The darker side of days by the sea

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Jul 21, 2007 

It was August 1999, the edge of the century, the edge of the millennium, the summer of the total eclipse of the sun. I was 39, teetering on the edge of 40, and because my husband didn't really see the point of English seaside holidays, I'd rented a place by the sea for a fortnight alone with our three children.

It was a seaside palace - a lofty, three-bedroomed flat over the butcher's in the high street. Light and sunny, it had a feeling of holiday - as well as the smallest dishwasher I had ever seen. The entrance was in a narrow brick alleyway that led conveniently straight to the children's playground with the rubber tyre swing that my three adored. There was no sea view but the beach was two minutes' walk away and you could see the lighthouse from the bedroom windows. At night the children made me leave their curtains slightly open, so they could fall asleep to its regular, reassuring wink.

I slightly missed my husband. But there was something delicious about giving myself over entirely to the children, not even attempting any grown-up time, not trying to get them off to bed early, not caring how messy anything was or how long anything took. I remember that fortnight as a time of endless Coco Pops, longer-than-usual bedtime stories and socks, knickers and Batman figures scattered all over the floor. I remember the anarchic fun of eating on our laps simply so that we could leave a mammoth Star Wars jigsaw puzzle half-done on the dining room table for the whole two weeks, popping in to have a go whenever we felt like it.

And every day we did whatever we felt like doing. We caught tiddlers in the boating lake, played Crazy Golf by the pier. We ate cream teas and crab sandwiches and fish and chips and sometimes carried supper down to the beach and ate it on our big green blanket as the sun sank into the sea and the shadows crept up around us. If it all sounds pretty perfect, then really it was. Until the rain started.

We woke one morning to a steady downpour but we didn't panic. One rainy day was hardly a problem. And anyway the kids had been desperate to go to the Sea Life aquarium in Yarmouth and I'd said it was a waste while the weather was so nice. But we set off for Yarmouth only to turn back after 20 minutes as I couldn't even see to drive. Next day it carried on raining. And the next and the next. August 11th was only a few days away. How were we going to witness a total eclipse of the sun in pouring rain?

I decided that a little bit of rain wasn't going to ruin our holiday and I went and bought us all matching waterproofs from the chandler's at the harbour. But, next day, four navy blue, waterproofed people - one big and three small - only got as far as the nearest shop awning before having to rush straight back to the alleyway, where the water was so deep that each child had to be lifted over and on to the front doorstep. They laughed but I nearly cried.

From then on, the holiday got slowly more surreal. I remember an afternoon when the water stopped falling out of the sky just long enough for us to watch out of our sitting room window as a car parked in the high street began to smoke and then burst into flames. Floods and now fire - what was going on? Raphael (seven) said he didn't want to see the eclipse after all, he just wanted to go home.

But a day later it was just about dry enough for us to sit on the beach with a huge, silent, cross-legged crowd and wait for it to happen. "Will it get pitch black?" the children wanted to know. "Might the sea actually burst into flames?" They dug sandcastles while they waited and Raphael sat in my lap with his thumb in his mouth.

But instead of day turning to night as we'd expected, all that happened was the light got a little bit dirty, the sea turned grey as metal and time seemed to slow down in the strangest, most sinister way. Even the most familiar faces looked odd and dead in that harsh sad light and my children's quick, happy voices slowed down and grew jagged. Raphael shut his eyes and shoved his face against my T-shirt. And then, just as suddenly as it had started, everything seemed to speed up again. The darkness loosened its grip, faces grew rosy, the light bloomed yellow, the world started turning again and everyone was laughing. We went back to the flat and heated up spaghetti hoops for tea.

We have a place of our own by the sea now and everything's changed again. Now my husband loves going there but the children - typical urban teenagers - can't bear to leave London. And a few months ago I was there all alone and there was an eclipse of the moon. Over a couple of hours it dissolved to black, before standing out in mysterious relief, like a beat-up tennis ball. And I sat on that same beach at night with just the dog for company and couldn't really believe I was the same person who'd once seen the high street under water, a car in flames or had a thumb-sucking seven year-old safe and warm in my lap.