Quite how they managed to pack three boisterous children, a dog, themselves and two week's worth of provisions and toys into an Austin Cambridge, is one of the many unexplained mysteries of childhood.
I've enjoyed countless holidays as an adult, many in amazing places, but those afternoons with the car parked on nearby Portrush Strand, ourselves huddled on a tartan rug behind a windbreak, eating white-bread sandwiches, gritty with sand, and sipping sweet tea out of a battered thermos, remain, to my mind, the template for a perfect holiday.
PORTRUSH STRAND
They are still there: I see them all.
Mother, father, sister, brother,
a scruffy dog, a bouncing ball
they wildly pitch to one another,
a sandcastle with moat and wall.
A tartan rug and deck-chairs hide
behind a wind-break by the car.
As wind whips up a dancing tide,
kids gather small fish in a jar,
displaying them with nervous pride.
Along the Strand, from place to place,
cars park as other families
spill out, spread out, mark out their space
eat sandwiches, drink thermos teas,
play cricket, tennis, race and chase,
but I see only my own kin
clear through the telescope of time:
hot Portrush sun on Belfast skin,
my family, then in their prime,
knee deep in water, splashing in.
Sand dunes rear up like towering waves.
We venture in to hide and seek,
to hunt for trails like redskin braves
or clamber to the highest peak
seeking the Grail that each child craves.
We did not know how happy then,
in those fine hours of that bright day,
we were, or that the lives of men
are not enriched with constant play
and all existence ends in pain.
A man awaking to cold dawn,
I summon back those days again,
of sun-warm sand to play upon,
school holidays, devoid of rain
when, endlessly, the great sun shone
and feel my heart begin to break,
with anguish, sharper than a knife,
for the long-dead, and for the ache
of living a survivor’s life,
a ship with sorrow in its wake.
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