The Seasiders

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Book excerpt

Prologue

Who doesn't have fond memories of childhood trips to the seaside?

At some point in our lives, we have all been there, whether it was a busy Welsh coastal town with fun fairs and candy floss, a Northern resort with bright lights illuminating the promenade and a shingle beach, or a sleepy harbour on the South coast, with cream teas and donkey rides. The seaside was a place where we would either go to for a day trip, packed into the back of our parents’ cars alongside picnics and the family dog, or longer stays where we would be allowed extra pocket money to spend on souvenirs and handfuls of copper to waste in the penny arcade.

When you are young, and excited about visiting these holiday places, you never quite comprehend that people actually live there all year round. They will be there in the winter trying hard to make a living from selling ice-cream that people are too cold to eat, or travelling to the cities to sell the shellfish that is too abundant for the locals to consume by themselves. Some might desperately try to hone their other talents such as painting or poetry, in the hope that next year their income will be two-fold and enough to help them survive the bitter frost when nobody comes to visit, save the few avid walkers that seek fresh air and solitude.

As children, we wouldn't have given a second thought to the seasiders whom we left behind after our day trip or when our holiday had come to an end, but their lives continued just the same as it always had. We would travel home, sun-kissed and exhausted from the salty sea air, back to our homes, our families and our secrets. And just as we were bound to keep hidden gems that we only told those in our inner circle of friends, those seasiders held secrets of their own. Maybe not as shocking or as bold as those of their counterparts in the cities and towns but, nevertheless, they were things that were kept behind closed doors, shuffled away to a place where everyday folk couldn't see or hear about them, secrets that belonged exclusively to the seasiders. This is the tale of one such place.

Chapter One - Amazing Grace

Grace Thomas was in the middle of ironing a pile of white cotton tablecloths when she heard a loud bang, followed by the rantings of someone cursing, coming from the garden. She carefully put down the iron and, leaning forward, pressed her nose against the cold window-pane to see where the noises had come from. As it happened it was nothing. Well, nothing out of the ordinary anyway.

Grace’s husband, Dick, had been attempting to lay yet another slab on the patio but had lost his grip and the heavy concrete block had toppled to the ground, smashing into several chunks as it landed. Dick wasn’t hurt, it looked as though only his ego was damaged, and he stood gazing at the broken slab in front of him with a very glum look on his face.

“Bloody fool’, Grace muttered to herself as she turned back to her work, “That man should win an award for being the world’s slowest worker!”

She wondered if she would ever be able to serve meals outside in the good weather, at this rate it seemed very unlikely. If only I had married a rich man, Grace mused. Although, the only remotely rich man in their town had been Rhys Pugh, and he’d moved away years ago. She looked around the kitchen and shrugged. Most of the appliances were in good condition, although they had all been handed down from either her or Dick’s parents. The walls certainly needed a fresh coat of paint but there was no urgency and the floor tiles gleamed due to rigorous polishing. Life could have been a lot worse, Grace was well aware of that, but in the winter months when the guests were few and far between, her home was always just a little too silent.

Grace’s thoughts were no reflection on the love that she felt for her husband, but simply a matter of truth. You see, Dick had been laying the patio for over twelve months, tediously raking the ground, laying a slab, repositioning the same piece of concrete and then needing to rest for five days before starting the process all over again. He claimed to have a bad back but Grace thought it was a disease called ‘Lazyitis’. Her mother had warned her that all men suffered from it, especially when there were important jobs to be done around the house. But Dick was affectionate enough, in his own simple way. He always gave Grace a peck on the cheek before they went to sleep at night, never had to be asked to take the rubbish out and occasionally would buy her a small box of chocolates, just to show that he cared.

The Thomas’s ran a guest house overlooking the seafront, well, if truth be told, Grace did so with very little help from Dick. He sometimes offered to help the guests to check out, and occasionally managed to repair a leaking tap or broken skirting board, but it was his wife who saw to most of the day to day running of the business. She would never admit it in public, but Grace liked to be in full control. The couple had inherited the establishment from Grace’s parents some ten years before and, being brought up in its rooms, she found the day to day running both enjoyable and rewarding. The property stood just a few paces up a cliff road. White and detached, with ivy growing around the door, it looked very grand to the visitors as they approached. Three of the front windows faced the beach below and these were what Grace called her ‘best rooms’. Spacious and immaculate, with comfy double beds, no better accommodation could be found in the town below, therefore from Easter to Halloween, the Thomas’s made a good living from the business bestowed upon them. Grace had taken to it like a duck to water. It was just a pity that Dick felt like a duck too, but one very much out of the pond and his invisible wings flapped helplessly as he tried to keep up with his wife’s demands. It was a bone of contention that Grace was left to see to almost everything. Over time she became annoyed that Dick seemed to disappear every time the telephone in the hallway rang. Grace didn’t understand what was so difficult about making a booking. A large leather-bound ledger sat on the hall table, with lines drawn vertically upon the pages to clearly show which rooms were booked and which were vacant on any particular day. Nevertheless, there only had to be one tinkle and Dick would either take himself rapidly off in the opposite direction, or feign sleep if he happened to be in his chair. Grace knew that Dick had no problem talking to strangers, he would always have something polite or interesting to say to their guests, and he wrote with an impeccable cursive hand, so she really couldn’t understand what was so difficult in writing down a few details in the bookings diary. Unless of course he was terrified of incurring his wife’s wrath if he made a mistake, as he’d done once in the early days of their marriage. Yes, that was it, Grace supposed, she hadn’t spoken to him for a week after Dick had stupidly reserved the same room for two different couples one summer. He obviously wanted to avoid a similar scenario.

