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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

Sand: Gold Fame Citrus & My Own Beach Memories

22/3/2016

12 Comments

 
There’s no rain in California. The swimming pools that graced the homes of the beautiful people are nothing but rubbish tips, no-one can wash and drinking water is rationed. Just beyond Los Angeles, civilisation lies buried under mountains of moving sand. Most people have been evacuated to the camps out East; those who remain take their chances in this lawless environment. It’s not only the sun that is harsh.
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Since birth, Luz Dunn has been used and abused as a symbol of the impact of untrammelled climate change. She’s about to leave to take her chances in one of the internment camps, when she meets Ray, a former soldier who cannot bear mention of the war. She’s fallen for him before she discovers that his lack of identity papers put them both at risk, especially when they take in the toddler, Ig, partly kidnapped, partly rescued from a dubious gang of roughnecks. When they hear of a man on the edge of the Dune Sea, a saviour who can find water, they seem to have no choice but to set out to find him. Of course, that’s where their difficulties really start.

A
cli-fi novel somewhat reminiscent, with the quasi-messiah, of Station Eleven, Gold Fame Citrus (named for the treasures that drew people to south-west America) is an engaging debut from Quercus books, to whom thanks for my review copy. Now and then, I didn’t quite get the Americanisms and cultural references, but enjoyed it all the same. With the intense heat, it also put me in the mind – albeit a potentially unreliable mind, given it’s a long time since I read it – of the classic dystopian novel, On the Beach.
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This reminder of Neville Shute gives me an opportunity to segue across to another Australian writer, this one actually alive, my blogging friend Irene Waters, who is asking for beach memories as part of her community memoir project, Times Past. Having survived meals in restaurants and washday blues, I thought I’d pitch in once more.
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The house in which I grew up was about two miles from the coast – which we called the shore – and, from the age of about nine or ten, I’d walk or cycle there most summers. The small harbour was flanked by a rocky area to the north, formed by the slag of the nearby steelworks, where my sister and I stretched out under the sun taking turns to read aloud from novels we’d borrowed from the library  – Sylvia Plath and Evelyn Waugh, who we probably thought, initially, was a woman – until the day a man with a camera took too much interest in what we were doing. To the south was a scrappy beach of pebbles and sand where families would gather for picnics and where we pimped out a pony that wasn’t ours for sixpence a ride.

For our family picnics on the beach, we’d pile in the car and drive a little further north to where the sand went on for miles. We did the usual stuff: building sandcastles; paddling in the shallows; queueing for ice cream and enduring cricket matches which catalysed my lifetime’s loathing for the game. With the breeze blowing away any heat, and protective strategies like shade and sun cream and covering up beyond the 60s British brain, we’d burn before we knew it; the price to pay, it seemed, for a day at the seaside. This picture of me and my dad, drying off after a rare dip in the sea, is on another beach further south, a real beauty spot, unfortunately in the lee of a nuclear power station, and thus possibly radioactive.


Exploring Europe in late adolescence, spreading out a sleeping bag in a secluded part of the beach stretched my money a little further. It took me a while to realise, however, that the perpetual feeling of tight and itchy skin was the result of washing in seawater.

Now I live about as far from the coast as it’s possible to get in Britain which, admittedly, on our small island, isn’t very far. When I want to commune with nature, I tend to prefer to
take to the hills, although I’m still fond of the British coastline. To mark my fiftieth birthday, I was able to combine both, walking over the course of a couple of weeks from the west coast to the east, a celebration of friendship as much as scenery, after which I began writing what became my debut novel, Sugar and Snails. There’s a suggested trip to the beach in that, but it never comes to fruition; nor, despite the title, is there an awful lot of beach in my short story The Beach Where He Found It. But there’s a little more beachiness in my next novel, Underneath, scheduled for publication in May next year.


Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
12 Comments
Carlie Lee link
23/3/2016 06:52:06 pm

Love that photo! How happy you both look - I can imagine whoever took it was smiling, too.

Reply
Annecdotist
24/3/2016 09:32:41 am

Thanks for reading, Carlie, and now you've got me wondering who actually DID take that photo since, back then, my dad and I were the main photographers in the family!

