Elie, then and now.
The renowned Jack House once wrote a piece for the Evening Times: ‘Elie for the Elite’. (An exaggerated claim, for my family wasn’t, but still, it was a popular perception in the Fifties.) The first nineteen Julys of my life were spent in that East Neuk village; looking back, they all seem to morph into one.
Both my parents were teachers, so we enjoyed the long holidays that were compensation for poor pay. The final school bell had barely rung before we were on the train, bound for the rented house that we knew well. ‘The Fife Coast Express’ took three hours to get there from Queen Street, until Beeching butchered it.
Every July, Elie, and its ‘suburb’ Earlsferry, turned into the west of Scotland. It was a thriving community as my young life evolved, with proper shops: two newsagents (‘Clean Andra’ and Dirty Andra’) Boullet’s bakery and tea room, and two grocers, one owned by the fearsome Miss Allison, by her side Mr Turner, a Richard Hearne lookalike, of whom tales were told. The days followed a pattern. Mornings I would golf, or pull my dad’s caddy-car; afternoons were for the beach, often huddled behind a windbreak or sheltering in a beach hut. Cinema in Earlsferry Town Hall, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, (Tuesdays and Thursdays if wet: no kidding). I grew up there, fell in love there, fell out of love there too, then back in again.
Only six years after my last July in Elie, my very young family and I moved to Gullane, where I’ve lived ever since. Scarcely a day goes by without my looking across the Firth, at Kincraig Point, where lurks MacDuff’s Cave, which gave Earlsferry its name, with its hazardous Chain Walk, and at the tiny line of the town to its right.
My cousin Annie and her husband Graeme live there now, in retirement; I can see their house with binoculars. I should visit them but something holds me back. Probably it’s all the ghosts: Miss Allison and her (as he was) ever-silent Mr Turner, Janet Gowans and Minnie Sutherland, our landladies, John Elrick, who owned the Nineteenth Hole, my friend Kenny Crawford, but most of all, the town itself. It’s a dead place now, killed by prosperity, as most of the houses became second homes.
Ironic, is it not? Old Jack House was right after all.
Quintin Jardine's blog 
As someone from East Fife I always wondered where your obvious knowledge of this area came from, including the East Neuk ans St Andrews. Now I know. I love the chain walk too, do it frequently when the tide is right.
I’m well pleased to hear that it’s still there. I’d feared that the health and safety police might have closed it.