I remember those miles of beach so clearly. The biting East Coast wind would cut through my forehead with the most intense searing pain. The dog and I used to run along the golden sand every morning, freezing and shivering and dancing in the waves, Zoë ripping the kelp to shreds in frenzies of joy. The first time I saw a Vettriano picture, it tugged at my soul with an intensity belied by the kitsch of the subject matter. It was the quality of the light that I recognised and yearned for again, the absolute translucence of the pure Northern air, the thin clear skies. Ridiculous pictures really, the fairy tale couple, the outlandish dinner party, and the butler holding the parasol for the couple dancing on the sand. Except that I have memories that mirror those images; sheltered beneath the castle walls, the French count (sorely missed, the world a more dreary place without your eccentricity) on May Day with his ancient gramophone, winding the antiquated horn covered handle to listen to scratchy jazz against the surf and the crackle of bonfires, dancing in a ball dress in the sand with my shoes in my hand, walking down the pier after a night on the town to be battered by the fiercest of waves and wind swept spray in a proper Scottish hoolie, aghast at the power and the ferocity of the water.
On other days we would go scuba diving along the outflow pipe, watching the crabs scurrying around with their purely organic fed bounty. I used to watch the ripped guy from my class (also RIP) bouldering on the ramparts that defined Castle Sands, poetry in motion, a dance that excited all the primeval instincts, an alpha male at the top of his game, beautiful, sculpted, sharpened muscles flowing as I memorised their names and the actions. When things weren’t so good with the Keep Britain Tidy man I used to climb around the corner of the castle ramparts, to howl at the wind and cry into the salty sea; from there the town faded and all that was left were the ancient walls and the indifferent waves.
I have a vast store of kinaesthetic memories, running along the Chariots of Fire beach, after the summer at Ridgway’s when running had, as the madman predicted, become a way of life, a necessity, a drug, without fail going that bit too far. It was always easy running away from town as the prevailing wind was at your back, and the shock and the effort and the pain of turning around and battling back home was a superb preparation for the pain of kicking to the line in all the races I never ran. Running became my meditation, the cruising absence seizures that kept me sane in those heady days of hedonism. I ran in the hail, the rain, but always the wind, and nearly always the sun, the liquid sun that would creep up over the expanse of treacherous mercurial sea and light up the magical towers in the mornings. Running past the Laird’s house, another imbecile man who was too keen on freedom, commoner and Laird, what fools we both were.
The beaches of St Andrews define so many of my memories.
The young South African, another tortured soul, idealistic as only a teenager can be, had run from his father, the mayor of apartheid, all the way from Johannesburg to London to Aberdeen. I don’t think the North Sea howled wild enough for him, used as he was to the freezing Atlantic, the cruising sharks and the monstrous surf of his homeland. I learned my lessons well that winter, about all kinds of betrayal, friends, lovers, beliefs, oneself. Maybe most of all, I learned about the power of dreams, and the power of freedom. He was a child of privilege, the English South African, the “selt poel” as Dennis used to call them, because they had one leg in England and one leg in SA and their dick dangling into the salty waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The young South African realised, possibly quite late in life that blacks should be free and equal and have the suffrage and he joined the ANC, an angry teenage rebel trying to change the world. I don’t think his father was a bastion of apartheid at all, but he was the mayor of a small coastal town near Jo’burg. I understood, reading between the lines, that the mayor felt the best way to change the country was from the inside, via the political route and the position he had been entrusted with. I never knew how deep the rift between the young South African and his father went, but he went travelling, as they all did and ended up in the house in London with Dennis Goldberg, the last true radical, the philosopher, the intellectual, the most humane man I ever met, and the wisest, who had finally come to believe that bombs as well as words were needed to free the black South Africans.
I remember the day the young rebel stopped stock still in the high street to watch me jaunt past, on my way home from work in the fancy dress shop, my twenty pounds salary burning a hole in my pocket. He came into the pub that night, by chance I presume although you never know but I preferred to think of it as fate. It was the week before I left for university. We had an intense week of passionate debate, fuelled by some of the strongest fags I had ever smoked, a truly intellectual affair. I was his intellectual sparring partner, a widely read coffee coloured girl with the words and the wit to argue my points. In our own way we were all discovering freedom, free thought, all those tortured middle class rebels all kicking off the traces of suburbia and running off around to change the world.
