Memoir

Shrimping

I’m running round the beach chasing my granddaughters, aged two and three, who are having the time of their lives. They are laughing and trying to keep their hair out of their eyes as they head for the waves. This might not be a problem, except that, although it’s sunny and unseasonably warm, it is November, they’ve been shedding their clothes as they run, leaving little pink and purple discards across the sand. Right now, in this minute, the beach is their world and they own it.

I remember that feeling, too. I can see myself now, at about four years old, and my parents, the Twins and I were spending the summer at my grandparents’ house by the sea. Later, I would remember those summers the way children tend to do, as golden and carefree. But at the age of four, I had nothing with which to compare. All I knew was that my parents smiled more, we saw Daddy every day, and we spent ages on the beach, paddling barefoot in the shallows, holding firmly to my father’s hand. To keep his trousers dry, he rolled them halfway up his calves.  He stooped to hold my hand, and I knew he would never let it go. My mother sat on a striped blanket not too far away, shading her eyes from the afternoon sun as she watched us and smiled. She was surrounded by four pairs of sandals, my father’s large ones, and ours, forming a small circle of admirers around them. My twin sisters used to chase each other around the rock pools, their almost white curls flying around their heads. They were two years older than me, and I can hear them singing out to each other, the way they did when they were having fun – yells of pure joy. The three of us wore ruched bathing costumes, with little straps that tied behind our neck. Mine was pink, the twins’ blue and green.

I could smell the salt as the sea edged towards us, getting closer with each wave. Daddy would stretch out his arms and take in an enormous breath of ‘good sea air’ before letting it out again. The waves weren’t too big, and they made me curl up my toes and wiggle my feet further down into the sand as the waves retreated again. Daddy would pick up a tiny crab with his free hand, and crouch down to show it to me. I looked in his eyes and he was smiling. I knew the crab wouldn’t hurt me so long as he was there.

I used to wonder sometimes if the sea would ever come back again. I would look out of my bedroom window, under the eaves of Granny and Grandpa’s house, and times the sea would be right up, covering the pebble beach, and at other times I couldn’t see it at all, it was so far away. All I could see was sand, stretching away to the end of my world. It felt a bit scary, but there is one wonderful thing about sand like that. In the summer, after we’ve had supper, my father might take me and my sisters out shrimping before bedtime.

We set out down the drive toward the main Lancing road in front of the house. Holding hands in a straggling chain, we would cross the road after repeating the incantation: “Look right, look left, look right again. If all clear, quick march.” This last was, I suspect, my mother’s variation on “cross the road”. She had been in the army, after all.

The beach directly in front of us was lit with the rays of the setting sun, which illuminated the gleaming wet sand that rippled away to the horizon. Closer to us was a row of what looked to me like child-size houses, brightly painted so that they resembled a row of coloured building blocks separating the real world of the beach from the grey world inland. These were the bathing huts, and they consisted of one room with no windows, and a tiny wooden porch.

Ours was the green one, and we use it for changing in or out of our swimsuits, as well as for storing our buckets and spades, towels and deck chairs. We girls weren’t allowed to touch the deck chairs, in case they suddenly collapsed and squashed our fingers. The only person allowed to trap his fingers in the chairs was our father, who did so fairly regularly as he set them up in front of the hut, to the accompaniment of terse mutterings and the occasional yelp.

I clung tightly to my father’s large warm hand as we manoeuvred over the shingle that started at the road. We stopped at our bathing hut to collect our shrimp nets and buckets, in which we would be carrying home our catch. We left our sandals in the bathing hut, and made our way slowly across the shingle to the sand, trying not to tread on too sharp a stone. Our father would remind us to stay between the two breakwaters we could see to the right and left of us, stretching down towards the sea. Then the real trek would begin.

I loved the feel of that sand. It was cool and wet, and I loved to curl my toes into it before picking up my feet to watch my footprints slowly sinking back into the beach. I was fascinated by the little coils of sand that lay on the surface of the sand. My father explained that these were left behind by worms that had been digging tunnels under the beach. He would often stop to talk to the men who used to dig up the worms for bait. If we weren’t shrimping, we would stop too, and gaze curiously at the wiggly things as they were dropped from the garden fork into bigger buckets than ours. At that age, I didn’t understand the concept of fishing and bait, but I could easily see why someone might like to have a worm collection.

Once on the sand, I would try to keep up with my sisters, who liked to run everywhere, but eventually I would flag, and was only induced to keep going by the sight of the approaching waves. They were gentle waves, and I wasn’t frightened of them, but they could suddenly reach my knees if I strayed too far from the shore. So I always made sure my father was nearby before venturing in. 

Then I would demand my shrimp net and start pushing it along the sand in the shallows. The net was, essentially, a wooden pole with a flat board across the end of it forming a T shape. The flat board was designed to scoop up the shrimp, which would dig themselves into the sand when they heard footprints approaching (or so said my mother, trying to explain how it was that we rarely caught any). A net attached to the board would collect them and we would then tip them into our buckets. At least that was the theory.

I think I may have caught a total of six shrimps, ever. And these were not American shrimps, these were English ones, about half an inch long, and sand coloured, so that they were hard to see, even if I did catch them.

What we did find in our nets, and this made me forget my yearning for shrimp, were shells, crabs and the occasional mermaid’s purse. Our father would pick the crabs gently out of the net, and turn them upside down to make us count their waving claws and look at their peculiar eyes on stalks. Sometimes he would let us carry them for a little while in our buckets, but eventually he would explain that we had to let these crabs go back to their mothers, and it was time for us to go back to our mother, too.

We would toil back up the beach, carrying our buckets full of shells and seaweed, quieter now, and yawning, ready for sleep.

I still go down to the sea whenever I can, even though those days vanished forever when I was twelve, and my father died. But, though that time can never come back, I will always have the memory of that safe place. No matter what happens, the sea will always advance and then recede. Sometimes it will throw up dirty plastic bottles, but mostly it will hand me beautiful shells, if I care to pick them up. There may be rainy days on the beach, days when the wind is almost too cold to bear, and I long to shelter somewhere, but, on clear days, I take my granddaughters to the beach and paddle barefoot with them in the shallows, looking for crabs. I hold their hands, or maybe they hold mine.