If you walked down our back yard and went out of the gate you went into an alley. Oh it wasn't a proper narrow alley but quite wide. Wide enough for the dust cart to drive down. If you turned right and walked along the alley to the road at the end and then turned left you were but half a minute from the sea wall. The sea wall was as tall as a house and there were steps and a slope for prams that went up to the top. The other side of the sea wall was the beach and then the sea. Most of the beach was pebbles with strands of sand below the high tide mark. At low tide vast expanses of sloppy mud were revealed. The beach was broken up by breakwaters. Put there to stop the beach from being washed away. These were useful as windbreaks, a screen to help preserve modesty when changing and as something to jump into the sea from when the tide was high enough.
To a kid this presented a number of games apart from the usual swimming and sand castle building. There was the throw a lump of wood (or anything else that floated) into the sea and then bombard it with pebbles until it was out of range game. The quite common dodge the waves game (kind of chicken played against the sea) that needless to say usually resulted in going home with wet salty shoes and socks. The make a pile of rocks, stand a tin can on top and see who could knock it off with a thrown pebble or, when we got good at that, to see who could toss a pebble into the tin without it falling off. At low tide there was the make a path of stepping stones across the sloppy mud game and then see who could get along it the fastest without missing a step and end up ankle deep in the mud. Grown ups really did not like us playing this one but it did not stop us. There was the step jumping game. (On the beach side the sea wall was a series of quite large steps going down to the pebbles. So from the beach you would go up one and then jump back. Then go up two and jump back, Then three, Then four and so on. By the time I was eleven I could jump nine steps without injury but my best mate Pete could always jump one more than me.) There was the looking for near perfectly round pebbles and stones and then rolling them along the sea wall game and sometimes playing marbles with the round stones. There was the search for interesting things along the beach and then make up a game to play with them game. There was the find really smelly seaweed and throw it at each other game and the chase someone with a jellyfish game.
Now and then the sea would throw up something really scary or interesting. Because, I suppose, there were places where animals could wander into the sea, every now and then we would find a sheep skull. Once while playing around looking under rocks Pete nearly turned over a really large crab by mistake as he only saw at the last moment what it really was because most of it had been buried in the sloppy mud. Living by the sea we knew a few things like how to pick up crabs and lobsters safely - though lobsters were quicker than crabs and had sharper pinchers. So I picked it up and we took it up to the sea wall. It was very heavy, being so large, so we took turns in carrying it. When we put it down on the sea wall it started to run around very fast waving its pinchers in the air. The sea wall was quite busy at the time as it was the holiday season. We didn't show it but were very amused by the way people kept screaming and running away from it while we chased it. Then a man picked it up and took it down to the sea and chucked it in. We were disappointed but decided to be somewhere else by the time he got back. Another time there were lots of jellyfish washed up after a storm. They all had bright red or orange markings inside and long tendrils. We knew enough to avoid jellyfish that had color - they could sting you! But to us it was scary because there were so many of them. After a while two men with dustbins, overalls, leather boots and leather gauntlets came along and started picking them up and putting them into the bins. We asked them why. They said they were dangerous and we should not be on the beach. There were other men putting up notices saying, "Warning! Danger on Beach!" {It was only in later years I wondered why the council had notices like that already made up.} As we had been walking on the beach among them we had instant bragging rights among our mates.
The beach though, to our minds, also included the jetty, the shelters and even the arcades, shops and cafes along the sea wall. The arcades were a challenge. We had frequented them so much we had learned the sequences of colors that the race game horses won in so after a minute or so we knew which to bet on to win. In fact we had got used to lots of the machines so well that we could go in with a penny and come out with enough to buy something to eat and a drink. Trouble was the blokes that ran the arcades knew it. So we had to sneak in, win enough and get out before they saw us. If they caught us they would give us a clout, usually on the back of the leg, and send us on our way. We called getting such a clout red legging. If you got red legged your mates would take the Mick out of you until the red mark went away. The jetty was good for diving off of when the tide was in. It was really good for dodging spray thrown up by waves when the sea was rough.
In all our times on and around the beach though it was the actions of holiday makers that amused us the most. There was one cafe on the seafront next to a patch of grass between high tide mark and the sea wall. Holiday makers would get their cuppas and hot dogs or whatever and head for the grass to sit down and picnic on. It was the only patch of grass for some way in any direction. Guess where the dogs decided it should be best to poo?
When we went swimming on days that it was likely to rain, we took with us a waterproof bag to put our gear in while we were in the sea. We would heap up a pile of pebbles just above the high tide mark and put our bag on top. This would make it easier to see from in the sea. When it rained we would carry on swimming and playing in the water. The holiday makers though would scream and shriek and run up to the shelters and only after it stopped raining again would they come back to the sea. That always made us laugh but we did not let them see we were laughing at them. That would break another rule - never show up the holiday makers as we want them to come back and spend money.
There was that little work available and what there was was so poorly paid that the people who lived on the island were dependent upon holiday makers to bring in the extra cash. In the summer most people let rooms. As kids we would take our box carts down to the bus and train station and haul holiday makers luggage for tips. If they were new to the place we would tell them where to find things like the fair, boating pool, crazy golf, swimming pool and so on. Mr. G. who ran an Italian cafe (and did the best espresso coffee I have ever tasted) used to tip us to tell them about his cafe. Some kids used to walk up and down the seafront selling fruit from locals' gardens. As we got older we would help out on the boats that gave trips around the wreck. We could also sell any fish we caught to the local fish or fish and chip shops. We soon learned to clean them as they paid us a bit more for doing that.
So the beach was a place to play but also a place where we learned a number of life lessons.