The Belgian Coast

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The window of the apartment sitting room in Koksijde-Bad stretches from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. All you can see from it is the beach, the sea and the sky. Three broad bands of colour: pale ochre, Prussian grey and duck egg blue. Gustave Courbet re-interpreted by Mark Rothko.

Beyond the window is the balcony. We sit out on it every morning eating a breakfast bought earlier from bakers round the corner. My seven-year-old daughter, Maisie swings her legs and gleefully attacks a pain-au-chocolat, which, with a characteristic Belgian aversion to culinary minimalism, comes with an added dollop of crème pattissiere. Below us the Flemish coast comes slowly to life.

On the waters edge a group of horse riders accompanied by a scurrying Jack Russell gallop past the giant bananas and boats-on-poles that serve as orientation points for lost children. The beach here stretches from the mouth of the IJser to the French border in an uninterrupted swatch of white sand. At low tide it is so wide it is tempting to hail a taxi to take you to where you can paddle.

At nine o-clock a green van with a brass bell dangling from a bracket above the passenger door drives along Zeedijk (the esplanade) to the accompaniment of a sonorous clanging. It stops every fifty yards and is assailed by crowds of people proffering saucepans. They are Belgians, they are on holiday, they have come to buy soup.

After the soup van has passed the waiters appear, arranging the tables on the decking terraces that stretch out onto the beach and chalking up the dishes of the day – tomatoes stuffed with grey shrimps, sole meuniere, crème caramel – on blackboards that advertise Trappist beer. Food is important to the Belgians, but on holiday no one much wants to cook. There are restaurants everywhere, some of them like Hostelerie Le Fox in De Panne and Zeebrugge’s Molentje and Maison Vandamme gastronomic landmarks. The traiteurs that line Zeelaan do a roaring trade in Gallia melons stuffed with crabmeat, coquille St Jacques and pomme dauphine. “Boiled whelks – buy five get one free!” say the signs in the fishmongers, the winkles are fresh in that morning. The greengrocers have wooden baskets filled with loose pre-washed mache and rocket; punnets of hairless pink gooseberries sit amongst yellow French beans. In the patisseries the strawberry tarts come with a choice of frangipane or Chantilly cream and the raspberry bavaroises look like the hats of an Ottoman sultan.

At 10 o’clock the lifeguards arrive on the beach from their headquarters under the art deco clock tower. They are clad in red just like in Baywatch, but this being the North Sea not the Pacific Ocean they are red waterproof trousers and anoraks not speedo swimsuits. The lifeguards wander the beach in pairs. Each is armed with a flag and a brass hunting-horn. They toot the horn and wave the flag at anyone who swims too far from the shore, or takes an inflatable whale out to a dangerous depth. The thing that really irritates them though is if anyone has the temerity to wander out onto the stone breakwaters, that stick, spine-like, into the sea, when the tide is coming in. This action produces a fanfare of honking and a frantic semaphoring from all quarters of the beach. If the French Lieutenant’s Woman had lived in Koksijde instead of Lyme Regis her life would have been a good deal noisier and less soulfully romantic.

We watch the gradual assembly of day-trippers until a Second World War DUKW amphibious vehicle, painted in jaunty red-white-and-blue and named Normandie swings in from the sea and trundles up the beach to pick up passengers. We take this as the signal that it is time to go out.

On the pedestrianised esplanade dozens of children whiz up and down on a variety of rented machinery. Go-karts, electric scooters, bicycles and vast 8-seat pedal carriages that all the family can enjoy move back and forth in a merrily unregulated stream. Maisie hires a pedal go-kart called a Turbo 2000 for half a day and we set off south, pausing for holiday sustenance at a frituur. In Belgium candyfloss is known as Barbe a Papa. At the frituur stalls they spin it into a great whirl of pink fluff (Papa may have a bushy beard but he is in touch with his feminine side) that can cover a child from crown to knee in sticky goo removable only with a pan scrub and industrial solvent in the time it takes to say “Those clothes were clean on this morning”.

Despite the best endeavours of the Belgian tourist agencies (there are two, split on linguistic lines like the nation they promote) much of the country’s holiday industry still adopts a relaxed it’s-here-if-you-want-it attitude. Many of the estate agents that rent out the holiday apartments along the coast have web sites in French, Dutch, German and English. The staff, unsurprisingly perhaps in a country that runs hours of British and US television programmes a day with subtitles, speak our language immaculately. They accept credit cards in payment and refund deposits via Swift payments. Everything is set up for international trade, but there is only a limited effort at promotion. Not that much is needed. In summer incoming holidaymakers – from the Belgian interior, Germany, France and Holland mainly - treble the population. The agencies handle hundreds of apartments. The keys are racked up behind the reception desk in twelve-foot rows. It is less like renting a holiday home than checking in to some vast hotel.

Few of the apartment blocks that line the coast in a practically unbroken strip from Ostend to De Panne is architecturally appealing. Concrete is the favoured medium. From the Hull-Zeebrugge ferry they look like a row of greying, uneven teeth. Without them the coastline and the flat Flemish plains beyond would be little more than a feint, smudged line between sea and sky.

