore a hat. That's where my mind places the eternal summer of the Secret Seven and the Famous Five, when Billy Bunter was at Butlin's and Henry Hall was on the radio.
And that's what I find myself thinking about, when I'm sitting at a formica table in some place with salt spray on the windows, drinking hot chocolate out of a thick-sided mug and listening to the pinball machine at the back of the café. I'm here in the present but there's so much more to it, only one layer deep and only just out of reach. It's all around me, and wherever I look. It's in the sea-pitted railings, it's out in the boarded-up pavilion on the pier. A theatre of shadows, cast by the notso-long-ago departed. Beyond those shadows are even older ones, of fishing boats and smugglers and wreckers with their lanterns, luring tall ships onto the rocks. It might feel like something out of Robert Louis Stevenson but it happened, and its echoes are there.
There's a word for it, I suppose. When you're in a place or a moment that is energised by a sense of inexplicable meaning. The word is, magic.
Louise Cooper knows all about magic. So possessed was she by that of the Cornish seaboard that she not only realised a dream when she eventually