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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
'Both moving and hilarious' Spectator, Books of the Year 'A tale of gloriously eccentric British pensioners. Aitken rivals Alan Bennett in the ear he has for an eavesdropped remark ... boy, can he write.' Daily Mail, Book of the Week FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE ACCLAIMED A CHIP SHOP IN POZNAN. One millennial, six coach trips, one big generation gap. When Ben Aitken learnt that his gran had enjoyed a four-night holiday including four three-course dinners, four cooked breakfasts, four games of bingo, a pair of excursions, sixteen pints of lager and luxury return coach travel, all for a hundred pounds, he thought, that's the life, and signed himself up. Six times over. Good value aside, what Ben was really after was the company of his elders - those with more chapters under their belt, with the wisdom granted by experience, the candour gifted by time, and the hard-earned ability to live each day like it's nearly their last. A series of coach holidays ensued - from Scarborough to St Ives, Killarney to Lake Como - during which Ben attempts to shake off his thirty-something blues by getting old as soon as possible.
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For my sisters and brothers –
Daisy, Jay, Jo, Lee, Mark, Nicola and Tom.
I hope you get to the end of this one.
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Contents
About the author
Ben Aitken was born under Thatcher, grew to six foot then stopped, and is an Aquarius. He has four grandparents in working condition, and couldn’t be happier about the fact.x
Part 1
2Scarborough, Yorkshire, England
1
We’re hard to spot, aren’t we?
‘Are you one of the drivers?’
That’s the first thing said to me. That’s the first impression I’ve made. I’ve made it on Pat, who’s never seen anyone like me on a Shearings holiday before. She says that on her first holiday she didn’t play bingo the first night because she thought it was for old people, but that she played the second night and realised that either it isn’t for old people or she’s an old person, one of the two. She’s been on loads since. All over the country. She says you meet all sorts. She remembers one meal when she was sat with a posh couple that looked stuck-up and not her type of people at all. In the event, they had a blast. ‘I didn’t think posh people could be funny. Goes to show: you never know who you’ll get along with.’
On the M275 eastbound, Pat offers me a cup of coffee from her flask, then tells me she has a flat in Turkey that she bought with the lump sum she got when she retired from the NHS, and that I can use it if I give her enough notice and she’s not there. I ask what part of Turkey the flat’s in, east or west or whatever, but Pat says she doesn’t know, says she doesn’t bother with geography. Approaching Havant, she tells me to sit next to her so it’s easier to talk.
About half a dozen get on at Havant. They’re chirpy, even at this hour, a bunch of larks or nightingales, saying hello and good morning to the coach and all its fittings. I 4don’t think I’ve been as cheerful my whole life, certainly not before 7.30am. An early indication that whoever said that we’re happiest as children and elders, with the bit in between made relatively miserable by responsibility and vanity and anxiety and work, might have been onto something. I used to doubt the idea – that we’re least happy in the middle. Youngish adulthood is so routinely associated with pleasure and indulgence and excitement that it’s hard to believe that – according to the boffins, according to the stats – it’s the stage of life that yields the least satisfaction. Whatever the data, and wherever the peaks and troughs, another elder’s just got on and immediately sent round a tin of Quality Street.
My nan could get on here, at this pick-up point I mean. She lives just round the corner. As far as I’m aware she’s not been on such a coach holiday. I can’t remember the last time she went on holiday, to be frank. She mostly busies herself digging up the family tree. She’s dug up two paupers this week already, while a few months ago she hit upon an illicit connection to Henry VIII. She’s 81. If this trip goes alright I’ll drag her along to Torquay or Windermere or something. Somewhere nice. She showed me a picture once that contained the outlines of two women in one image. A sort of visual puzzle. I only saw the younger one. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘we’re hard to spot, aren’t we?’
It’s hard not to get more interesting as you get older. That’s what I’ve come to think, and that’s what’s led me here. Some manage it, of course, and manage it well. But as a rule of thumb, one can expect a person over 50 to be more 5interesting than a person under it, if only by dint of having more grist in the mill. And yet for the most part, I ignore this probably-more-interesting section of society, preferring to robotically and thoughtlessly mingle with my own generation, some of whom, indeed many of whom, are about as interesting as margarine on toast.
So over the past year or so I made an effort to shed my millennial skin. I started spending less time online and more time hanging around bowling greens and bingo halls, hoping for chance encounters. Why? Because it appeared to me that my elders had more to offer. Every time I went near a grandparent, or someone of grandparental vintage, I invariably came away from the encounter with some kind of snack and a new perspective on things.
