THE COAST THAT WASN’T A COAST OR MAYBE IT WAS

It’s 1964 and I’m walking home from Low Valley Junior School with my mate Keith Barlow. The school is in the valley, the low valley, and we’re walking up the long hill; the valley is misty but there is sun, enfeebled but strengthening, at the top of the hill on Barnsley Road. A bloke walks towards us and it’s obvious to me now from a distance of many decades, even though it wasn’t at the time, that he’s spent a few hours and a few quid in The Darfield Hotel. His steps are tentative and leaning towards the turbulent. I’m writing this in the present tense because it is always present to me in my head; later I’ll do a gear change to the past tense as I try to peer through the lens of history.

‘Heyop lads!’ he shouts, his voice enlivened by a win on the fruit machine. ‘Look down theer!’ He points to the mist-laden valley, past the school to Darfield Main Pit and the headgear that looks as though it’s been drawn on a theatrical backdrop with a pencil. Although I’m familiar with the headgear and the winding wheels, perhaps I’m too familiar with them; they’re just part of the landscape, something I never think about.

‘Look!’ he shouts again, too loud for the muffled afternoon. ‘Blackpool Tower!’ He points theatrically, too theatrically. He almost falls over. I look; yes, that could be Blackpool Tower. It really could. Keith Barlow says, ‘But isn’t that the pit?’ The drunk bloke’s face almost slides to the ground in amazement, cartoon fashion. ‘Nay, kid. That’s Blackpool Tower. Get down theer and have a paddle,’ and he wanders off, laughing.

Keith Barlow and I discussed the sudden appearance of Blackpool Tower as we walked home: could it be true? Could there really be the seaside down where the River Dove ambled towards the River Dearne? We parted at the top of the hill and decided to investigate at the weekend. Dr Who had recently arrived on our tiny black-and-white TV screens and the programme had opened up all kinds of temporal and spatial possibilities for the people who watched it, like it still does. In other words, it didn’t seem odd that Blackpool Tower might suddenly materialise in the middle of the South Yorkshire Coalfield.

My dad, a practical man with a hint of the romantic, was dismissive; he said that it couldn’t possibly be Blackpool Tower. Then he paused and said ‘It might just be a trick of the light’, which led me to believe that maybe he thought it was possible. My mother, a romantic woman with a hint of the practical, was gently enthusiastic: ‘Well, it might be. All kind of things can happen in this world.’ Which led me to believe that it really was happening and that the seaside could be anywhere you wanted it to be.

We couldn’t wait until the weekend; the next day at school we told our teacher Mrs Hudson about what we’d seen and because this was a West Riding Education Authority School where Creativity was everything, she told us to write a poem about it. At playtime, from the yard, we were disappointed not to be able to see the tower. It wasn’t misty any more so surely it should have been in plain sight, but it wasn’t. In the bright sun the River Dove shone like a bread knife. A gull passed over on its way to the tip, giving us a moment of brief hope. The pithead gear of Darfield Main was just that: the pithead gear of Darfield Main. The wheels were turning, bringing a shift up the shaft or dropping a shift down to the face and from this distance of years I can imagine that a lot of those men wished they were paddling in Blackpool rather than coughing dust in Yorkshire.

The next day Keith and I told our parents that we had some after-school activities and we’d be a little late home. This was both true and not true; they weren’t official activities like the Chess Club or tidying the school garden, they were unofficial coastline-hunting activities.

We walked out of school that afternoon and Mrs Gaskell the lollipop lady showed us across the road. As an aside, I sometimes think that one of the reasons I’m a writer is that I had a lollipop lady called Mrs Gaskell; when I left the Juniors in 1967 to go to The Big School I gave her my autograph book to sign and she wrote ‘Well done is better than well said’; that sounded impressive and I said so but then she pointed to the same words on a poster on the wall of the Methodist chapel opposite. The reason she’s in a book about the coast is that I saw her many years later walking round the harbour in Bridlington. I walked up to her and declared ‘Well done is better than well said’ but her face was as blank as an eggshell.

Keith and I wandered down Pit Street to the pit. Huge wagons of coal trundled by and the pit bus rattled along, taking the morning shift home. The pit gear loomed in the bright afternoon. It didn’t look much like Blackpool Tower but we pretended that it did, in the same way we pretended that we could see Stephenson’s Rocket when we went trainspotting down by the sidings.

A kind of fiction-generating madness overcame us. We saw the Tower. We saw trams. We saw donkeys. We saw people in Kiss Me Quick hats eating bags of chips. The idea that the coast could somehow transpose itself to the middle of the country didn’t occur to us as odd because in our imagination anything was possible, anything at all. We even believed we’d made a sandcastle, in the dirt by the pit pond.

And then, just like it was time for tea at a guest house, we went to our separate homes and never spoke about it again, until now, because The Coast is a coast of the mind as well as something that gets between your toes.