by Andy Ramus

Created on: March 01, 2010

71-’72 First Kiss

As a typically shy child of 9 or 10, the mini bus, which occasionally took us from Shoreham Beach to St Peters RC school, could be a daunting affair, mothers would ask me if I’d like to sit next to their daughters, and I’d politely decline while going crimson with embarrassment. Attention of just about any sort would then bring on intensely irrational responses, over which I seemed to have no control, and absolutely no idea of what I was about to say or do, but whatever the reaction was, and it would nearly always be a bad one, it would (as it seemed then) just heap further embarrassment and humiliation upon me. Well, knowing this, I had a surprise in store, when one year, I think I may have been ten, certainly still at infant school, and during another of the many fine summers we used to have, a girl, who’s name has long since been lost to my memory, came to stay with her family for a holiday at our next door neighbours house, Mrs Whitehead, who, throughout the summers, let her upstairs as a holiday apartment to various families. We’d always be on the lookout to see who the ‘new’ lot would be, for any potential playmates. And, as I say, this girl turned up one year; we hit it off straight away and spent all our time out on walks around the riverbank, the beach, and the airport together. This one time, we headed from the beach and off towards the river Adur, which kind of sweeps along parallel with the coast line, before making its way North through the Adur valley as it carves its way through the Sussex Downs. Shoreham Beach is a peninsular between the river and the sea, and when you step off this peninsular, as a child, you’re entering a whole new playground of farmland, playing fields, a railway bridge and embankment, beyond which lays Shoreham airport and the Downs. Shoreham airport was always an immensely popular place when we were young, flanked on two sides by the railway embankment and riverbank with their grassy sidings, and the Gothic Cathedral like Lancing College as a backdrop, with its surrounding woodland set in to the Downs, (always a popular conker picking place). Small planes and helicopters always buzzing or whirring around, and giving a general air of excitement to a child. Standing under the railway bridge as the trains went over, holding our ears to muffle the rattle and roar, especially so when the bucket carriages of the cement works came through, pulled by dirty great

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