Want some more about my childhood? Here’s the bit where I was in a camper in Aberystwyth, listening to Nightowl by Gerry Rafferty and semi-convinced that, when I grew up, I’d marry Joey Boswell from Bread. I always enjoy writing about my childhood. It requires absolutely no research and always seems pleasingly improbable—like something I dreamed of when I fell asleep in a wardrobe, looking for Narnia.

ABERYSTWYTH: THE ONLY PLACE I STOP WANTING

We first went to Aberystwyth when I was thirteen, at the height of my parents’ hippydom. We had no TV, we lived on huge pans of lentil soup, and I ran barefoot across fields so long, the skin on my soles was like cork tiles.

We were spending our summers in a camper with no toilet in a field outside Pontrhydifendigaid, near Tregaron: eight kids, two parents, and three huge dogs. In my memory, when you walked towards the camper, the faces and legs of all the humans and animals were pressed up against the glass of the window, like a terrine. That camper was very full. When my parents had sex, the van would rock like a fairground ride, and all the kids would sit in the front room, quietly singing “California Girls” by the Beach Boys—to block out the sounds—until it was over. Our harmonies were terrible. We were not the Wilsons.

We had a Volkswagen campervan—the greatest vehicles ever created; a cheery cupboard on wheels—and when my parents had finished noisily co-joining, they would take us on post-coital journeys all across West Wales: up to Port Madoc, down to St. David’s—right round the yawning pig-jaw of Cardigan Bay. Wide white estuaries, book-stack fishing villages, and bleak, wet-slate hamlets where it always lashed rain against the single, solitary phone-box.

I don’t know why it took us four months to finally go to the nearest, biggest town—Aberystwyth—but when it did, some inner room in my heart twanged; some lever was pulled. It wasn’t like falling in love—I was thirteen, and had never been in love. I just felt—not unhappy anymore. The quiet litany of pubescent frets that I counted, daily, like rosary beads—I was fat, I was lonely, I knew too much about my parents’ sex life, I didn’t have any shoes, and I wanted, more than anything, to be the best friend of the Duchess of York—all stilled the first time our van drove down Darkgate Street, and turned left onto the seafront.

There was something so perfect about Aber that it halted my lifelong internal monologue. I needed silence, to fully take the place in. It had a Gothic university like a castle, castle ruins like a smashed cake, a cliff-top Victorian theme park that appeared to have been commissioned by a drunk H. G. Wells (a funicular railway! A camera obscura! A golf course using GIANT golf-balls!) and then—slicing the town in half like a fabulous blindness—the cold, hard, glitter glue of the sea. Apparently, dolphins chased by the rock pools, at dawn.

Face pressed against the window, wetting it with breath, I wanted to concentrate on this town. And then eat it, whole, like a potato chip sandwich, but even better. For the first time ever, my heart stopped wanting.

“This place is shitting brilliant!” I chirped, from the back of the van.

“Don’t swear in front of the fucking kids,” my dad replied.

Twenty-three years later, and I’m back with my husband, and my kids, to the only place still that makes me happy and quiet. I came here with Pete when we were first in love, then again with each baby; and now we come every year, at the end of August: migratory creatures that can be followed on a map. We take the same apartment on the seafront, go to the same restaurants, do the same things, have the same days. I think even the conversations are the same: “No beach has better pebbles!” “No castle has better views!” “No freak shops have a better array of skull-shaped bongs, dude!”

The first day is Arrival—falling from the car on a journey that is always an hour longer than you remember, dehydrated and shrunken-legged. Aber’s magic is that—ninety miles from the nearest motorway—it is near to, and on the way to, nothing, except the dolphins in the Bay. You only come to Aber if you’re going to stay in Aber—a night, at least; a week, usually; the rest of your life, if you’re one of the hippies who first pitched up here in the 1960s, or one of the 8,000 students a year who come here for their degrees, then just . . . don’t leave.

We throw everything into the apartment, then walk along the seafront—the sea! The sea! Sailor blue! Or else, with bad weather, as hard, thrilling and unstoppable as a sword—to The Olive Branch, on the corner Pier Street. It’s a comfortable, higgledy, pine-and-spiderplants joint and, if we’re lucky, the window table will be free. We’ll eat good Greek food—my husband is Greek, so he’s picky about these things—while staring across the Bay to the distant shadows of Anglesey and Snowdonia. Because it’s the first day of vacation, I will have had at least two glasses of wine by the time we finish, and go down to the beach for the first time: Pete and I leaning against each other as the kids fall into the waves for the first, and then the second time; wringing out their shorts, and spreading them on the beach to dry.

