Today London is being lashed by wind and rain. The streets around our temporary home are empty and the only noise is the hissing of cars up and down the Kingston Road. Penny is out riding her horse and trying to avoid thinking about preparing her case for tomorrow. The cat is lying stretched out on the carpet at the top of the staircase sleeping and snoring with a soft whistle. I am nursing a cold and wishing I was by the sea.
Until I went to university I lived by water. From ages three to seven I lived in Gravesend, a town with a viking name in the lower tidal reaches of the Thames. I remember it as a gloomy marshy place in whose embrace, with a startling flash of glamour, Pocohontas had died. For a time it had enjoyed a reputation as good place for Londoners to holiday. It was sufficiently removed from London that the sea had diluted the effluent in the Thames and removed the risk of Cholera. Families paddled in the mudbanks or stood wind-blown on the salt marsh as tall ships moved creaking up and down the great river travelling to and from the outer reaches of the empire. Charles Dickens had a home there and the bleakness of the Kent river coast features repeatedly in his works. It is, for instance, by Gravesend that he has Pip row Magwitch in the hope of getting him aboard a steamer in Great Expectations.
At age seven I moved to Frinton-on-sea. Frinton is well-known in South East England as an eccentric bastion of middle-class values. It developed from a small village from the turn of the last century and peaked in the 1920s. It was a place for senior civil servants and bankers to retire to. Grand houses and still grander hotels had been built. It was bounded by the railway and to get into the town you had to cross a level crossing with a gate that had to be opened and closed by the station master every time a train passed. Within the gates no public houses were allowed (though there is one now). Instead what flourished was tennis and golf, drinks at the Memorial Club and Sunday School. Frinton has a long esplanade with a greensward running two or so miles in length. A steep slope runs from the greensward to the sea and strung along the slope are lines of carefully-maintained wooden beach huts.
As a child I adored the sea. When school stopped for summer we would dash down the seaweed covered steps onto the shingle and kick through the tidepools at the water’s edge. We would sit and let the green North Sea waves break over our heads and shriek as they lifted us and pushed up the beach. The more adventurous would swim to the rafts chained to the seabed a 100 metres or so from shore and lie on our backs watching the clouds dissipate in a sky so blue it hurt to look at it.
Come July university students would arrive to teach bible stories to us and lead us through town on fancy-dress treasure hunts.
As I grew older I became fonder still of other seasons. The walk along the seawall in the aftermath of a Christmas gale with grey waves breaking hard and throwing spray 10 yards into the air left you breathless and with skin stinging with salt. I loved the early autumn when the dusk gathered earlier and earlier and I would sit with friends in the wooden shelters on Victorian benches and we would let the breaking of the waves dictate the pace of our breathing. There in front of us was a body of water made up of countless molecules all in ceaseless agitation; the whole sea dragged by the moon and yet it could somehow communicate only calm.
Landlocked now and on days like today I miss it terribly.
I hear you Moobs!
beautifully put moobs 🙂
i grew up in alaska on the coast and in hawaii *sigh* i miss the ocean too.
I’ve never been to these places, but thanks to your vivid writing I can picture them (and smell the ocean air) now. Also thanks to you I can impress friends and family with nifty new facts about Pocohontas and Dickens. I’ll stash those away for future use.
Some of my first memories are of being on the seafront in Lytham-St-Annes, where we lived up until I was 6 years old. Being on a deserted beach or seafront in Winter is one of the most wonderful things I can think of.
My childhod was in Leith (Edinburgh) and spent many days beachcombing or watching the fishing boats come into the harbour.
When we were homeless for a bit we stayed with a lady right down in Granton…..she had a bungalow beside the ruins of a castle/keep in which her son now ran a market garden. On summer days, I would go and ‘help’ in the garden and at lunch time the grandson (a robust young man of about 20) would take me up on top of the castle wall to eat our egg sandwiches and watch the great cold North Sea sparkle in the sun.
I cannot imagine NOT living close the sea.
CC – Frinton is like North Berwick but without the fishing port.
Ah…I like NB…My moms friend had a B&B there….filled with golfers.
I know what you mean. My husband and I lived in the mountains of North Carolina for a while. They were beautiful, but they weren’t the ocean. Now we live by the intercoastal and within walking distance of the ocean. I basically gave up a perfectly lucrative and comfortable career in part so I could live here (also because of the children) and chose employment I could do from anywhere. Where I live, the scenic beauty and peace of a place, is more important to me than anything except my family. And there must be ocean.
