Growing up in an aquarium

When you tell people you grew up in an aquarium, generally they have visions of you feeding conger eels, holding starfish and watching tiny baby seahorses take their first curly steps. As it happens, this isn’t too far from the truth.

Though we only lived on site – among the mermaids’ purses and the hermit crabs – for a year after I was born, I spent the majority of my free time there from a very young age, and my dad would often bring fish home with him too. One summer we had a tank of baby blue lobsters, their perfect tiny claws pinching siblings as they grew into themselves. I could watch them for hours.

It was at the Sea Zoo that I learnt most about fish, crustaceans and bivalves – from the conger eels’ migration to the oyster’s pearly exploits, the jellyfish’s lack of brain to the octopus’s famous ability to open jars (though not predict football results). The late great David Bellamy narrated all the information boards about the animals – you could press a backlit red button and his distinctive, booming voice would ring out among the tanks, which were dark, had a particular smell, and were designed to feel like walking through a shipwreck.

When I remember my days at the Sea Zoo, it is always summer in my mind. Principally because I would be there every six-week school holiday, without much adult supervision. As a young child this meant a lot of eating. Midday in the coffee shop I would order a large white buttery bap filled with egg mayonnaise, and the ladies in the shop would save me the broken chocolate fish that they couldn’t sell, tails or heads snapped off, tonged from the glossy white boxes for afters. Later, I would return to the tearoom for a cone of Mr Whippy, served with a candy shrimp studded jauntily in the top. In between I would wander the playground, the ‘aquablasters’ – where you could pay to shoot water guns to cool off in the summer sun (you got 10 seconds free to tempt you in) – and the gift shop, lusting after an enormous plush seal or colour-changing thumb ring. Often I’d have friends in tow, whose parents were also working and took any opportunity for childcare, even if it meant being looked after by lobsters and clownfish.

As I got older, my entrepreneurial parents enlisted me to help alongside my older brothers. My first job was making leaflet packs – putting thousands of brochures about the fish into an envelope with other tourism leaflets from the area. I’d be called in for pot wash on busy days; I can still see the blue plastic trays and clattering stainless steel teapots backing up now. And then I learnt to laminate in the back office (we loved to laminate in the 1990s) – usually jaunty signage printed in Comic Sans.

By the time I was at secondary school, my summer holidays became an opportunity for paid work. Firstly, I was employed in the giftshop, unpacking plastic shark grabbers, of which we sold thousands, or running boxes of homemade rum and raisin fudge through the till. Before long, I had graduated to the ‘Pearls Counter’. This was where a customer could choose an oyster from a bubbling tank that had already been x-rayed to show it was holding a pearl in its midst. I would don gloves and open the oyster with a special knife while a crowd watched on (and usually videoed with a handheld camera). I’d then feel through the innards with my fingers – a squelchy, often smelly job as the oysters were long dead – until the pearl emerged, pure and iridescent under the lights. I’d measure it, identify its colour, write a certificate in a special calligraphy pen, and then set it in jewellery if the customer so desired.

The counter was atop a fish tank that you could walk over – giving the visitor the chance to see plaice and dogfish below their feet – but this meant that the whole process – already fraught for a self-conscious young teenage girl – was perilous. On more than one occasion, I enthusiastically narrated the process to onlookers, while popping the gelatinous sac suddenly with my knife, so that the pearl jumped out of my fingers and straight into the tank below, lost in the sand forever. The potential owners watched on, eyes wide.

This is a short extract from Jess Lea-Wilson's new book The Coastal Almanac, you can pre-order it here. Illustrated by Krisztina Anna Dékány.

Excerpted from The Coastal Almanac by Jess Lea-Wilson.