Apple & Thread.
So many little clips of my younger life run around my head, things that I often reminisce about nowadays when I am attempting to get some sleep. I have found that this practice has often helped me to skate away into that dark forgetful void, and also allowed me to drift away to Nod on a cloud of fond memories.
Lately I’ve begun dredging through some of my vaguer memories, and today I have selected two of the longer recollections at the edge of my filed thoughts.
I’m still very young in this first memory, and this first one relates to my father, and something that he always did in the late summer – autumn when he was out with me.
He and I would be walking the dogs in Porth, some of the time, it would be a walk out onto Trevelgue Headland’s island.
The island back then was much wilder, and after crossing the slatted wooden bridge to the island, you then walked through high earthworks to get into the interior. These fortifications were very interesting to me as a child, and although I’ll talk more of these in memories to come, I’ll also dally slightly on them now.
When the bridge had been constructed, the engineers had cut through these earthworks and exposed the inside layers. My father had been intensely interested in Archaeology, and between us, we had discovered many flint arrowheads, and even a flint knife.
He’d explained to me that these arrowheads must have been used during a battle to defend the island, and then lost to the soil.
He would often paint vivid images on my young mind of how these battles may looked, with me listening in awe.
During the war, and before I was born, the family had lived in Dorset, and he had visited ‘Maiden Castle’ a lot. Often as he talked to me about Porth’s history, but he had also told me of Maiden Castle, and just how impressive it was.
Eventually I had visited it for myself, sadly though, a short while after my father had died, for I would have loved to walk its slopes with, see it again through his eyes.
For the first few years after his demise, I often walked on my own with my own dogs, out onto Porth island and its fortifications, and thought back on him, and regretted the things we would never share again.
Back then, and once we’d gotten out onto the island proper, we’d then make the slow ten-minute walk to the farthest point on the right-hand side.
It was then that we’d sit on the rocks in the warm sun facing out over the Atlantic. There might be a slight breeze that would bring ozone to our nostrils, an aroma as of slightly rotting seaweed, salt and mixed with a mysterious fragrance that to my romantic mind thought of as far away exotic destinations.
After a while, and we would sit there for at least thirty minutes, it was then that he’d always suddenly produce two small apples. They were usually small Cox’s Orange Pippin, their skins would be striped with shiny red, orange and green, and they’d be warm and fragrant from the heat of father’s pocket.
We’d sit there eating their juicy flesh, sometimes he would regale me of tales of foreign countries, and on others there would be a silence between us.
I would often find myself lost in observing the restless water, and their ebb and flow. I found the sounds of the ocean, the gulls and breezes, very relaxing, and even today, I love to sit near to water, especially an Ocean.
I’ve sat next to the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and they seemed too vibrant, it’s hard today for me to believe that human stupidity is killing them.
My second memory today, is of my father taking me to a large rock pool on Whipsiderry, it was situated next to a large natural stone archway.
The archway in itself was interesting, it was raised from the sands on a pedestal made of hard rock, and the mainstay curve stood a good fifty at its highest point.
Underneath and to the right-hand side of this massive rock doorway, there was a deep and wide rockpool. It was a microcosm of the sea, with its own seaweeds, anemones, fish, crabs and prawns, and its waters were replenished at every tide rise.
I have memories to tell of just this pool, of my sisters, my friends, and Sharon and I, but it will feature later in this telling of my life on the beach.
The rock pool I will talk about now however, was on the left of this archway with its massive pillar. This pool was set into a large dark rock that I guess was made when the archway was slowly being formed by the rumbling strength of winter storms.
We’d scrambled to the top on that day, and once there, had hunkered down by the side of this pool. Its jagged edged side went straight down into the surface of its salty waters, it was a wide largish pool with a depth of eighteen inches. The bottom was covered in fine sand, weed and a few large flattish stones.
As I had crouched there in my T-shirt, chino shorts and bare feet, he’d taken his penknife out.
He had a cream bone handled knife, and it went everywhere that he went. Over the years to come, I saw him use it many times in the garden, peeling fruit, cutting up pears and apples to eat. Although he ate the cores, much as I do today, leaving no waste behind us when out, my mother and sisters didn’t, hence his needing it.
