On the pier at Worthing, July 27, 2004. Worn concrete, chewing gum, cigarette butts, the detritus of a thousand visitors. Sunny and warm, the wind light from the southeast, a constant squawking as gulls circle and dive down to skim the waves. It is busy, but not too busy. No one in the water and only a few walk the pebble beach.

“She doesn’t go in the sea.”
“Who?”
“Nicky.”

Fragments of passing conversations.

A carnival is in town, the amusements lining the Marine Parade, blocking the view to the sea. You can win Disney prizes, Winnie-The-Pooh and inflatable clown fish. There is a movie theatre, its dome just poking up above the onion-shaped tower peaks of the trampoline ride. Spiderman 2 and Shrek 2 at seven and nine o’clock. There are restaurants, Italian, Mediterranean and Thai. A man walks by me, swinging a battered portable radio in his right hand, a fishing pole in his left. The radio blares, hisses and crackles. Neil Diamond, I think, but I can’t place the song. Because of the carnival, it feels a little seedy, like Coney Island. The sea glistens and sparkles in the midday sun. A dog runs in and out of the waves.

There are two ships in the distance, their progress barely perceptible. I am looking down the full stretch of the beach toward Brighton. The railing cuts the view. Faintly rusting, painted blue, so many layers blurring the details cast in metal —ship, flowers or fish? A family walks to the rail. Sunglasses and mobile phones. Look to the sea. Take a call.

“You want this view,” she says.

A dog runs in and out of the waves.

An old man asks, “Can you feel it?” No reply. “There’s something wrong with you,” he complains, as he continues pushing an empty wheelchair.

A woman in an electric wheelchair pulls up to the rail. Matching blue cardigan and floral dress, her colours match the sea. She rests, head in hands, staring into the distance, thinking of whom? A kid passes with a yellow balloon, and now more blue cardigans.

“I like it at the seaside, don’t you?”
“ If we lived here we’d probably be sick to death of it.”

Sidney Beck’s Wellington Inn is long gone, it’s site now occupied by an Italian restaurant. A Tourist Information Centre blocks the view from that site to the beach. Squeezed between that building and the Casino Mint amusement stand, there is a historical marker identifying the place where the Salvation Army first preached to the assembled fishermen. This is where they went out from, those eleven lost souls who have brought me to this place.

The Brave Eleven: James Newman Sr., along with his sons James and John and his brother Harry, William Hoskins, James and Stephen Edwards, William Wicks, Henry Slaughter, John Belville and Harry Bacon. Worthing. November 25th, 1850. I am here in memory of them.

“Two hours of songs of the good old days”, a voice beckons. Two minutes to showtime at the pavilion that anchors the pier to the foot of South Street. I walk to the rail and look down to the beach, where they would have pushed off to meet their fate in the pale light of an early morning gale. Below me, one man begins to gingerly enter the surf, another sweeps the beach with his metal detector listening for the right signal. The man in the water stops about one hundred feet from shore, lies face down in the water and allows the waves to gently carry him back towards shore. He looks lifeless. The man on the beach keeps listening.

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