Tim Parks: An Italian Education

I remark to my wife, Rita, that where I was brought up, if you got down to the sea at 8.30 in the morning, you would freeze to death. But she is busy stopping Michele from picking up a crumb of coconut that has fallen in the sand. And now he’s dug out a cigarette stub, too.

I remark that if you set up a sunshade on the beach at Blackpool, where I lived as a child, the chances are it would be blown away. Even with a huge cement base. And assuming you wanted to set it up somewhere dry, that would mean you’d have to walk half a mile out before you got to the sea, with the danger that then the tide would come in so fast it would sweep the thing away. Though, of course, it would sweep away the cigarette stubs, too.

In Pescara, halfway down Italy’s fancy boot on the right-hand side, the sea scarcely moves at all on summer days. Or it’s as if a broad dishful of water were tipped ever so gently this way and that. Tiny wavelets creep up the beach a metre or two, only to creep respectfully back, leaving the strollers and sunshades and pedal-boats untouched. The sand Michele is crunching in baby hands a hundred yards from the shore has the soft fineness of sand in an hourglass, dry as desert bone, certainly too dry to make a sandcastle with, but good for tossing up in the air, or pouring over Daddy’s legs. Fortunately, there’s not a breath of wind today to blow it into your eyes.

A couple more families saunter along the pathway from the road and the bathing-station bar down to their sunshades. The pathway is paved with small, square flagstones, because it is wearisome walking far across soft, dry sand, and then it would be difficult to push a buggy through it. The sunshades have small red discs with numbers to avoid confusion.

I said families, but in fact there are no men in the groups, for it’s not the weekend, and not really holiday time yet. Only late July and August are really holiday time. A harassed mother is carrying a huge inflated shark. Her two small boys drag a rubber boat full of toys.

They settle, as they always do, at the sunshade across the path from our own. For that is their sunshade. Rented for the whole summer. Number 34. But no, the boys can’t go into the sea yet. No! Per l’amore di Dio! It’s too early to go into the sea. Not before ten o’clock! Though the temperature must already have hit thirty… Certainly I stripped my shirt off long ago.

‘If you waited,’ I remark to my wife, ‘till it got hotter than this to go into the sea at Blackpool, you’d never go in at all. Which might be just as well, because…’

But Rita’s worried that Michele has sand in his nappy now, and she’s debating whether to take it off. Is this early morning sun already too strong, perhaps, for his delicate skin? And if she puts cream on him, will the sand stick to it?

When you went swimming at Blackpool, you pulled off your clothes in a hurry and were shivering before you’d got your costume on. To fight the cold you ran fast across the beach through shallow water, or on a hard, ribbed sand that hurt your soles. Laughing and splashing, you plunged your goose pimples into a murky sea and fooled around in the waves for as long as you could without suffering serious exposure, then raced back out of the water to where Mother stood waiting with a big bath towel already opened. Father rubbed your hair furiously, distorting your vision of low cloud over the Edwardian seafront. The sand was damp and sticky and would never come out from all the body’s secret corners, perhaps because the towels were never a hundred percent dry. The very air was wet and clung to you. Then there would be flasks of soup and tea and coffee, crouching in the shelter of a windbreak, sniffing and wiping your nose on a sandy wrist. Afterwards, fully dressed again, you dug channels and built dams for the water that lay just below the surface everywhere, all the time keeping a wary eye on a possible pincer movement of the tide, famous for carrying off the less experienced beachgoers. Your overall feeling on departure was one of battered heroism.

Rita laughs. She feels sorry for the English, but she also finds them rather ridiculous. Never once, in all our trips to England, has she braved an English sea, though she is an excellent swimmer.

In Pescara, the mothers bring their children early to the beach, to get the sun at its healthiest. Later they will let them go in the water when its coolness can only be a relief. And when the children come out, they don’t change back into their clothes, shivering like wet dogs, teeth chattering, but into a second dry bathing costume. Or even a third…

Overhead and a few hundred yards out to sea, a light aeroplane flies low and parallel with the shoreline towing a long strip of orange plastic. It’s advertising CRODINO, a soft fizzy drink. Nobody needs soup or hot tea here.

Michele spits out his piece of coconut. It appears he doesn’t like it. ‘ Cocco ,’ he says cheerily, apparently not having really made the connection. So I get to finish it up, perhaps my first piece of fresh coconut since the coconut shies of Lancashire funfairs twenty and more years ago. One thing about having children is that they remind you of so much. And having children in a foreign country gives you a new awareness of distance, a new dimension to your awayness.

After ten o’clock, as more and more people arrive, the sunshades become a warren of orange and green activity, most of it, at this hour, dedicated to the well-being of young children, who have to be undressed, smothered in sun cream, wriggled into their bathing costumes, and given a hat, which of course they take off, so it has to be put on again, then they take it off again, so then it has to be tied on, so that now they begin to cry — and perhaps the sun is already so hot that they could really use a T-shirt, or perhaps not, How hot is it already? and Don’t throw sand, Matteo, Don’t throw sand, Cristina, and no, you can’t have pizzetta , it’s too early for a pizzetta . Yes, I know I promised. Well, we’ll go and get one at eleven o’clock. No, you can’t go in the water yet. Not yet. For the moment just be quiet and play with your toys.

For they all have lots of toys. They have big plastic buckets and spades, and they have rakes and forks and then little plastic moulds to make bas-relief frogs and rabbits and dogs and cats of sand, except that the sand is too dry here, somebody will have to go and fetch a bucket of water, and they have plastic dolphins and rubber rings and water wings and goggles and snorkels and flippers, all in extremely bright colours, and tip-up trucks to move sand and excavators to dig it and rackets and balls and perhaps even a boomerang or a kite.

But they have no father to play with, to make their toys come alive, because father is in the office, or the factory, or even the fields, working. And for the most part they have no brothers or sisters to play with, because Italians of my generation rarely have more than one child.

The only children nose around their toys wondering what to do while their mothers chat.

For since the mothers always come to the same sunshade, which is their sunshade, they pretty soon get to know all the other mothers who have the adjacent shades, and they do this far quicker, it seems, than the children get to know the other children. After all, adults have had more practice.

The sunshades to our right are taken by two primary school teachers. Sitting on their lounge beds, creaming their stretchmarks, their small talk is inexhaustible: TV game shows, supermarket prices, medical tests, friends divorcing, celebrities divorcing, nappy rash, toddling, tortellini, teething. Nearby, the dear children they’re more often than not talking about fret with their toys and, if they have a companion, begin to hit him, while the sun creeps up to the vertical, squeezing the shadows in beneath the sunshades.