Long Shore Drift

Stand at Westward Ho! opposite the darkness of a drowned forest where the town merges with the short grass of the cliffs. Where "Braddock's Holiday Camp" , with it's 37' caravans and square windowed flats, clings. Winceyetted couples from the Midlands relax on the promenade whilst young men drop their keks outside girl's windows. Just by'er, me, my brother and dad discovered a couple making love: his bearded face, her rucked-up pastel pink dress.

Here you can look out along small wooden beach huts surrounded by knee-high wooden fences. A kid sneaks into the amusement arcade to play air hockey and pong. The miniature golf course with friends cheating on each other. An ice-cream van is pinned by intense sunshine, ready for fronts to creep in from the bay. Opposite, old folks sit in the shelter licking fast-dribbling ice-cream.

Pink candy-floss streams, wasps trail. Emulsified knick-knack shops and a blue pub with a balcony jutting into the breeze. Surfers gather at dusk, boxer-lite on their feet, cracking jokes to their carmine-lipped beach-blonde girlfriends, faint sparkles of sun-dried sea-salt on brown skin, the days warmth slowly escaping.

As strong as the pull of cheap perfume and lager,

brush past to the temporary comfort of  an amusement arcade with it's diamante and glace lights, chrome and bronze. The cherry land-mine on the cusp of a disintegrating sea-wall and lumps of concrete piled by the branching cracks reaching towards your feet. The slipway slides into stones. With October waves, the brave ones dice

with swash and caving breakers. Dogs bark, girls scream. Now holiday-makers swarm on the sand and slipway, windbreaks and towels, beach balls bouncing, crinkled costumes, kids licking toffee-apples, granp still asleep on his candy-striped deck-chair -

slip away from the crowds to the fat finger of sand. Stay parallel to the ridge. People thin as the pebbles proceed north-easterly, stuttered by lines of wooden stakes or large wired caissons pointing to the breakers. Pebbles pile high to the southern side. Attached to the dunes, a net of marin grass  sussurates in the onshore breeze.

Seagulls float around you. Stragglers walk their labradors, fly kites. Beneath a gauze of sand, your feet, dried-up seaweed, washing-up bottles, opaque crabs, hollow shells, old life-belts. As we reach the Dump, features peter out into grey pebbles that once sat near Westward Ho! and the race reaches in to tag the shore with deep, dark swiftness.

The Spit.

Down to the water's edge, you wave-skip pebbles. Before you, a white house with black windows nestles in the gold-and-green of Braunton Burrows. To your right, the estuary splits to the Taw and Torridge, and the "new" lifeboat sits at anchor in the Skern, mud-flats, ozone and slime at low tide. Behind the dump where rubbish from round here goes. Wind always onshore. Lights wink, from Westward Ho! to Hartland to Lundy to Braunton Sands and small boats hugging the channel race. Buoys blink in the dust-blue dark. The pebbles before you shelve deeply into deep black water. The wind rips hard and the bar-buoy clangs: rapidly, loudly, alone.