Felix was getting proprietorial about his sandcastle.
It was a grand affair. Not because it was intricate or beautiful; it had no drawbridge, no towers, no subtle crenellations. There was not even a flag to mark it. Its grandeur lay in its very bulk: a huge mass of sand surrounded by a moat to make a minnow quiver.
Felix would love to claim it as his own, but someone else had built it and left it there, torn away by the cruel necessity of lunchtime, with no picnic to come to their aid. After a traditional French lunch of moules and frites in a French cafe inhabited by Real French People, Felix was in the mood to annex a fortification of magnitude, and found it waiting for him on the silver sands of Wissant beach.
He has similar bold territorial aspirations to our absent friend, Macaulay the dog. When our four-legged hairy friend makes a conquest of land, however tiny and insignificant, he defends it heartily to his last percussive bark. ‘Here’ and ‘There’ become warring empires, and he is Here.
If you happen to be there, you are in his barking line and must expect severe admonishment.
Felix is eight, and begins to realise that the lands of Here and There are too bald a set of divisions. He must, he reasons, dress up his territorial disputes with a little more sophistication.
So today he drew a line round his castle, a circumference a meter from the moat, and declared it his land.
And then, sporting a cheeky grin to mask warlike tendencies, he drew in everyone else’s land. We all had a circle drawn carefully around us. Our circles were far from equitable: Felix thought it a blast to give us scant room for our countries. But each had a space all their own.
And now came the sting in the scorpion’s tale. What is the point of a country if one cannot annex other countries and make them one’s own? Felix began, with charm and determination, to claim other countries.
Each of us had our own tactics for fending him off. I put my foot down and said no: Phil came to share the coat I was sitting on.
But Maddie thought of an entirely original way to save her country from her marauding little brother.
She scooped up a great handful of Her Country, a fistful of sand which was her territory, and she ran away.
This delighted Felix. There is nothing so sweet as rampaging after one’s elder sister and Her Country. Up and down that vast beach ran two tiny stick figures, the taller one first with fists grasping the treasure and the smaller one behind, ecstatically brandishing his latest version of a Pointed Stick, a nice utilitarian spade.
Eventually, Maddie took steps to preserve Her Country for a little longer. She requisitioned the bucket, put Her Country inside, and arranged to take it back the 30 miles under the sea to our holiday home on the Kent Coast.
As they played and we watched I became aware of another piece of proprietorial power-play, up on the dunes behind the beach.
There on the hill, lodged firmly in the perfect sand of the French coast, was a great black hulk of a building. It was black as night and vast in scale.
What’s that? I asked Phil. And he said, oh, I think it’s a Blockhaus.
A German bunker from the war. The word had me in its thrall immediately. This had bulk and power with no beauty or subtlety, but it did have a lowering presence.
I left the play on the beach to scale the dunes and take a closer look, and discovered quickly that the great expanse of beach plays tricks on our sense of scale.
As I reached the top of the dune to look at the blockhouse I gasped: it was far bigger and more terrifying than I had suspected from the safe distance of the beach. It was intimidating beyond words.
The Germans, it seems, were certain that, when the British made their play to reclaim the territory which had been swallowed up by the Third Reich, they would come this way.
About 200 miles of silver sands were similarly fortified. The fearsome territorial markers must have struck terror into the hearts of the first soldiers to make their way back onto French land. Fitted with a naval gun capable of firing at landing craft as they came ashore, as well as smaller machine guns, it is enough to make one take one’s courage, put it in a bucket, and run away home.
Territory begins, with little boys, as a game: but time has shown it does not always stay that way.
And it is this strip of sea, La Manche, a thin grey neck between the great and the stubborn, that has seen some of the most desperate territorial battles in history.
Some of that great fallen power’s sandcastles remain, hunched among the dunes, for me to find, one Tuesday afternoon in August, some 67 years later.
I shuddered, turned my back, and stalked back down towards the play below.
Kate Shrewsday 
Quite remarkably tthought=provoking. The propensity is ingrained into all of us?
Erk. I usually leave the answers to you lot. But I do find the propensity my alpha-male son has to annexe his own territory, using fair means and occasionally foul,resonates with other situations I see around me. The bunker just hit me between the eyes today..(figuratively, of course :-D)
This is a great evolution (of sorts) to follow. The connection between something so innocent and something so menacing and historically weighted is the kind I try (and often fail) to notice.
Sitting on the beach these things come to find you, Jessica 😀
A beautiful and powerful post, Kate.
There are similar battlements along our shorelines ~ up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Most built by “us” to fend off “them.”
Us vs. Them . . . leaves little room for “We”, oui?
Oui, certainement, Nancy 😀 Our darkest times have come when “we’ become insignificant. Except that while some great power might be bringing darkness, somewhere there are always pockets of the brightest light.
if only it were as easy as that, scoop up one’s country and run away to protect it
installations of war are selfom things of beauty, are they?
They are not, Sidey: although this had the same style that a lot of the paraphernalia of the Third Reich had: a kind of modernist intimidatory language with a stark black minimalism to which the eye is drawn.
We can certainly learn a lot by watching our children play. Sometimes it’s very frightening.
It can be, Selena: thanks for coming over and commenting! Psychologists have spent a lot of time, haven’t they, analysing play and its relationship to later life. Lord Of The Flies, by William Golding, takes the whole thing to its nth degree, doesn’t it? But I think children are playing out scenarios and behaviour which, hopefully, changes and moderates over the years. Now you have me wondering what some of the darkest figures of our past were like as children….
How chilling that must have been to find. I wonder how many go by, at the distance you were originally at, and have no idea what stands there.
It is amazing, isn’t it, those territorial tendencies that are ingrained in us in childhood? This was a very thought provoking post. Wonderful, Kate.
Thanks Penny. Children are endlessly fascinating. I love to watch them. Think of what Kezzie has stored up for you in years to come….
At least sand castles have some life expectancy because the ones in the sky of clouds last just a minute or two at best.
They do… you remind me of that satirist William Heath and his picture with castles in the air.
A very enjoyable read, that bunker sure does loom 😦
It scares the living daylights out of you when you get up close, Cindy…
A thought-provoking post, Kate.
I couldn’t help thinking that nature would take care of all our pretensions in the end – where are the great empires now?
I love the way Maddie thinks.
She has a lovely turn of thought, Tilly 🙂 You are right: empires rise and fall. But it’s the bad stuff that happens in a life when it’s happening: each human has 70 years, and it is a sad thing if they are marred or forshortened by terror.
What a great analogy Kate between the innocent play of a boy and the menacing territorial battles of man.
Thanks Rosemary …. it hit me between the eyes, so to speak, with it all going on around me.
I liked the flow of this one Kate. From innoncent joy to sinister intent, then your surprise and indignation followed by: “I . . . turned my back, and stalked back down towards the play below.”
Thanks:-) This one wrote itself…
This post reminded me so much of Peter Gabriel’s song ‘Games Without Frontiers’
“If looks could kill they probably will
In games without frontiers-war without tears”
Excellent call, BB 🙂 Love that song.
I like the balance in this one, Kate. The light and the dark, the new and the old, yesterday and today. Very thought provoking indeed.
Thanks, Tom. It was quite a lesson as I sat there on the beach 🙂