David Gentleman's Coastline [antikvár]

Going to the seaside is the first experience I can properly remember. It was an unforgettable moment when the road from the station, which had seemed to end abruptly in empty sky, fell away to reveal the magically straight and level line of the sea's distant horizon. Beneath it lay the waves and the beach of hard-packed sand, divided by dark wooden groynes running straight out into the water. Just across the road from the beach was a terrace of four or five houses; one of these was Mrs Drew's boarding-house. Everything about this house seemed to me very odd. The dining-room had an aspidistra plant in a pot, many layers of thick cloth on the table, and a jigsaw puzzle: a scene of snow-covered houses with yellow lamplit windows. My bedroom had a chamber-pot and a heavily curtained sash window that wouldn't slide up and down; it looked straight out on to the sea.The beach was reached by way of stone or wooden ramps sloping down from the esplanade, which was fenced with heavy green cast-iron railings. Down on the sand there were tin buckets and wooden spades, streams and pools and wormcasts and the smell of seaweed; and there were newly made friends, the Blacks and the Harrops, who were staying in other nearby boarding-houses. My father would dig holes and build sandcastles with me while my mother tried to shelter from the east-coast wind against one of the groynes. Sometimes, to my dismay, they would abandon me to play grown-up games with a quoit or a hand-ball, on a squarish court newly scratched out on the sand with their toes; jealously I tried to rub these lines out. I know from old snapshots that my mother had a straw hat with a wide brim and that my father wore a 1930s bathing costume with shoulder straps, though I'd never have remembered such things. But I can remember very clearly how when he went swimming I would cling piggy-back to him in the odd-tasting waves.At the top of the beach was a steeply sloping seawall made of rough boulders; since this was easy to climb up but hard to climb down, I had to be rescued frequently. A little way up the beach was a long wooden pier. You could trundle to its far end on an open tramway, or you could walk it, past groups of anglers whose rods had little round bells at their tips which jingled if they caught anything. If you peered down through the cracks between the deck timbers you could see the heaving waves. A paddle-steamerwith a black-and-yellow funnel sailed from the far end of the pier, left to Felixstowe, right to Clacton or even to London. Or you could get to Frinton under your own steam -a country walk along low cliffs topped by grass, called the Greensward. My father and I sometimes used to make this walk in the morning after collecting the terrier Dan from his overnight imprisonment in the town kennels. On the way back my father would point out the projecting headland, like a snout sticking out into the North Sea, that gave Walton-on-the-Naze its name. Walton must, I suppose, have been cold and windy and occasionally very boring, but if so I've forgotten. I can only remember loving the place, assuming that this was what all seaside towns were like, and wanting, after each visit, to go back there.Not long ago I did go back, after a gap of over fifty years. It was not much different from what I remembered: a pretty little town still complete with a working railway station, a Martello tower, an Old and a New Pier Street and a Marine Parade. The seafront was run down but not too tarted up. Some of the terrace I remembered had gone, but a bed-and-breakfast still stood on Marine Parade in roughly the same place as Mrs Drew's boarding-house; that is, in the stretch remaining between Steve's Takeaway and the foundations of a new hotel on the one hand and a concrete public lavatory of the locked-up-till-the-season variety on the other. The terrace's own front gardens had become concrete car-stands but there was a walled patch of municipal grass landscaping in front. On the esplanade below it a Walls van was delivering ice-cream to a neat little café whose front was ablaze with bright plastic buckets and spades and whirling windmills. The cast-iron work had gone and an almost vertical concrete seawall, perfectly smooth and clinical, had replaced the rough sloping stonework I'd once clambered up; but small family groups still huddled for shelter against the wooden groynes. Thinnish spreading stains of brown sediment discoloured the beach, and a large expanded polystyrene box, once used to pack some piece of electrical equipment, bobbed weightlessly on the wavelets.The long straight wooden pier was as splendid and as solid as ever, and as I walked its stoutly timbered length in the spring sunlight and the light breeze Walton suddenly seemed almost unchanged. Towards the far end the pier alters course several degrees to the south and widens out, the pattern of the deck timbers growing more complicated.