I was so fortunate, as a child, to have a wonderful sea view
from my bedroom window. My father had his wish granted, to run a pub on
Blackpool promenade and the family had landed in paradise. It was the beginning
of summer and I remember it as blue skies and a sun that turned orange and
slipped into a shimmering sea. We went on the beach, a lot. My sister and I
played there, all day sometimes. I went
out for walks on the shoreline at dusk with my mum. It was our time on a calm
evening, quiet, thoughtful, listening to the gentle waves. We strolled between
South Pier and Waterloo Road, not far, just in front of where we lived. We
would look for creatures in the tangle of seaweed that marked the tideline, but
we only found bits of dead crab. It was our mother-daughter bonding. Moments
that became special memories to treasure. Even now, many years later, I still
think of that stretch of beach as mine.
Although born inland, I’ve always been drawn to the coast.
Any coast will do. When our children were young we had family holidays in
Pembrokeshire where every seashore is stunning. There are lots of sandy beaches
to play on, also the fun of finding a way over the boulders to poke about in
rock pools at Wiseman’s Bridge, or skimming stones at Amroth. We covered the
English East Coast between Redcar and Withernsea, where the North Sea claims a
bit more of the land each year. On a returning visit to Skipsea we were shocked
to discover how much land had broken away, including a road that we had used.
The Scottish seashores are breath-taking. I could spend all
day looking at Ailsa Craig from the Ayrshire coast. We stayed in a caravan at Embo
on the Scottish North East coast where we stepped out directly on to the beach
and walked along the shoreline every day. It is somewhere I hope to return to.
The most stunning seashores I have found so far are in the Outer Hebrides. At
South Uist, the sand shines silver and white, shells are bleached white with
the sun – I brought some home and keep them in a jar.
I’ll be on my travels again soon. It’s time to breathe some
Scottish air.
Here is Simon Armitage,
The Stone Beach
A walk, not more than a mile
along the barricade of land
between the ocean and the grey lagoon.
Six of us, hand in hand,
connected by blood. Underfoot
a billion stones and pebbles-
new potatoes, mint imperials,
the eggs of birds-
each rock more infinitely formed
than anything we own.
Spoilt for choice - which one to throw,
which to pocket and take home.
The present tense, although
some angle of the sun, some slant of light
back-dates us thirty years.
Home-movie. Super 8.
Seaweed in ropes and rags.
The weightless, empty armour
of a crab. A jawbone, bleached
and blasted, manages a smile.
Long-shore-drift,
the ocean sorts and sifts
giving with this, getting back
with the next.
A sailboat thinks itself
across the bay.
Susan, nursing a thought of her own
unthreads and threads
the middle button of her coat.
Disturbed,
a colony of nesting terns
makes one full circle of the world
then drops.
But the beach, full of itself,
each round of rock
no smaller than a bottle top,
no bigger than a nephew's fist.
One minute more, as Jonathan, three, autistic,
hypnotised by flight and fall,
picks one more shape
and under-arms the last wish of the day -
look, like a stone - into the next wave.
Simon Armitage
Thanks for reading, Pam x