A Day Trip to the Seaside

This is the High Street in Old Leigh in Essex, on the Thames Estuary. The scene in the photograph looks virtually unchanged since I was a schoolgirl in the 60's and 70's, and indeed since my 89-year-old Dad was at junior school and played in this street in the 1920's. Back then fishermen lived in the 2-up 2-down cottages in Old Leigh, and the other end of the High Street was lined with cockle sheds selling freshly-caught and prepared shellfish from the Estuary. Today, a few of the sheds remain but Old Leigh has long since become gentrified. In the late 70's the Peter Boat pub was a favourite drinking hole of the group of boys and girls I went round with as a 19-year-old. As soon as I emerged from Leigh-on-Sea station today, and saw the creeks and boats, and breathed in the sea air, I thought "I'm home". Dad and I used to spend time together here while Mum was visiting with her sisters for what we called the "Tuesday Gabble" - cups of tea and gossip. We'd drop Mum off at one or other of her sisters' houses and head straight for the cockle sheds, buy a plate of peeled prawns and sit and eat them looking out at the boats and across to Two Tree Island. Such happy and precious memories of my Daddy Dates.

Today we had an "old girls" reunion of classmates from my year at school, and lunched together in a restaurant just beyond the picket fence and the row of cottages in my picture. I hadn't seen some of the girls since the day we left school 39 years ago. As soon as we met up, the years melted away and everyone seemed to settle back into just the way we were in the classroom. Other people in the restaurant may have looked at us and seen a bunch of chatty middle-aged women, but to each other we were virtually unchanged from the class of '75. Still the same lovely, decent, fun girls. It was like getting long-lost family back.

I hope it's not another 39 years before we have the next get-together.