Semi-Detached (5 page)

Weston-super-Mare
was a dreary exile. I would have been happy to be fed sweetmeats and get fat in
my grandfather’s fruiterer’s. Instead I was only ever sent once or twice a year
to the limbo where they had elected to wait to die. The bungalow, although new,
was a gloomy mausoleum inside. The net curtains were never drawn. A pallid
light illuminated the heavy brown furniture, the piano, the polished mahogany
table and the Welsh clock that ticked and whirred heavily in the gloom. It was
prison. Granny seemed to have become a little old woman at the earliest
possibility. Grandpa was struggling towards drawing his last agonizing breath,
his lungs filled with coal dust and cigarette smoke. He must have been a strong
man once, but he was bent with arthritis by then. And he struggled to get in
and out of cars. ‘Dew, dew, fucky!’

‘Grandpa!
Children!’

But
movement clearly hurt, so he didn’t move much. Days were often spent just
sitting in the gloom, visited by other decrepit old people like Aunty Betty,
with her fizz of grey curls and currant eyes, and Uncle Jan, whose idea of amusing
children was to let them look at his pocket watch. Most of the games we played
in Midhurst have gone from my memory. I was too engrossed. But the few ‘holidays’
when my parents dumped us at Granny’s, by contrast, are lodged in a yellow
jelly made of furniture polish: the laborious preparation, of tea; the clink of
cutlery against a plate; the shuffling feet in the corridor; the endless, inert
waiting. It was the antithesis of life. I have been left with a horror and impatience
for the petty rituals of home ever since. Nobody goes off to change their shoes
‘for going out’ when I’m around. We were by the seaside, but we only went to
the front on special days, and anyway, when we got there, the water had
inevitably gone into retirement too, disappearing miles out into the Bristol
Channel, way beyond the end of the mile-long pier. So we had to sit and wait
for that as well. Most days we were pushed into the deadly boring strip of
garden for the morning, as long as we behaved quietly, with the shed smelling
of creosote, the hybrid roses in the yellow clay soil, the cement paviours
along the side of the house where snails faced lingering, fizzy death from my
grandfather’s salt attacks. Our main entertainment was running down to the
embankment at the bottom of the garden and waving madly at the trains.
Sometimes the passengers could be induced to wave back.

Driving
to Weston-super-Mare in September
2005, I
found myself wondering whether
anything would have survived to fire up any memories. Had the approaches been
as slatternly then as they are now? There were so many signposts and safety
instructions winking in the sharp autumn light, I feared that the
Weston-super-Mare I had known had probably been swept away by a quango.

‘We
have to find the floral clock,’ I told Jo. ‘That, Timothy White’s and the trains
are all I remember about the centre of the town, and I presume the others have
gone.’

It had
been that dull. The floral clock was considered a form of light entertainment.
The big minute hand would judder its way through the rockery plants and a bird
would pop out with a wheezy ‘cuckoo’. If we arrived ten minutes early Granny
and Grandpa seemed perfectly happy to sit and wait expectantly for the hour.

To give
it its due, the centre seemed a glamorous destination then, if only by
comparison with the bungalow I remembered a Lubitsch-like prosperity: dark,
shiny shop fronts, window displays and discreet red and dark green liveries.

Now we
parked in a cleared lot. It was one of many A single Regency building stood
marooned in the asphalt with a boxer dog roaming its fenced roof. It sported a
big sign:

‘Biker-Friendly’.

The old
lady in the car next door decided that the floral clock had’ probably gone. ‘Weston’s
not what it was, no, it’s not.’ I liked her Somerset emphasis. It wasn’t. After
a foul seventies shopping development — ‘Multi Value’ — and a set of flats that
tried to define the word ‘block’, we walked past another empty lot facing
directly out on to the promenade.

But not
all of it. ‘Look up there!’ In front of us was a neat populated hillside closing
off the bay ‘I don’t remember that elegance at all.’ But I did suddenly
remember the Winter Gardens, where we used to go for tea, just past the pier.

