Excerpt from "Let's Explore the Seaside"
It was the second day of our holiday and it was time for breakfast.
We sat around a small table on stools that were very wobbly which made it hard to eat breakfast. We had cereal and then we had toast. On the toast we had strawberry jam and lime marmalade. As soon as we opened the jam the wasps would start to fly into the tent. They would buzz around all of us and land on the sticky jam pot. My Father would wave his hands furiously in the air, but it did not help.
My Step-Mother said, ‘Breakfast is over. We are going to the beach.’
When I was younger there was just my Mother, my Father, my sister called Michelle and me. Now my father had remarried, there was now
my Step-Mother and the other five children from her first marriage.
My Step-Mother was never really interested in Michelle and I. She was only interested in her own real children. This meant that there was always a kind of war going on in our family. This lasted for many years until I left home.
When we got to the beach I would say to Michelle, ‘What are you going to do?’ She replied, ‘I am going to swim in the sea.’ I would say, ‘I think I am going to swim in the sea too.’ When the other children heard this they would all laugh out loud, because I wanted to be with my elder sister. So sometimes I would take myself off by myself and look for shells and interesting things on the sand.
Some children had shrimp nets and crab buckets. I would watch them play in the rock pools and run off to their parents to show them what they had found.
Step-Mother then shouts, ‘It’s lunch time.’ She took a big Tupperware container out of a bag which was filled with sandwiches. There were peanut butter sandwiches and ones that were made with spam and tomato ketchup. Some of them also had a paste inside called Sandwich Spread. I did not like these sandwiches.
Mark S. Masters - August 2015