For Dick’s part, he thought Grace was amazing, but over the years had become oblivious to his own faults. He saw the patio project as a work in progress, with fine attention to detail being the order of the day. He was also unaware of his hours disappearing. Every morning he would lumber downstairs to eat his breakfast before a short walk to the newsagents. Dick wasn’t allowed to have his paper delivered to the door, Grace only arranged that for ‘paying guests’ as she called them, besides her husband was always telling her that he liked a bit of sea breeze first thing. On returning from the shop, Dick would spend an hour in the softest armchair of their lounge, flicking through the pages at leisure. He would then spend another thirty minutes choosing which horses to bet on each afternoon. Dick Thomas was very proud of his ability to pick a winner, but even prouder of the fact that he could keep his hobby a closely guarded secret from his wife. You see, every afternoon Grace would write out a list of items that she needed Dick to fetch from the market or local store, and every afternoon her husband would amble off to buy them, with a slight detour to the betting shop.

So, quite understandably, by the time Dick had fetched the paper, read the paper, eaten breakfast and lunch, chosen his runners for the day, consumed six cups of tea and made his daily trip to the shops, he was too exhausted for anything else. Dick did get twinges in his back, the result of falling off his motorbike some years ago, but that wasn’t’ the reason that the garden wasn’t progressing as fast as his wife would have liked, it was simply a case of not being very good at it. He didn’t mind the digging, the ground was soft enough, he just couldn’t seem to get the hang of laying the slabs straight. Grace had very clearly told him that she wanted the patio finished for the summer. She just hadn’t stated which summer.

Grace peeked outside again. Dick was still standing there, but now with one hand in his trouser pocket and the other mopping his brow with a giant handkerchief, as though he were waiting for someone to come along and help him clear up the mess. She did still love him, after all they’d been together over twenty years, but how things had changed. Gone was the suave and sophisticated young man freshly returned from the war, with his flashy smile and greased back hair, who used to take her out on his shiny red motorcycle. She saw hardly anything of that young man in her husband. Nowadays Dick was almost completely bald, overweight, and always tired. He didn’t have a full day’s work in him and Grace often wondered how a person who did so little could spend so much time either in bed or asleep in his armchair. Still, Dick was kind and had never even raised his voice to her, so she let him be.

Grace had kept her youthful figure, not least due to the number of times she had to run up and down the long flight of stairs every day. She also had her hair set every Thursday, ready for the new group of guests who would arrive on a Friday, for either a long weekend break or a proper beach holiday. Her hair hadn’t changed in style for over a decade, Dick said he liked it that way, and so Grave stuck to having it put in rollers and generously laced with hairspray to hold it in place. Grace liked to look her best and, every night before turning in, she would always carefully pick out her outfits for the next day. She loved her A-Line skirts and sensible trousers, matching them with patterned blouses with big frilly bows. Much younger girls, down in the town, were now starting to wear their skirts shorter but Grace was far to prim to follow fashion. She was a great lover of tweed and believed that a good jacket could transform even the dowdiest of outfits. Not that she got many chances to go out, of course. There were always sheets to change, bathrooms to scrub and food to cook. Still, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

The couple hadn’t been blessed with children, so all that they had were each other and their small circle of friends. Grace would have been happy to adopt, but Dick was more concerned about wagging tongues and genetic defects than giving an orphan a loving home. Therefore, time had passed and they now considered themselves too old, though both only just touching forty, and the likelihood of parenting was quickly fading away. Grace was an only child, so there was no chance of her becoming an aunt within her own family either, although Dick’s siblings were many and produced a new set of nephews and nieces for them to dote on almost every year. Grace still had her parents to love and care for although, since their retirement some years ago, they did seem to spend more and more time travelling around, visiting stately homes and country teashops. They had refused to have a telephone installed, arguing that they were ‘just up the road’ but Grace had often walked the mile or so to their new bungalow only to find a note on the back door saying ‘Gone out for the day’ or ‘Back at six, playing bridge with the Neath’s’. Years ago, on the odd cold day when her parent’s hadn’t felt like venturing far, Grace would come down from her cleaning upstairs to find them both in the kitchen making a brew, smiling as if they still lived there and she was the guest. Grace loved those moments, especially as her mother always brought freshly baked fruit cake or a bread and butter pudding with her, which could be served to the guests as a treat after their evening meal.

