An Englishwoman’s Home Is Her Castle: Social Morphologies and Coastal Formations

Abstract

There is a picture of my mother, naked and joyful (she’s four-years-old), blurred where the camera can’t catch her. She swings her Micky Mouse bucket on the beach at Felpham. When did they stop making buckets out of tin? she asks the AA’s Illustrated Guide to Britain’s Coast as we beachcomb our way through it. The tin bucket recurs in many of the photos we’ve dug out. From Broadstairs to Swanage. She’s older by Lynmouth and Minehead, gone from boarding house to hotel. She’s in tents with the Guides by Colwyn Bay; on Sunday school daytrips by Morecambe and New Brighton. On the east coast, it’s my turn. There is a picture of me—trunks, Guernsey jumper and superman cape—pleased with my plastic bucket at Cromer. Pleased with my wetsuit in Cornwall. We’re in cottages by then. We trace post-war social change, measure it by the granularity of the beach, the view, the buckets and spades. An Englishwoman’s home is her sandcastle, constructed with galvanised tin or moulded plastic. We read the map of the shoreline and follow the profile of change in our family: the granular shift, the strands, as we surge and drift the British coast.