My mum says she heard him scratching under the floorboards ever more faintly for the next couple of days The bones are probably still under the bathroom floor. But that, of course, was for people that my grandmother would call "common".We could play safely on that infinite stretch of sand. Hopscotch, leapfrog, digging and shell-collecting were all very well. But there can be five hours to fill as the tide creeps back in across the half mile of sand and the water becomes deep enough for swimming.My sister must have been old enough to write letters but not to know the meaning of four-letter words I'd have been about nine. She was a willing helper, running a driftwood stick through the sand to form the letters B L O O D Y and S H I T.
Long before the waves had licked the beach clean of dirty words, my mum turned up. She was famous for her bollockings, delivered at a run with fists clenched and lower jaw set. As the rest of us stood there sheepishly, my older and bolder cousin Kate took the rap.That summer we stayed in one of a semicircle of 19th-century coastguard's cottages in the Bay. The dunes between them and the sea were a perfect play- and battleground.The following year, in a just-built house round the corner, our hamster fell down the gap between pipe and lino and couldn't be rescued.
For a week or two over several summers we joined them, staying in the Bay.Strangely, as far as most of our relatives were concerned, we were living in south-east London and prided ourselves on bringing a little much-needed inner-city guttersnipery to snooty Sandwich Bay We longed to be at Pontin's in Margate. A fast golfing set (if that's not an oxymoron) hung out here. Nancy Astor had a fine Edwardian mansion; James Bond's creator Ian Fleming was a frequent visitor in the Fifties.My grandparents had been going to Sandwich since the 1920s for the golf They were insiders. A few daytrippers may have had the gall to bring their windbreaks, and - whisper it between gritted teeth - transistor radios, but outsiders were viewed suspiciously. Still are, if the number of "Private" signs marking out the boundaries of houses with dunes as their garden is anything to go by.On a couple of roads leading up to the beach from the tollgate, past what is now a bird-watching centre, the estate consists of a handful of ostentatious houses, built as holiday homes for the English gentry from Edwardian times to the 1970s.The rest of the land behind the dead-end road along the shore is devoted to golf.
