When I was a small boy my family often spent our summer holidays staying with Uncle Doug and Aunt Kath at their house in Birchington, in Kent on the South East coast of England. My uncle insisted that Birchington was on the Isle of Thanet, but I could never quite determine which particular ditch gave arise to the status of Isle. Birchington is not far from the better known seaside town called Margate.
Of course in my mind the sun always shone. My father and uncle would take my younger brother Dick and I each day to collect something edible from the sea. Sometimes it would be a case of gathering winkles and mussels, which grew in abundance on the rocky parts of the shore. Other times we would dig in the sand for cockles, easily found due to the little air hole they breathed through, or plod through the shallow sea water with our specially designed nets, scooping up hundreds of shrimps. I usually had the job of emptying my brother Dick’s net, since he refused to touch the wiggling catch he had gathered.
It was interesting how the shrimps got larger as we approached the warm sludgy effluent, which emptied into the sea from a large rusting, seaweed encrusted pipe, which was presumably how Birchington disposed of it’s sewerage in those days. I won’t say the effluent was untreated, but it was warm and certainly contained enough nutrients to ensure that no local villager in possession of a shrimping net, need ever go hungry.
The day’s catch would be taken home and popped into a large pot of boiling water for a few seconds before being consumed. The winkles (edible sea snails) were probably the most fun, since you had to open the little door that protected them in their shell. This was done with a pin taken from Aunt Kath’s sewing kit. The next challenge was to use the same pin to pull the slippery little body from it’s spiral home. Once skilled in this art, it was easy to get the winkle out whole, but early attempts often lead to only half a winkle being recovered.
Before consuming the pin impaled winkle, it was usually dunked into a small dish of malt vinegar. Part of the fun was deciding whether to eat each individual winkle as soon as it was out, or to amass a collection of extracted winkles on a plate, enabling the whole lot to be consumed in one sumptuous mouthful.
For those with a scientific bent the winkle is Littorina Littorea in Latin and it’s little door is called the operculum. I know this because I spent two years studying them many years later as a project, which helped me pass my biology A level.
Learning to shell the little shrimps was also a challenge, since some of them were really tiny. To do this successfully, you had to first hold the head between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and the tail similarly in the other hand. Next you had to push them together until you detected a small click, rather like a masseuse cracking a human finger, but on a much more delicate scale. If done correctly, a subsequent small tug would cause the shell to pull away cleanly, leaving a tiny but delicious piece of shrimp flesh to be consumed. Until this technique was mastered a lot of shrimp got wasted and the untrained sheller got very hungry.
Again the fun was deciding whether to consume on the fly or to accumulate a stock. While it was wonderful to gobble twenty shrimps in a single mouthful and watch everyone else salivate, you had to be careful. Collecting an overly impressive heap of little shrimp corpses tended to bring out the thieving side of otherwise honest neighbouring diners.
Sometimes the shrimps had clusters of eggs attached to their shells, these were very tasty but also very messy. The strange thing was that before cooking all the shrimp were a translucent grey clour. After cooking most were still grey with some pink patches, but a few were pure pink. The pure pink ones, rightly or wrongly were labelled as being prawns. They tended to be larger and were highly prized. Taking only the prawns was frowned on as being a sign of gluttony, so the trick was to take just enough prawns, without taking so many as to raise the suspicion that one might not be colour blind.
Selecting shrimp was rather like going with a group of friends to a celebrated cocktail lounge such as ‘Trader Vics’ or ‘Stringfellows’ and buying one of those huge, expensive cocktails, which come with half a dozen straws.
Before you is placed this delicious drink in a large exotic container, laced with lashings of ice, fruit juice and alcohol. You wait for someone else to take the first sip, then you insert your own straw and take your own sample. You hope your own sip appeared to those assembled to be lot less greedy than the first. At the same time you are hoping that you’ve perfected the art of the long, strong, silent suck more effectively than the other suckers. Of course you know in the bottom of your heart they are all hoping the same thing.
But let’s return to Birchington….
My least favourite shellfish from our daily haul was the mussels. They tasted fine laced with vinegar, but occasionally had clustered stands of what looked like seaweed attached to their fleshy bodies. Uncle Doug insisted on calling these their beards.
One of the compensations of wandering over the low rocks, looking for mussels and winkles was that we would usually move round into Grenham Bay. This was in the days before the promenade was build and the chalk cliffs were still riddled with caves. We often found fossilised urchins embedded in the chalk. Sometime we would also find World War II incendiary devices, laying in the rock pools. Unfortunately after a few continuous hot summer days, Grenham Bay would stink as washed up seaweed rotted on the beach.
Dick & Me beside the sea
As a special treat we would sometime go out in Uncle Doug’s 10ft wooden carvel built rowing boat ‘Janet’. This treat was preceded by digging deep into the sandy beach to uncover large numbers of worms which we would use as bait. Most of the worms were smooth, resembling an earth worm, but we always also uncovered a few which looked like bright red centipedes, with a couple of rows of wiggling legs on the outside of their bodies, these we were told were rag worms.
Being very ancient ‘Janet’ was somewhat warped and rather more resembled a tub than a boat. Uncle Doug would tell us that Janet had participated in the World War II evacuation from Dunkirk. The beach at Birchington was very shallow at low tide and you could walk out a long way before the sea reached your knees. So Janet would be manhandled out until the water reached my crotch. I always hated that first wave which chilled my immature genitals. But that happening seemed to be the signal that the water was now deep enough to climb aboard. The trip would start with a couple of dozen pulls to get the outboard engine started. We then headed offshore for about 20 minutes before the engine was cut.
I can tell you it is not easy for four people to fish from a 10ft tub, but our catch usually consisted of over a hundred dab. The dab is a brown flat fish, which somewhat resembles plaice or sole. Most were quite small and the smallest were thrown back into the sea. The ones we kept were also pretty small. To give you an idea of how small they were, six of us would eat the whole lot of over a hundred at two sittings.
We usually returned to shore a couple of hours later under oar power, since the outboard could seldom be persuaded to kick into life twice in a single day.
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