Cambois Beach

Cambois Beach

The Coal Collector

On spring days, when the worst of winter is behind us, I walk Lola on Cambois beach. I check the tables, and go when the tide is out, hoping the relentless wind that makes the sea angry and dark with white-topped waves will occasionally pause for breath. It is a bleak landscape, beautiful because of its scars, defined by the River Wansbeck to the north and the gash of Sleek Burn to the south. I carry a flask of coffee, brewed fresh each morning, and wear my green wellingtons and hunting cap, the one with the long sheepskin ear covers that I know makes me look ridiculous.

When I open the car door, Lola explodes, racing between tufts of wild dune grass out onto the vast expanse of sand, sleek and clean, nose twitching in the cold, saltwater, air.

I follow at my own pace, nodding good morning to the coal collector who is making his way across the beach. He carries a sack, gathering sea coal that has been washed up by the tide, eroded from old underground seams over the years. My father worked at Cambois pit before it closed more than half a century ago and he used to say how sea coal was its legacy, one that would last even after the colliery was abandoned forever. Today will be a good day for the coal collector, judging by the long black streaks that have been left overnight at the highwater mark.

I used to bring my father here in the last months of his life because he said it was the place that made him feel the most alive. Gasping with emphysema, which he insisted was unrelated to his time down the mine, his face would flicker with delight whenever he caught sight of the ribbon of steel gray water jammed between sky and sand, the wind turbines scudding offshore, and St Bartholemew’s church just visible in the distance, sitting out on the low rocky promontory at Newbiggin.

The Dead Fish

In my dream, the sky is streaked pink, clawed by high cirrus clouds as the sun rises. It is cold, deathly cold and I slap my gloved hands together blowing smoke like a dragon. Sometimes there is even snow, cut into lines by the wind, searching out undulations in the sand where it accumulates.

The tide has retreated, leaving the beach ice-rink smooth and Lola runs through the softer, lighter sand of the dunes out onto the darker expanse where the going is easier.

But, when I crest the dune, I see she has stopped abruptly, aware that something is wrong. Because the beach is pockmarked, all the way to the mouth of Blyth Harbor, dotted with the silvery bodies of dead fish, left behind by the sea. Their eyes are wide and bulbus and they gulp soundlessly drowning together, as if part of some mass suicide pact. There must be hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands.

I walk between them in my green wellingtons, examining each one carefully. Lola is unsettled and hangs back.

Eventually I find one that has the face of my father. His eyes are unmistakable, baggy skin hanging in that familiar hang-dog look. Liquid, milky, eyes, like oysters. And the fish’s mouth is his mouth, his lips. Opening and closing, gasping for air.

It is the dream that never stops tormenting me, no matter how many times I wake from it.

Unable to get back to sleep I head downstairs, padding across the linoleum floor in my thick woolen socks. The cottage is cold, but the sky lightens above the line of trees beyond lumpy frozen fields outside my kitchen window.

I brew coffee and Lola watches me as I pour it into the flask. Then I pull on my hunter’s cap and wellingtons, grab her leash, and we head out together, into the brittle, frosty air.

The Fisherman

Today, I stop to talk to the thick-set fisherman whom we frequently encounter on our walks. I do not know his name, but he is in his usual spot, a sentinel guarding his rod, eyes cast out to sea.

He scratches Lola behind her ears, as her tongue flops idly from her mouth. Lola is a whippet, and the fisherman told me he once owned a lurcher, so he appreciates her beauty.

A little way out to sea, gannets skirt over “the rockers”, an offshore reef that makes this section of the beach a good fishing area even in heavy seas, creating currents that attract cod, coalfish, and whiting, where baits like peeler crab and lugworm are effective,

“Anything biting today?” I ask him. The same first question every time.

“Not yet,” he replies in the way all fishermen do, as if any bad luck he might be suffering from will only be fleeting.

I have one of those ball throwing devices, a modern-day trebuchet that allows me to fling a tennis ball with the power of an Olympic javelin thrower, so that Lola can chase it as it skitters across the wide plain of sand.

“Beautiful dog,” says the fisherman as Lola snatches the ball up in her teeth. “That’s the thing about purebreds,” he says without taking his eyes off the end of his line beyond the first breaking waves. “They run like they know they are free.”

I wonder what he means. How might Lola run if she didn’t know she was free? Or did the lurcher he once owned run differently?

But before I can ask him, the wind whips up my thoughts and tumbles them out beyond the breakwater and I stay silent.

On Cambois beach, it is hard not to feel free. It sustained my father when he could see his end approaching like a slow-moving train, and now that he is gone and it is just me, it sustains me too. This place where gray meets gray, and the horizon line is sharp as a scalpel cut.

