A dark, thick, late August afternoon – a storm coming in over the sea. The prom is deserted, just a lone runner and one or two die-hard swimmers hobbling along with damp towels over their shoulders. The sea, a queasy blend of violets, greys, maroons, metallic yellows. The enormous sky, bruised and swollen with rain, growing blacker by the minute. Lightening flashes over towards Walberswick – once, twice. For a second or two, nothing. Then a slow rumble of thunder, followed by a deafening clap. Then one more moment of eerie stillness before the water empties itself out of the sky.
The beach huts are all deserted, shuttered and locked, their sherbet-sweetie assortment of faces staring, unconcerned, out to sea. Shangri-La, Summer's Lease, Happy Days – optimistic names for optimistic days. I take shelter under the wooden porch of one of them, pressing up against its padlocked doors as the storm flashes and crashes and the rain – and soon, astonishingly, hail as well – is bouncing off the concrete of the prom.
And then, sudden as it began, the rain eases and a band of white sunlight races over the heaving black sea and on to the beach, its sand mottled and pocked by the hail. I sit on the damp wooden steps of my hut and watch as a rainbow lights up the sky.
It isn't "my" hut, of course. But for a short time on that stormy Suffolk afternoon, it really does feel like mine. An open, in-use beach hut belongs to someone. But when they're locked, in a storm on a dark and deserted afternoon, then they're up for grabs – anyone's to shelter under or sit on, simply part of the seaside landscape to claim and own and relish.
Still, they're at their best when open and alive with activity, food, drink, swimsuits, towels and people – gatherings of quite a lot of people usually. We drank brandy on the steps outside one several years ago, just after Christmas, under a frozen, star-scattered sky. And we gathered outside a friend's rented one till late one summer's night, laughing and drinking till the air grew damp and dewy and a bunch of his kids and their friends decided to go skinny dipping and a wristwatch was taken off and, inevitably, lost somewhere on the dark shingle.
But that was then. Walking along the prom at Southwold now on a hot summer's day, I watch the people who get to play house in those little painted huts. Brewing tea. Reading books. Drying their feet. Standing in a dripping wet swimsuit on a sandy wooden floor and reaching for a sea-stiffened towel. Sitting in a deckchair and eating slightly gritty sandwiches off perfectly chipped crockery. All of it under their own little wooden roof.
When I was seven, my best friend, Jane, was allowed to make a den in her dad's garden shed. He even removed the lawnmower so it could feel like a proper house. I coveted everything about that space. The site down at the secret, leafy bottom of their garden. The smelly old scrap of carpet that somehow lent serious domestic credibility. The play-dough machine that made "real" spaghetti, and the tin of real biscuits that we ate with serious faces when we pretended we'd just come home from "work" and we were living here in real life and this was our "tea".
Don't beach huts tap straight into that old childhood longing for a pretend house? The ramshackle, Swiss Family Robinsonish space with just a few basic things – chair, kettle, plate, spoon (for who really needs anything else?). And where more romantic to site this Crusoe house than in the place where, having come to the end of all your journeys, you are forced by nature to stop. The edge. The end of the world. Right by the sea.
You aren't allowed to sleep the night in most beach huts, and that seems so unfair. As if there's some kill-joy grownup out there making the rules (we weren't allowed to sleep over in Jane's garden shed, either). But you can still do all the other things that are most fun about playing house. Boil water. Make tea. Wash up (in Jane's shed we were pretty crazy about pretending to wash up).
I once wrote a novel where I realised I was going to have to let my characters have sex in a beach hut. This fictional hut was about as close as I had ever come to owning one, and I couldn't resist seeing what might happen. But I see now that there are all sorts of logistical problems. You'd have to lock the doors so there'd be no light. Would candles be dangerous? (listen to the Health & Safety killjoy). And what if you fell asleep afterwards and – accidentally – spent the night there? Would that be illegal? And if so, who would find out, and what's the penalty anyway?
But in my own beach hut fantasy, there's no sex. Just me, sitting alone on a small striped deckchair with only my thoughts for company, watching that ever-changing mass of water and sky. That's the dream. But in real life, I know I'd soon get bored and lonely. I'd need talk, laughter, cold white wine, fish and chips. Because, in essence – and as all these pictures so vividly show – beach huts are about people and family and sharing. Shared space, shared days, shared summers and shared experiences.
Look at the wonderful 1920s family in their intrepid wooden hut on stilts. None of them have taken off a stitch of clothing – not even, by the look of it, the smallest kids. The suit, the watch chain, the shoes and stockings, the long skirts, the dark wool cardigans. They might just as well be in their own damask parlour at home. Except, most crucially, they're not. Here we all are, they seem to be saying, in our hut, on the sand, on holiday – our souls (if not quite our bodies) at liberty for the day.
But I like to think that by the time they returned home that night, the dad might perhaps at least have taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. The kids – the little girl on the left is Sarah's mum, Joyce – will have been allowed to strip off and tear about and feel the sand between their toes. And the lady on the step in front might just have caught the sun and have a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her bespectacled nose. Remember that day at the hut, they'll say. How hot it was. What a time we all had.
In the 30s picture, the clothes have come off and the bathing suits are on. Large, heavy breasts and endearingly chubby, pale legs. Elbows and knees. The awkwardness of half-undress. But there are limits: the tea is served with saucers. And little Joyce, now eight or nine, in her sand-shoes and carefully buttoned-up cardigan, has the look of a person who is entirely comfortable here – my holiday, my beach hut. It's what I know I was lucky to have as a child – and tried to recreate for my own children – the euphoric anticipation of returning year after year to the same English beach, the same sand, the same unchanging sea.
Of all the pictures, though, my favourite by far is the one of the now grown-up Joyce and her husband Ralph on their loungers in front of the windbreak in 1971. Why? Partly the colours – the Kodachrome reds and blues, the acid green of the grass, the wide, drifting turquoise of the almost cloudless sky. Everything about it shouts: "Holiday!"
But it's also, I think, the story it seems to tell – the way it brings these two complete strangers close. I'm moved by the obvious familiarity and contentment on those two middle-aged faces. The intimate symmetry of the two pairs of knees tilting in towards each other. The dark glasses. The just kicked-off deck shoes. The holiday book that looks as if it's only just been started – a man's book, saved up for holiday, with its captain on the back and glimpse of a white sail on the cover.
I know nothing about these people. But you sense that a whole marriage is here – its hard work and its compromises and its ultimate, hard-won sanctuary. This is as good as it gets, the smiles say. It might have been a hell of a year – because who knows what difficulties and losses and sadnesses these two may have been grappling with through that winter and spring? But right now nothing else matters but the two of us. Right here, right now, on holiday, today.
And maybe in the end that's what the dream of a beach hut most pungently stands for. The possibility – and the implied freedom – of temporariness. The idea that we can escape from our real lives for even the briefest of times – just for a day – and set up camp somewhere else. By the sea. With almost nothing but ourselves and a windbreak and those we love.
If, after everything that life throws at us, we can still do that – can still be genuinely on holiday – then not only is there palpably still love. There's also something just as sustaining – hope. And perhaps a good hot cup of tea.
Julie Myerson's latest novel, The Quickening, is published by Hammer. Buy it for £7.49 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