He’d pare twigs on shrubs for cuttings, and basically used this knife to cut anything he had need of to slice.
So, on this day, he used it to cut up a limpet, a fat limpet that he’d knocked from its mooring on the rocks surface with a quick blow of his hand. He’d then removed the flesh from its almost unbreakable shell and he’d sliced away all the inedible parts, and finally portioned it into four.
Next from his pocket, he’d produced some strong black cotton thread on a spool, it was slightly waxed. He’d unrolled about eight feet, and then cut that length off, and then repeated his actions.
He’d shown me how with a simple knot, he could tie the little portion of limpet flesh to the thread.
Having made his, he’d had me make my own, the orange, grey, cream flesh of the shellfish was slippery and hard to tie onto the thread. I remember that I wasn’t too impressed by the tangy smell of the limpet either, but I never have told him that, I had wanted to seem brave.
He had then lifted me and sat me securely on the edge with my little legs dangling, he’d then hunkered down by me, and shown me how to dangle the line into the water below.
I’d watched fascinated as he had jigged the tiny piece of limp meat up and down near one of the larger flat stones.
He had then pointed out that the stone was lifted at one end because it was sitting awkwardly on another stone under it. As I had watched, I had spotted movement under this part of the stone, and then out had popped the dark greenish head of a little fish.
With a little more tempting, the fish had left its home, and moved on the bait like a flash before dragging it back out of sight.
We had waited a short while, and then he had gently pulled the line back to him, complete with the wriggling fish, the fish that he had explained to me, was a common Blenny.
I had examined it as it had lain in the palm of his hand, watched its wide mouth opening and closing, it’s gills juddering, and felt its slightly slimy skin.
I’d then watched as he had carefully pulled on the thread with the bait still attached, as it had slipped from the fish’s mouth. I’d seen him drop his hand down near to the water, and then he released the fish back into the pool. I had watched it dash back to its hidey hole and disappear, and then he gave me an important lesson. “Never kill anything unless you intend to eat it, or it is threatening you, and you cannot safely run away.”
We stayed there for maybe an hour, me fishing in the pool, and him identifying what every catch was, whilst he lay back in the sun.
I caught crabs, both brown and green, Goby’s, and more than once, the same Blenny.
It was an idyllic afternoon for me, being with my father on my own, the adventure of fishing, the interest in the all the life in the pool.
In later years as I got older, I found that I just couldn’t recapture that excitement, although I did still enjoy catching crabs and prawns around the rock pools, which I then ate, and did right up to when I married Sharon, also subject to a memory to be written.
My Earliest Memories of the beach.
The memory that jumps to mind immediately as being my first of the beach, is sitting on the soft sand of what has to be Porth beach and digging in the sand with a red plastic spade.
I still can see the spade quite clearly, it was about eight inches long and the colour was very bright, the red being of Royal Mail post-box shade.
I had a bucket as well, it was bright canary yellow and round, and my father had been showing me how to make sandcastles with it.
It's easy to remember the golden sands, dry and warm at the surface of the beach, but underneath wet and cold. It was this wet sand that I needed, so that the castles I made were solid, and didn’t crumble immediately.
I must have been three or four years of age, and I was quite happy to be digging in the sun in my little T-shirt, shorts and sun hat.
Along with this memory, and this is why I am sure the first memory is of me at Porth, is paddling with my father in the river running out of Porth.
Every stone in that stream, and there were many, had a slight covering of bright green seaweed, and every stone had a ring of tiny glass eels.
These see-through eels would be wriggling, and desperately trying to stay in place until they had a chance on the rising tide to get even further up the river.
They’d most likely been born in the Sargasso Sea, a gyre in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, covered mostly by Sargassum seaweed.
The waters of the Sargasso are deep and clear blue, and an ideal spawning place for eels. The elvers, so called glass eels, due to their transparency, would swim back to the rivers that their parents had lived in.
Once there, they’d feed, grow fat darkening to a dark grey colour. They’d be much larger by this time and ready for their long swim back to the Sargasso to breed.
I’d collected lot of these eels with my bucket, and by just dipping it into the water near them. As water had flowed into the bucket, so had they, it wasn’t at all hard to catch them.
