The Shore Road, lined by hedgerows, permanently framed in sandy kerbs, delivered you to the plumb centre of the beach. Just before you reached it there was a cattle grid to the right demarcating the edge of Jimmy Johnson’s farm, and next to that, a flat brick stand on which milk churns were always standing; full and waiting for collection, or returned empty. I always fancied that this was where I was left for Polk or Dolly to pick me up when I was delivered to Beacham by the milkman. Sometimes we went to the far end of the shore this way. First you had to negotiate the cattle grid, then you had to walk through the cows, next you went through the caravan site, and then along the edge of the golf course, and then as that ran out, through the sand dunes, and to the far point of that walk, Dallingholme Rock.
If you carried on past the milk stand towards the beach, you came to Connie’s cafe on the other side, but she only opened in summer. You could turn right just past there and go to Dallingholme directly by beach; left took you to the pier, where there were caves to explore along the way. It wasn’t a proper pier though; it was just called that.
There was another route to the pier end of the beach that started on the Shore Road near Dolly’s house. It meandered through allotments and dusty spits of unclaimed land where there were streets which started as tarmac but which had run out into sand by the time you reached the end of them; and where you’d find isolated municipal buildings that could only be reached by following a network of black sandy paths. Me and Bobo tried to recreate this route under our own steam but never managed it. We conflated it with the mystery walks we were taken on in winter that often set off in a similar direction. And only by accident, on our own, did we ever locate the parrot in his single occupancy aviary, which was the great delight of taking that route.
Dallingholme was a sort of small island out in the beach just beyond the sand dunes. It rose up about a hundred feet and had a gentle helix of flat grass that made it look like it had two distinct plateaux from a distance, like a tiny squat Christmas tree. When the tide came in, it was almost surrounded, but you were safe on the top and you could always find a route back to dry land off the back end, though it was best not to be there at high tide if you could help it. High tide was a pier day. The tide stayed out for ages and went out for miles when it did. And though most of it was ridged and wet and puddly as far as you could see, Dallingholme was surrounded by soft dry white sand that no one else knew about. Dolly said that it came into being when it was fired out of the volcano at Dead Combe on the other side of the bay, and when you looked across there was a Dallingholme sized crater missing out of Dead Combe just beyond the edge of Marsham. But I could tell by the way Polk said, ‘Aye, some say,’ when we asked him about it later, that it wasn’t true.
Dolly produces boiled eggs from her mac, and we sit on the flat stones surrounded by white sand, consciously angling our faces up to get the best out of the sun, and we laugh at how long it takes us to eat them. ‘Good heavens,’ she says, as she finally swallows the last piece, ‘that was hard work.’ I don’t know why it’s hilarious, but it is. As we finish ours, she’s ready with segments of oranges for us.
The pier jutted out into the sands heading towards Marsham. Polk told us that it was made from the slag out of the iron ore mines in a brave but misguided attempt to build a link to Marsham as an alternative to taking the thirty-mile trip up past where Polk came from, round the estuary. As if there was a time not very long ago when you were just allowed to build useful new roads if the thought struck you. They didn’t finish it though, Polk said, because you can’t just stop the tide from coming in, and even if they did, the high tides in spring would have brought it all down. Dolly said that they would never have been able to build anything across the channel even if they’d wanted to, because it was bottomless.
That’s why you could never walk across to Marsham, because once you got half way there, you’d come across the channel, which was basically a very fast, deep river, that kept running, even if the tide went out. And once you’d got that far, it would be too late to get back to the shore again before the tide came in round the back of you and cut you off. If we were with Dolly, we were allowed to go out as far as Uncle Basky’s fishing boat, which lined up with the end of the pier.
Sometimes, as the eldest and only male, I was invited out on early morning expeditions with Basky. Once accepted, they were hard to refuse. A matter Dolly bitterly regretted, every time they came round. As too, I did, because she wouldn’t let me out of the house without wearing at least six layers of her discarded wardrobe, plus, extracting a promise from me, that I’d spend the entire trip with one arm looped around the lifebelt.
The pier had a gap in it just where it started, which, if it hadn’t, would have meant that you could walk straight on to it from the centre of the village without having to go on the beach. As it was, you had to locate one of the little paths cut into the cliffs from the beach to take you back to the town side of the pier. Basky took me down a new one that morning, and I couldn’t wait to come back and share the information with Bobo, despite everything. It seemed to throw light on lots of things that confused us about the strange and changing geography of that part of Beacham. Sometimes, when we were with Dolly, we went home by another one of those paths, then across the unallocated open spaces on the cliff top, part of which were referred to as the Lots, where the parrot lived, though we could never work out exactly what fell inside the scope of the Lots and what didn’t. It reminded us of the black and white films from the Deep South that we watched on Sunday afternoons, where the right to occupy land and build things on it seemed to have more to do with usage than it did property rights. To me there was no difference between the women singing close harmonies together in those films and the ones we knew in long cloth coats who would suddenly appear in the village with their troupe of children around them. Everything seemed new and old at the same time.
The walk back reversed the journey into manmade civilisation, and me and Bobo always looked at each other in half feigned surprise whenever we turned left from Beacham’s farthermost street and found ourselves at the end of the main shopping street. We rarely went beyond the gap in the pier, and never unaccompanied, but we loved the caves on that side, and I remember a summer day once, where there were lots of us, and this communal recognition took hold that this was the best part of the beach, with hitherto unrecognised deep clear lagoons to swim in. Polk explained it by describing how the sands were constantly shifting and how subtle changes in ridges and depths, though innocuous seeming, produced enormous changes in the way the tide worked, which was why the little pools it created on the way in, or left on the way out, would be different every day. Or maybe I dreamt that.
And we always came back with a haul. Usually shells, which were judged on strict Beauty Pageant rules, or pebbles, which were assessed on the basis of their conformity to a given type described before the competition began. Other times an early beachcombing find would set the trend and create the theme for the day. We left them in the whitewashed yard when we got home – leave by the front, return by the back – for them to be cleaned up in the dolly tub the next day if the weather was suitable. Or Saturday morning, when the week’s reckoning was taken.
And when you guessed the time, it was never, ever, only five seconds later.
Dickie White's Diary 