Terry Prone: Weather like this brings the world to my doorstep for a day on the beach

A dawn chorus filled with hope, melody, and occasional argument. The tide full in, calm as a lake, tiny waves sidling up to the beach, denying the primeval threat of the black-hearted ocean. Not a whisper of a breeze, so the irises stand proud, clothed in royal purple. The daffodil and bluebell leaves collapsed, the ones under the weighty parallel pile already rotting into readiness for the coming year, ready for inhumation in the vast compost heap. Early planes headed out over the Irish Sea, contrails crossing and swelling in their wake.

Later would come the cries of excitement as families arriving on the beach staked out their spot for the day, some making sure their backs were to warmed sheltering stone walls, others planting their shelter stakes right out there in the middle. Fathers unpacking and structuring shelter. Mothers chasing after toddlers headed for the water. Bright primary colours brightening the day as beach toys emerged from the big bags.

Some things change, some things stay the same, at this beach I watch from my bedroom window. Once upon a time, teenagers arrived in groups, ghetto blasters on shoulders, ready to disrupt the quieter folk with heavy metal. Now, they have phones clipped to their upper arms, those phones to be checked before any rugs are laid out. 

The teenagers rarely bring food, relying on the van up at the viewing point which provides coffee and pastries and might stretch, this summer, to triangular packets of sandwiches. The van is close to the other vehicle which houses a sauna which does remarkably well, even on hot days when it seems contradictory. 

If the teens can’t be bothered with advance food preparation, it’s the ones in their 30s, the “settlers” with six and seven-year-olds, who bring small barbecues that will later send spirals of coke smoke across the sand, followed by cooking scents of unimaginable promise.

It’s called Tower Bay, this little cove.  Imagine having a beach area named after your house… Mine is the Martello that looms in irrelevant threat over the holiday makers, creating a new set of memories among the children who lean their arms on the beach gate, wondering what this castle might be like, inside. Their parents and grandparents did the same. 

On the mornings the tower is open to the public — summer Saturdays and Sundays — they confide their memories, those older people. Of being brought out in their father’s Ford Anglia or on the bus.

 Dragging picnic baskets and towels to a familiar, always-chosen spot. Looking up at the tower and wishing they could get inside it, imagining that if they were on the roof, they would see as far as France. In fact, they wouldn’t. On a good day, we kid ourselves we can make out Wales but, for most people, Lambay and Ireland’s Eye are sufficiently enthralling vistas.

A new item for the tour commentary is supplied by Diarmaid Ferriter’s recent book, Between Two Hells, about the Irish Civil War wherein he looks at the imprisonment of anti-Treaty Republicans and the lengths gone to — and considered — for that incarceration: “A note to each minister noted that the 617-acre Lambay Island, off the coast of County Dublin, ‘would be capable of accommodating 10,000 men’.

“It surely could have become the real Irish republic if this proposal had been followed through,” muses Ferriter, “but it was deemed too expensive.”

IN these more modern times, the beachgoers are supervised by my two cats. Specs plants herself on a wall overlooking the sandy, rocky curve and lazily observes. Dino, a feline police officer, takes up different wall positions and now and then actually walks the beat, dropping down onto the warm weathered masonry of the slipway and having discussions with some of the groups encamped there before plodding back up the steep slope to home.

Some of the visiting families have fallen in love with the new steel door of the boathouse leading to the slipway. Up to a few months ago it was bricked up and blinded, the boathouse which had once housed the lifeboat, before lifeboats became too big for the entrance.

When that happened, the slipway was left to deteriorate and in places disappear, and the then owners of the tower filled in the door. Now, the bricks have been torn out and a great steel replacement has gone in, to the fascination of beachgoers who watch the making and fitting of it with the judgemental comments of the completely inexpert.

Open, the new door brings sun-filled life into a long-dead structure. Closed, it reflects heat onto the visitors smart enough to line themselves up with it. You can see the parents taking extra care to cover every inch of juvenile skin with SPF 50 to protect their children and prevent those later medical questions wondering if you ever got badly enough sunburned in your earlier years to produce blisters.

The acoustics of the bay are such that, while every yell of protest at being splashed can be heard, so can quiet conversations in many languages. The conversations one can understand are never about the big issues of the nation. You don’t hear discussions about homelessness or Sláintecare, but about new babies and the ailing old, about decisions regarding school and mobile phones and getting help for a mother who’s beginning to fail.

Meanwhile, the dogs, blessed as they are with no capacity to speculate about oncoming misery, go hysterical when the tide won’t obey orders and stop coming in. Fathers help younger ones build castles, although the sand, coarse and ungovernable, rarely allows the golden perfection it’s possible to achieve on the nearby Portrane beach.

In this little cove, it’s pointless excavation and bockety bucket-fed structures, most of them collapsed before the families begin their exit, weighed down departure, dragged by the heat of the day.

Me and Bryan, a friend who keeps the garden from going full jungle, rarely stop our weeding to watch the families. The exception is when lower back pain requires a lean on the handle of a shovel, or a stretch with the back of the right hand applied, just below waist level. You stand in the noisy peace of the garden, listening to the bees giving out about their hard life, watching butterflies being ridiculously performative, hearing the wood pigeons mourning.

Then you get back to driving the fork into soil crusted, desiccated, and diamonded by the heat of the sun into a verisimilitude of a million scorched river beds throughout the burning world.