Widows & Orphans

by Michael Arditti

  ‘As you know, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge – or should that be on to the beach?’ – he paused for a laugh that was not forthcoming – ‘since the pier was closed in 2008. The FPT has fought hard to maintain it as a public amenity and I commend their efforts, but it was never a viable proposition. Like other outmoded Francombe institutions, the structure needs a complete overhaul.’ Duncan could not decide whether Geoffrey was looking directly at him or merely in his direction. ‘Our feasibility study proves that it’s impossible to retain the pier as an all-purpose family recreation complex. Quite apart from the enormous costs involved – at a conservative estimate, around £50,000,000 – where are the families we’d have to attract? I’ll tell you where: sitting in front of their home entertainment systems, eating takeaway pizzas, watching satellite TV, playing video games and listening to iPods. They don’t want variety shows, fruit machines, winter gardens or tea rooms. The old-fashioned family pier is as obsolete as the old-fashioned family.

  ‘The FPT has described the pier as a community asset. But the world has moved on and it’s our kids who are leading the way. They don’t have communities; they have networks. Their friends are as likely to live in New York or Sydney as in the next street. Far from being an asset, the pier is a liability: a white elephant – or should that be a beached whale?’ Once again he paused to no avail. ‘So do we leave it to rot: a blot on the landscape and a drain on the public purse? Or do we think outside the box? Do we find our USP and transform it into Britain’s first X-rated pier?’ He allowed time for the collective gasp. ‘Think about it! Seaside resorts have always been a bit edgy – a bit risqué. Look at Donald McGill postcards and What the Butler Saw machines. We’re just taking it a stage further. So we’ll replace the ghost train with a love train and the variety shows with erotic revues. We’ll sell latex and lingerie instead of rock and toffee apples. We’ll put a tantric therapist in the fortune teller’s booth, pole dancers in the fun fair and a sex museum in the Winter Garden. We’ll have strip shows, adult cinemas and naked volleyball – remember, we’re the ones who brought women wrestlers to Francombe. We’ll cater for stag and hen nights, swingers, and the respectable end of the fetish market. We’ll sell Kiss Me Quick hats that mean what they say. You don’t need me to tell you that Francombe needs a facelift.’ Duncan sneaked a glance at Frances, whose smile was as stiff as her skin. ‘With the carpet factory closed, there’s no more light industry. Our fishermen are drowning in EU regulations. The only thriving tourist facilities are the caravan parks, and how much income do they generate for the town? At last we’ll give people a reason to come here. And they won’t just be day trippers. With our late-night entertainment, they’ll be wanting to stay. No wonder the Chamber of Commerce and the Hoteliers Association are backing us every step of the way. I’m counting on all of you to do the same.’ Duncan raised his hand. ‘Well, maybe not all of you,’ Geoffrey said with a thin smile. ‘I’d hoped that even our most diehard opponents would take a moment to reflect. But at least have the courtesy to hold fire until Archana Nayar has shown us her drawings … You’ll know Archana by reputation,’ he said, neatly wrong-footing the ignorant. ‘Not least for her prize-winning contribution to the 2012 Olympic Park. We’re honoured to have her on board.’

  Acknowledging the applause, Archana stepped on to the dais, and Duncan understood why Frances had been so attentive to a woman whose dowdiness would otherwise have dismayed her. After thanking Geoffrey for his generous tribute and insisting that it was she who felt honoured to be associated with such an innovative and exciting project, Archana asked for the lights to be dimmed (which in practice meant switching off the fluorescent bar nearest the screen). Then, in a deft display of computer graphics, she led the audience on a virtual tour of the remodelled pier, explaining the various shaded areas as clinically as an oncologist.

  ‘It’s easy to be sentimental about the pier,’ she said. ‘Contrary to popular belief, it’s only the steel frame that dates back a hundred and forty years. Everything else has been rebuilt, often several times: the Moorish pavilion (which some might regard as a relic of cultural imperialism) after the fire of 1954; the Winter Garden after the roof collapsed in the early Seventies; the bandstand after the great storm of 1987. Even the decking was completely refurbished in the mid 1990s. So please, let’s hear no more about the architectural integrity. What about environmental integrity? Throughout the design process, I’ve been at pains to integrate the pier with its surroundings so that for the first time it will both enhance the vista from the bay and reflect the existing seafront. Thank you.’ She returned to her seat amid warm applause. ‘One thing I forgot to mention,’ she added from the floor. ‘The entire site will be disabled-friendly.’

