I Burn in Twenty Minutes, and My Family Lives for the Shore

The genetics I did not ask for

I have the kind of skin that comes with a warning label. Pale, freckled, the sort of red hair that was funny at school and expensive at the pharmacy. My mother used to dress me for the beach like I was being sent into a blizzard, long sleeves and a wide hat and a nose painted white with zinc, and I hated every second of it. I grew up believing, deep down, that the beach was simply not a place for people like me. Other children ran into the waves. I sat under a towel pinned between two deckchairs and watched the light move on the water and counted the minutes until we could go home.

So it is one of life's small jokes that I married a woman who was practically raised in the surf and that we produced three children who, every single one of them, inherited her love of the ocean and none of my caution. By the time the eldest was six I understood that I had a choice to make. I could spend the next fifteen summers being the sad man at the edge of the car park, or I could find a way to actually be there, with them, in the one place they were happiest. The problem was that the place that made them happiest was the place that physically could not accommodate me for longer than it takes to eat an ice cream.

The summer I kept score of my own failures

For a few years I tried to brute-force it. More sunscreen, applied more often, in thicker layers, until I looked like a man who had fallen into a vat of paint. It helped and it did not help. The trouble with a whole day at the beach is that a whole day is a long time, and the sun moves, and children need you to come and look at a crab, and by the third or fourth hour there is always a patch you missed. The back of the knees. The tops of the ears. One memorable year the parting in my hair, which blistered, and which I will not describe further out of respect for anyone eating.

I tried hats, but a hat only shades your face. I tried a cheap umbrella, the kind you jam into the sand, and I spent most of a windy afternoon chasing it down the beach while strangers laughed, which they were entitled to do. I tried sitting in the shadow of the lifeguard tower, which works for exactly as long as nobody minds a grown man loitering under the lifeguard tower. None of it was a solution. All of it was a series of small defeats that added up to the same old feeling, that the beach was a place I was tolerated rather than welcome.

What I wanted was simple to describe and apparently hard to achieve. I wanted a reliable patch of real shade. Not a sad little circle of it. Enough that I could sit, and read, and have a child flop down next to me dripping and cold, and still be able to stand up at the end of the day without the tight, hot feeling across my shoulders that told me I had lost again.

The thing my sister-in-law had in her boot

It was my sister-in-law who sorted me out, and she did it without any fuss at all. We had all gone down to the coast together one long weekend, and while I was doing my usual routine of surveying the sand for any scrap of natural shade, she simply opened the boot of her car and pulled out a bundle that did not look like much, and inside about three minutes she had set up a proper beach tent, stretched and anchored and sitting there like it had always been part of the beach. I stood looking at it the way a man dying of thirst looks at a tap.

I crawled into the shade of it and I did not come out for a while. It was properly cool under there. Not the pretend coolness of a thin umbrella but actual, committed shade, with a breeze coming through and the light knocked down to something my skin could live with. My youngest came and sat next to me, and then my wife, and then we were all under there eating sandwiches that for once did not have sand in them, and I remember thinking, with a slightly embarrassing lump in my throat, that this was the thing I had been missing for about thirty-five years. Not the ocean. The ability to be next to the ocean on my own terms.

My sister-in-law, who has no patience for sentiment, just said that they are not complicated, that people get far too precious about beach tents, and that I should stop being a martyr and get my own. So I did.

Learning to set the thing up without swearing

I will not pretend I mastered it on the first go. There is a small art to anchoring anything on a beach, and my first solo attempt, on a windy morning with three children offering contradictory advice, involved more swearing than I am proud of. But by the second or third outing I had the knack of it, and now I can get ours up in the time it takes my wife to walk back from the kiosk with the coffees. I have become, improbably, the person other families watch with a slightly envious expression, which after a lifetime of being the one who watched is a feeling I have decided to enjoy quietly and not mention to anyone.

The real change is not the sunburn, although the sunburn is genuinely gone, and that alone would have justified the whole thing. The real change is that I am in the photographs now. For most of my children's early childhood I was behind the camera or absent from the frame entirely, hiding from the light, and when I look back at those pictures there is a father-shaped gap in almost all of them. The last couple of summers, there I am, cross-legged in the shade with a book on my chest and somebody's wet towel across my feet, squinting out at the water with the rest of them. My eldest, who is old enough now to be embarrassed by me as a general policy, told me recently that the beach feels wrong without the tent, that it is part of our beach now, and I had to look out at the sea for a moment so she would not see my face.

What the shade gave back

I think a lot of people assume that the small apparatus of a family holiday, the chairs and the cooler and the beach canopy and all of it, is just stuff, just clutter you cart from the car to the sand and back. And most of it probably is. But every so often one object turns out to be the hinge that a whole part of your life swings on, and for me it was a simple square of shade that let a man who burns in twenty minutes finally belong somewhere he had spent his entire life believing was closed to him.

We went down last week, the five of us, for the first warm day of the season. The children were in the water before I had the tent half up, shrieking at the cold the way they do every year as though it is a fresh surprise. I got it anchored, crawled into the cool, and sat for a while watching them. My wife came and sat next to me, and neither of us said anything, because after enough years together the good silences are better than the talking. At some point I realised I had not thought about my skin once all morning, and that I was simply at the beach, being at the beach, like a normal person, like someone who had always belonged there. I have made my peace with a lot of things in middle age. That truce with the sea, brokered by a bit of fabric and some well-placed pegs, is the one I would least want to give back.