Oh what a holiday!
Whitley Bay, a land of unknown riches! For once, the weather has been
glorious – a hot and hazy sun beaming down on this dreary and slightly careworn
caravan park. It used to be called
‘Feathers’ when I was a lad, but a conglomerate now owns it, and it now sports
a rather more posh and inappropriate name.
The caravans in our section are old and faded, like ancient filing
cabinets stored away in a long-forgotten files repository. The grass is long
and neglected. It’s punctuated by great drifts of golden dandelions and
coquettish daisies. There is hardly any space between the caravans. You could reach out and shake hands with your
neighbour in the same fashion as you could in seventeenth century London. As long as the sun shines, and it stays hot,
it doesn’t matter.
It’s mid-morning. In the distance there is the sound of a
petrol strimmer, so the grass is getting some attention after all. It drowns out the lusty warbling of the
skylarks in an adjacent farmer’s field.
Earlier, I took the little black dog towards St Mary’s Island. The tide was in and the causeway to the famous lighthouse was covered
with water. We took one of the numerous
trails that skirt the edge of steep cliffs that plunge a hundred feet down to
the water’s edge. We ended up at Old Hartley, marked by the Delaval Arms, once
a busy public house popular with bikers, now seemingly derelict. It looked as if some work was being done on
the interior, as a man in a blue sweat-shirt was up a ladder in one of the
windowless attic rooms.
On the way back, on a different, narrower trail, I met a
woman of fairly advanced years leaning on a rail at the edge of the cliff.
‘Don’t jump!’ I said
to her and she laughed.
‘I’m just wondering if I can climb down those steep steps
and let the dog have a run on the beach.’ ‘It’s easy to get down,’ I replied,
‘But you have to get back up.’
‘I’ll take it slowly, and one step at a time.’ She said it
without irony.
I had brought my camera, and had taken several snaps of the
lighthouse on the island. Most of my
photographs are dismal and extremely tedious,
but as I focused again, this time directly into the sun, a man wandered into
view. Both he and the lighthouse were in
silhouette and the sea was sparkling and shimmering with the rays of the sun,
so the context for the image was just right, so I pressed the shutter.
Remarkably, when I later transferred the image to my laptop, it came out
perfectly.
As we passed the car park, a coach pulled up and a phalanx
of little children clambered out excitedly, eager to see the island and the
lighthouse. Their teacher lined them up
into a crooked crocodile and gave them the signal for ‘Quick March’.
‘They’ll have to swim for it’, I said wryly,
to no-one in particular.
