Pier Review

by Jon Bounds

  Lowestoft appears after the countryside recedes into suburb and then town again. One thing about coastal towns is that everything seems very flat; buildings don't need to grow up if they can grow out. And, being a city boy, it's always weird the amount of room you're afforded when not in one. The directions to the front are clear, and a good indicator of how much the town values tourism. Lowestoft is part of what is poetically called the 'sunrise coast' and, being our most easterly point, it is the very first place the sun hits as it make its golden cameos in the movie of our lives. I read that Lowestoft is where Captain Birdseye employs over 700 people and I'm a little disappointed that a giant, wooden frigate isn't moored by the first pier we come to, staffed by salty and surprisingly non-abused children, eyes narrowed at the distance, searching for the signs only shoals of wild fish fingers leave in their wake.

  * * *

  The first of Lowestoft's piers is perfectly pierish, nothing we haven't seen before. The only thing noteworthy is just how bored a teenage girl fishing off the end is. Pink top and tracksuit bottoms and the deepest glower against the world I've ever seen.

  LOWESTOFT South

  Opened: 1846 (Architect: unknown, but an earlier wooden pier was built in 1831 by William Cubitt)

  Length at start: 1,320 ft (402 m)

  Length now: 1,320 ft (402 m)

  Burn baby burn? A reading room was added in 1853 and a bandstand in 1884; both were destroyed by fire in 1885. In 1987, the seaward end closed due to structural problems, not to be opened to its full length again until 1993.

  People often gather on the pier to mourn loved ones. The Lowestoft lifeboat crew will scatter ashes at sea near the pier while carrying out their weekly training exercise.

  South Pier is as disappointing as the concrete jetty that is Felixstowe Pier. Only a slightly tacky 'entertainment complex' squats near it. We dutifully walk its length and then we're off down the seafront towards Claremont Pier. There's a massive seagull sitting on the concrete wall. I've never believed the usual stereotype of seagulls as angry, mean bastards. To me they always look slightly surprised that they're birds, like they half-remember being human and are confused about why we are so reluctant to share our food. The one on the wall staring at us is a big bastard, though. I half-joke to Midge that that one could probably overpower him and take him back to its nest, but he pretends not to hear me.

  'Hey, look – don't they make shower fittings?' Midge has already moved on. He is pointing to a large statue of who I presume to be 'Neptune' but it is in fact labelled 'Triton', who, according to the sign, was Poseidon's son. I hate not knowing that sort of stuff, so I pretend that I do.

  'Course,' I say casually, 'who did you think they named the company after?'

  'You know all sorts of weird stuff,' says Midge, not sounding impressed at all.

  I am surprised that this is the first time the Greek god Poseidon had been referenced, though. Around the seaside the statues and place names so far have favoured Neptune, the Roman god of water, which is interesting because Neptune to the Romans was a fresh-water god, not connected to the sea nearly as strongly as his earlier Greek form. I go to mention this, but Midge and Jon have already moved on. Okay, so I do know all sorts of weird stuff.

  I step, blinking, out of the light, letting the random flashing and disjointed bloops of the amusements welcome me back into the dark. We make our way as far back as we possibly can. Part of our ritual to try and reach each pier's furthest point. What we don't know is a storm back in 1962 washed a large part of it away, so we are soon at the entrance of the roller disco that occupies the last half of Claremont's 720 feet. We look at each other.

  'We've got to do it,' says Jon, with a mixture of playfulness and resignation.

  'What?'

  'We're going to have to go roller-skating, aren't we?'

  A pang of guilt hits me. 'I'm not sure my budget can stretch, to be honest, mate.'

  'That's okay, it's part of the trip budget.'

  I stifle a wince. To be honest, I lost count a while ago, and I am pretty sure he has too. Anything over is coming out of his bank balance.

  'Are you sure?'

  'Yeah, it'll be fine.' But with how excited my face was, in retrospect, I'm not sure he could have given any other answer.

  LOWESTOFT Claremont

  Opened: 1903 (Architect: D. Fox)

  Length at start: 600 ft (183 m)

  Length now: 720 ft (219 m)

  Burn baby burn? No, but in 1962 the pier head was destroyed by storms, along with some of the main structure.

  When a pavilion was built in 1913 the pier reached 760 feet, which was reduced to 720 feet in the 1962 storms. More recently, artist David Ward was commissioned by the local council to create a visual link between Claremont Pier and South Pier. St Elmo's Fire was unveiled in 2001 and consists of a group of lights on tall poles, which are reflected in the water.

  I can't roller-skate; neither can I dance in a way that brings pleasure to anyone. And I don't believe that any white man over 20 can do both together. So, of course, I'm handing over my Adidas trainers, sandy inside and scuffed on the outside, along with a tenner for roller boots for me and Dan at the end of Claremont Pier. This, I'm pretty sure, has broken the bank of Pier Review. Organised people would be keeping these receipts and noting down just how much the trip is costing. It's not that I'm profligate or careless. In fact, there have been times when I've done nothing at night but turn over financial scenarios in my restless mind. I'm just at the extreme end of the scale of British reserve that doesn't like to talk about money, even to myself.

