Tower Hill

We walk together down the overgrown stone steps, the bold weeds waving and weaving out of the ancient grey; colourful, present, refusing to acquiesce neatly to a sombre memorial spot. I like them here. New blooms...unbroken, chaotic, slightly feral.

You won't read the plaque. You're sixteen, you've seen it before, and your friends are sending you pics of the boys jumping into the harbour again.

Here, in 1556, a mother and her daughters burned together. The plaque is small. You will not read it. Head down, smiling at something private in your hand, you pass slightly ahead.

I pass it: flinch. I don't mention the stabbing, visceral shock that lies in wait each time we walk this way. The survival strategy I try of well, surely times have changed.  I don't tell you how little I trust history to stay buried. I don't tell you that every mother in every century must have believed the worst was over. I don't tell you any of this.

You wouldn't want it, and anyway you have your own things. You have sun on your face, a birthday skirt and have just been asking if I can buy you a new mascara. You're typing something on your phone that I will never read, that you will never show me, that may save someone I'll never meet.

The tide is going out. I will walk back home along the beach and up the cliff later.

The sun catches your  hair then, the curve of your profile, and for a moment the world feels impossibly young again.

The wall is granite, solid. The town is full of friends. You finish what you were typing and look back.

Mum? Yes. Lola's?

Yes.