Don't Need The Sunshine

The seaside has always been a special place for me. Every summer my family and I would go to Swanage. Swanage was where my mum was born and where my Nan lived. It is also home to Jonathan Ross- at least in the summer- so my mum continues to tell me. For two weeks every year we would wave goodbye to the Home Counties and set up home in Hardy country. Having made the trip so many times, the journey was as much a part of the holiday as the holiday itself: getting lucky on the M25, an easy ride on the M3 (“God’s road,” according to my Dad), a smooth passage on the M27, then the real work would begin: the longueur of the serpentine A road. (It was our Highway 61 and like Dylan we had been there before.)  Its 60mph speed limit a sleight of hand trick, a deception designed to make you think that you’re tearing tarmac when in all actuality you’re treading treacle on a limbo trail to nowhere. On escaping the Bermuda Triangle, we would start queuing in Sandbanks for the ferry. Being British, I love a queue. It gives me valuable daydream time. (My daydream time like the bee is currently under threat. I remember a time when I could dissolve into my imagination, making fantasia of my subconscious: images of lifting the FA Cup or flirting with Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs would play out on my dream reel. Now as a classroom teacher, I don’t get a minute to myself. I think here’s my chance; I’ll have a little stare out of the window, and then just as I'm about to go through the turnstiles of my imaginarium, I see a fight that I have to go and split up.)

Making our passage across the waves, the drawbridge of the ferry was lowered and we'd disembark. Journeying down the hill, we see what we came for: there in all its splendour is the sea. Invariably, the sun would be shining on it, making diamonds out of water. Across the seafront we'd go, then up through the town where the search for the parking space would begin. Sometimes the Gods would be shining on my dad's company car and the vehicles would part to fit the four wheeled longboat; other times the Gods didn’t get the memo and we’d have to circle potential vacancies before an occupancy could be found.  

Unloading the boot, we would run down the alley, throw open the gate and make our way through the garden, approving the recent botanical upgrades. Nan could hear the gate from the kitchen and was there ready and waiting to throw out kisses like a winning fruit machine. Then love dispensed with, she gathered herself and returned to the task of making us feel at home. My Nan’s hero was the Queen; like her she was born with a sense of duty, a belief that the needs of others should be put before herself. Every time we went there, there were chocolates waiting for us in the spare room. More often than not, it would be ‘Misfits’: chocolates that were misshapen on the assembly line and consequently re-packaged and sold on at a cheaper price. Just because they were malformed, they weren’t any less delicious. In many ways the ‘Misfits’ chocolates were the confectionary equivalent of an Aesop Fable teaching us not to judge something on appearance.

In the evening we would all sit down to enjoy my Nan’s cooking. A regular at the WI my Nan knew how to cook. She was a one woman restaurant: Head chef, maître d’ and waitress. If you tried to help, you were paid short shrift. There would be a full main course served on the kind of plate that Alan Partridge would bring to a hotel buffet. Also, you would get multiple pudding options: ice cream and jelly, melon and brown sugar, blackcurrant cheesecake and cream. For a woman living on a state pension, she made it go a long way.

Then in the morning, it would be the beach. No matter the rising costs, my family would always have a beach hut. While other families would enjoy a place in France, we would have a place on the sand. Chairs out and windbreakers erected, the land was ours; shovels readied to ward off invaders. And there we stayed: from dawn ‘til dusk. The intervening hours filled with games of boules, bat and ball and beach cricket. On hot days I would run into the sea, believing that the temperature outside the water would match the temperature inside the water; I was sorely mistaken. Out I would run into the arms of the approaching towel – like an exhausted marathon runner blanketed at the end of a race.

Why am I talking about this? Because this week I’ve been reading John Osborne’s Don’t Need The Sunshine. I first heard about John (I know its customary to refer to artists by their last name, but 
Osborne is such a lovely, familiar chap that the forename seems more appropriate) whilst reading Stewart Lee’s article on the government’s latest attack on the BBC. In the piece, he mentioned how on a drive home he listened to a new young writer called John Osborne, whom had left him and his family spellbound. On listening he cried, knowing that no other media would broadcast something of such beauty. Being an admirer of Lee's work, I listened to the Radio 4 broadcast and agreed wholeheartedly that it was something entirely special. In the show John spoke about four different seaside holidays: it begins in Scarborough where he’s teaching at a summer school, goes back in time to recollect a childhood holiday on the Isle of Wight, then onto university where his friends enjoyed a day trip in Wales, before ending in Southwold with a paean to pier plaques.

I loved Osborne’s voice and language. His love for people shines through in his work and reminds me a lot of comedian, Daniel Kitson, who also makes heroes out of the ordinary, magic out of the mundane. Looking online, I noticed there was a book version of the Radio 4 show so ordered it immediately. The Radio 4 show is a fine distillation of the book: the hit singles to the albums if you will. But the book is rather beautiful too. Where the radio show felt more poetic with vignettes flitting in and out of one another, the book reads more like a Bill Bryson travelogue. I laughed at the description of two-penny pushers and beach family cricket; but I also learnt loads about how the railways helped popularise the seaside, then when the going got tough turned its back on it. By the end of the book, you're left worrying that what you've read is an eulogy to a dying tradition.

This year my Nan passed away. She was a lady who swam in the sea, come rain or shine, up until the age of 80. A few months ago, my parents and uncle scattered her ashes in the water. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I believe in symbolism; I love the fact that their action means she'll continue doing what she loved. Now she's gone, there's the risk that our attachment with Swanage might go too. Fearing this, my mum and dad have talked about buying a caravan or flat there, which will ensure the seaside stays in our family for generations to come. If this plan comes off, I’d like to think in the Year 3000 the heirs to our noble line will be down on that beach, arguing over umpire calls in the millennium-long tradition of beach family cricket.

John Osborne's Don't Need The Sunshine is available to buy from all good retailers.