At the southern end of De Panne’s Zeedijk there is a statue of the man who spotted the potential of the area as a holiday resort, Leopold, first King of the Belgians. De Panne is where the monarch arrived in his new kingdom in the summer of 1831. He had crossed the Channel from his former-home in England to France and ridden up the coast. Leopold was a Saxe-Coburg, the uncle of Queen Victoria. As a young man he had been handsome and cavalier and had carried on an infamous affair with Hortense, daughter of the Empress Josephine. By the time he arrived in De Panne, however, much of the dash had been knocked out of him and he had become a dull, sententious middle-aged man. Even his mistress, the German actress Caroline Bauer described him as “wearisome beyond endurance”.

Nevertheless he had done much to forge the young nation and he had left his mark on the Flanders shoreline, building one of Europe’s first passenger railways to link Brussels to the coast. His son Leopold II, a man so amoral and dissolute that after his state visit to Germany the Empress Augusta had the rooms he had stayed in exorcised by her chaplain, continued the job, pouring part of the fortune he had accrued from his brutal exploitation of the Congo into transforming Ostend from a fishing port to a resort that for a while rivalled Monte Carlo. On the coastal tram that links De Panne with the glitzy northern resort of Knokke-Heist (often described as “Belgium’s St Tropez” if such a thing can be imagined) you pass the remnants of Leopold II’s grand design, the long arcade of the Galeries Royales that linked the King’s chalet with the Wellington racecourse.

The fishermen’s cottages – pantile roofs, low, white rendered walls, green shutters – that were the coast’s only dwellings until the developers moved in are back in the dunes tucked away from the wind and surrounded by 1930s holiday bungalows, a kind of suburbanized-version of the originals with names - “The Paddock”, “Cosy Cot”, “The Anchorage” – which suggest that as with computing and air-traffic control English is the international language of naff house names.

One of the pleasantest of the fisherman’s dwellings is in Sint Idesbald and once belonged to the painter, Paul Delvaux (a number of artists lived or settled on the Belgian coast. The proto-surrealist Ensor and the gloomy Spillaert, a friend of Edvard Munch, both came from Ostend). Delvaux began as a socio-realist but quickly turned to surrealism. Though not so well known outside Belgium he is so popular amongst his fellow countryman that his paintings adorn everything from shopping bags to biscuit tins. His contemporary Rene Magritte caustically remarked that Delvaux’s success was attributable solely to the amount of naked flesh that adorns his canvases. In the museum cunningly concealed beneath Delvaux’s house it is easy to see what Magritte was getting at. Droves of large-eyed, pale, nude women decorate practically every picture. A look through the cabinet of Delvaux’s possessions reveals a rather touching truth, however. Amongst the mementos are several photos of his wife, a pale, large-eyed lady. The thousands of naked women who populated Delvaux’s dreamscapes are the woman he married.

Next to the Delvaux Museum is a garden café where you can eat pancakes and home-made ice-cream. Afterwards we travel back along the esplanade more slowly. A man selling ice-pops and cold drinks from a tray saunters along the beach, nimbly dodging the kite strings and the foxholes dug by children; tousled blonde beauties in Breton sweaters loiter in the sunshine outside the yacht club, the beach patrol parp and wave at some boys who are diving off a pedalo.

In Koksijde we return the go-kart and read the inscription on the memorial to the French Zouaves who died in the First World War defending the section of the frontline that ran from the fish-dock of Nieupoort-an-Zee south along the river IJzer. You are never far from a battlefield in Belgium. On the coastal tram you pass sections of the Nazi’s Atlantic Wall defence network, north of Ostend is a restored Napoleonic fort, in 1600 on the beach at Nieupoort 12,000 Dutch and English soldiers annihilated a similar number of Spaniards, the Menin Gate is half an hours drive inland.

After dinner we settle down on the balcony again. The sound of Spanish music wafts from Terlinckplein where a formation dance troupe of OAPs is demonstrating the paso doble . A northerly breeze has whipped up and a couple of teenage boys with the power kites are bounding over the blue-and-white windbreaks and skittering across the sand. From the Frituur below comes the smell of chips and waffles. Candles flicker on the tables of the café terraces. By nine the sands are deserted save for a few black-headed gulls and a middle-aged man who appears every evening with a shovel and broom and aggressively fills in all the holes the kids have dug in front of his striped beach hut; the sea is tinged orange by the setting sun. “Can we stay here for ever?” Maisie asks.

Surrealism, which Delvaux explored and the Belgians invented, points out the bizarre that lurks within the mundane. But something else is hidden there too. At Koksijde, Oostduinkerke, De Panne and the other resorts on the South Belgian coast there is nothing to make you gasp in wonder, nothing astounding, or dramatic. There are just grandfathers building sandcastles, and grandmas on electric scooters; mums throwing frisbees and dads with hermit crabs scuttling about on the palms of their hands and many, many smiling children. And although it is certainly worth remembering that there is strangeness in ordinary thing, it is important never to forget that often there is contentment in them too.

Apartments in Koksijde-Bad and the rest of the Belgian Coast can be rented direct via local estate agents. The following agents websites provide photos, prices and availability plus on-line booking.