Then a friend told me that his great aunt had been on a coach holiday to Exmouth with a company called Shearings, whereupon she had enjoyed four nights full-board in a period hotel, return coach travel, entertainment each evening, various excursions, a fair bit of wine, and the uninterrupted company of people of pensionable age, all for a hundred quid. I quickly calculated that I could live on such a holiday for less than the cost of renting a room in London, and I just as quickly booked one: four nights in Scarborough, excursions to York and Whitby, twelve courses of dinner, a quartet of cooked breakfasts, plus the outside chance of being mentally extended and winning the bingo. £109. That’s how much my sister paid to get into a disco in Ibiza.
My ambition – as you might have deduced – wasn’t especially earnest or high-minded. I didn’t mean to bridge gaps 6or get a handle on geriatric issues. I didn’t mean to examine myself (or anyone else), or take the temperature of anything. I didn’t have a quest, or a resounding or convincing existential motivation – the sort beloved of publishers. I didn’t seek wisdom. I didn’t seek revelation. I didn’t seek vengeance against any baby boomers that might have stolen my future.1 Simply put, I did it because I thought it might be nice.
On the A3 heading north, Pat says that it’s only when she looks in the mirror that she remembers she’s 68. She says she’s not comfortable with her age, not really. Am I comfortable with my age? With being 32? Not entirely, else I wouldn’t routinely tell people I’m 30 or 31 or 29 – whatever I fancy, so long as it’s not older than the truth. There’s a film, The Age of Adaline, which is memorable only for its central conceit: the protagonist doesn’t age beyond 29, because she can’t stand the idea of being 30. I can relate. I couldn’t stand turning 30. I denied it. Deferred it. Kicked it down the road. But why? I don’t want to live forever. It’s not that. I get bored on Sunday afternoons. What would I do with forever? Perhaps it’s a latent fear of non-existence. I might do a good job of pretending otherwise (a bit grumpy, a bit complacent), but the fact is I cherish life, am uncomplicatedly 7fond of it, and so I shy away from birthdays, from moving on, from running out. I’ve no time for death, and so I distance myself from it, however stupidly, however ineffectively. Time to grow up, Ben.2
10.00. London Gateway services at the foot of the M1. This is the interchange, where passengers switch to coaches heading to their respective destinations. Shearings has its own lounge. It’s like heaven’s waiting room – or your average GP surgery. I buy a coffee and take a seat on the edge of things, the better to weigh up the scene. I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but it’s fair to say that this lot are probably better at bridge than me. A couple from Reading are off to Bournemouth. Both are retired but busier than ever, don’t know how they ever found time to work. She’s writing a book about a bear who’s made in China and gets up to all sorts. ‘For kids, is it?’ ‘Rather adult, actually,’ she confides. Her husband, for his part, is a ‘street’ photographer. He gives me his card, wishes me a pleasant trip, and then the two of them head off. I stay where I am, wondering what the next pair I chat to will be working on – perhaps a concept album and a pornographic comic. Everyone’s got something up their sleeve, I suppose, and I shouldn’t be surprised if sleeves get bigger with time.
11.36. Somewhere on the M1. We’re eleven in total, but will be collecting another load near Coventry. The driver says: ‘We’re a small group today, ladies and gents. Average 8height, five foot four.’ It’s not a complicated joke but I didn’t see it coming so it does a job on me. I’m in seat 13A. More or less at the back, more or less alone. With nobody to talk to, I give Scarborough some thought. I know Alan Ayckbourn’s from Scarborough. I saw a programme about the playwright a few years ago. He was sat in his back garden, which overlooks the town and the beach. I remember thinking: I wouldn’t kick Scarborough out of bed. It used to be a so-called spa town, put up in the 1800s so well-heeled folk with broken ankles could dip said ankles in medicinal waters and be, well, well healed. It grew to become one of the most popular holiday spots in the world, before easy aviation got Britons in the mood for Spain and Florida. They used to fish for tuna off Scarborough, and the town’s in Yorkshire, God’s Own County. That’s about all I’ve got.3
13.45. Corley. The East Midlands interchange. A dozen climb on. That’s better, they say, ’ere we go then. They look younger, this lot. I suppose they didn’t have to get out of bed until mid-morning. Unlike the rest of us, who’ve bags under our eyes as well as under the coach. Our driver suddenly identifies himself, as if he’s just remembered what his job is. ‘My name’s Roger. This is the service to Blackpool.’ A few whispers and doubts. ‘Only kidding. We’re off to sunny Scarborough. Scarbados they call it – the mad ones anyway.’ 9That’s enough of Scarborough, reasons Roger, let’s move on to the essentials. ‘You’ll get four free alcoholic drinks a night. There’ll be no discriminating. Even the oldest will get served. Unclaimed drinks don’t carry over to the next night, unfortunately. Given the choice, I’d have sixteen on the Thursday.’ Good on you, Roger.
