by Tim Moore
Lights twinkled fetchingly along and across the harbour, and by narrowing my eyes slightly I managed to blur out the superstore car parks that the brighter ones shone down upon. There was a lively, fresh bite to the wind, and that stirring sense of quest and adventure that always hangs in the air by a large, dark sea. Somehow it seemed larger and darker on this side of the country: I had a palpable feeling that here stood a gateway to grander, more epic voyages – ocean voyages – than those suggested at previous docksides I’d bestridden. The New York Times reporter had sailed into Barrow aboard the town’s weekly transatlantic steamer service. At Great Yarmouth, or Hull, or Methil, a salty old pipe-puffing cove might fix his flinty gaze at the grey horizon and murmur, ‘Out there lies a land that some call Belgium.’
The gale died away, replaced by a thin drizzle that hung in fuzzy orange halos around the streetlamps. I quickened my step across the quayside retail compounds, mixing regret and relief for all the stevedores and ironworkers who had once earnt their grubby crust here. But Barrow is still doing something it’s always done, and it’s doing it in the enormous beige shoebox – the tallest building in Cumbria, no less – that now reared up behind the Tesco Extra and across a stretch of black water. Over 120 years since the world’s first torpedo-firing submarine rolled down a Barrow slipway, almost three thousand locals clock in at the BAE submarine yard, producing nuclear-powered jobbies for the Royal Navy. If I was going to see another Maestro it would be here: as a town with three thousand welders and easy access to rust-resistant submarine paint, Barrow is renowned as a Shangri-La for shitheaps.
There was certainly a Life on Mars timewarp feel to the balance of the evening, though no Craig-alike asserted his boxy features amongst all the eerily preserved Capris and Cortinas. I tramped down street after wet and empty street of cramped little Victorian terraces and – once it became plain there was nothing else to do of a night – in and out of a succession of timeless and exclusively male pubs. I’d recently read that the average British man spends over £65,000 and an entire year of his life down the pub. This man lives in Barrow.
It’s a long time since I’d heard anyone order a pint of black and tan, or hum along to ‘Forever in Blue Jeans’. My world was suddenly full of tubby blokes in under-sized knitwear, sipping brown froth, reading the sports pages of crumpled tabloids, stooping to release a clatter of pool balls with two fifties and a ratchety yank. And, as I noted after a while, doing it all in silence. There were nods, raised eyebrows and the odd phlegmy chuckle: every one of the principal communicative tools of restrained male companionship, but no words beyond those required to procure a fresh draught of ale or conduct a game of eight-ball pool (to wit: ‘spots’, ‘stripes’, ‘two shots’).
Some website recently declared Barrow ‘the most working-class town in Britain’, on the grounds that it was home to more chip shops, bookies, working men’s clubs and trade union offices per capita than any other. However fatuous all that might sound, Barrow was plainly a town clinging tenaciously to its roots. I could just tell by looking at my hefty, oily-fingered fellow drinkers that they didn’t work in retail security or customer care or anything else that might have been on offer at the Job Centre Plus in Middlesbrough – these were men who made stuff in factories, even if it was Andrex. As a British industrial town Barrow must have endured its fair share of economic kickings, but somehow the bottom had never fallen out of the place. In fact, the population has barely changed in the past hundred years, stuck at seventy thousand. Perhaps it was all down to the arse-end-of-beyond factor: the grass might well be greener, but when the fence is 70 miles wide who’s going to cross it and find out?
ANYONE SEEN ON CAMERA DOING DAMAGE TO THIS HAND DRYER WILL BE BARRED. THE MANAGEMENT DO NOT CONDONE ILLEGAL DRUGS IN ANY FORM. ALL INCIDENTS WILL BE ENTERED IN OUR DRUGS REGISTER. Reading these and many similar notices in a succession of silent public houses, I began to see a civic trend developing. Was this how people communicated up here? Perhaps every Barrovian carried about a bundle of printed cards, to be displayed as appropriate in lieu of conversation: SEE YOU MONDAY, THEN, A CHOCOLATE DIGESTIVE, IF YOU’VE GOT ONE, WE’LL GET THAT PAEDO WHEN HE COMES BACK FROM THE BOGS.
