BUTLIN’S at Filey. When I was 11 years old, those words had a faraway, exotic ring to them. Especially if you were as geographically ignorant as I was.
‘Hey, Shack, where you goin’ on olidi this year?’
‘Butlin’s at Filey. And you?’
‘Er, Tuscany. Have a good ’un, mate.’
(Actually, no one in Keighley in the mid-70s went to Tuscany, though a few did make it as far as ‘Ma-jorca’.)
So, along with boxes of shopping from Morrisons – doubly exotically, we were going self-catering – we piled into the Datsun Cherry and headed towards East Yorkshire.
All the way up, I studied the entertainment guide that the travel agent had sent us. It had a little illustrated map of the camp: the outdoor pool with north and south fountains like blue-painted concrete wedding cakes, the French Disco Bar and Viennese Lounge, roller-skating rink, the chairlift, the miniature railway, even the launderette, sundae bar and ironing room sounded exotic.
Further pages promised the Miss Heineken Contest (sponsored by Whitbread), the Look-In Junior Talent Contest, Junior It’s a Knockout and perhaps the spookiest – but it didn’t seem so at the time – in the Children’s Theatre, ‘Magic and Fun Shows with their favourite entertainer, “Uncle” Ken Rich’.
‘There it is,’ said my dad, pulling into the main gate. ‘Butlin’s.’
After a quick park outside the reception building, we collected the chalet key (with its huge fob of red plastic – we were in the red chalet block) from the receptionist. We left behind the smiling, benevolent photograph of a mustachioed Billy Butlin and caught the Puffing Billy train, a dressed-up tractor, to our home for five nights – a three-room, wood and asbestos barrack.
After settling in, it was time to explore the camp.
Swimming pools indoors and out, with the legend painted in red, four-foot-tall letters, Indoor Heated Swimming Pool just in case we hadn’t realised. There was a tunnel under the latter from where you could view people’s legs underwater through glass windows. There was an indoor market, a huge gift shop where you could buy any item with your name on, unless your name was Shaun and all you could get was a plastic comb in a wallet. If you were called Sean, you were laughing.
There were the chairlifts, children’s playgrounds, slot-machine arcades and cafes and if you wanted to, which I didn’t, much to my mum and dad’s disgruntlement, you could join the Beavers and be perpetually entertained by the Redcoats.
At night there was entertainment with comedians and quizzes and dances and there was a nursery chalet patrol whereby you could leave your babies and toddlers asleep and if they woke up, a lightbox at the front of the stage would flash ‘Baby crying in chalet 14’.
We went to see Diamonds Are Forever one night at the cinema and on another visited my favourite, the Beachcomber Bar.
This was a huge room done out like a film set of a tropical island with jungle foliage, crabpots, shipwrecked boats and coloured lanterns, pools and ancient tribal sculptures. The bar and various tables were made to look like mud and straw huts.
Exotic waitresses in grass skirts and leopard-print bikini tops served fruit-based cocktails and Double Diamond beer, but best of all, at the far end, a panorama of the island seashore would every now and then project a cartoon of a whirlwind across a painted horizon, accompanied by stormy sound effects.
I loved the place. To me, this encapsulated the exoticism of Butlin’s at Filey.
But in retrospect, was it all that good? The holiday itself was brilliant, a rare week away for all of us – my mum, dad, sister and me. But wasn’t the paint on the concrete fountains peeling? The concrete crumbling a bit? Wasn’t the chalet just a bit damp and draughty? Weren’t there a couple of kiddies’ rides that stayed out of service for the whole week? And the exotic waitresses in the Beachcomber Bar, weren’t they just normal, dark-haired lasses from Grimsby and Hull, wearing fake tan and up for a season of laughs and frolics?
Weren’t the Redcoats just slightly hungover and ever so crotchety every morning? The towels a touch threadbare and stained? The tyres on Puffing Billy treadless? The thousands of toy aeroplanes hung from the ceiling of the Viennese Lounge thick with nicotine and dust? The ladders in the pools just a mite rusty? And as for ‘Uncle’ Ken Rich?
This is where the clear-eyed recall of adulthood wins hands down over the blind optimism of youth. You could call it disappointment but realistically, it’s just an ever-growing cynicism.
When my sister, Vanessa, was a kid, her favourite TV show was The Flumps.
The 13-minute-long lunchtime programmes featured a tight-knit northern family group of loveable balls of fluff consisting of Mother, Father, Perkin, Pootle, Posie and Grandfather Flump (who played the flumpet, a weird, magical musical instrument).
Back in 1976, Vanessa thought these sweet-natured little creatures lived an idyllic, bucolic existence which bounced along to mild japes, gentle hilarity and a jaunty theme tune.
After watching the DVD, she realised her cherished memories had lied to her.
These coughed-up cat hairballs were all stilted 70s stereotypes (flat-capped eccentric old-timer, thick but DIY-loving father, forever kitchen-bound, continuously baking mother) and they all seemed to be living in the redbrick ruins of a post-apocalyptic Barnsley terrace street.
Even the once-jolly theme tune palled mournfully into a lone trombonist playing at the poorly attended wake of an unloved clown.
What was once a harmless stop-motion puppet show in childhood was actually, in the harsh, chilling fluorescent striplight of adulthood, a bleak survival manual for mutants after the A-bomb had dropped.
Through tears of bitter disappointment, my sister watched the DVD only once.
And this brings me to Sark. The Gaffer, Princess, Little Red and I went there for three nights last week. The sun didn’t shine but it didn’t matter because the kids spent most of their time in the hotel’s heated outdoor swimming pool.
We ate like kings, the food and service were brilliant, the staff at the hotel was fantastic (not one seemed over 30) and the room was great.
Likewise, the people of Sark were as friendly as they have always been. But something wasn’t right.
It was the first time I’d been in seven years and it wasn’t the Sark I remembered.
The old, characterful meeting hall lay empty and had been replaced by a huge, multi-purpose building that wouldn’t have looked out of place as a Happy Eater in a Rotherham leisure village complex in 1984.
At the end of the Avenue there was a stretch of road that had been surfaced and behind it a group of new houses that resembled Brookside Close.
Even seven years ago, this place was the Gormenghast that Mervyn Peake had found so inspirational, with the art deco post office perhaps the shining beacon of modernity among its corrugated iron and prefabricated cottages in the trees.
So it was with sadness that I boarded the ferry home. My girls would never know the Sark that I knew when I was their age.
Then, as we rounded the craggy mountain top that is Jethou, all cynicism, disappointment, call it what you want, disappeared and was replaced by gleaming hope: at least we still have Herm. That beautiful little gem will never ever change, will it? Will it?
Article posted on 6th September, 2008 - 2.00pm
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