One jar a year: the shells I keep and the ones I put back
I started collecting shells the way most people do, by filling my pockets, and by the end of the first summer there were three ice cream tubs of them under the stairs that I never looked at. Now I keep a single one-litre jar a year, and three rules decide what goes in. The shell must be empty. It must come from the strandline, not from a pool or off the rock. And it must be something the jar does not already hold plenty of.
Empty is harder to be sure of than it sounds. One October I found a periwinkle shell in a lovely shade of orange, dropped it into my coat pocket, and felt it move on the bus home. A small hermit crab had been inside all along. It went back to the beach the following weekend, in the same pocket, and I hope it forgave me. Since then every snail shell I pick up goes down on wet sand with its opening facing downwards, and I give it a full minute. If it tilts or wanders off, it stays.
On the sandy bay many of the cockles and tellins have a perfectly round hole near the hinge, as neat as anything made with a drill. The holes are the work of necklace shells, snails that plough through the sand and bore into other shellfish to eat them. They also lay their eggs in curved collars of sand glued together with mucus, which lie on the lower beach in summer looking like pieces of perished rubber. For two years I took them for litter. They are not, and they stay where they are.
By the second week of November this year’s jar held forty-seven shells of thirteen kinds: pink tellins still joined at the hinge like open wings, flat periwinkles in yellow and orange, topshells worn down to mother of pearl, slipper limpets stacked three high, a razor shell that has not broken yet, and two cowries. The cowries took three hours of searching along the shingle at the back of the bay, which is about my usual rate.
At the end of December the duplicates go back onto the strandline. Empty snail shells are housing for hermit crabs, and broken shell slowly becomes part of the beach itself, so I would rather keep one good example of each kind than a tub of things I never look at.