The Cowrie

By Jane Hylton (my mum)

When I was a child my mother used to say that finding a cowrie shell on the beach was like finding a jewel. When I returned to the holiday shack from the beach my pockets would be laden with treasures – fragments of glass worn and rounded by the movement of the ocean, or bits of seaweed whose colours faded as they dried out – she would examine with genuine delight every fascinating object I had found. But her excitement really grew when I had found a cowrie, a tiny grey one, or a slightly larger one, delicately spotted with white and brown. She told me that you could never find a cowrie if you actually looked for one, and that was what made them so magical. I knew it to be absolutely true. So often I deliberately searched for one without success. As soon as I had forgotten my quest, there it was in my hand, retrieved as if by accident from among the shells dumped by the latest storm.

Today, in my fifties, my mother long dead, I wander on the beach with my friend. I am utterly absorbed by this paradise of sand, shells, seaweed, sea urchins (on this day the flattish ones prevail) tiny, delicate bones, feathers and pieces of driftwood, just as I was when I was a child. My friend is equally transfixed. We both meander, eyes down, with the sound of the sea and the call of the birds as a heavenly accompaniment to our meditative, companionable search for nothing in particular. Every now and then one of us stoops and fossicks through the piles of shells, picks up an object of interest and shows it to the other. We squeeze oozy bits of sponge, are fascinated by the endless forms that spirals can produce, look for sea anemones in rock pools and marvel at dried out sharks’ eggs.

I sit down on the beach in the middle of a mass of all kinds of shells. The tiny red ones have delicate spotted patterns, larger ones have subtle colours that seem to encapsulate the beach itself. Shells shaped like fans hold every colour of the sunset. And there it is, the cowrie, indistinct amongst the others until it is lifted into isolation, examined and tucked into my pocket. I remember my mother and smile.