Sheep and sea!
The Royal Navy Station is gone.
All the buildings are empty and falling into disrepair.
The doors are splintered and hang on rusty, squeaky hinges.
Windows, many cracked or broken, are covered in cobwebs, which hang like grey lace curtains.
The dust of months lies undisturbed on the floors. There is no longer the sound of the laughing, shouting sailors, only the strong wind, blowing and moaning.
No voices, just lonely silence all around. Snow starts to fall, billowing, covering everything in sight, hiding the dust.
Here, now, there are no footprints to break the whiteness, no brassy glints of buttons on uniforms breaking the snowscape or navy patches to break the blinding light of it. Before there had been marching feet, calls, doors slamming and navy blue shapes and figures everywhere; now just loneliness and blinding white, broken only by the outlines of white covered buildings. The buildings!
How full of life.
Records blaring, radios, friendly talk and open fires.
Always full, happy.
Even here in the wilds there had been hospitality.
How can snow and emptiness be hospitable? On the wind comes the sound of pitiful baa-ing of sheep, left on a far distant hill.
Somewhere, someone would be going to rescue them from this loneliness.
But here there was no-one.
Only silence and emptiness, made more ominous by this one distant noise.
Unfriendly. Somewhere a dull bang.
Can life be returning?
But no!
How can it?
There's nothing here.
It was just something falling, muffled by the snow.
Perhaps it was in the distance.
It sounded so close.
Everything seems nearer, brought close by the ghosts and memories of yesterday. In the corner a gust of wind catches and flaps a piece of canvas.
No uniform comes running to weight it down.
Perhaps they are too cold to move from the fire and hot drinks.
Of course, they are not here. It is just memories.
Reminders of times gone by.
Familiar voices come whispering from the past.
Do they feel the loneliness?
They ought to.
It's all around.
Just silence, emptiness, barren. The snow stops.
Perhaps it will melt.
The sailors will be out soon, brushing, clearing.
They will be calling, laughing once more. Once again that intolerable silence closes in.
Voices come whispering, surrounding, but still there is only silence.
Remembrances of before, of all the good times now gone. When will they come out to clear that snow?
The Commanding听Officer will be angry. They have gone.
Recollections.
That desolate silence.
Memories calling back realisation.
Casting out shadows.
Everything is finished.
They have left.
The ship sailed.
Gone. | 
