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  

The Story of Ballyferris. Chapter 7.The Farmer and the Farm.

  The Farmer and the Farm

Mr. William Hope owned the caravan field and the surrounding farmland. In fact we were eventually to find out that he also owned much of Millisle and large swathes of Donaghadee too! Of which town much more later. But without meaning to be disrespectful, even at the tender age of eight or nine, this would have seemed to be a fairly tall story to me. "Wully" Hope was the complete essence of the Ulster country man. Rough farm clothes, strong and almost unfathomable County Down accent, and add to that a ripe vocabulary, introducing me to expressions that I had never heard of in my safe narrow life. What an education for a good city child! But a man of property? Ah no, I didn't think so...then. How often are the definites of our lives and beliefs turned upside down for better or worse.

Anyway the farm was run by Wully and his two sons, young Will the older son and Neil the younger. the farmhouse itself was kept in order by a housekeeper, Miss Gilchrist, who also ran the dairy. Mr Hope was a widower. To be allowed to enter the house required a lot of feet wiping on the sacking provided at the back door, watched over the whole time by a scowling Miss Gilchrist. Now, I understand her feelings with mud walked in from the hidden garden beyond the house here and clay dust creeping in under even closed doors from Alan's ceramic studio next door. 

Very early in this history mum and Miss Gilchrist became friends and so we were allowed the amazing treat of sitting on the living room floor in the farm on rainy days to watch television. But for me the best thing about the farm, was going to the dairy room to collect milk, cream, butter and eggs from Miss Gilchrist. this aways entailed being extra polite as there was the possibility she was busy preparing  family food, cleaning or some other part of her busy life. I didn't wish to receive a sharp slice of her tongue. The whitewashed walls, the scrubbed slabs, the gleaming buckets full of steaming fresh milk....what joy. Spotlessly clean cloths covered the jugs and buckets and she would uncover one, plunge in a ladle and fill our container for the caravan.

The back of the farm was reached by turning right off the lane...then the farmyard.To the left a large open barn used for storing hay and straw. Woe betide you if you were caught on the top of the bales at harvest. Either the farmer or young Will would "gulder" at you...(shout)... with many expletives ....      . "get the f... off the f...ing bales before I f...ing come and drag you off the f...ing things mesel".

Clear enough!

However if Neil, the younger son was home from boarding school - Campbell College- it was often a different matter. Any young farmer's son knows that the best place to do a bit of courting is in the hayloft, and with the daughters of the caravanners around  the choice was increased.

Campbell...there's a thing I could never understand, Ian and the Hendersons...Douglas, Jackie and Robin...all attended the Methodist College Belfast, and Rosie and I both followed in our time. Campbell was Methody's sworn enemy..rugby you know...and not only was it a boys school but apparently  more cultured...oh yes and snobby!Yet there was Neil, his untranslatable country accent with a plethera of expletives, encouraging girls up into the hay with many expressions that were new to me... why even the men where aunt Helen worked in Belfast may have wondered at them!

The Farmyard was a dangerous place to cross at times. Mr Hope kept geese. Geese could peck a chunk out of your leg if they took a mind to and no amount of reassurance could persuade me to put them to the test.So when it was my turn to fetch water from the farm pump I always hoped and prayed that the geese had wandered off somewhere. There were also two sheepdogs. Prince the old one and Rex the puppy. I was and still am a dog lover but I realised that they were working dogs and had to be respected and avoided. So to get to the pump was often quite an adventure. Dad had invented a trolley which could  hold a large milk can, the type you used to see waiting on stone steps outside a farmhouse waiting to be collected by the milk companies.This we trundled up the grassy field along the lane and into the farmyard. The pump was on the far side of the yard and to get any water out you first had to prime it with a little more water if you wanted an easy flow from the spout. Then it was just a matter of pumping with the handle as hard as you could until the water came gurgling out and filled the can. Of course then you had to get the heavy can hauled on to the trolley and safely back to the caravan with most of the water still inside.

A cottage was attached to the side of the farmhouse. Every year it was rented out to a well known Belfast family. I thought of them as extremely exotic with their red curly hair and the rumour that not only did they have a pub but they were catholic. I regularly walked past the back door of the cottage hoping against hope that I might see the children or even be invited inside to play. It never happened. Perhaps I was too exotic for them as well.

