ULTIMOTION

Day four of four

I drew back the curtains of the bedroom and looked out on another glorious day.  The sun shone, the wind blew, the temperature was modestly high.  I took the dog to the promenade.  This day, she didn’t much like the roar of the sea, the crashing of the waves, or the giddy breeze in her face.  She sought the shelter of wooden fences and garden walls wherever she could. Three more ships had joined the solitary one from the previous day.  The wind tugged at my hair and my shirt collar, and my jacket flapped about like a bird caught in netting.  The sea, brown two days ago, black yesterday, was steel-grey today with patches of gold where the sun’s rays settled on the surface.

I heard hammering on the lower promenade and I looked over and saw workmen making something out of wood.  An unshaven, unkempt little man with an equally unkempt little dog said: ‘The sea wall’s damaged.  They’re making up timber shutters.  They fix them to the sea wall and pour concrete slurry into them. These harden after a few days.  By then, the men have moved on to the next damaged piece.  They work all the year.’  

The wind reached gale force at the southern end of the promenade, and lumps of foam were again being tossed high into the air.  Not wishing to have my glasses covered in salt again, I headed back through the town. There was shelter from the breeze and the sun was warm on our backs. The noise of the motor traffic was no worse than the roar of the sea.  I checked my pedometer when we got back to the caravan.  We had covered four and a half miles.

After coffee, wife, dog and I drove to the inland lighthouse.  The sign approaching Withernsea had read ‘Please visit the lighthouse.’  The lighthouse was shut.  The sign should have read: ‘Please visit the lighthouse, except in autumn and winter, when you needn’t bother.’  We went to the library instead, a modern, bright and airy building. In a book of photographs there, I saw that the location of the old Withernsea railway station was just behind the library, adjacent to the promenade.  We walked there.  The site was now a boatyard, but the municipal buildings, the reference point in the ancient photograph, showed that I was in the right place.  You could have disembarked from the train and walked literally fifty yards to the beach.

After a sandwich lunch in the neat and pretty memorial gardens, we drove to Hornsea, famous for its pottery.  I’d been there before, but the place looked totally unfamiliar to me.  To be fair, there had been a gap of some 25 years, but Hornsea didn’t look as if it had changed much.  It’s an attractive little town, redolent with cafes and restaurants.  It has a picturesque little parish church with its quota of ancient graves: ‘Here lie the mortal remains of Tommy Woodhead, departed this earth 7 July 1821’. We drove back to Withernsea along a twisty ‘B’ road.  It was dinner time.

We took our last walk, the dog and I, straight after dinner, to ensure we returned before dark.  I had to see the boiling sea one last time. Clouds were gathering and it was noticeably colder. We strolled as far as the lifeboat station and turned back.  As I passed the pier head gateway castles, I noticed a long bench which contained some narrative.  There the mystery of the vanishing pier was resolved.  The two gateways were modelled on Conwy Castle, in Wales.  The pier had been built in the 1870s and was originally 1200 feet long. It had proved very popular – you paid a penny to gain entrance to it.  The storms of late Victorian era were many and furious. Several times ships were driven into various bits of the pier, and once these sections were demolished, they were never rebuilt. The end came in a terrible storm in 1897 in which a Grimsby cargo vessel carrying a huge load of timber broke in two and went down with all hands. The timber was driven by the storm straight into the remaining slender wrought-iron stanchions and all but 50 feet of the structure was swept away. The rest was demolished in 1903 when the promenade was being built. The gateways remained, apparently unique amongst British piers.

And so, very early the next morning, we undertook the long drive home and waved bye-bye to this quirky and likeable town, with its storms, its fanciful pier gateways guarding a non-existent pier, its long promenade, its wooden groynes, its maroon and cream buses, its screaming winds and that massive, rolling sea.  Four days simply wasn’t long enough and, in the honeyed words of Mr Schwarzenegger: “I’ll be back.” 

Footnote

In the library, I had picked up the ‘Holderness Gazette.’ On the front page was the truly awful story of how Suzie the dog had met her end.  She wasn’t run over, as I had imagined.  She had been disembowelled and had her left back leg removed by one of those large Chinese mutts with jowls like Alfred Hitchcock.  A man at the scene described Suzie’s terrible screams that he said would stay with him for the rest of his life.  They rushed Suzie to the vet, and he had no choice but to end her pain with a lethal injection.  The Chinese dog’s owner, a woman, was arrested and charged with keeping a dangerous dog, which will no doubt result in a piffling sentence.  The Chinese dog is in a Police pound, until a decision is taken on its future, which is not likely to be a long one.