It’s summer and there’s an inescapable holiday feeling in the air. All over the Netherlands children are beginning their summer holidays. Families are making plans. Campers and caravans are being spruced up again ready for the summer trip. Will it rain? Will it be fine? Somehow the memory plays tricks when it comes to past holidays – surely the sun was always shining when we were children? Not always! But here is one holiday reminiscence where the sun just seemed to go on shining endlessly…

Ask anyone who is old enough and still has a memory and they will tell you about the summer of ’59. Wow! It was a summer to remember – full of warm sunny days and cloudless blue skies. That was the year, in the middle of August, that our family went to Sheringham on the north Norfolk coast for our annual holiday. It was a good choice. We tried to repeat the experience the following year with a trip to Lowestoft, which was not so lucky. We paddled about in the rain and came home early.

However, if my memory serves me correctly, we enjoyed three glorious weeks of sunshine in Sheringham. Various friends and family came to visit us and share in the holiday, staying either in our small rented flat or in the one our friends had rented, across the hallway from us, in a big holiday apartment building close to the cliff top. Grandpa Gayton came. We have photos to prove it. He was my father’s father and I loved his visits. He was a very obliging grandpa and I used to enthusiastically leave him pages of sums to do when I went to bed at night. In the morning they were done! Friends of the family were in the next door flat, together with their two daughters, close to my sister’s age. My sister also had another friend to stay for part of the time and I just joined in as best I could. I was only five. We rode seaside ponies (another photo) and we played on the sand to our hearts’ content, making huge sandcastles, digging moats and waiting for the tide to come in and fill them. A real traditional seaside holiday – and the sun kept shining!

I have a vivid memory of going with my mother down to the quaint little high street early in the morning, to stand in a long queue outside the bakery, with everyone else, waiting to buy bread and rolls for breakfast and our daily picnic. The smells wafting from the bakery were delicious. I searched for the bakery when we returned years later but sadly failed to find it. However, the memories hold good. I remember too how we would walk slowly home from the beach everyday, with that wonderful warm, satisfied feeling that you get after a long day in the open air, trailing buckets and spades and feeling the sand in our shoes. I remember crowding into the flat, watching while mum cooked our dinner in the tiny kitchen on the top floor of that big building and running across the hallway to see how our friends were doing.

Strangely, although the sun shone almost continuously, it is a rainy day that sticks in my memory. We played all morning as usual on the beach and gathered together on the sands to eat our picnic. Later in the afternoon, the clouds gathered overhead, the sky grew overcast and the first big drops of rain fell. We gathered up wet swimsuits, buckets, spades, thermos flasks and picnic baskets and ran. It was only a short climb onto the prom, then a dash along the path to the archway that led through to the cliff top path. We sheltered under the arch whilst the heavens opened and the thunder reverberated all around – a real summer storm. I stood under the archway, watching the rain, on that memorable day: the day I lost my fishing net!

No holiday in Sheringham is complete without a fishing net to trawl in the water, catching shrimps and seaweed, and I played with mine every day. Children still play with fishing nets today on Sheringham beach. On that fateful day, the fishing nets were gathered up in a hurry, as we ran for shelter, and I still seem to retain a picture in my mind (maybe I imagined it …) of my green fishing net, propped up against the wall of that archway. In the event, when the rain finally stopped, there was no time to return to the beach. It was time to climb wearily back up the hill for tea. It was not until much later that night, when it was too late to go back, that we realised the net was gone. We had left it in the archway.

Of course, the next day we searched for it but it was no longer there. Tears were shed, no doubt. I can’t remember. Neither can I remember whether kind, indulgent parents bought me a replacement. Money was tight in those days. I only know that the tiny incident was important enough to me to have remained vividly in my memory all these years. Anyway, it’s alright now – my husband bought me a new one!
 

Julie Duke

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