21st-Century Yokel

to the legend that a black bull passed through it and emerged all white, so traumatised was he by his subterranean experience. Prawle Point, with its microclimate within a microclimate, where on a July day you walk through clouds of butterflies above turquoise water and want to wrap the whole place up and lock it in an old ottoman where nobody else can steal it. Start Point, a long, arthritic wizard’s finger of land pointing out into the watery dark, where before the construction of the lighthouse at the end of the headland the relationship between ships and weather catastrophes was roughly akin to the relationship between toddlers and falling over: two whole ships, the Marana and the Dryad, sank here in one night in 1891, with every hand on the latter drowning. The long flat Slapton Sands, where the road bisects sea and freshwater lake but which, viewed from above near the village of Strete, looks like an unnervingly straight highway running through the ocean itself. Blackpool Sands, where my nan picked those first shells for her grotto and, with its leaf-framed natural windows to France and pine rows and brontosaurus coastal road, which brings to mind a chilly miniature version of Italy’s Amalfi Coast. The cascading gorse terraces, wild-pony ledges and hidden coves surrounding Dartmouth and Kingswear. All this and more in less than forty miles.

I am not a tremendous observer of anniversaries. For one thing, they come around a bit too quickly nowadays and take me by surprise. But not long after a recent anniversary of my nan’s death I walked from the high zigzag village of Stoke Fleming down to Blackpool Sands to find some shells. A day previously my friend Hayley had seen me walking along the roadside near my house, stopped her van to say hello and handed me the shell of a small beautiful limpet, and since it was the only one I owned, I thought it would be nice to add to it. As I walked through the trees to Blackpool Sands a girl called sweetly to a dog named Holly as girls with dogs called Holly often do on beaches, but when I arrived on the beach there was no girl and no dog, creating the impression that what I’d been hearing was an ambient beach soundtrack superimposed over the scene rather than noises from the real life of a dog and its owner. It was November, but at the scrubby back corner of the beach chamomile was still thriving. Blackpool Sands is the most benign cove for miles around and regularly packed with semi-naked bodies on a summer’s day, but now I shared it with no more than three or four other chilly walkers. As I walked along the hard-packed stretch nearest the waves, the bank of shingle behind me got steeper until I realised that, in a matter of less than an hour, with the tide rushing in, I would become totally blocked off, in the far corner of the beach. I am not sure exactly where shingle becomes small enough to be classified as sand, but the shingle here was not that far from it. There were not many shells, or maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough.

After my nan died, my mum, Jayne and Mal sold her terrace with the forlorn, unalterable realisation that her shell grotto would probably fall into alien, uncaring hands. Would it be torn down? Replastered? Filled with pesticides and air guns? We decided it was best not to know and best not to think about it. The street outside began to look more down at heel. The brewery had been bought by a large corporation and was closed down shortly before her death, many of its windows soon being broken by vandals. Schoolkids drank Special Brew in the empty building, just as I had in the park up the road. Despite the brewery’s demise, a phantom smell of hops lingered in the air as far as where my auntie Jayne and uncle Paul lived, which was now a few streets away and no longer within sniffing distance of the bread factory. In 2012 my mum received an unexpected postcard from my nan’s house’s next-but-one owner, Jackie, informing her that she was continuing my nan’s project with the help of her granddaughter. Together they had filled the remaining spaces on the walls with yet more shells and begun to plaster the ceiling with shells too. Supporting photographs ensued. Jackie wrote that she had got the contact details for my mum from Liz and Andy, the house’s previous owners. Due to her slightly scrawled handwriting I read what she’d written as ‘I got your address from Lizard Andy,’ which made me wonder who Lizard Andy was, what he looked like, and caused me to speculate on the various ways he might have acquired his nickname.

‘Loves the heat, does Andy. But it’s done bloody awful stuff to his skin.’

‘Remind me to tell you the story about Andy regenerating his tail. It’s a long one though, so reserve plenty of time for it.’

‘Andy? Everyone knows Andy. He’s like the Kimberley answer to Jim Morrison.’

I found only a few good shells on Blackpool Sands beach, none of them a match for the best in the grotto, but that was nothing new: my contribution to my nan’s project had always been derisory. As I walked west around Start Bay, towards the cliffside wraith copses above Hallsands, the light slowly dripped away. In the brown gloom, with the long wizard’s finger of Start Point ahead, it was more possible to imagine the terror that must have been experienced here during one of those shipwrecks: the utter helplessness in the face of the dark hugeness of roaring drunken waves and the unforgiving black humour of impassable cackling cliffs. When you go away from the sea, your mind has a way of making it smaller and more manageable. Its size in three dimensions, especially here, never fails to shake me. This is