Coastal reflections

On March 1910 Katherine Mansfield arrived at the English seaside town of Rottingdean in Sussex where she took a room above the local grocer. While Mansfield craved library books “the sun shone and the sea breezes filled the house. She had not been able to sit on the shore and listen to the sea since she left Day’s Bay in New Zealand.” A century later residents of Rottingdean are petitioning to commemorate this crucial sojourn. The only recorded grocer, Mrs Tickner’s premises, await the 1911 census’s full details, and if the cottage remains elusive, the sheep-filled opening of At the Bay could be as much Rottingdean as the Antipodes, where “the leaping, glittering sea was so bright it made one’s eyes ache to look at it”. Mansfield died in Fontainebleu, France in 1923, aged 34.