The Beach

I grew up on the south coast of England. It was so close to the coast that the town was officially named 'Bexhill-on-sea'. That's right, next to the freezing cold English Channel, with pebbly beaches that were painful to my tender young feet. Because we lived in a "seaside town", there was some obligation to take advantage of that fact - the ritual of trekking out to your family (or family friends') beach hut, changing, spending a few shivery moments in the icy water and then suffering the rest of the day with damp, gritty sand between your toes and in other bodily crevices.

Despite this weekend torture, summer vacation time was spent doing pretty much the same thing - just a couple of hundred miles further west along the coast in Dorset. For many years, my mother and I would make the drive to the Sandbanks Hotel where we'd spend a week on our own with her teaching me how to swim, watching me gain trampolining skills and visiting local points of historical interest.

I remember one year, the hotel caught fire. We returned from a trip to discover we weren't allowed back in. Luckily, our room wasn't affected, but some beach toys we'd stored in a closet on our floor were lost to the flames. Being about four years old, my memory of the incident was fuzzy, but I know my mother was deeply affected.

Another year, when I was nine or ten, my mother decided she had enough money for us to buy our own sailboat. It was small, with two tiny beds in the cabin, and not much else. We spent the week painting it, equipping it with essentials and naming it - "The Mayfly". Then came the night we decided we'd sleep in it for the first time, before sailing it around the coast to the next bay over. In the early hours of the morning, my mother was awakened by the sound of me falling out of bed. The tide had gone out, and in Poole Harbor, that means that half the moorings were dry. The boat was resting on the mud at a 45 degree angle, and we had to walk a long distance to get back to the shore. The next day, our inflatable dingy that we used to get to the boat blew off the roof of our car in high winds, and landed in the sea, where it drifted off, never to be seen again. My mother was so discouraged that she put the boat up for sale the next day. Later, we discovered the mayfly has a lifespan of no more than 24 hours. I guess we picked a prophetic name for the boat.

I did learn a useful skill during those vacations, however. As it was just the two of us traveling, I learned to map read from a very early age. The first time I helped my mother navigate her way there was just before my fourth birthday. Luckily, I was already a decent reader, and could pick out the names of towns and road numbers. My sense of direction and ability to store maps in my head remains with me to this day, and even now I can navigate the freeway system of the Greater Los Angeles area better than many natives. (Edited just for Abby, to add this link of the journey)

My mother's memories of those times are doubtless more positive than mine. She'll recall the first time I took off my water wings and swam unaided (even though that was just a few minutes after she'd run out of film in her camera). She found pleasure in taking me to see the school she attended in the area when she was my age, where she was just a year or two below Angela Lansbury (even though she remembers being one of the few not invited to Angela's birthday party that year). Somehow she always had a positive spirit about her, no matter the events that befell our lives. I'm sure it's her example that has kept me on the positive side of the happiness scale for most of my life. And from thence comes strength.