Andrew Bailey
The Apparent Futility Of Bravery
Twenty year old Veterans, broken Upon war’s iniquitous Catherine wheel, Will never be the same again. When battle scarred or limbless, They try to make adjustments In their shattered lives which, With bravery and fortitude, They may succeed in doing
The familiar cry tells us that The dead are often better off. I do not believe that can be so. The dead young men believed That what they did supported justice And our right to be free. So, they gave their lives In selfless frightened courage For the greater good.
The image of man’s inhumanity haunts my every day, on every day I wake and draw my breath To ask a question – where is God In all this useless slaughter? Is it that He’s there but we, In all our twisted logic, Have chosen to ignore Him? Or has He given up on us As a ghastly unfulfilled experiment?
C:Bailey 2010
Summers By The Sea
When I was a child, 24 hours after the last school day had ended during the first week of July, my long summer days began at Paddington railway station, home to "God’s Wonderful Railway". It was there that the smell of burnt coal and steam was the smell of holiday journeys to the sea. The excitement was intense as we made our way through crowds of other holidaymakers - suit case laden parents and wild-eyed children - to find our reserved seats.
It wasn’t long before whistles blew, doors slammed, the guard waved his green flag and the mighty locomotive pulled its train of coaches from the station. It picked up speed slowly through the drab post-war suburbs of west London but it wasn’t long before there were green fields and we gained more speed. Then, the mad mute song of the up and down dancing trackside telegraph wires, slow and without tempo at first, began to match the clickety-click of metal wheels on metal rails. Westward we sped, through tunnels and cuttings, over viaducts and under bridges as smoke from the engine’s funnel made fleeting shadow patterns on the fields. Stations flashed by with names we had not the time to read. People waved at us from trackside footpaths and level crossings. Sheep and cattle fled from the roaring behemoth which carried us nearer and nearer to a children’s paradise.
Taunton, Somerset’s county town was the first stop and it was here that our long summer holiday really began .It was here that we changed for Dunster station on the branch line to the seaside town of Minehead. It was here that a friendly engine driver, with Edwardian whiskers and a big moustache, lifted a six-year-old boy up onto the footplate of his steam locomotive for the thrill of his young life. Most of the time, the branch line train was waiting for the train from Paddington but, on more than one occasion, we had to wait for the train. When that happened, we had the chance to watch non-stop trains with romantic names like The Cornish Riviera Express thunder through the buffeted station which trembled and shook. We squealed with delight at the awesome power and the deafening noise.
It took fifty minutes to reach Dunster station where we waited for Mr Lewis and his Buick taxi, The beach was over a mile away by road but less than
half that as the crow flies. We could see the rows of beach chalets - we called them huts - through the trees which bordered one side of the station yard. Beyond the beach huts, lay the Bristol Channel. Mr Lewis - "Lewis the Taxi" - was a thick set Welshman who came, originally, from Swansea. He wore thick horned rimmed glass and had a happy disposition. When he wasn’t driving large American cars about, he ran the grocery store at a little place called Lower Marsh, less than a mile from the station. He arrived in a car with seven seats to sit on and a box of groceries, ordered the week before, in a boot big enough for two more seats. That Buick made me feel very important as it purred its way along the narrow lane, winding at first and then straight to the beach.
It was always about 5pm when we were set down outside Granny Aspray’s hut which was number 180 out of a total of 184. The first task was to collect ice-cold fresh water in large metal jugs from a nearby standpipe, as there was no plumbing in any of the huts. Even the lavatories were a fifty-yard walk away.
Those standpipes were turned off at the end of October, when the last of the holidaymakers had gone and the huts were left shuttered and sightless; the beach deserted until the following spring. It all sounds rather primitive and, from a modern perspective, I suppose that it was. It didn’t seem to matter though as the beach was a summer time only sort of place and people were far less fussy than they are today.
After a cup of tea and whilst our parents unpacked the cases, my sister and I went off in search of last year's friends. These were children whose parents or grandparents also owned property on the beach and who, like us, spent most of the school summer holiday there. New friends came later.
