Memories of “The Sea, The Sea”

Neither Xenophon or Iris Murdoch can do justice to the feelings we have about the sea. There’s something magic about the way it feels when you look at it. If you sail on it, you always respect its behaviour. 

I was not born by the sea and we only live half our time by the sea at the moment but both my parents came from the East coast of England. This was where I spent much of my early years. I can remember my first fishing trip out to sea watching lines being thrown over and then hauled in and getting very wet whilst all the fishermen grinned at me. I have no idea why I was there as I must have been about four years old. It must have been a family ritual introducing me to Poseidon. 

Other memories of the Essex coast were watching “doodle bugs”, as we called the “Vengeance 1” V1 rockets, pass over the coast on their way to London where we lived. In London it was terrifying to hear the motors of these things stop before diving towards the ground and exploding. We were glad to be staying on the coast which was not a target at the time. 

I loved the backwaters more than the seafront. They were a network of winding waterways through which we would travel to places like Stone Point where we ruffled the wet sand for cockles. Of course, it was a haven for bird watchers although my family were more interested in shooting them for food than watching them. 

We had an unlimited supply of large fresh eggs while we were on the coast as the family kept chickens. If my grandfather visited us in London, he would arrive with a brace of wild birds, which he had shot. We hoped that nobody had to sit next to him on the train. In London, like most other families, we kept rabbits which formed the majority of our ration-free meat supply.

My grandfather was coxswain of the lifeboat and I remember him receiving details by ‘phone when the lifeboat had to go to the aid of a vessel in distress. The coastguard would then fire off the maroon and members of the crew would “run for the boat” from wherever they were at the time. Some fishermen would take other jobs during the cold season. When enough of the crew had arrived they would jump into a small boat and head for the lifeboat that was anchored someway off the pier. 

My uncle Franck was a fisherman and I can remember him as bowman bouncing up and down on the very buoyant lifeboat bow as he handled the mooring before the boat set off on its rescue. He later became coxswain himself and, like his father, received many commendations for bravery and of course seamanship. 

The seas off the Essex coast can get rough. Each time the weather worsened, we knew that somewhere a boat or ship would sometimes run into difficulties and the coastguard would receive a distress call. After hearing the maroon, people would assemble on the sea front to see off the crew as the lifeboat bounced like a cork on its way to the rescue. Here is a history of the Walton lifeboat in photographs showing the brave men who served on it. There is one picture of my grandfather and two including my Uncle Frank.

Later on, I crewed for my Uncle Frank and I can remember the bitter cold just before dawn when I had the job of starting the Lister diesel by hand with a large flywheel. We caught lobsters using an ancient method apparently only employed on the Essex coast. We would motor out from the backwaters until we were a few miles from the coast and then lay a line of round baited hoops with nets below on one of the North Sea banks. Lobsters on these banks, which were seldom fished, would immediately scramble for the baits until we came round and yanked the cable hard so they fell into the bottom of the net. We had to continue pulling in the cable very fast to prevent the lobsters from escaping. Other fishermen would simply lay inshore lobster pots which needed a slow very hard haul to get them into the boat so that the lobsters could be taken out and the pot rebaited. 

Besides fishing I managed the local amusement arcade on the pier and sold toffee popcorn on the prom. I also took a blue jacket job at Butlins Holiday Camp down the coast in Clacton. This was a strange job because I simply had to supervise the food going between the kitchen and the waitresses. I had a pleasant surprise when I worked there as the waitresses handed me huge amounts of money at the end of each week. When I enquired how this could be, a friend informed me quietly that the waitresses offered extra services to the husbands on their family tables and they could blackmail them into giving extremely large tips which they shared with me. 

I was also amused by the man with whom I shared a Butlin’s hut. On my arrival, I knocked on the door and before he opened the door he shouted out, “Do you like Stan Getz?”. I obviously shouted back, “Yes!” To which he answered, “You’re not worthy to like Stan Getz!” This love of Stan Getz was echoed later on when I met George Martin, producer of some of the best innovative pop recordings with The Beatles, in his brand new studio above Oxford Circus. His very first recording session in his very own studio was not a pop recording; it was a recording of Stan Getz. He was definitely worthy to like Stan Getz.

After working through the Summer, I often took a few weeks off touring the Mediterranean Sea coast. I can still remember getting off the train on my first visit to the French Riviera and climbing the hill to the hostel. The view was amazing but, after my first dip into that warm sea, I resolved never to endure the cold waters of the North Sea again. 

Year after year I travelled the whole coast of Italy down to Sicily’s Palermo and Agrigento then I did the same around the coast of Crete and Gavdos then the Cyclades travelling by night from island to island. 

