Air-Raid Meanders

Suddenly we're deep in summer now. Spring (which felt more like a rainy winter) feels like years ago. The suddenness of the heatwave makes it feel like August. Springtime is a rumour, autumn is a myth, all there is is this... Come next week, I'm sure the heatwave will have faded, so I'm trying to enjoy this odd disorientation while it lasts.
I was in training all day today, so at first break I sat out on the fifth floor balcony, and continued to read John Burnside's 'A Summer of Drowning', set in the endless summer of the Arctic Circle. The absolute summeriness of the balcony surprised me, the sun, the heat, the shimmers in the distance, the shadow of the netting that hangs over the balcony... I swear felt the shadows cut fall onto my skin like delicate knives.
Seagull song, the sea, the sky, and the air itself seems to perspire. Watching the boats on the mirror-still sea. From the windows of unfamiliar floors, spying the wooden gargoyles on the wooden spire of the church next door. Bombed in world war 2, they rebuilt the spire from wood, though you can't tell unless you look really close. Bombs falling on Brighton. Seems impossible now. I think of the last drawing I did; a boy on a bed kneeling at the window, looking out onto a landscape of buildings beneath a yellowed portentous sky. The buildings are those outside the window where I sit at work, and the picture I called - with little reason - (as ever) 'Waiting for the Air Raid'. I wonder if anyone waited for an air-raid from where I sit and take calls? I remember a taxi driver once telling me how he had been machine-gunned at by a German fighter plane down London Road... and to think I believed him. I remember Nan telling me about the outbreak of World War 2. Houses she knew being bombed, streets destroyed, and Dad not even born (he was born in 1943). I read somewhere that they barbed-wired off the beach during the war. No sunbathing, no drinkers, no deck chairs, just the gulls and the tides over winters and summers and sudden heat-waves, falling onto the pebbles with a noise that must have sounded like a guilty, lucid silence.