  ‘Haven’t they suffered enough?’ Duncan whispered to Ellen, who shushed him. ‘Seriously, does it just mean ramps and extra-wide doorways or will there be special cars on the love train and booths in the erotic revue bar? How about lower nets on the volleyball court?’ he added, warming to his theme. ‘Or would that be the disreputable end of fetishism?’

  ‘They’re watching us!’ Ellen hissed.

  Duncan looked at the stony faces of Geoffrey Weedon and Lorna Redwood as the latter announced that she was opening the floor to questions. ‘Duncan Neville from the Mercury,’ he said, shooting up his hand.

  ‘I’m sure you need no introduction, Mr Neville,’ Lorna said, admitting him to that select band of luminaries in which she had recently placed herself.

  ‘Thank you. Can you tell us if the Council knew about these proposals when it agreed to sell the pier to the developers?’

  ‘For the last time,’ Lorna said with a sigh, ‘I’m not here tonight to speak on behalf of the Council. The proposals will go before the Planning Committee, which will rule on them in due course.’

  ‘Why, when everyone knows it’s already a done deal?’

  ‘If you’ll allow me, Madam Chairman,’ Geoffrey said, rising to his feet. ‘I’ve emphasised the economic benefits of the development, but many experts see our regeneration of the pier as an end in itself. I have here a letter from the National Piers Society endorsing the project. Even the Victorian Society has given us its blessing now that we’re committed to retaining the original frame. I’m happy to pass both letters on to Mr Neville and expect that, in the best tradition of independent journalism, he’ll print them in full.’

  Duncan sat tight-lipped, trusting that other objectors would fare better. He was reassured by the first name that Lorna called.

  ‘Dr Kingswood.’

  ‘May I ask if Mr Weedon appreciates the weight of opposition to his cultural vandalism?’ Glynis said.

  ‘Of course our plans won’t be to everyone’s liking, any more than they would if we rebuilt the pavilion as a hotel or a casino. Just because those who oppose the scheme make a lot of noise doesn’t mean there aren’t hundreds – thousands – who support it. I’m a great believer in the silent majority.’

  ‘Shouldn’t that be the apathetic majority?’ Glynis asked.

  ‘If you say so. Personally, I have more respect for my fellow townspeople,’ Geoffrey replied to a murmur of approval that in other circumstances Duncan would have echoed.

  ‘But why the pier?’ the Methodist minister asked. ‘Build your pornographic theme park if you must, but build it somewhere without such a rich history.’

  ‘First, let me assure Your Reverence that it won’t be in any way pornographic. All the attractions will be strictly policed and no one under eighteen will be admitted. Second, it’s precisely because of its history that I’ve taken on the project. I grew up with the pier and I want to preserve it.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Isn’t it odd that the people who make the most fuss about Francombe’s decline are the first to cry foul at anyone who tries to reverse it? They call themselves conservationists; I call them dinosaurs … well, I call them something else, but not in public. Just because they choose to live in the past, do they have to drag the rest of us back w
ith them? I don’t want to personalise the debate but it’s no secret that the opposition to this scheme – along with almost everything else I’ve done for Francombe – has been orchestrated by the Mercury.’ Feeling Ellen tense beside him, Duncan clasped her hand. ‘It didn’t take a genius to realise that the old arguments would resurface tonight so I’ve done a little digging and you might be interested in what I’ve found. How many of you know that the very facilities Mr Neville is now so anxious to restore were once bitterly attacked by his paper? In the 1920s the Mercury denounced the owners of the pavilion when they proposed to turn it from a concert venue into a dance hall. In the Seventies it was back on its high horse when the new owners – or maybe they were the same? I don’t know – turned it into a roller-skating rink. And in the 1980s it waged a war of words when, in a final transformation, the rink became a disco. This is from one of its leading articles: “Has any engineer studied the effect on the pier’s foundations of hundreds of young people leaping into the air to the beat of the latest popular music hit?” And, yes, ladies and gentlemen, popular music is in italics.’