Close by the cottage was a byre where the cows were milked.  If Will Hope was feeling friendly and if you waited outside the entrace without being annoying there was always the possibility that he would invite you in to watch him milk. I think I was allowed to have a go at milking once, but then that may be another of my imaginings which has grown into a happening. Possibly my family will say so though I shall go on remembering it as a fact! I do know that if Will or Neil were milking in the byre you were more than likely going to get milk squirted at you. There were no modern machines used, everything done by hand and the milk swooshed into the galvanised tin buckets previously sanitised by miss Gilchrist with boiling water.Then the foaming bucket full of milk was carefully carried back to the dairy  room and left to settle before the cream was skimmed from the top.

On past the byre through a gateway and you were in the pig yard. I remember this as a smelly place with a pig house by a far wall. So far...so good. However from easter on the pig or pigs lived in a walled garden at the front of the farmhouse on the corner of the lane. Then the pig house was swilled out and dried, whitewashed inside and out and pronounced fit for a poor family to use as a holiday home. What!..I hear you say. This was the 1950s and not so long after the second world war, only just after the end of rationing. Money was tight and to have a holiday at all was a luxury. Of course as usual I thought it amazing. To make a space out of such a place seemed to me very creative. I'm sure that all of these unusual environments at Ballyferris have gone towards my joy in later life when taking properties  others have rejected and turning them into something useful and beautiful.

By the way the sow was called Susie, whether the original pig or not, and family history says that it was Rosies first word as she ran away from the caravan towards the walled garden.

Dogs, pigs, geese, ducks, hens, cockerels, and farmers sons made for an adventure to be remembered for ever as you walked through the old farmyard. 

Rosie on her way to see Susie!

The story of Ballyferris. Chapter Six. Dad's Garage.

Dad's Garage

I'm retracing my steps today to post this little snippet about the workshop that dad used to produce the caravan 

to give the family a place to holiday and one with salty fresh air ...and freedom.

Dad's garage....was not for the car.

For on a rough wooden bench...with oil stains from sump oil spilled from the pot that was used to seal the wooden and tarred roof ....stretching across the garden end ... the important joinery was carried out.

 An ancient wooden and metal vice...with a long handle slotted through the turning screw and two balls of metal...one at either end  to hold the bar in place...was screwed to the bench.

Along the walls, held in place with strips of wood tacked on to the vertical structure, were off cuts of timber kept for use in future assemblages.

Under the work bench and to the right in the darkness was an ancient travel trunk with a domed lid and wooden slats that held down the oiled fabric on the top.

 In this trunk were kept scrolls extolling the different members of the Williamson family..mum was a Williamson... and their academic successes.

 And also in this treasure box under the scrolls were hidden beautiful 1st world war postcards with  messages of love embroidered on silken gauze and pictures woven to depict exotic places.

To the left and behind the side door, a dog's bed with straw and water dish, for dad was born a farmer's son and took a hound with him when he went hunting .He was always a country man at heart.

His woodworking tools were beautiful . Handmade by himself at the City technical college in his free time. Oak and mahogany handles turned and often enscribed with his name D.G.McC. There were wooden boxes on the top of the workbench holding nails, screws, hinges and other equipment in separate sections.

A window above the bench looked out to his garden of roses and perennials.And always a bed of sweet pea to scent the air at the end of summer.

Above his head, slotted along the roof joists were more lengths of wood. Whether they were ever used I cannot say but it all seemed to me to be a sacred place. Nowadays I suppose it would be called a man cave...and there is no doubt that it was a place of refuge from the hustle and bustle of family life.

In this holy space, a caravan was conceived and built.

Memories and dust remain.

...Y

Yet his legacy lives on in my son who studied cabinet making at Ryecotewood College at the time in Thame near Oxford...

Chapter Five ...The Caravans at Ballyferris.

 The potter's mum and dad had a wonderfully sophisticated static caravan near Lancaster for many years....bedrooms...bathroom...kitchen et al.

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The caravans parked on the two fields at Ballyferris were not like that.

No

Mostly very basic.

However growing up with such freedom and friends.......extra facilities did not ever seem to be the most important thing.

                                                     

                                                                 

 The Caravans

 They were a motley bunch of holiday homes.  Not at all like a modern camping site. There were commercial vans with internal toilets and separate bedrooms that is true.

But as well as these were the wonderfully inventive alternative constructions,  and in those days...these seemed to me...the most exciting....still do!

Two in particular really captured my imagination. The first, based in the left hand corner on the seaward side of the field, was a double decker bus. Downstairs, the living room with the kitchen area, upstairs the bedrooms. What fun it must have been for this family to climb the stairs at night and look out on the other vans from their lofty height.

