We first went to Aberystwyth when I was 13, at the height of my parents’ hippydom. We had no TV, we lived on huge pans of lentil soup and I ran barefoot across fields so much that the skin on my soles was like cork-tiling.
We spent our summers in a caravan with no toilet, in a field outside Pontrhydifendigaid, near Tregaron: eight kids, two parents and three huge dogs. In my memory, when you walked towards the caravan, the faces and legs of all the humans and animals were pressed up against the glass of the window, like a terrine. That caravan was very full. When my parents had sex, the ’van would rock like a fairground ride and all the kids would sit in the front room quietly singing California Girls by the Beach Boys — to block out the sounds — until it was over. Our harmonies were terrible. We were not the Wilsons.
But we did not spend much time in that caravan. Later we had a Volkswagen camper van — the greatest vehicle ever created; a cheery cupboard on wheels. When my parents had finished noisily conjoining, they would take us on postcoital journeys across West Wales: up to Porthmadog, down to St Davids — right round the yawning pig-jaw of Cardigan Bay.
Wide white estuaries, book-stack fishing villages and bleak, wet-slate hamlets where it always lashed rain against the solitary phonebox.
I don’t know why it took us four months finally to go to the nearest biggest town, Aberystwyth, but when we did, something in my heart twanged. It wasn’t like falling in love. I just felt ... not unhappy any more.
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The quiet litany of pubescent frets that I counted, daily, like rosary beads — I was fat, I was lonely, I knew too much about my parents’ sex life, I didn’t have any shoes and I wanted, more than anything, to be best friends with the Duchess of York — all stilled the first time that our campervan drove down Great Darkgate Street and turned left on to the seafront.
There was something so perfect about Aber that it halted my lifelong internal monologue. I needed silence to take the place in fully. It had a Gothic university like a castle, castle ruins like a smashed cake, a clifftop Victorian theme park that appeared to have been commissioned by a pissed H. G. Wells (a funicular railway! A camera obscura! A golf course with giant golf balls!) and then — slicing the town in half like a fabulous blindness — the cold, hard, glitter-glue of the sea. Apparently, dolphins chased by the rock pools at dawn.
My face pressed against the window, wetting it with breath, I wanted to concentrate on this town. And then eat it, whole, like a crisp sandwich, but even better.
“This place is s****ing brilliant!” I chirped from the back of the van.
“Don’t swear in front of the f***ing kids,” my dad replied.
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Twenty-three years later and I’m back with my husband and my kids — to the only place that makes me happy and quiet. I came here with Pete when we were first in love, then again with each baby. And now we come every year, at the end of August; migratory creatures that can be followed on a map. We take the same apartment on the seafront, go to the same restaurants, do the same things, have the same days. I think even the conversations are the same: “No beach has better pebbles!” “No castle has better views!” “No freak shops have a better array of skull-shaped bongs, dude!”
The first day is Arrival — falling from the car, dehydrated and shrunken-legged, after a journey that is always an hour longer than you remember. Aber’s magic is that, 90 miles from the nearest motorway,it is near to, and on the way to, nothing except the dolphins in the bay.
You come to Aber only if you’re going to stay in Aber. A night at least. A week usually ... Or the rest of your life if you’re one of the hippies who first pitched up here in the 1960s, or one of the 8,000 students a year who come here for their degrees, then don’t leave. We throw everything into the apartment, then walk along the seafront. The sea! The sea! Sailor blue! Or else with bad weather, as hard, thrilling and unstoppable as a sword — to the Olive Branch, on the corner of Pier Street. It’s a comfortable, higgledy, pine-and-spider-plants joint and, if we’re lucky, the table by the window will be free. We’ll eat good Greek food — my husband is Greek, so he’s picky about these things — while staring across the bay to the distant shadows of Anglesey and Snowdonia. Because it’s the first day of the holidays, I will have had at least two glasses of wine by the time we finish and go down to the beach for the first time.
Pete and I lean against each other as the kids fall into the waves for the first time, and then the second, before we wring out their shorts and spread them on the beach to dry.
It’s a fine pebble-and-shale beach — crunchy, not clacking — and the currents bring a junk-shop variety to the stones on the tide line. Quartz, slate, igneous Ordovician, meta-limestone from the Lleyn, cider-bottle glass smoothed to emerald. We fill our pockets with the most interesting ones; the ones shaped like letters, or animals or, once, a Volkswagen caravanette, just like the one we used to have. You can crab, happily, for hours off the boardwalk; legs hanging into the sea. In summer the boardwalk is filled with coachloads of Orthodox Jews — hats and curls buffeted by the sea breeze. It seems right that they’d come here — Barmouth is too normal, Tenby too twee. Aber feels as practical and time-suspended as they are. It’s far too windy for urban spores of anti-Semitism to take a hold here.