15.00. Yorkshire. England’s biggest county, its broad shoulders, its steely, sooty, verdant pectorals. On average, Yorkshire folk are unusually proud of their county. Exhibit A: August 1 every year is Yorkshire Day, whereupon children dress up as Yorkshire puddings and bat stubbornly until September. Exhibit B: Yorkshire County Cricket Club recruited only from Yorkshire until the mid-90s, decades later than any other county. YCCC wanted God’s own leg-spinners, and nowt else. If Yorkshire is God’s own county, then God knows what Hampshire is. Hampshire folk, to my mind, aren’t in the slightest bit proud of their county. They might be proud of their village, or their town, or the size of their mortgage – but not their county. Indeed, most residents of Hampshire, as far as I can tell, are unaware they are residents of Hampshire. They probably all think they live in Surrey.
16.20. The land around the A64 seems ancient, medieval, out of time somehow. The land is tumbular, if that were a word, a washing pile of downs and wolds. And when the light goes and a mist comes, it’s like we’ve entered a different genre of book, of story, of land – from old pastoral to neo-Gothic. Out on a limb, is how you feel, and so you might. York’s the nearest large settlement to Scarborough and that’s 40 miles away. 10
I like Scarborough’s preamble, its build-up. Two colossal hotels headline the scene, while two bridges make light of a valley, with the illuminations of a promenade below. Roger points out what shops we might pop to, where we might break for tea, where we might rent mobility scooters. A longish climb brings us up to the hotel – the Norbreck, a bit of which fell into the North Sea a few years ago, suddenly providing one guest with an unexpected en-suite. We’re up on a headland here, a promontory. The next settlement east is a town in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, while due north, via the Norwegian and Greenland Seas, is the Arctic. And to think this was the spot chosen for Britain’s first seaside resort.
I’m in room 312. I’ve been given my drinks vouchers for the week and told not to photocopy them. A porter, operating on autopilot, insisted on carrying my backpack up the stairs. When I told him not to bother, he said: ‘Better safe than sorry, sir.’ If he’s assuming the incapability of a millennial, I can only wonder what he assumes someone in their 80s can’t manage – ‘Need some help with that biscuit, madam?’ The room is singular: if you had a guest, they’d have to sit on your lap and share your teacup. But it’s warm and cosy and done in yellow and green and red, soft shades of each. My curtains bring a fruit salad to mind.
I go down for dinner. I’ve been allocated table 13, as I was allocated row 13. The table’s for four but for now I’m alone. I’m dressed in a new outfit and I’m recently groomed (haircut, shave, etc.) with the result that I look smarter than I 11have done since my christening. I’ve made the effort because my nan insisted upon it. She said it wouldn’t do to turn up to dinner looking relaxed. She said that her generation ‘wouldn’t be seen dead dressed casually in a hotel’, which is an interesting scenario to consider.
There must be about twenty tables of two, and half a dozen tables of four, tucking into their meals watchfully, each diner as much aware of the strangers around them as what’s on their plate. Everyone in the hotel’s on the same holiday as me: four nights, excursions to York and Whitby, full-board etc. I read the menu self-consciously. I feel like a menu myself, being read and judged. Anomalies attract attention. That’s just how it is. Oddness is intriguing. The odd or anomalous thing needn’t have any special qualities or enviable attributes, they need only be odd or anomalous – a potato among plums, for example. I order the fishcakes.
A man sits down opposite me. He doesn’t look anomalous.
‘I don’t know about yours but our driver was full of it. I wanted to chuck him off the coach,’ he says.
‘That wouldn’t have got you far.’
‘I only booked yesterday. I fancied exploring. I reckon I’ve seen enough of Birmingham.’
We talk easily over bread rolls. Alan was married at eighteen, and a father of two at 21. For most of his life he worked in a foundry, pouring liquid metal into a mould, where it adjusted to its cast, filled its boots, and then altered not. Alan tells me he had a couple of heart attacks in 2006 and then retired ten years later. I suggest he might not have waited so long, but he reckons you’ve to muddle through. 12
‘I used to tell the young lads at work who were moaning about the heat or the tedium – “Don’t worry, boys. It’s only for a lifetime.”’
‘I suppose you might have said the same about marriage.’
‘I might have indeed. I divorced at 38 – which was twenty years too late, I can tell you.’ He orders the chicken, then adds: ‘The kids take everything you’ve got. You’ve nothing left for each other.’
