Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Mr Broadhurst had quickly settled into a routine at Cliff Top. Which is, of course, the way to become a fixture. He had signed up to do voluntary work at St Dunstan's, the blind home, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. First thing in the morning, he walked to the shops in Saltdean to get his shopping and his newspaper. I would often meet him there, as I came out of the sweet shop fondling a paper bag full of gonad bonbons with the fingers of an aspirant sensualist.

‘Ah! The young Rosicrucian.’ Although his voice was pitched normally I was always aware of the distant booming of riverine surf. ‘With a sack of sweetmeats — may I?’ He would take one with fingers rendered all the more queerly huge for their precision and dexterity.

On Sunday afternoons he would come to tea, and he and my mother would talk of people they had known back in Yorkshire. From this much at least I gathered that Mr Broadhurst had been a friend of the Hepplewhites for many years. He also condescended to help me with my homework. On the arts and humanities subjects he was vague and often out of sorts with my textbooks. But in maths and the sciences he was an adept if overbearing didact. Maths in particular he excelled at; he called it his ‘favourite subject’. And it was by tutoring me in maths that he first gained a toehold on my mind.

One Sunday a month Mr Broadhurst would take my mother and I to the Sally Lunn, an old-fashioned tea shoppe in Rottingdean where they served an eponymous tea-cake of which the three of us were especially fond. Mr Broadhurst could eat as many as thirty of these ‘Sally Lunns’ at a sitting. He mounded so much honey on top of the buns that they looked like miniature stupas. Truly he was a big pale Sambo.

I can see the Sally Lunn now. In a small whitewashed room with a dark beeswaxed floor, lobster pots, nets, glass floats and other marine decorations are hanging about the walls. Mr Broadhurst and my mother are chatting about this and that, nothing of consequence, prospects for the on season, a fourteen-year-old Saltdean girl who was having an abortion (they are euphemising but I get the drift). On this particular Sunday Mr Broadhurst looked up from his piled plate and scrutinised the tea shoppe. Examined it critically as if seeing it clearly for the first time.

‘D'ye know, Dawn,’ he said, ‘I don't think this place has changed much since I used to come here regularly, and that must have been before the Great War.’

My mother didn't seem to register the significance of this statement, but it stuck with me. Later, when we were heading home through the rain-dashed streets, my mother and Mr Broadhurst walking ahead of me, their contrasting figures like a Grimm illustration framed by the tip-tilted housefronts of the old village, I figured out the arithmetic. If Mr Broadhurst had been grown up enough to visit a tea shop regularly before 1914, he would have to be at least eighty by now, easily. Yet despite his declared retirement there was nothing obviously decrepit about him. Had there been I would certainly have spotted it.

I knew about old people the way a boy who lives next to an airport knows about planes. Our slice of Sussex coastline was already beginning to fill up with the moribund — or, as they prefer to put it nowadays: was becoming a growth area for the grey market. Saltdean even boasted specialist shops for the old, retailing surgical supports, Zimmer frames and herbal remedies. But Mr Broadhurst just didn't have the shuffling gait that I expected of the old, only a certain calculated languor to his movements. This was a comprehensive slow-motion, affecting his gestures and orotund tones as well as his locomotion.

‘What's a gyppo, Mum?’ It was the following week. I was eating high tea after school. Beans on toast, Ribena.

‘We don't say gyppo, Ian, it's common.’ She was wiping the kitchen surfaces with a J-Cloth, rubbing them vigorously, her features distorted with distaste, as if they were the limbs of a Formica corpse.

‘Mr Gardiner said that Mr Broadhurst was a gyppo, and he had gyppos with him when he came, didn't he, Mum?’ This jarred her and she grew terse.

‘Look, Ian, I know this much, that Mr Broadhurst worked for many years in the salvage industry and I believe that he counts a number of travelling people among his acquaintances. That's all, now eat your tea.’

The undercliff walk, which ran from Rottingdean along to Brighton, was my special haunt. This was where I consummated my boyhood. It was a peculiar place, especially during the off season, when detergent waves span against the dirty parapet. The two-hundred-feet-high cliffs rose above it and the shoreline below it was a torn shattered prospect, strewn with huge lumps of chalk and discarded trash from the Second World War; pillboxes and dragons’ teeth, which were in the process of being reduced to rubble by the tides.

Some mothers said the undercliff was dangerous and wouldn't let their children play there. They spoke of high tides washing little ones clean away (there was no access to the top of the cliff for over three miles). My mother wasn't amongst their number. I was allowed to go down there all I wanted. I transformed the pillboxes into Arthurian redoubts and tenanted them with my fellow knights. It was only child's play but highly charged and for me more emotive than the real world. My eidesis allowed me to paint the storybook characters on to the rocks around me; and often, so enmeshed had I become in make-believe that a solitary dog-walker coming along the concrete causeway would terrify me, as much as if they had been the Black Knight.

The winter after Mr Broadhurst came to Cliff Top, on two or more occasions, I thought I saw him down on the undercliff. This was strange enough, for how could such a big man be at all elusive, especially to one as sharp-sighted as I? And yet I couldn't be sure if it was he, backed into one of the chalky gulches at the base of the cliff and chatting conspiratorially with one of his hawk-faced gypsy friends, or just some ordinary be-mackintoshed pensioner, a sad stroller on the far shore of life.

Increasingly the off season at Cliff Top belonged to Mr Broadhurst. It became associated with him in my mind, in just the same way that the on season belonged to my aunts and cousins. Like many only children of single parents I was emotionally precocious. I sensed that my mother was pleased and even relieved by the interest that he took in us. I knew that he helped Mother with her accounts and made suggestions as to how she could drum up more custom for the caravan park. For some reason these stratagems seemed to pay off. Come summer there were more guests. More than half of the static caravans would be filled. The older people — middle-aged or elderly couples — Mother would put up in what she grandly termed the ‘PGs’ Wing’. In the mornings I would catch sight of them, their unfamiliar nightwear rendering the sun porch sanatorial, as they processed to and from their allocated bathroom.

Mr Broadhurst wasn't there to see the fruit of his business acumen, for come Easter he would be off, winging away like some portly and confused migratory bird, to different climes. Or at any rate that's what I imagined for him — he wouldn't tell me where he went. He wouldn't even hint at it.

‘Where d'you go in the summer, Mr Broadhurst?’

‘That, my lad, I am afraid I am not at liberty to disclose. My perennial peregrinations are perforce secret. All in good time — should you appear worthy of my confidence — I will divulge elements of my itinerary.’

However, far more affecting than Mr Broadhurst's seasonal leave was the impact on my home culture of the improved management of Cliff Top that he had bequeathed. This amounted to a paradigm shift in the social status of my mother's household. As Mr Broadhurst became more familiar to us, more heavily entrenched in the winter seaside, so my mother upped herself. It was as if, with the failed father gone, she was once again free to resume an aspirational trajectory. Dinner became lunch and tea became supper.