  ‘That was written by the previous editor,’ Duncan interjected.

  ‘Who was, of course, your father. Three cheers for nepotism!’ Duncan felt Ellen’s fingers digging into his palm. ‘I’ve been painted as a johnny-come-lately, an opportunist out for all he can get and, frankly, I resent it. I love this town. True, Francombe has been good to me, but I like to think I’ve been good to it in return.’

  ‘Hear hear!’ a voice shouted from the back of the room.

  ‘Now I want to do more. This development is the biggest opportunity to come our way since the building of the railway in the 1860s. Do we grab it and make Francombe proud again, or do we let it slip and condemn ourselves to terminal decay? It’s your call. Are you with me?’ His appeal prompted a surge of ‘yeses’ and a solitary ‘no’, which Duncan took to be a misunderstanding rather than genuine dissent.

  Geoffrey sat down, and Duncan knew that he was beaten. The nepotism jibe had stripped him of even the dignity of defeat. As the applause swelled around him, Geoffrey signalled to a young man crouching at the edge of the dais, who flicked a switch, flooding the model pier with hundreds of minuscule lights.

  Seven

  £3,260 raised in Mercury Christmas Toy Appeal

  by Brian Gannon

  Thursday, 19 December 2013

  Mercury readers have dug deep in their pockets to raise a magnificent £3,260 for our fifteenth annual Christmas Toy Appeal.

  The money will be used to buy toys and presents, which will be added to the bumper sacks of goodies, including dolls, jigsaws, board games, colouring books, dressing-up clothes and DVDs that have arrived at Mercury House and our various collection points across town over the past few weeks.

  Among the last donors to contact us before Saturday’s deadline were two big-hearted schoolgirls, Hayley and Tanya Watson. Francis Preston pupil Hayley persuaded her younger sister to join her in raiding their piggybanks after reading about our appeal.

  Hayley, 11, said: ‘It made me sad to think that there are children who won’t be able to have any presents at Christmas. I thought we should give them our pocket money so their mums and dads can buy them some presents.’

  Tanya, 6, who attends St Columba’s primary school, said: ‘We opened up our money boxes to help the poor children. I hope now they can have a doll’s house and a bicycle.’

  The £3,260 is made up of £180 deposited in our collection boxes, £440 sent in by readers, and £2,640 contributed by local businesses. Topping the list of donations are £200 from Francombe Numismatics; £250 from Tesco’s, Bartholomew Road; and £1,000 from Weedon Investments.

  Mercury editor, Duncan Neville, said: ‘Once again there has been a fantastic response to our appeal, and I would like to thank all our readers and local businesses for their support. In the fifteen years that the appeal has been running, we have been able to help more than 6,000 underprivileged children in the Francombe area. I am delighted that we will be able to do so again this year.

  ‘It is at Christmas that we realise how lucky we are to be surrounded by our loved ones. But in the current economic climate many people are facing a bleak future. Thanks to the goodwill of the local community, their children will be able to wake up on Christmas morning with a smile.’

  Despite the shampoo dripping down his forehead and stinging his eyes, Duncan leapt out of the shower to silence the radio the moment that Elvis Presley at his most lachrymose launched into ‘If Every Day Was Like Christmas’. Even in such an overcrowded field, it must win the prize for the most fraudulent lyric of all time. The festive season was gruelling enough on an annual basis. With neither a strong faith nor a young family to give it meaning, he felt secret sympathy for Scrooge.

  This year there would at least be the compensation of spending his first Christmas since his divorce with Jamie and his first ever with Ellen. In the meantime he had to endure various official functions, starting with the staff Christmas dinner in two hours’ time. The three-course set meal at the Metropole, complete with selected wines, was a far cry from the Christmas parties of his youth: dinner dances in the Pier Pavilion, which his mother allowed him to attend on condition that he stand behind her in the conga line to shield her from the printers’ wandering hands.

