From a Distance

The summer of 1959 was record-breakingly warm and sunny.   I was 15 and came home from boarding school on 24 th July and according to my diary, the sun shone every single day for that whole holiday.   The loveliest thing was that the sea was not only beautifully warm but day after day, it was as flat and still as glass.   It seemed to swell and roll in almost imperceptibly at high tide. Even Dad had a daily dip after work using his strange and rather awkward Trudgen stroke; -  breaststroke legs and a sidestroke like crawl with only one arm which he’d probably learned on holidays in South Wales during his childhood in the 1890s. That summer was idyllic in other ways too.   There were lots of families with teenagers staying in Bognor and Felpham for the summer.   Cheap foreign travel had yet to come.   We formed a group of teenagers who idled around together each day, swimming, riding our bikes, playing tennis with trips to the cinema in Bognor. ...

When war was declared in September 1939, my parents and my older sisters Ann and Sally, then aged two and nine months, were living at Beachcroft, our grandfather’s house in Southdean Drive fifty yards from the sea. The whole area rapidly became a vast armed camp with military manoeuvres accompanied by the screeching and clattering of tanks. There was no chance of those toddlers playing by the sea. Beaches were fenced off with barbed wire, sown with mines and protected by high iron scaffolding.   Our mum watched one of the unexploded mines bob about on the waves just yards from the house before it was safely detonated at low tide.   There were coastal batteries and gun emplacements in front of the house with relentless overhead activity from the RAF bases of Tangmere and Ford; the latter was shortly to be dive bombed by Stukas.  When the military took over in the village, our family did a reverse evacuation in August 1940. Mum hired a lorry, packed it with h...