Who knows where the time goes?
I’m watching an episode of ‘Michael Portillo in Portugal.’ It was a good series - one of his best. He’s covered the architecture, history, food, and culture of the country and has been to all the major cities: Porto, Aveiro, Sintra. Now he’s in Ericeira and is talking about the day the King went into exile after the Republican revolution in 1910. It suddenly dawns on me. I recognize that place, It’s the town where I spent a beach holiday with my boyfriend some fifty-five years ago; the place where I almost drowned.
On the Sunday morning after the Michael Portillo programme, I am lying in bed listening to Broadcasting House. As a feelgood item, they interview someone about his life as a surfer. He mentions a holiday in Ericeira which he took before it became a world surfing reserve. I don’t immediately recognize his voice, but the timing and the details fit. Could it be him? If so, it’s an amazing coincidence to have been thinking about the holiday the night before and to hear his voice on the radio the following day.
When these things happen, I put them down to synchronicity rather than fate. Like when I’m writing a story, I’ll be in the middle of typing a sentence and the very word that I’m typing will come up on the radio at exactly that time. It seems to happen when your consciousness is attuned to everything that is happening around you, when you’re in tune with yourself and the world. So why is that holiday in Ericeira coming back into my consciousness, I wonder?
There was one way to find out if we were talking about the same holiday. A quick search on Google could provide the answer. My ex had indeed written an article about a surfing holiday in Portugal in the 70s, when his surfboard had gone missing, and I was named as the girlfriend. I read it through a couple of times. It was him, but I barely recognised his description of me.
For a start, I was not a fluent French speaker. I could read the language well enough but struggled to make myself understood. German had been my foreign language. It was true I had long hair. Didn’t everybody? But I would hardly have called myself a hippie. I’d spent the previous six months working as a clerk in an insurance office in Gant’s Hill and was keen to find a more suitable career that fitted my qualifications. I was intent on dropping in, not dropping out. And I hardly every wore denim or used drugs, apart from the odd joint.
As for the holiday, I had no recollection of hitching to Portugal. It wasn’t that I was against hitching. The year before I had hitchhiked back from Greece on my own after an aborted holiday but how would you do that with a surfboard? Nor did I have any memory of spending the night in a park in Madrid and getting hauled off to a police station. And I was quite sure we were never spat at or had stones thrown at us. It would have put me off travelling for life. I put it down to his vivid imagination.
My own memories of the holiday were limited. It was in 1971. We were on the point of moving from London to Canterbury. He was the surfer. I, on the other hand, was a novice swimmer. We’d travelled by train to Madrid and then to Lisbon. The surfboard had gone missing somewhere in transit. Somehow or other we’d ended up in Ericeira, a small fishing port with a seaside community. Without a surfboard, there was nothing much to do but go for walks or lounge around on the beach. And I wasn’t a fan of beach holidays.
What I remembered most about the holiday was the ferocity of the Atlantic Ocean. I’d just learnt to swim and was reluctant to go into the water. I’d only ever been in the sea in Cornwall. There, the waves lapped right up onto the beach, and you could walk in slowly. Here, there was a ledge at the water’s edge and then a sudden drop into deep water. And there was an undercurrent I discovered, once I’d plunged in.
My boyfriend was back on the beach guarding our possessions. There were loads of kids swimming up and down parallel to the shore. I swam around for a while. It was when it came to getting out that my problems began. I just couldn’t get a foothold onto the ledge. The more I tried, the worse it got. The waves kept dragging me back into the ocean. I tried to hold back the panic. There was no point in shouting out for help. I couldn’t see any sign of a lifeguard. Eventually I managed to scramble back onto dry land, staggered up the beach and collapsed onto my towel. I don’t even know if I said anything. I was too embarrassed. But I didn’t go into the sea again, at least not on that holiday. Years later, I heard tell of someone who had died on the coast of Portugal because of the Atlantic riptide. I realized then I’d had a lucky escape.
We broke up several months after the holiday and went our separate ways. He went back to his hometown in Cornwall, and I moved to Ramsgate to start my new career, teaching English to foreign students. That led on to me living and working abroad, which was something I had always wanted to do.
After reading his article, I toyed with the idea of contacting my ex. I wanted to let him know that my memories of the holiday were completely different to his. But it was such a long time ago. What would be the point? When we’d been together, we were different people. It had been a crucial time in both our lives when we’d been finding our feet. There was no point in raking it all up. The holiday had been a turning point. We were already on different paths. Perhaps we always had been.
abou tht author
Jenny Palmer writes short stories, poetry, memoir and family history. Her collections 'Keepsake and Other Stories.' 2018, and 'Butterflies and Other Stories,' 2024, were published by Bridge House, and are on Amazon. 'Witches, Quakers and Nonconformists,' 2022, is sold at the Pendle Heritage Centre, Barrowford.
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