Neil Hanson - Wish You Were Here! - The Lives, Loves and Friendships of the Butlin's Girls

Despite the weather, they had all loved their first holiday at Butlin’s – so much so that before they left to go home they all said: ‘We’re definitely coming back, and what’s more, we’re going to have two weeks next year.’ So as soon as they got home, they booked the next year’s holiday and began saving for it straight away. By the time the second year came round they all had steady boyfriends, and Hilary was actually about to get engaged to hers – a boy called Dave – but nothing, not even that, was going to get in the way of her holiday, so she took a deep breath and said to him: ‘All of the girls are going on holiday together. We booked it a year ago and even though I’m going to be getting engaged to you, I’m still going on holiday with them, without you.’

She’s still not sure what she would have done next if he’d said that he didn’t want her to go, but he just shrugged and said, ‘Okay,’ so that was that.

That second year, 1958, there were twice as many of them: eight girls, four to a chalet. The camp was packed with crowds of people all having a good time, and as they strolled around, the group of girls met up with gangs of boys and chatted and flirted with them, and then went dancing in the ballroom every night. Even though none of the girls really drank, they would still call in at Ye Olde Pigge and Whistle early in the evening. The bar was huge and had a fake tree in the middle of the room and a half-timbered, mock-Tudor ‘street’ down one side, with the ‘windows’ opening onto the bar. It was just as bizarre as it sounds! They’d stop in there for a little while, chat to the boys and have a soft drink, and then they’d go to the ballroom. They would still be there, dancing away, when the boys all came through after the bars had shut, and then they’d be dancing with them and generally having a good time until the ballroom closed down for the night.

One night they were chatting to a group of boys, and one of them was a real joker. He wasn’t tall or short, broad or skinny, or particularly handsome, but he stood out from the crowd and Hilary can still clearly remember him. This lad was asking Hilary what she thought she was going to do with her life when one of her friends butted in and said: ‘Don’t bother asking her. It’s too late for her, she’s already spoken for. She’s getting engaged when we go home.’

He just looked Hilary straight in the eye and said, ‘It’s never too late, until you’re standing at the altar in front of that man with his collar on back to front, saying “I will”.’

She just laughed at the time and thought no more about it, but when she got home, what he’d said kept coming back into her mind. She did get engaged to Dave and, as girls did in those days, she began saving and putting things away for her ‘bottom drawer’. She might buy a pillow case one week, a towel the next and a saucepan the following week, and put them all away in the bottom drawer of her dressing table, ready for when they set up home together. ‘It was how people did it in those days,’ Hilary says. ‘You had to save for everything and buy it a bit at a time, whereas now people just go and buy what they need on credit, all in one go.’

At that point in her life, Hilary could easily have gone ahead and got married, and would probably have had a child before she was twenty, but she went to the cinema with Dave one night and there was a travel documentary showing, the short film they always put on before the main feature. ‘Usually I was bored to death with them,’ she says, ‘but this time, as I was watching this film showing all these exotic places in different parts of the world, I thought to myself: you’re only eighteen, and there’s a whole world out there you haven’t seen and know nothing about. There and then I decided that I was too young to get married and wanted to see a bit more of life before I was ready to settle down, so I broke off the engagement with Dave straight away. He was a lovely lad and he took it very well. I mean, he was upset at first – we both were – but I was sure I’d made the right decision and I didn’t go back on it.’

Hilary went back to going dancing every night with her friends and was really enjoying herself. None of them were engaged or married, or even going particularly steady with anyone, so, still inspired by that short film she’d seen, Hilary said to them: ‘Why don’t we all go off somewhere together, like Australia, or Canada, or anywhere, really? There’s got to be more to life than we’ve seen so far. Let’s go and find out what we’ve been missing!’

It wasn’t that she was unhappy at home; she had a very happy home life. Her parents had just moved from the back-to-back terraced house she’d grown up in to a new house on an estate called Holmewood. ‘It’s not got a good reputation these days,’ she says, ‘but when they moved in there, just after it was built, it was wonderful. It had a bathroom and all the mod cons that we’d not had before.’ So her life was comfortable, she was happy enough and not short of anything, but she just felt that she wanted to do something else and see more of the world than Bradford.

So in early 1960 Hilary and her three closest friends made up their minds that, yes, they’d go off somewhere together and have an adventure! Based on little more than the fact that it had looked beautiful and very different from Bradford on the travel documentary Hilary had seen, they decided they would all go to Canada, so they applied for visas, got all the forms and filled them in. However, a couple of the girls then started to get cold feet, and the other one started going out with a boy and didn’t want to leave him, so in the end Hilary was the only one ready to go. She didn’t feel let down or fall out with the girls about it – ‘They were very good friends to me then, and I’m still friends with them over fifty years later. I go on a night out with them all every now and again, and two of them still live in the same village as me now’ – and it didn’t shake her own determination to do something different before she settled down.

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