The fervent whistle of the wind is a familiar song as I walk along the promenade, breathing in the sharp salt air, punctuated by the stench of kelp. Even that occasional rank breath gives me a little thrill, reminding me of days long past, jumping over waves in my red gumboots, or flying a kite with my grandpa. The buckets of shells and stones and stinky crab carapaces that Grandma would make me leave on the doorstep with my boots.

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It’s been a long time since those memories were made, and life has taken me several shores away from this little slice of paradise. Yet in idle moments between phone calls and meetings, I still find myself smiling to think of the whitewashed cottage on the hill, its green-painted doorway, and the improbable mass of clematis and honeysuckle that hangs over the lintel, like a curtain of colour and scent.

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That small wonder was the last milestone on the landmark-spotting game that carried my brother and I, restless in the back seats, all the way up the A1. First to see the sea gets a prize, my mum would say. First to see the Angel of the North. First to see the flowers at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

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I remember pushing through the summer-heavy tangles, pausing to cradle delicate blooms in my clumsy hands and breathe in the scent, before shouldering through into the kitchen, exchanging that brittle white perfume for the reek of damp coats and woodsmoke, the comfort of baking bread.

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The kitchen was another world entirely - as if the curtain of flowers was a gateway to fairyland - except instead of dancing fairies, the long, low, slate-tiled room was filled with old women. 

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My grandmother’s kitchen table was home to a constantly moving feast of clucking hens: aunts and neighbours, the vicar’s wife, friends from the village and folks passing through. They would perch along the farmhouse benches and gossip over milky tea. And they would knit: making mittens, mending old jumpers, unravelling unfinished projects, starting new ones, sorting scraps and swapping patterns.

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I don’t think I knew then, as I settled on my favourite seat by the stove and accepted a homebaked biscuit, that this scene was as much a miracle as the flowers over the doorway. To me this was simply what women did. One holding a skein while the other winds a ball. One holding a hem taut while the other darns a hole. “No, no, give it here,” they would say, passing coloured squares back and forth across the table like so much bunting.

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It was only later, much later, that I saw the real worth of that work. When, in the middle of lockdown, conducting my business over so many screens, something in me snapped, and all I could think of was my own unravelling, like a half-finished sweater, with no community to complete me. 

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I became obsessed with the idea of returning. With seeing it one more time: the cottage on the hill with its whitewashed walls and bright green door, the heavy curtain of clematis like something from a dream.

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My feet turn up the street without me asking them, like a compass pointing homeward. I walk the narrow way with a smile, recalling long evenings traipsing from the beach to the cottage: the wet socks, sand in my pants and stinging goosebumps. “First to see the flowers gets a prize”, my mum would say.

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And then I stop short, feeling drained and dizzy and foolish, because nobody’s getting a prize. The whitewashed cottage is around the corner, exactly where I left it. The road curls the same way, even the gulls overhead sing the same toneless song. But the door is brown now. And the flower curtain is gone.

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I gape from the road, my eyes frantically searching the white walls for hooks or holes, traces of where climbing plants once clung. But the paint is fresh, the walls pristine, a tidy potted plant tucked beside the door. No buckets of crab shells and hagstones. No crowd of clucking knitters. Only bricks and mortar, a five-star holiday home.

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I linger in the road a while, trying to reconcile the then with the now, my impulsive pilgrimage with the passage of time. It was only a plant, I tell myself. Only a memory. Only an anchor to something safer.

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Deflated, I turn and walk down the hill to the bus stop. I try to recall the honey-sweet scent of pink and white blossoms, and how they gave way to the warmth of the hearth, the chatter of knitters. I remember sitting under the table, lost in a forest of knobbly knees, collecting discarded scraps of wool and braiding them into bracelets. And the time my grandmother offered me needles and ushered me through my first tangled mess.

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“You can always undo it,” she told me when I grew frustrated. Knit and unknit. Knot and unknot. Unravel things entirely, and use the wool again.

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Something in that sticks with me as I reach the coast road and settle myself, not at the bus stop, but on the low sea wall, looking out over the waxen green grasses and the shell-white sand. After a while I reach into my handbag and bring out a pair of needles. A skein of fragile blossom-white wool. And I begin to knit.