by Jon Bounds
The second-longest pier in the UK and the oldest iron pier in the country. Unusually, it wasn't sectioned during World War Two but it was closed to the public so that searchlights could be installed to protect the industrial towns nearby.
A high-diver calling himself 'Professor' Bert Powsey often dived off the pier, a brave feat not so much because of the height but more for the lack of much water in the sea.
In the old-fashioned, penny-arcade amusements at the end of the pier is an automated doll labelled 'Have a laugh with Jolly Jack', which has been described as 'by far one of the creepiest things I've ever encountered' by one visitor.
Just outside there is yet another street named after Queen Victoria. She and her intimately pierced Prince Consort are huge presences in our coastal towns. Is that because the idea of the seaside as a resort blossomed – like the trains – under her reign? Was she truly inspirational, or just in the right place at the right time?
I'm waiting to meet Roy, a guy who made contact when we started talking about this whole thing on the Internet. He's a writer, psychogeographer and photographer with an interest in piers. And he offered to show us around the town. I don't know what he looks like, but – sitting at the table outside in the cold, fiddling with my phone in the hope of solace or entertainment – I'm sure I will recognise him.
* * *
Having texted Jon on the journey back, I meet him, Midge and Roy at the front of the pier.
'Did you see the penny arcade at the end?' I ask Jon.
'Nah, we only got halfway up and got bored.'
* * *
Meeting people from the Internet is weird, but less so – you may think – than being thrown together by accident of work or birth. It's certainly hard to start with, though, as you have common interests but no common experiences. Overcoming a lack of common experience is what the platitudes are for.
Roy says: 'Do you fancy going to the smallest pub in England?'
Of course we do.
* * *
We walk along the seafront with Roy. Along with the pier, it's recently gone through a £23m redevelopment, so it's all white stone and smooth concrete. Roy tells us that he works for the student liaison office at Edge Hill University near Liverpool. Because of a record amount of students starting that September, Roy arranged for the excess students without accommodation to be put up in a couple of chalet blocks at Pontins. We tell him that we are to stay there that night and he promises to put something up on their Facebook group page.
* * *
The Lakeside Inn is 22 feet by 16 feet and is licensed to hold up to 50 people. For a weekday afternoon the wooden-boathouse or cricket-pavilion type place is pretty full – 50 people would be a standing-room-only party. There are about four or five groups dotted around and none are obviously tourists. It's good to talk to someone who isn't us, even if right now it is about piers.
* * *
England's smallest pub is quite small. Midge looks it up and down.
'I've seen smaller,' he says dismissively, probably forgetting that normal-sized humans are probably not allowed in the Borrower pubs he normally frequents. We sit in the corner. Wherever you sit in the Lakeside Inn you're actually in a corner. We sit patiently waiting for the barmaids to notice us, which in a pub this size shouldn't be long at all.
'Well, we can go to Asda and do a big shop if you… Oh, hello lads, what'll it be?' asks the older lady with frizzy, hennaed hair. Roy orders a bitter. He's a man who's difficult to age really. His hair has a little grey, his glasses are Jasper Conrad, and the day we meet him he is wearing a navy-blue windbreaker with red tartan lining.
* * *
We go off to another bar – via me buying a new black notebook (soft cover, faint lines) in Waterstones. Roy knew the importance of my noting equipment, and knew just where to get what I needed. In certain circles – ours – the notebook becomes like a drug ritual or a magic spell. I celebrate by attempting to sharpen my pencil in the toilet of the bar. The Inn Beer Shop is set in a row of shops hooded by a pavilion-style canopy. It has a shopping-arcade concept and a sort of mock-Tudor vibe. It's a tight alley of bottles, an off-licence. But there are small tables and as you approach the counter, a couple of beer pumps rather than a selection of chocolate bars. It's bright, but decorated in a style that fades. The clientele are exactly those you'd expect to be drinking in an off-licence at about noon, most plumping for the scrumpy that is served from a plastic keg balanced behind the bar. We're like that too. We've got the air of itinerants, of day-drinkers, of a furry-yeasty fug replacing a layer of aloofness. We'll talk and drink, as we've nothing else to do.
* * *
The next place is an 'outdoor', a word unique to people from the Midlands. It means 'off-licence' and comes from the door in a pub where they used to sell beer for taking away. Anyway, this is a specialist-beer off-licence, mostly European bottled beer, but out the back are a few small tables and a couple of taps.
* * *
I pick a strong lager from the fridge and settle in the corner under a – slightly askew – picture of young Elvis. He tells me not to give up.
* * *
Blue Hawaii Elvis grins down from a vintage-advertisement display. Jon at this point only has to gesture at it for me to know its significance. Hawaiian Elvis is my favourite Elvis, while white-jumpsuit Elvis is Jon's. As we acknowledge its presence, 'Blue Suede Shoes' fizzes from the buzzing meshed speaker overhead.
