At Hastings 1949

My father, mother, Richard and I were 'on leave' in England in 1949 and one of the places we visited was Hastings. According to my mother, "Jonathan had very bad septic prickly heat and was not very fit so Dad thought we ought to get away in the hot season and he would follow as soon as possible." We sailed on the Llanstephan Castle from Dar.

While we waited for my father to arrive we stayed with Granny Wilson in the hotel she owned in London, then we stayed in an hotel in Dover, where my cousin Carolyn joined us for a week - this picture was taken on Margate beach.

When my father arrived we moved to Tenterden. The place we stayed, Thirlfield, was not far from the station so perhaps we caught the train to Hastings via Robertsbridge - the line is now closed.

There are only three pictures preserved in the album of the Hastings trip and two show my brother and I in the fashionable small boys' bathing suits of that era. My father didn't like beaches, not even the lovely white-sand, palm-fringed beaches of the East African coast, so he must have been at a very loose end to accompany us to the tar-covered pebbly beach at Hastings.

If the first two pictures were of a typical family on holiday by the seaside, the third is a bit of a mystery. It shows Hastings Castle but the girl isn't anyone I recognise. She may have been one of the other guests at Thirlfield.

Perhaps it was on this holiday that my parents first became acquainted with this part of Sussex as it was to the Hastings area that they chose to retire when they left East Africa in 1961.