It is impossible today, for me to tell how many eels there were in the stream mouth, as there were hundreds of thousands. However, I do know that the last time I visited when they should have been swarming, there were none that I saw, and that was maybe three decades ago.
Having captured some, I would return slowly to my waiting father who would be sitting in the sun keeping an eye on me, and then we’d watch them for a while.
He always encouraged me to let them go, but I have to admit to remembering that I once waited too long, and they had died from the suns heating of the water in the bucket.
This is my earliest memory of death, as when I had poured them back into the river later, and they’d not wriggled away. I’d enquired of the reason why, and my father had explained about death, and I had been quite startled.
With this memory of bucket and spade, also stirs my first memory of jealousy, because around this time, there became available square buckets with built in turrets at each corner.
I never did have one of these buckets, but as a small child I can remember my envy of other children who had these buckets. It was just a tiny desire to have the ease that these brought for building sandcastles, but it was jealousy.
Luckily for me, I lost all interest in what others had been given or bought early on. I was happy for friends who were happy, but often I chose a different path, and wanted different things in life to them. I guess you might call me sensitive now, as I enjoyed being on my own, painting, drawing and writing’ I also had a fascination for the company of women, and avoided football, drinking and other so called manly pursuits.
This wasn’t inherited from my father’s genes, as he enjoyed a pint, loved watching football, and supported Arsenal is I remember correctly. The interest in women? That definitely came from my father’s side, that I do know, as he actively encouraged me to have girlfriends when I was at an early age.
Lack of jealousy? I count myself lucky that I’m not in constant competition with neighbours and friends over possessions, keeping up with the Jones. In my mind, this can only lead to sadness, and I seek to lead to a constantly happy life and have no time to worry about what others have chosen to do with their lives. That isn’t to say that I take no notice of their lives, but I’m contented to be happy for them, if they feel they’re filling their desires.
I’ve suffered so called friends who constant vie to be ahead of me, and I have always let them slip away.
This lack of jealousy did make me more inclined to play by myself as I wasn’t competitive, and just found my own company healthier.
So, although I had a lot of acquaintances, I didn’t have many close friends in my childhood.
A lot of my acquaintances had absolutely no idea who I was inside, and I just didn’t care, quite often going out with the intention of staying on my own.
So, without further ado, onto the older memories that I have of the beach.
The next is set in the winter, I’m about four, and it’s certainly before I even started school.
It was cold and stormy day; my mother had dressed me in a royal blue duffle coat ready to go out for a walk with my father and the dogs.
I remember leaving my parents bungalow on the hill above the beach, it had been very blustery. My father was holding me by one hand, and his other hand was concerned with our three long haired black and tan standard dachshunds.
They were pulling his arm out as they attempted to beat each other to the beach and were dragging him along behind them.
I don’t remember what I was wearing on my bottom half, but I do know that I had on short red wellies. I also remember that my father was wearing his sage green naval duffle coat, with a dark navy blue bottle hat, and large dark green wellingtons.
I was being somewhat hauled along by my father, as the Dachshunds progressed and pulled at my father arm. As they neared the seaside, they had yipped their way more and more confidently to the beach.
We only had to cross one road at the bottom of the hill and then a hundred yards later, we’d be by the sand.
We’d not gone onto the left side however, we had crossed the road bridge and then walked out on the right-hand side of the beach.
As a child, and all the way through growing up, I called this side of the beach, ‘The Rocky Side’, the other, ‘The Sandy Side’.
The rocky side was just a narrow strip of sand by the river side, the low cliffs of Trevelgue head on the other side.
The sea had been halfway in, and the beach in some places was covered to a depth of three feet with a deep cream coloured sea foam. It had been generated by the winds whipping up the heavy winter seas.
The top of the foam had dirt covering, and if you got it on your clothes, it stuck and stained them.
The dogs had been released from their leashes, and were dashing alongside the cliffs, but keeping well back from the foam.
Leaving me to play on the sand, my father had taken up a position on a bladder wrack covered rock and was currently gazing out to sea.
The river had been on the side furthest of the rock, so well away from me. I couldn’t see it though, because of the foam.