In England, I seemed to have spent more time by the coast than in London. However, we were always excited as the train left Frinton before arriving at Walton. “The Sea! The Sea!” we would shout as the train ran along the clifftops before approaching Walton station. 

My school was also by the sea on top of the White Cliffs of Dover. Sometimes I could look out of a window during a class and see Calais across the channel. At weekends, we would explore the cliffs and sometimes play the organ in Dover Castle chapel. We never actually enjoyed the sea except for some beach landings as part of army exercises. 

But I was most happy when I was able to go to a university that not only had mountains but was also by the sea. I was even able to take up rowing on the sea. In fact we rowed fours on the sea and eights in the river heads and regattas. 

My first permanent job was to a city on the sea and my second was to a city on Port Phillip Bay Australia. There we even joined the Royal Melbourne Yacht Squadron and spent every weekend sailing in the bay or out into the Bass Strait. I also competed in the Wednesday races with a sailmaker so we sailed a different boat each week. Members would sit in the bar busily drinking beer until the barman called “Workboat”, at which time everybody would stagger down the steps to be transported to their boats. It seemed a miracle to me that their boats usually managed to avoid each other assuming that they managed to find the race start in the first place. 

Moving back to England, we enjoyed the Devon and Cornwall coast from Topsham, our base near Exeter. Here, our house even had its own mooring. It was from here that some of the ships left to face the Spanish Armada but its attraction for us were the birds on the estuary mud and the surrounding fields. The coastal areas of the West of England were very attractive and their history was fascinating. 

We also spent a lot of time in St Joseph Michigan, USA. This was not on the sea but on one of the Great Lakes. One year we spent time in Montecito a very exclusive enclave full of film stars we thought were dead near Santa Barbara for the Summer. This is where we first discovered that the sea in California is even colder than Britain’s North Sea. 

Our next residence was in a beach house in Noosa Queensland Australia. It was on one of  a number of islands in an offshoot of the Noosa River. This area is well known for its lack of high rise buildings and its National Park with spectacular beaches. Although the entrance to the Noosa River was routinely dredged, the depth was maintained at a sufficiently shallow level to deter cruising yachts from visiting the town. This meant that fishing groups returning to port would all have stand on the bow to enable the propellor to clear the bar. The river ran through a couple of lakes and the area beyond was called the Noosa Everglades in an effort to attract tourists. There are no alligators in Australia and crocodiles do not come as far south as Noosa yet. 

My next residence was in an ancient flat built into the roof of a chapel in the centre of Florence. This was nowhere near the sea so my next port of call was Venice which is at least surrounded by water. Once again, we were in an ancient dwelling which was, I discovered, an outbuilding of the palace where Richard Wagner died. Venetians preferred more contemporary interiors so estate agents were very reluctant to even show this type of primitive residence to us. We never took the expensive gondolas but often took the traghetto over the Grand Canal.

Our next residence was on Whidbey Island north of Seattle, USA. The views of mountains East and West were spectacular and the coast around the island was very attractive. Many people living there were happy to be far from the busy streets of Seattle and the excellent freeways around the area. There was an efficient ferry which allowed easy access to the parts people were apparently trying to avoid. But the water was extremely cold. Another feature of the island was that Boeing based nearby would test each of its new planes by flying them round the island. I even met a qualified pilot who flew each new plane around the island and told me he had never flown anywhere else. That was difficult to believe. 

Our next move was to deal with the deficiencies of Whidbey, beautiful as it was. We needed a warmer climate and a warmer sea temperature. We both knew of a very civilised city in Florida called Sarasota so we moved down there and managed to find a beautiful townhouse a few hundred yards from the bay. Travelling to and from orchestral concerts in Seattle from Whidbey Island had taken hours but we could walk to the Sarasota concert hall in five minutes. The opera house was a ten minute walk away. Most important was the fact that Gulf beaches on Lido Key were a mere three miles away. Perfect! 

In England, we moved to Cambridge, physically a tiny town. It doesn’t have a decent concert hall like Sarasota but has had a vast influence on the hi-tec and biotec advances in the world. There are many beautiful walks along the Cam River which quickly take us out of the town. You can walk East West across the town from green fields to green  fields on the other side in a couple of hours although the town is expanding in a southerly direction. 

Like Sarasota, we have a townhouse on the outskirts of Cambridge. Not being very near the coast, we take trips to my boyhood haunts in Walton and Frinton on the Essex coast and Aldburgh on the Suffolk coast. The sea still draws us to the coast.

But when our car approaches Walton or Aldeburgh, I still feel like shouting out, “The Sea! The Sea!”.