If only I could describe Skeggy so eloquently………
PS) In reading your archives, you talk about Pot Noodles. I am now craving them and can’t have them. Damn you, Moobs. American pot noodle things are horrible!!
I currently live 50 metres from the sea; but – for some reason – have elected to move away in a week’s time. Blee.
Can I tell you…I’ve been to Gravesend. It was in 1990 and I was staying with a house full of Irish guys and gals who I met when they were working in the Poconos a few summers prior.
I saw the statue of Pocohantas.
And I must admit a sort of weird longing for gloomy bleak places the same way I really enjoy Edward Gorey drawings. I think I was once a chimney sweep.
But right now, there is nowhere else I’d rather be than by the sea. You write it that well.
You’ve made me miss the sea too, now. I love the sea in winter – blustery walks along shingly beaches. Lovely.
I just felt a hit of homesickness.
There’s nothing like the open space stretching to the horizon.
Of course, my sea was filled with bikinis, surfers, barefeet, and the muscle bound men (!) that are drawn to Venice Beach. Or the quiet solitude and rocky coast of Mendocino County where the evergreen pine forests reach the sea.
I also loved a good winter storm. In Venice, the rain and wind was strong enough that you could stand on the sand and it would literally push you off the beach.
Thanks for the memories!
o wow – i lived near gravesend too – do you remember that playground quite near the river? it had a huge slide (well it looked huge to me), a kind of roundabouty thing and a structure like a huge inverted cone mounted on a central pole that used to swing from side to side and round and round – we called it a frying pan for reasons i can’t now fathom. hey – maybe you tried to feed me weird berries one time!
OGC – Mendocino is so beauthiful when we paid a visit it was all I could do to tear myself away.
MM – That all sounds scarily familiar. In my day children’s playgrounds were proper hardnut places where a moment’s inattention could lead to a child tumbling headfirst on to concrete or losing their milkteeth by being thrown from a roundabout. If that was not enough our parents would hand us toys like “clackers” which were pretty much guaranteed to blind.
You didn’t go to St John’s did you?
yeah – proper tarmac – none of yer poncey safety stuff. but that made us the well balanced, scarred, concussed, toothless specimens we are today. clackers were eventually banned cos you could break your wrist with them too. but wasn’t that half the fun? no wonder there’s a gambling epidemic – life’s just not thrilling enough any more. no – not st johns – i lived near hartley and went to st josephs. don’t think it exists any more, but the funny little thatched church does – st francis de sales, it was. were you at st johns then?
Growing up by the sea was wonderful. Moobs, your evocations were spot on – but I don’t think you go far enough in praise of beachy headland.
When you’re feeling troubled, stressed or generally hassled by the world, just sitting and staring out to sea, with its hypnotic sound and bracing breezes means that you can metaphorically but also literally put the world behind you – the sea’s expanse, ending in the sharp edge of the horizon, clears your view and your head at the same time. Just you and the ocean, communing.
I suppose it’s somewhat akin to laying on your back in a field in the country at night and staring up at the star-flecked universe enveloped in complete silence. It puts you deep into the centre of natural world but also somehow removed from it.
When you’re young, the sea offers so much; at night it’s practically magical, especially watching for the soft phosphorescent flashes as the waves hit the sands. At night, ships in the distance seem bedecked with fairy lights, and our hearts tell us they could be carrying passengers to the far-flung corners of the world, even if our heads know they’re probably only laden with cargo and are headed to a rusty European port.
When you’re young, standing and staring out to sea, to where the water meets the sky reminds you that there’s a whole world out there still to be explored, just over the horizon, and that no matter how bad things are at home, at school, at work, there’s somewhere else we can go, an exciting, exhilirating place where our dreams might just be fulfilled.
The sea offers all this and more. It’s constant sounds – mighty waves crashing – reminds us how the world goes on. Even at our deepest despairs it can be a comfort and remind us that the earth will keep turning, the moon will still keep pulling the tides, and we’ll carry on and everything will right itself. It’s a place for eternal optimism, and I’d be bereft if I could never see the sea again.
Thanks lil bro – but wtf “jezzafuji”?
Mendocino is very like Northern Ireland, I think. The coast of N. Ireland is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. Although it could be genetic memory – that and my capacity to drink large quantities of RedBreast in one sitting.