JULY 2020: THERE’S A COUPLE THERE WITH MASKS ON

It’s a warm day and there’s a hint of socially distanced summer in the air. Restrictions have been lifted and my mother-in-law is trying to decide if she can go to her beloved caravan in Cleethorpes for a curtailed season; usually she’ll be there from April until early October, cycling and swimming and going on the bus and kalling (grand old Yorkshire word) with her mates at the Knit ’n’ Natter, or should it be knatter, although the site itself is open from March until the end of November.

This virus year she’s been reduced to welcoming my wife and I first to her garden and then to a tiny space near her old coalhouse where she’s set up a couple of chairs and where we talk endlessly about what it’ll be like at the coast at that very moment. ‘It’ll be red hot in front of the van,’ she’ll say, ‘if that bit of wind would drop.’ We nod and eat slices of last year’s Christmas cake.

Now it’s July and a key has turned in the lockdown lock and we’re taking my mother-in-law to her caravan for the day just to try it. Bear in mind that she’s not been further than the end of her path since March, and this is a long journey. We swing out of the end of the street and head for the sea.

The A1 and the M18. Then the M180, that motorway built to serve some kind of Lincolnshire Powerhouse that we’re still waiting for and which suddenly ends and becomes the A180 which is like driving across a piece of avant-garde percussive/drone music. We comment that, as we approach the North Sea, the weather seems to be getting better; we try to say it aloud but the road is too noisy so we just say it as part of our internal monologue.

We drive through Grimsby and trundle into Cleethorpes; the sun has staked a claim on the sky. There are quite a few people about and they’re wearing the usual array of East Coast clobber. There are people in shorts and tops that exemplify the word skimpy. There are old men in suits and flat caps but, incongruously, trainers as white as half-sucked Polo mints. There are people in overcoats walking directly behind people in hotpants and tops that exemplify the word scanty. As we slow down in the limping traffic, my mother-in-law says, from the back seat, ‘There’s a couple with masks on. And there’s another one.’ We pass a bus and there are masked people aboard. My mother-in-law is reassured by this: all is as usual, except it’s masked.

The tide is out. Of course it is. This is Cleethorpes. I’m exaggerating a little but I’m 64 years old and I’ve been to Cleethorpes endlessly over the years and I’ve only ever seen the tide in five times. I’m exaggerating a little. Twelve times. The sea is so far out it’s speaking Dutch. There’s life here, though; there are people sitting out at cafés sipping lattes and there are people sitting out at pubs glugging beer. A man walking along the front is laughing so uproariously that he seems to be in danger of his face working loose.

We’ve downloaded a pass that we show to the man at the caravan park barrier and he waves us through. A masked queue waits outside the shop in the manner of polite bank robbers. We pass the touring field and my mother-in-law says, as she always does, ‘Plenty of tourers in!’ A ball is kicked high into the sky. And then we pull up at the side of the caravan. And maybe now the summer can begin, carefully, cautiously, masked and distanced. The two keys let us in; it doesn’t seem like half an hour since we were locking up in October and looking forward to a new season that, we all reassured ourselves, might be the best one ever.

We sit and marvel that here we are again, that this little scrap of coast has welcomed my mother-in-law once more, like it has since the 1940s. So much has changed and yet the sky hasn’t, and the sea, like a reluctant teenager, still doesn’t want to come in.

We get the kettle on and we go for fish and chips. We know that if we ask for fish and chips three times we will get so many chips that my mother-in-law will be able to eat them until August, so we have three fish and just one portion of chips. A small portion, which still contains enough chips to feed Kettering and probably Corby too. Not Wellingborough though. That would be exaggerating.

We bring the fish and chips back to the caravan and my mother-in-law has buttered some bread and got the red and brown sauce out. So little in 2020 makes me happy; so much in 2020 makes me sad and angry but: these chips, these old plates, this buttered bread, this brown sauce, this crafted batter, the sound of a grass cutter in the distance, the sound of a gull laughing at its own joke, all make me happy.

We go for a walk on the tops and down to the sands, like we always do, and the tide turns like Columbo at the door and starts to wander in. My mother-in-law sees someone she knows from a nearby caravan and they exchange a few unmasked words. We stroll back for tea and cake, the vast truth of the sea to our backs.

In the caravan, my wife asks, ‘Do you think you’ll come back then, Mam? To stop?’ My mother-in-law considers for a moment, but only for a moment. ‘I think I will,’ she says. I married into an undemonstrative but profoundly loving family and I know how much this means. There won’t be swimming, of course, and there won’t be bus trips and there will be no knitting and nattering but there will be a presence here, defiantly walking, slowly and with a stick, but defiantly walking by the distant sea. ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ my mother-in-law says.