A story somewhat like this was intended to be an entry in the Summer Island competition but my attempts to make it a TG story wouldn’t work, so here is the love story it was probably always meant to be.

It was a strange way to meet. We must have been the only two passengers on the ferry who weren’t heaving their hearts out over the side on the way to St. Marys. The Atlantic was giving the ship significant ups and downs from a swell that must have been five or six feet, even though it was a fine June day.

She was a girl who I would normally have considered to be out of my league and if there had been anybody else in the cabin I would never have dreamed of making eye contact let alone any actual interaction. She had long honey-blonde hair and eyes the colour of the sea set in a heart-shaped face with lips that said kiss me. She had a dancer’s body, lithe and elegant. She could not have been more than twenty.

Me, I’m the ultimate in nondescript. I’m the guy who, if somebody waves at you across the room, they’re actually waving at whoever is standing behind you. Ordinary is my middle name. I often think I would make a good spy, the invisible one nobody pays any attention to while I steal their secrets. The only exotic thing about me is my name, Tristan.

However, since we were the only two occupants it seemed churlish not to look at her and strike up a conversation over our drinks which were slopping with the swell. We laughed and gloated at our superior sea-legs (and stomachs) compared to the twenty or so poor souls hanging over the lee side.

The journey from Penzance took about three hours although the first half hour was in relatively calm waters until the ship turned into the ocean proper. We chatted for about two hours while we were alone. Apart from being strikingly beautiful she was a yachtswoman, so had endured seas like that many times before and was a Plymouth girl who had also never before been to the islands. Her name was Isolde, as exotic as her looks.

I came from London and had been fascinated by these islands since I was a kid. I had first come across them, in a way, in the Arthurian legends of the lost lands of Lyonesse which in myth extended beyond Lands’ End in the days of magic but had sunk beneath the sea.

When I saw the Scilly Isles in an atlas I imagined that they were the last remnants of Lyonesse. They were or they weren’t of course, who knows, but in my young imagination they were magic. However, I did find that as late as Roman times they had been larger and were a place of exile for political dissidents. Sometime in about the third or fourth centuries A.D. the seas had risen or the land had sunk and inundated the greater part, leaving the remaining islands. There were still walls and ruins to be found under the modern seacoasts. Nowadays we know that they were part of Doggerland which was drowned when the ice age came to an end ten thousand or more years ago. The seas rose and the land links between the British Isles and Europe disappeared.

They were always described as being sub-tropical but the English have a strange definition of both “sub” and “tropical”. I would later view them as being a little more temperate than the rest of the British Isles but never having been there before I still believed the publicity.

My own immunity to ‘mal de mer’ came from trips across the Channel with my merchant-seaman dad on ships round about the same size as this one.

What I did know to be true was that the two main pillars of their economy were tourism and the export of cut flowers to the mainland earlier in the season than you would find them in our urban centres. Your first daffodils and tulips likely originated from Scilly, twenty-five miles west of Land’s End, benefitting from the effects of the Gulf Stream.

I really expected our brief liaison to finish when we docked but there are such things as coincidences and it turned out that we were both staying at the same guesthouse a few hundred yards from the town centre. Actually there weren’t that many alternatives on the island and virtually none on the other inhabited specks of land. Our hostelry was pretty basic but the rooms were comfortable.

The biggest drawback was the lack of bathrooms and loos. The toilets were down the corridor and you had to knock to determine if other guests were inside before you entered. Ablutions were limited to a large jug of water, a basin, a bar of soap and a towel in each room.

And so Isolde and Tristan became a couple for the duration of our respective holidays, each having taken two weeks away. I was a civil engineer working for the railways and hopefully clawing my way upward out of the working class. The cheap train travel to which I was entitled was a part of the reason that I could afford to spend my holiday on these islands. It was just as well since most things on the islands are expensive due to transport costs from the mainland.

Isolde was way above my social standing. Apart from yachting she was an aspiring actress and had achieved small parts in theatre and television, none of which I had seen. She had been educated at Roedean, next to my original hometown of Brighton (Hove, actually!) where I had been a Grammar school boy, another coincidence. That alone demonstrated the gulf between our classes, but she was amazingly down-to-earth and normal except for her cut-glass accent, which made her sound like Joanna Lumley.

We did hit it off and I fell hopelessly in love, although I expected it to be a holiday romance, over once we returned to our respective homes and daily lives.

We were lucky with the weather. In that way the islands almost lived up to the hype and we did all the touristy things.

Our first day was touring Hughtown, not that there was that much to see in a metropolis of about fifteen hundred inhabitants. It was quaint, with some history as old as five hundred years, and had its own distinct flavour and the locals were friendly. They knew which side their bread was buttered on.

Then we went to Old Town, on the other side of St. Mary’s, just as quaint as Hughtown but smaller. That exhausted the urban areas so we hired a couple of bikes and visited the flower fields which were in full bloom with enough tulips to rival The Netherlands. The perfume was evident as soon as we approached.

