The Town that Defied the Laws of the Universe

The inhabitants of the small Norfolk seaside town of Breezehaven wouldn’t have been human if they weren’t occasionally jealous of their near neighbours in Hunstanton. Oh, there were no barriers or riots, or anything remotely like that, and it was by no means unknown for there to be what were called (only in jest, of course, people hurriedly added) mixed marriages. The good folk of Breezehaven even sometimes expressed a certain pity for their counterparts in Hunstanton. “We can live perfectly well without being the answer to a pub quiz question,” was a remark you sometimes heard. The relevant question was worded in different ways, but all amounted to the same thing, that Hunstanton was on the East Coast and faced West. You see, it was on that arm of the North Sea known as The Wash, which pub quiz devotees may also recognise as the place where King John’s crown jewels were reputedly lost, and the weird quirks of geography meant that journeys from Norfolk to Lincolnshire took twice as long as they would otherwise. One thing in which the inhabitants of both towns were united were in thinking a bridge would be a great idea, but it would never be built. 

     The oddity of geography also meant that sunrises and sunsets in Hunstanton were particularly spectacular, and it was nicknamed Sunny Hunny. Some claimed that the town’s name itself came from “Honeyed Stones”, but the general consensus was that it was more prosaic and merely relating to its geographical position on a river, with the suffix “ton” for “town”.

     Mary Shaw ran the Violet Villa guest house in Breezehaven. The name sounded poetic, but as she proudly said, unlike some others (naming no names, but thinking about Castle Hill and Cliff View) it was entirely accurate. The guest house was, indeed, a 1930s villa, and Mary was justifiably proud of her collection of African Violets. But she didn’t go over the top and have the walls painted bright purple of anything like that. Mary was, for the most part, happy enough with her life. She had a business that might not exactly be the proverbial little goldmine, but “washed its face” (how easy it was to fall into using expressions you didn’t like!) and she enjoyed being a proprietor of a guest house, though she determinedly avoided either calling herself a landlady or falling into the stereotype of one. It was a shame her marriage hadn’t worked out, but she and Toby were still on reasonable terms, and everyone agreed their children were a credit to them both. Alice was doing a nursing degree and wanted to specialise in paediatric nursing, and Joe was in the sixth form at school and wanted to be an engineer. She liked to think that at some point in the future she might have grandchildren, but it certainly wasn’t one of her absolute priorities.

     Although Mary ran the guest house effectively and efficiently, she had a poetic and thoughtful side, and often, particularly after a rather stressful day (every hotel owner dreads a plumbing emergency, but at least she could rely on Ron to come quickly and fix it properly) she liked to take a mug of coffee, or sometimes a glass of wine, out into the garden, and take a few deep breaths, and enjoy the sunset. 

     She was expecting a particularly beautiful one that night. It had been the right kind of day; a day of sunshine and showers, the kind of day that led to shafts and shades at twilight. It was a cool evening, but with the kind of gentle coolness that held the warmth of the afternoon and the promise of the warmth of the next day.

     It took Mary a few seconds to realise what was both glaringly obvious and absolutely impossible. The sun was setting in the east. And the sun just did not set in the East. Weather forecasters both could and did get things wrong, but other things were set in stone, and had been since – well, she wasn’t sure about the Big Bang (though she was always rather taken with the idea that you could hear its echoes in the static on your radio) but for billions of years, and would be so for further billions of years.

     Which was fine in theory. But Mary knew her eyes weren’t deceiving her, and she hadn’t even had a glass of wine, settling for coffee that evening. She was the kind of person who could be zany enough to have faith in her own sanity, even after a difficult day. And the sun was most definitely setting in the East. 

     Mary decided to look on the Internet. And already reports were coming in. The Impossible Happens in Small English Coastal Town was one of the more level-headed of them. Some took it as a harbinger of doom, and though there were some that regarded an odd shaped cloud as a harbinger of doom, there was no denying this was bizarre, and whilst not sharing the apocalyptic warnings, she could understand why people felt that way. But she had seen it, and had not been afraid, baffled, yes, but not afraid. 

     It soon became evident that only Breezehaven was affected by this strange and inexplicable turn of events. It extended to the little estate on the outskirts, but no further. It did not impact on the whole country, nor even the whole county. It did not – and the good folk of Breezehaven couldn’t help feeling a certain smug satisfaction at this – even affect Hunstanton. “So let them go on about their little claim to fame,” Mary’s friend Frances at the pharmacy said, “I reckon we double trump it!”

     It was not some one-off. The sun in Breezehaven carried on rising in the West and setting in the East. It became the subject of some of the hottest scientific discussion since the splitting of the atom. And nobody could work out exactly why it was happening, as explanation after explanation was offered, even those who offered it plainly just as puzzled as everyone else. Some tried to make out it was like those streams that seem to flow uphill, or those moons that look suddenly enormous, just a trick of the light or the atmosphere or perspective deceiving your eyes. But probably nobody really believed that. It was generally agreed that it was utterly harmless. Which was a relief.

