Tied.

When I was very little, I thought my uncle went up on the roof, stretched out his arms as long as they would go, and flew.

It’s because Aunt Jo said he was flying from Lydd. It’s a place down on the Marsh, but I thought they meant a lid, which was the roof of the Martello Tower where they live.

My uncle doesn’t fly any more. Aunt Jo told someone on the phone that he’d had a near miss. These are the things he does instead:

• Builds models of aeroplanes and ties them to the ceiling. When no-one is looking, they fly in circles, like the planes on the round-about at Hastings. You can tell, because if you open the door of my uncle’s study – if you open it really quickly – you can see them shaking because they’ve stopped suddenly.
  
• Watches gulls hanging above the sea. He has a telescope.
  
• Asks people who photograph the tower without permission: ‘How would you like it if trippers kept taking pictures of your house?’
  
• Walks with me on the beach from the tower to the lifeboat jetty and back.
  

Yesterday, we found: three bits of blue rope; a cuttlefish and four slipper limpet shells (I’m collecting those). We picked up the blue rope because it’s litter; and the cuttlefish we are going to post to grandma for her bird-in-a-cage.

Today, we found a dragon face kite with its tail tangled in the breakwater and its yellow eyes staring out to sea. It’s wet and sandy, and the string is broken, but we think it’ll fly. We have a kite string, and my uncle has tied it on.

We have lunch, and then Aunt Jo goes to play golf. I’ve been thinking about our kite while it dries – the dragon face was red, and now it’s orange. I’ve been thinking that it escaped before, and it might escape again.

I say: ‘It’s more of a looking-at kite, isn’t it.’ My uncle says: ‘That’s what I was thinking. They were silly people to try and fly it.’

‘Probably trippers,’ I tell him. And we hang the kite on the study wall, twine the tail around the barometer, and look at it.