Nowhere is ever as magical as the place you holidayed as a child
BY A WRITER WHOSE FAMILY HAVE VISITED THE SAME BEACH EVERY SUMMER FOR 60 YEARS
THe old black and white photograph captures a traditional beach scene.
Four women in smart sundresses, carefully curled hair and sunglasses have their arms around four children, who squint into the sun. An upturned bucket and two beach balls provide evidence of a busy day’s play.
On the far right side, in a black and white patterned swimsuit, is my mother. It’s August 1955, which means she is nine years old.
Another photograph is in faded colour. It’s 1979 and the little girl in the black and white swimsuit is now a glamorous woman standing by the sea. She is holding on to her first child. Me.
The snapshot captures my face wincing with shock and delight as the icy cold waves hit my feet. My red ringlets are flapping around in the wind and my naked tummy is covered in sand. I am nearly two years old and this is my first trip to the beach.
Fast-forward nearly 40 years and there’s another photograph of my mother, Mary, and me. This time I am 39 and my mother is 70. It’s a cool day, so we’re fully dressed and have just finished a brisk walk.
But behind us are the roaring waves of the same Atlantic ocean that I dipped my little toes in all those years ago and the same sand that my mum played on as a child . . .
The photographs kept in a box in my mother’s house document not just the passage of our family life — the births, the deaths — but the passage of time. So much has changed in the 60- odd years, but one thing has remained the same: our family holidays on Ballybunion beach.
A recent survey found that a third of us will keep going back to the same holiday spot year after year, favouring the comfort of the familiar over the excitement of the new. And that is certainly the case in our family.
My mother grew up just outside the seaside town of Ballybunion in County Kerry on the west coast of Ireland. She was born in 1946, the eldest girl of seven children. In the black and white shot, she is leaning into the arms of her mother, my late grandmother.
AlSOin the picture, on the far left, is my mother’s adored grandmother. She was long gone by the time my sisters and I were born, and we were raised with stories about the woman known as ‘Mom’ who lived in a little house called Shady Nook.
The eldest of nine children, it was her job to raise the younger children after her mother died when she was ten. She was a trailblazer, apparently — the first woman in town to buy a car, a Morris Minor, which she refused to position anywhere but the middle of the road. A day on the beach would be a rare treat for her.
In the Fifties — before Ryanair and package holidays — Ballybunion was like St Tropez, says Mum.
People travelled there from all over the country to stay in the holiday park or in the town’s various guesthouses, which had names such as Sea Crest and Cliff House. For the well-to-do, there was the fancy Castle Hotel.
At night crowds would flock to the Central Ballroom, where women danced in full skirts and stiff petticoats and big bands played. As a child, Mum remembers marvelling at the glamour.
Back then the beach was divided into two — one half for men and the other for women. Heaven forbid that the sexes saw each other in their ‘togs’ — an Irish term for swimming gear. There were donkey rides for children and seaweed baths for the older generation, housed in long buildings at the top of the beach, which contained cubicles with baths filled with seaweed and hot water.
These baths were considered a cure-all for everything from arthritis to a hangover. Old men with aching limbs and worn-out mothers with varicose veins would treat themselves. The brave would then run straight from the hot baths into the cold sea, while the timid would return to the sand and announce that it was time for tea.
But that did not mean a flask — heaven forbid! Back in those days, Collins’s and Daly’s tea-shops sold fresh pots of tea and homemade scones and apple tarts which you could bring down to the sand on a tray piled high with china cups, a jug of milk and a big tin teapot.
And little changed on the beach into the Sixties and Seventies. There are photos of Mum, through her late teens and 20s, looking like a pin-up, posing with her sisters, my aunties Ann, Pat and Mag.
Then in the late Seventies, Mum
met Dad, moved to London and I came along, followed quickly by my two sisters.
But she took us back to her beach every summer. Almost all my childhood pictures were taken on long hot days at Ballybunion. The only way to cool down was in the icy Atlantic, whose waves were so huge and crashing they inspired a mixture of terror and excitement that was addictive.
We’d spend hours diving into those waves like little mermaids until finally, our lips chattering blue, we’d walk back up to mum.
When I was a teenager, the appeal of Irish summers wore off.
By then it was the early Nineties and my friends were going off to places with exotic names such as Costa Del Sol and Corfu. They talked about water parks with big slides, and I vowed that when I grew up I’d swim in kidney-shaped pools drinking Pina Coladas.
But it hasn ’t worked out that way. Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to travel to some of the nicest places in the world. I’ve drunk wine in the Italian Riviera and hung out by pools in LA , but nothing beats Ballybunion.
My ghost-white skin isn ’t built for the Mediterranean and I sweat too much to hang out with the glamorous people — so it ’s the only place I come back to year after year. And it ’s not just me. Even though we live in a time where you can fly to exotic locations almost as easily as get a bus, it seems the appeal of the old- fashioned seaside holiday has endured.
These days you can hear young kids with English, American and even Australian accents playing in the sand as their parents watch on, smiling to see their little ones enjoying the same summers they did. On this beach, as with others around the UK and Ireland, time seems to stand still.
Grannies still sit on deckchairs, watching the world go by . Little girls still boss around little boys. Old men in grey trousers, rolled up above their ankles, will walk along the water’s edge.
Mothers, with one eye on the kids, catch up on the events of the day. ‘Any news from town?’ one asks. ‘ There’s a new one - way system — ’tis desperate,’ replies her friend.
I’ll walk to the water and paddle. My Aunty Ann, who swims every day of the summer, will try to convince me ‘it’s as warm as a bath!’, but I’m now older and wimpier about the water. I’ll get in, splash about in icy panic for a few minutes then head back to the beach for tea.
It’s not in a teapot any more, but self- service from a machine that also makes cappuccinos. But it ’s warm and delicious. I’m tempted to have a hot seaweed bath — they’re still going strong.
SOMEthings have changed: the kids are in all- in- one sun- protection suits, whereas we’d run around half-naked.
And fathers are much more involved than they were in my childhood, and certainly more than in my mother’s. A few feet away, a dad is singing to his baby daughter: he’s wrapped up in a hat and coat and she’s under a pink blanket. No matter that it starts to rain. Nobody moves.
I overhear a conversation between two women drinking tea next to me. ‘Why would you want to be anywhere else?’ asks one of them. ‘Wouldn’t we be miserable sitting in 40- degree heat? We’d be sweating and wouldn ’t be able to sleep . . . thisis much better.’
‘It is — we’re saving ourselves a fortune on sunscreen!’ laughs her friend, zipping up her anorak.
And that’s the thing — no amount of bad weather will stop the place of your childhood summers from being magical. It ’s why I’ve been coming back for 40 years and why I wish to come back for 40 more.
I hope that for many years I’ll be able to splash about in the giant Atlantic waves and come home all glowing and happy , ready for a dinner of freshly dug potatoes with mountains of butter.
Full and happy, I’ll look out the window as the sky fades from pink and purple to black . Then I’ll fall asleep, feeling like I’m nine again. My mother’s child.