Alan later remarried, but his second wife has claustrophobia and gets nervous around people. I ask if it’s his first time.
‘Oh no, I’ve had chicken before.’
‘I meant—’
‘I’ve been to Eastbourne with Shearings. They’ve got a nice big place down there. I was sat with a young woman for dinner.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Well, she was 60-odd. Flirting, she was. I said, “Stop it, I’m married.” She said, “Relax, so am I.” We had a nice day out in Hastings.’
Our puddings turn up. Alan looks at his vanilla ice-cream.
‘Getting down to Eastbourne opened my eyes a bit. On the way home, I wondered where else I might have liked, if only I’d been. I got settled where I was and didn’t know anything else. Everything just sort of got stuck after a while. I thought West Bromwich was the end of the world.’
We sit longer than the rest, talking about the grandkids he doesn’t see enough of, and the amount of gel in the 13waiter’s hair. ‘He’s young,’ explains Alan. ‘Lad’s got bugger all else to do.’
It’s three quid to play bingo. The lounge bar is packed – there are more in here than were at dinner. I’m pretty good at bingo. I’ve only played once, on a ferry from Zeebrugge to Hull, but did alright for myself. There’s about a hundred playing tonight, I’d say, but it makes no odds to me – I only go and win again. My triumph doesn’t go down well. They don’t mean to be rude, I’m sure, but when I go up to collect the cash price, someone tries to trip me up with their cane.
The bingo caller changes his jacket and does a few songs. He’s got good range: Roy Orbison, Robbie Williams, The Human League. When he does the latter’s ‘Electric Dreams’, one bloke from Sheffield looks ready to get up on the tables, though he might need a stairlift to do so. ‘100 per cent Sheffield that is!’
It’s not all jolly, mind you. There are a few couples, scattered around the room, who are looking a bit down, a bit left out. After all, not every marriage is a never-ending Fred Astaire routine. When Alan calls it a night, I go and sit with one such couple. They’re from Corby, Northamptonshire. Dennis and Clementine, or Clem. The former does most of the talking. He wears the trousers and the skirts, I’d say. Nice enough bloke, don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t mind knowing if Clem’s got owt to say. When I tell them it’s my first time, they’ve lots of tips for me. I’m to make sure I use all my vouchers; to invest in a travel pillow if I’m going abroad; and to make bacon butties at breakfast and then have them 14for lunch. And – especially important – I’m not to bother paying extra for a sea view. They did that once and felt like they couldn’t leave the room.
Dennis checks his watch. Then he looks at my spare vouchers. He puts two and two together and sends me up to the bar to make use of them. The reason I’ve got spares is because I’ve been trying not to drink lately. Edward Albee said everyone’s got a certain amount of drink in them, and that while some spread it out over 60 years, others get through it in ten. I fancy I fall into the latter category. When I get back from the bar, Dennis says he’s got something to tell me. Oh yeah? He says that he knows my game, that he saw me chatting to your woman at the bar. I hand over one of the two pints (I’m on holiday after all) and tell him, quite sincerely, that I wouldn’t dream of it.
1 David Willetts wrote a book called The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Stole Their Children’s Future, which argues that the boomers (born 1945–65) have pulled up the property ladder and any other ladder they could get their hands on. For the record, I took David’s book with a titular pinch of salt. I know plenty of boomers who’ve barely a rung to stand on, to say nothing of a ladder to pull up.
2 I’m 33.
3 Not sure why Yorkshire acquired this nickname. Maybe it has to do with the countryside – the dales and the moors. Else it could have to do with Michael Palin, Judi Dench, Alan Bennett, J.B. Priestley, Barbara Hepworth, Sean Bean and the Chuckle Brothers – all of whom are of the county, and a heaven-sent consortium if ever there was one.
2
There’s an art to eating happily alone
I slept well. It’s not hard when you’ve bingo winnings under your pillow. And I like single beds. I find the lack of options restful. Boundaries can be good for us – when the world’s our oyster, it can give us a dodgy tummy.
I go down for breakfast. We’re in the same room as dinner, with the wide, west-facing bay window now full of things it hadn’t been – namely, a terrace of Victorian houses and part of the North Sea. I’ve a boundary down here as well: I’m expected to sit at the same table for the duration of my holiday (says a waitress when I try to sit by the window), so I’d better get used to Alan and 13.
As I investigate the buffet, someone says: ‘You did well last night.’ Then someone says words to the same effect as I’m waiting on my toast. And then someone says well done as I’m sitting down. At first I’m apologetic – ‘It won’t happen again. I promise.’ Then I change my tune: ‘Yeah, I’m good at bingo and I’ll be good at it tonight as well.’
