I can’t now track down what triggered my thoughts, but someone on Threads wrote about the sadness they felt when ‘saying goodbye to the sea‘ I think they were somewhere on the east coast, their image was taken from a cliff path, as if they had stopped to take one last look, and there was a bit of beach and the sea. I think sometimes with my memories I colourise them – but the image I have of their picture was a very blue sea, no doubt partly reflecting the blue sky, a pale sandy track, and that washed out green of maritime plants.
I’ve always loved being beside the sea, and we live very near it now – four hundred yards from it and four inches above it! The sea we live beside is a dingy brown as it’s full of mud , fed by English and Welsh Rivers – the Severn, Avon, Wye, Taff and Usk. We also have the second highest tidal range in the world, after the Bay of Fundy which is between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Canada – so the sea on our muddy beach goes out a very long way!
When I was a child living in East Anglia, it wasn’t that far to the Norfolk coastline, and we used to go on day trips, plus a week away at the end of summer each year at a holiday camp in Hopton. If you have seen the series ‘Hi-de-Hi’ you’ll have a very good idea of what it was like. The camp was on the cliffs above the beach and we probably went every year from me being about four, until I was about fourteen. I’m sure my parents became a little bored with it, or maybe they were more financially able to go somewhere else, so I was about fourteen when we took our last holiday . On the last day, I looked out sadly over the sea, and silently promised that I would return – I was quite a dramatic child, probably from reading so much! I was really very sad, so many memories from being a very little girl.
Some long time later, for several years, probably about five or six times, I went with friends to the South of France and camped near the town of Menton, right on the border with Italy, in the small village of Gorbio. We were very hard up, so most days were spent on the beach and in the sea – which costs nothing of course. I would float on my back beneath a brilliant azure sky, and look up at the Alpes-Maritimes and feel so happy, so content, so at one with everything. One year we decided that next time we’d go somewhere else, and as we left, driving along the corniche, and I looked out over the searing blue of the Mediterranean, and again promised I would return – which became another broken promise of course!
Eight years ago, a dream came true, and we went to Tasmania, to the Australian island where my great-grandfather had been born in 1845. I was so excited, had thought about it for years, and when the small plane which took us from Melbourne across the Bass Strait began to descend to Hobart Airport and I could see the island surrounded by the bluest sea I’d ever seen, I was almost ecstatic! The whole holiday was wonderful, extraordinary, the greatest we’d ever had (accompanied by a strong feeling of déjà vu) but the time we spent in various places, just sitting and staring at the sea – communing in a way, I guess, was like being on a kind of sociable retreat. So, when we climbed back into the little plane, to take us to Brisbane this time, I had a familiar, but powerful sense of bidding farewell to the sea.
Lois Elsden 