June 2010
‘I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky’. The pull of the sea is a very strong emotion: however beautiful the countryside, there is something special about the sea, being beside water, looking out onto the endless, often grey expanse that strikes a deep cord in the human psyche. But, just a day at the seaside? Everyday is a day at the seaside for me. I am lucky enough to live within five minutes walk of a stretch of water that is actually an estuary but the town is referred to as being ‘on sea’. Indeed some of my less geographically alert students in past years believed it was the coast of France they could see from the end of the pier rather than the more prosaic north Kent coast. A walk in either direction, eastwards towards Shoebury or westwards towards Leigh is a constant delight at all seasons of the year. Carefully positioned benches allow the walker to sit and admire the ever-changing scene. Not for this estuarine dweller the endless empty horizons of the North Sea, but a panorama of small ships and large container vessels, the occasional cruise ship, sailing boats and wind surfers sometimes close and sometimes to be viewed across acres of exposed mud flats where thousands of birds look for sustenance winter and summer.
In my childhood years, however, a day at the seaside was a rare treat for children and adults alike. For us, living in Kent, Hastings was the great favourite for day trips. My father, being an early riser and eager to make the most of the day, would have us up and out so that breakfast was taken at a lay by some way past Sevenoaks or Tonbridge, the tea being brewed on a primus stove. Since we were the owners of a car from the late 1950s, a green Ford Anglia (UML 862) we could then venture to even more exotic and distant places and Dymchurch with its extensive sandy beaches later replaced Hastings and became the favoured destination. My grandparents, uncles and aunts, dependent on the train, remained faithful to Westcliff and Cliftonville, never Southend or Margate. In these ‘safe’ environments where there were kosher facilities to hand they could stroll in their best clothes up and down the promenades and be sure to meet some long lost cousin or friend. Always their best clothes: coats and hats and on chillier days the great status symbol of a ‘mink collar’ to ward off the risk of double pneumonia as the piercing easterly winds hit the Thanet coast.
It was from the 1950s that we started taking holidays when the clothing factories would close in the last week of July and the first week of August and my parents had a whole fortnight’s release from the grind of work. I remember queuing at Waterloo Station in the drenching rain for the train to Portsmouth where a ferry would take us over the water to the Isle of Wight and then by ancient steam train to Ventnor, a journey and destination that sounded as far away then as a trip to Dubai sounds to the modern child. And another equally wet queue where the slow shuffle forward with heavy cases to the barrier for the train to Bournemouth was enlivened by the antics of a man only partially dressed in the sparse clothing of an African chief calling out ‘I’ve got a horse!’ My father declined to explain who or what this man was to a mere child of seven so it was years later I realised that I had seen and heard the famous yet notorious Prince Monolulu. After our acquisition of a car, we were able to abandon the railway station and the lugging of cases for the freedom of the road and far away Devon and Cornwall, the long journeys westwards a nightmare for a car-sick child to endure in order to relish for two glorious weeks the wonders of those red-soiled, sea-cliffed counties.
And when my own children were small, how many days in the school holidays or weekends were spent on the local beach, just a five-minute stroll with buckets, spades and the other necessities of life required for two small boys on a beach? There when the tide was out we would walk looking for crabs singing impromptu crab-encouraging-out ditties or make elaborate fortifications with moats, gatehouses and impenetrable walls modelled on the great Edwardian castles of North Wales and wait to see whether they could withstand not the onslaught of a native army but the attack of sea water: and of course sadly they never did, however complex we made the defences.
So now as I sit on one of the wooden resting places that commemorate long dead inhabitants of my little world, I contemplate a possible seaside in the world to come. I hope it will replicate my ideal seaside: a watering place nestling between two giant red cliffs with a promenade lined with grandly named Victorian hotels, carpet bedding in the gardens and a band playing jaunty martial music from a bygone age. If it does, then, I, unlike the old king, will not be shouting ‘Bugger Bognor’!