It is a
conference centre now, next to the Wonky Donkey gift shop, but still a noble
seaside building. The manager showed us round. We went into the main ballroom.
It had a wooden sprung parquet floor and a raised balcony running right around
it. Here the tables used to be laid with superconductor silvery metal tea
pots, too hot to be poured except with asbestos gloves, and ice cream scoops
that you chased around those metal bowls on stalks.

‘The
Beatles played here,’ the manager told us proudly, but I was equally affected
by the poster outside which announced that Robert Pratt and Mark Howes, in
association with Derek Franks, were about to present ‘the Troggs, P.J. Proby,
Herman’s Hermits and the Ivy League’ on their fortieth-anniversary tour. God, I’d
like to have been there for that.

I ache
for proper British seaside. I even associate it with proper British pop. After
all, Herman’s Hermits, Dave Clark and the Beatles always ended up looning
around at the seaside in their films didn’t they? When we were taken off on our
middle-class holidays on our middle-class sailing boats, we kids had to
solemnly negotiate with my father for R&R days in Walton-on-the-Naze. I
loved the pier and the crowds. The Mighty Waltzer on Walton pier was a shocker.
It still is and, as a fifty-year-old piece of machinery, is genuinely scary now
At seven I became enormously excited by the posters advertising the arrival of
the secret
Daily Mirror
man in a trilby ‘He will be in this town on
Tuesday.’ This was real intrigue.

Once we
stumbled on the
Radio One Roadshow
on the beach and glimpsed Pete Murray
on a big temporary stage. (I saw him stand in the wings and say in a different
voice, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, give a big hand for Pete Murray,’ before walking
straight on to a big round.) We were deprived children. I wanted to be inside
the barbed wire surrounding the famous Butlins in Clacton, spending all day on
free rides, instead of having to listen to my father making jokes about
prisoner-of-war camps on the pebbles outside. You could get vouchers for
Butlins worth three pounds in the
Hotspur.
Unlike where we lived, the
seaside was cosmopolitan. I still visit resorts now, whenever I can, with an
unhealthy addiction to their melancholy ‘Strangers on the Shore’, the Acker
Bilk clarinet theme, starts playing in my head. It was one of our first
forty-fives, with a holly-green label. The television show opened with that
shot of a beach, and that mournful tootling. It was the theme.

Weston
was proving a marvellous dose of decrepitude for me, a proper husk. ‘My sister
used to dance on this floor!’ I pointed at the parquet.

‘Mmm,’
said my wife. ‘Can we get lunch near here?’

The
manager pursed his lips. ‘What sort of lunch?’ He looked doubtful.

‘She
would run down the stairs there. There would have been an orchestra. We must
have danced here together, my sister and I, just to ingratiate ourselves with
the old people. “Ah, there’s lovely!”‘

Before
we left the Winter Gardens I peered closely at some blown-up sepia photographs
of Weston in its flouncy prime. Surely it was, historically, as important as
nearby Tyntesfield House, which had been saved for the nation at the cost of a
small fighter plane, except that, instead of being the private playground of
some fertilizer manufacturer, Weston was the playground of huge numbers of
factory workers from Birmingham and Cardiff, who effectively built the place
out of their wages following the Bank Holiday Act of 1871.

I
pieced together the grains of the lumpy, blown-up gelatine and suddenly
thought I identified some donkey carts, which had operated near the pier. A
parking attendant confirmed my detective work. ‘That’s right, he said as I
nodded proudly ‘They had a stagecoach and a train and a space rocket.’

I was
pleased with myself. This had made the whole trip worthwhile. I distinctly
remembered the hard, red-painted seats and the complicated clip door on the
space rocket, a Flash Gordon affair, pointing upwards at a forty-five-degree
angle. And, yes, it was slightly incongruously drawn by a donkey. That didn’t
matter to us. You had to jump in quickly before other kids took all the places.
‘And look!’ I had made another archaeological find in the sandy valley There
was the oval pool for sailing boats, still there in the middle of the beach,
still filled by every rising tide, where I launched one of those bright red
miniature yachts with the woolly sails and the figure-of-eight cleats that,
astonishingly, sailed very well, and which, even more astonishingly, you can
still buy.

