Shuttlecock

[35]

And today — a Sunday — I forwent for the first time one of my visits to Dad. I said to Marian and the kids yesterday evening (for I knew it was going to be one of those hot, cloudless, high-summer Sundays that sometimes come even in early May): ‘Let’s go out for the day tomorrow. Let’s go to Camber Sands.’ And Marian looked at me, as much as to say: ‘But aren’t you going to see Dad?’ And the kids, as much as to say, ‘What about Grandpa Loony?’ But they did not say these things, and their expressions of surprise soon melted. They are a shrewd family.

Why Camber Sands? There are other parts of the coast which are shorter and easier drives from our part of London. Sentimental reasons. It was here that Marian and I used to come when Martin was scarcely beyond the crawling stage; and not just because in the soft sands of the dunes a small baby could come to very little harm, but because in the hollows of those same dunes it was possible for a young couple, with a little circumspection, to spread a blanket and make warm, airy outdoor love.

But it was here too — and it was only because of this that I was to return later with Marian — that I used to be taken as a boy, when we stayed for weekends with Uncle Nigel, a colleague of Dad’s in the engineering business, who had a country cottage near Rye. And what attracted me then about Camber was less its whispering billows of sand and wheeling black-headed gulls (for this was before Mr Forster and his Nature Study classes) but the relics of the war that still littered the region. Rusting tangles of metal to waylay landing-craft; huge, zigzagging rows of concrete teeth waiting to snap at German tanks; pill-boxes marking the dykes on Romney Marsh. All this was scenery from that awesome drama in which Dad had only recently been an actor (these were the late forties and early fifties). And looking out at the grey, flat English Channel, which in that part of the coast retreats to a sullen distance at low tide, I would have a vision of the war as a simple, romantic affair of opposing powers. I would think of watchers on the shore with telescopes; of the dim line of the horizon hiding on its further side massing, unknown forces. I dabbled amongst the rusty iron. Perhaps as I did so — who knows? — Mum and Dad made love, circumspectly, in the dunes. The tide would come in, slick, shallow and frothy — and the incoming tide, as every child knows, is an enemy invader.

And now, invaded and littered in another way — by caravan-sites and chalets, beach-side cafés and amusement arcades — Camber Sands still retains these old savours of love and war. Don’t ask me why, knowing that this spot must be even more spoilt, even more strewn with seaside junk since Marian and I last saw it, I should still determine on going there — I who have this hankering for untouched countryside and have often harangued and bored my family with conservationist lectures. Perhaps certain things are inside us and we don’t have to go searching for the appropriate setting in order to find them. Or if they aren’t inside us, then — perhaps we should admit it — they aren’t anywhere.

We packed a picnic bag, blankets, towels, swimming things, sun-tan oil, and set off early. I slipped into our car boot my cricket bat and a ball (for there is no finer cricket ground than the damp flat sands of Camber when the tide is out). But I would not push the point. Peter sat in the back seat with Marian. He was excited. In the rear-view mirror I saw his wide eyes keep darting to things outside the window, the way children’s eyes do when they are being taken to the seaside — as if they are crossing a continent. Martin sat in the front beside me, silent and aloof. He was eleven years old and was already affecting to be above such things as family trips to the sea.

Sure enough, Camber, even so early in the season, had fallen prey to the paraphernalia demanded by the holidaymaker and the tripper. Martin cocked up his head at this. He would gladly, perhaps, have spent all day in the cafés and amusement arcades, learning the arts of the seaside hustler. But we tramped a long way from our parked car, till we found a relatively secluded hollow among the dunes; and even on young go-getters in the making, the sun and the sea exert their pull. In a few minutes Martin, no less than Peter, had slipped into bathing trunks; and they were off, down the slopes of the dunes, running across the corrugated sands to confront that great brooding invader.

I watched them. The tide was out at its furthest point, so they had no small distance to cover. By the time they reached the water they would be just two more of several indistinguishable, limbed dots moving in the silvery margins where sea met land. Martin was already several yards ahead of his brother and clearly set on making no allowances for Peter’s shorter pace. He was bent on getting this primal seaside ritual over with as soon as possible, on accomplishing it with the maximum of athletic ease and the minimum of childish fuss. His stride was rhythmic and arrogant. Peter’s was still the furious, labouring dash of an infant, in which was plainly visible his despair of keeping up with his brother. Half way between the dunes and the sea their bodies lost tone; I could no longer discern Peter’s maroon, Martin’s blue trunks, and they were distinguishable only by their stature and gait. Two naked, fleeing creatures. And suddenly they were no longer running towards the sea, but running, being impelled, towards the future — another sea of sorts — and their bodies travelling over the sand were mapping the course of things to come. Martin, with never a look back. Peter, doomed always to chase that flying image of his brother, who would run better than him, swim better and, in all things, act more surely than him; doomed to pant after it but never to catch it up. Peter, who will feel in later years, much more than his brother ever will, the odd stab of nostalgia for the salt air and the dunes of Camber Sands; who already possesses the harassed, irresolute looks of his father, and who already has — for I saw it for the first time, as he struggled up again, over the lip of the dunes, a full minute after his brother, breathless and tense, a thread of seaweed stuck to his leg — the hard knot which his father has between the brows, which bespeaks a kind of cruelty.

Peter: ‘What are those rusty metal things over there, Dad?’

Dad: ‘Oh, they’re something left over from the war.’

(As Dad and Peter — Martin having slunk off, to the beach cafés perhaps, or to disturb loving couples in the dunes — walk out again — walk and not run — to the water’s edge, which has now drawn considerably nearer; and Dad thinks, almost for the first time, that day, of his own Dad.)

Peter: ‘Oh.’ (Unenlightened, unwilling to display ignorance by asking further questions, but just a little bit afraid, gripping his father’s hand, that the rusty metal things might still be dangerous. And all this suddenly and literally washed away by Dad’s visible recoil and audible gasp of cowardice at the icy temperature of the water which has just licked over his foot.)

But this was later. After lunch, after trips for ice-creams, after a deadly-earnest cricket match in which Martin suddenly revealed himself for a murderous fast bowler, and after — even while that first trip to the water’s edge, that first trip to the future and back, was taking place — Marian and I made love in the sand. We had to be quick, quick as sparrows — you never know when someone might appear over the crest of the dunes. Need for haste; but none for hinting or persuasion, nor for pointless sophistication. All those laborious bedroom antics, to return at last to burrowing in the sand. The beach-grass waved; the gulls floated, white fragments in the blue above. But this would have been Marian’s view. My view was filled with sand, a miniature dune-scape, a whole shifting and rippling Sahara that was forming and reforming round our blanket. I thought, it is the landscape of the desert, bleached and smooth-contoured, that most approximates to human flesh. If any landscape can be called naked, it is a landscape of dunes; and perhaps that is the true source of my nostalgia for Camber Sands. And then these same soft-gold hues and gentle contours made me think of the pale, furred creature who was the cause of my beginning these pages, and I remembered the magical words Mr Forster had spoken when I was a boy (Peter’s age): ‘a piece of nature’.