Hilbre Island 1965

We met at the Pierhead at 7 o clock. First me and Roddy my cousin. Then Paul Massey. Then Bobby Blundell, preceded by his gravity defying blonde quiff. Modest by today’s standards I’m sure but in the black and white world of grammar schoolboy Liverpool in 1965 a sight to behold. Indeed, to the teachers, a clear declaration of independence, an incendiary device to be extinguished only with an overwhelming response of sarcasm and physical violence – a ready marriage of verbal and physical brutality.

As I was saying - Bobby came first, emerging out of the gap between two ‘buses, one a bafflingly named Atlantean – still a rare sight in Liverpool in 1965 – and strode towards us his blonde quiff nodding and swaying majestically before him and combining with the clip clop of his Cuban heel boots to lend him the likeness of the Minotaur or some pan like figure emerging from the old greenwood, in this case represented by the green wall of the double decker buses. Paul Massey followed immediately upon him his hair in contrast hanging in limp blonde strings his shoulders hunched and his thick national health glasses magnifying his pale blue grey eyes.

Earnest study of that essential bible of all sea fishermen the national tide tables for 1965 had convinced us that we had no time to lose so, giving up on the stragglers most pertinently Bo Camo aka Kenneth Cameron a school bully of no mean accomplishment in the 3 years we had been at the school … the school in this case always being the or should I say The Liverpool Institute … but alas a reign soon to grow to an ignominious ending: but at this halcyon stage no shadow yet encroached on the at this moment Mycenaean blue skies that covered us. As I was saying before educational asides - there will be many of these in this our early association - we had no time to lose if we were to reach our destination before the tide turned and the waters came sweeping back in from the Irish Sea funnelled into the bottleneck of Liverpool bay and roared crept meandered insinuated convoluted and climbed over the deceptively dry terra firma of the Dee estuary and proved once more that for for at least half the time Hilbre Island was correctly called an island.

Thus, from the Pierhead we descended onto the ferry crossed the mile of the Mersey in a great loping loop against the current eventually allowing it to sweep us in under the lea of the landing stage at Wallasey watch the deft handling of the ropes by the wizened iron-muscled deckhand as he followed the perfectly cast leader rope the thickness of a washing line with the great hemp woven rope thicker than a mans thigh that was expert guided by his opposite number on the shore in a figure of eight down around the great iron capstan with such precise light effortless ease that it appeared for all the world that the rope coiled there in that fashion by its own volition – of its own choice. Such sly art almost gone now but still seen up there though the landing stages are all concrete now though still floating still dependent 0on the vagaries of the rising falling flood.

Then on to the bus strange leaden blue or green vehicles of ancient and uncertain pedigree faded like the town they served the whole peninsula in fact a land of former glory… their destinations diverse and none of them disappointing to the reaching romanticism of teenage schoolboys escaping from the grim deprivation of secondary school classrooms which had found themselves at a loss to understand the world they were in theory preparing these boys for… Thurstaston Hill – sandstone outcrops and sandy heath Clwyd mountain range looming across the river Dee, Frodsham – some boys found a hobby’s nest there once, marshes, Parkgate – once a riverside resort, a pleasant sandy spa teashops and shrimp boats in Victorian and Edwardian times then the river wandered in its broad bed and the silt settled and became brackish marsh home to lapwings and rough marran grass took hold and flourished hence now two miles from the life giving trade-route of the fickle river.

And finally Hoylake our destination our jumping off point onto the sometimes treacherous sands that appeared to stretch solid and uninterrupted six miles to the base of the Point of Ayr – could easily deceive you into thinking you could set off on a sedate stroll to North Wales without more peril than an mild burning from the jolly sun. In fact each year despite all the signs and cautionary tales of previous years the unwary were deceived into attempting the crossing only to realise too late that the main channel of the river half a mile of moving water lay hidden under the lea of the Welsh point unseen behind the intervening sandbanks themselves also on closer acquaintance discovered as not level firm and dry as they appeared from the promenade but cut with a baffling maze of meandering channels some ten feet deep and accompanied by pockets of sinking sand.

Without a compass or a rudimentary knowledge of direction finding from the sun one quickly became disorientated in these deep rutted quagmires where all sight of landmarks on either shore was lost behind hills of sand and mud made mournful by the streamers of bladder wrack and kelp and other flotsam and jetsam of the deep sea that carved them. These signs also reminded one that the absence of water was temporary and that any minute these dry riverbeds would begin to fill. This is the point where one would be hard pressed not to panic. I know because I’ve done it returning from the island at night and suddenly finding myself somehow heading towards the open sea the comforting lights of the shore magically receding and imagining in the same minute that I’d misread the tide tables forgot to subtract an hour for Greenwich meantime or been given the previous years figures or … and immediately awash with unadulterated terror my heart pounding convinced I’d never set eyes on home or loved ones again and wishing I’d paid more attention. Almost hearing the distant lisping approach of the ocean come to surround me and claim me.

We rode the bus all the way to West Kirby climbing over the sandstone spine of the peninsula and rocking and rolling through the leafy lanes dappled sun lighting the cool upstairs interior in a green mist of excitement and pleasure at the unaccustomed riot of vegetation and the clearness of the roads. We alighted in a quiet bus station already breathing the proximity of the sea, shouldered our rods and bags and strode down to the seafront and followed the worn green steps onto the sand. Somewhere in the distance, barely visible in the morning mist other than as a faint glimpsed half-doubted mirage, was Hilbre Island our destination then our home for the next nine hours. In that time millions of tons of water would roll across the intervening sands sweep up to the ancient walls of Chester and return.

Even now I still remember the apprehension as we began to head down the beach towards a vague heat-hazed mirage horizon of endless sea somehow through the curvature of the earth seeming to rise ever higher above us as the land receded. The marine e lake with its flotilla of sailing dinghies the constant whine and cow bell rattle of their masts and rigging as the constant offshore wind sang through them, the shops and teahouses with their ice cream signs and their weathered peeling paint on the front – all flattened and fell as hills grew behind them and a lighthouse rose on the top of the peninsula and before us the bulk of the great Orme clarified out of the formless void and deepened in shade and substance as the world behind us the world we’d left behind – faded.

A point would come as we well knew when turning back would be too late to beat the incoming tide and like Macbeth after the murder of Duncan and Banquo we would have no choice but to go on. Despite all the checking of times of tides of hours subtracted or added on despite all this there still lurked the fear of having made some dreadful error over the date or the day or even the area. Maybe these times only applied to London Bridge or Southampton (which incidentally had 2 tides every 24 hours!). Maybe we’d stray off-course in the half-mist and miss the island outflank it and find ourselves bound for the unreachable bulk of the Welsh dragon land slumbering low in the green soft shining magical old waters gleaming and streaming – meanwhile at back of us the sandbanks submerging beneath the incoming tide. Our way back gone erased from memory.

So, out on a vague diagonal straggle the boys across the changing sands firm-packed on the low ridges ranging longitudinal along the river bed then soft ooze in the bottoms streams ceased to flow remain grey residue blowing with lugworms casts razor fish and those strange armoured chimneys that protrude above the mud an inch or so like broken branches but up close manufactured by the beast that dwells from stuff like shells hardened salivate that ventilate the who knows what below.

Eventually the low archipelago of islands of which Hilbre was the dominant itself divided by a channel that filled at spring tide. First in sight was the slight bump of Bird Island, a hump of sand covered in maran grass that rose some 20 feet above the sandbank on which it sat itself part of a low tongue of ancient soft sedimentary rock that stretched intermittently in a crescent to Hilbre.

9th June 2004 (to be continued…forever)