A Somerset Lad

Where is the best seaside to be beside? Undoubtedly, Lyme Regis in Dorset.

I was eight years old in 1969, when I first remember going to Lyme Regis. It was a wet day in August, (there seem to have been a lot of wet days in my memory), an uncle and aunt took me out for the day. Wrapped up against the wind and the rain we walked the Cobb and visited the aquarium and sat in the car park and ate Cornish pasties. Even squalls off the English Channel could not detract from the fact of being there.

Visits to Lyme (its original name, the “regis” was only added in 1284), were confined to day trips until 1971, our first family holiday.

We rented a caravan for the week, it cost us £15. I don’t remember really doing very much during that holiday. There were lots of walks down around the harbour. We watched the solitary trawler coming in each evening (was she called Barbarella, or is that a fanciful piece of imagination?), and I read a book called The Otterbury Incident. Thirty years later, when he was ten years old, I tried to interest my son in the same book, he looked at it with disdain, it hadn’t the sophistication of Twenty-First Century writers.

I was almost a teenager in September 1973 when we moved upmarket and rented a chalet close to the bowling green for a week. It was £20, a big hike from the £15 paid for a caravan. It had full en suite facilities and was much closer to the town. I remember the precise location because we had a dog called Rommel that was unruly in its behaviour. The behaviour was fine at home, but it escaped from our clutches and did a few circuits of the billiard table-like surface of the bowling green before being recaptured.

Memories of that week remain vivid. James Bond’s Live and Let Die was on at the cinema: I still think of Lyme Regis when I see the scene with the double decker bus going under the low bridge. The pocket money ran to a couple of trips out on the mackerel boats, trolling for whatever one could catch with hand lines. Was it 25p for a 45 minute trip in those days? Most of the holiday was spent doing simple things. I fished with a friend in the harbour, using limpets on lines to catch crabs that we threw back into the water and using rods and lines to cast spinners into deeper water in the hope of something bigger – nothing was ever caught.

I was allowed to go to the amusement arcade each day, but only as long as my pennies lasted. There was a horse racing game in the arcade on which you could bet pennies; it was mechanical and not very sophisticated, even a young boy could work out how often particular horses won and prolong his stay in the arcade until mid-morning.

There was even a moment that holiday that I have never had a chance to repeat anywhere. The chance to play bowls on the bowling green. The man in charge closely inspected our shoes to ensure that our rubber soled basketball boots would have no detrimental effect upon his turf.

Lyme Regis would never have impressed friends who went off to much more exotic destinations, yet even in much more recent times, when holidays took me across the Atlantic, Lyme Regis held its place as the best seaside I could imagine.

PTSD, it would be called now. Perhaps there was a name for it in the 1960s, if there was I never heard of it.

The stay in Tone Vale Hospital lasted long enough for the visits to remain in my memory. I was six or seven years old at the time and we would wait in the car while my grandfather was visited by my grandmother and one or other of my parents.

The visits lasted long enough for us to need to take a picnic tea which we would eat sitting in the car. My grandmother would have a bag filled with sandwiches and cakes and a flask of tea.

My grandfather was a fireman with the National Fire Service, a Section Leader, he served in London throughout the war, including all through the Blitz. The experiences were harrowing: people hideously burned, bodies, fragments that had once been people. There were no debriefings, no-one with whom to discuss the emotions evoked.

Perhaps the nightmares had always been with him, perhaps he had always suffered flashbacks. By the time he was sixty, in 1967, the trauma had gained the upper hand and he was hospitalised. He would shout aloud across the ward, warning people of dangers, shouting in alarm at things he had imagined.

My grandmother, like most people of the time, could not understand such behaviour and would shout at him to be quiet and to stop being silly. My grandfather’s illness was something not to be discussed, it was considered to be a lack of willpower.

In the Great War, my grandfather would have been accused of “LMF” – a lack of moral fibre. By the 1960s, with the experience of another World War, there would have been a greater understanding of the human psyche, but it was not sufficient to ensure that he received more sympathetic treatment by my grandmother.

Tidying shelves and sorting through things, I found my grandfather’s magnifying glass. Picking it up on a summer’s afternoon, there was a sense of the gentle, softly-spoken man sat in his armchair at his East Coker home, carefully going through the pages of his stamp collection, closely examining stamps from far corners of the Commonwealth.

Reflecting on memories of him, it is hard to reconcile the quietness and reservation with the requirements of commanding a fire crew.

He was sixty-five when he died, seeming an elderly man. Perhaps people grew older younger. Perhaps the PTSD had aged him prematurely. Holding the magnifying glass, I wondered what thoughts he may have had as he used it.