* * *
We venture off again to a hotel basement. It's dark and full of bodies in the early afternoon. Red carpet swirls, coats of arms and suits of armour. Fortified against attack and holding out against despair. I go to the bar, then swerve and spill the sticky beer – some local, strong concoction, our guide reveals – towards the back of the room, scooping three pint glasses in my fingers and holding them out front like an unstable flag to my vintage motorcar. I reach them in an alcove, Roy on a wooden seat with decorative flourishes, which is raised higher than Danny's more usual pub chair. After distributing the drinks, I pull out a padded stool and step over to sit. The older man is talking and Danny is listening.
We toast with sweet pints in handled glasses. And then we leave, squinting into the hazy afternoon sun and not quite at right angles to reality.
* * *
I know we go to two more pubs because their names are in my notebook. I don't remember them or saying goodbye to Roy. But I bet there were hugs involved.
* * *
Midge is parked in the Clio on double-yellow lines outside. He drives us disapprovingly, but swiftly, into the camp, where we're waved in without question by the guys posted at the gatehouse.
The layout is imprinted on our minds like it is part of a former life. We know where to leave our carriage, how to announce our arrival and how to navigate to our rooms. A huge draughty place, it has never felt in the best of repair, but something about how it looks exactly the same as it always has suddenly makes it darker. A holiday camp is cut off from the outside world as surely as a valley with its own microclimate is safe from evolution or nuclear fallout. It's a Pimlico or Grand Fenwick, a bubble-preserved enclave of the sixties and seventies, and it now therefore seems even further adrift in time.
* * *
Fred Pontin started building his resorts in 1946, ten years or so after Billy Butlin started building his. I don't know if his intention was to cater for the lower working class that couldn't quite afford Butlin's camps but that's what happened. My whole family would go to Pontins. We would book out two or three chalet blocks and everyone related to my nan or even in her orbit would go to Southport for two weeks in the summer. Even my uncle would pile four or five of his mates into a room (a practice strictly forbidden by Pontins) and drink for two weeks straight. It was awkward for me. I wasn't quite old enough to drink, something that the adults did almost to the exclusion of all else. I was too teenage to enjoy the family-orientated games, and decidedly too old to be part of the children's games.
The
children were partly looked after by a group of bluecoats, the bluecoats being the performers/entertainment staff that were not at all a rip-off of Billy Butlin's redcoats. They ran games, treasure hunts and activities. And every night around nine they would be joined in dance and song by Captain Crocodile himself, before leading the kids out of the main ballroom to 'The Crocodile March'. A great way of delineating the night between children and adult time. Most of the babies and kids would be put to bed by one of the adults and left on their own. Every half an hour a bluecoat would walk around the aisles and if they heard crying from your chalet they would put your block and chalet number on a board to the right of the stage. The first few times I went to a proper church and saw the hymn order to the side of the pulpit I wondered why nobody was going to sort out those kids.
My brother loved the Crocodile Club and to this day can sing 'The Crocodile March'. Me, not so much. I would spend my holidays being snuck into the adult events sipping beer and watching the darts exhibition matches (according to family lore, my nan beat Bobby George once), or reading comics.
There were three or four Pontins sites our family tended to visit, but the one we went to the most was Southport. I can see the playground now where I spent the majority of my time, and most of the landmarks are in the same places. In fact the only concession to time that I can see are a series of branded characters. To complement Captain Crocodile, there's a sassy zebra, some sort of bird, and a man with upbeat hair. The thing is, they haven't removed a lot of the old branding or signage and even though the font colours and style of illustration are similar, it isn't exactly the same. Pontins went into administration just a few months ago and it seems it has no idea who it is or where it's going any more.
* * *
Rows of boxy two-tier rooms, each identically pebble-dashed and greyingly whitewashed, surround squares of grass all facing inwards. The grass is just too long to be anything but permanently damp and the paths in front of each row are religiously stuck to. When you stay in a holiday camp you spend a lot of time in confusion: come round the corner into a square and you're convinced it's yours, and you walk round the edges looking at numbers which have no real pattern. You have to get out of the squares to get a bearing, then dive between the corner gaps of the next 'right one'. We're on the top row, in one corner. There's hardly a soul here.
* * *
We grab what we need from the car and pile into chalet 104. I bagsy the shower first and flick the hot-water switch while Jon puts up a huge Cuban flag in the window. I throw the styrofoam head I have acquired from a skip at Midge and proceed to wield one of the wardrobe rails as a sword while I open the first bottle of shampagne. We turn the TV on. As kids, both me and Jon remember PTV, a station for the camp which shows the schedule for that day, what to look forward to in the week and, as the technology developed, highlights of yesterday's activities. Switching around the channels we find it, slightly off tune, and looping the same 15 minutes over and over again. It lacks the tacky warmth we remember, looking now more like an emergency broadcast by a cheerful dystopian cult after a nuclear detonation.
