A life in letters: Dam Dempster

During each of our holidays at Seamill Hydro in the 1950s and early 1960s, I spent many hours on the beach which you entered through a little porch at the bottom of the hotel lawns.  I paused there to take off my sandals, sitting on the bench seat with my feet on the cold, sand-scattered concrete, the atmosphere an echoey fragrance of seaweed and ozone and salty wind. Then I’d bound down the steps and across the beach, to begin constructing waterways as the tide receded, damming up the trickles of water it left behind. ‘Don’t you think “Dempster’s Dam” would be better?’ my mum questioned, in a pleasant voice but rather uneasily, the day I completed a particularly impressive sand barrage, and wrote on it with my forefinger in big capitals DAM DEMPSTER. Somehow her suggestion didn’t have the same resonance.