Reply
Irene Waters link
25/3/2016 11:11:00 am

Thanks for joining in again Anne. Neville Shute was one of my favourite authors in my teenage years. You have reminded me I should reread some of his books including On the Beach and my favourite A Town Like Alice.
I too think that photo is great. Although you look like a swimmer, swimming obviously was not the main reason for going to the beach. Pity that man with a camera stopped your reading on the beach but from a sunburn point of view perhaps that was a good thing. It must be an English pursuit travelling to the seaside in Europe. Around Lloret de Mar in Spain is the place of my husband's memories. I'll remember not to wash in sea water.

Reply
Annecdotist
25/3/2016 12:47:02 pm

Thanks, Irene. A Town Like Alice had a big impact on me also in my teenage years and I know I’ve read that one twice at least.
I think we’d definitely been in the sea that day but in this country it generally wasn’t warm enough – although braver souls would manage it. And travelled around that part of Spain in my first trip abroad without parents – we were supposed to be learning Spanish but there wasn’t much chance of that around the resorts.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
26/3/2016 09:52:05 am

Hi Anne, I don't think that cli-fi is for me, but I am looking forward to reading Underneath next year. I agree with Carlie and Irene about the photo. I was surprised that you'd have to worry about sunburn over there so much. It was a way of life here. Sadly now many of us are paying for it. I grew up at the beach and spent a lot of time swimming and, dare I say it, sunbathing. We used to burn until we were as red as beetroots and take turns in peeling large layers of skin from each other's backs. Gross! I'm pleased the younger generations are not only more sensible, but have ready access to sun screen. I remember reading about some of these incidents before. It's nice to be reminded of them. Thanks.

Reply
Annecdotist
26/3/2016 05:20:29 pm

Thanks for sharing, Norah, but yes even we had the pleasure of peeling skin. I think it was that the sun was so rare we got out into it as much as we could, but also use things like cocoa butter to bring along a tan/burning!
My worst experience however was after my first ever experience of snorkelling in Zanzibar. Despite covering up with were quite badly burnt and it didn’t help that we had to sleep at the airport the following night (I was well beyond to sleeping on the beach at that stage of my life) when we got back to Dar es Salaam as there wasn’t a single room (double room) available in the entire town.

Reply
Charli Mills
26/3/2016 08:31:46 pm

Everything that glitters is not gold...not sure if that's a quote or a lyric from a country-western song. In the US we always image the apocalypse as beginning with California dropping off into the ocean after a catastrophic earthquake, so buried in sand is a new twist. It's a more realistic one given the decline in water due to drought.

It's almost fantastical for me to think of living in a place, never far from shore. I wasn't sure if i could find a beach memory and the one I landed upon is more recent and tied to a difficult but worthwhile life transition. I enjoyed your recollections and happy to see you continuing with the memoir prompts.

Reply
Annecdotist
28/3/2016 03:40:52 pm

“All that glisters is not gold” is in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (I’ll admit, I took the time to google it) but could well be a country and western song too.
Yeah a major advantage of living on a small island you can get to the sea quite often, even from where I live. I’m off to see how you dealt with the challenge!

Reply
Lisa Reiter link
30/3/2016 05:19:21 pm

I envy a childhood near the sea. As a 'fen girl' I was a 7 mile bike ride away from a swimming pool (at least it was flat!). Great to see a photo of a young Anne here. I've unfortunately drawn a blank on photos as ours from that era are all on slides and Mum couldn't face going through them to find one!

Reply
Annecdotist
31/3/2016 08:42:27 am

We had slides too but, as my dad liked to develop and print his own, there are a lot of black-and-white copies in the archives. When I was living alone in my early 30s, I decided to “wallpaper” the toilet with photographs. Took ages to do, but looked good until I sold the house and had to get rid of them. This is one of the survivors from that time, although sadly most were lost. But digital has its downside also. I had hundreds of photographs from my coast-to-coast walk saved on an external hard drive which has decided to give up the ghost. Maybe just as well to rely on memories.

Reply
Linda Bowes
28/5/2016 02:49:27 pm

Is it a photo from Allonby? I've tried to download the photo to 'my photos' but it's not happening. Another job for my granddaughter!

Reply
Annecdotist
29/5/2016 02:47:57 pm

Its Seascale. I think you can right click to copy, or press on the image with a touchscreen. (obviously I wouldn't be happy for people I don't know to do so) I'll email you a copy

Reply



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