I butter my toast nervously. The feeling of oddness is back from last night. I try to look appreciatively over the talking heads and out the window, but I’m kidding myself, I’m posturing. I’m pretending to be at ease, to be nonchalant. There’s an art to eating happily alone. I don’t have it. Alan arrives and says: ‘Aaron Ramsey has gone to Juventus for silly 16money.’ I’m pleased to be wrenched from my own neurotic half-thoughts. I’m pleased to see Alan.
We’re off to York this morning.4 Roger’s commentary begins before I’ve got my seatbelt on. He tells us that Anne Brontë came to Scarborough and liked it so much she never left, which only works as a joke if you know she’s buried in the church next to the hotel. He tells us that McCain’s (of frozen chips fame) are a big local employer, and that the Eastfield estate on the edge of town is about as troublesome as they come. ‘If you want drugs,’ says Roger, ‘let me know as I can get you a discount.’
When we reach our destination, Roger puts us down in a carpark and tells us to be back in a couple of hours. People head off in separate directions – like a search party splitting to cover the most ground. I pop into a riverside café and ask the barista what’s lovable about York, alluding to the fact that the city has repeatedly been elected Britain’s best place. ‘I like it when the river floods,’ he says. I ask him what he thinks other, less peculiar people might love about York, suggesting the ancient walls, the narrow cobbled lanes, the elderly buildings, the city’s historic relationship with chocolate, or even the Richard III Experience, which has proved incredibly popular with visitors despite involving being taken to a field and shot at with a bow and arrow. The barista says it’s 17probably the city’s beauty. I ask him to elaborate. ‘I would, but it’s difficult to put your finger on. And to be honest I only notice it when I’m not here.’ There’s philosophy in that last admission. I bet the lad’s not alone in only seeing what’s under his nose once it’s behind his back, if you’ll forgive the impractical construction.
I do a lap of the city’s old wall. I join it at its northernmost point, round the back of the Minster. Giving the church a once over, I think of the art critic John Ruskin, who reckoned the camera was ruining our ability to notice and appreciate things. And this was back in the 1880s. Instead of photographing things, Ruskin suggested we draw them. I’m not in a position to draw the Minster but I do tarry to look harder, look closer. It’s certainly a sizeable item – the second-largest Gothic church in the world, after the cathedral at Cologne – and is much wider than it is tall, with the effect that if you bunch up your eyes you could easily mistake it for a battleship (albeit a battleship with transepts and lancet windows). Of more interest to me than the Minster, however, is the adjoining Deanery, and in particular its back garden. Within the garden, a pair of yellow socks has been left on the grass below the washing line. Perhaps the Dean was in a rush when bringing the washing in, or perhaps he was in a real rush when putting it out. In any case, were I to draw the scene before me, I’d be tempted to place more emphasis on the socks, and the small drama they hint at, than the Minster. We each have our own sense of importance, I suppose.
I continue clockwise to Walmgate Bar. During the English Civil War, this bar (or gate) was a key fortification that saw a 18fair bit of uncivil action. Now it’s a wonderful café with an enjoyable roof terrace. During the war, an attempt was made to undermine Walmgate Bar and blow its bricks off, but the plot was discovered and nipped in the bud. Had it not been, whosoever happened to be up on the roof terrace drinking coffee would have been a very flat white indeed. The barista is Australian. When I tell him about Walmgate Bar nearly being blown to smithereens, he says: ‘You guys are so lucky to have history.’
I drink my coffee on the roof and survey the scene. Of all its elements – and there are many – it is the non-smoking industrial chimney that holds my attention. Not because it’s the most dynamic or curious or aesthetically pleasing element of the landscape, but rather because I recently saw a documentary about a steeplejack called Fred Dibnah, who back in the 70s and 80s, when health and safety regulations were a thing for wimps, would climb such chimneys by a series of conjoined ladders and then knock them down brick by brick, often in the middle of winter, and invariably with a fag in his mouth. Fred said some terrific things in that programme, some moving things, and all in a thick Boltonian accent. On the matter of death, Fred reckoned ‘the ideal way out would be, I think, instead of dying in bed of lung cancer or something ’orrible like that, just to drop off a chimney one sunny day.’ Turned out to be a pipe dream. Fred died of bladder cancer in 2004.