The Boy Who Never Came Home

Back in the seventies, a teenage boy drowned on Cambois Beach.

It happened out by the old waste pipe. My father used to call it a varicose vein, becoming increasingly exposed as the tide retreats, but which always eventually gets swallowed up by the water, its outflow remaining hidden.

My Dad and I used to walk to it, until he became too weak to make it onto the sands. It was a walk that defined us, because we both knew what people said behind our backs. Not to be cruel, but also without pity: the dying man and his weird, unmarried son, wandering together across the lonely beach.

As part of our ritual, before turning around for home, we would each place the palm of our hand on the cold metal of the big pipe, as if patting the side of a huge steel horse, mottled with rust and barnacles, seaweed wrapped around it.

After my father died, I discovered he had kept all the Northumberland Gazette articles about the drowning. I found them sorting through his things. The clippings were yellowing, the newsprint strangely old-fashioned, carefully pressed between the pages of a heavy book.

The boy had been fishing alone near the waste pipe, where the water was warmer and attracted fish. But somehow his line got tangled and when he waded in to free it, he slipped and was pulled out to sea by a rip tide.

One of the clippings shows a photograph of the boy’s parents, a gaunt faced man and a woman with wild hair. And of the boy himself: nondescript, dressed in school uniform with an uneven fringe and bony cheeks. Just a boy who went fishing and never came home.

I take the clippings out and look at them from time to time. Because, in the end, we are all just one missed step away from the rip tide.

Tonight, I dream again about the dead fish, stepping between them in my green wellingtons, until I find one that has the face of the dead boy.

The Birdwatcher

It is Lola who first discovers the birdwatcher, a plump woman with ruddy features, sitting in a sheltered spot between the dunes, a pair of binoculars around her neck.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say when I see Lola trying to lick the woman’s face. “Heel!” I use my most commanding dog handler’s voice, which Lola, of course, ignores.

“Don’t worry, pet!” The birdwatcher smiles broadly and pats Lola. “I’m almost done here, anyway.” She gets to her feet with a grunt. “I’ve been here since dawn. My name is Ester, by the way.”

She extends a gloved hand covered in sand, and I shake it awkwardly, her familiarity disconcerting.

“Did you spot much?” I ask her.

“Guillemots, Northern Fulmars, Sanderlings, a couple of Oystercatchers.” She reels them off, like items from a shopping list. “Also, some Arctic Terns. They’re early this year. Global warming I suppose.”

She battles with her folding chair like it is a broken umbrella and, once it is defeated, she examines me more closely: the ear flaps on my cap dangling down, flask in hand, tip of my nose pink from the wind.

“I was up at Embleton yesterday,” she tells me, all cheerful bluster and boundless energy. “There are nesting marsh harriers in the wetlands. Beautiful creatures!”

“It’s prettier up there,” I tell her. Embleton is a golden sword of a beach, a links golf course threading its way along its coastline, the jagged ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle visible on the hillside at the south end of the bay.

“It’s pretty alright,” says Ester. “But Cambois is special too. It’s industrial, you know? A tribute to our past, if you ask me.” She makes a face as if she is about to burst into a rendition of the national anthem.

I nod. My Dad used to talk about when Blyth was the busiest port in England. Six million tons of coal a year were shipped out of here back in the sixties.

“It’s all gone now though, isn’t it” I say, motioning towards the town. “It’s just an empty shell. Thatcher and that bastard McGregor made sure of that.”

I realize I have let the bitterness seep out of me, the acridity there for her to taste. She turns away, her good humor smothered.

“I must get going. Lovely meeting you!” She makes her excuses and leaves me, staring out at the nothingness, imagining those huge, dirty colliers, slipping their moorings and sliding silently out of port, half-submerged giants pressing forward into the heaving waves.

The Camper Van

The next day, Lola and I walk along the line of the old tank traps, concrete blocks and metal piping, laid after Dunkirk when the fear of Hitler invading was real. One section only got uncovered quite recently, one night after a particularly heavy storm.

The smell of rain is in the air, and to the north there are gloomy clouds gathering out at sea, so we pick up the pace.

On our way back, we pass a brightly colored camper van, half hidden behind a dune in one of the little-used parking spots furthest away from the beach. It has a roof rack loaded with surfboards, and a young man with a blonde bun is sitting on the step of the open side door. Despite the weather he is dressed in shorts, a baggy floral shirt hanging open to display his torso.

Parked next to the camper van, is a sleek tanzanite-blue BMW. An older woman, dressed in a business suit and heels that are entirely unsuitable for the beach, gets out and greets the younger man with a big two-armed hug around his neck, twisting her face to plant a kiss on his lips.

