The dreaded striped box. Image by Simon Howden

A beach isn’t a beach without a red and white striped box, dormant for about ninety percent of its life, but awash with all of human nature for the other ten percent. Ok, so, yes, as an adult I enjoy secluded bays, cliffs and the peace and quiet provided by our coast in Yorkshire, but as a child, we hadn’t really ‘seen the sea yet’ until I saw that box.

We spent most of our holidays, ( a week, or possibly two each summer) in Swanage. My dad would pack up the Cortina (beige with brown vinyl roof) with bucket, dinghy, windcheater (with yet another patch or pole replaced from the previous year, in fact, i think the whole thing had been replaced entirely within a few years) and towels early in the morning, ready for the massive drive down. You could tell it was a holiday, rather than just a day out, as the flasks weren’t full, which in turn could only mean one thing; We would be stopping at one of dad’s favourite road side cafés for lunch.

That alone was exciting enough for a young lad. The promise of a hamburger (MacDonald’s had a long time until they landed in Britain) and a milkshake, a thick one that would take half an hour of noisy sucking and slurping to polish off, was an integral part of the ritual.

We never arrived in the middle of the day, but often when the sun was beginning to settle into the sea. This meant a hurried tea of corned beef sandwiches before taking a walk on the beach before it got dark. That’s when I acquired my irrational fear of the Punch and Judy kiosk.

There’s something about a solitary, slightly moving and wobbling shape that was the only other occupant of the beach in the twilight, something that drew me across the sand to it. As a boy it towered above me, the ‘stage’ at least a foot above my head, the canvas sides pegged down hard to stop either the weather stealing the theatre or prying eyes like mine, or both.

Punch and Judy in Swanage

The fading light, the frustration of not being able to be nosey and my dad warning me against trying to peek into Mr Punch’s house “…after all son, you know what he does to his kid” all added to the spooky feeling. I didn’t like it. Wherever I went on the beach the thought of Mr Punch sat still and silent in his beach house followed me. I loved seeing the show, sat with all the other lads and lasses, busily getting sand on my ice cream cone, or worse, my pasty, while lapping up the antics of the policeman, judge and crocodile as they chase Mr Punch for his crimes, so quite why the still box worried me so much in the evening is still a mystery.

Maybe it was broken, years later, when i first saw a Punch and Judy man leave the ‘stage door’. I was in my twenties, so old enough to know exactly how it worked, but somehow, until I glimpsed beyond the plywood facade, hanging puppets and flask as he hurried off for a cigarette, the spell had just a little hold on me.

So no matter how much foreign sand I get stuck between my toes, how many times that I eat fish ‘n’ chips in Whitby harbour, or how windswept I get in Scarborough, I still don’t feel like I’m properly on holiday till I see that solitary striped box.