It is 7.42am on a Tuesday morning and my daughter is chasing an iguana.
She is meant to be on her way to school. Her brother is scootering back and forth, endlessly. I am standing holding two rucksacks with very large water bottles and their packed lunches, one shoe (nobody ever knows where the other one is), and my third attempt at a coffee (having been up since 5am to work London hours), thinking, as I did most mornings, that I couldn’t quite decide if this was the best decision we ever made or a spectacular but wonderful mistake. Most days, I landed on both.
The hectic school run continues even by the beach, though these days it’s a negotiation between a visit to the beach and a school uniform – a far harder task to win. My cold coffee remains, my unkempt hair remains, and of course, the one missing shoe remains. What we’ve exchanged is sun block for tights, jackets and a brolly in case it rains – which seems a reach right now, in the middle of the sunny days, but come January, that island warmth was very welcome indeed. I’m pretty sure my comrades back home were envious; I was basking in the pleasure of no cold. I understand now the beauty of good weather – something that never really fazed me growing up in Britain, where the weather is not only part and parcel of your daily conversation, but something you simply get on with.
When we told people we were leaving the city for the coast, most people honestly looked at us with undisguised envy. Moving to an island with small children is sold as either an idyll or an exile, and nobody tells you it’s a bit of both. I had visions of my children growing up salt-haired and sturdy, with the sea as their back garden. What I hadn’t fully reckoned with was what I’d be giving up – or what I’d come to understand about what children need, which turns out to be rather different from what we think they need.
Nobody warns you that when you live by the beach with children, the sand becomes a permanent member of the family. It’s in the car, the bath, the bedsheets, the doorway entrance, shoes that haven’t been to the beach in weeks. But then, nobody needs to warn you about the other thing either, which is that for small children, the sea is just about all they need.
Here is what I’ve learned: kids don’t actually need very much. Certainly not before five or six, and possibly for longer than we’d like to admit. They don’t need soft play centres or enrichment classes or the good museums. They need outdoors in almost any weather, and the beach is the most endlessly renewable outdoors there is. It’s a racetrack for scooters, a construction site, a zoo (crabs, shells, lobsters), and – my favourite discovery – a classroom. I’m British born, raised through the rigorous English schooling system which is still so heavily engrained into me that learning (even at this age) is imperative. Mine have learned to write their letters in the sand, dragging their fingers through it in wobbly capitals. The tide has politely erased their mistakes, and no worksheet has ever offered such forgiving feedback. They drink fresh coconut water daily (that they order from our local coconut shack), suck the juice straight from a mango they picked from a mango tree (in true Mowgli style), ice cream is a daily necessity (no longer just a summer treat, along with my accompanying spicy marg of course), they jump off the pier into the ocean, they pick up Christmas worms and chase lizards.
But I’ll admit, I won’t pretend it was all picture-book idyll. There were days, whole strings of them, when I would wonder what I was supposed to do with them, beyond going to the beach again, when the city would offer an itinerary. But here’s the thing I had to keep relearning: the crisis was almost always mine, not theirs. While I was mentally cataloguing everything we weren’t doing (and I wasn’t doing), they were quite content. Another morning on the sand was not a failure of imagination to them, it was Tuesday afternoon, and Tuesday was brilliant, every day felt like a holiday. Frankly, as a toddler, why not?
And yet the lack of culture gets to me, I can’t deny it – a low hum most of the time, occasionally a proper ache. I miss galleries I can wander into on a whim, children’s theatre, parks (oh, how I miss parks, swings, climbing frames). London oozes all of it, and I am greedy about it when we’re there. I work in travel; I have built a career on the conviction that exposure to the world – its art, its food, its languages, its strangers – is one of the greatest educations going. It would be more than a little amiss of me to preach that for a living and not make sure my own children benefit from it. So we made sure they did. And here’s the thing about an island: what it lacks in galleries it makes up for in arrivals. Tourists, new faces, new languages, a fresh friend to play with most days of the week. We took boats, we took planes, we crossed borders when we could, hopped between islands at the weekend, joined a carnival, learnt somebody else’s traditions.
Which brings me to the thing I’ve learned most of all, and the thing no property listing or relocation guide ever mentions: children are staggeringly adaptable. Anywhere they are, and where their nearest and dearest are, becomes, quite quickly home. Mine can spend a week feral and barefoot, naming tides and dragging home shells (to open the paints at home and create a collage for papa’s office), then be dropped into a capital city and take escalators and explore exhibitions entirely in their stride. On our friendly little island, my daughter grew so used to greeting everyone she met with a fist bump – the lady in the bakery to the builder – that she began offering “huggies” to complete strangers at bus stops. Something I quickly put a stop to, because, well… London. But that instinct – the assumption that everyone she meets is a friend she hasn’t fist-bumped yet – is the beach’s doing, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The coast gave them ease and travel gave them curiosity. And between the two, they’ve developed an openness to other people and other cultures that I’m not sure a single postcode, however well-appointed, could have given them.
So, the honest audit. The pros: freedom, fresh air, letters in the sand, freedom of imagination, and children who treat the world as fundamentally friendly. The cons: sand in everything (not really a con in all honesty, just extra cleaning), culture that requires planning, an ongoing plane ticket, and those long afternoons when I ran out of ideas before they ran out of contentment. I remain conflicted, and I’ve decided that’s fine. I’ve stopped auditing our life against the one we might be living somewhere else. There’s a skill that the children mastered long before I did, being content with being content.
They don’t need everything to be everywhere. They need the outdoors, and people who love them, and the occasional adventure to remind them the world is bigger than the bay. The rest, as it turns out, they carry with them – being adaptable, conversational and sandy, wherever they happen to wash up (currently with armbands on!)
Any Questions or Tips to add?