The Story of Ballyferris...Chapter Eight...The Beach.

The Beach 

The name... Ballyferris...  is enough to set me off on a sweet daydream.

Growing up in the suburbs of Belfast city... life lived by the Co. Down coast meant freedom.

 The flat landscape, the open skies, the ever present blue-grey Irish Sea, became a raison d'etre for living ...yes I think it's not going too far so say that this became a truth for me .....and the main reason for the obsession was definitely the beach.

 Nowadays, with cheap air travel we  have a greater knowledge of beautiful expanses of golden sand and turquoise sea, from Portrush to Portugal, India and beyond..at least on the internet!!

But nothing can compare with early memories, and mine are of the beach at Ballyferris.

 Waking up to the smell of an Irish fry, bacon,eggs, mushrooms and toast. Knowing that a whole day and the exploration of the beach was ahead of me. No homework, no responsibilities, this was tantamount to heaven. I didn’t analyse it then, and it’s taken me a lifetime to work out even a little of why I loved it so much.

Come with me, as we walk over the little grassy ridge at the coast edge of the field.  Come down to the beach, there you will find yourself treading the worn path that many have taken before. Around you, the smell of  beach daisies.... a type of camomile. My love for these innocent flowers  has stayed with me since. I even wrote a song about them once... “I love the flowers, I love the trees, but most of all I love daises.” ...not exactly  Larkin or Heaney!...

When I walk on other beaches, Morecambe, Southwold, Portrush or Brighton... I strip some seeds from the abundance of the seedheads, to drop on coastal areas bare of daisies.

 Rarely did I return to the caravan without a bunch of these flowers for mum.

So, on past the daisy strip, which by the way could take any thing up to an hour, on down the beach, heading to the sea.

If the tide was out , I squelched my way over a mound of sticky brown seaweed, treading lightly in my bare feet, for fear of some squirming creature having been caught there, left by the receding tide. The hard sand was cold beneath my feet.Truth is it was very cold, and this was probably why my patient mum always shouted after me to put on wellington boots ...as I ran off from the caravan. Clothes for Ballyferris were basic.... a t-shirt or at the most a felted woolly jumper, a pair of cotton shorts and bare feet. I’m convinced,  this is one of the reasons why I still have fairly healthy... if rather large feet! Soon reaching the water and taking a tentative dabble at the edge with toes in, before running  back up the beach to warmer sand.

At the end of the summer the sand at the top of the beach had dried up in the sun and shone like silver dust. It was very fine and a joy to scrunch under your feet until they were covered by the earthy warmth.

In the first few years of our holidays at Ballyferris there were sand dunes about thirty yards to the right of the bottom of the lane. Ian and other big boys were regularly to be found jumping from the tops of the highest dunes into the soft warm silky sand at the bottom. Every younger sister knows that the real excitement of the day will be found wherever your big brother is playing. I was no exception to this rule. Often mum's last words to us as we left the van were, "don't play in the dunes, you'll get your feet badly cut on the broken glass." Famous last words and all that... although my cut foot happened on top of the back ridge of the field also after instructions not to go there because of broken glass. Miles from a hospital and without transport, it was once again farmer Wully Hope and his kindness who came to our rescue and ferried us to a doctor.

I should mention at this point in case you were wondering how we got to the field at Ballyferris. Each weekend dad came down on the green bus while we stayed at the caravan with mum for the whole summer and then borrowed Mr Megaw's car to take us back home when school began again.

...so back on the beach where Ian and the other lads around dug and created some serious structures in the sand. I remember being instructed by him not to touch anything..I was obviously too young, too inexperienced and too girly to handle such technical constructions. Nowadays I watch fathers and grandfathers on the beach at Morecambe instructing their offspring with the same words and tone and understanding of this serious business. And just think how world wide men compete in professional sand castle competitions, shushing children and siblings all to win the ultimate summer prize...                 "Best castle of the Year".

Maybe I got fed up waiting for my chance to help with the digging in the sand beacause more and more I took to wandering further and furthur away along the miles of beach. When I consider the safe life that  my own children lived and even safer one of my grandgirls today I can only both bless my mother for her faith and trust in me and my angels for their watch over me. In lots of ways life was not much different from today. People were good and people were wicked. Such is life and I met both.

The beach to the right was probably about a mile long before it hit a headland and turned a corner and this was  the place for long walks on a summer evening. Late Sunday afternoons found most families ourselves included promenading along this stretch of sand.

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The poem below was on a post by Anthony Wilson ...writer, poet and blogger...

...and it reminds me of that girl and the freedom she had in those days.

Who?

Who is that child I see wandering, wandering
down by the side of the quivering stream?
Why does she seem not to hear, though I call to her?
Where does she come from, and what is her name?

Why do I see her at sunrise and sunset
taking, in old-fashioned clothes, the same track?
Why, when she walks, does she cast not a shadow
though the sun rises and falls at her back?

Why does the dust lie so thick on the hedgerow
by the great field where a horse pulls the plough?
Why do I see only meadows, where houses
stand in a line by the waterside now?

Why does she move like a wraith by the water,
soft as the thistledown on the breeze blown?
When I draw near her so that I may hear her,
why does she say that her name is my own?

Charles Causley, from The Collected Poems for Children