  As we lace up, it strikes me that I can't remember if I asked Midge if he wanted a go.

  'You sure you don't fancy it?' I say, pretending that I have but also covering my arse.

  'Nah. Give us your coat and stuff. I'll just watch you pair of idiots,' says the tiny punk Passepartout.

  Roller disco is a sport that both seven-year-old girls and 70-yearold women are somehow built for. It's something to do with the intensity of interest and practice needed to do anything more than roll warily in a circle. These seem to be the ages of female obsession, of getting so engrossed in one activity that you can devote to it all the time it needs – and that can be any amount of time that strikes them as necessary. For men the age of obsession is 12 (football or Dungeons & Dragons), then 18 (music and girls). Ah, who am I kidding – the male psyche is much more prone to obsession anyway. That's why most youth tribes are based on male fashion, and it's why model-train shops gather just enough custom and not too much dust around the corner from the main shopping street in towns around the country. It's why two blokes are willing to leave home and work, and drag another from home and dole, for two weeks for no purpose.

  * * *

  Skating over to Jon I tell him to bend his knees a little and loosen up. He listens because he knows that I spent a whole bunch of time in my late teenage years rollerblading, or, as me and another friend put it, 'roller bleeding', because for a couple of summers we did nothing but hang out watching hidden-camera police shows until it got dark and then go to our skate spot, drinking miniature bottles of absinthe along the way. The skills are similar, but not the same, and after a while I adjust and am able to glide at some speed. And for brief moments I feel it – the rush, the level you get to in your brain when you're just flying. It seems no effort at all as the world hurtles past you and nothing can touch you – not worry, not fear of crashing, just the sensation of the wheels that you feel on the soles of your feet, as connected to you as your toes, spinning smoothly around.

  * * *

  If I'd practised this, or even tried it before, I wouldn't be clinging on to the side while dead-eyed anthem 'I Will Survive' drives the glitterball around clockwise. Clockwise against the stream of embarrassment that is ages seven to 70. A portly, long-haired Brummie whips past me over and over again. I should have known. Danny, it turns out, is good at this.

  On one trip round he gives me some advice: let th
e wheels run, don't pull them up, glide. I try it and it does seem to work. But my nervousness takes over, makes me think that this can't possibly be right and I walk my feet. This immediately unbalances me and I windmill into the barriers for safety.

  Eventually I manage to get a bit of a hang of it, and it's fun. I lose myself in the activity. And then Danny falls flat on his arse. Legs splayed in a 'v' and a surprised look upon his face.

  * * *

  I hit the floor hard and look around to see who's seen. There's the young mum teaching the toddler at one end and, of course, the two young girls running circles around Jon making his baby-giraffe-like steps. So far, so good, but I turn to our seats and Midge is laughing openly as he sits next to our pocket detritus and the extra layers of clothes me and Jon peeled off for him to look after.

  I scrabble back to my feet, and the two young girls glide past, placing each foot over the other in a way that looks so easy it must be really bloody difficult.

  * * *

  Danny let himself go, fell over and bruised his coccyx. He enjoyed himself, though, I think. I went gingerly and didn't fall. But nor did I have a great time. Midge sat watching and seemed to piss himself laughing. Is all of this a metaphor for life?

  Walking back towards the car we are hit by what I'm hoping is a local radio roadshow. An outside broadcast with Beach FM one-oh-three-point-four, including some contest that will involve judging by how loud the crowd shouts. That would be perfect.

  Turns out, though, to be the end (or the start perhaps, we never work it out) of a sponsored walk in memory of a local guy. I'm not quite sure now what fate befell him, but in a way it doesn't matter: for the people who loved him it won't be the cause of the loss but the loss itself that hurts. And for those that didn't, the feeling of doing something and being a part of something won't be heightened or lessened by a particular illness or other tragedy. That we have an excuse to come together with T-shirts and balloons, to talk of our loss to strangers behind the prop of a sponsorship form, is enough.

  Lowestoft and Yarmouth are very close to each other, and to almost nothing else. This I know, as I've been here before. Yarmouth is a day trip from Pakefield, where I spent many a holiday in my late teens. The Pontins camp there was discovered by my Uncle Nicky and something about it determined that our already large family should be further extended with many extras in order to spend a week there in late August that year.

  The east coast almost couldn't have been further from Birmingham, or more difficult to get to. In the early nineties there wasn't a motorway in that direction, so our convoy of ageing three-door hatchbacks and boxy family saloons took nearly four hours to bend and stall across the country. It's because of these journeys that I can do nothing but press out a thin smile and feel the beginnings of a furry headache when I'm reminded of towns like Thetford or Diss. We went a number of times, but on the first I was navigating – pre-GPS, of course – for my dad in our green Mini Metro, so the twisting red line of the A11 is etched into my subconscious.

