St Leonards-on-Sea

On Thursday 9th April, my boyfriend and I took the 6.45pm train from Victoria to Hastings and, after two hours of uneventful travel, reached England’s South East coast.

We stayed with a friend who recently bought a flat in an old Victorian house overlooking St Leondards, one of Hastings’ districts by the sea. My boyfriend was there on business: he had been hired by our friend to give a workshop to children at the art gallery she works at. I tagged along to get away from London and enjoy a bit of sunshine on a pebbly beach.

Our friend brewed us nettle tea on that first night and told us she was having problems with a student placement at the gallery. The student was a mature woman who she realised, too late, was a bit of a handful. A few days before, the police and the RSPCA (The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) had shown up at the gallery and taken the woman away while our friend was out on a visit. When our friend came back, her office colleagues (three dog lovers who spoke all the time about their pets as if they were children) broke the news that someone had found the student’s dog locked in her car and called the police. It was a hot, sunny day and the dog had been there for hours, without water or much air.

The dog, a black shaggy doe-eyed creature that didn’t look too dissimilar from its owner, was OK, and the student apologised profusely, but my friend’s office colleagues weren’t happy with the situation: the last thing the art gallery needed was a front page scandal in the local rag.

On Friday, while they delivered the workshop at the gallery, I wandered by myself around St Leondards and Hastings.

I riffled through second-hand shops in search of old pulp horror and sci-fi novels, drank filter coffees in cafés, watched drunks laugh and sunbathe on the beach, walked past tables set up by Labour and Green volunteers canvassing for the upcoming election; and when my feet got tired, I found benches that faced the calm, empty sea.

In Boots the Chemist, to buy some sunblock and soap, I stood behind a skinny bearded young man with thick, long brown hair who seemed to have walked out of a cave. He wore white gloves and was shopping for diapers. He occasionally twitched and scratched his body, as if following a song only he could hear. He reminded me of a young man with a chronic fear of germs who was part of a Channel 4 documentary some years ago that looked at people living with mental illness.

On Saturday, we visited antique shops, ate calamari with chips for lunch and daydreamed in front of real estate agencies.

By the promenade’s mini golf, we noticed a family staring up at the softsand cliffs overlooking town. We spotted a group of teenagers on the steep side of the cliffs by Hastings Castle’s ruins, jumping from one rock edge to the next. Any wrong move and the local funeral directors would have their work sorted for the week.

Inside Hastings’ best ice cream shop, I ordered a Raspberry with Marshmallows cone. A little ginger girl by the counter, with freckles covering her sunkissed face, nodded her approval.

‘It’s the best,’ she said with authority.

Outside, my boyfriend told me I’d ordered a little princess ice cream flavour.