A beach somewhere

When I was a kid, my dad and I were master beachcombers.

Dad always loved the sea and he loved fishing. We lived in the same beachside suburb where he grew up. When he was five and his little brother was three, the pair of them would walk to the jetty alone to fish. This was the 1930s, 30 years before the Beaumont Children disappeared. Little as they were, they didn't drown, they weren't kidnapped and more often than not, they came home with a bucket of tommy ruffs.

Dad and I used to fish for tommies and gar from the same jetty or for carp in the local creek. Sometimes I'd go out in the boat with him on the hunt for whiting, but it was usually just Dad and my brother or one of his fishing buddies, Frank, Dudley or one of the two Alfs. One of my favourite pictures of Dad shows him holding up two huge snapper. His legs are skinny and tanned from the glare off the water and he has a Christmas morning grin and a fag dangling from his bottom lip.

If Dad hadn't gone fishing on a Sunday morning, he'd make omelettes and then we'd grab a bucket and walk to the beach. Occasionally we'd bring home driftwood, but mostly it was shells. I was one of those kids who would collect anything: stamps, badges, stickers, you name it. Shells were always my favourite. Most of the booty we brought home from the beach was garden-variety and easily identifable: cockles, perwinkles, pheasant shells, scallops, abalone, turban shells, mussels, limpets, hammer oysters. There'd be the occasional volute or cowrie, bringing with them a whiff of the tropics.

Some of what we collected, we didn't have names for, so we made up our own. Chinese fingernails, frillies and pinkies were our favourites and I still don't know what they're called. I have a bowl full of the pinkies we found and others that I've picked up since I moved further down the coast. They look like tiny pieces of dawn.

The morning after a rough night was always the best time for shell collecting. Dad referred to a storm as "a big blow", maritime-fashion. Sadly, the expression has been ruined now. We'd poke through the seagrass that had been washed into bales and ridges by the waves, exclaiming over new finds.

Storm pickings were rich, but though the shells were clearly deceased estates, their residents were often still firmly lodged inside. We tried various ways of removing half-rotted shellfish: soaking, scrubbing and using little hooky bits of wire. If Mum hadn't drawn the line at boiling the rank shells in a saucepan, we wold probably have tried that too. "Not on my stove, you won't!" she said with a dangerous look in her eye. Defeated, we decided to leave those shells to the seagulls.

Some mornings we'd walk for miles, rugged against the wind and not talking much. Our eyes were on the sand at our feet rather than the sea. In winter, there would only be a few half-frozen dog-walkers and fluffed-up seagulls for company.

When I walk on the beach now, I think of him. I pick up a shell and carry it in my hand, gradually rubbing the sand from it with my thumb until it's clean. Dad died when I was 17 and I would rather think of him on a beach somewhere than in the cemetery we visited yesterday.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.