Intellectual doesn’t mean devoid of passion, as I found out screaming at the sea in rage the night I went to knock on my friend’s door because he hadn’t arrived off the train from Aberdeen that Friday. I remember walking through the West Sand dunes with him, wrestling with his conscience shortly after my so called best friend had seduced him, this inferno of a man who had followed me to Scotland for a glimpse of a different future, proving, to his chagrin, that no matter where you are and how high flown your principles are, it is the basest instincts that win in the end. He told me, that, like Clinton, they had never “had sex”, but by then I was already a little less gullible. The irony was that for all his talk of equality, the girl he fancied the most was an English rose. He had too much passion for St A’s, the small town with the narrow mind and the loosest of tongues and the mess he made was just irreparable and he ran away for keeps, first to the dour greeking granite of Aberdeen and the adrenaline of the oil fields; he trained as a paramedic and went offshore. Then he went home to Jo’burg to scoop up the injured and the underprivileged in the machete versions of the war against apartheid. I wonder if he ever sold out, bought the house, got the mortgage.
The beach always offered an escape from the latest reality, in a thousand different ways. Bless the Captain! The police girl and I used to hack his polo ponies out for miles, always well over an hour, all over Wormit and the hills beyond. We could never understand how he always happened to drive past in the Landy, miles from his nearest farming interest. They were as fit as fleas, those ponies! He boxed us down to the beach and we three rode as far as we could away from the town, not quite turning the corner to the Eden estuary and turned their heads and raced the wind back to town. Four miles long that beach is….we couldn’t have raced that far! And Cince the Argentine Criollo pony didn’t have a hope really, those massive quarters gave us a huge burst of speed over a hundred metres but no stamina, it was the blue racing blood in the thoroughbreds that won out and the Captain and the police girl beat us by miles. We carved perfect figures of eight on the sands, prize winning circles, flying changes, we stick and balled with a plastic beach ball, bolting up the beach for goal, but having to turn back as the wind caught the over large ball and stopped it in its tracks. The sand was perfect: you could stop and turn right on their haunches without a fear of a slip. Cince was always the best to stick and ball, nippy and neat and balanced, chasing the ball for you to tap into goal. All the while the watery April sun cleaned the air and the grey stone of the town glistened like the sea, the spires reaching up to greet the start of summer.
Stop and turn; the central move of polo….full out gallop, dead stop, wheel around, well on the haunches, fast as you like, strike off again always into full gallop, always on the correct lead or they will break a leg with the pressure of the take off. Hours of practice down the fence line, first one then the other, all on the neck rein, cowboy style and all in the weight from the back not the arms. Full out, full stop, don’t look down, look around as you spin around, then they will choose the leg, close your eyes, don’t think, again and again until it is instinct, until when the ball flies over your head it isn’t you turning the pony but simply your body, your extended body turning on a sixpence and haring back down the field to get the ball back.
That same year, working down in Ascot, I found a pony that would stop and turn so well you could tie the reins around her neck and show off with a gin in one hand and a fag in the other. Guillermo liked his horse so sharp that it would spin you off, you being the mere mortal English girl groom. “Again” and “again” he would shout, the fence posts coming down from five to three to two, until G-force won and the pony deposited you in a heap at the fence post. Then Guille would fall over laughing, pick me up, dust me off, cat leap into the stirrup and tap a ball off into the middle of the field. And I would hop onto PT and practice down the long side, watching the Argies spinning the ball in the air, the pony a part of them.
No matter where I lived in St Andrews, I always walked home along the beach last thing at night. I have enough memories of West Sands to keep me going for a barren century away from the sea. I cherish a different view now, of rolling hills and changing forests, always seen between a pair of neat black pointed ears but a sniff of salt or a trick of translucent light is enough to put me right back on the Fife coastline, leaning into the wind and dreaming of distant shores.