  Two things had attracted Nicky. One was that the place was still running a full-board dining system, at a time when most holiday camps had turned to slews of self-catering. In the last episode of fifties-set sitcom Hi-De-Hi! staff are told that the future is coming, and they're not required on the voyage towards it. 'Next year it'll be nineteen hundred and sixty. We've got that self-catering starting,' Maplins hatchet-man executive Alec Foster tells the assembled entertainments staff by way of letting them go. And while the redcoats and bluecoats, unlike the fictional yellowcoats, didn't all disappear in the time it took to say 'You have been watching...', the era of mass participation at these camps was fading. That it existed in such a pure form as it did on the east coast at that time seemed to bear testimony to how isolated and living in the past the area was. That longing for the past, a past with no responsibilities – not even cooking or deciding where to eat – other than to enjoy oneself might have been Nicky's thinking.

  But maybe it was just the ability to load his tray with double and triple helpings, while calling 'I'll get yours, Fred' to no one in particular.

  At Maplins, melancholically upbeat camp host Ted Bovis wouldn't have minded. It's very much the sort of fiddle he'd be pulling himself. And the staff at Pakefield couldn't have cared less either. They'd been there long enough to see all the fiddles, the sports bags under every table at night containing cans of lager and bottles of scotch. The nightly 'adult' comedians would let you know they were in on the joke – and that it happened at every camp they travelled to around the country. I remember one starting his act in the Hawaiian Ballroom by imitating the noise and action of ring pulls.

  'When the lights go down… pssht, pssht, pssht.'

  It was, and probably still is, a trope to liken Pontins or Butlins to POW camps, where you might stand outside the bar idly shaking your trousers to let earth from the tunnel fall out. Any terseness from the staff would result in references to them being guards, and there'd be mention of Red Cross parcels. The thing is, though, this camp we kept returning to – from when I was about age 14 until after I reached 20, the others probably still go – had in fact been a prisoner-of-war camp during and just after World War Two. An entrepreneurial post-war chap had seen the row upon row of basic accommodation huts and thought – that's just what people recovering from the horrors of conflict will need to come to in order to find relaxation.

  Especially those who had escaped from Colditz, of course.

  They'd done it up a bit in the intervening years since the war. I guess that not even the barbed wire that stopped you getting too close to the cliff was an original feature. I also doubt our German cousins had bars or a nine-hole pitch and putt course.

  One attraction of those camps in those days was much more relaxed licensing laws: bars open all day and into the early hours, rather than being restricted to lunchtimes and evenings till 11 p.m. My family took full advantage of those laws to drink calmly, good-naturedly and amusingly, but essentially all day every day. And with their own drink where possible.

  * * *

  The first thing we notice about Great Yarmouth's Britannia Pier is all the Mini Coopers. It seems that we've arrived on the day of a rally. Most prominent in the crowd of cars is one that has a seat built on top of it. In that seat sits a giant golly doll. Jon nudges me with glee on spotting it.

  'What kind of rally is this?' he says out of the corner of his mouth.

  'I don't know, mate, but if they start pouring petrol on a cross we should leave.'

  Pouring petrol anywhere near Britannia Pier would be in poor taste. Plagued by fires throughout the last hundred years, it survived World War Two intact only to catch fire again in 1954. It was reopened in 1958. The most notable of these fires was in 1914, reputedly started by one of the suffragettes who had been refused a meeting venue in the pavilions.

  Looking at the predominantly male list of performers not famed for their liberal views advertised on the large hoardings at the entrance, I wouldn't blame the sisters for coming back now with a jerrycan for another go. Hopefully they can lock Jim Davidson in his dressing room before they do it.

  Most of the amusements and the pier itself have opted for the pirate theme that seems to be clinging to the coast like a capitalist rash.

  GREAT YARMOUTH Britannia

  Opened: 1901 (Architects: Joseph and Arthur Mayoh)

  Length at start: 810 ft (247 m)

  Length now: 810 ft (247 m)

  Burn baby burn? An earlier pier lasted from 1858 to 1899, when storms took it. The first pavilion on the replacement pier burnt down in 1909 and a second lasted only until 1914. A ballroom lasted from 1928 until 1933, and a third pavilion from 1933 to 1944. And then they gave up on pavilions until 1958; this latest one remains unburnt.

  We've not had a beer on a pier so far. I've wanted to do so at every opportunity but there really haven't been that many. We've been on piers in the morning, hung-over, and in the evening, about to rush to the next campsite.
A casual beer hasn't been on the agenda, but now five stops in and just another easy one to go today it seems like the atmosphere says we can. And we do, but it's immediately a mistake – sharp and stewed Carlsberg Export is served in thin glasses.

  * * *

  We opt for a pint in Long John Silver's, a nightclub bar halfway down the pier. The place is massive and set up for the night crowds. The huge space for the dance floor and the plastic cups swept into a corner are indications of the cheap cattle market it would become during the hot summer nights.