York is better for its wall. It encourages you to think about its historical function, about who it was meant to repel (Vikings, Normans, Parliamentarians), and what it was meant 19to contain (scandal, cholera, Royalists). To my mind, a walk on the wall has the quality of a ride. It is always a tiny bit exciting to rise above the rooftops, to look down on what is normally above. The change of perspective helps one see more, or see the same things in a different way. So much so that, with a bit of effort, I can just make out, in the garden of the Royal Oak (it’s either Royal Oak or Loyal Oat), a crouching figure tying his laces with a fag in his mouth which is unmistakably Alan.5
Crossing the River Ouse on my way back to the coach, I remember that book by Graham Swift, Waterland, which goes on about this river. I remember a flow of startling pages that made me see the brilliance and magic and circularity of rivers, of history, of time. The book really got the thumbs up from me, which wasn’t something that happened often back then. Not because I was a tough critic, but rather because I hadn’t really read any books. I was in my second year at university, and was to all intents and purposes, and by all accounts, a dipstick. I’d read only six books right the way through (two of those being diaries of Bridget Jones), and had about as much interest in rivers and history as a poached egg. The best books can do that though, can take you by surprise, can ambush and capture you, no matter what they’re on about.
On the way back to Scarborough, Roger tells us about a couple of local news stories. He says an aluminium 20rhinoceros was stolen from outside a college a few years ago, and that some penguins at a nearby zoo have been prescribed antidepressants.6
Alan thinks the man who smokes cigars might be autistic. I tell Alan that my girlfriend is a teaching assistant at a school for children with autism. I tell him she likes it much more than the school for children without autism that she used to work at, where she routinely opted to wear shin pads, so often did she get booted in the legs for having the cheek to ask what the capital of Kenya was. Alan asks whether my girlfriend takes off the pads when she gets home, implying that I’m in the habit of booting her in the shins as well. I order whitebait to start, then hake, then lemon sponge. Alan says I’m naive to double-fish.
Talk of autism leads to talk of Alzheimer’s. Alan’s dad had dementia, and Alan was the only one of his five siblings that was prepared to care for him. ‘He was strict when we were growing up. He wouldn’t let us do our homework. He’d give us chores instead. He wouldn’t let Mum listen to the radio. And she wasn’t allowed to touch the telly.’
21‘My dad was the opposite,’ I say. ‘We’d go to him on the weekend and it was carte blanche or whatever the term is as far as he was concerned. We lived off Pot Noodles and Kit Kats. I don’t think we let him touch the telly. That or he shared our taste for Gladiators and Baywatch.’
‘Not impossible,’ says Alan.
‘No, he’s a good bloke my dad. Once, I needed a cricket bat but he couldn’t afford a smart proper one, so he made one. Me and my brother would play in the concrete garden, three-by-three metres, with a drainpipe for the stumps. I was a decent bowler in my teens and I’m sure it was because I grew up aiming for a drainpipe.’
‘Mine didn’t make cricket bats,’ says Alan. ‘Mine was a policeman. He used to come home and play the harmonica and tell us about the scoundrels he’d walloped. Then one day, he just stopped playing. I don’t remember him touching a harmonica for 40 years. Then when he got dementia, I bought him one and took it to him. He just stared at it for some time then picked it up and started playing it like it was yesterday.’
I let this sit for a bit. And then a bit more. And then:
‘My dad’s so cheerful it does my head in,’ I say. ‘It makes me look awful. There I am, trying to drag myself out of bed, moaning and groaning like I’ve got swine flu, and in he wanders with a cup of tea for me, whistling a tune, saying he can’t wait to finish the wheelbarrow he’s been working on, then drawing my curtains like Mary Poppins and looking out at the grim terraces of inner Portsmouth as if they were an orchard of cherry blossom trees. I’ve told him more 22than once: “Dad, I’m going to stop you coming in here if you’re going to carry on like that. You’re making me look like a prick.”’
‘Fathers, eh?’ says Alan.
I go through to the lounge for the bingo. I sit with a couple who live in Rhyl, North Wales.
‘You did well last night,’ he says. ‘The wife’s normally very good at bingo but she hasn’t won for three years.’
I smile at this idea of normality – that something can still be normal even if it hasn’t happened for three years. Then I ask the man why he thinks his wife hasn’t won recently. He says he reckons she’s got complacent. I ask the wife if she agrees with her husband’s point of view, but he says: ‘You won’t get a word out of her. Not until the bingo’s over.’
I buy two bingo coupons from reception. One for me and one for the lady from Rhyl – to save her legs. She tries to give me the three quid but I tell her not to bother. ‘Well which one is mine?’ she says. I hold out the two coupons. She closes her eyes and takes the one on the left, then puts it back and takes the other.
