SHANKLIN AND HOME

It felt different this morning - autumnal, cold, crisp: the kind of morning when you walked to school and for the first time, you were glad of your coat, even though the sun was bright in the clear blue sky. It definitely didn’t feel like a holiday morning.

Good then perhaps, that this would be the last morning before we went home from this out-of-season ‘summer’ holiday. The shadows fell long from the low sunshine, the air condensed around me in tiny puffs of chilly white fog. We loaded the glinting car and headed, as improbably as ever, off to the beach. It felt wrong somehow.

It’s not our fault that this pandemic shunted our summer holiday, I know. And in terms of consequences, this was a very minor effect on the big wide world. I still felt a bit sad though. We’d made the best of the situation, like British people so often do; it just so happened that October isn’t July, and this was what it was.

We had an eight hour gap between the checkout time and the ferry, so once again we rehashed the blueprint for the day - Shanklin. Close enough to stop anyone worrying about actually missing the boat (never in doubt, but it needed to be addressed anyway), nice enough to give everyone at least a bit of a cheery time on the last day, and varied enough to change the plan based on the ever-shifting weather forecast. And so, as the sun sparkled on the sea and the cold wind hurried the ocean to the shore, we sank our camping chairs into the sand, wrapped ourselves in our jumpers, and told each other that this really was ‘the life’.

Shanklin, just down the road from Sandown, is another delightful seaside place on the island. Like the others, Ventnor and Ryde, the esplanade runs along the shoreline in front of tired hotels and boarded amusement arcades. The paint is chipped, the woodwork blasted by salt and sand, but there’s still a sort of a sunlit charm about Shanklin that erosion and time can’t really shake.

The cliffs are higher here. Vertical walls of red clay soar above those frontward properties, with delightful houses and bungalows perched on top. At some point, probably in the 1960s judging by the design, someone built a ‘cliff lift’ - a square shaft of grubby concrete that rises 150 feet from the esplanade to the top of the cliff and the town centre, for an elevator. It is of course, out of action.

Shanklin is also famous for another feature, one that turned out to be wonderful. From the top, not far from the ‘cliff lift’ a stream of water carves out something of a glacial path through a wooded valley, down to the beach. It’s known as a ‘chine’ and as far as I know is quite a unique thing to the Isle of Wight.

Shanklin Chine was magical. The ferns and bracken and greenery have grown so abundantly in the vertical valley, that following the chine was like stepping into a make-believe fantasy world. Steps and zig-zag paths lead you down the steep cliffside, all to the happy burbling sound of the cool, fresh water tumbling into dark, shady pools, cascading its way to the shore. I’d have barely blinked if fauns and dryads had peeped out from the leaves.

What’s more today, the sun, still bright, painted the trees and translucent leaves above, leaving the gorge in quiet shade as we descended. If you ever go, it is well worth a ramble - and in the summer apparently, they illuminate it all with fairy lanterns in the evenings.

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So. Anyway. All of that leaves me with only the thought of the things we didn’t do this week. En route to the ferry, we found a viewpoint overlooking Brading Down, the bay and the ocean. A puff of white steam chugged into the air towards Havenstreet.

“Ah!” I snapped my fingers, “We didn’t get to go on the Isle of Wight Steam Railway!”

“I doubt they’d have let you stand on the plate and shovel the coal in,” said my Dad drily, somehow reading my thoughts.

“Always good to leave something for next time,” replied my Mum. The white steam thinned in the air above the hills.

I’d also wanted to walk on Tennyson Down. The Intrepids thought it might not be as appealing an idea for them, so I let the thought of being moody and poetic on a windy hilltop go this time.

And with that, we were on our way to Fishbourne and the ferry. It was nice to see the evening sun sink between the trees. It had altogether gone by the time the ship churned its way into the Solent. All that was left was a burst of colour through the sky, a swirling sunset of purples and blues and deep pinks and reds. The island, stretching out beneath it, looked like a long, narrow cut-out: a silhouette of undulating hills and steeples that gradually faded into the distance. We had had a great time. Out-of-season, sure. Chilly and wet at times, and melancholy too in lots of ways. But there was lots to enjoy, and lots, I reflected, leaning on the aft railings of the ferry, to come back to someday.