Hornsea

I saw a water worn brick in the sand. Mortar streaked one side. The corners rounded and ground down by erosion, it could have been a boulder but for the colour and the shape.

Pebbles piled high against the north side of the groynes, but there was a 3 foot drop on the south side, to sheltered beach sand, to me and to this brick, resting in a small crater carved by the tide.

The waves break in long rollers, the surf head high, but nobody rides the waves today. The sea is brown with mud and sand.

This coast retreats, the sea eating into the glacial clay and digging away the land. It sweeps it south and eventually gives it back to Holland, miles across the water.

And so to my brick. What could it tell? Is it from a farmhouse kitchen, eaten by the rapacious sea? What women had worked beside it, making meals for their men? How long had it supported the family’s roof, as the land had supported it and them? But the land and roof are both gone now, the brick lies forlornly before me.

Perhaps it is from fortifications, now lying in jumbled heaps of concrete and brick in the sand below the cliff top they once defended. Their land lost, not to an enemy across the sea, but to the sea itself.

Did this brick once shelter a Home Guard, furtively lighting a fag as he gazed out across the empty seas again and again, searching for an enemy which, thankfully, he was never destined to see?

The sea itself is the enemy now. These slow brown breakers remind me that Japan has felt the power of the sea, as tsunamis swept all before them. We have only this slow and patient scrape, scrape, scrape which takes property but leaves lives intact. I pray that is all we will see from this sea.