Ian McMillan’s father, a sailor, often took his family to the coast. “The sea was always the thing for him,” McMillan tells me, speaking in a broad Yorkshire accent. “When he went to the beach, he would go and stand at the edge of the sea and just look out. I guess I’m not a good sailor—I stand further back.”
Before lockdown, McMillan, who has published dozens of poetry collections and hosts BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, had planned to do a poetry gig in every village hall in Britain. After gigs, he intended to visit the nearest seaside resort to research a book about the UK’s beaches. But when Covid curtailed his tour, he had to work from memory instead. The book, My Sand Life, My Pebble Life, published in June, is a delightful account of his visits to UK coasts as a child and as an adult.
“Every day I would, in the pandemic, jump to this little room that I’m in now and sit down and start writing these things,” he tells me. “[The memories] are there, but they appear a long way away. But then by looking at them long enough, they do return.”
He did change some details. “The memory is like a cardigan: serviceable, but dull. So it’s just a matter of embroidery, a couple of things on the pockets. I might give it some bright shiny buttons, too. So the memories are there. But they’re kind of elaborated a bit just to get a laugh sometimes.”
He enjoyed the process of recollection. “It brought me closer to the person I was when all these things happened. So rather than being a 65-year-old bloke, I was this 10-year-old kid who can use his knees suddenly. It was like watching a film in reverse.”
He likes the way a beach never looks the same from one day to the next. “From a writer’s point of view, the beach is always redrafting itself, and always becoming something else.” He likes the fact that oceans link faraway shores: “I can stand on a beach in Cleethorpes, and I’m connected to a beach in Europe.” And he likes how the seaside transforms people. “You see staid-looking fellows who spend a lot of time in meetings batting balls about in beach cricket, because somehow the beach allows you to be the silly clown jester figure… I wish they were like that all the time.”
McMillan grew up in what was then the West Riding, in a school where the arts were encouraged—“these days it’d be called trendy and left wing.” He always wanted to be a poet. “Why not? The teachers encouraged you. You didn’t have to do anything silly like they do these days, like fronted adverbials.” He would like more funding for the arts in the UK. “There should be a new library on every street corner; there should be a new theatre in every village.”
McMillan’s son Andrew is also a poet. “When he started writing poems, we were just so excited by him,” he says. “These days, he’s more famous than me. I realised I was fading into the background, which is great.” Now, when Andrew calls his parents, “My wife will have a chat with him. And then she’ll go, ‘I’ll just pass you onto your dad for some poetry news.’ As though there’s such a thing as poetry news.”
McMillan, who lives in Barnsley, currently writes a column for the Yorkshire Post and is in the process of translating the opera The Barber of Seville into Yorkshire dialect. Despite this, he sees himself as semi-retired. “I said to my wife, ‘I’m thinking of retiring.’ She said: ‘Retiring from what?’ Fair point,” he laughs. “I’ve been lucky.”
