Largs at last : Dublin to Glasgow (Part 5)

 

Largs is Nardini's and Nardini's is Largs. 

The Italian family owned ice-cream and coffee place is located deep within my cerebral cortex. I have a specific neuron that responds to the sound of the espresso machine, whooshing fountains of childhood delight. As a youngster I didn't drink coffee as my father told me it would turn my skin yellow. But, I had a sweet tooth and could easily be bribed to be good, or relatively good, for an entire week or two, just with the promise of a Knicker-Bocker Glory ice cream. They used to be 75p, they are now about a tenner.

The 11:45 pulled into Largs, and I dragged my bag purposefully down the seafront to Nardini's. I hadn't been good, so no ice-cream, but a bowl of soup, a sandwich and a delightful coffee. 

Years before Starbucks and Costa, Nardini's was. 'Lord, who shall I say sent me. Tell them 'I am'', and where should I drink coffee? Tell them Nardini's. As a teenager and young adult I would sit in Nardini's feeling very proud as I ordered their wonderful coffee or hot chocolate, leaving a tip for the waitress. I would be scanning the shares section of the Financial Times, and working my way through my share portfolio, as I still do today.

After lunch the rain stopped and the seafront looked glorious, with sun-flecked black pavement and silver railings guarding the sea. I was on a Lord Kelvin quest. He built a house in Largs in the 1880s for about 8,000 pounds (he earned a lot of money from his patents, as well as being a tenured Professor at the University of Glasgow). He died in Largs in 1907 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

I walked back along the front and grabbed a Scottish Tablet ice cream from Geraldo's on the front. By now it was officially sunny. I could check in to my Airbnb which was above the former Bank of Scotland building. When I was five years old my father took me into the bank and I opened a savings account with my birthday money - a grand amount of five pounds. My father told me that my money was keeping Scotland working, and so for about 20 years I resolutely kept the money there, compounding interest, and keeping the economy alive.

My father is buried in Largs (or rather, his ashes are interred there), just up from his mother and father, and his brother. I walked to the cemetery, stopping to buy some heathers in a plastic tray from the shop near the Haylie Hotel. 

    

I had a very deep experience of nostalgia, chatting to my father's grave. I shared all the news with him, and shared the heathers between his grave, that of his older brother (who only outlived him by four years) and that of their mother and father. I even drafted some notes for a poem.

I refuelled at the Haylie shop - a can of Irn-Bru and a banana - and headed up the hill to Douglas Point, with a fantastic view over the Clyde, towards Cumbrae and Arran in the distance.

The familiar view also prompted a poem:-

Hill Above Largs

for my father

I walked it again—

the steep bit past the stile,

where gorse tears the shins

and the wind leans

hard off the Firth.

Largs below,

hunched into its rooftops,

the Clyde stretched pewter-flat

toward Arran.

Close to the grave.

Fifty-five years.

The same count

he carried

to the ash and box.

I remembered:

the day before the burial,

I climbed this hill—

higher than needed—

then dropped down, dazed,

toward the opened earth,

the pit scooped raw

on the green lip of the cemetery.

He went in the next day.

The hill held its shape.

The wind kept coming.