By Cathy Watts

My love of the seaside goes back to my childhood with all the happy days I remember my family spending with my grandmother who lived on the south coast of England. In fact, I have never lived far from water for any length of time and I am a keen swimmer and canoeist. The last twenty-five years of my life have been spent in Brighton on the south-coast where I can indulge my hobbies to my heart’s content! I have always been fascinated by the coastline: by the treasures thrown up onto the beach such as the mermaids’ purses and hag stones; by all the seaside noises like the seagull cries and the waves scraping over the stones at the water’s edge; by the ever-changing shapes of the coastline as the tides pull in and out; by the feelings of health and optimism as the face of the sea reflects the light from the sky.

Having always wanted to own a beach hut, my dream was realized in 2004 when my son was four and one came up for sale at the end of the road where I live. This gave my family a base on the promenade and opened up a new dimension to the beach and the seaside. We discovered a whole beach-hut community with people from all different walks of life coming together along the promenade. We got to know the lifeguards who were based on the strip of beach outside my hut during the summer holidays, as well as the seafront officers who were always ready to tell us tales about their work. Tales of hot stones left behind on the beach after people had finished their barbeques and which badly burned a small child; tales of the vandals who deliberately damage the huts for fun. And some of the things that happened were just things involving everyday folk, such as children stepping on weaver fish lurking beneath the sand, or the mice who nested in someone’s hut one wintertime or a seagull getting tangled up in some fishing twine and having to be rescued. And then there is always the hand of nature too, causing great planks of wood to wash ashore from a capsized cargo boat in heavy seas for example, or leaving a cluster of starfish stranded on the beach as the tide goes out.

So the stories of the Sandies in the Beach Huts emerged from these real happenings along the coastline and I started to tell them to my young son, Alex. He enjoyed hearing them so much that I decided to write them down. Alex was at the stage when he wanted to move beyond the picture books for younger children and start reading books with more text. But he was not quite ready for really long books such as the Harry Potter series. So I wrote the stories about the sandies to tide him over this phase to some extent, but mainly we had a lot of fun at bedtime reading the tales together. Then my next-door neighbour, who knew I liked beach huts, gave me a newspaper article about the first Festival of Bathing Beauties at Mablethorpe in 2007 and I felt I would just love to be a part of the next one as it seemed to offer my book the perfect home. It took about six months to secure my invitation and I am so excited now at being included. I feel sure that this visit won’t be my last!

Sandies in the Beach Huts is published by Pomegranate Press, illustrated by Emma Ball and will be on sale first during the Festival of Bathing Beauties 2008 at £5.99 directly from the author, Cathy Watts

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