The lady from Rhyl is off to a flier. She’s very focused. Almost possessed. Her feet are tapping away under the table. Her husband says he doesn’t like playing but he certainly likes peering over at her card, making sure she doesn’t miss a trick. Ten balls have been called and I haven’t one of them. It’s starting to wind me up to be honest. Then a run of numbers – same both ways, two fat fellas, a pair of crutches – and I’m back in the hunt. Another good run 23and I only need seventeen. My mind races ahead to the prize ceremony. I’d have to refuse. They’d throw me into the North Sea if I won again.
I don’t mind that the lady from Rhyl won the bingo. Not really. I don’t even mind that she didn’t think, after collecting her 60-odd quid in cash (lots of cheering for her, by the way, which is ageism in action if ever I saw it), to offer me my three quid back, or thank me for presenting her with the winning ticket, or slip me one of her drinks vouchers by way of compensation. Nah, not really. I suppose after a drought of three years, a bingo win is going to cloud your judgement a bit, play a bit of havoc with your manners. She’ll probably realise when she’s in bed. She’ll omit a sigh and put her hand to her forehead, and her husband will turn to her and say, ‘What is it, love?’ And she’ll say, ‘That young man. What was his name? Bill, was it? I didn’t even thank him. I’ve not won for three years and he goes and hands me the winning ticket and I don’t so much as offer him a drinks voucher.’ And he says: ‘I wouldn’t worry, love. I bet he’s not given it a second’s thought.’
I move to one of the comfy chairs closer to reception. I sit with a bloke called Paul and his two support workers – Doughnut 1 and Doughnut 2, he calls them. One of the doughnuts explains that Paul’s got Down’s syndrome and that she and her friend take him on holiday twice a year. Paul doesn’t think much of her explanation. ‘I take you two on holiday, more like,’ he says. 24
Doughnut 1 shows me a picture of her dog and says that she got him after she had a stent put in her leg which enabled her to walk again. ‘I was walking everywhere!’ she says. ‘That dog’s done more miles than a Vauxhall Astra. I know it’s a cliché but you don’t know you’ve got any legs until you haven’t.’
I tell her that my dad had a stent put in his leg to unblock one of the arteries so the blood could get round. The doctor told him that if he doesn’t pack up smoking, the other leg’s going to block up and they won’t give him an operation, because it will be his own sodding fault.
‘And has he stopped?’ she says.
‘Nope,’ I say.
‘Twat,’ she says. ‘In a nice way, like.’
I explain that I don’t hassle him too much because he gets defensive and worried and ends up smoking more, which isn’t really what I’m after. Besides, he’s an alcoholic who hasn’t had a drink for ten years, which takes some doing, and if he reckons he can’t stop, or doesn’t want to, then I’m inclined to listen to him, or at least respect his decision.
‘How did he give up the drinking?’ she says.
‘A banjo,’ I say.
‘You what?’
‘One day after umpteen attempts to stop and not managing it, he comes home with a four-hundred pound banjo.’
‘That’s bloody heavy,’ says Paul.
‘He’d never played a musical instrument in his life. I guess the thinking – if there was any thinking – was that 25you can’t take something away and just leave a hole. You’ve got to fill it with something.’
Anyway, now he plays the piano and guitar and drums as well, and is in two bands, and hasn’t had a drink since.’
‘Fair play,’ she says.
‘Fair play,’ says Paul.
I call it a night. Paul gives me a fist bump. I climb the stairs to the third floor and think: I don’t know if I’ve ever told my dad just how proud I am of him for turning his back on a 40-year addiction, for buying that banjo, for becoming a new man at the age of 57. I’m sure I’ll get round to it one day.
4 Known as Eboracum under the Romans, and then Jorvik under the Vikings. Then later as Yerke, Yourke and Yarke. Before a true visionary suggested York and they settled on that.
5 It wasn’t Alan.
6 I chased up both stories. Regarding the rhino, PC Michelle Neighbour, of North Yorkshire Police, said, rather helpfully, that ‘the rhino is not something you could just walk off with by yourself,’ before appealing ‘to any scrap dealers or anyone who regularly uses scrap yards to get in touch if they remember seeing the rhino being weighed in.’ Regarding the penguins, it turns out the reason they were prescribed antidepressants was because they’d grown so thoroughly cheesed off with the easterly wind off the North Sea.
3
Why aren’t you in bed?
I write a list on my napkin of things I want to do on my birthday. I write down ‘lap of town’ and ‘dinner with Alan’. Then I leave the hotel and head down Castle Road. Some of the houses on this road – tall Victorian or Georgian jobs – would fetch millions elsewhere. Sash windows and columned porches; pediments and porticos: they remind me, at a stretch, of the streets around Victoria in London, or around the seafront in Brighton. Once upon a time, you would’ve needed a fair bit of money to own a house like this in Scarborough. You would’ve needed to be flogging a fair amount of donkey rides. Now most of them look vacant, knackered and unwanted. One’s for sale for 60 grand.