But
most of all I suddenly got flooded with a vision, of a sea swimming pool. It
was somewhere along the front. I trotted off in search of a blinding snowy
light, reflecting off the cream-painted walls of the lido, and the bright blue
tiles of the pool itself. Was it still there?

It was
boarded up now, behind a green-painted hoarding. Inside, someone was pumping
water through a pipe into the main sewer, but I couldn’t find a
way in,
so I went around the side, and found a set of steps down to the beach and a
rusty side entrance.

‘Look
at this,’ I grumbled to Jo, moving away some temporary barriers. ‘They’ve
tried to stop us getting down there.’

But in
fact they’d just built new steps. I put my hand on the rail and covered it with
an orange tar that took six days to get rid of.

But I
still lay on the sand and peered under the rusted gate. The great parabola of
the diving boards, the nose of the place, had been surgically removed. Not a
trace remained, but I could just see, over in the corner, beyond the sweep of
the cracked plain of pavement, which I was now looking across from a child’s
viewpoint, the wedding cake structure of the fountain. That fountain had been
the essence of a trip to the pool. It was white on the outside and seaside blue
inside, with a rough-finished non-slip circular lip. It had a scrapey surface,
and my sister, who used to wear a ruched pale-blue swimming costume, would
clamber through a sheet of falling water holding hands with me until we were
inside, splashing in the shallow blue pool and looking out on the Technicolor
world through a water lens.

‘There’s
a plan to revive the place as a
Caribbean Paradise Disco Resort,’ the
car park attendant explained.

And
that was that: the fountain, the mini-stagecoach and the concrete pond in the
sand. All brought back to the frontal lobes. Later, in the interests of further
research, I directed my wife through the back streets to where the houses
backed on to the railway, to Coleridge Road.

‘This
seems to be some sort of sink estate,’ she said, but we came round the bend and
there were some houses with peculiar second floors built into mansard roofs. ‘Stop.
This could be it,’ I commanded.

‘I
thought it was a bungalow’

‘Yes,
but these places were once bungalows. I’m sure of it. Look, they must have
built these silky roofs on later. That’s exactly the same crusty grey
pebble-dash. Those are the concrete slabs of the path round the side. And look.
I remember those prefab garages.

I rang
my mother. ‘I can’t remember the name of the street,’ she said. ‘My memory is
going for all that sort of thing. Anyway,’ she went on, remembering after all, ‘I
was never there for more than half an hour. We’d dump you lot and high-tail out
of it.’

‘Where
were you going?’ I sounded abandoned.

‘Oh,
just off on holiday without you for a change.’

‘Oh.
Well, this is where you dumped us.’

‘No, it
wasn’t.’ She remembered more. ‘It was a cul-de-sac.’

‘They
probably extended the road later.’ I took a last look at the horrid little
house we used to hate.

When we
were back on the motorway my mother rang back. ‘It was Brewster something. I’ve
just remembered. Brewster Road, or Close. You see, my memory isn’t so bad.’

We’d
been nowhere near.

3. All About Me

Between attempts to
prostrate my poor mother by ‘disappearing’ in public places and ‘appearing’ in
even more public places, I was gaining a reputation as a forward child: cheeky,
of a ‘sunny disposition’ and a nuisance, sniffing out the advantages of my
position. I was one year ahead of the vulnerable, girly baby, Helen, and three
years behind the aged William. He had to take responsibility for all three
children, the dignity of the entire family, and the duty of carrying dicta to
elderly relatives, while, as ‘Griffith, Griffith Bach’, I was allowed to simper
and wriggle.

‘Don’t
shift the blame on to Griff, you’re the oldest.’

‘You
can stay behind and help your father … because you’re the oldest.’

He was
also the biggest, so he could hurt me. His function, apart from absorbing
parental flak, of course, was to act as a mobile punch bag.