2. MCMLXXIII

... being a further exploration of my boyhood fascination with the East Yorkshire coast.

On a shelf in the room where I write, is a fossilised sea urchin. It is about the size of a snooker ball. There are a lot of shelves in the room where I write and there are a lot of bits and pieces on them, much of it, admittedly junk. In fact there is so much stuff collected there that when I started to think about writing this little essay, I wasn’t sure that the sea urchin was actually amongst it all. But it didn’t take me long to locate it. I have had it in my possession for fifty years now. I don’t often examine it, I don’t often think about it, but it has stayed with me through half a dozen or more house moves, a divorce, two marriages, and everything else that life has thrown at me.

It is a remnant of the childhood cycle trips to the East Yorkshire coast that I spoke about previously. I found it on a beach, whilst fossil hunting with my Dad.

Not that my Dad was a geologist, or even a particularly keen fossil hunter, He was a watch and clock repairer by trade, but he clearly wanted to give me and my sister, Sue, every opportunity to enjoy our childhoods, and learn about the world around us. Thats why he bought the caravan at Easington, and for a few summers, had the whole family take the two hour cycle trip there almost every Friday evening and then back on the Sunday afternoon.

He didn’t drive, which is why the cycling was necessary, but he did invest in a car battery. He would charge this up at home overnight on Thursday, and strap it to the back of his bicycle the next day. When we arrived at our home at the coast, he would use it to power up a small portable black and white television. We had no electricity in the van. Lighting came via gas mantles, which hissed and glowed and gave the place a magical old fashioned atmosphere. Water had to be carried over from a communial tap in a plastic drum, and if we needed it hot, we used the kettle on the gas ring, which whistled with an increasing pitch as it boiled.

When Mam and Dad had sent me and Sue to bed, separating themselves from us by means of a heavy curtain drawn across the centre of the van, we would listen to what they watched on that portable television. “Thats Life” with Esther Rantzen and Cyril Fletcher doing an ‘odd ode’, then later an episode of Sargeant Bilko. To this day, if I hear the theme tune to either of those programmes, I am instantly transported in my mind right back to that time and place.

I can’t recall anything that we watched as a family on that TV, but I do remember that as the battery died, as it would at some point over the weekend, the picture would get smaller and smaller, taking up a diminishing rectangle in the centre of the screen until it eventually winked out completely. After that, there was no more telly until we got back home.

We weren’t too bothered about that though, we were not there to watch telly. There was the great outdoors to explore, the village, the fields, the beach. Even when we were in the caravan, we could hear the sea in the distance, like a rhythmic white noise as the waves came in. As I listened to it could imagine the small stones jostled by the swell, lifting a little and crashing back down into each other, like they crashed onto my feet when I went paddling on the shingle.

Getting down to the beach was what it was all about for me. I loved examining the stuff which washed up on the shore, sometimes plastic bottles with foreign writing on them, had they been thrown off passing ships, or had they travelled over from Holland, or perhaps even further? I sometimes found an empty bottle, with a trickle of something inside that I fancied smelled of rum or whisky mixed with sea water, maybe discarded by a pirate of long ago, or the captain of a more modern vessel. I particularly enjoyed sorting through the pebbles in search of precious stones, or the fossilised remains of prehistoric sea creatures. My Dad encouraged me in this. He would regularly buy me some book or other to learn from - “The I-Spy Book of Fossils,” “The Observer Book of Rocks and Minerals” or some such educational publication.

There were hours when, whilst Sue made sandcastles, and my Mam sat on a folding chair and read “Woman’s Realm” me and my Dad would search the shingle or the boulder clay cliffs to see what treasures we could find; Ammonites, Belemnites, some ancient petrified shells known as “Devil’s Toenails,” and ancient plants called Crinoids. It was on one of these hunts that I found the sea urchin that I have kept with me for half a century.

A few years ago, I was at a creative writing session given by the Bradford poet Ed Reiss. Ed was giving an introduction to the work of the English poet, Geoffrey Hill, (1932 -2016)¹ who was known for being difficult to understand. To be honest, I wasn’t a fan. I might enjoy a cryptic crossword, but I generally like my poetry to be fairly easy to decypher. Yet Ed was quite persuasive about the benefits of making things a bit oblique, and encouraged all at the session to have a go at it.

He suggested we focus on a particular time and place, and try to evoke it by describing the sensory experience, I immediately thought of my Dad and the caravan site at Easington all those years ago.

There is no cycle ride, sea urchin or Sergeant Bilko in the poem I produced that day. I saved them, perhaps to be used in a piece of prose writing at some point in the future.

MCMLXXIII

Holding the rope to steady us 
we stumble down the boulder clay.
The damp mass of it sticking to our shoes
will collect coarse sand from the shore.
Before tea, we will have to run them under an outside tap
and poke at the stubborn remnants with sticks 
but for now, that is a distant inconvenience 
like death, 
best left unimagined.
For what good does it do 
to dwell on future difficulties
when things are as good as this?
When you are breathing in fresh North Sea air
or the smoke of a hand rolled cigarette
or some magical blend of the two.

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1. Amazingly almost the same dates as my Dad - (1931-2016)