     Of course, it wasn’t only the scientific community that was highly taken with what they called the Breezehaven Solar Aberration as it was officially known. Some people, especially those whose living didn’t depend on the tourist industry, remarked that although it was true Breezehaven Solar Aberration sounded like some unpleasant illness, the marketing of Breezehaven as The Town that Defies the Laws of the Universe was somewhat vulgar. The trouble was, it was also true. And also, when it came to the marketing, probably unnecessary. Breezehaven had gone viral. Guests swarmed in as they never had before. There simply weren’t enough rooms to accommodate all their visitors. With laudable magnanimity, they did, if needs must, direct people to Hunstanton, after all, they could afford to be generous. A new holiday village on the outer edges of the town (but still within the range of the Solar Aberration) was built and opened more quickly than a field hospital. Up until now Breezehaven had relied mainly on trade in “the season” (an early Easter was a boon) but now they had become an all year round resort. People wanted to see autumn sunrises and sunsets there, and when it came to the Winter Solstice – well, Stonehenge suddenly found itself playing second fiddle. The kind of people who normally only appear on screen if a solar eclipse were imminent dutifully warned about the dangers of looking directly at the sun, and of course there were right, but to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the Solar Aberration (or defying the laws of the Universe) did not, thankfully, lead to one case of eye damage. 

     The good times were rolling, everyone agreed. There was even renewed talk about the bridge project, and this time it didn’t seem so fanciful. It was all like a miracle.

     Mary, like so many others, saw her bank account swelling in a most pleasing manner and reflected that perhaps she might be able to make that trip to Australia to see her brother Kieran after all. 

     The trouble was, when? There was no such thing as an off-season now, and she had even opened a little annexe in what had once been her conservatory. Although she had been one of the first (she liked to think the first but there were other pretenders to that title) to see the phenomenon, she now hardly ever got to see it at all. When the sun was rising or setting she was either catching a few hour’s sleep or had to be busy. But she did know that at times it was impossible to catch a proper glance of the sunrise or sunset anyway as the beaches were often packed like chicken batteries with people jostling for position. It was mainly good-natured, but not always, and though actual arrests were rare, there was some bad feeling. In the few hours when the beach was relatively quiet, an army of local council workers strove to clear the rubbish that had been dropped. “I never thought I’d say this, but it has its downside,” Frances said, “I mean, I know it’s great for you Mary!”

     “It’s certainly set me up,” she agreed. Or was that agreeing? She hadn’t said it was great because she, too, was beginning to have her doubts. Even as she spoke, she felt an elbow from one of the holidaymakers in the queue, standing behind her, who said, “Sorry,” but in that kind of tone that implies that it wasn’t an accident, and she wasn’t sorry at all. Mary felt a sudden absurd nostalgia for the bad old days of social distancing, though of course nobody in their right mind would want the reason why. 

     As time wore on, she realised that many of the visitors were no more seeing the sunrise and sunset than she was. After all, you could see them in profusion on the internet, and they were always the best and most spectacular ones (because the aberration was, in itself, no guarantee of a sunrise or sunset being spectacular). The important thing was to have been to Breezehaven, to have those bragging rights that rankled with your friends and family until they had been there too. As many selfies were taken by the sign welcoming people to the town as were on the beach. There was a market for little pseudo-passports, all, of course, carrying a warning that they served no official purpose. And they were amongst the least tacky souvenirs that were stacked high in all the shops in Breezehaven.

     It was November, which would normally have been one of the quietest times in Breezehaven, with most of the guest houses, Violet Villa included, not open at all. They were open now, as were the holiday villages (for one had now been built on the other side of town, too) and Mary had been struck by the awful thought that she might possibly have double-booked one of the rooms for the Solstice Break which everyone expected to be even more of an event than the first one had, the previous year. Or at least, for more people to flood into the town, for more jostling, for more dropped rubbish, for more short tempers and more buying of useless souvenirs. Sometimes she was hard pushed to keep track what time of day it was. But she did know, if only because of the news programme she had just managed to catch, that it was late afternoon and the sun would soon be setting. 

     She knew the double booking issue wasn’t going to go away, and she would have to do something about it, but she desperately needed a few breaths of the clear, cold air of late autumn, needed to feel it on her face and she even half-hoped it was raining.

     At first she just thought it was one of the less spectacular sunsets, and she wasn’t even that bothered. It dawned on her far more gradually this time. The sunset, it was true, wasn’t that bright and brilliant and evocative, but was quite undeniably in the West. 

     Once more, Breezehaven was in the headlines. Cancellation of bookings began as a trickle, then turned into a flow, though there were those who were as keen to see the ending of something as they had been to see its beginning and its afternoon. But the return of things as they should be has neither, at heart, the longevity nor the newsworthiness of things beginning to be how they not only shouldn’t be, but couldn’t be. And yet, undeniably, were.

     It was a shame. Of course it was. And yet, thought Mary, standing on a near-deserted beach one cold and quiet Sunday morning, in another way it wasn’t a shame at all. Perhaps it had stopped just in time!

AUTHOR’S NOTE

As some readers may know, the Norfolk town of Hunstanton does, indeed, exist, and it is on the East coast facing West for exactly the reasons given in this story. I know and love the place and offer it my apologies for enlisting it as a “supporting actor”. However, Breezehaven, even with sunrises and sunsets as they ought to be, is entirely a product of my imagination and this is most definitely a work of fiction!