I think the best advice I got was from Tasmin – to just let the pain have its wicked way with you. When the tears come, don’t fight them – because they will always win.
Despite the crying fit, Joe was excited about going back to the cottage, and seeing Poppy again, and possibly setting off on an A–Z adventure. I was less excited – especially when I realised that she’d been staying there.
It’s mean spirited and petty to resent that, but I did. I felt like she’d somehow had more time with Mum than I had; laid claim to the place, put down roots. Become the better daughter. All very unattractive, but that, coupled with my sugar deprivation, didn’t exactly put me in the best frame of mind for our reminiscent family trip.
Mum had obviously pictured some kind of emotional reliving of glory days past – trying to get us to remember those happy family holidays; playing barefoot in the sand, hunting for shells, flying kites on top of the cliffs. Simpler times.
She’d left a package for us as well as the poem, which contained a key with a number tag on it, and a pile of photos. The photos were all of us when we were kids, pulling faces and proudly showing off sandcastles and eating ice creams. It looked as though every day was blissfully sunny, and every beach was our own personal playground.
Joe was fascinated by them, and kept staring at me, and staring at Poppy, then staring at the pictures, as though trying to make it all line up in his brain. Kids never assume their own parents were little, do they? I felt the same when I saw that photo of our mum as a baby. Surely she’d arrived on the planet fully grown and ready to cook my tea?
We explained the rhyme to Joe on the way down – the first verse was about Durdle Door, a magnificent limestone arch that rises up from the sea off the coast of Dorset. There are about a million steps carved out of the cliff to get down to it, and by the time we arrived, it was after lunch and the place was swarming with people, crawling up and down the steps like little touristy ants. It was a gorgeously sunny day, and the shimmering sea was bobbing with kids paddling and dogs swimming and little rowing boats.
I struggled with the climb – both up and down – and noticed that both Poppy and Joe pretended to be struggling as well, stopping every few minutes and making a big show of being out of breath when I knew they were fine. I understood that they were trying to be kind, but it made me feel even more disgruntled. Like a depressed hippo trying to keep up with the graceful gazelles. All my own fault, and at least it made me more determined to stay on the latest health kick.
It’s a beautiful place, but not quite like I remembered it. It’s … fuller. With hindsight, I think Mum must have planned our trips to this part of the coast for the early morning or late afternoon, when there were fewer people around. Clever Mum.
Our next stop was Charmouth – the ‘burned mouth’ in the poem – a beach where you can dig for fossils, and eat ice cream, also referred to in Mum’s dastardly clever rhyme. Another place we loved to go as children – we’d hire hammers from the local shop and chisel away at rocks, trying to unearth some rare belemnites. Mum would treat each find as a precious and amazing scientific discovery, and keep them all in little coin bags for us to take home.
Joe and Poppy got into the spirit of things, digging away and poking around on the cliff faces, both of them using their phones to take pictures of their finds, Poppy running off to the shops to get a carrier bag so Joe could store his fossils.
I was glad to see Joe happy – but not quite glad enough to jolt myself out of my sulk. If I’m honest, I still feel threatened by their relationship – Joe isn’t daft, he knows something bad must have happened to break us apart, but he doesn’t know what, and hopefully never will. His newfound Aunt Poppy is just a barrel-load of laughs as far as he is concerned, and I feel frumpy and boring and old in comparison.
After our trip to Charmouth, we ate fish and chips (I took the batter off, honest), and Poppy called round various places until she found us somewhere to stay for the night. I was keen to get it all done in one day, but she pointed out that it was getting late, and we wouldn’t be able to go digging around a beach at night-time without potentially getting arrested.
Now, as I look around at the pastel-coloured shops just opening for business, and the crescent of brightly painted beach huts stretching around the curve of the beach, I’m glad I listened to reason. Yesterday might have been a fail on the happy memories front, but this place was always my favourite.
It’s already quite warm, and I am barefoot on the sand, enjoying the feel of it between my toes as we stroll along the beach.
‘So, I see what she means about the gay colours now,’ says Joe, looking at an especially vibrant pink café. ‘But I’m not sure about the orange?’
‘It was a joke,’ Poppy replies. ‘Because orange is supposed to be the one word you can’t rhyme properly, and also it’s a fruit, like a lime – and this is Lyme Regis. Geddit?’
‘I suppose. It’s quite clever, but Granny wasn’t exactly Ricky Gervais, was she?’
‘Thankfully not,’ I respond. ‘That would just be weird, especially with the beard. Now, we’re looking for number … what’s on the key again, Poppy?’
She checks the tag, and points ahead. The beach huts are one of the loveliest features of this place, and we always used to hire one when we visited. People really love them, and paint them up, filling them with all of life’s essentials for a British seaside holiday – kettle, windbreaker, raincoats, umbrellas, that kind of thing.
We arrive at our particular hut, and find that it is an extremely cute shade of bright blue, almost exactly matching the colour of the sea. Poppy raises her eyebrows in a question, and I gesture for her to go in.
I am assuming that this was one of those field trips that Lewis mentioned, and I find myself wondering if Mum came with him. If she was well enough at that stage. If they drove down here together, and strolled along the Prom, and ate freshly caught crab and watched the sunset. I really hope they did.
Poppy opens the door to the hut, and we all crane our necks to see inside. Sure enough, there’s a kettle, as promised. Canisters of tea and coffee. A couple of striped deckchairs. A pile of Mum’s beloved tartan blankets. And – laid neatly out on a little wooden shelf – a vast collection of fossils, exactly like the ones Joe and Poppy collected yesterday.
I know that these ones, though, are antiques in their own right – these were collected by two brown-haired little girls in the 1970s and 80s, carried home in triumph and immediately forgotten about. Except she didn’t forget – she never forgot anything. She kept our treasures, and cherished them on our behalf, and now she’s trying to give everything back to us.
It’s an unexpected sight, and it brings the sharp sting of tears to my eyes. I’m a mum myself now, and I know I do the same – I have hoarded the precious mementoes of Joe’s childhood, the certificates and prizes and finger paintings, keeping them safe long after he’s forgotten about them. My mum loved us like that, with that same steadfast dedication, and it’s killing me that it took her death for me to finally appreciate it.
Joe gives me a little squeeze on the shoulders, and I blink the tears away.
Poppy looks at me, as if to check that I’m all right, then, when I nod, walks into the beach hut and emerges waving a huge garden spade. There is a luggage tag tied to its metal handle – one of those big old-fashioned cardboard ones, like Paddington Bear had – and she holds it steady in the morning breeze, so she can read it out.
‘Can you dig it? Look behind the hut!’ she says, frowning. She’s gone without her make-up this morning, and her hair is loose and wild and unbrushed, and she looks a lot more like the little girl I used to play with on this beach than she has for a long time. Staying at the cottage has definitely relaxed her, and I’m ashamed of myself for begrudging her that time there.
Joe, who might think he is grown-up but is still a giant child in half-baked man form, is immediately thrilled at the thought of digging for treasure, and disappears off behind the hut. There’s not much room, just a few feet, and he just about slips into the gap. Poppy passes him the spade, and he starts digging, in an awkward straight-armed motion because of his trapped position.
‘This isn’t as easy as it looks,’ he says, scooping shovels-full of sand off to the side.