At suppertime, the sun shone right though the half-open stable-type doors at the back of the hut and by the time we had finished eating, night clouds had built up over what was to become the Exmoor National Park. By nine o’clock, the western sky had turned pink as the sun began to set. Time, then, for a walk along the beach with mum and dad who, invariably, fell into conversation with other adults who may or may not have been their own holiday friends from the previous year. The sun sank lower, shadows lengthened and the twilight deepened but seemed to last forever. I remember standing with my father in that half light with a chill sea wind blowing, looking out over the channel towards the Welsh coast. The lights of the town of Barry shone across
the twelve-mile stretch of water and the lighthouses winked at us through the gathering darkness.
Eventually, it was time for bed and, as we crawled between the covers, the last train of the day gave a shrill whistle and pulled out of Dunster station bound for Taunton. It was the signal that the end of the day had come. It wasn’t long before two tired children were chasing the sandman across the counterpane canyons.
Each morning and very early, as night was chased away by another bright day, my sister and I would awake in our curtained-off beds in what was the sitting room when everyone was up and about. Tip-toe stealthy, we crept into our shorts and shirts, forgot our shoes and ran across the road, through the gaps between other beach huts, over sand which was cold between the toes, skirted sea grass sharp enough to cut young feet, tumbled down sand dunes and picked our way across foot testing large blue and grey stones to the sea. Over our heads, the thieving gulls swooped and screamed and cried before settling, chests puffed and proud, near the likeliest looking human being in case they could beg or steal breakfast.
It’s only right that childhood should carry with it many certainties. One of ours was that our parents never heard us as we crept out into that early time. We just knew that they slumbered on in the partitioned off bedroom with its hand embroidered Home Sweet Home above the bed, a faded Fragonard print on one of the walls, a ewer and basin on the marble topped wash stand under the window. I am equally certain now that, although we closed the door as quietly as we could, my father got up to make the first pot of tea of the day.
It’s funny but no matter how early we were, there were always other children on the beach. We would join them in building a castle wall to halt an incoming tide which was deaf to all our entreaties. Eventually, a solid wall of water crashed down on carefully constructed ramparts. We mourned the loss of new-every-day castles as they melted back into the beach sand from which they had risen. We stopped mourning when a weather beaten old man who had a bent back and who supported himself with an equally bent stick, told us not to be sad for the sea folk had taken them to live in.
We got to know the old man well. His name was Tim and my sister and I called him Clockwork Tim but never to his face. We called him that because he could tell the time of day simply by looking at the sun. In fact, he did have what
are called "clock eyes" - marks like roman numerals about the edge of each iris. I say he was old but, most likely, he wasn’t much more than fifty something. However, when you are only six, someone who is only ten years older has one foot in the grave. He lived by the gate to the beach beneath a roof of tarpaulin and moss covered corrugated tin with walls made, in part, from the same blue and grey stones which tested so many young feet. He kept house for five dogs on five leads and one, which wasn’t on a lad at all. It is romantic to think that he may have been an old salt who had been dry-docked some years before and, although he looked like a tramp, he had, in his younger days, been a jockey. Years later, my father told me that Tim had been married to a woman who was much older than he was and, when she died, he took to the road as a way of coping with his grief. What he was or was not made little difference to us children. He was our friend because he was kind to us and we always stopped to feed scraps to his dogs. Sometimes, we sat outside his little shack and listened whilst he told us stories, some of which may have been true. He was moved away from the beach eventually and I think he was given a barn to live in by the owner of Dunster Castle and there he remained until he was too infirm to live by himself. The last time I ever saw him, he was leaning on a five-barred gate outside his new home, looking up at the sun. He was giving the time of day to a passer-by. Clockwork Tim is as much a part of my childhood summers as anything else, which comes to mind. He is buried in Dunster churchyard.