  Even without the financial considerations, he would have balked at holding a dance for a staff of eight, or rather six since Trevor was going to his newly divorced brother’s freedom party and Mary had been kept at home by Bob. While shedding few tears over Trevor, who routinely confused drunkenness with conviviality, he would miss Mary, who was fighting to save her marriage. Bob’s response to the mural had been chilling. Far from celebrating his wife’s portrayal, he had railed against the public humiliation, giving her the biggest black eye Duncan had ever seen outside a comic strip. When she turned up for work three days later claiming to have ‘walked into a door’, with no ‘it’s my own silly fault for drinking too much/not looking where I was going/not buying new glasses’ to corroborate her story, she seemed to be daring him to challenge her. But when he did, reminding her of her plan to move in with Jordan, she described it as a menopausal fantasy, adding that she deserved whatever Bob gave her after destroying the one thing that he had left: his pride.

  In a further setback, Henry rang the next morning with the news that the figures of Adam and Eve in the mural had been defaced, purportedly by Jordan himself, who was found with two empty cans of acrylic paint beside a graffiti-daubed fishermen’s memorial. Whatever his motives for the attack, Duncan refused to believe that he had acted of his own volition. He must have been intimidated either by Bob or Norman, who had lately been released from Ford, with one or other of them driving him into town and forcing him to vandalise the monument, before tipping off the police. Jordan himself gave nothing away. In court he spoke only to confirm his name and address, and plead guilty, whereupon the magistrates activated his suspended sentence, jailing him for six months. No doubt all those readers who had complained of his being mollycoddled after the front-page photograph of him shaking hands with the bishop would feel vindicated.

  All else being equal, Duncan would have preferred to hold the meal at Vivien’s but he feared that some of the staff would feel cheated. So, after calling in at the café to drop off a present for Connor, his four-year-old godson, he proceeded up the Parade, where the annual orgy of consumption lacked even a fig leaf of festivity since the major retailers, citing the Recession, had refused to pay for Christmas lights. Several of his correspondents, together with Brian and Jake, who confounding expectations took the Elvis Presley view of Christmas, proposed that the Mercury should initiate a boycott of the offending stores. But, mindful of the outrage provoked by the recent ‘Tide of Filth’ story on the state of Francombe beaches, he was reluctant to alienate any more powerful interests (or, as Trevor put it, potential advertisers), not least when he would need their support to stem the tsunami of filth that
Weedon’s was preparing to unleash on the town.

  Further evidence of the Recession was to be found in the half-empty Crystal Room. The sweep of white linen, unrelieved by the gleam of silverware, cast a pall over proceedings as Duncan led in his guests, all except Ken having observed the smart-casual dress code that Stewart described as the only oxymoron he would ever let pass. They had scarcely sat down when Sheila insisted that they pull their crackers, at which Brian, ignorant of the history, declared that Stewart was ‘firing blanks’ after his failed to pop. Exhorting everyone to put on paper hats, Sheila made Rowena swap, first with Jake and then with Ken, to find the one that best matched her cardigan and Duncan relinquish his mitre for her own ‘more appropriate’ crown. ‘Ever the office manager,’ Ken said, defusing the tension, which rapidly built up again when Jake read out the jokes.

  Duncan, whose sense of social obligation was not shared by the rest of the table, struggled to keep the party flowing. The veto on talking about work left them painfully aware of how little they had in common. In a welcome distraction, Jake, announcing that soup made him sweat, removed his jacket to reveal a knitted woollen waistcoat with a border of pigs. Sheila, already on her third glass of wine, stretched across Ken to stroke what she declared to be the prettiest pussies she had ever seen, whereupon Brian snorted so hard that his nose began to bleed. As the scarlet stain spread across his napkin, Rowena and Ken bickered over whether he should bend his neck backwards or forwards; Stewart suggested dropping car keys down his shirt; and Jake claimed that his mother used to swear by running a butter knife along the spine. Sheila, professing to have such poor circulation that her hands were like ice, offered to rub his back, at which the bleeding abruptly stopped.

  Brian’s choice of main course kept him at the centre of attention since, while everyone else had ordered crown of turkey with herb stuffing, cranberry compote and sprout puree, he had chosen venison. Ken, moved more by antipathy than tradition, compared it to asking for shellfish at a bar mitzvah, whereupon Sheila, telling him not to be such a bully, assured Brian that if he wanted stuffing he could have some of hers. ‘Next she’ll be asking if he’s a leg or a breast man,’ Rowena hissed in Duncan’s ear.