I used to visit Cromer occasionally as a child - my father was from Norwich where his parents still lived, and I think there might have been relatives in Cromer itself. I remember grey skies and a stony beach. I remember Dad eating cockles out of a paper cup, prising gelatinous corpses out of shells with a pin. Was there a pier? If there was, any memory of it has been lost in the mists of time...
We have to drive through the outskirts of Norwich before we can get to Cromer and the only thing I recognise is the name of one of the roads - Unthank Road. What a marvellous name. To unthank. Should be a verb. Asda supermarkets, tower blocks and out-of-town car dealerships are obviously all new since I was last here and it is only once we have left Norwich behind and are driving through a small forest of pines that anything remotely resembles the landscape of my youth. The Satnav takes us off the main signposted route to Cromer for no apparent reason and sends us (we're blindly obedient) down some narrow, deserted country lanes, criss-crossing farmland, turning left and right in seemingly random fashion. We reach the entrance to a Zoo where we get held up at a temporary traffic light before plunging down a hill and reaching, suddenly, unexpectedly, Cromer itself.
It takes a mere minute to orientate ourselves and find the sea. It's simply obvious in which direction it is going to be. We find a deserted car park right on the sea-front, unattended, park and have to go to a nearby Ford garage to pay our four pounds entry fee. The man in the garage seems somewhat surprised to see us. Perhaps the good citizens of Cromer don't normally bother to pay.
Having placed a scrap of a ticket on the dashboard we grab Sniff and head for the sea. It's immediately devastatingly clear that the entire beach has been cordoned off - they are rebuilding the groynes and doing repair work before the summer season begins. Numerous cranes are dotted about the sands (for the beach is both pebbly and sandy) and from up here, on the Upper Promenade, the workers look like wasps in their high-visibility yellow jackets and black trousers. Tractors and lorries buzz back and forth - it is veritable hive of activity; all of which is preventing us from reaching the beach.
In the distance though we can see people walking the length of a pier - so there is one, and it's open. We eagerly head down the Promenade towards its finger of promise.
Before we reach the pier we are distracted by a secondhand bookshop - a rather good secondhand bookshop. Its contents are extremely well organised, its shelves neat and tidy. Daniel buys a pile of books about music (including a biography of David Bowie, may he rest in peace); not because he has suddenly taken an interest in the subject, but because he has started a bookstore at his Arts Centre and he can re-sell them there (only books about the arts are allowed). I buy a pile of Georgette Heyer books - really lurid 70s editions, published by Pan; only a pound each - because I am sick of reading reviews by respectable critics explaining how exceptionally good she is but never daring to read her because they look like terrible tawdry romances. I figure that if I am going to plough ahead and plunge into her torrid world, I should read them in the tawdriest editions possible. And as they say, never judge a book by its cover.
We press onwards to the pier and pass the hotel where Oscar Wilde once stayed (presumably for a dirty weekend with Bosie) pictured here perched high on the West Cliffs:
We are beginning to get cold and are pleased to discover that not only does the pier have a cafe but it has a cafe that welcomes dogs. We head indoors and have a cup of tea. Now it feels like a proper seaside holiday. We're on a pier, we're looking out at a very, very brown sea, we're sheltering from a bitter wind. An oyster-catcher ambles past the window, joining the smokers outside. Sniff eats some treats, Daniel eats a chocolate covered shortbread and I eat a Norfolk shortbread (it seems you simply add lard to a normal shortbread). There's a theatre behind the café at the end of the pier and the programme is on our table. Plenty of cover bands, the odd bunch of drag queens and a trail of awful-sounding and looking comedians. Plus the Vienna Festival Ballet doing Swan Lake to bring the tone up a bit. Come Summer though and it boasts "the only end-of-the-pier show in the whole of Europe: a true live variety show". Perhaps we could train Sniff up a bit to appear in it. At the moment, he's only interested in finding shortbread crumbs to hoover up from the café's floor. Time to go.
For the next hour or so we amble through town. We find three antique shops, none of them particularly good, one particularly dire. There's an impressive deli, a great-looking butchers, an old-fashioned fruit-and-veg shop and a proper bakers, so relocation, if you were contemplating such a thing, wouldn't be impossible. Cromer Parish church is open and we're the only visitors. Many of the original stained glass windows were destroyed by bombing during the Second World War and there are some rather ugly modern replacements but, as many of the windows were replaced with clear glass, the church is surprisingly light and airy.
The bookseller, under questioning, informed us that The Red Lion was good for lunch - just behind the Parish Church - and that dogs were welcome. As our feet were rapidly becoming blocks of ice once more we headed there as the town clock struck one and were soon ordering fishfinger sandwiches (Sniff does love a bit of cod), eaten whilst watching the greyish-brown sea through the large windows, lapping the shore, lapping the shore, and lapping the shore again. A young couple came in with a large be-muzzled Alsatian and sat down rather too close for comfort. The barman offered them a bowl of water for their dog and it drank noisily, sounding much like a herd of elephants having a bath. Most of the water ended up on the floor. I realised that Sniff, although he has his faults, is quite a tidy little drinker...
Replete with fishfinger, we head out into the bitter sea air and finally find a part of the beach that is still, in the depths of winter, open to the public. Our feet hit sand. It feels like an achievement. We can go home, our heads held high. Paddling, a pint of cockles and a haul of dressed Cromer crabs will all have to wait until Summer but Cromer in January certainly has a certain icy charm all its own.
