Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Old Sidney had had four daughters, all of whom had married wispy and ineffectual men. The whole bunch, aunts, their men-folk and assorted cousins, descended on Cliff Top every year for their two weeks of holiday. Indeed, in the early seventies during the worst of the slump, when even ordinary working-class families were all bound for the Med, I think it may have been my aunts’ custom that really kept my mother's business afloat. I can remember muttered discussions at night in serious, adult tones:

‘What would you do without us then, Dawn?’

‘Aye, what would y'do? You'd be on your uppers, lass, with Derek all gone to pieces, like — and that tubby brat of yours gobbling owt in sight.’

The aunts were like caricatures of my mother, such was the family resemblance. While Avril may have been thicker in the waist than Dawn, and Yvonne was perhaps prettier than May, all four of them had the same broad, sincere faces, chestnut eyes and mousy hair. They also painted their faces up in the same naive manner, adding cupid bows of lipstick to the powdered flesh above their lips.

It was like having one big four-headed Mummy when the aunts were in residence. They gathered us up in a giggling ball of blood-relatedness. During the off season my mother's smothering affection was often cold-tempered by financial chills — she would snap at me, deny me love and withdraw the physical affection I craved. During the winter I sometimes became the failed husband she had, rather than the demon lover she had always desired.

But each summer it all came right again. She would lie around with her sisters drinking beer, eating scallops, whelks, mussels and cockles. They would all smack their lips — sometimes in unison. Whenever a child got near enough to this recumbent maternal gaggle it would be grabbed and kissed, or raspberries would be blown on kid flesh, sticky with ice-cream and gritty with sand.

When the aunts and cousins were in residence I ran free. Together with my cousins I would plunge down the steep steps to the rocky beach. Then we would make our way along the undercliff walk to Brighton where we would ride on Volks Electric Railway, or play crazy golf, or thud along the warm boards of the West Pier. In the pier arcades, antiquated mechanical Victorian tableaux were still in place. These were cabinets, in which six-inch-high painted figures, animated by a heavy penny, would jerkily reenact the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, or the hanging of Doctor Crippen. The shingled beaches along the front at Brighton rattled and crunched with the exertions of many thousands of rubber souls. There were motor launches, rentable for a shilling's cruising on the oblong lagoons beneath the esplanade at Hove. Further along still, towards the ultima Thule of Shoreham, there were the salt-water baths of the King Alfred Centre. My favourite, situated as if in open defiance of the laws of nature, up a steep, magnolia-tiled stairway.

We would often stay out until way past dark.

The scents of piss and soap, blown around the concrete floor of the shower block. A thin man — possibly an uncle — braces down his back, shaving in the chipped mirror. The moles on his shoulders are bright pink in the wash of morning sunlight and he accompanies himself with a rhythmic little ditty, ‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ the emphasis always on the last ’cha’, Gulls are squawking overhead. While along the horizon a freighter weeping rust proceeds jerkily, as if it were just a larger version of the plaster ducks in the shooting gallery on the Palace Pier. In this sharpened past I'm always sinking my mouth in my mother's hair, which is frazzled by her accumulated sexual charge. It's sweet, undulant, as sticky as candyfloss. You get the picture. Mine was a childhood that was sufficiently problematic to make me interesting, but not enough to disturb. The on season, that is.

I was about eleven when Mr Broadhurst came to live at Cliff Top. I had passed the eleven-plus and was shortly to become indentured to Varndean Grammar. This would mean an eight-mile round-trip every day to the outskirts of Brighton. To celebrate the result, Mum had bought me a new briefcase of blue canvas and black vinyl, and stocked it with a tin-boxed Oxford Geometry Kit and plastic-backed exercise books. I was carrying this self-importantly around the caravan park, very conscious of the interplay of my feelings: the adoption of the correct professional stance when holding the briefcase and the sense of foreboding I always had, standing on the verge of the off season.

Under quickstepping clouds, a chorus line of nimbus, the Downs, the cliffs and the sea form a frame within which to direct fresh action. In the clear air the resort towns are strewn over the land, each pocket-sized manse perfectly visible. I watch, playing with my sense of scale, as toy cars, each one a different colour, process along the coastal road.

Then a schoolfriend's dad, Mr Gardiner, pulled off the coast road and drove his bulbous black truck down the thirty yards of track leading to the caravan park and into actual size. I stood against the wall of the bungalow, my plump palms wedged between buttock and pebbledash, while Mr Gardiner talked to my mum. Then I accompanied him as he backed his truck between the caravans, down to the cliff edge.

‘You did all right in the exam then?’ he said, shouting over the banging engine.

‘Yes, I did,’ I replied brightly, anticipating more praise to add to my aunts’ and cousins’.

‘Well then, you'll be off to Varndean with the other smartarses.’ Too late I remembered just how thick Dick Gardiner was. But I swallowed my humiliation and helped his father position the big metal hooks under the base of one of the caravans.

‘I'm having this one,’ he said. He was poking around inside it. He sat down on the boxed-in bed, squashing the foam mattress pancake flat, and fiddled aggressively with the dwarfish kitchenette appliances. ‘Not that it's worth eff-all, mind. I'm just gonna put it on blocks in the garden. I'll use it to store tools.’ He stood and the caravan rocked on its defunct wheels. Mr Gardiner was larded with avoirdupois. His breasts bulged out on either side of the bib of his overall, as if it were a garment specially devised to enhance his womanliness. He poked his finger along the top seam of the caravan. ‘Mind you, I'll have to put a deal of work into it. I reckon I'm doing your mother a favour just by takin’ the thing away. Look — look here.’ He had been addressing me via the mini-dormer, but now I stepped inside the fibreglass cabin.

‘See that?’ His digit had dislodged a wet gobbet from the ceiling. ‘I'll have to get busy with me mastic. Frankly it's a wonder your mother gets anyone to rent these things — they're probably infested.’

After that he wouldn't talk, he just hitched the caravan up and made ready to drive off. He was already in gear when I chimed up, ‘But what's going to happen, Mr Gardiner, with the van gone?’ It would be like a gap in a full set of dentures.

‘Well. . ‘ He rounded on me. His face was mottled with prejudice, smeared with bigotry. ‘Your mum's got a new lodger coming. That's what she says. An off-season lodger, and guess what — he's got his own caravan!’

His own caravan. The very idea sent me into a lather of expectation. I tottered on the turf, the gulls screamed at each other over my head. Mr Gardiner was grinding his way back to the road, but he took time out to shout back at me, ‘Fucking gyppo!’ I couldn't work out whether he was still angry with me, or whether he was referring to the new lodger, the mysterious man who had his own caravan.