Not a bitter pill

Your article on pillboxes sparked memories of when as a child my parents and

I walked along the beach Cardigan Bay at Aberdovey back in the sixties. They went to drink coffee at the Seabreeze café and left me to get a frozen orange triangle, which I think was called a

Jubbly, out of a machine further down the road.

The beach used to be lined with pillboxes and as a child, I would run between them, climb them and drop down through the hole in the top to shoot driftwood guns out of the slits.

When we went to the beach for the day you always hoped you could get a pillbox because you had somewhere to play on and be a soldier, your parents had somewhere to lean against and read a book or their paper and it also provided a brilliant windbreak that didn’t billow or get blown over.

As years went by they became used as toilets and litter bins, but my own sons could still run between them, jump off and shoot driftwood guns. The council filled them with stones off the beach and with the vagaries of the winter storms, tides and wind started to have an effect and they started to break up. Thank goodness they were never built with reinforcing steels otherwise they could have proved impalers of holidaymakers.

There’s only one left now, but there were still children jumping off it and parents leant against it – now reading phones and tablets instead of papers. Happy days.