Pebbles

Today

Yesterday I worked away at Paul's waistcoat until the heat on the veranda became too much and the sparkling sea beckoned us out.

We walked via the Enclosures onto Madeira Drive and crossed the Volks railway line onto the beach. We slid and scrambled over the pebbles to the shore. We looked at the waves and made our way, eventually, back up to the promenade. Our feet adapted to the sliding pebbles easily and we even felt that the scramble was doing us good.

"Of course", I said to Paul "Pebbly beaches are what I'm used to."

In My Day

Most of our excursions to the seaside during my childhood involved Brighton; sometimes Eastbourne and, at a pinch, Hastings. All these resorts have pebbly beaches, some rebarbatively so. Some show a scrap of gritty sand at very low tide, but, basically, the East Sussex coast is pebbles.

I don't think I minded; somehow I couldn't quite believe in beaches where you could make a sandcastle. When I read the Rupert Bear annuals in which he visited "Sandy Bay" and sat on and played with sand, it seemed more fictional than the wildest fairy tale.

Having said that, one of my earliest seaside memories involves sand. The holiday was in 1951 to Southbourne, near Littlehampton. There wasn't just a sandy beach; there were sand dunes, Pictures in the family album as well as a visit I made when a student in Worthing attest to the truth of this.

I remember that holiday. How I so wanted to clamber up the enticing dunes after Mamma and the boys. I tried, but they were too steep for my little three-year old legs and I slid to the bottom. My memory is that Mamma and the boys all laughed at me. Can that be true? I don't know but I still remember that sense of being too small and insignificant to achieve what the others were achieving with such ease. I can still see that steep, steep hill of sand from which I felt so excluded . Certainly the album has a picture of me at bottom with spade and the boys and Mamma scrambling to the top.

Who, knows, this experience may have contributed to my aversion to beach life and my complete lack of interest in sand. What I do know, is that I had a lovely time yesterday.