* * *
We spread out in our chalet, turning the telly and the hot water on. Along with the simple pleasures of having switches that do more than unlock car doors, it's a joy to have even the most basic of home comforts. We're happy and boisterous. Dan's running around with his shirt off talking loudly and constantly. Even Midge seems to have one of his happier-looking bemused smiles on.
The carpet is worn to a shine in places and the fresh double glazing is only on the front of the huts, but it's a comforting home. Bathroom, kitchen area and one bedroom with twin beds. There's a festive atmosphere too, forced through the closedcircuit fuzz of Pontins Television. It announces that we're already missing bingo.
But suddenly there's water everywhere, and a dark mood descends.
* * *
'Err, guys, we may have a problem,' I shout. Midge and Jon come in and see the water coming from a missing section of pipe in the cupboard behind the sink.
'Shit,' says Jon going back to the living room.
'Well, standing there laughing isn't helping. Do something,' says Midge, seemingly quite worried.
'Like what? I'm not a plumber.'
'I'm not a gynaecologist,' shouts Jon automatically from the living room.
'But I'll have a look,' we finish in unison.
'Stick your finger in it,' says Midge.
'That's the spirit,' shouts Jon.
'No, the pipe, to stop the water.'
'Balls to that, you stick your finger in,' I say. Midge sighs and sticks his finger in the hole. I shout to Jon to take the flag down while I go find someone.
I grab one of the building supervisors who is walking around talking into a radio. After he turns the water off he tells us he's going to find us another chalet. Twenty minutes later he comes back and tells us to go to 120. It's the next block over so we grab what stuff we can and go over to 120. I see movement through the large single pane of glass. I knock and a small Welshman answers.
'Hello?' He sees me, half-pissed and grinning at the insanity of the situation, clutching a bottle of Asda's own champagne, and then he looks at Midge, smiling but worried behind me, carrying his sleeping bag.
'Hi, our chalet had a leak so we've been sent to this one as a replacement,' I say smiling. He says nothing for a while.
'Oh,' he says.
'But it looks like you're using this one – I don't suppose you want us sharing? We're very nice.'
'No, we're all right, thank you,' says the man.
'Okay, we're going to sort it out now. Goodbye.'
'Goodbye,' says the Welshman.
Luckily another guy with a walkie-talkie is passing by. He looks at us standing there with our gear around our feet. He rolls his eyes. He takes us to 140 but this time I make him wait there while I check it's a) not occupied and b) has hot water. It does meet these very meagre requirements so I grab the guys and the rest of the stuff. Once settled, I open the second bottle by way of celebration.
* * *
'I wanted this to be good.'
Dan is frustrated.
Wind hums through the bathroom window like a hospital harmonica.
There has been a guy on a plastic school chair smoking outside chalet 106 since we first got here this morning. He's still going, puffing and staring in his shirtsleeves, as we head out for an evening's entertainment.
* * *
The chalets were sparse 30 years ago when they were new, but now they're positively threadbare. All the paintwork needs repainting, the carpets have bald patches and the furniture is mismatched. Although everything is very clean, it feels broken, like the set of an Eastern European film about cat AIDS. But these are the back blocks; the ones nearer the front, including the ones the students are using, have apparently been renovated – new furniture, double glazing, and new bathrooms fitted. To us, though, it was high luxury, like having a tent you can stand up in, or not needing to walk across a field to shower.
We arrive in the main ballroom for the evening's entertainment, to find it completely decked out in Christmas decorations: lights, tinsel and, on the stage, a plastic tree with fake gifts that all have tiny tears where the children have had a peek at what's inside. We choose a table in the middle. All the good tables, of course, will have been reserved with coats and bags when the room opened earlier in the day, and periodically checked up on by a series of people from within each group. I got paid 50p and a coke if I looked after the seats when I was a teenager. Seeing as I'd probably only be reading comics on the adventure playground or wandering around the arcade anyway, it was a bargain.
There is a Christmas quiz going on, as if a Christmas quiz is an actual thing that exists anywhere other than here. The room is half full or, as the new owners of Pontins would see it, half empty. All the families are hunched around the tables whispering about the answers, well the men are anyway, barely looking up to grab their pints, while the w
omen sip at vodka and cokes, half-watching their kids running up and down and skidding on their knees on the polished floor.
* * *
Tinsel is draped flaccidly over the bar. It's summer. Apparently Morris dancers have decided that it should be Christmas every week – a pagan spell against the turning of time. Summer can't end if it's never summer and always Christmas. We celebrate with three pints of Carlsberg.