I had a pint in a low-ceilinged Sixties blockhouse, where an old man alone at the next table drank three double whiskies in half an hour, then fell asleep, chin on chest. I had another in a bijou shrine to Manchester United, shared with the young David Beckham, seven Roy Keanes and the heady scent of marinading urinal cakes. My third and last was slowly sunk at a sepulchral old dockers’ pub just back from the waterfront. I was draining it when an enormous young man walked in out of the rain, sat down at the bar and immediately let forth the most protracted, buttock-rippling guff it has ever been my misfortune to endure. ‘Two-twenty for your Worthington,’ said the barman, when at last he was done, ‘and a tenner for a new seat cover.’ It was the longest speech I heard all night.
Extremely fresh air and my curious failure to take onboard any solid calories since a Welcome Break near Preston made the walk back rather a light-headed adventure. Stepping carelessly off a kerb I was nearly mown down by a motability scooter: when the driver turned to berate me I recognised him as the old chap I’d seen an hour before, deep in blended-malt slumber. I rolled straight past my guest house, plunged in silent darkness as it was, then suffered a panicky pocket-patting key-hunt at its front door. By the time I found it my racing mind had imagined every fate that might befall those who committed this most deadly of guest house sins, all of them too complex and terrible to be encapsulated on a laminated card. And that was before I tripped over three trunks on the half-landing.
Chapter Eleven
‘ANOTHER ‘ORRIBLE DAY in Barra.’ Thus did my landlady see me off into the grey morning, replete with fried bread and the blunt logistics of her pachydermal mania (‘Got first twenty-nine years back. Stopped counting at three and half thousand. Clean buggers with hairdryer.’). But as I drove through the red-brick, rain-polished streets I realised that even in the cold light of a wet day, I rather liked this strange and remote old place.
Seagulls cawed from the town-hall clock tower. The flanks of venerable buildings were faintly emblazoned with hand-painted advertisements for furniture brokers and general dealers. I exchanged a flash of homofocals with an Austin Montego, the Maestro with a boot. I passed along a street lined with steamy-windowed launderettes and cosy little cafeterias, full of headscarved old dears having a natter and a break from the rain. There was a defiant, almost heroically traditional feel to the town, a sense that here at least the Tesco belt hadn’t yet been pulled so tight that it stifled the life out of the place. The radio producer John Walters once declared that ‘human society can be divided into two eras: pre-avocado and post-avocado’. Barrow, the town that time forgot, was stoutly pre-avocado and proud of it. And more than that, it had character, which as I was finding out is about as much as you can ask for from any British town these days. Everything seemed lightly dabbed with the brush of daftness: an ex-ferry party ship moored up by the Morrisons’ car park, the existence of a street called Powerful Road. And a guest house breakfast room where the bland and age-old menu strictures of grapefruit segments OR orange juice OR cereals (porridge on request) were offset by a thousand watching elephants and a warning that smokers would be severely battered about the head and body.
The only way out of Barrow is the same way you came in, and I retraced the A590 at intemperate velocity. We sped across damp green undulations scarred by the occasional quarry, and through villages full of homely, good people – the sort of people who lived next to a big sign advertising The Walker’s Hostel or Canal Adventures and never crept out at night with a pot of paint and a puerile snigger. Ozzy led the way as ever, and was presently accompanied by himself: Ozzy Osbourne’s 2005 covers album, Sing? These Days I Can Barely Talk!, or something like that. This at least had the inestimable appeal of not being Paul McCartney’s ‘Frog Chorus’, which had incited a small off-road advent
ure near the bog-roll factory. Plus it guaranteed plenty of gratifyingly surreal Ozzy-on-Ozzy action: ‘I am the god of hell fire, and I bring you f-f-fookin left turn ahead!’
I hit the M6, headed a few junctions south, then turned off into the Lancastrian coastal flatlands. Above me the sky cast aside its cloud blanket and let forth the full force of a mid February frost: on went the gloves and scarf, and Ozzy was lost in the heater’s tepid roar. The hedgerows holding the rippled potato plains at bay seemed to blacken and wither around me, as if some fairy-tale curse was passing across the kingdom. Then the heavens darkened anew, and grubby beige flecks began to spatter the screen at a jaunty angle. Three days at the seaside beckoned, and it was snowing.
