I have always been told never to speak to strange children on beaches.
This admonition was uppermost in my mind when having my first paddle for the season on a golden weekend recently.
The first paddle is a solemn rite for an elderly man. We begin as paddlers at the sea and we end as paddlers. Life comes full circle before it paddles by
It was in this sombre frame of mind that I was pushing my old toes through the nippy salinity of the gulf when a small shadow fell across the sand.
I tried to ignore its owner, a belligerent child leaking sea water and with a mouth that had raspberry crumble intermixed with soft-serve ice-cream. He was on the level of my left thigh and he eyed my kneecaps with an awful intensity
Why aren’t you wearing bathers?
Oh child, if only you knew the folds and failures of flagging flesh concealed beneath this old t-shirt, the chest sunken forever in the shapeless sargasso of over indulgence. Only the feet, the face and the freckled arms dare the light of day that beats upon this suburban shore.
If I came out, bathing-trunked, you would scream for your parents or stare even more wonderingly at this old whale belly that has emerged from some urban back-water for a bask in the spring. No, thank you. I shall remain a paddler, old toes supporting fattened ankles, knees of no shapeliness with a tendency to knock together.
Thus I soliloquised. I wanted the child to be off. Never speak to strange children. Never encourage them or they will follow you like jackals and harass you like wolves.
You can make me a castle.
Go away child, I want none of your condescension. We are, all of us, castle-makers.
Make your castles (they cry to the newlyweds). Have a loan from so-and-so. Spend your life meeting payments Visit your bank each month. Castles, child, if you must make them, make them in the air. Give them shining battlements and en suite staterooms. Fill their courtyards with white chargers, their boudoirs with beautiful women, their great halls with feasting and video recorders….
My lip curled in a sneer and my t-shirt hung grotesquely. At this stage a larger shadow joined the smaller one. This was the protective mother, glaring at me as if I had crawled from under the nearest seaweed.
You mustn’t talk to men, child.
Indeed you mustn’t. This man wants none of you. Go and drip elsewhere. Here is your sister also dripping, dripping ice-cream in a long white stream…
Thus I mused, as I wandered on. part of the golden day. But the children would not let me be.
You’re not allowed on this beach.
This from an authoritative child, arrogant with freckles and hung loosely with a pair of floral trunks. The spade was not mere plastic but metal with a wooden handle, a sign of opulence. This child well might go on to be a land developer. He had a highly illustrated bucket with a brilliant marine motif and it glinted in enamelled arrogance Two lackeys were digging moats around his castle. The small tycoon of the tide stood shouting orders and turned insolently to me again
My mum says you keep away.
Yes, child, I can see your mum She is sitting on a nearby rug what is possibly her brother already sun-blackened, chain around his neck and eyeing me with the malevolence of a white pointer.
So I paddled away as unprovocatively as I could, let an old paddler be, young sir, I muttered.
I am doing no harm on the tide of memory, I mused, recalling the young surfer I and once was, belly flopping on the low waves and spouting my watery regards at young mermaids long since grown into matronly shore persons.
Oh the joy of a slow and wandering wade. I promised myself I wouldn’t notice any children ever any more even if they flung themselves at my feet with a thousand mothers tantrumming in the background.
The first paddle in spring. Nothing must disturb it. Yachts made coloured triangles of sail The gulf, sea proud with America’s upmanship written on every passing spar, prepared itself for blue days and white waves while seagulls sideslipped, eye-bright for scraps.
My toes became wrinkly I left he sea accompanied by an old unleashed dog that found in me an echo of its own infirmity.
The dog saluted a jetty pile to the surprise of the barnacles. That’s another thing about beaches. Never talk to stray dogs!
Max Fatchen