Gullen Beach
Collecting was something I think comes easily to my mother. As far as I can remember she has always been a highly tactile person, picking things up in soft freckled fingers and rotating them inside her palms. On days out to the beach, my sister and I would rocket forward out of the back doors of the car at the sandy gravel car park, buckets and a bag of toys in tow. Launching ourselves across cold grey sand towards the dark and foreboding North Sea, tasting salt on our lips and falling in amongst rock pools with bloody knees and a badly restrained sense of enthusiasm. Our father would spread out the contents of the rucksack around him in an organised half circle and sit down on one of the two solitary camp chairs on the empty beach. He bent his book back over itself so the spine snapped and he could hold it in one hand, the voice of reason in all this madness with a sensible pair of velcro sandals on and a sun hat that had a flap at the back of his neck to keep it from blooming into a crusty bloody red.
‘Rock pooling’ or ‘guddling around’ as it was known in our family is a very precise art. You have to be somewhat subdued and have a strong core balance below your lungs so you could carry yourself for any distance but also be able to make it back once done. The parenting style here was very much similar to a dog becoming stuck down on an embankment as a river gushed past: if you found a way down there you can find a way back up. Other skills which came in handy was patience to keep going no matter how many dud puddles you came across, and a strong stomach for anything slimey or dead. As children, our mother raised us with a morbid sense of interest in living creatures, no shoes in the summer and climbing across things so we were fully fledged tidepool rangers from a young age. We darted across the edges of sharp black rocks, screeching and laughing about putting hands in messes of smelly seaweed or how the pools in the sun sat warm like fresh urine.
We would be called over, ‘Take your time’, to watch a large rock be pulled back inside a calm pool and see what jewels lay underneath for us. Finding the perfect rock to lift was a gift my mother possesses and a skill I am yet to completely master even now. So far my notes conclude it needs to be far enough from the usual tide line to maintain an ecosystem, have a mix of soft feathery seaweed and for some reason a lack of sticky anemones. The rock would be pulled back slowly so not everything would startle at once, and everyone would wait with a baited breath to see what would scurry out. Mum wouldn’t shriek as such but rather let out a small shout of excitement when she saw something move, whilst we struggled to spot whatever was causing the fuss.
Then, we would see the first piece of movement.
The split second of heaving sun-kissed breathing would pay off and we would start clamouring and patting wildly at any swishing of the water. A small crab would shoot out into the middle of a sunny streak of water as if lapped in mini moves over itself again and again as the clouds magically parted over the grey beach. It would pause then as if a tiny screwdriver was pressing on top of the shell, and would drop itself under the same sand in the pool. Tiny claws scraping under itself to throw frantic clouds of sand over little black eyes and strange waxy looking whiskers. I remember always admiring the gentle colours that sat over their spotted backs, moss greens and browns as if it was just part of the tide pool landscape.
Other things would dart out with more freedom and carelessness after the crabs. Little fish that shoot around in twos or threes and if we were very lucky a small wriggling eel. ‘Quickly’, we would be instructed to dip the bucket with a small volume of water. My mother would always be propping up a rock with her knees, making wild circles with her lips and we would be summoned into a little witch’s coven to catch whatever she had in a white knuckled prison of hands. The creature was dropped in for us to peer at safely for a while before it was tipped away a minute or so later. Species would be collected, one at a time and never mixed, a half digested fish in a crab’s claw probably wouldn’t have gone down well. Occasionally, there would be some children nearby and a parent, the kids would clamber over to see what the commotion was. I remember a sense of pride blooming out of my flat sun burnt chest, ‘Look what my mummy found’, I would think to myself, ‘She found that all by herself’.
