SEA & ROCKS

When I lived at home, I would walk the dogs on the beach almost every day. A vast expanse which itself holds no fixed identity: enough of a void to completely consume you and render you empty. I love how the wet air suspends time and how the sea steals sound. At the bottom of the beach, where the sand is darker and damper, there aren’t many other walkers. I am alone. I am so small. I walk over slimy rocks with beads of seaweed like blown glass. When I lose grip, the rubber of my trainers feel the spikes of limpets encrusting the underbelly of a large sewage pipe. The pipe feeds into a stream which then weaves into the sea. I’ll try to find the narrowest part and leap over. Sometimes my feet make cliff edges of the waterlogged sand and I fall into its cold embrace. The sand here shines in my footprints like an indented shoe-cap, then remerges in gloop and forgets my presence.

My struggles are unmarked, the sand forever moulds and remoulds which is both unnerving and reassuring. I place faith in the cycles of the tide which will always sweep the shore back and forth twice a day. My family have dotted around different places throughout their lives but similarly cycle back. As my parents plan where they will live next, their only request is that it be by the sea. I think this would be my request too; when I’m in a city for too long, my head feels tight wanting the open nothingness of the beach. We all have this longing for the sea like we too are bound to a greater lunar force which lures us back. The beach remains my favourite thing about Hartlepool, the place I look forward to on return home. There is no other comfort like the sea.

Rocks stir a vague childhood feeling within me; not only to my juvenile curiosity, but to my Dad’s fixation too. Walking on the beach with my Dad, there was always an interval where he would slip away and clamber up on the riprap (A jagged, sloping breakwater of large loose stone slabs) to try and find, amongst the rocks and debris trapped in its ledges, coal.

Seaton Beach is a sandy beach, but at times throughout the day and year, can be tinted black by the coal shoals of the North Sea creeping landward after a stormy night and strong easterly. A handful of seacoalers, with their ex-army Land Rovers, arrive at the turn of the tide and skirt the coast locating the coal. In mole-hills they scrape up the black glitter and load up their trucks as the tide waxes and the sun withers. Like ghost-ships, they quest into the sea at night to deposit at the depot. ‘To be able to do this, day and night, each seacoaler has had to learn to speak the language of the sea as fluently as any fisherman’: as Jonathan Tulloch describes in ‘Boys from the Black Stuff’: ‘There are the melancholy container ships that haunt this coastline, all full of the oil demanded by the chemical industry of Teesside.’ A dying labour, a literal raking of their income in a place where secure jobs and the dignity and stability of family life that go with them are ‘as rare as a skylark above a coal heap’

A couple of years ago, seacoalers were banned from the beach. Now there is only a single humble amateur; my Dad.

It came to my Dad’s great satisfaction when upon kicking through stones, picking up and inspecting the black ones, he had found this precious fossil- calling me over if it impressively filled two palms. If the stony contender was too heavy, lacking sedimentary streaks and brittle porous texture, or if the rock was too perfect in shape, or lacking lustre- it was swiftly thrown back. If Dad thought ‘it’ll burn in the fire’, it was pocketed and onward with the search. I never liked this part of the walk. I, like the anxious fisherman’s wife, would lurk at the bottom of the slabs waiting for his return after a successful day’s find. Of course, his humble foraging’s would have only amounted to pennies-worth saved, and often some did not ‘burn in the fire’. The imposters fed to the fire would spit back in contestation.

However, I grew to adopt my Dad’s beach combing habits; walking parallel through the pebbly parts of the beach, eyes scanning ‘between the sea foam and the sea sand’ for specs of black which I could earnestly offer up to my Dad for inspection. I was always slightly elated if he pocketed my findings as it meant I had successfully distinguished the coal from the slag and won his seacoaler approval.

Now I of course walk amongst the riprap like a promoted pirate, freely hunting for fiery- embers and sometimes- being that ‘the booty of the see is free for all’- pocketing other rocks that catch my eye. I think I’ve always liked rocks from then on, especially the mundane ones. I think I really liked my Dad walking next to me again.