Some places stay with you because they were spectacular.
Others stay because, somehow, they became part of the ordinary rhythm of childhood.
For me, the seafood stall on Watts Slope, just in front of Spanish City, belongs firmly in the second category.
It was not grand. It did not need to be.
It was simply there: part of the promenade, part of the sea air, part of the walk home, part of those long summer days when everything seemed to happen between the sound of gulls and the lights of Spanish City.
And at the centre of it all was Flo Symington.
Shellshack, the fourth poem in Spanish City Slickers, is dedicated to Flo, who ran the little seafood stall that became part of the landscape of my childhood.
For me, it is impossible to think about that stretch of Whitley Bay without remembering paper cups of cockles and whelks, vinegar sharp enough to make your nose twitch, tiny forks, salt on your fingers and gulls hovering with the kind of confidence that suggested they had already worked out exactly what you were carrying.
There are certain smells that can undo fifty years in a second.
Vinegar is one of them.
A Small Stall on Watts Slope
The stall sat on Watts Slope, close to Spanish City and the promenade.
To a child, it was one of those places that simply existed.
You did not think about who built it or how long it had been there. You did not stop to consider its importance to the character of the seafront.
You went to the hatch.
You handed over your money.
You got your paper cup.
And, for a few minutes, you owned the North Sea.
That is the image at the heart of Shellshack.
The poem calls the stall a “cockle-shell cathedral” and imagines those little servings of seafood as “paper cups of childhood” — ordinary things elevated by memory into something much larger.
That is what memory does.
It takes something small and practical and, years later, reveals that it had been carrying far more meaning than you realised at the time.
The Sea Keeps Things
Unlike Shoot-Out at Arnie’s Corral or Helter Skelter, this poem is not really about action.
It is about return.
The narrator is older now.
The stall has gone.
The child has gone too, at least in the literal sense.
But the sea remains.
That became the central idea of the poem: perhaps places do not vanish completely. Perhaps they become submerged.
Not gone.
Just below the surface.
Like wrecks beneath clear water.
Like things waiting for the light to fall at the right angle.
A smell.
A song.
A gull calling.
And suddenly the years thin like sea-fret and the past is there again.
That is one of the strangest things about growing older.
You can go years without thinking about a place, and then some tiny sensory detail pulls a thread and the whole world comes back with it.
A Poem That Moves Like the Tide
The flow of Shellshack was inspired by the rhythmic tide of Neil Finn’s beautiful song I Know Different.
I did not want the poem to march forward.
I wanted it to move in and out.
To return.
To circle.
To carry something towards the shore and then quietly draw it back again.
That is why the poem repeatedly moves between the boy and the man, between then and now, between the promenade and the sea.
The tide slides in.
The tide slides out.
Memory does much the same thing.
Some days the past feels distant.
Other days it is standing beside you.
Every Version of Us
One of the central ideas in Shellshack is that perhaps the sea keeps every version of us.
The boy with salt on his hands.
The lad beneath the Waltzer lights.
The man looking back decades later.
Not separate people exactly, but different shells scattered along the shoreline of the same life.
I like that idea.
We spend so much of our lives thinking that we leave our earlier selves behind.
Perhaps we do not.
Perhaps they remain attached to certain places.
A fairground.
A seafood stall.
Return to the place — or sometimes simply think about it deeply enough — and there they are.
Waiting.
Sixpence and a Seagull’s Call
The subtitle of the poem is for sixpence and a seagull’s call.
That phrase captures something important about the world Spanish City Slickers is trying to remember.
It was a world where pleasure could be very small.
A ride.
A game.
A paper cup.
A few coins in your pocket.
You did not need much.
That is not to romanticise the past. Childhood has always had its complications, its boredom, its rainy days and its disappointments.
But there was something wonderful about the scale of things.
A small treat could feel enormous.
A walk along the promenade could become an expedition.
A paper cup of cockles could become, in memory at least, an ocean held between two hands.
The Lights of Spanish City
Spanish City itself sits quietly behind the poem.
It is there in the lights.
In the Waltzer.
In the walk home.
In the sense of a whole seaside world glowing just beyond the darkness.
By the end of Shellshack, the little stall opens again in imagination.
One last paper cup is handed over.
A boy walks home through the lights of Spanish City, carrying an ocean without yet understanding what he is carrying.
That, in many ways, is what Spanish City Slickers is about.
As children, we rarely know which moments will matter.
We do not recognise memory while we are making it.
We simply live.
We run.
We swim.
We ride.
We play.
We eat cockles from a paper cup while gulls circle overhead.
Only much later do we realise that some of those moments never really left us.
They simply went below the surface.
Waiting for memory to catch the light.
Stephen Watson is the co-founder of Shades4Seasons and manages the day to day operations of the store. As a professional copywriter Stephen manages the store's social media marketing and content creation. Stephen has published long-form articles and blogs extensively on LinkedIn on topics ranging from technology to self-improvement and commercial matters. He is also a published author with his collections of poetry "The Milling Street Tales" and "Spanish City Slickers". You can find out more about Shades4Seasons founders here.