After the sandcastles came a hearty breakfast and then the milkman announced his arrival with the clanging of a large brightly polished brass handbell. He came with churns full of fresh farm milk which he ladled into jugs held by young hands and carried back very carefully to waiting parents. I have never tasted better than that which came from those churns. You could almost hear the lowing of the cattle in the milking parlour as it splashed, cold and creamy, from the ladle for the equivalent of less than a penny a pint. After the milkman came the butcher and the baker, the egg man and the fishmonger, all of whom supplied the beach shop, run by a man whom everyone called The Colonel. I have no idea whether he really was a colonel or any other rank for that matter but he certainly had a military appearance. He stood ramrod straight, had iron-grey hair and kind eyes which kept an occasional close watch on the activities of his younger customers. His shop was a treasure trove for it sold other things apart from food. There you could buy kites, beach balls, water
wings, postcards, indoor games for that rainy day, buckets and spades, fishing nets, playing cards, toys of various description, newspapers, magazines and our favourite comics as well as paper backs for all ages and tastes.
The beach was about three quarters of a mile long. At one end was a wide stream which, after tumbling down from the Exmoor hills and meandering across several water meadows, ran by the side of a dark wood of oak, beech, ash, evergreens and high adventure. As it left the wood, it was channelled into a metal pipe, which carried it right down the seashore. At two places above the metal pipe, wooden topped inspection covers had been installed. The wood planking had warped sufficiently for us to be able to drop pebbles down into a stygian gloom and hear them plop into the fast but silently running water some fifteen feet below. Under that planking was a playground for King Oberon’s sprites and twilight faeries.
Each Sunday morning at 8.30, we would set off along the death-quiet, sleeping beach road to a church in Minehead, at the other end of a three-mile golf links walk by the sea. Halfway along the walk was an old tower, painted white with an always-locked blue door at the top of an outside metal staircase. When I asked my father what it was, he leant on his walking stick, sucked on his pipe for a moment and said it was something to do with the coastguard. It’s a funny thing but I remember that a lot of men puffed on pipes and leant on walking sticks in those days, almost as if they were fashion accessories. After church, my sister and I spent far too much of our holiday money in the penny arcades before we all caught the train back to Dunster and a big lunch.
The beach was taken over by the army from the middle of 1940 until the end of the war. One of my grandmother’s Minehead friends told her that, within weeks, the beach was covered in barbed wire, landmines and concrete tank traps. When we first went there in 1948, although the landmines and barbed wire had gone, the tank traps were still much in evidence. They were large cylindrical shapes of re-enforced concrete which had weathered moss green and been worn down by the wind and rain, so much so that some of them showed the steel re-enforcement - like nothing so much as a number of mad spiky haircuts. Some had crumbled altogether and the steel had removed for other things. In 1950, the day before we left for London and another school year, a gang of men arrived and began to break down the remainder with pneumatic drills. The next summer, all trace of them had gone.
During the war, the army put up several brick buildings which when hostilities ceased and the holidaymakers returned, were boarded up and left to dereliction. The building nearest to our hut had been an NCOs mess hall but in the way of children with any imagination at all, it was a place of mystery and fell happenings. Eventually, we did manage to prise away one of the wooden boards over one of the glassless blind window spaces and climb inside. It was completely empty, except for an old mattress in one corner and it smelled of old things, lavatories and stale air. An awful disappointment!
There were nearly two hundred beach huts in two rows and ours was in the row furthest from the shoreline. Behind us and running for almost the full length of the beach, lay the Aune, a series of dark watered, bull rush ponds, alive with speckled trout, eels and smaller fish. It was - still is - all that is left of the original river course. Hundreds of years ago, the beach had been a spit of land and provided safe harbour away from the vagaries of the winds and the tides in the channel. At that time, it was called Dunster Haven and, for quite a time, more than rivalled Minehead in its importance as a trading centre. Spanning one of the ponds was a stone bridge. This had a practical use when the ponds were a river to the sea but it made no sense now unless you know the history of the beach.
On the other side of the pond stood a two-storey building, disguised to look like a normal house from a distance. In reality, it was a lookout tower built during the war but it was from there that we planned our campaigns because, every now and then, we were the army for a summer afternoon. We played at battle among the sand dunes above the high water mark and I remember that, on one occasion, there were thirty of us - fifteen a side and all dead by tea time. Ho hum!
