Drop the rind
Hayling Island
I didn’t have high hopes for Hayling. While I have fond childhood memories of dragging crabs out of the water as they clung to a bacon rind on a string and filling a bucket with their egg-shell bodies and nipping claws. Then delight and alarm tipping out the bucket and the crabs raced back to the water where we found them, perhaps to be caught on another bacon rind the next day. My other memories of Hayling aren’t so positive, in the 1970s the beach front felt like a last ditch holiday romance that smelt of hot chips and desperation. Winter nights listening to the songs of Patti Smith on the stony beach, where Hayling was the end of the road. “Down by the ocean, it was so dismal.” I could cling to the bacon rind or be dropped off into the unknown, here at the end of England.
Back, nearly 50 years later and around the corner from the ferry, shingle paths lead south towards the Solent with the long line of the Isle of Wight for a horizon. The sea is running with a strong tide through the mouth of Langstone Harbour, little waves slapping on the shore.
There’s a fenced enclosure to keep walkers and their dogs out of a designated plover nesting area. I hope the birds get the message that they are protected here. Plovers are tragically vulnerable, their nests a scrape in the stones, their eggs disguised with a light scribble and their chicks delightful running fluff balls. I don’t see any plovers but there are skylarks above and purple orchids in the shore grasses. It couldn’t be more unlike the tended greens of the golf club, but this corner of Hayling feels like a toe-hold of wildness away from the ice-creams and amusements.
On, past the Royal Hotel where Charlie Chaplin sent his family for beachside breaks, walking between the brightly-coloured beach huts that block together like a collection of garden sheds washed up by the tide. Before I can totally dismiss these structures as a strange English desire for privacy and solitude in a public space, I am wondering how much it would cost to rent one for a week and spend the days brewing tea and sketching the sea and beach goers.
Fun land amusements provide rainy-day gambling excitement for adults and an under 18 section for juvenile punters to learn their skills, whet their addictions and grab the rind. Then it’s on through the shingle past beach-front bungalows, all the way to Sandy Point where the entrance to Chichester harbour makes swimming dangerous and I think I recognise the place where we went crab fishing. Time to drop the bacon rind and go home.
Plover, biro drawing by Sue Webber