Our True Intent Is All for Your Delight: it sounds like the sort of gibberish you might see printed on a Japanese T-shirt, but these words are actually the official motto of Butlin’s. They wouldn’t have made much sense to me as a child, and barely do now, but somewhere in that slogan lies the promise of carefree, communal holiday-camp fun that the pre-teen me pined for. For the thick end of a decade I fantasised about summer fortnights in a chalet at Minehead or Camber Sands, days of chips and splashing about and nights of noise and neon and – yes! – Crompton’s Penny Falls. I lobbied hard for a couple of years, but always in vain. When it came to holidays my father was a rolling stone: to him I was just a loose pebble, the smallest of three sliding about on the hot back seat of a Peugeot estate. His was a summer wanderlust that could never be sated. When times were good, we drove all around Europe. When they weren’t, we drove all around Wales. Our family never spent more than a single night at any hotel or campsite, having generally arrived well after dark. We weren’t so much tourists as desperate fugitives.
A holiday camp offered the August inertia I craved, and also the raucous group larks that were always just starting up when we slammed the boot and drove away into the morning, or always just winding down when the Peugeot crunched to a halt on the moonlit reception gravel. The TV ads promised startling attractions – Billy Butlin had introduced the electric dodgem car to Britain, and his Skegness camp was home to the nation’s first monorail – and a heady ambience of juvenile anarchy. I watched children being left alone to get on with it, children given the run of all-inclusive entertainment facilities, children wearing expressions they didn’t wear whilst being dragged around an arboretum in Düsseldorf or Herefordshire’s largest collection of Edwardian bottles. It all looked like a thrillingly unsupervised mass sleepover at a funfair, like Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island without the downsides (enforced cigar smoking, and being turned into a donkey). At some pertinent stage of early adolescence I was exposed to the film That’ll Be the Day, which dramatically broadened the appeal of the British holiday camp by presenting it as a place where even Ringo Starr might open his chalet door to find a queue of young women demanding wanton satisfaction. But sadly, when at last I gained responsibility for planning my own holidays, I’d fallen under the influence of factors that hadn’t hitherto seemed at all important, like hot weather and tremendously cheap booze. Off I went to the Mediterranean. And so did everyone else, which meant that before long there weren’t any holiday camps left. Well, hardly any.
With six hundred chalets and uniformed entertainment officers, Butlin’s Skegness – opened in 1936 – was the first proper British holiday camp. The idea for it came to Billy Butlin during a disastrous week with his family at the Welsh resort of Barry Island: in accordance with a practice then universal and which still lingers on in Barrow, the Butlins were ejected from their seaside guest house at 10.30 a.m., obliged to wander the seafront in teeming rain until the landlady re-opened her doors in the late afternoon. Being British, his fellow holidaymakers thought they deserved no better and put up with it. Born in South Africa and raised in Canada, Billy felt something should be done, and did it. Three meals a day, organised in-house larks and the option of a roof over your head at all times: when the papers ran the first ad for Butlin’s Skegness, under the winning catchline A week’s holiday for a week’s pay, ten thousand families placed bookings overnight.
I’d always thought that Billy expanded his empire through the judicious post-war acquisition of decommissioned military camps, but in fact nearly every Butlin’s was purpose-built. Most of that army-surplus rebadging was carried through by his arriviste competitor Fred Pontin, whose chain of smaller, cheaper, monorail-free holiday camps always seemed a poor relation: like Man City before the sheikhs turned up, right down to the whole bluecoat/redcoat rivalry. By the Sixties, Billy’s nine super-camps were welcoming over a million British families a year, more than twice as many as Fred’s bijou twenty-four. Holiday-camp bookings didn’t actually peak until the 1980s, but by then Fred and Billy – sharp operators both – had seen the budget-flight future and sold up, bagging millions and a knighthood apiece. A succession of huge and stupid entertainment corporations oversaw the ensuing meltdown: today only three Butlin’s camps survive, though the Pontin’s empire, with its portfolio of more modest and economical sites, weathered the storm slightly better. Five remain, amongst them the razor-wired compound hunkered up before me in the twilight sleet.
