Pier Review
Page 20
* * *
Something about the framed olde worlde posters makes me uncomfortable: it's one thing to glamorise the violent theft of the pirate, after all the very monarchy of the time did exactly that, but treating the slave trade as something quaint is not right. How many of the assembled – when they actually assemble (the place is empty) – parents would take time to explain about slavery to enquiring kids? Or how many partake of alarming casual racism like the cartoonish golly out front and think nothing of it?
* * *
Yarmouth is another one of those places where the sea recedes out past the pier.
With Jon lost in thought and Midge fiddling with something or other, I look over to the guy on the table opposite and recognise him. He's got a shaved head and is wearing a Nike vest top over a paunch he's showing no sign of shame about. His gold-sovereign rings reflect the sun as he picks up the dummy that the baby in a cheap pram has spat out. Pausing only slightly he wipes the dummy on his three-quarter-length trousers and dips it into his cider before giving it back to the child. I can't place where I know him from. But then it hits me that he's an amalgamation of every male adult I grew up with. I don't just know him, I nearly was him, or could have been if some quirk of genes hadn't sent me down a different path. He is my uncles and their friends, and the people I served in pubs and worked with in every temporary job I've ever had.
To the right, the machinery of industry dominates the skyline and I try and remember why and when I became the person I am. How did I get off that conveyor belt straight from my school to the Rover factory down the road? I suddenly resent his happiness, his contentment, how at ease he appears with everything. I have debt, a degree, and a brain full of memories that decay by the second. He has a life, a kid and, it seems, no doubts nagging him at all.
* * *
The Mini rally is in some way raising money for Help for Heroes, which is sort of the tabloid version of the British Legion Poppy Appeal: all X Factor and passive-aggressive pressure.
* * *
I can see the front stretching off to the right, the 'Golden Mile' which consists of 12 amusement arcades and the Joyland outdoor amusements. The Golden Mile in fact covers two square miles up to the second pier, Wellington. Everything about the seaside is here, rock shops, ice-cream stalls and cheap, plastic buckets and spades. You can buy fake plastic dog poo and a hat that declares your position as a member of the FBI, or 'Female Body Inspector'. There are practical, handwritten cardboard signs and makeshift bins by the side of the food stalls. In places it's old and battered by the weather, like the benches by the sea wall, but in others it's also glitzy and showbiz. The shimmering metal signs flicker like the scales of a fish. To be English is to embrace our contradictory nature, and own our hypocrisy, so it fits that our seaside should as well.
* * *
Yarmouth's second pier isn't much of a pier, and it doesn't reach the sea by some distance. It's as if Marine Parade is crouching over the sands to relieve itself. The crystal palace stands guard over an arcade with ideas above its station. In between the buzzing slots and the falling coins is an expensively monogrammed carpet.
Across the water an oil refinery doesn't exactly belch smoke across the North Sea, but it shadows the front and peels back the curtain on the rest of life.
GREAT YARMOUTH Wellington
Opened: 1853 (Architect: P. Ashcroft)
Length at start: 700 ft (213 m)
Length now: 700 ft (213 m)
Burn baby burn? No, none at all. However, it survived a demolition bid by the council in the eighties.
Named after the Duke of Wellington, who died the year before it was opened and had similar views on foreigners to eventual pier owner Jim Davidson.
The original Wellington Pier was opened in 1853. Five years later Britannia Pier opened just along the promenade and killed its trade. It struggled till 1899 when the local council had to step in with a bailout. They opened a new pavilion and shipped the Winter Gardens by barge from Torquay. The Winter Gardens look like something out of an old science fiction novel – a giant ornate greenhouse with chipped white paint and ivy growing around the trellises, and which hints of unspeakable horrors inside. The pier has almost gone and the pavilion is all that's left after comedian Jim Davidson sank his own money into renovating the inside but not the outside. The rest of the pier was demolished in 2005, and the Winter Gardens are often closed in high winds for fear of collapse or attack from the Elder Gods.
The inside of Wellington Pavilion is a densely packed arcade/ bowling alley/children's play area, a soulless mash of what a money-obsessed misanthrope might imagine ordinary families to want. We wander through in a daze, Midge disappearing to do whatever Midge does when he disappears – which could be talk to his 17 kids or report back to the planet he's originally from, for all I know. Jon beats me at foosball, something that gives him more satisfaction than he lets on and annoys me more than I let him know.
Outside, the building extends over the beach. We consider jumping off onto it, thereby fulfilling our promise to everyone before the trip that we would 'jump off a pier'. But we both know it would be a get-out, a non-satisfactory loophole. So we gather up Midge and head to the car.
* * *
We weren't sure we'd make Cromer this evening. In the plan there is a stop tonight just inland from here, but our spirits at this point are good and 30 miles more doesn't seem too much to take on. The piers really do start to stretch out along the coast now, and after Cromer there's a long drive round the bulge on the map.
