Open Writing

When I was a child I didn't like beaches, associating them with gritty sandwiches and general discomfort. I vividly recall at the age of three being kicked by a donkey on Southport beach.

The best thing that happened to me at the seaside in my childhood was when we went on a boat trip from London to Clacton. I didn't see anything of sea or sand. My parents left me on Clacton Pier with a pocket full of pennies.

I spent an entertaining and educational afternoon watching machines of the 'What the Butler Saw' and 'Murder in the Red Barn' variety. There were rows of these contraptions, all showing highly unsuitable viewing for impressionable young minds. I had a wonderful time and finished the afternoon off stuffing myself on rock and candyfloss.

Beaches first became places of pleasure after I got married. In Folkestone one moonlit summer night Hugh and I wandered barefoot the length of the deserted beach. On one side the sea made soft sounds in our ears and on the other the flickering lights of the town shone down on us. Later we walked home, our footsteps echoing in the empty early morning streets, and made love all night.

In Penang there was The Beach of Passionate Love. Dazzling white sands fringed by coconut palms and frangipani sloping down to a sea of brilliant blue. As for passionate love, we didn't have the time or opportunity to test it out. We were too busy keeping an eye on Alison and Richard, our two young children, and searching for shells and coral washed in by the sea, but I remember it was very beautiful.

Morib beach looked from a distance completely deserted but proved to be a seething mass of marine life - a myriad of miniscule crabs, each one no larger than a thumbnail, scuttled about. Cautiously we placed our feet on the beach, only to find that the tiny creatures disappeared beneath the wet sand just ahead of our footsteps.

The children, delighted, ran wildly, but never managed to catch any of them. They looked like miniature fiddler crabs, with one claw - the right one - larger than the left, and they fiddled away while we sat eating our picnic, watching them watching us. It was a novel experience, never to be repeated on any other seashore.

A few years later we returned to the Far East. Unlike sleepy Malaysia, Singapore was a busy, bustling island. We lived high on a hill in Holland Village, on the top storey of a small block of flats. On another hill, over to our right, was a large Chinese cemetery.

The funerals were noisy, rumbustious affairs with marching bands of Chinese musicians. Behind the mourners came huge floats with paper houses, cars and even aeroplanes on them. These were burned in the cemetery, together with a fortune in paper funerary money. All these possessions were intended for use in the next world. The Chinese really saw off their dead in style.

At the sound of the gongs and cymbals the European children would watch in round-eyed silence, be-dazzled by every spectacular procession making its clamorous way up the hill.

Once a year - on Ancestor's Day - whole families arrived to clean and polish the elaborate gravestones and then laid out food for the dead. I never discovered what happened to the food. Maybe they ate it themselves or the birds and ants scavenged it later, after the relatives left for home. That, or the dear departed, held spectral midnight feasts. Who knows?

High on a hill, our flat was cool and didn't need air-conditioning. Although every room had a ceiling fan, they were seldom used. The enormous living room had no windows, instead eight great slatted shutters opened out onto a wide, tiled balcony. These were opened at first light and stayed open until we went to bed.

Beyond and below lay the exciting city of Singapore, city of the Lion. The place that never sleeps, where anything might happen.

To be continued.