There was a place called Summerdyne. Situated in Torquay’s Greenway Road, an old Edwardian house carved into around ten apartments, with a life of its own tucked inside the walls. It might still be there now, under another name, its past folded neatly into estate agent listings and fresh coats of paint.
To me, it was never just a building. It was an escape hatch. From 1989 to 1997, we went every year, to different apartments, varying versions of ourselves, but always the same place. Towards the end, when I got older, we split into two apartments with me, my sister, and her friend in one and my parents in another. That felt so grown up at the time as if I had quietly crossed into a another parallel version of my life without anyone announcing it.
Summerdyne itself was comfortable, but basic. It wasn’t glamorous and wasn’t trying to be. There was a tiny launderette the size of a garden shed, fully plumbed, a whiff of detergent omnipresent and faintly humming with the sound of other people’s knickers getting washed. There was also a payphone in the hallway behind a heavy echoey door that made everything feel official and slightly mysterious. Really? It was just the door that led to the owner’s flat.
The back garden was something else though. It was massive, almost endless. It had a badminton court with grass that scratched, picnic benches, swings, and a sandpit I was technically too old for but still secretly loved.
Actually, did it have a sandpit? Maybe I’m misremembering.
There was space to run, lie on the grass, and exist as a child without being watched too closely.
Behind the scenes were the lovely people who ran it all, Jo and Derek. Warm, friendly, always present, they were the kind of hosts who made a place feel safe and familial very naturally.
But this memory isn’t about the building itself, so much as who I was when I was there. In 1989, I arrived at Summerdyne at the end of a school year where I had spent far too much time alone. I’d fallen out with my best friend at the beginning of that year and drifted at the edges of everything for a long time after that. I discovered quickly what it felt like to be the girl nobody quite noticed.
It was the year I started writing. Because if I couldn’t have friends or live the life I wanted, I’d create beloved characters and happy endings.
No one stepped in or rearranged the world to make space for me. Nobody invited me to play with them and it was hard to break into already established groups. And there was the ever present shadow on my life created by a girl who used to be my most trusted friend and then treated me like I was less than nothing. So I created my own worlds where I was loved.
At Summerdyne, I wasn’t that girl. I didn’t have to be ignored or hated. I could, for a summer, be whoever I wanted to be. And I leaned into that feeling like it was the oxygen I was gasping for. I was simply existing without feeling alone or despised and it was so healing.
As the years moved on, people came and went from my social circle. life changed and I evolved. But nothing suddenly transformed me. I was always me. If anything, life became more complicated. By 1995 and 1996, it was heavy. The kind of years that leave emotional tattoos on you. Some would call them scars, but I don’t like that idea.
But every summer, there was Summerdyne, waiting like a reset button for my confidence.
It was the place where I could put my life down for a while and pretend, if I needed to, that things were different. I practiced being someone else until it started to feel possible.
Eventually, it ended. Jo and Derek moved to Alderney. My heart broke when we got their Christmas card in 1997 telling us the news, accompanied by a box of clotted cream, with a Channel Islands postmark as the proof. It was sold, broken into separate apartments, absorbed into something more modern, profitable and impersonal. Around the same time, our lives shifted too. We started going to places that were, on paper, “better.”
By 1998, I think I had started to outgrow Summerdyne anyway. It wasn’t that It had lost its magic. I just saw it differently. It wasn’t just an oasis in the desert anymore. It was also a reminder of why I needed an oasis. I was ready to embrace a new era of life when I didn’t want the memories.
Now, at 45, I think about it differently again. Part of me wants to go back and stand on the grass, just to see what it feels like now. Maybe lose a game of badminton? I’d sit at one of those picnic benches and let the past and present overlap for an hour or two.
But part of me thinks… maybe it belongs exactly where it is?