Our plans are sketchy. The only one that really matters, the only one that needs confirmation and organisational skill is Pontins. I'm way too shy to let the organised side of my brain show, as it would mean taking on the responsibility of getting what we needed out of other people. I can't operate in that way, so I feign disorganisation enough for Dan to have to be the organised one. I hadn't quite calculated just how casual that would mean I had to pretend to be, but I'm having to act as if I really don't care, that I haven't poured over the logistics, that I'm not often fleetingly terrified of us miscalculating. I am in fact scared of missing Pontins; that's important.
Danny has got us this far, to Cromer, and the town scores highly on the Kurt Vonnegut Car Park Rating Scheme (8/10), leaving us with a view down a steep incline to a prom and a pier, which looks white, wide and well used. The road in front is alive with activity. I count the dogs and brood about my lack of animal companionship.
* * *
On top of the cliff overlooking Cromer Pier I look out at the sea reflecting the grey sky and look down at the structure, solid and white. At the moment it looks like the only real thing I have seen that day.
The vocal parts of Pink Floyd's 'The Great Gig in the Sky' stab into my ears, just the higher register, far away like in another wing of a mansion.
'Do you hear that?' I ask Jon.
'What?'
'Music?' I reply.
He answers with a look. And we set off down the cliffside stairway
'Look at this,' says Jon as we get closer. 'The Drifters, The Searchers, and a Bon Jovi Tribute.' He smiles. 'It's a shame we don't have time to catch a show,' he says with excited regret.
But I'm not listening. I'm staring at one of the biggest posters, advertising the Pink Floyd Experience. Got to be a coincidence, I tell myself, as 'The Great Gig in the Sky' once again swells up in my head. We head onto the pier past the crabbing families. The first person ever to eat a crab must have been really fucking hungry, and odd, very, very odd. I head to the end of the pier as quick as I can.
CROMER
Opened: 1901 (Architects: Douglass and Arnott)
Length at start: 500 ft (152 m)
Length now: 500 ft (152 m)
Burn baby burn? No, but damaged by storms in 1949, 1953, 1976, 1978 and 2005.
Reputably 'the most haunted pier in England'. Incidents of ghostly apparitions, poltergeist activity and the wails of lost sailors have all been reported on
the pier. All of which failed to be caught by the cameras of TV's Most Haunted in April 2009, but the cameraman did get a headache so the jury's still out.
Sightings of Russ Abbot (who filmed for the TV drama September Song here), Stephen Fry (who opened the refurbished pavilion in 2004) and Steve Coogan (as Alan Partridge) are confirmed and a little scarier if we're honest.
The theatre on the pier, large but closed now as people fish and stroll around it, is about to feature The Barron Knights. Now, if you're not aware who The Barron Knights are, then you're probably younger than me, or less taken with the place where comedy and music meet. They've been parodying pop songs with skill and a certain type of wit since the sixties. A very English experience: a nod, a wink and a double entendre. At some point in my childhood they must have been getting regular TV work as otherwise I'd never have heard them. And I was really hooked. One tape of theirs I had was a real favourite. What strikes me now is that I didn't really know what the original songs were. The first track on the cassette was a version of the hit 'Angelo' by Brotherhood of Man – already a parody of a sort. 'Angelo' was a song constructed to be as close in feel to the Abba hit 'Fernando' as possible. The Knights' version transposed the Spanish Civil War setting for south London and kitchen-sink romance. Closer to home, but still something I wouldn't have known anything about at the age of ten. Culture spins around on itself, with Ever Decreasing Circles on in the background.
* * *
It's been a long day, so I don't disturb Jon as he meditates staring straight out to sea. I hear it again, the vocal solo of 'The Great Gig in the Sky', but not in my head this time. I move closer to the pavilion and it gets louder.
'Jon!' I hiss. Jon comes over. 'Can you hear that?'
'Hear what?' he says on reflex as he cocks his head to one side.
'Pink Floyd. You can hear that too?'
'Oh, yeah,' he says. 'Must be rehearsals, they're playing tonight. I was saying earlier that it's a shame we can't go, but you looked pretty spaced out. How many painkillers have you taken today?'
'Enough,' I say as I walk off.
* * *
In the kebab shop where Midge decides he must eat is a fruit machine themed around kebab shops. We're stuck in a loop. While I wait for Midge to be fed I scan the selection of tourist leaflets drooping in the window. At least four out of ten of the attractions in some way feature steam engines.
The campsite we find doesn't inspire confidence in me as we park up; it looks too ordered and prone to rules to be comfortable. There's row after row of static caravans with tended gardens around their concrete slab steps. I read something on the gate about a last check-in time, a time we've missed. I'm trying to keep disorganised and calm. Danny needs to sort this out. It's confrontation. It's a confrontation in which he has to essentially prostrate himself and beg to give them money to lie on an empty patch of grass. I waste the time during which he does this by making Midge pose on a giant chessboard on one of the lawns. There are no pieces, we just need another 30 Midges, I tell him, and he's not amused.
