Beach Buttons

At the art & craft group at Eastbourne Blind Society we do a lot of work with donated materials. Looking through tins full of buttons some of us get talking about our fascination with mother-of-pearl buttons. |She still has her mother's buttons, one lady tells me, among them buttons her mother collected on the beach in Pevensey Bay in 1940 when a merchant ship, the Barn Hill, was bombed by the Germans near Eastbourne and the cargo washed ashore. People went to the beach to collect what they could: tins of tomatoes and other food and buttons. The buttons were difficult to spot among the pebbles and shells - many might have been carried by the tides to far-away shores, others still buried in the sand.

Next time I go to the beach I will look for pearl buttons.