If you ever find yourself in West Bay, perhaps waiting for the connecting bus to Lyme, you could do a lot worse than sneaking a pint at the Quarterdeck Inn. Its tables may be blistered and the benches bowed, and much beer gets spilled on those uneven tiles, but my goodness is it a delightful place to waste an afternoon! Many a time Debbs and I have shipwrecked at the Quarterdeck after a blissful day wandering between the village and neighbouring Bridport, promising ourselves a restrained but well deserved pint, only to roll out of there beyond last orders having waxed and waned with the locals. They also seem to have a limitless supply of Crevettes (large prawns to my uncultured eye) served with American style French fries, salted cherry tomatoes and garlic mayonnaise, which is, I believe, the perfect accompaniment for slightly warm Indian Pale Ale and sun startled eyes. All manner of interesting and strange folk pass through the Quarterdeck, and it is a dog friendly pub too, with lap bowls and kitchen scraps, which again lends an entirely welcome Medieval air. I’m not fond of modern gastro pubs or the many ubiquitous chain affairs that have metastasised in city centres the length of England over the past twenty years. My preference is always for a house of strange angles and low ceilings.
These pictures were all shot in and around West Bay on my Fuji XT-10 digital camera, which I picked up secondhand. Fuji lens are beautiful things to be sure, but they’re also fiendishly expensive. Happily, with the addition of a thirty quid converter, I can use my old Canon FD lens which fit my AE-1 Programme 35mm camera.
Despite a promising start to the week,a brisk storm worked its way along the Jurassic coast, which by mid-week produced some lively seascapes, some of which I captured on my 200mm FD zoom.
The last day of the holiday saw a break in the storm and the return of warmer weather. We packed a picnic and toddled off to the pebbly beach, more or less in the exact spot where the body is disovered in season one of Broadchurch, which was filmed in the harbour area.
The high redstone cliffs are a magical place. Old sepia photographs that adorn the gents’ toilet walls at the West Bay Hotel show another world separated by two world wars and a technological revolution, and yet the iconic cliffs remain remarkably the same, although some distance further out in the sea. As a small boy in the late 1980s I holidayed at Eype, a short breathless Cliffside walk away. Weather permitting, we would hike up and over the hump into West Bay to fish for prawns with a drop net baited with leftovers. Those memories stand out as the most perfect of days. The joyful expectation that accompanied the raising of the net, prawns snapping like electric quotation marks. Maybe a bag of chips or an ice-cream, and then, as the sun set, we would retrace our path across the cliffs with a bucket of spoils. Freshly boiled with bread and butter always felt like a victor’s supper and engrained in me a lifelong love of shellfish. Visiting West Bay again these past few years I have felt the ghost of memory in these familiar sights. Old photographs swim to mind, a little boy with blonde, almost white hair, in a plaid shirt, walking the high cliffs with his father, fishing tackle slung over a shoulder, the promise of a glorious day ahead.
More often than not it rained on these September holidays. It was a time when parents could take their kids out of school during term time with a polite letter, which for poor families meant the chance of a cheaper holiday in the off season. When it rained we would retreat into the caravan, which I always imagined to be a space shuttle or something from the Star Trek universe. There, in the discrete unfussy interior we would play board games, usually monopoly, for hours upon hours. It seems so dull now, but the three of us together, rain sliding down the little windows that faced the ocean so that the horizon drew a feint line like steam rising, was completely wonderful.