The First Wave.
Bantham 1974
Do you remember the first time you encountered surfing?
Despite growing up landlocked, surfing hit me like a board in the face when I first saw it in real life. Simply watching someone wobble along a wave and then fall off moved me in such a way that I gave up my holiday money in one go – therefore forsaking a week’s worth of Smashers, Fabs, Zooms and Hawaiian Delights – to join the divine order of golden dreamers, watermen and outcasts. At that moment, like most moments while surfing, nothing else held any importance for me. No amount of 99s could give me the same buzz that riding my cheap polystyrene surfboard could, despite the cold water, the cut feet, the wrinkled fingers and the sunburned shoulders.
I was a surfer now. Everything else in my life – sensible shoes, uniforms, Zooms - could fuck off.
The dropping sun had cast a golden light on the beach, making the shadows long and the dunes glow like fire. The people paddling in the water were backlit and silhouetted as they jumped the dying waves in the shallows. The sea sparkled like a sequinned flag. Across the curve of the bay, Burgh Island’s Art Deco hotel sat on its green hillock of land, marooned by the incoming tide, a white box with a pointed copper turret facing inland towards the bay. Behind it the island’s Devonian slate cliffs, upended by time, seemed to flow into the sea like a landslip.
I looked up from my sandcastle building and gazed across the water. Between me and the Island, waves were breaking out to sea, arriving at the beach in neat, convex lines. A figure sat on a surfboard beyond the broken waves, looking outwards towards the sun and the horizon. A wave, bigger than the others, approached. The surfer spun the board around and started to paddle for the shore. The wave appeared to rise from the depths, picking up the surfer and throwing him forwards. In a split second he stood up on the board and began to ride the wave as it broke behind him.
I watched, open mouthed, as the surfer, black against the golden sea, rode the wave towards me. The board, gliding across the wave face, sent arcs of glittering, gilded spray into the air. I was utterly mesmerised. This was easily the greatest thing I had ever seen. It was, I was sure, better than tearing my bike around the bomb craters in the wood near my house. Better than showing off to get attention. Better than home.
As suddenly as the ride had started it ended. The board faltered and the figure fell backwards into the water with a splash, his arms and legs splayed. I didn’t care that it was a fall. What I had just seen seemed so otherworldly and strange, so exotic and unattainable, and so far removed from the stuffy world I knew where I had to watch my step and do what I was told. There, on the beach, where it was sunny and warm, where my hair could be wild without reproach and my skin could prickle with the salt and the sun, that golden surfer, riding a golden swell, looked like freedom and happiness.
I noticed there were other surfers in the water and watched them for the rest of the afternoon, my hands shielding my eyes, until it was time to return to the holiday cottage and my bullying dad and my mother holding it together and the silence of my sister.
As we walked back to the car I saw a polystyrene surfboard – it was a body board really - for sale outside a shop. I hung back and dawdled so I could look at the price. It was £5, exactly the same amount I had been given to spend on the holiday. Back at the cottage I whined and begged and, finally, persuaded my mother that I would be perfectly able to go without ice creams and drinks for the week if I spent all of my holiday money on the surfboard. She relented and promised me that we would go to the shop the next day. In the morning I gladly handed over my fiver and walked away from the shop with the board under my arm, down to the beach, to catch my first waves with my first surfboard.
My life would never be the same again.
Thereafter all holidays would be marked by the quality of the waves, or if there were any waves to play in. When I could I spent hours in the sea up to my waist, waiting for the lines of whitewater to catapult me towards the shore. I learnt how to push off the sand at just the right time to get enough forward momentum that the surge picked me up and pushed me into the calm flat water in front of its breaking whitewater. I learnt that if you push to early or too late you might get overrun by the wave or picked up and dumped by it, with indignity in the shallows. I was beginning to learn the art of wavecraft, of reading the sea and how it could tumble me, release me or hold me in its cool, unemotional grasp. Being pulled by currents, turned over by whitewater or bashed by a wave that doubled up with another was a lesson I was loving in the best classroom imaginable.
