Footprints In the Sand

There was no sandy beach where I was born, no sea-breeze to blow away the smoke and fumes of South Lancashire industry. But later, walking on an Irish Sea beach between Mersey and Ribble I left a boy’s footprints in the sand which would remain until a high-tide erased them.

From a neighbouring village, the sturdy, large wheeled shrimp carts would move westwards across the samphire to the sea’s edge, leaving only hoof prints and wheel tracks to do battle with a later incoming tide.

During the first months of the six-year war that encompassed my late teens and early twenties, the footprints I left along England’s south-eastern coasts resembled garlands impressed around the regular spaced, lurking beach mines which I had helped to lay, to await the expected invader’s deeper imprint of tank-track, or pressure of jack-boot, to explode them and leave the beach littered with mangled metal, and bloody scraps to feed the hungry seagulls.

Along the southern rim of what the Romans called ‘the middle of the earth sea’ are beaches which I have imprinted with feet rejoicing to be, for however short a time, free of Army boots and sweaty socks. Such a beach, at Carthage, once home of Hannibal, before he set off to defeat the Romans in their own country, was my home too, as I and an army of others waited the signal to invade the Italian monarch’s former kingdom. There I swam in the warm, blue sea, left footprints in the wet sand at the water’s edge and learned how to eat spiny sea-urchins and drink Tunisian wine with a delectation formerly relished during boyhood only when enjoying meals of potted shrimps, a butty and a nice cup of tea!