Fun and Games

Lord,

The sea is so wide

And my boat so small.

Be with me.

- prayer of a Breton Fisherman

Make no mistake about it: we are at war. We are always at war, though you wouldn’t think it today.

It is one o clock, the sun is blazing down, keeping the mercury hovering around twenty eight degrees; the tide has slunk back, the sand a glistening layer of honey softly levelling itself.

A hundred years ago this beach, Aberavon Sands, was one of the premier coastal resorts in the country; the sweep of its long, sandy bay attracting visitors by the busload from far and wide, packing the trains that would run back and forth from the valleys and through the town like a steel artery, every day throughout the summer.

Scattered across the walls of some f the town’s pubs and shops you will find pictures from this bygone age  of glory. Men in striped blazers and boater hats hooked arm in arm with parasol carrying ladies, their skirts ballooning around them like falling parachutes. They seem to stare eternally out from images he colour of the sandy earth to which they have long since returned.

Even now, decades later, if you drive a few miles up into the valley behind the town and on into Afan Argoed Country Park, after fifteen or so minutes of walking you will arrive at one of the old stone platforms overgrown with grass and punctuated by weeds, waiting timelessly like some stone sentinel for passengers to suddenly materialise like smoke from between the trees.

But no trains run to the seafront today, only car after car pulling up in one of the spaces along the gentrified avenue, calling into Remo’s for an ice-cream or sidling into one of the bays facing the Kite Trail – the crippled, rust-flecked eleven tonne giant that is our steel sculpture.

It never ceases to amaze me when I consider the amount of money that is now spent on seafront areas: massive developments and concrete facelifts akin to those beloved by glamour models and fading Hollywood starlets are now commonplace to the level of faddy must-have.

At any given time along any given stretch of the Welsh coast, it is almost impossible not to find hoardings bearing words like ‘project’, ‘development’, ‘leisure’ or ‘waterfront’. Still, should the Vikings ever wish to resume raping and pillaging any time soon there will, at least, be a strong possibility that they will throw their battleaxes and war hammers clattering upon the deck and wade ashore with lilos cradled under their arms instead.

Leisure is in actual fact, a very appropriate word today. Games of beach cricket and football are springing up everywhere; the neon blades of frisbees cut the air and the shouts and screams of laughter echo from the leisure centre to the chip shop, from the adventure playground to the skate ramp and out across the bay. Down on the sand in front of me a young mother is struggling to control a toddler who is squirming and turning purple as an angry plum with frustration to join his older siblings further along the beach. With a sigh, she puts him down and watches him go.

At times like this, in conditions like this, it is easy to forget that, aside from the Bay of Fundy, a rocky stretch of coastline tucked away on the eastern flank of Canada, the Bristol Channel has the highest tidal range in the world. On the biggest of spring tides the difference between low water and high water can be as much as fourteen metres in depth, the sea devouring everything between the low and high tide lines in its relentless advance.

But not everyone has forgotten. If you step back from all the fun and games and cast a general’s eye along the beachfront, you can’t fail to notice the long silver-grey scimitar of the promenade sweeping along its length, the lower tier separated from the upper tier by a drop of seven feet or so, giving way in turn to the fortification of rocks that arc down and out twenty feet, coming to rest on the sand and forming an impressive stone fortification. It seems that someone has remembered we are at war, and they have made preparations.

I look down again at the young mother, hands on hips. Her hair slowly begins to drop through the colour spectrum, gradually darkening, the facial expression blanking from mild irritation to nothingness, and although she hasn’t moved, now she is another woman and it is twenty years ago.

For over a fortnight, the South Wales coast had been doing what it does best – getting smashed. I mean this in the physical sense rather than the alcoholic but, come to think of it, either applies equally well.

We are a nation of drinkers. At drinking, we are incredibly talented. You could recite the list of possible achievements of the Welsh and discover this for yourself: rugby? Decent enough, fair to middling. Music? We do okay. Acting, then? Yep, not bad at all – Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen all hail from my home town. Drinking? Ah, now that is something at which the Welsh, particularly the southerners are superb. Astoundingly gifted, in fact. During Six Nations away games, drunks are our biggest export. I ask you, what other country could hold up with pride and reverence a chosen national bard whose dying words were “…eighteen straight whiskies, I think that’s the record…” But I digress.

For weeks the prevailing south-westerlies had swept in off the Atlantic bringing bands of rain, huge swells and crashing surf with them. The banks of rock hadn’t yet been put in place; instead there was only a series of crumbling stone steps leading down to the water’s edge. On the larger tides, these would be all but submerged, and in weather like we saw that night, they were exposed to the sea’s full fury. With the arrival of the first autumn storms and the huge equinoctial spring tides that come with them, this had become a scene of chaos; the gales ushering in wave upon wave like massed ranks of brown and black-uniformed mavericks, battering into the land, hammering the coast into submission.

I wasn’t fishing but had, for some inexplicable reason, gone for a walk down to the shore simply to look at the sea. It’s always been this way with me and will never change. If I’m not in the sea or trying to pull something from it, I can still happily waste hours just looking at it.

Despite living in an age in which I can look at the Statue of Liberty or the Great Wall of China from the comfort of my armchair I, like so many British residents, still have the island dweller’s mentality.

It’s easy to take the sea for granted when any mystery can be explained by Jeeves or Wikipedia. Every once in a while though, there wells up a sudden impulse to be confronted with something that is at once inexplicable and indefinable, to feel that tiny upsurge of fear, to remember that despite the fact that we can carry its past present and future in a series of circuits nestled in our pockets, the world is actually a massive, untamed and often very dangerous place. And seventy per cent of it is water.

It was immediately clear that something was wrong. A few hundred yards along the promenade, the autumn evening was lit by a dull, unnaturally yellow glow which upon closer inspection turned out to be a haphazard zig-zag of cars nosed right up to the rusted railings, their headlights cutting into the breakers only yards away.

Between and around them, completely covering the cracked, crumbling hardcore of the gravel car park that would eventually be plastered over with smooth glossy tarmac years later, were masses of people, some armed with torches whose beams were added to the lights already thrown over the surf. Always the worst sign. No matter how educated, wealthy or religious a person might be, the vulture mentality will always take hold at the first sign of disaster, and this crowd had clearly sniffed something out.

With little else to do in the iron-grey wasteland, a group of teenage boys had been playing chicken with the tide – running back and forth along the top of the steps in between the waves – and one had misjudged it. In a split-second he had been floored, sucked out into the equivalent of a giant washing machine and had simply vanished.

The screams and pleading of his friends had brought bystanders running in their droves until the area was a scene of absolute mayhem – the shouting, the panic, the crashing spray and, behind it all, the insistent shush of the tide. For hours they scanned the dark waters, frantically searching for a sign, any sign; but they didn’t find one. Nor would they.

And despite all of this – the noise, the turmoil, the crush of bodies and the fear, there was, in the middle of it all, a void of pure, concentrated, heartbreaking silence. Nobody had identified her as such but I knew instantly who she must have been.

She stayed like that for a long time, at once lost and confronted with a conflict out of her control, a player in a game in which the rules kept changing with each surge of the tide, a game that she never chose to play. Her clenched hands tightened as though seized by the salt spray, forever locked now at half past six, quiet and unmoving as a memorial statue.

Her face is drawn down into one long, unanswered question, a question that the world, and all the mothers in it, have always struggled to answer and always will. All the while, her ghost-white, red-rimmed eyes stare out across the waves as they slink in and out, in and out through the night, the black and white of tomorrow’s headlines.

© copyright Simon Smith 2011