So we are fortunate to live so near the Littleferry beach: it's an impressive swathe of sand and usually as deserted of humans as any comparable tropical beach - today we saw just three people walking their dogs - but we do like beaches to have some wildlife along their shores.
Those were very happy days, with the sun always shining.... perhaps.
The vegetation at the back of the beach is dominated by high coconut palms between which are stands of casuarina. In places this becomes impenetrable, the home of iguanas and, further back, all sorts of game including monkeys and Cape buffalo.
The beach is deserted for it is early morning, before six, with the sun not yet up above the distant horizon. The only sign of human existence is the 'ngalawa, that elegant, lateen-rigged canoe that is the poor-man's fishing boat of this coast. There is a chill in the air and there is silence, a deceptive silence because this beach is rarely silent for, far out, there runs a fringing reef across which the great swell of the Indian Ocean breaks in a ceaseless roar: it is just that one is so accustomed to the sound that it becomes unnoticed.
This is the beach of my dreams because I was born at the back of one; I lived at the back of one. I was brought up to play on its sands, to make boats out of it's flotsam, to swim in its waves, and to walk far out across its low-tide pools in search of shells and shoals of tropical fish and corals and sea urchins. This is the beach of my dreams and I accept now that I will likely never see it again.
The hotel only had a handful of rooms as it seemed to make its money from its food, based mostly around the wonderfully fresh fish from the waters it faced. It didn't offer lunch, but we made do with the huge breakfast served late in the morning, which did mean we had to....
As time carries us inexorably on into the depths of a Scottish winter it's good to be able to warm my spirits by thinking back to the days when life was spent on this tropical beach - Nyali just to the north of Mombasa.
This beach is now crowded both with the tourists who stay in the huge, modern, four-pools hotel which has replaced the simple, makuti-thatched building we knew, and with the hawkers and chancers and thieves who prey on them.
We were so, so fortunate; and I'm as fortunate to have the memories to warm me.
Many thanks to Tony C for the first picture
Although it may not look it, this is a picture of a very happy small boy. I know, because it's me, aged perhaps six, and I'm holding my precious inflated inner tube in which I love to sit and paddle myself around just off the beach. In my left hand there's a ball, the idea being that I throw the ball and then paddle like mad to collect it.
I'm at the Swimming Club, which is on the north side of Mombasa's Old Port, the historic harbour into which the great dhows from the Persian Gulf arrive in November and depart in April. There are no dhows so, the picture was taken in the months in between.
The Club looks across the harbour to Mombasa's Old Town, its buildings crowded along the waterfront. To the left is Fort Jesus, the great castle which dominates the harbour. Built by the Portuguese, it changed hands several times in wars with the local Arabs, conflicts which gave Mombasa the name Mvita, the island of war.
I loved the Swimming Club. It had a sandy beach on which to build castles and dams, interesting things. were washed up along the tideline, and there was enough in the water just off the beach to make snorkelling fun. Even getting to the Swimming Club was an adventure, because we were rowed across the harbour from the Old Town in a water taxi, having ridden down to the jetty with Mum on our bikes. That was one of the best things about our Mum - she loved packing a picnic and taking us to the beach. Mum did have her down-sides as well: being a Scot, she was very careful with her money, so, for example, our swimming costumes weren't the most fashionable.
I look at this picture and remember those early years in Mombasa as very happy ones; and then look at the small boy and grieve for the tsunami which will engulf him in a couple of years' time, when he'll be packed off to boarding school in England.
The reef might be a mile out but, living almost on the beach as we did as boys at the Hoey house at Nyali (above), the sound of the ocean breaking across its coral rampart was a constant, distant roar, a reverberation, a sound which was part of the fabric of that beautiful, peaceful place.
This framed photograph is hung in a prominent position in what is currently our 'snug' but which started off as an office. If my memory serves me right, it was once a calendar, I think in our Kilchoan days, and is now rather faded, yet it has survived the various recent moves and efforts to downsize simply because, to me, it represents a memory and a dream and an ideal, a perfect beach in a perfect climate with no other humans around to spoil it.
It's a memory because these were the sort of beaches we enjoyed as children growing up in Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa, long before the invention of mass tourism ruined so many of them. The boy in the photograph is Tony, a good friend from those far-off days, and I think the beach is Whitesands, to the north of Mombasa.
In our various travels, Mrs MW and I have fortunate enough to find and walk similar beaches, ones which haven't been spoilt yet, both in the Caribbean and East Africa - picture is of our daughter Elizabeth at Long Bay on the east coast of Jamaica. I'm so pleased we did seize the windows of opportunity to make those journeys as I think the dream of seeing one again is fading - our age and our increasing senility preclude any further such adventures.
So I am left with the photographs and the memories they help to preserve - and thank God I have them, for when the sun does come out here, and I sit in the back garden in its welcome warmth, it is the memories of those glorious beaches that play through my mind.
It's a bank holiday. The weather is perfect, with warm sunshine and an almost imperceptible onshore breeze. There isn't another soul on the beach so we wander along it, stopping to remark on the....
Breakfast was always late at the little hotel on Long Bay beach, partly because everything runs late in Jamaican time, partly because the hotel's excellent little seafood restaurant worked long into the night. It wouldn't have mattered except we would be woken betimes by a small girl who was hungry but also wanted to be out in the bright clear morning sunshine upon the pristine beach that ran to right and left in front of the hotel. So her mother fed her the snacks we always brought against this eventuality and I would spend a happy if hungry hour or so with her building an elaborate sand castle which, we both knew, would be smoothed back into the beach by the next rising tide.
The top picture was taken at the Mombasa Swimming Club where, because it was within the Old Town harbour, the waves were slight. However, the lower picture was taken a few years later with my brother Richard, right, and I swimming off Nyali beach where, at high tide, the waves could be quite fierce - fierce enough to bowl us over and wash us ignominiously, and sometimes rather painfully, up onto the beach.
I recall a similar occasion when she suddenly shouted at us to come in. She had, she said, seen a shark's fin. Sharks never came inside the fringing reef which separated the lagoon from the open ocean - the waves breaking across it can be seen in the distance. A few minutes later a large turtle surfaced close offshore.
Towards the end of our time in Mombasa the problem was at least partly solved by my father's promotion to general manager of the African Mercantile which brought with it an important bonus, a chauffeur called Gabriel. By that time my father had a Rover 90 - seen here - which was a very smart car but had the same problem as most cars in those days - it was black so absorbed heat. If Gabriel and the car were available, we could then be driven out to a really good beach in (rather warm) style.
