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FRINTON-ON-SEA

Even the name sounds like a hundred years ago. I haven’t been to Frinton-on-Sea since I was a little boy, I hope it hasn’t changed much.

Every year my grandfather rented a house at Frinton for the summer and my mother, grandmother and I and stayed there for about six weeks. My grandfather came down at weekends. Aunts, uncles and cousins came down for occasional weeks. My cat Tigger came with us one year and showed his deep devotion to me in the way only cats can. He scratched my legs and ran away. We found him a week later, fat and content in a genteel teashop full of cream cake. He celebrated his return to the bosom of our family by scratching my legs.

The house we rented came with one of the beach huts in the photo. I think ours was the middle one because I remember the veranda had the gate in the middle. There were deckchairs and a little stove to boil the kettle and to this day if I smell burning methylated spirits it takes me right back to Frinton and the home-knitted swimming costume made of string that sagged below your knees when it got wet, which it did when the adults sent us down to the sea with our shrimping nets. There were never any shrimps. The only thing my cousins and I ever caught were colds.