What secrets do the uniform little red, green and blue huts contain?

Beach Hut life

January 2022 – In which Sam Davey acquires a beach hut, remembers her childhood summers and becomes very familiar with mould removal spray.

I recently found out that owning a beach hut in nearby Bexhill can set you back £46,000, which makes acquiring one unaffordable  for most people.

Renting is a more economical option, although at a cost of  £26 a week, it is still something of a luxury – but one that I was prepared to prioritise. When I moved to St Leonards from leafy but land-locked Bedfordshire, I put my name down with Hastings Council’s Resort Services and after being on the waiting list for over six years, I was delighted to be offered a beach hut to rent on St Leonards West Marina.

Why did I want a beach hut so much?. When I was a child, my parents would leave me for a week in the summer with my Grandma, who used to run a guest house in Rhyl on the North Wales coast.

Whilst I could tell that my mother felt a little guilty about this, because she didn’t particularly like my Grandma, and assumed her young daughter would feel the same, I actually relished this time away from my parents and the opportunities it gave me to spend hour upon glorious hour at the beach.

If the weather was good, we would get up early, pack our beach bags and head out across the golf links to the shore. First, we would set up our base – stripy towels to sit on, positioned within the small, protective semi-circle of our stripy windbreak –  and then a day of timeless, perfect pleasures would begin.

I would explore rock-pools and build sandcastles; dig trenches down to the wave-edge, hoping that the tide would come in and fill the moat, which I had decorated with seashells and lined carefully with sea-weed in an attempt to stop the water from seeping away. I would run about the beach until I was exhausted, and often, as the sun started to move closer to the water and the shadows to lengthen on the sand, I would snuggle up under a towel, my head on my Grandma’s lap as she read her book or completed the last few rows of her knitting.

When she was finished, we would pack up and head for home. We would always walk past a row of beach huts and oh, how I envied the children I saw sitting inside them. The huts were small, but compact. A table and chairs, a small cooking stove sitting atop rather rackety enamel storage units,  padded benches along the wall, covered with bright cushions and abandoned towels.

Families would be talking and laughing, drinking tea and eating fish and chips. I imagined them sitting there as everyone else went home, watching the beach become empty and quiet, until the sand and waves belonged only to them.

I had forgotten much of this until we moved to St Leonards. In our first few weeks, I would walk Lily, our beautiful if rather nefarious cocker spaniel along West Marina, watching those happy, well- favoured souls take out their deck chairs and settle themselves for a day at the seaside.

I would sneak a look inside, admiring the small, cosy huts with their battered, well-used furniture, picturing myself in residence. However, I quickly learned to walk as far away from the beach huts as I could, as Lily would take any opportunity to sneak inside and pilfer.  One on occasion, I had to apologise profusely to a family who had rather recklessly left out an open biscuit tin. “Fair Game” thought Lily. “Tragedy”, thought the children, who were now deprived of their custard creams.

Lily also had an unaccountable passion for socks, which she would snaffle from shoes left outside the huts, bringing them proudly to me and depositing them, covered with slobber, at my feet. I gave up trying to locate the owners and would leave them piled up on the groynes, held in place by a pebble – a colourful if rather bizarre tribute to a spaniel’s misplaced passion.

But though I now avoided the huts, I never lost the longing to one day have one for my own. I had put my name down on the list so long ago that I had almost forgotten about it. Then, towards the end of December,  I unexpectedly received an email telling me that I had finally made my way to the top of this list. I went over to Muriel Matters house, signed all the paperwork, and was given the keys to a rather battered blue beach hut.

When I opened the door, the first thing to greet me was, unsurprisingly, the smell of damp. The walls were filthy and covered in mould and the floor was bare and uninviting. But it didn’t matter. I was in love.

I spent the next few weeks cleaning, scrubbing and painting. I am now an expert on mould remover and have acquired a rather natty metal broom to clear away the constantly renewing stones from the front door. I have invested in a small gas stove and a camping kettle and have bought and upcycled some chairs and a table from Facebook marketplace.

I don’t know yet what this year will bring, but as I sit in my beach hut, looking out at the waves, and watching the turnstones strut purposefully across the pebbles, I feel a sense of joy and well-being. Who knows what will happen, who I’ll meet and what stories I will uncover? I look forward to sharing them with you in my beach hut diary.

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