At the end of Quay Street, I ask a lone fisherman what’s being caught around here these days.
‘Nothing anymore. Not since the fish went missing.’
‘Huh?’
‘What comes in nowadays comes from over Norway way.’
‘What you doing now then?’
‘I’m bringing my pots in.’
‘Of course you are.’ Of course he is. ‘Why are you doing that?’
‘To see if there’s owt in ’em.’
I leave the man to it and continue along South Bay, still pretty much clueless as to the state of the local fishing scene. 27The fish went missing, now they’re over Norway way, and yet he’s bringing his pots in to see if there’s owt in ’em. This is why people Google things.7
I enter an entertainment venue called The Spa and ask the girl on the box-office what she reckons of Scarborough. She says she used to live in Manchester and Leeds but is happier here. She says that, rightly or wrongly, here’s where she’s from. She says that some people can’t put their finger on where they’re from but she can. She says that the people she loves and the people that love her are concentrated in this town, by this sea, among these streets and below those moors, and that’s just the way it is. I ask what she’d do if she had one day in Scarborough, hoping for some inspiration. ‘I’d walk my dog,’ she says.
Having no dog to walk, I climb through the Italian Gardens and up to Esplanade Crescent. The latter is some street. The stone tenements are five stories high. They put 28me in mind of Edinburgh and the old (sorry, older) residential streets south of the centre, around the Dalkeith Road, where the likes of Hume and Hobbs and Walter Scott did their thinking and scribbling, their pipe-smoking and pipe-dreaming, and were aided in their efforts by fifth floor servants, whose liberty to think and scribble was reliably compromised by their obligation to serve, but so it goes. I sit on a bench facing the sea, my back to the emphatic Victorian terrace, and think: I could live here, with or without love. Then I get a text from my mum. Parents remember first. ‘Happy birthday darling xx hope your balls drop.’ Presumably an awkward bingo reference.
I return to the town centre and then head north-west on Dean Road. As I do, my girlfriend calls to tell me she’s going to stop being a teaching assistant and start being an artist. I tell her to think seriously about what that would do to our finances. ‘We’ll be the poorest couple in England, Meg. Think about it. Somebody has to put the sourdough on the table.’ But she’s resolved. She’s going to be a painter first, and something else second, rather than the other way around. At the end of the call, I don’t tell her I love her, because she knows I do. By the same logic, she doesn’t mention my birthday, because she knows I know it’s my birthday. That or she’s forgotten.
‘Oh, by the way,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘It’s half-term next week, right?’
‘Yeah.’ 29
‘Do you want to go on holiday to St Ives?’
‘Would it just be the two of us?’
‘No, it would be a Shearings holiday.’
‘In which case, okay then.’
I find North Bay. It’s twilight now. There’s a golf course up on the cliff. A pair of gentlemen, presumably unmarried and insane, are persisting with illuminous balls. The promenade stretches south for a mile, then turns left toward the castle and my hotel, which for now is a vague smudge in the distance. The tide is out, and on the flat, hard sand, owners exercise what’s theirs – balls are flung and kicked for children and pets. There are a range of colourful beach huts – orange and green and yellow, somehow still glowing in the dusk. Inside one such hut, a couple sit entwined under rugs, a pair of low dogs peeping out from between their feet. I think of Larkin’s couple at Arundel. What survives of us is love.
An upward path takes me to the North Cloisters, a lofty run of stone enclosures, a place to come and sit and contemplate the view, half-sheltered from the weather. Writing is on the wall. Support is pledged in dark pen – to the nation, the region, the town, this or that cause. Someone has written: ‘Every piece of meat begins with an animal begging for its life.’ Beneath this, someone else (at least, I presume it was someone else) has written: ‘Bacon – yum!’ The stone surface is a veritable message board, a forum of competing leanings, a chatroom of public pledges – evidence of the various directions in which emotion can travel, the various ways passion can take. To my mind, much of what’s written isn’t meant, not really, not fully. Were you to bring any pair of on-paper 30adversaries up here and sit them down in front of the sea, perhaps under a rug with a flask of tea, like that pair in the hut, I’d be surprised if they so much as raised their voices. Sure, they might not get on like French and Saunders, but they wouldn’t be unkind to each other. I don’t think so. From a distance it’s hard to see what connects us, but up close it’s easy.
