As soon as I saw the
lighthouse half a mile ahead, I knew I’d been to Withernsea before, many, many
years ago, when the children were small.
I found the caravan site with the greatest difficulty and booked
in. It was 3 ‘o’ clock on a glorious
Monday afternoon in early October, and we were expecting a hint of luxury from
our ‘bronze’ caravan. What we got was a hint of the barrack-room. The caravan we
had been allocated, on the curiously-named Nutmeg Grove, must have been all of
twenty years old. It smelt of stale
sweat and rancid tobacco. The kitchen
blind wouldn’t work, the shower fittings came away in my hand, the taps were on
their last legs, the moquette on the collapsing seats was ripped in several
places and we had to send out for a man to light the boiler and change the gas
bottle.
The caravan park itself was
seedy and run-down, as befits these places at the end of the season. The grass was tired, the caravans faded and
peeling. The place, which held at least 300 caravans and was the size of six football pitches, was more or less
empty. As if to compensate, the weather
was beautiful. The sky was as clear as
spring water and the sun shone down warmly.
Later, after a meagre dinner
cooked on a gas cooker whose knobs had no markings on them to tell which gas
one was lighting, I took the dog for a walk.
Across the road from the caravan park was a large stretch of ugly
grassland leading to the sea. A number of minuscule paths criss-crossed the
untidy grass. We walked seawards but
this was no path to the beach. We came to the edge of crumbling cliffs with a
drop of eighty feet to the sea below. We
hurriedly retraced our steps. We walked
into the town. By now, the light was
fading but it was bright enough to see how dilapidated the town centre was,
with its betting shops and shabby mixed goods emporia, selling mainly tat. We
wandered back in darkness. The people
whom we passed were generally pretty scary – mainly shaven-headed men with
menacing faces. Most looked like Bill
Sikes. The streets leading back to the van were at right-angles to the sea.
They were small fishermen’s and artisans’ cottages. The street names were picked out attractively
with glazed tiles, a tile to each letter.
There was one extraordinary cottage on Hubert Street
