It is very pleasant in August to recline in Fleet Street, or
wherever stern business keeps one, and to think of the sea. I do
not envy the millions at Margate and Blackpool, at Salcombe and
Minehead, for I have persuaded myself that the sea is not what it
was in my day. Then the pools were always full of starfish;
crabs--really big crabs--stalked the deserted sands; and anemones
waved their feelers at you from every rock.
Poets have talked of the unchanging sea (and they may be right as
regards the actual water), but I fancy that the beach must be
deteriorating. In the last ten years I don't suppose I have seen
more than five starfishes, though I have walked often enough by
the margin of the waves --and not only to look for lost golf
balls. There have been occasional belated little crabs whom I
have interrupted as they were scuttling home, but none of those
dangerous monsters to whom in fearful excitement, and as a
challenge to one's companion, one used to offer a forefinger. I
refuse regretfully your explanation that it is my finger which is
bigger; I should like to think that it were indeed so, and that
the boys and girls of to-day find their crabs and starfishes in
the size and quantity to which I was accustomed. But I am afraid
we cannot hide it from ourselves that the supply is giving out.
It is in fact obvious that one cannot keep on taking starfishes
home and hanging them up in the hall as barometers without
detriment to the coming race.
We had another amusement as children, in which I suppose the
modern child is no longer able to indulge. We used to wait until
the tide was just beginning to go down, and then start to climb
round the foot of the cliffs from one sandy bay to another. The
waves lapped the cliffs, a single false step would have plunged
us into the sea, and we had all the excitement of being caught by
the tide without any of the danger. We had the further
excitement, if we were lucky, of seeing frantic people waving to
us from the top of the cliff, people of inconceivable ignorance,
who thought that the tide was coming up and that we were in
desperate peril. But it was a very special day when that
happened.
I have done a little serious climbing since those days, but not
any which was more enjoyable. The sea was never more than a foot
below us and never more than two feet deep, but the shock of
falling into it would have been momentarily as great as that of
falling down a precipice. You had therefore the two joys of
climbing--the physical pleasure of the accomplished effort, and
the glorious mental reaction when your heart returns from the
middle of your throat to its normal place in your chest. And you
had the additional advantages that you couldn't get killed, and
that, if an insuperable difficulty presented itself, you were not
driven back, but merely waited five minutes for the tide to lower
itself and disclose a fresh foothold.
But, as I say, these are not joys for the modern child. The tide,
I dare say, is not what it was --it does not, perhaps, go down so
certainly. Or the cliffs are of a different and of an inferior
shape. Or people are no longer so ignorant as to mistake the
nature of your position. One way or another I expect I do better
in Fleet Street. I shall stay and imagine myself by the sea; I
shall not disappoint myself with the reality.
But I imagine myself away from bands and piers; for a band by a
moonlit sea calls you to be very grown-up, and the beach and the
crabs --such as are left--call you to be a child; and between the
two you can very easily be miserable. I can see myself with a
spade and bucket being extraordinarily happy. The other day I met
a lucky little boy who had a pile of sand in his garden to play
with, and I was fortunate enough to get an order for a tunnel.
The tunnel which I constructed for him was a good one, but not so
good that I couldn't see myself building a better one with
practice. I came away with an ambition for architecture. If ever
I go to the sea again I shall build a proper tunnel; and
afterwards-- well, we shall see. At the moment I feel in
tremendous form. I feel that I could do a cathedral.
There is one joy of childhood, however, which one can never
recapture, and that is the joy of getting wet in the sea. There
is a statue not so far from Fleet Street of the man who
introduced Sunday schools into England, but the man whom boys and
girls would really like to commemorate in lasting stone is the
doctor who first said that salt water couldn't give you a cold.
Whether this was true or not I do not know, but it was a splendid
and never-failing retort to anxious grown-ups, and added much to
the joys of the seaside. But it is a joy no longer possible to
one who is his own master. I, for instance, can get my feet wet
in fresh water if I like; to get them wet in salt water is no
special privilege.
Feeling as I do, writing as I have written, it is sad for me to
know that if I really went to the sea this August it would not be
with a spade and a bucket but with a bag of golf clubs; that even
my evenings would be spent, not on the beach, but on a bicycle
riding to the nearest town for a paper. Yet it is useless for you
to say that I do not love the sea with my old love, that I am no
longer pleased with the old childish things. I shall maintain
that it is the sea which is not what it was, and that I am very
happy in Fleet Street thinking of it as it used to be.