Next came a trip to Tresco, another island that boasted the Abbey gardens full of plants not found on the mainland, which almost lived up to the claim of being sub-tropical. On the sunny day when we visited they truly exceeded our expectations.

Bishop Rock lighthouse was our next destination, the most westerly point of England, reached in a pretty small open boat and looked at in awed silence while the swell cradled the vessel. It was awesome to think how this edifice had been constructed on a tiny rock in the Atlantic. It epitomised all the lighthouses that we’d ever seen.

After that we started repeating the pieces of our holiday that we liked the most. One thing about the Scillies was the expense. Most things had to be transported from the mainland so they cost more. The one local thing in abundance was seafood and there were a couple of restaurants that did inventive things with fish, lobsters and shellfish.

We ate some delicious dishes and even the local fish ‘n’ chips were better than what you could get back in England proper, so we weren’t going hungry and the prices were reasonable.

However, one of the things we were missing was a shower or a bath, so after that week Isolde insisted that we must get rid of our body odour and the only way was to go for a swim. Now the beaches around St. Mary’s were fantastic, fine golden to white sands matching anything on the travel brochures for the Mediterranean or the Caribbean. The sea was an inviting blue-green, minute waves lapping at the beach.

There she was, gorgeous in a teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikini, and me in a standard black Speedo. I had to get into the water to hide my feelings. We both dashed in at the same time and the temperature of the sea was Arctic despite the alleged presence of the Gulf Stream.

We stayed in long enough to give ourselves a good wash all over, but the amorous intent that my body had betrayed dissolved with the temperature of the water and we both exited with goose pimples on our goose pimples, to be stunned by a shore was not the same.

The houses that had been there were gone. The land rose up before us, much higher than when we had begun our nautical bath. Crowning the nearest rise was a castle, not of stone but with wooden palisades.

The garments and towels that we had left behind were still there on the beach but metamorphosed into linen and apparel akin to what I thought Romans would have worn, mine a kind of one-piece combined shirt and kilt with a belt. No underwear to be seen, and hers a long flowing dress like a caftan. Both were white with edges bordered in colour.

We dressed hurriedly, although the breeze was warm and the day still fine, all the while gawping at the change in scenery, wondering what the hell had happened.

She recovered first.

“We’ve been transported back in time. I don’t know how, but it’s the only explanation.”

As soon as she said it I knew it must be true. The raised landscape, the castle on the hill, our clothing that of Roman times. I didn’t know how or why but there must have been some purpose. Then it hit me like a thunderbolt. I had never made the connection between us and the story of Tristan and Isolde, yet here we were, back in the time of the original lovers.

“Black sails! It was the lie that tore us apart,” I said. “Maybe it’s being corrected.”

In the original fable Tristan had been returning from Ireland and if all was well the vessel would show white sails but if disaster had befallen then the sails would be black. Jealousy by Tristan’s wife had caused the ship to hoist black sails causing Isolde to kill herself and as a consequence Tristan also committed suicide.

“I think we’re being given a second chance,” exclaimed Isolde. “I loved you then and I love you now.”

My heart did a somersault. She loves me!

“I love you too, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know if you felt the same. I couldn’t believe you would fall for a nobody like me.”

“You silly man. You’re kind and caring. People should see the inner you and not just the shell and I fell for you on the ferry over but I thought it would be one of those holiday flings. It’s not. I think it’s destiny. We’re here together and alive. Maybe this time we’re meant to be together.”

We both reached out and held hands, coming together in a rush which ended in a passionate embrace.

“If this is our destiny we had better make it work this time around,” I said when we broke apart, “but how are we going to do that? I don’t think we can stay here.”

“Well, the sea brought us here, maybe it can take us back, but I’m not letting go of you this time.”

“Let’s try, and whatever happens we’re together at last.”

So hand in hand we re-entered those inviting but freezing waters, wading out until we were immersed and finally dunking our heads while kissing. If our world was going to end again then it would be as one.

I don’t suppose our kiss lasted more than thirty seconds but we broke the surface by unspoken mutual consent and turned towards the shore making sure not to loosen our grasp on the other’s hand. Shivering again, we reached the beach and seemed to pass through a rainbow as we emerged. Our Roman clothes had disappeared, and we were once more in twenty-first century swimming gear.

To our great delight the landscape was as it had been that morning, with the cottages back in their allotted places and our clothes and towels waiting for us. We wasted no time drying ourselves and donning the clothes in which we had started the day.

My heart was singing as we made our way back to our lodgings, arms entwined, a stupid grin on my face. I didn’t believe in fairy tales or ghost stories but it seemed as if I had been hit in the bum by one or both.

The remainder of our holidays was spent in a kind of bliss, but we didn’t go swimming again! Walks on the beaches, bike rides around the island, more exploration of Hugh Town, it all passed in a daze for me.

Finally it was time to go. She had already decided that she would come with me to London. Her career as an actress meant that she frequently travelled there anyway, and now she refused to be parted from me. I didn’t argue.

Epilogue

We’re still together and always will be. Some cosmic quirk of fate decided that we should go to those magical islands at the same time and be reunited, centuries after our tragic parting.