. . . on where the brass band plays tiddly om-pom-pom
YOU COULD CHECK the tide, whether it’s in or out or somewhere in between, but there’d be no fun in that. Better to drive down and be surprised by whatever the water is doing today. The sea spills into view. Close as you like and twinkling in the glow of this all-of-a-sudden summer. A proper crowded beach scene, like a foreign holiday postcard – just with whiter skin, and only a handful of bikinis, beautifully engineered two pieces worn by the very young or those with nothing to hide.
You are not dressed for the beach. Apart from a hastily shoved-on pair of flip-flops. You wear sun absorbing black from head to toe and you don’t care. You’ve always dressed for sunny weather in a confused, makey-uppy sort of way and anyway there’s a woman in a burka sitting smiling on the rocks. You grin at her in solidarity. She smiles serenely back.
Then you are hauling the bags down the sandy stone steps, the same steps you raced down as a child nearly every day of every summer, which were always this hot in your memory even though your mother, perched on a rock in a flower print dress says, “not every summer, not like this”.
So many bags for one brief visit. This is because you are in the company of two ecstatic three-year-olds who might at any moment decide that their favourite yellow bucket will not do and that, in fact, they need the orange bucket with the turrets or the one shaped like a turtle as a matter of some urgency. So you pack all the spades and all the buckets and you pack more towels than the Olympic swimming team and you cram in two spare pairs of everything just in case.
You shimmy the girls into their hand-me-down togs, one pair fits perfectly, the other is too big and sags slightly. The sight of this one racing into the shallow water, togs flapping about her legs, makes your heart ache slightly, a dull, happy kind of pang.
“Where’s your togs, Mum?” the other one calls and you make up some story about an accidentally-left-behind swimsuit but you know that some day soon you are going to have to get over yourself and wear togs once more on the beach where long ago it didn’t cost you a thought.
The pair of them start singing. “Oh I do like to be beside the seaside . . . where the brass band plays tiddly om-pom-pom” and you take out the camera, hardly believing that you have two children doing an imitation of the doggy paddle here in the same spot where years ago you were thrown with love into the Big Cockle Lake by your father who called this seaside baptism Learning To Swim. You click away not caring if the good camera gets splashed because you want to capture them here, pretending to swim in front of the red and white towers, two totems of the best days of your childhood.
There’s food in the bags. You don’t come to this beach without supplies. Their father has made some of his world-famous Mars bar buns and there are cheese sandwiches and a flask of coffee poured into proper mugs. From the rock my mother remembers back in the day boiling potatoes until they were nearly done, draining the water, putting the pot of spuds in the pram and walking with us all to the strand. By the time we got there the steam would have worked its magic and there’d be handfuls of warm fluffy potatoes to stuff into your face while the sun shone. Or she’d pack the whole Sunday dinner in tinfoil and you’d sit there swaddled in towels opening the silver-wrapped portions of roast potatoes and beef. And when you were older a single of Borza’s chips still warm, if you ran fast enough, by the time you plonked down on the sand.
No need to walk far for a swim today. After a while one of them, the one with the runny nose, says she’s had enough and runs out to get dry in her Nanny’s arms. The other one won’t come out, says she wants to stay there all day and all night and forever. Eventually she’s had enough too and there are snacks and stories and sandcastles and moats filled by the still incoming tide.
You get ready to leave and that’s when, dry and dressed, one of them runs back towards the water and she is too quick or you are too slow and suddenly she is sitting, smile as wide as the Big Cockle Lake, with her dress floating all around her. Another change of clothes, everything gathered into the bags, the regulation something forgotten exclaimed over, this time the sun cream. Walking back to the car is like walking out of a dream. Amazing how you can think a time and a place is gone and then, like driftwood or yesterday’s togs, you see all of it swimming to the surface again.
In other news . . . with so many female singers warbling in their undergarments nowadays, comedy trio The Nualas considered wearing only thongs for their next gig – they reckon they could have sold out for a month that way. Instead, they’ve opted for ‘One Night of Dignity’ in Vicar Street, Dublin on June 8th. Tickets available from Ticketmaster. thenualas.com