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The sea turns silky and electric-green as the sun goes down — tide rising by the minute, sucking at your knees until you leave the bay and walk home. Safe, looking out from the apartment window, the bay explodes into sunset — fire, fire, pink nuclear fury, and then the utter insanity of Welsh starlight, mirrored by the trawler lights, heading for Ireland.
The next day is a proper beach day and we head 16 miles up the coast, to Ynyslas. There’s a picnic in the boot from Ultracomida, on Pier Street — a jewel-like Spanish restaurant-cum-deli with breads, cheeses, olive oils and pastries — and the drive takes you high enough to see the lion-back Cambrian Mountains, which chase you all the way to the end of Dyfed.
Ynyslas is a National Nature Reserve consisting of nothing but sky, sandpools and dunes. Over a morning you follow the tide out, past endless, new, creature-filled sandpools, until you reach a newly revealed sandbar, miles out to sea.
The afternoon is then spent in a slow, contemplative retreat back to the mainland — racing across the sand as the tide comes back in, throwing together doomed sandcastles and writing our names — MUMMY, DADDY, DORA, EAVIE — in metre-high letters on the beach, in the way that, two decades ago, my siblings and I wrote CAIT, CAZ, EDDIE, WEENA, PRINNIE, GEZMO, JIMMY, JOFISH, in the same, not-same sand.
The third day it will rain — Cluedo — and the fourth day rain, probably, too: the Ceredigion Museum, on Terrace Road, is Aberystwyth’s old theatre, now filled with curious agricultural tools, archaeological finds, stuffed animals, maritime oddities and a dinky café, all in a Womble-ish jumble. Then we might go to Wasabi — Aberyswyth’s sushi restaurant, on Eastgate — before home, and the concluding round of Cluedo.
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Day five is probably my favourite: full immersion in Aber. A half-hour walk takes you to the top of Constitution Hill, and the Luna Park — the benevolently ghostly Victorian amusements on top of Aber’s outcast cliff. A candlelit, rickety shrine to the Virgin Mary, halfway up the path, is the point where you stop to eat crisps. At the top it’s tea and Welsh cakes.
Then the funicular railway lands you down in the centre of town again, and lunch at the Treehouse — another of Aber’s jumbled, pitch-pine joints, this time selling soul-cheering local wholefood and chilli hot chocolate. You can spend hours here, on a rainy day, as the windows mist up; the smell of fenugreek, jasmine tea and goat’s cheese making the room pleasingly dreamy as you do the crossword, or stare out of the window at the million greys of wet, Welsh slate rooftops.
And then, when the weather breaks, the castle: a green hill overlooking the sea, with the rib bones of a 14th-century castle poking through. The view is the very best, the one I bone-ache for in London: Cardigan Bay from end to end; the full length of Wales visible in one long sweep.
The first time that I saw it — aged 13, standing here in a wet crocheted poncho, holding my squalling two-year-old brother — I felt insane wild jealousy towards the Prince of Wales.
“I can’t believe he’s the Prince of all this!” I shouted into the wind.
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“I would kill for this!”
And then I remembered that, of course, in a roundabout way, he had.
There’s a quiet, stubborn, time-biding, self-contained Welshness to Aberystwyth that makes the idea of it being “ruled over” laughable. This place simply disbelieves that it belongs to anyone but itself.
In the playground, in the dip next to the castle — sheltered, and lavish with white clouds of hydrangea — the slate gravestones from a demolished church have been laid, like purple flagstones, around the perimeter. So many are in Welsh — the stories of farmers and captains and politicians and priests who would have had no idea of England’s existence as they lived, and died, here — having travelled no farther than the mountains behind us and the sea in front.
As the wind blows across again, and the grass sings acid, rain-drowned green, and the bay looks like a billion smashed fish scales stretching for ever, who could ever imagine England, east of here: flat, dusty, half-coloured, quiet, and so, so distant?
In the car, on the way home, I cry — like every time since 1988.
Where to stay
Gwyn Hafan is a light and airy contemporary- style apartment in a converted Victorian building. It overlooks Aberystwyth’s Blue Flag South Beach and Cardigan Bay to the front, and the harbour, marina and town to the rear. The apartment is five minutes’ walk from the centre and sleeps three.
Details One week at Gwyn Hafan (01970 611379, gwynhafan.co.uk) starts from £595.
The apartment at 46 Brynglas Road has three double bedrooms and is close to Aberystwyth Arts Centre and the university. Decorated in a modern style, it has a sun terrace and dining area with views over the town.
Details One week starts from £500 (01970 615452, 46brynglas.co.uk) Gwesty Cymru is a terraced house on the seafront that has been beautifully renovated using Welsh architects, craftsmen and artists. It has eight light, modern rooms with handmade oak furniture and classy bathrooms. Downstairs is an excellent restaurant — in warm weather you can eat outside on the terrace overlooking the sea.
Details B&B doubles start at £87. Three-course meals cost about £30 (01970 612252, gwestycymru.com).
More information visitwales.co.uk