The two children were sitting out on the sea front away from their caravan to eat breakfast. There they were on the fringe of the site close by the camp shop, watching high tide on a fine, clear morning just along the coast from Minehead.
They had two huge pieces of toast and jam each and it was lovely for them just to feel independent and, better still, to be away from London. One was a little, fair-haired girl; at her side sat her diminutive brother. His hair was also very fair, but, unlike his sister, he had not bothered putting a brush through it that morning.
Joyce saw them as they sat on the wall, heels kicking against the brick. She saw them from a good distance as they approached when she was still some way down the promenade. She was, as usual, walking the straight mile from her home in the nearby village. Joyce was well into her fifties, a little stooped, a kind-spirited woman who had seen years and years of campers in the time she had kept the shop on the site.
As she approached, she saw, as well as the children, someone else, another woman, a woman older than herself, who had stopped to talk to these two young visitors as they were enjoying their breakfast so independently.
What was all this? The old woman was not a camper; Joyce sensed it. She hoped that these kids had been instructed never to talk to strangers. In view of what she had seen, Joyce quickened her step. But there was no danger, as she drew closer she could soon see that. The woman had finished talking to the children and was now approaching Joyce herself.
There was no danger. No cause for concern. The old woman approaching was a bent, shabby figure with a tatty old shopping bag. The only surprise for Joyce was that she had not recognised who it was sooner.
"You're up early, Rosa," she said as they drew level.
"Nice day," replied Rosa with her mouth full. She walked with a shuffle brought on by a worsening spinal problem. She was an unfortunate soul, the product of a deprived childhood, a brutal and negligent husband and a personal handicap. But Rosa was a harmless spirit.
"What's that you're eating, love?"
"Toast," Rosa answered.
"Don't you better than to scrounge food off children?"
"Oh, they said it were O.K.," but Rosa looked contrite.
"Well, you mustn't do it, love. You do understand me, don't you?"
The conversation was over. Rosa shuffled off to her caravan where she had lived alone for years and Joyce walked the rest of the way to the camp-site entrance. She had already thought up a friendly greeting for the two children, but, by the time she reached the gate, the youngsters had gone.
I remember being in the camp shop one morning during our visit to the West Country. In front of me in the queue was a man with two young children. The little boy ahead of him left the line briefly to get something he had forgotten from a shelf nearby. The man let him back in.
"Go on," he said in an accent born in South London, "you was before us."
While we were waiting, the man had a word with his own children. There was a little girl with shoulder-length fair hair immaculately turned out in her prettiest summer frock and canvas shoes. Her tiny brother with a runny nose and a shock of spiked fair hair, stood at her side. There was something endearing about him in his little shorts and T-shirt - something to like in both of them.
"What's up wiv you?" said the father to his daughter.
"I'm hungry," she said plaintively.
He waved the morning paper he was going to pay for airily in her direction.
"You should've 'ad anuvver piece o'toast," he said.
The little boy joined in. His voice was also plaintive.
"We only got one!"
When it came to their turn, the lady at the counter surprised the man by offering each of his children a piece of fudge.
"After all, it is their last day," she said. She told him nothing of how they had given Rosa some of their food.
The children were delighted. As they left the shop, the little girl couldn't resist telling her father in a stage whisper, "She don't know we're stayin' anuvver week!"