It was ten o’clock in Bournemouth, Saturday night: silent and still with a faint hint of chilliness under the stars at Hengistbury Head, where my parents live. My wife, children and I had spent a gentle week with them, pottering and pootling. No better place for it either. Hengistbury Head is right at the other end of Bournemouth Bay from Sandbanks, the place you may have heard of where houses cost more than they do in the Hamptons, where you might see Harry Redknapp or Piers Morgan or Botox ladies. I’ve never seen anyone famous at Hengistbury Head and I really hope I never do. It’s a cosy little backwater (much prettier than Sandbanks), still quite underdeveloped, suburban even. The odd luxury high-rise is starting to sprout among the bungalows, and I suppose it’s only a question of time before the developers get their teeth into it and it starts to look like Monaco or Miami.
Ten o’clock at Hengistbury Head and for all that was happening it might have been the dead of night in the depths of winter. But ten minutes’ drive away in the town centre I could picture the scene: Bournemouth raging in high summer. I haven’t been out in Bournemouth since my stag night seven years ago. I was promoting a record at the time and that week had been to Paris, Berlin, Milan, Stockholm and Madrid. Bournemouth on a Saturday night blew all the capital cities of Europe clean out of the water — it really did: an erotically supercharged, teeming bacchanalia. I didn’t fancy that at all this time but it was nice to think it was happening nearby. The day — one of sandcastles, ducks, swings and sausage rolls — wasn’t quite over.
‘I’m sure there’s fireworks in Christchurch tonight,’ I said. ‘It was in the Echo.’ My dad thought so, too. The ladies were settled in for the night and not budging, but my father and I dug out a couple of ramshackle bikes without proper lights and, avoiding the roads, wobbled giggling for a mile or so around the back of the little golf course along black tracks and pathways to Wick ferry. I remember my Aunty Winnie telling us how she used to walk down to Wick ferry with a candle when she was a girl. That must have been in the Twenties, and back then it would have been the bank that we were on now that was the more built-up side. Wick village is still pretty much as it was back then, a wilderness of watermeadows and warblers dotted with pretty cottages, but the other side of the river, which in the Twenties would have been a misty no-man’s land, is now more densely populated than a beehive. The ferryman had given it up for the night and it was pleasantly dark and deserted on the Wick side of the river, but over the flashing water, beyond the swaying boats, the thump of a bass drum, disco lights and heaving verandas. Earlier in the day we’d been down here watching the rowing; unexpectedly gripping it had been, too. It had all looked so wholesome, but by night it had collapsed into a drunken revel, visible, audible and ugly for miles around.
Along the water’s edge we found a bench overlooking the river, behind some tall reeds. The tide was high and the water splashed over our shoes as we sat there, quietly, thinking about Aunty Winnie and that mad boat she lived on. We fell into talking about boats, and their owners. Widgeon, Asterix, Souvenir, Nancy Ann, precious little floating worlds evoking cascades of memories. ‘What was Scotty’s boat called? That was the nicest. Wasn’t he murdered? Was that ever proved?’ ‘Yes, I think so, but no.’
Nothing at all stirred but our faces were alight as we remembered epic trips to Cherbourg and St Peter Port on our own boat, still moored a stone’s throw from where we were sitting, although the new owner never takes it further than the harbour entrance. So much time I’d spent as a child happily idle on this river as the man next to me tinkered with rope, wrenches and paint. Well, we’d been there some time and it didn’t look as if there were going to be fireworks after all, but somehow all those silent detonations of memory, flashes of vivid colours of the past were worth any number of rockets. I raced him home and lost, just.
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