There were trips to Dunster Village, about 2 miles away, as well as daylong coach trips to Clovelly in north Devon and half day trips to places like Wells, Cheddar Gorge and Wookey Hole. These, however, were occasional diversions in a nine-week summer vacation and most of our time was spent by the beach.
It was an idyll that seemed as if it might last forever but time refuses to stand still, even for the most determined Peter Pan. Quite suddenly, adulthood was not far away but, before it arrived, I spent a week on the beach on my own. It was May 1960 and I was almost 17 and enjoying not only the freedom of my own company but a wage packet as well. I had left school the previous year and
been a working lad for almost 15 months. That week signalled the end of my childhood days. If I had known that, I might have chosen to spend it with others in my family.
My grandmother died that year but the hut wasn’t sold until the end of summer in 1967. Six months after she died, I joined the RAF and began an engagement, which was to take me almost all the way around the world in the next 9 years. Apart from a fleeting visit in late spring the following year, I would see the beach again only twice during the following 12 years.
August 1972 and I was with my eldest child who was almost 5 years old. She rode on my shoulders as I walked along the now disused railway track between Minehead and Dunster. We reached the deserted station and turned down the lane towards the golf links, the sea and the line of beach huts. As we walked, her small hand slipped into mine and she asked me the same questions I had asked my father. I gave her the same answers which he had given me and almost heard his voice as I spoke. Who said that history doesn’t repeat itself?
I felt good that day. I also realized that because of all that the place had meant to me, I was never going to be entirely free of it. Maybe I will even own my own beach hut one day. Maybe I’ll persuade my children and my grandchildren to come and stay on a beach which, although less wild than it was, has remained pretty much unchanged since the first hut was built over sixty years ago.
Maybe.
C: Bailey 1985
When I was a child, 24 hours after the last school day had ended during the first week of July, my long summer days began at Paddington railway station, home to "God’s Wonderful Railway". It was there that the smell of burnt coal and steam was the smell of holiday journeys to the sea. The excitement was intense as we made our way through crowds of other holidaymakers - suit case laden parents and wild-eyed children - to find our reserved seats.
It wasn’t long before whistles blew, doors slammed, the guard waved his green flag and the mighty locomotive pulled its train of coaches from the station. It picked up speed slowly through the drab post-war suburbs of west London but it wasn’t long before there were green fields and we gained more speed. Then, the mad mute song of the up and down dancing trackside telegraph wires, slow and without tempo at first, began to match the clickety-click of metal wheels on metal rails. Westward we sped, through tunnels and cuttings, over viaducts and under bridges as smoke from the engine’s funnel made fleeting shadow patterns on the fields. Stations flashed by with names we had not the time to read. People waved at us from trackside footpaths and level crossings. Sheep and cattle fled from the roaring behemoth which carried us nearer and nearer to a children’s paradise.
Taunton, Somerset’s county town was the first stop and it was here that our long summer holiday really began .It was here that we changed for Dunster station on the branch line to the seaside town of Minehead. It was here that a friendly engine driver, with Edwardian whiskers and a big moustache, lifted a six-year-old boy up onto the footplate of his steam locomotive for the thrill of his young life. Most of the time, the branch line train was waiting for the train from Paddington but, on more than one occasion, we had to wait for the train. When that happened, we had the chance to watch non-stop trains with romantic names like The Cornish Riviera Express thunder through the buffeted station which trembled and shook. We squealed with delight at the awesome power and the deafening noise.
It took fifty minutes to reach Dunster station where we waited for Mr Lewis and his Buick taxi, The beach was over a mile away by road but less than
half that as the crow flies. We could see the rows of beach chalets - we called them huts - through the trees which bordered one side of the station yard. Beyond the beach huts, lay the Bristol Channel. Mr Lewis - "Lewis the Taxi" - was a thick set Welshman who came, originally, from Swansea. He wore thick horned rimmed glass and had a happy disposition. When he wasn’t driving large American cars about, he ran the grocery store at a little place called Lower Marsh, less than a mile from the station. He arrived in a car with seven seats to sit on and a box of groceries, ordered the week before, in a boot big enough for two more seats. That Buick made me feel very important as it purred its way along the narrow lane, winding at first and then straight to the beach.
