CHAPTER 1 The Sunny Days of Childhood

When I was a small boy my family often spent our summer holidays staying with Uncle Doug and Aunt Kath at their house in Birchington. Birchington is in Kent on the South East coast of England. My uncle insisted that Birchington was on the Isle of Thanet, but I could never quite determine which particular ditch gave arise to the status of Isle.

Of course in my mind the sun always shone. My father and uncle would take my younger brother Dick and I each day to collect something edible from the sea. Sometimes it would be a case of gathering winkles and mussels, which grew in abundance on the rocky parts of the shore. Other times we would dig in the sand for cockles, easily found due to the little air hole they breathed through, or plod through the shallow sea water with our specially designed nets, scooping up hundreds of shrimps. I usually had the job of emptying my brother Dick’s net, since he refused to touch the wiggling catch he had gathered.

It was interesting how the shrimps got larger as we approached the warm sludgy effluent, which emptied into the sea from a large rusting, seaweed encrusted pipe, which was presumably how Birchington disposed of it’s sewerage in those days. I won’t say the effluent was untreated, but it was warm and certainly contained enough nutrients to ensure that no local villager in possession of a shrimping net, need ever go hungry.

The day’s catch would be taken home and popped into a large pot of boiling water for a few seconds before being consumed. The winkles (edible sea snails) were probably the most fun, since you had to open the little door that protected them in their shell. This was done with a pin taken from Aunt Kath’s sewing kit. The next challenge was to use the same pin to pull the slippery little body from it’s spiral home. Once skilled in this art, it was easy to get the winkle out whole, but early attempts often lead to only half a winkle being recovered.

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