 The second, not actually a caravan, but a nissen hut left near the entrance to the field and used for coastal defences during the second world war.These were littered everywhere around that area.... after all the war had only ended about eight years before the period about which I am writing.  We got to know Barbara and the family who stayed there very well, and even went to see them up in Belfast, in their home.

When I look at some of the magazine articles nowadays, and how they emote rather romantically over recycling, and then think how inventive these people were, well, it makes me smile. They had divided up the inside space, by using old hospital screens. I remember these as ornate and heavy, the type that any interior designer would give their eye teeth for today. There was a living area in the middle with sleeping areas on the edge, and a kitchen at the far end.The couple who inhabited this extravaganza shared it with their daughter, and we became beach companions roaming far and wide.....often to the point of forgetting to return to our families at mealtimes.

 Much to the distress of my poor mother, with a toddler daughter, unable to go out searching for me.

I think that our caravan was based on the commercial Eccles shape. It was rounded on the roof with a skylight in the middle. The two ends sloped slightly, and each had a window in it. The door was to the left of the front side with a window to the right of that. The back had another two windows...so quite a lot of light which made inside feel like outside - inside! To the left of the door was a long bench with one mattress to sit on and another behind to lean against. At night this pulled out to make a double bed for mum and dad. Underneath was the storage space for the bedding. Great creamy woollen blankets and crisp white sheets with eiderdowns for extra cold Easter or autumn nights. No duvets then, this was the fifties. Along the back wall was a tiny “toy” sink with a lid which covered it, cleverly cut out of the wooden cupboard, constructed by dad to house that and the calor gas cooking rings. Even now, when I strike a match for my own cooker or  light a candle, the smell takes me back to those years and the wonder of it all.

Opposite this unit was a tall cupboard used for coats and boots. But the thing that made that great, was the bulge at the bottom covering one of the wheels and this somehow made the fact that we were balanced on two wheels all the more real. When we were small enough we used to climb inside and hide perched on top of this spot. Maybe that could be part of the reason why I love the beginning of the Narnia story, though I feel that perhaps playing hide and seek in a small caravan takes even more imagination!

At the far end on either side were another two bench seats, once again covered by mattresses and hiding storage for bedding underneath.  In between them attached to a small drawer and cupboard unit by an ingenious “Dougie” device, was a dining table, balanced on one end leg. This was either up for a meal, stored above the wardrobe or cleverly slotted on two rails attached either side of the short benches. So at night all three children had to go to bed at the same time , which was inordinately unfair on Ian who was four years older than myself and eleven years older than Rosie. Still that’s the penalty for a life of freedom. But I'm sure that it was the main reason for my brother’s later lack of enthusiasm for all that Ballyferris held dear for me.

Above both the end cupboard and the bench by the door, were two glass lamps protecting the delicate gas mantles that gave us our light in the evening. And as soon as dusk fell they were lit. This was always a tricky task. Holding a match too near to the mantle might mean piercing a hole in the fine gauze. Not holding it close enough could mean a build up of gas which regularly caused minor explosions. What excitement. The gentle hissing sound of the lamps had a wonderfully soperific effect on us all and combined with the sea air it meant that sleep came easily to both over excited children and tired parents.

All of the woodwork was of light coloured plywood...birch I believe, which dad had lovingly and carefully french varnished. And the upholstery and curtains were made by mum of heavy,brown, modern furnishing material. Above the sink and cooker unit were two wall cupboards. One held the dry and tinned goods and the other crockery. Brown and yellow checked plates and saucers with yellow cups, very fifties, very smart. Outside the caravan was a meat safe placed to the north, no fridge or freezer facility as yet. At the back we stored the calor gas cylinder and a drain-away for the water from the sink. The collecting of water is another story altogether. Underneath the van , a motley collection of deck chairs, buckets and spades and swimming gear waited for those days when the sun shone and the sea called out to us!

So there it is the wonder of it all, small, compact... and another place altogether.

Now as I’ve written there were other less unusual vans sited around the edge of the field, all commercially built, after all The Caravan Club was started in 1907, more than 100 years ago. However in the field to the right of the lane a caravan arrived, some years later, which I’ll mention briefly now but will go on to write about in much more detail in later parts of this story. This belonged to the P...... family and was again a home build. But this was like no other . It was made from a workman’s hut, the type that used to be trailed behind a steam engine. High on metal wheels, it was a wooden box par exellence. And what a family, also exotic... without exception!

...but more of that in another chapter.