It’s April 2021 and the country is slowly unlocking; one Wednesday evening, on my way back from recording a radio programme in Salford, I call in at The Station Tap on Sheffield station and drink a gorgeous pint in the bracing open air. A man passes; he looks appreciatively at me pleasure-glugging. ‘Just like being at Cleethorpes!’ he says, indicating the ever-changing cityscape. I laugh. He notices my scarf. ‘It’ll be colder theer though,’ he says. ‘Allus cold in Cleethorpes!’ I agree and feel a slight East Coast shiver. I can almost smell the fish and chips and the sea air. I pull my hat down further and gaze at the beer’s gold glow.
My mother-in-law’s caravan in Cleethorpes is unserviced, which means that she has to use shared facilities in the concrete toilet block across the field. This further means that she can’t stay in her caravan until 17 May, a restriction she accepts stoically. She’s spent her time getting things ready to take with her for The Great Unlocking. Others, with modern vans, can be walking on the tops and licking ice cream just as I’m sipping beer in Sheffield but my mother-in-law is still at home making transcendent egg custards and sublime rhubarb crumbles in between watching snooker and Westerns on her TV. Snooker and Western isn’t a genre, by the way, although maybe it should be.
I got a taxi to the station the other day and usually the driver and I talk about football but this time he wanted to talk about his caravan in Cleethorpes; he’d been to visit it, to set it up ready for when he could stay. ‘I had a walk on the front,’ he says, ‘and you could see all the way to the other side.’ He repeats the phrase as I get out of the cab. ‘You could see all the way to the other side.’
Seeing all the way to the other side is what this time of Cleethorpes-interregnum is all about for my mother-in-law and the taxi driver and anybody else who hasn’t, in this uncertain and brittly joyous spring, been able to stay in their caravan yet.
We’re still in the garden and I’m eating a slice of currant pasty, although I’m from Barnsley so I call them ‘kerrens’. We’re all trying to see all the way to the other side. I’m picturing this iconic walk along the tops that we always talk about even when we’re doing it, the wind coming in from the sea so athletically that it’s running rings around me and flapping my scarf like a flag on a yacht. I can hear myself trying to say something witty/poetic to my wife who is holding on to her hat but in the end neither of us can hear my aphorisms because the wind is shouting too much. My wife is picturing a moment when one of our daughters was a baby and we’re pushing her along this path sometime in 1983 and the sun keeps playing hide-and-seek with the clouds.
She shouts the memory across to me and now I remember it too; we’d come for a few days at the caravan with our new baby because sleeplessness feels less punishing when there’s sea air involved. We’d got a lovely buggy and I was always a proud dad when I pushed it down the street and people would lean into it and say lovely things. About the baby, obviously, not about me.
We’d bought a kind of movable parasol that fitted to the front of the buggy with a wing-nut attachment that seemed to me, as a deeply and proudly (well, it gets me out of changing fuses) impractical man, that even I could work. The idea was that if the sun shone too hard in the child’s face, you just loosened the wing nut and adjusted the parasol and the shade was instant and sleep-inducing.
How young we all looked, because how young we all were! There was, as ever, a strong breeze that shoved the clouds around a side-plate-blue sky, so we made sure the parasol was secure as we headed out. We pushed South along the path towards the yacht club but somehow the sun, rather than the wind, kept changing direction and it seemed that every two minutes it hurled its blazing light into the baby’s innocent face.
This meant that every two minutes we had to stop and adjust the wing nut and the parasol, but it seemed to us that every time we performed The Ceremony of Readjusting the sun was one step ahead of us and changed direction again, or it would skulk behind the clouds for a few seconds and then leap out to surprise us. That short walk on that sunny and windy morning has become part of our enduring family folklore. We often talk about it and exaggerate how many times we had to adjust that flipping parasol and how recalcitrant the wing nut became and how the passers-by gazed at us with a mixture of pity and, well, more pity. But the fact remains that I had to personally adjust that parasol at least ninety-five times. And that’s no exaggeration.
Back in my mother-in-law’s garden, I’ve finished the kerren pasty and we’re laughing about the parasol and the wing nut from all those years ago. ‘I’m sure we didn’t alter it that many times’, my wife says, but I’m not sure. Memory is a really interesting prism; you can see all the way to the other side.