It was always about 5pm when we were set down outside Granny Aspray’s hut which was number 180 out of a total of 184. The first task was to collect ice-cold fresh water in large metal jugs from a nearby standpipe, as there was no plumbing in any of the huts. Even the lavatories were a fifty-yard walk away.
Those standpipes were turned off at the end of October, when the last of the holidaymakers had gone and the huts were left shuttered and sightless; the beach deserted until the following spring. It all sounds rather primitive and, from a modern perspective, I suppose that it was. It didn’t seem to matter though as the beach was a summer time only sort of place and people were far less fussy than they are today.
After a cup of tea and whilst our parents unpacked the cases, my sister and I went off in search of last year's friends. These were children whose parents or grandparents also owned property on the beach and who, like us, spent most of the school summer holiday there. New friends came later.
At suppertime, the sun shone right though the half-open stable-type doors at the back of the hut and by the time we had finished eating, night clouds had built up over what was to become the Exmoor National Park. By nine o’clock, the western sky had turned pink as the sun began to set. Time, then, for a walk along the beach with mum and dad who, invariably, fell into conversation with other adults who may or may not have been their own holiday friends from the previous year. The sun sank lower, shadows lengthened and the twilight deepened but seemed to last forever. I remember standing with my father in that half light with a chill sea wind blowing, looking out over the channel towards the Welsh coast. The lights of the town of Barry shone across
the twelve-mile stretch of water and the lighthouses winked at us through the gathering darkness.
Eventually, it was time for bed and, as we crawled between the covers, the last train of the day gave a shrill whistle and pulled out of Dunster station bound for Taunton. It was the signal that the end of the day had come. It wasn’t long before two tired children were chasing the sandman across the counterpane canyons.
Each morning and very early, as night was chased away by another bright day, my sister and I would awake in our curtained-off beds in what was the sitting room when everyone was up and about. Tip-toe stealthy, we crept into our shorts and shirts, forgot our shoes and ran across the road, through the gaps between other beach huts, over sand which was cold between the toes, skirted sea grass sharp enough to cut young feet, tumbled down sand dunes and picked our way across foot testing large blue and grey stones to the sea. Over our heads, the thieving gulls swooped and screamed and cried before settling, chests puffed and proud, near the likeliest looking human being in case they could beg or steal breakfast.
It’s only right that childhood should carry with it many certainties. One of ours was that our parents never heard us as we crept out into that early time. We just knew that they slumbered on in the partitioned off bedroom with its hand embroidered Home Sweet Home above the bed, a faded Fragonard print on one of the walls, a ewer and basin on the marble topped wash stand under the window. I am equally certain now that, although we closed the door as quietly as we could, my father got up to make the first pot of tea of the day.
It’s funny but no matter how early we were, there were always other children on the beach. We would join them in building a castle wall to halt an incoming tide which was deaf to all our entreaties. Eventually, a solid wall of water crashed down on carefully constructed ramparts. We mourned the loss of new-every-day castles as they melted back into the beach sand from which they had risen. We stopped mourning when a weather beaten old man who had a bent back and who supported himself with an equally bent stick, told us not to be sad for the sea folk had taken them to live in.
We got to know the old man well. His name was Tim and my sister and I called him Clockwork Tim but never to his face. We called him that because he could tell the time of day simply by looking at the sun. In fact, he did have what
are called "clock eyes" - marks like roman numerals about the edge of each iris. I say he was old but, most likely, he wasn’t much more than fifty something. However, when you are only six, someone who is only ten years older has one foot in the grave. He lived by the gate to the beach beneath a roof of tarpaulin and moss covered corrugated tin with walls made, in part, from the same blue and grey stones which tested so many young feet. He kept house for five dogs on five leads and one, which wasn’t on a lad at all. It is romantic to think that he may have been an old salt who had been dry-docked some years before and, although he looked like a tramp, he had, in his younger days, been a jockey. Years later, my father told me that Tim had been married to a woman who was much older than he was and, when she died, he took to the road as a way of coping with his grief. What he was or was not made little difference to us children. He was our friend because he was kind to us and we always stopped to feed scraps to his dogs. Sometimes, we sat outside his little shack and listened whilst he told us stories, some of which may have been true. He was moved away from the beach eventually and I think he was given a barn to live in by the owner of Dunster Castle and there he remained until he was too infirm to live by himself. The last time I ever saw him, he was leaning on a five-barred gate outside his new home, looking up at the sun. He was giving the time of day to a passer-by. Clockwork Tim is as much a part of my childhood summers as anything else, which comes to mind. He is buried in Dunster churchyard.
