Thinking of ‘55

On this, our last day here, I felt the need to walk through the places I’d walk almost every day in my childhood holidays. My heading refers to the heatwave of 1955, when it rained for the first two days of the holiday and then didn’t rain again for the whole eight weeks we were there. My parents bought me and my sister Mexican style straw sunhats and plastered us in Skol sunscreen (anyone remember that?) and we went to the beach just about every day. I wonder if my parents enjoyed it as much as we did.

Somewhere there are photos of that summer (I’ll try to find them) showing two small girls in big hats and short shorts up to their knees in water in what we called “the lagoon” - actually two sizeable areas of seawater, larger and deeper at high tide, with soft, silty bottoms, joined by a canal-like strip that was dry at low tide and too deep to wade at high.

They’re gone. The golf course has encroached at the north end; the sand to the south. It’s as if all the sand washed from the other beach has fetched up here. I’m still traumatised…

But we had a good walk. We ended up having mint tea and apple and cinnamon cake at The Wineport, where I can remember the odd bleak wet day cuppas being available in a resonant, stone-floored building if you were there on a day it was open. The seats were orange folding plasticky and tubular metal jobs, and I once fell through the back of one. It was much lovelier today.

We came back and started packing. It’s terrifying remembering where you tucked things away in a house, even a wee one like this. But I’m giving up now. I need proper food and wine. A frittata, I think, and salad .

First photo in the collage was taken at breakfast…