I remember I had felt the need to be up on the rock with my father, see what he was looking at, and so, I had climbed up.
I was maybe four feet from where he stood with his back to me, and I’d attempted in my little wellies, to walk over to him.
My boots had slipped, I’d stumbled, and slid down under the foam and into the river.
As I’d gone under, I’d screamed in fright, but under the foam, and in the water of the river with the incoming tide, I’d a mouthful of dirty water, and was panicking because I couldn’t breathe now.
I wasn’t in that predicament for more than a few seconds, because of course my father jumped in and hauled me out by the hood of my duffle coat.
He’d dropped me back to the beach like a floundering fish, and checked me to see that I was okay, and then used his handkerchief to clean up my face and clear my nostrils.
He was of course, none too pleased at my adventure, but as he had been responsible for looking after me, he knew that he’d be in trouble with my mother as soon we got home to mother.
My father had rounded up the dogs, and then he’d marched me back home, and he’d been right, mother had berated him for a long time, as she had stripped and then bathed me.
He couldn’t have hidden what had happened to me, as my duffle coat was thoroughly wet through, and also covered in messy foam, so the moment my mother’s eyes had alighted in me, he was in the poop.
It took my father quite a while to live that particular incident down. Whenever he took me out for the next few months, he was admonished before we had even left the house. Although he kept more of an idea on me now, he never really curtail my freedom, and I had many happy hours with him on the sand as you’ll find out.
You would think that as I had decided to learn to swim, and the fact that I lived right by a huge body of water, and a had my father who was such a good swimmer, that all would be easy. How wrong you would be though, I managed to learn to swim in tiny stages, nothing as straightforward as you would have expected.
So, here I note the people who actually helped me to swim…
Dorothy Sweet.
Firstly, Dorothy Sweet, a bubbly large breasted teacher in the secondary school I attended. Affectionately called ‘Dotty’ by us kids, she was one of the teachers who accompanied us on the trip to France in my first year of being in Treviglas school. So just before the summer holidays, off we went in an old coach, caught a ferry across to France and travelled to our first port of call ‘Dinard’. It’s a coastal town on a river, that was twinned with Newquay in the early days of the UK joining the Common Market. I believe that there may be still a sign on entering Newquay that proclaims this alliance, but I haven’t been in or out of Newquay by that road in years. I guess now that Brexit has been accomplished, that the signage will be removed, and local councillors who enjoyed their trips across the channel, will have to make do with having their public paid for holidays somewhere else.
Dinard was nice, a bit like Newquay, but better, and in France. We visited the first Olympic sized swimming pool I had ever seen. On the pool side, Dotty soon discovered that my friend ‘Codger’ and myself, couldn’t swim at all. Clad in a one-piece low-cut swimsuit, she had me to place my head between her voluminous wet breasts, and then hanging onto her rounded figure, I got to kick my legs as she dragged me across the shallow end. I can assure you that the rest of the trip, I was teased unmercifully by my pals for having my face in such close proximity to her cleavage. However, Dotty did get me dog paddling before we left the pool that afternoon and was responsible for starting me trusting water again. Without Dotty’s time and tuition, I’d never have sailed, swum, snorkelled and eventually dived in the ocean. The sea has given me constant pleasure nearly all my life and was with great sadness that in the Indian Ocean, on an island in the Maldives, that I discovered I could no longer swim due to my dystrophy.
I arrived home from France, and then it was suddenly summer holidays, and my father taught me to surf out in the rollers on Whipsiderry beach. Here in the soft summer sun, salt spray and grinding sand beneath my feet, I found a rare true happiness. Catching a wave and having the rushing, crashing glistening white water caressing my sides as I thundered up the beach was a delight almost hard to put into words. The sound of the sand as it was dragged by the fury of the wave, the sight of its yellow flakes lifting in the water, and the sting of it on my legs and chest, this made me feel almost invincible. At twelve, there were lots of exciting things ahead for me, riding motorcycles at speed, girls, sex and travel. Surfing, swimming, sailing and being in the water generally, has always stayed with me, and I found a calmness just by sitting and watching the ocean, hearing it, smelling it. To someone who maybe hasn’t had the same upbringing as myself, it is hard to quantify the Atlantic Ocean, and the peace that this mass of water brought me.
