The picnics may be a little better – back then he says you were lucky to get a ham and pickle sandwich – but otherwise the pleasures of the beach remain the same as in his childhood: a morning swim in the glittering blue water, building sandcastles with his wife Helen’s grandchildren (aged between seven and four) and watching the sunset from a slice of the beach to call his own (if only for a few weeks). Every year his family rents the same hut: no.61. “It is a part of our history,” he says.
They also assiduously plan for the queue. His wife divvies up a shift rota between Roger, his sister and their daughter and her husband, with whom they share a nearby holiday home.
“My wife worked out a plan and we stuck to it,” Roger says of the overnight stay in which they were second in line. “She opened the batting at 5.10am. I did a couple of stints and then relieved our daughter (53-year-old Amanda) at 4.30am the next day when she was starting to get a bit cold, and waited until around 8am.”
Aside from some “friendly banter” and “the odd complaint about snoring”, at that late stage, he says everyone in the queue was just trying to snatch a few hours of sleep.
Once the booking was secured, they celebrated with a family roast dinner – although not before they had all caught up on a bit of kip.
Now in his 10th year of waiting in line, Roger admits that he has actually started to enjoy it. The queue has become as much a part of his family’s seasonal ritual as the beach hut at the end of it. Plus, he adds, those long dark nights of the soul have taught him a valuable lesson: “To get what you know you want in life you have to be prepared to put yourself out.”
The rise of the beach hutterati
By Jan Etherington
When I moved to the Suffolk coast, a decade ago, I should have been satisfied that the sea was at the end of my road but still, I looked with longing at the row of black beach huts, standing like sentinels along the dunes. It was five long years before I got my hands on one.
In my village, you can only ‘apply’ to have a hut if you have a permanent local postcode. Your name is added to a list and when someone moves or decides to give up their hut, it is offered to the applicant at the top. No queue jumping or ‘deals’ allowed!
This is unusual and it is because the land is owned by the village’s common lands charity, so we pay the seller for the value of the structure and the charity an annual licence fee.
But the general rule, along most of our coast, is that anyone can buy a beach hut – if they can afford it. They are the new Hermes handbags – a limited supply, changing hands for six-figure sums. Those whose hut has been passed down through the generations for decades can’t get over what they’re now worth. Forget the family silver, in coastal hotspots, like Devon and Suffolk, selling a ‘sea shed’ (complete with no electricity or running water) could set you up for life.
Local estate agents will tell you that many go to cash buyers, from out of the area, who maybe want to rent it out to other holidaymakers, which means, sadly, that even on a gloriously sunny summer weekend you often find very few beach huts are actually being used. Some remain empty for months on end.
But for local beach hut owners, it’s simply a joy to have a place to entertain family and friends – and boy, do you acquire a lot of friends if you have a hut.
The facilities in mine can best be described as basic: a calor gas stove, folding chairs, towels, a trestle table and binoculars are as ‘equipped’ as it gets. However, there are bespoke beach hut designers who will fit a Smallbone of Devizes kitchen, tastefully distressed flooring and custom built shelving (all in muted coastal shades, of course) for the bottomless pockets of the hutterati.
I find it surprising that so many are prepared to shell out a fortune on fittings, when most beach huts get regularly whacked and often flooded by high tides and some disappear altogether in overnight storms.
Of course, with the gentrification of huts can come resentment, which occasionally spills out into break-ins and pointless vandalism, leading many hut owners to lock them up like Fort Knox. Yet nobody with any sense keeps anything of value between the clapboard walls, because sugar gets damp, coffee congeals, books curl up and the locks are rusty with sea salt.
Still, I love wandering along the prom, peering through the open doors, while the owners enjoy the attention. Oh yes they do. They might sigh and ignore the cheery greetings of holidaymakers but there’s no point in having a beach hut if you can’t be seen to be enjoying it – and that’s why there’s such huge snobbery in where the hut is situated. Prime promenading sites are the most expensive and desirable.
I discovered this, soon after I moved to the coast, when I overheard two women talking in a designer changing room in Southwold.
The first cooed, “Oh, I didn’t know you had a beach hut darling! Where are you?”
“Just north of the pier,” came the reply.
There was a pause and then, with the kind of sigh you might deliver to a friend whose dog had recently died, the first woman replied.
“Oh, my dear. You must come to ours. We’re at Gun Hill.”
I soon learnt this is the posh end of the beach.
As Kirsty and Phil would say it’s all about ‘location, location location’, for any property, even if it’s only a 12’ x10’ wooden shed, where your light comes from a torch and the only running water is the North Sea.
Conversations from a Long Marriage by Jan Etherington is available on BBC Sounds