Pontin’s Southport was opened in 1970, the last old-school, pre-Center Parcs holiday camp ever built in Britain. By then, all the more obvious seasides – Somerset, Devon, Kent, Norfolk – were well covered, but with demand still burgeoning, the operators felt encouraged to tackle more challenging destinations. All the same, and even making due allowance for the time of year, Southport seemed a bridge too far. Driving up to the security gates I could imagine Fred’s executives exchanging panicked glances as the old man pinned that final blue flag in the map on his office wall. Are you completely sure about this, boss? A holiday camp in Merseyside?
The guard slapped a huge and garish Pontin’s sticker on Craig’s filthy windscreen, and invited me to park up by reception. It was by now truly bitter – I had to gingerly half-skate my way from Craig to the check-in lobby. As I approached it, breath wisped forth from my gaping mouth: the place was loudly abustle. People, lots and lots and lots of people, had willingly chosen to go on holiday in Merseyside, in February, and – why else was I here? – in the most poorly regarded holiday camp in all of Britain.
Signs above the long check-in desk sorted arrivals into alphabetical groups; I took my place in the H–N queue. Everything was blue and yellow. A rank of posters advertised a forthcoming 1980s roadshow featuring Toyah Willcox, Paul Young and Brother Beyond, touring under a banner title I now forget – Tears of Shame, Dregs of Dignity or something like that. Most of my fellow arrivals were parents with many boisterous children in tow, but there were a few unburdened young couples – such as the one I now noticed at the adjacent customer services counter, on account of the noise they were making, and the 4-foot length of wood the husband held in his arm. ‘This fell off the bed when I sat down on it,’ he loudly declared, brandishing it like a one-man angry mob. ‘The whole room’s knackered!’
‘And it stinks,’ chimed in his wife. ‘It’s rank.’
It was a compelling encounter, yet as I craned and peered I realised that no one else was paying them any notice – least of all the blue-uniformed woman on the receiving end, who absorbed their outrage with a sort of dutiful, nodding boredom, like a desk sergeant being told about a stolen catflap or the loss of a favourite sock. Her heard-it-all-before demeanour was consistent with the research data. Of the many, many negative opinions I’d scrolled through over the past few months, none were more numerous, more heartfelt or more luridly improbable than those supplied by the erstwhile patrons of Pontin’s Southport. I can’t imagine the typical holiday-camp guest is especially hard to please, yet almost every single one of the 119 visitor reviews I’d read related an experience that had fallen distantly short of expectations. On the hi-de-hi scale, this place was the low-de-low.
I recalled some highlights as the H–N receptionist handed over my key and the sheaf of electricity-meter credit cards I had purcha
sed to procure such holiday indulgences as heating, hot water and illumination.
‘As I walked in, the smoke alarm fell on my head.’
‘We went to search for somewhere else to stay and when we returned to the apartment our food and beer had been stolen.’
‘Someone was thrown through a window, someone was thrown off a balcony … I had to repeatedly tell my wife that it was OK and we would survive.’
‘Opened the bedroom window to let out the smell of damp and it completely fell out of the wall.’
‘Unbelievable filth – complained about the minging carpet and they gave us sheets to put down on it.’
‘Hit on head by bottle thrown from upstairs balcony and taken to hospital in ambulance.’
‘Opened a drawer and it was half full of water.’
New experiences are generally the sign of a good holiday, but at Pontin’s Southport guests found themselves chalking up unwanted firsts: drinking Coke that smelt of lager, going to bed with their shoes on, scrubbing dried blood off a kettle. When praise was delivered, it came couched in the faintest terms: ‘Little kids will enjoy it as they don’t know any better.’ I presumed this factor and the half-term break were one explanation for the healthy attendance. The other: for a three-night stay, I had paid £61.
I’d been required to enter my age when checking in, and understood why as I piloted Craig through the frozen puddles towards. my appointed dot on the camp map. The accommodation was laid out like a huge wheel, with spokes and rim formed of flat-roofed, two-storey blocks. Those closest to the main reception and its attached bars and entertainment facilities were allocated to youthful revellers; further around the perimeter I passed noisy families unloading people carriers. Finally I arrived at the camp’s silent and lonely outer limits, the circle of Pontin’s reserved for childless old men. Thus did the spirit of Cumbernauld Ned pursue me up a rusty staircase, along an undulating balcony walkway and – with the furious shriek of warped and swollen plywood parted against its will – into the gloom of apartment 556.