Something tells me their meeting is clandestine: the place they have chosen to park, their age difference, the way they molded together when she pulled him towards her, the lingering way they kissed. These are the little things that give us away. Our secrets that reveal themselves like tank traps the morning after a storm. Because don’t we all have something to hide?

When we reach the end of our walk, I take a towel from my car. Lola has grown used to this particular ritual, patiently lifting each paw in turn so I can brush off any wet sand.

“Live and let live. That’s what I say,” I tell Lola, thinking back to the couple and the camper van. Lola eyes me dolefully while, above us, dark clouds glower.

It is a good maxim to live by, I think to myself as I open the car door and she jumps back inside. But when I climb into the driver’s seat, I recognize the familiar yearnings: the anticipation, the taste, the smell, the urge, the shame. It is never far away. As recognizable as the tang of salty sea air. Because we all have something to hide.

We drive in silence. Lola is exhausted from the exercise, and I am in no mood to listen to the mindless grind of the radio. As I drive, raindrops spatter the road surface, slowly turning it from sandy brown to black.

The Rip Tide

They say, if you get caught in a rip tide, swim across it, parallel to the beach. Because you can never swim against it. It will eventually tire you out and pull you under.

Loneliness is like that too, I suppose.

I often find myself thinking about the boy who drowned with his school uniform and jagged fringe.

I take the unopened bottle, twist off the cap, and pour myself a shot of vodka which burns on my tongue and in my throat. It is soothing, reassuring, the fire and the balm. All the while, Lola watches me restlessly.

Sometimes, I go weeks without a drink. One time, close to eight months. But, in the end, I seem to always circle back to this.

I wonder how if perhaps the boy had not drowned, we might have been friends. Or that the thick-set fisherman might be that boy, now fully grown, somehow having cheated death.

I think about Ester too. Birdwatching with binoculars hanging around her neck, scratching observations into a notebook. I wonder where she lives, if I might perhaps run into her again one day when I am walking in the dunes. Whether she might agree to share some coffee from the flask. How we might drink it, sitting together on one of the benches looking out to sea.

But I recognize these thoughts for what they are. Weird, half-formed ideas that linger for a moment then I chase away with another drink. Because they will never be true. I am convinced of that.

That night I know I will dream about dead fish again, washed up on the beach as far as the eye can see.

The Body on the Beach

Every Thursday, a group of women who own deerhounds meet to walk their gentle giants across Cambois Beach. They are magnificent animals and whenever I run into them, they always greet me warmly. These are women who like to talk to men like me who prefer to listen rather than speak, while Lola runs like a hinge of lightning zipping in and out amongst the deerhounds with their long, ambling, strides.

But, when I arrive this particular Thursday, the deerhound crowd are gathered around a spot where a dead body has washed up on the beach. A white tent has been erected, and a mortuary van driven out onto the sands, leaving tire tracks visible like autopsy scars, rear doors open like sails in the wind.

“Do you know who it is?” asks one of the deerhound women.

“I divvent know, madam” says the police constable who has been posted to prevent anyone getting too close. He looks frozen to his bones, his face raw from the wind whipping in from the sea.

“I bet it’s one of them druggies from Blyth?” one of the other deerhound women says. “They fall off the harbor wall when they’re high on crack.”

“Or a suicide jumper?” offers her friend.

“Maybes an illegal immigrant. One of them boat people you hear about on the news, you know?”

It is bleak on the beach. Beautiful and wild, but also hopeless in its own way.

“I don’t know,” repeats the policeman. Because how can he know?

When the jump-suited medical examiner emerges from the tent, he nods briskly, and the mortuary attendants move in with a stretcher.

How can any of us truly know how the decisions we make will change the trajectory of our lives? In those moments when everything seems lost, when desperation is too strong to resist and we are no longer happy with ourselves and who we are. That is when our decisions become the most profound.

So, as the attendants move towards the van, braced under their load, I wonder whether the bulky shape beneath the sheet might be someone I have met during my walks. Someone I recognize, but do not really know: the woman in the blue BMW, the coal collector with his black oar-hands or the thick-set fisherman. Maybe even Ester.

I think about the boy taken all those years ago by the rip tide, out by the waste pipe. I wonder whether his body was ever washed ashore somewhere, miles away from here, where nobody recognized him, in a place nobody was waiting for him to come home.

Or maybe it is me. I imagine if the wind were to whip back the sheet, I might see myself lying there; bloodless, eyes staring lifelessly up at the sky, while back at the cottage, Lola would be scratching at the door, wanting to be let outside.

And all the while the wind turbines keep turning and the white topped waves, angry and black, throw themselves desperately onto the shore, again and again and again.