There’s a town in North Wales I remember well. The Dovey River comes down from Snowdonia, winds gently through the coastal hills, and greets the Straits of Man in a wide, flat estuary called an aher in Welsh. The town of Aberdovey sits snug in a cove against the hills – dozing slate giants mantled with a thin layer of earth to make the walking easier. When the tide ebbs and tips the little boats on their sides, the rippled beach, cratered with ponds, stretches out to meet the bar – almost too far away to see.
Our house was at the very tip-top of Gibraltar Terrace – past the butcher’s and the little shop that sold News of the World and fresh milk in bottles. It wasn’t really a lane, Gibraltar Terrace, but more a vertiginous path cobbled with stone and high-walled on both sides. It wound upward, ever upward, to the little cottage perched on a cliff, with the red door and the shroud of wild roses that grew wilder every year.
In a wooden box in the attic of the cottage at the top of Gibraltar Terrace was my collection of holiday toys. Every July since I was five this box awaited my arrival, and every year the contents became larger and more respectable. There were figurine soldiers, and personnel carriers, and scale-model trucks; there were bright-orange crab lines – tangled and reeking of brine- and little wooden frames to wrap them around; there were spades for digging and buckets for dredging, and wire-framed nets for interesting things the tide left behind.
It rarely rained in Aberdovey in the summer but when it did the box held cards to play, and a game called Pairs that one day I rigged so expertly I never lost a set until I was twenty-one. There was a toy shop in the town that was open ’til six, the kind of shop that – come July – burst its bud with beach balls and kites and bathing towels and racks and rows of snowshakers and shell beads – all tagged with lurid green labels that grew more ragged as the summer, and the beach-sticky fingers of children wore on.
On certain days the beach became a battleground, where grey armies of the Wehrmacht, retreating over the beach blanket, succumbed to the superior forces of the British desert army who, being buff coloured like the sand, always returned to the box fewer than before. When the fighting was done, the bucket and spade came out, and the limbs of slumbering parents would disappear beneath mounds of shovelled sand. Then the yellow bulldozer – my favourite – a miniature replica with real rubber tires and a tiny man behind the controls. Under my gaze it grew to full size until I forgot myself and became the driver, ploughing industriously through golden sand, ploughing around the legs of giants, ploughing past thermos flasks the size of lighthouses. At low tide, the little man and his yellow dozer journeyed out to the water line where the sand was wet and pliable, and raised grand castles on the bar.
When the world turned on its axis, and the mussel-crusted pier sank low in the water I would go crabbing – with my line, my bucket and a packet of meat from Griffith the butcher. Crabbing was man’s business and required the best tackle money could buy. There was an assortment of weights in the box – rings of lead with nodules that served some purpose I never discovered – and blue steel hooks wrapped in neat, wax paper bags. On a good day my bucket bristled with blue-backed crabs. It was very nice to peer in occasionally, and watch them blowing tiny bubbles, climbing over one another and making a crackling noise like pocket pebbles. When the time came to go home, I’d pick them out with my small, careful hands and watch as they floated back down into the greeny briny gloom.
Nineteen seventy-two was the year the yellow bulldozer, with its real rubber tires and articulated bucket, did not return to the box that went back in the attic on the second Sunday after our arrival. It stayed on the beach, buried in the same hole its driver had dug and then abandoned. I try to explain to myself, even now, how I could have lost my yellow bulldozer. At what point did my imagination falter? At what point did my grip on that busy little dozer loosen just enough to let it go, to leave it behind in the sand? The next year, on the first morning after our arrival, instead of pulling down the wooden box in the attic, I went sailing with my father. All afternoon I roamed the exposed sands, half-heartedly searching for my yellow bulldozer with its little man inside. But the search was in vain.