No. 135 "I just wanna go home!"
From The Education of an Island Boy Chapter 1 "Ole Pa's Crowd"
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| Billy Hancock on Diamond City |
... Ole Pa (my grandfather, Charlie Hancock) later would
bring Billy with him when he moved his family off the Banks after the 1899
storm. His youngest son, my father, was born in 1909 and was too young for
having any real memories of his grandfather who died in 1914. But his older
brother, my uncle Louie, who was seventeen years older than my father, would
tell another story about Billy that was not nearly so happy or gleeful as the
ones about his whaling and running.
Rather, Louie would describe, sometimes
with a choked voice, of how Billy would stand on the south shore of Harkers
Island and look longingly across to the Banks to where he had lived all but the
last few years of his life. "Ah Lord," he would exclaim over and over
as he waved his hands towards what had been the community of Diamond City and
the setting for all of his happy memories.
One time, Louie would tell, after his grandfather had gotten really old and "feeble-minded," Billy started to walk out into the
water and towards the Banks. As Charlie and Louie grabbed hold to restrain him,
Billy would plaintively explain to his son and grandson that he just wanted to
go home one more time!
"He would cuss
us," Louie would recall, "and then beg of us as to why we wouldn't
let him just go home. That was all he wanted. He would ask us what he had ever
done to us so we wouldn't let him go home just one more time?"
By then Diamond City
was just a memory, having been all but washed away by the great August storm of
1899. There quite literally was no home for Billy to go to. Though it was less
than five miles away across the Sound, and the yellow hue of its sand hills
still could be seen on the horizon, Diamond City was, for Billy, as far away as
"Old England" had been to his fore bearers three centuries earlier
when they landed in Virginia ...
