The bottomless pool

Every year, for two weeks we visited paradise in the form a tiny chalet overlooking Whitesands Bay, a stretch of sand with wild green sea on the Pembrokeshire coast. My dad would walk the two miles each day to fetch bread from the bakers. Sometimes he would let me accompany him and I’d listen to the humming of the wind in the telegraph wires and smell the wild mountain herbs as we crushed them under our feet. We’d meet no-one on the way. Each day I would dig sandcastles on the lonely beach with my spade, cutting channels that quickly filled with the subterranean water, watched my castles dissolve as the tide came in. Next day I would build them again and explore the rock pools with their soft red anemones. But, near the cliffs, there was one frightening feature on the beach. ‘Don’t go near that pool’ my mother would say. ‘It has no bottom and if you fall in you will drown’. At night I would dream of the bottomless pool. It was like a fissure in paradise. My mother has long since died and Whitesands Bay is now crowded in summer. The bottomless pool is no more but merely a pool in shadow from an overhanging rock.