Knock knock.. Who's there?.. Mandy.. Mandy who?

Man de life-boats, we're sinking.

Ba-boom, tish!


I managed to talk with Gran a bit without interruption today, and asked her about how she was "shipwrecked", as she had announced it proudly after we were discussing the unexpected and rather disgusting adventure of the day: moving dead sheep. (I'm not going to explain about that).

Gran was about 17 and she was on holiday with her family. This must have been the early 1930s. Every year they would have a week or two at the seaside, at Bridlington in East Yorkshire. She was the youngest, the rest of the group were elderly members of the family. (I assume her brother had left home by then. He was a bit older). So to keep her from boredom, her father took her out for boat-trips, which the older ladies didn't fancy.

One day, shortly after the boat had set out, she says, they noticed something was amiss - their feet were getting wet and the deck was covered in water!

She started to wonder if she could manage to swim to Flamborough, as the crew signalled for help.

Modern Bridlington

Of course, another boat came out and they had to leap across to be taken to safety. Apparently while moored overnight, the tide had dropped the boat onto a sandbar, and the keel had pushed up slightly through the wooden hull causing the leak. This went unnoticed until the boat started to sink while taking its holiday-makers across the bay the next day.

She spent most of the rest of the holiday ashore, not because she was particularly frightened by this, it had all been a bit of an adventure to her (while her father wasn't so keen, since he wasn't as sprightly as he had once been) but because she had access to a horse to ride at a relative's farm, a mare called Lady.


She talked a little about Granddad as well: she always reminds me, as we drive "Oh Granddad used to say if you see a corner marked in Cornwall, you may know it is a corner. "