John Dyer.
The next person who helped me to finally swim, and I think they are largely unaware of this, was John Dyer, a lad who lived two doors from me. He was older than me, not by much, but nonetheless, enough to be ahead of me in all things. I liked John immensely, some friends you are in constant competition with, but in John I had a friend who I secretly adored. It is strange to be writing about my memories and finally realising how much I loved being with him.
He and I were on a cusp, me graduating from child to young man, and he already having risen over that ridge. This particular summer, John started snorkelling, and I wanted to go with him. I was surprised, as when I talked to my father of my want to go snorkelling with John, he agreed immediately. Now of course I understand that my father saw John who was older than me, as a sensible steading hand for me. John agreed I could go with him, and my father bought me a mask, snorkel and as I called them, flippers. For the rest of that summer, a good warm, still watered summer, I was in nirvana. When the tide was in the right place, I would, with John, go snorkelling in a small cove that was set into the righthand side of Porth. The bladderwrack would hand in the water, with small fish darting amongst its fronds as I watched crabs on the bottom. Large shoals of fish passed by the entrance to the cove, hanging almost within the touch of my fingers. With the tide in, the sands were magically transformed in an undersea wonderland, one I could almost imagine a mermaid inhabiting. We never ventured out of the cove, we didn’t need to, but when John had enough of snorkelling, and wanted to go home, I always left the water reluctantly. By the end of the summer, with the aid of the fins, and Johns pushing me, I could actually swim fairly well. Just following John around exercised my legs, and I could swim fairly well in breaststroke.
Elsie Tucker – known to me, as Mrs Tucker.
Come the end of the summer, my father who had walked out along the cliffs occasionally and watched me, broke the news that he and two others were forming the Newquay swimming club. The idea was to teach as many twelve- to fourteen-year-olds to swim. Newquay had no swimming pool of its own, the school I attended, had a very small one. So, lessons commenced at the school pool on Thursday evenings with my two for the sports teachers and my father teaching. When the weather got colder, the lessons were moved to a large indoor pool at a tourist site just outside of Perranporth. This pool was ten miles away, and we had to get there by coach, and there was a small fee. Apart from the rental of the pool, and the fuel for the old school coach, any monies left over from a small fee levied for the nights training, went into a fun for a pool for Newquay. My endearing memory of those evenings was the smell of chlorine, the taste of Heinz oxtail soup out of a flask on the way home in the coach, and Mrs Tucker. When my father had formed the club, he had done so with a colleague, and at the meeting at the school when they had asked locals if they would support such an idea, they had asked for a female volunteer for the girls.
Not one woman stood up, not one, and there were plenty of mothers there. I knew from what I had overheard my father saying before the meeting, that they needed at least one woman who could go into the pool with the girls. If not, one came forward, it would mean that girls would have to be excluded from the swimming lessons. At the main doors into the school assembly hall, where the meeting was being held, there was a bit of a commotion. I remember the woman who stepped through the crowd apologising that she was a little late that evening. She had dark curling hair, and wore dark rimmed glasses, she looked a determined to me as a very young man. My father invited her up on to the stage where my father, his colleague and some teachers were seated, and then heroically said she would be happy to fill the position. Her name Mrs Tucker, I only ever knew her as Mrs Tucker as young people were much more respectful of their elders back then, and to start with I was even a little scared of her.
I laugh now looking back, but I soon found her to be a really good laugh, and in the water at the pool, she taught me to swim the crawl, one of the more valuable styles, especially in the sea when it’s rough. Mrs Tucker was always up for a bit of a laugh, and she never told us off too harshly for mucking around and left me with a very endearing memory of her in her black one-piece alongside the pool shouting encouragement to myself and others as we attempted to swim stronger under her tuition.
And so, summer came around, and my skill in swimming was much better, I’m thirteen now, and John and I venture into the cove once more. As the school holidays progressed, I noticed John’s attention wasn’t on snorkelling so much, and he had a hankering for a malibu board. As the weeks slipped by, he got a board, and with another friend, started surfing. For me, the summer adventures in snorkelling didn’t stop, but now I ventured out of the cove. Firstly, I turned to the right, and slowly over a few days made my way to the entrance of Porth. Here by the side of the low cliffs I encountered right red spider crabs, clinging to the rocks by the long spiny legs.