After the sandcastles came a hearty breakfast and then the milkman announced his arrival with the clanging of a large brightly polished brass handbell. He came with churns full of fresh farm milk which he ladled into jugs held by young hands and carried back very carefully to waiting parents. I have never tasted better than that which came from those churns. You could almost hear the lowing of the cattle in the milking parlour as it splashed, cold and creamy, from the ladle for the equivalent of less than a penny a pint. After the milkman came the butcher and the baker, the egg man and the fishmonger, all of whom supplied the beach shop, run by a man whom everyone called The Colonel. I have no idea whether he really was a colonel or any other rank for that matter but he certainly had a military appearance. He stood ramrod straight, had iron-grey hair and kind eyes which kept an occasional close watch on the activities of his younger customers. His shop was a treasure trove for it sold other things apart from food. There you could buy kites, beach balls, water
wings, postcards, indoor games for that rainy day, buckets and spades, fishing nets, playing cards, toys of various description, newspapers, magazines and our favourite comics as well as paper backs for all ages and tastes.
The beach was about three quarters of a mile long. At one end was a wide stream which, after tumbling down from the Exmoor hills and meandering across several water meadows, ran by the side of a dark wood of oak, beech, ash, evergreens and high adventure. As it left the wood, it was channelled into a metal pipe, which carried it right down the seashore. At two places above the metal pipe, wooden topped inspection covers had been installed. The wood planking had warped sufficiently for us to be able to drop pebbles down into a stygian gloom and hear them plop into the fast but silently running water some fifteen feet below. Under that planking was a playground for King Oberon’s sprites and twilight faeries.
Each Sunday morning at 8.30, we would set off along the death-quiet, sleeping beach road to a church in Minehead, at the other end of a three-mile golf links walk by the sea. Halfway along the walk was an old tower, painted white with an always-locked blue door at the top of an outside metal staircase. When I asked my father what it was, he leant on his walking stick, sucked on his pipe for a moment and said it was something to do with the coastguard. It’s a funny thing but I remember that a lot of men puffed on pipes and leant on walking sticks in those days, almost as if they were fashion accessories. After church, my sister and I spent far too much of our holiday money in the penny arcades before we all caught the train back to Dunster and a big lunch.
The beach was taken over by the army from the middle of 1940 until the end of the war. One of my grandmother’s Minehead friends told her that, within weeks, the beach was covered in barbed wire, landmines and concrete tank traps. When we first went there in 1948, although the landmines and barbed wire had gone, the tank traps were still much in evidence. They were large cylindrical shapes of re-enforced concrete which had weathered moss green and been worn down by the wind and rain, so much so that some of them showed the steel re-enforcement - like nothing so much as a number of mad spiky haircuts. Some had crumbled altogether and the steel had removed for other things. In 1950, the day before we left for London and another school year, a gang of men arrived and began to break down the remainder with pneumatic drills. The next summer, all trace of them had gone.
During the war, the army put up several brick buildings which when hostilities ceased and the holidaymakers returned, were boarded up and left to dereliction. The building nearest to our hut had been an NCOs mess hall but in the way of children with any imagination at all, it was a place of mystery and fell happenings. Eventually, we did manage to prise away one of the wooden boards over one of the glassless blind window spaces and climb inside. It was completely empty, except for an old mattress in one corner and it smelled of old things, lavatories and stale air. An awful disappointment!
