Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘There'll be more guests again this summer,’ I remember my mother saying, setting the femurous receiver back on its pelvic cradle and closing her bookings ledger. ‘That extra advertising Mr Broadhurst suggested we do has certainly paid off.’

More guests meant that there was more money; and more money meant better clothes, new caravans for the site and new interior decoration for the bungalow.

Kitchen and carpet were fitted. A central-heating system replaced the gas fires’ bleating and the controlled explosion of the geyser. The winter mornings, when in darkness I would bolt from the warm confinement of my bed to dress in the kitchen, became instant memories. Nostalgia for a simpler, more technically primitive age.

Once the bungalow was vitalised people started to come by for drinks, rather than simply having drinks when they came by. There was also an alteration in the ambit of my mother's socialising, for the drinks people tended to be the parents of my schoolfriends at Varndean Grammar. They were a cut above the shopkeepers and tourism-purveyors that I was used to. Their business was more elevated, further removed from the raw stuff of exchange. Their conversations with my mother referred to a world where the ambiguity of the relationship between value and money was greatly appreciated.

The people who had had drinks when they came by, well, they were a distinctly odder crowd, including Madam Esmerelda, the thyroid case who had the palmist's concession on the Palace Pier. Her boyish friend was an old circus midget called Little Joey, who still wore his stage clothes (‘It's all I have, you see, Sonny Jim, unless I want to wear kids’ gear'), Norfolk jackets in screaming plaid, topped off with a Derby hat. Joey and Esmerelda's talk was colourful, peppered with the showbusiness expressions of an earlier age. It was set against types such as these that Mr Broadhurst was able to insinuate himself into my life, without appearing quite as aberrant as he might otherwise.

I will say one thing for my mother. I will grant her one, severely back-handed compliment. And that is: that as we ascended the greasy pole of English class mobility together, she seldom embarrassed me. For, if her great fault was the almost-sexual intimacy with which she blanketed me in private, her great asset was the preternatural sensitivity she showed towards me in public. She never patronised me or made me jump through the hoops of propriety the way that I saw other children forced to by their parents. Indeed, she treated me with an easy egalitarianism that was far more effective — in terms of my succesful acculturation, that is.

Of course the person we were both really taking instruction from was Mr Broadhurst. It was his long-winded locutions that we both began to ape — never using one word where five would do. And it was his heavy-handed delicacy to which we aspired when our everyday Tupperware was replaced with bone china.

At school things were better for me as well. During my time at Saltdean Primary I had always been subject to the tiny-mindedness of a tiny community. My father's desertion of us was well known and often commented on. No matter that this was without malice, it meant that I felt excluded, cut off, beyond the pale. But at Varndean Grammar no one knew about my father. When I started there I simply lied about him and said that he was dead, which gained me sympathy as well as cloaking me in something like mystery. This, I now know, was a mistake. Perhaps I even realised it as a child, because the lie was supported by my mother; and such complicity was worrying, bizarre even, to a twelve-year-old boy.

Nonetheless it gave me a brief lull, a fall in the feverish temperature of my life which I made full use of. Puberty and individualism don't mix. Running with the pack was something new. Mutually masturbating with skinny-hipped boys and mentally torturing sensitive student teachers, this became my idea of fun, but not for long.

There was one final summer before Mr Broadhurst began to take a more advanced interest in me. A summer when I ran as free with my cousins and the children of my mother's guests as ever before. That was the summer when I first became fully conscious of the arbitrariness of the division between the ‘on’ and the ‘off'; the last summer when I saw the sun twitch away the net curtain of mizzle that hid the mounded Downs and transform the world, so that the sky and the sea defined the land, giving curvature to the earth. The last summer that was acted out in the round.

I showed the guests’ children where to shop for sweets, where to go crabbing, how to get into the Dolphinarium for free. We ranged along the coast from Saltdean to as far as Shoreham. I felt engaged — masterful. Unlike the holidaymakers, this was my burgh, my manor. The tatty holiday glitz was my finery. I knew all the people who ran the amusements and all the roustabouts who worked on them. I could spring on to a dodgem at one side of the rink and proceed to the other by leaping from one rubber-flanged buggy to the next. My little crew would look on amazed.

The one bum note, the one hint that something was changing for me — and mind you, I cannot be sure that this isn't an intimation that belonged to that ultimate off season, the first autumn of my apprenticeship — was my heightened awareness of the very peculiar marginalisation of the Hepplewhite men. These wraithlike uncles of mine, who only came down for the weekend and never stopped for the week, were always ‘stepping outside for a pipe’, or even ‘just stepping outside’ with no explanation. Neither my mother nor my aunts ever enjoined them to ‘take an interest in Ian’. I cannot recall any of them saying, as might have been expected, that I needed a man's influence. Instead it started to dawn on me that this collective silence-about-men, this domination of the Cliff Top sodality, was in some way calculated, a willed silence between the emasculated overture and the powerful first act. The Hepplewhite sisters were preparing me for the stentorian bulky basso of Mr Broadhurst.

Towards the end of that summer the full weight of sexual maturity fell on me, and with it came the hormonal reclamation of the sea. The two formerly separate continents of the ‘on’ and the ‘off’ were reunited into one landmass of vertical concerns: term times and bus times; holiday times and homework times. I became sharply aware of the differences between my boy cousins and my girl cousins. Little furled genitals had long since been buried away under compost clothing, the better to mature there in the dark. I feared they might be gone for the duration.

I cannot explain why that from the off, my sexual feelings were so circumscribed by such awful shame. It made no sense — but it was true. Perhaps it was my chronic lack of male role models. To define myself as a man in relation to my mother and my aunts was an impossibility. Theirs was an unknowable sex, even to look at it was a kind of astronomy, so vast and remote were their bodies. The idea that they could possibly have been banged up by the uncles was flatly preposterous. With the girl cousins and the beach girls it was a different story. There were stirrings and presentiments. I longed, more than anything, to be a pebble or some shingle, pressed beneath those squash buttocks.

If the holidays were sexually perplexing, when term time came I also recoiled from schoolboy smuttiness. I couldn't handle ejaculation as a form of micturation. The ways of looking at the business were stark. Either gonorrhoea, syphilis and non-specific urethritis, explained by Mr Robinson with the new visual aids, or else German porn, bought by the older boys and displayed under desk tops. These pictures, which showed moustached men sinking their pork swords into the wounded abdomens of grimacing uglies, bore no relation to my fantasies, which were chivalrous in the extreme. It may sound pathetic to you, but at that time to be a man was for me to be a Roland or a Blondin. Lute-strumming on a forty-four-date castle tour, content to die for the sake of a radiant eye — let alone a thigh.