They sat on Redcar beach picnicking beneath the steelworks. Its chimneys blurted smog and clangs from the factory floor serenaded them. The thrusts of the grimy ocean could hardly compete – on coastal Teesside, this recital of industrial poetry dominated earshot.
The picnickers poached cling-filmed tuna sandwiches from a shopping bag and reclined into foldaway camping chairs. Their floral orange patterns jarred against a sky the shade of a well-used twenty pence piece. Abandoned at the group’s feet was a rolled-up canvas windbreak; erecting it in that afternoon’s furious North Sea gusts would have been like confronting a Roman centurion with a toothpick.
I was one of those 1980s picnickers, a child pointing along the beach and asking repetitively, irritatingly what came next. We moved away from life by the steel river before I ever got chance to find out. More than 30 years on, the child’s curious questions would be replied to by the man he had become: I would walk from Redcar, onwards down the North Sea coast.
Setting out through a frenetic gale, I watched locals carrying prams down from the esplanade to the beach, their heads bowed like pall bearers. Children launched frisbees which occasionally threatened to abscond towards Hamburg. An old man pursed his lips and whistled cheerfully as if in conversation with the wind. Above, seagulls lurked ready to raid foam trays of sallow chips and copper doughnut ringlets, Dick Turpins of the heavens.
Opposite, a strip of vivid amusement arcades and syrupy cafes made life that little bit merrier. "All for your delight" offered shimmering chrome letters above the door of Gabrielle’s Ice Cream. Daydream Believer spluttered from a tinny speaker attached to Tyne Tees Amusements, where a girl of seven or eight begged from her dad a pound for the grabber machine. 'They’re a fix, them,' he said, 'You might as well bury me money in the sand.' The girl looked back at him and asked: 'Can I do that instead, then?'
Redcar finished elegantly with the final bay windows and dormer roofs of Granville Terrace. I looked towards them and imagined severe landladies lifting their watch wrists theatrically at lodgers scuttling back late to their B&Bs. On the beach, children collected shells and sea glass in a treasure hunt that will never end. From the wall a lone fisherman cast his line long into the tide, rested his rod and then opened a can of lager. Near him, an old lady sat tight on a bench, immersed in a puzzle book. All were lost in blissful distraction. The land ends, there is nowhere left to go and we realise that staying still is a gladdening thing.
Thankfully, so too was strolling by the sea, its incidental chatter always in my left ear. The sands – in hot chocolate and Horlicks powder shades – now expanded into the distance and were punctuated every 50 metres by the prongs of old timber jetties, gnarled teeth on a monster’s decaying jaw. Beyond them, cliffs ascended and then ceased bumpily, their faces shaped like unfurled paperclips. With the lapping sea and cavernous sky, it was a view that tickled the senses. "You loved it and it was in your bones", read a bench plaque I paused to read, "now it is your final resting place."
Soon, the grass had given way to disorderly, lumpy dunes. Razorbills pecked at the sand and seemed to tiptoe with caution as if creeping in from a night out and trying not to wake their eggs. The sun glimmered, crayoning the beach yoke-yellow. Sea arrived dramatically before fizzling out and congealing into grotty foam candyfloss lumps. A traffic jam of container ships was illuminated now by the sun, a highlighter pen dragged across the horizon.
A crow perched on a wizened stile and a troupe of cows swished their tails like faulty pendulums. A mile away and far beneath, Saltburn appeared incrementally: first its pier, striking out in a lattice of iron beams and pillars; then the upper part of this seaside town, which seemed to float as if it were a great zeppelin society moored to the cliffs.
Down at the front, no-one walked with purpose and everyone sauntered or strolled, a shift from the muddy boots and mile targets of the coastal path. In a shelter, they bundled up close to share chips or ice cream, or feel the hurtling, unstoppable happiness most do when looking at a vivid row of beach huts. A man chatted to passers-by while repainting his hut in Space Hopper orange. 'It’ll be Summer before you know it,' he said.
I climbed high and beyond Saltburn. How the landscape now changed. Intermittently and for miles, people had picked and torn at the crust of the cliffs in pursuit of sandstone, jet and shale. It should have been abhorrent and yet it was endlessly fascinating in its scale and as a gallery of humanity’s ability to pillage its own blessings. In changing so rapidly and so often, the ground seemed to have a climate of its own, a weather separate from the sky’s.
Suddenly, verges ended curtly and gave way to vast craters 50 metres beneath. They possessed the bubbly textures of Aero chocolate. The cliffs themselves had been slashed, cudgelled and mangled, revealing rough surfaces that resembled tuna steaks torn asunder. There were now layers of different shades as in a geological illustration – the denim-coloured sea, then whale-flesh-grey shale, followed by grubby ironstone and rubble that merged into the dirty beige sandstone cliffs. This lunar wasteland was an inheritance from the alum mining trade. Inland, trees had been blown italic by years of wind.
The path began its descent into Skinningrove village along a lip of what was once known as the Iron Valley. Early evening had arrived, its dusky sun casting on the beach a pale pink light the shade of a chip shop sausage. It was a gorgeous scene. Two young women had started a small fire and now toasted marshmallows, turning them over and, one suspected, twisting back time. The pitter-pats of spade on bucket could be heard, strafing the air in a cheery barrage. They belonged to a child whose parents flipped the pail and gave cheers that trickled with love.
I watched, hoping he was asking them plenty of questions.