There were nearly two hundred beach huts in two rows and ours was in the row furthest from the shoreline. Behind us and running for almost the full length of the beach, lay the Aune, a series of dark watered, bull rush ponds, alive with speckled trout, eels and smaller fish. It was - still is - all that is left of the original river course. Hundreds of years ago, the beach had been a spit of land and provided safe harbour away from the vagaries of the winds and the tides in the channel. At that time, it was called Dunster Haven and, for quite a time, more than rivalled Minehead in its importance as a trading centre. Spanning one of the ponds was a stone bridge. This had a practical use when the ponds were a river to the sea but it made no sense now unless you know the history of the beach.
On the other side of the pond stood a two-storey building, disguised to look like a normal house from a distance. In reality, it was a lookout tower built during the war but it was from there that we planned our campaigns because, every now and then, we were the army for a summer afternoon. We played at battle among the sand dunes above the high water mark and I remember that, on one occasion, there were thirty of us - fifteen a side and all dead by tea time. Ho hum!
There were trips to Dunster Village, about 2 miles away, as well as daylong coach trips to Clovelly in north Devon and half day trips to places like Wells, Cheddar Gorge and Wookey Hole. These, however, were occasional diversions in a nine-week summer vacation and most of our time was spent by the beach.
It was an idyll that seemed as if it might last forever but time refuses to stand still, even for the most determined Peter Pan. Quite suddenly, adulthood was not far away but, before it arrived, I spent a week on the beach on my own. It was May 1960 and I was almost 17 and enjoying not only the freedom of my own company but a wage packet as well. I had left school the previous year and
been a working lad for almost 15 months. That week signalled the end of my childhood days. If I had known that, I might have chosen to spend it with others in my family.
My grandmother died that year but the hut wasn’t sold until the end of summer in 1967. Six months after she died, I joined the RAF and began an engagement, which was to take me almost all the way around the world in the next 9 years. Apart from a fleeting visit in late spring the following year, I would see the beach again only twice during the following 12 years.
August 1972 and I was with my eldest child who was almost 5 years old. She rode on my shoulders as I walked along the now disused railway track between Minehead and Dunster. We reached the deserted station and turned down the lane towards the golf links, the sea and the line of beach huts. As we walked, her small hand slipped into mine and she asked me the same questions I had asked my father. I gave her the same answers which he had given me and almost heard his voice as I spoke. Who said that history doesn’t repeat itself?
I felt good that day. I also realized that because of all that the place had meant to me, I was never going to be entirely free of it. Maybe I will even own my own beach hut one day. Maybe I’ll persuade my children and my grandchildren to come and stay on a beach which, although less wild than it was, has remained pretty much unchanged since the first hut was built over sixty years ago.
Maybe.
C: Bailey 1985
The Faerie Dell
Before you came to be, O best beloved,
Deep within the deepest forests,
where no man feared to tread,
Oberon rules a green and secret world.
Although long lost, maybe his influence still holds,
So come with me to the Fairie Dell
and tread so quietly; let your mind be still.
As the yellow moon is glowing in the evening light,
you might see the Wee Folk dancing joyfully,
in homage to King Oberon and his queen.
Beautiful Tatania, in all ethereal grace,
Her loving hand upon his arm,
Adores her king in her duty, adding majesty
To her lord as he dispenses secret faerie law.
So, as you walk the fields, my dear,
You may see the grasses move
When no breeze is playing on their fronds
and, collecting sticks inside the forest,
Think, in awestruck wonder,
Of the ancient memories of the trees.
C: Bailey 2010
Before you came to be, O best beloved,
Deep within the deepest forests,
where no man feared to tread,
Oberon rules a green and secret world.
Although long lost, maybe his influence still holds,
So come with me to the Fairie Dell
and tread so quietly; let your mind be still.
As the yellow moon is glowing in the evening light,
you might see the Wee Folk dancing joyfully,
in homage to King Oberon and his queen.
Beautiful Tatania, in all ethereal grace,
Her loving hand upon his arm,
Adores her king in her duty, adding majesty
To her lord as he dispenses secret faerie law.
So, as you walk the fields, my dear,
You may see the grasses move
When no breeze is playing on their fronds
and, collecting sticks inside the forest,
Think, in awestruck wonder,
Of the ancient memories of the trees.
C: Bailey 2010