It’s a fine, pebble-and-shale beach—crunchy, not clacking—and the currents bring a junk shop variety to the stones on the tide line. Quartz, slate, igneous Ordovician, meta-limestone from the Lleyn, cider-bottle glass smoothed to emerald—we fill our pockets with the most interesting ones; the ones shaped like letters, or animals or, once, a Volkswagen caravanette, just like the one we used to have.

You can crab, happily, for hours, off the boardwalk, legs hanging into the sea. In summer, the boardwalk is filled with coachloads of Orthodox Jews—hats and curls buffeted by the sea breeze. It seems right that they’d come here—Barmouth is too normal, Tenby too twee. Aber feels as practical and time-suspended as they are. It’s far too windy for urban spores of anti-Semitism to take a hold here.

The sea turns silky, and electric-green, as the sun goes down—tide rising by the minute, and sucking at your knees until you leave the bay and walk home. Safe, from the apartment window, the bay explodes into sunset—fire, fire, pink nuclear fury, and then the utter insanity of Welsh starlight, mirrored in the trawler lights, heading for Ireland.

The next day is a proper beach day, and we head sixteen miles up the coast, to Ynyslas. There’s a picnic in the trunk from Ultracomida, on Pier Street—a jewel-like Spanish restaurant/deli with breads, cheeses, olive oils and pastries—and the drive takes you high enough to see the lionback Cambrian mountains, chasing you all the way to the end of Dyfed. Ynylas is National Nature Reserve consisting of nothing but sky, sand pools and dunes: over a morning, you follow the tide out, over endless, new, creature-filled sandpools, until you reach a newly-revealed sandbar, miles out to sea.

The afternoon is then spent in slow, contemplative retreat back to the mainland as the tide comes back in—racing across the sand, throwing up instantly-doomed sand-castles, and writing our names—“MUMMY” “DADDY” “LIZZIE” “NANCY”—in meter-high letters on the beach, in the way that, two decades ago, my siblings wrote their names—“CAIT” “CAZ” “EDDIE” “WEENA” “PRINNIE” “GEZMO” “JIMMY” “JOFISH”—in the same, not-same sand.

The third day will rain—Cluedo—and the fourth rain, probably, too: the Ceredigion Museum, on Terrace Road, is Aberystwyth’s old theatre, now filled with curious agricultural tools, archeological finds, stuffed animals, maritime oddities and a dinky café, all in a Womble-ish jumble. Then Wasabi—Aberystwyth’s sushi restaurant, on Eastgate—before home, and the concluding round of Cluedo.

Day five is probably my favorite: full immersion in Aber. A half-hour walk takes you to the top of Constitution Hill, and Luna Park—the benevolently ghosty Victorian amusements on top of Aber’s outcast cliff. A candled, rickety shrine to the Virgin Mary, halfway up the path, is the point where you stop to eat crisps. At the top, it’s tea and Welsh cakes. Then the Funicular Railway down lands you in the center of town again, and lunch at the Treehouse—another of Aber’s jumbled, pitch-pine joints, this time selling soul-cheering local wholefood and chili hot chocolate.

You can spend hours here, on a rainy day, as the windows mist up, the smell of fenugreek and jasmine tea and goat cheese making the room pleasingly dreamy as you do the crossword, or stare out of the window at the million grays of wet, Welsh slate rooftops. And then, when the weather breaks, the Castle: a green hill overlooking the sea, with the rib bones of a fourteenth-century castle poking through. The view is the very best, the one I bone-ache for in London: Cardigan Bay from end to end; the full length of Wales visible in one, long sweep. The first time I saw it—thirteen, standing here in a wet, crocheted poncho, holding my squalling two-year-old brother—I felt insane, wild jealousy towards Prince Charles.

“I can’t believe he’s the Prince of all this!” I shouted, into the wind. “I would KILL for this!”

And then I remembered that, of course, in a roundabout way, he had.

But there’s a quiet, stubborn, time-biding, self-contained Welshness to Aberystwyth that makes the idea of being “ruled” over laughable. This place simply disbelieves it belongs to anyone but itself. In the playground, in the dip next to the Castle—sheltered, and lavish with white clouds of hydrangea—the slate gravestones from a demolished church have been laid, like purple flagstones, around the perimeter. So many are in Welsh—the stories of farmers and captains and politicians and priests who would have no idea of England’s existence as they lived, and died, here: traveling no further than the mountains behind us, and the sea in front.

As the wind blows across again, and the grass sings lysergic, rain-drowned green, and the bay looks like a billion smashed fish scales, stretching all the way forever, who could ever imagine England, east of here: flat, dusty, half-colored, quiet and so, so distant?

In the car, home, I cry, like every time since 1988.