The melancholy of seaside towns, & a story
Alike the world over, with their strange ruins, mourning gulls and ice-cream buildings. Ersatz somehow, built for pleasure, they perform at being a town whilst the audience dwindles
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I realise that for some time now I have been preoccupied with seaside towns. In some ways, the world over, they are all alike: ice-cream buildings and cobbled streets, mourning gulls, the absence of trees. In such places you do not need a map to navigate to the beach: only the light and the direction of the breeze.
Perhaps it is because I did not grow up near the sea. In the vicinity of Meriden — traditionally, though not in fact, as far from the sea as it is possible to go in England. Either way, seaside towns were a novelty: not places in which you could imagine people living, or even existing outside of holidays.
And the strangeness of them at the edge of the water: estuaries and ruined fortifications, mudflats that wash away to reveal ancient ruins. Time operates differently there. I was taken with John Lanchester’s description in a recent LRB of 850,000-year-old Neanderthal footprints recently discovered on a beach in Happisburgh, north Norfolk:
…the oldest human footprints outside Africa and by far the earliest mark of human presence in Britain. Surging tides had exposed long-hidden marks of a group of H. antecessor walking upriver: an adult and a group of children travelling along the muddy estuary where the Thames used to meet the sea, until glaciers shifted its course southwards 450,000 years ago. The exposed footprints had to be photographed and modelled at speed, before the tide washed them away days later. It’s a beautiful and eerie concatenation: a fleeting moment from the Lower Palaeolithic, hidden for almost a million years, suddenly exposed, and hurriedly captured for all time by modern archaeology, before its permanent erasure by wind and sea.
I have a dream about a seaside town. And in my head it seems like heaven. On an L-shaped bay, the road covered with blown sand. It might be in California or England: a petrol station with that stick-on white lettering, on a black felt board. At the corner of the road, a high canopy, like a petrol forecourt, decked out in a sunny yellow shade, with a sign raised high on a pole like an American diner that you can see around for miles, with ‘Beach Shop’ painted in pink and neon lights, and underneath, hanging from the canopy, are all kinds of delights: inflatable animals of every hue and kind — sharks, giraffes, leopards, snakes, lions, rhinos; then lilos, rubber rings, beach balls, boats; multicoloured footballs in a string bag like gobstoppers; spades and windbreaks and articles of clothes and everything you could possibly imagine.
And all around, people in the sunlight. Children, with footballs and surfboards, running barefoot along the street. Parents following, with bags and dogs and babies. And then on the beach: children playing, kicking the sand up into the breeze. The sun floating in the sky, half-descended: the older children squinting and shielding their eyes upon the dunes, watching its ever-arrested progression. Adults, dog walkers coming around the top of the dunes from who knows where: kites caught on the evening breeze. For the air is fresh, the light fading perpetually without ever draining away. Like a vanilla shake; pale and sweet.
On the edge of the street is a man in a striped apron with a hot-dog stand. Further down, the seafront houses are painted candyfloss like Llandudno or Portmeiron. In front of them are black iron railings. And then at the very end, where the houses and the road almost peter out, there is a sign affixed: an old, black-and-white sign that said ‘Victoria Street’.
I don’t know what this vision means but it’s stayed with me.
I have started to write stories in seaside towns recently. I am attracted to their ersatz air, the fact that they are playing at being a town; built purely for pleasure. Not like real towns, which simply functioning. The slight melancholy as, more and more, the performance is for nobody. I said to Aled there must be a word for this and he said yes — kitsch.
I have started one such story here if you’d like to have a read… and I’d love your feedback.
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Sincerely,
Ruth