There was a pebble beach at the bottom of the cliff near the cottage. When the tide retreated, the shingle gave way to muddy sand and revealed the debris of a whole new world to me: Irish moss, moon jelly, sea kelp, razor-clams and cockle-shells, sand dollars and frisbees, blue nylon rope and dead sea urchins. In the evenings, when I walked along the path of crushed, purple-ringed mussel-shells and grey whelks, I would hear the sea birds cry, plaintive calls of cormorants and black-tipped herring-gulls as sad as our uprooted, overshadowed lives. Then the northern sun would find its prism and the sky would flare into an incandescent sunset above the oil refinery on the other side of the estuary; petrochemicals stained the air in mauve and pink as deliciously as the Tropic of Capricorn off our coral-spangled south coast back home. The sea shimmering between the black humps of barnacled rocks, mullioned with gold bladderwrack like beached whales, thickened into a great beast reaching landward, snuffling and gurgling. The sky would redden, the earth redden, the sea redden. In pockmarked, marooned rock pools speckled hermit-crabs and rubbery, red sea anemones dug in; limpets and periwinkles and bubble weed held fast waiting for the tide. Thin, furry tongues flickered out of their lidded shells, casting for the slightest light in the eddies of cool water.