* * *
I charm the largely indifferent on-site manager to letting us having a pitch. I rush the tent up and grab my clothes, excited about the prospect of using the washing-machine facilities. Of course they're closed, so dejectedly I lug them back, trying to decide which are the least dirty to put on tomorrow. There's a rash on my inner legs and it's getting worse, becoming sorer by the minute.
* * *
I'm left alone as they both wander across the squared grass of the numbered pitches to the facilities.
It's the first time I've been alone in private since we set off, and I'm halfway through that when the front of the tent sways. I adjust my sleeping bag and suggest we all head off down the hill for a pint.
* * *
We decide to have a little walk to the pub, which Jon assures us is a 'little bit' down the road, but luckily we don't have to walk all the way down to the entrance of the campsite to double back on ourselves, because in the corner of the field is a gate. A sign tells us it is 'locked at 11 p.m. sharp'. It probably isn't, though.
* * *
The first of the pubs we come to looks a little rough from the outside. If it was in a suburb of Birmingham I think I'd be walking past. When you're so much the stranger, though, you are able to assume that you'll be a novelty and not a threat, and so not be in danger of being threatened.
* * *
The pub is a bit of a walk away, and the pain from the rash on my legs has set my senses sharp and bitey. So I see every inch of The Fishing Boat pub; the scuffed brass, the crayon on the table where a kid has been colouring, the fruit machine that is at least three years behind most others. But it's a good place, the crowd friendly and the jukebox a mixture of soul classics and new-wave punk. There are a number of teenagers in the pub, none of them drinking but all of them getting served soft drinks at the bar and being talked to by bartenders, regulars and strangers alike. It's hard to imagine these teenagers going out causing trouble: it takes a village to raise a child; perhaps it takes a pub to raise a teenager?
* * *
Once inside the roughness reveals itself to be nothing but unpretentiousness and homeliness. Random tat adorns the walls and at least six dogs slumber near their owners. The jukebox is frozen out of time and comforts us all with things we wouldn't have put on but are glad to hear. I think I hear a guy at the bar, unkempt but welcome, say 'I live in Norfolk, why would I go anywhere else?'
Indeed, it's warm, and the beer is cheap. Like many before us we sit around a pub table, each doing our backs not much good by leaning over on short stools, and talk of our origin stories. Danny's silhouetted against the glow from a lamp through the window, as he lifts his leg up above the table edge. He hoists a trouser leg.
'Got that falling off my 'blades.'
'Nice,' Midge stutters and removes his cap to scratch the front of his head. He too reveals a mark. 'Came off me bike.'
'Well, you see this.' I rub the bridge of my nose. 'And this,' pointing to the left of my top lip. 'And this… ' I stand and turn, slowly pulling my jacket and T-shirt up my back. 'All the result of getting out of the wrong side of a taxi.' These are the scars I talk about.
* * *
A guy called Patrick is holding court at the bar, talking to everyone who will listen about how he loves camping and how it affords him an escape from people. For someone who needs to get away from people he's awfully keen to engage people in conversation. The pub is traditional, warm and welcoming, like how every chain pub aspires to be. It's hard not to like.
When we get back to the campsite, the gate, true to its word, is locked. But the main entrance is quite far away.
'I can climb that,' I say, having no idea if I can climb it or not, especially after no food and a few pints sloshing through me. I half climb over the gate, swinging my leg round the fence laced with the barbed wire that surrounds it. I feel myself start to fall so style it out as a jump, landing with a thump on the other side. Midge comes next, frankly making it look easy.
'Hang on,' says Jon from the other side. 'Hold this.' I look around and something lands on my head. It's his black Paul Weller/Liam Gallagher jacket.
CHAPTER TEN
SKEGNESS IS MORE
Again I'm awake with the remnants of the summer. It's not too long past five but there's no hope of further rest. It was cold as we clambered through the bushes half-cut last night, so I've slept in a hoody and tracksuit bottoms. Slipping on my pumps, I'm punch-drunk but feeling sporty and the cool damp awakens me.
I start with a jog around the football pitch across the hedge. The sun is red in the sky. I then turn back towards the cliff edge through the camp. Wild rabbits scatter as I plod past along the edge, white tails disappearing under bushes and under caravans. Everything else is still. There's no wind, and looking across the fields there's a game of chess being played on maize and earth.
I'm mentally moving Midge to king's bishop four to put white under press
ure, when a glint of sun blinds me. Then I hit the deck hard, feeling the warm thud of a moving object, the wet grass on my back.
'You nearly went over the edge.'
Looking to my right, I am very close to the drop. To my left is a tall guy. He's lifting himself up and I can't see his face, only his tunic – tunic?
He stands over me and grips my hand in his. I feel the calluses in his palm scrape as he pulls me upright. The movement is swift, powerful, but not angry. I've met this guy before.