The Thomas’s family, friends and neighbours had been very kind, willing to lend a sympathetic ear in the early days of their marriage and careful not to broach the subject of ‘little ones’ in their later years. Grace still held out hope that a miracle might happen and that she would conceive naturally, but seeing as how she was always busy and Dick was always tired, the chance of them actually getting ‘down to it’ became more and more unlikely as the weeks and months passed. There was also the little matter of Dick’s sleep-walking, which meant that Grace would often wake up alone in the middle of the night, venture downstairs and find him sitting in the kitchen or pottering about in his shed making invisible shelves or potting unseen plants. Maybe that’s why he’s always so tired in the day, Grace had thought, and that had been her sole reason for not nagging at him.

They didn’t have much in common these days. Dick liked to listen to jazz, whereas Grace preferred the new music of Elvis Presley. It did no harm that the young singer was handsome too. Dick rarely picked up a book, whilst Grace could easily have immersed herself in a library and never surfaced in the outside world again. On the rare winter days that the couple found themselves with no guests and nothing to do, Dick would suggest inviting friends for a drink and a bite to eat while Grace, simply nodding her head and relenting, wished dearly that they could go for a walk or have a romantic meal alone in one of the two restaurants that opened for a few hours in the dark months.

Despite, feeling that life was passing her by far too quickly, Grace was content with her lot. She certainly held no secrets, like some folk she could mention. The Thomas’s weren’t gossips by any stretch of the imagination but during their years as proprietors of the ‘Sandybank Guest House’, the couple had learned that there were all kinds of goings on amongst the residents below. Their elevated position, high above the town, had given Dick and Grace a bird’s-eye view of some of the trysts and affairs that went on, and for that which they didn’t see with their own eyes, the electric dryer in Maureen O’Sullivan’s hair salon had provided an excellent location to learn the rest. Grace looked forward to Thursdays more than any other day of the week. It was like having the plot of a book unfold before her eyes when the gossipmongers were in the right mood, and besides, she liked having her hair done too.

As Grace carried the finished tablecloths through to the dining room, she wondered if she had time to spend half an hour with a book and a cup of tea before she needed to start preparing dinner for her guests. It was still early in the season and only two of the six rooms were occupied, both by elderly gentlemen, no doubt staying for some fresh air and long walks, Grace presumed. Most families who came to the area chose one of the cheaper holiday options and either rented a chalet on the site just out of town, where both entertainment and food were included in the price, or they hired a static caravan for their stay and made the short walk to the seaside down steps from the cliff top above. Therefore, it was mostly couples and singles who paid to be pampered at the ‘Sandybank’ and once word had got out about the soft feather mattresses and Grace’s excellent cooking skills, the ledger was littered with bookings from season start to season end. There would be nothing fancy tonight, just a slice of gammon with an egg and new potatoes so, as it wouldn’t take her long, she might even boil up some cabbage to go on the side. Albeit a simple meal, the little tables would still be set with shiny silver cutlery, china plates and little matching cruet sets that Grace had proudly purchased from a new department store on one of her rare trips out to the next town. Tiny glass vases held a few spring flowers and napkins were folded into fans, nothing was too good for the Thomas’s guests.

After seeing that her dining room was perfect for the two gentlemen to sit down and eat, Grace peered through the serving hatch dividing that room from the kitchen. Still no sign of Dick, he must be nursing his pride in the garden, she thought. Gently putting her hand through to the kitchen worktop, she placed her palm on the teapot, it was still warm. Grace pushed open the door and sat down at the kitchen counter. Slipping her Mary Jane’s off her feet, Grace wriggled her toes and picked up her Mills and Boone romance novel from the Welsh dresser. She glanced up at the orange plastic clock ticking away above the stove, it was four o’clock. Plenty of time for an hour of literary indulgence before her guests would be back from their various pursuits and expecting a pot of tea, and just enough time to see if the heroine, Catherine, could catch her handsome beau. Very soon Grace was whisked away to a time of Victorian courtship and elegant ball-gowns. It was far, far away from her current life, in a small seaside town, in 1964.

Book Details

AUTHOR NAME: A.J. Griffiths-Jones

BOOK TITLE: The Seasiders (Skeletons in the Cupboard Series Book 2)

GENRE: Crime & Mystery

PAGE COUNT: 180

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