I spent a lot of time hanging in those deeper clear waters, lifting with the swell and falling back, watching large fish hanging in the entrance to the cove. The sea was maybe twenty feet deep out here, and I’d catch glimpses of sparkling flickers near the surface, eventually realising that these were fast-moving hunting mackerel. One such afternoon, as I was just enjoying the feeling of almost flying above the sandy bottom, I saw a massive shadow on the sand that appeared to be approaching me. Looking across the water, instead of down, I had the shock of seeing a very large shark heading towards me lazily. Here at the entrance to Porth, I encountered a massive basking shark as it flicked its tail, turned and then drifted past with his enormous mouth wide open trawling the sea for its plankton dinner. As it passed, its eye rolled in its head to get a better view of me, and I swear that it looked quite friendly. I now wonder that I didn’t poop my swimming shorts that day, but I was so intense on watching the shark, that I never thought that its bulky body and powerful tail might harm me. I’ve swum with shark since, in other oceans, but I never felt fear as they were well fed, and I stayed away from them. But that day, the feeling of flight, and on meeting what to me was a giant of the deep, I felt ecstatic, more alive than when I had entered the water. And that is one of the things the sea did for me later in life, I felt it healed me, made me less stressed, and more at ease with my life.
Another week later, I slid through under the bridge across to the island on the righthand side of Porth. There’s a small island here, ‘Gull Rock’. A solid bit of volcanic rock, topped with sedimentary rock, and then a topping of soil. It stands only a hundred yards from Porth island, but it is the last land until ‘Lion Rock’ halfway to Watergate. At high tide, the water is twenty to thirty feet deep, and it’s unprotected from Newquay bay. Around the island I saw different species of deeper water fish, rays, monkfish, large plaice, huss, red coloured pollack, hake, gurnard and wrasse.
Here in those waters, over a few years, I experienced a sunfish, a massive, short torpedo shaped fish, which I never saw again until I was in the Indian Ocean. I also, with a close friend, encountered a massive jellyfish as on its side it slowly pulsed its way back out to deeper waters. I’m six feet six inches tall, and as I swam across its front, my fellow snorkeller told me it was wider than I was tall, a truly amazing sight. It was a plain white, no excitement of colour, and none believed us when we returned home, and yet recently, one has drawn the attention of the local news, and which was as big, if not bigger than the one we swam with.
Even today the ocean has amazing sights still hidden from us, and I remember my father explaining how he had seen huge black and white flying shapes as the ship he was in arrived in the Southern Ocean off South Africa. Many years later, I swam and watched manta rays feeding and being groomed on a tiny coral atoll in the Indian Ocean, on returning to the land, I saw them jumping, and arcing in the sun, drops of silvered water flying behind as they left the water. It was then I realised what my father had seen in the early 30’s, and his tale, it was then I realised that his encouragement to go into the water, and to explore the world around me, had brought me full circle back to his tale.
Walking by the sea, or indeed a river, has been a constant in my life until I became too ill, and even now I like to trundle alongside the little stream in the gardens at Trenance. I have climbed the cliffs of Cornwall with, and without rope, climbed the UK mountains in bright sunlight and in freezing snow, but nothing has given me such pleasure of being underwater. Snorkelling was my main source of interacting with the undersea world. Not needing or relying on much equipment, just fins, mask and snorkel in the bright sunlight of a nice summer day, was my preferred way of enjoying the ocean. I was therefore sad to have to give up snorkelling in 2007, when I found that I no longer had the muscularity to hold myself in the water due to my speedily progressing condition. When Sharon had helped me stumbling from the warm waters of Biyadhoo, I knew that I would never go back to the island to slip beneath those crystal waters, and that broke my heart. It was especially hard because Sharon had only just grown to appreciate being under the water with me, and she now revelled in my lifetime hobby. There can be no more of a cruel fate, than to have my passion at long last accepted by my beloved wife, and then have given it up forever, such is life though.
Your foot print will cross my ghost in golden grains of sand
From beneath the Duvet 