Essex Poison

by Ian Sansom

  ‘Think of it as a little holiday treat,’ said Morley. ‘An evening off.’

  ‘A holiday treat?’ said Miriam. ‘An evening in Southend?’

  ‘If it’s good enough for the East End,’ said Morley.

  ‘Then by definition it is not good enough for me.’

  ‘Miriam!’ said Morley. ‘That is hardly the spirit in which we’re working, my dear.’

  ‘The spirit in which we’re working? Oh, do come on, Father,’ said Miriam, ‘and don’t be so bloody self-righteous for once!’

  ‘Self-righteous, Miriam? Me?’

  Miriam snorted in response. It’s true that Morley could sometimes be a little self-righteous.

  ‘And I would thank you,’ he continued, ‘not to use bad language on a Sunday.’

  ‘I’ll use whatever language I like on whatever day I like,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Whichever,’ corrected Morley. ‘There being only a limited choice of days.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Ssshh,’ I suggested, noting that a number of our fellow guests had paused in their afternoon tea tea-cup tinkling to listen in. It made no difference.

  ‘Have you ever even been to Southend?’ Miriam asked her father.

  ‘No, but I hardly think that’s the—’

  ‘And am I right in saying that your favourite holiday destination is in fact Italy?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Somewhere delightful like Alassio, for example?’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Morley. ‘But that’s not to—’

  ‘A grand resort for the grandees of Europe? Do you know the Grand Hotel?’ asked Miriam, turning to me.

  ‘I can’t say I do, Miriam, no.’

  ‘Absolutely marvellous. You really should go. Best martinis on the whole of the Italian Riviera.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘And the English Library,’ added Morley. ‘Just across the way. Wonderful. Testament to Anglo-Italian relations.’

  ‘And there we are,’ said Miriam, addressing me. ‘Totally unlike Southend. Why on earth would anyone go to Southend when they could just as easily go to the Italian Riviera? Or the French, for that matter? The Negresco in Nice is simply divine.’ She really meant it.

  ‘Because, Miriam,’ said Morley, with considerable restraint.

  Miriam wriggled her nose: it was one of her all-time and all-purpose favourite expressions, signalling just about anything from disgust to desire. This time it was a wriggle that clearly signalled dismissal.

  ‘You really can’t beat the English seaside resort,’ continued Morley. ‘A testament to the triumph of hope over experience.’

  ‘The triumph of the utterly dull over the completely dreadful,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Give the place a chance,’ said Morley. ‘And anyway I’m concerned that we don’t have enough material for the book. We’ve already lost a couple of days with the Lagonda being out of action, and what with the Oyster Feast fiasco we’ve fallen behind again.’

  ‘We’re always falling behind, Father,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Morley. ‘Which is why – as I always say – it’s so important to try to keep up. Tempus volat hora fugit.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Father,’ said Miriam, finishing off her scone, and meaning of course that she didn’t give a damn about whatever he said.

  ‘What would you like us to cover in Southend, Mr Morley?’ I asked, having myself finished a substantial plate of good paste sandwiches, and therefore feeling strong enough to attempt to calm the discussion.

  ‘The Kursaal of course,’ said Morley.

  ‘The What-all?’ said Miriam.

  ‘The Kursaal,’ repeated Morley. ‘“By the Dome It’s Known!”’

  ‘I’m sorry, Father, you’ve lost me.’

  ‘The Kursaal. “By the Dome It’s Known”? Because of its beautiful big dome. Considered a folly at the time, but now quite an attraction.’

  ‘Nope, none the wiser,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Are the pair of you in any way in touch with what’s actually happening in the real world?’

  In all honesty, Miriam was never perhaps in touch with what was happening in the real world, and during those years I was doing my absolute level best – with every chemical assistance – to avoid it. I occasionally picked up The Times – Lindbergh in Munich, the Duke of Windsor in Berlin, killings, bombings, fascists – but soon managed to put it down again. It was all too much, everywhere, never mind keeping up with the latest in amusement park news from Essex. How Morley managed it I’ll never know. (He sometimes boasted of reading every local newspaper in the country, every week, which was certainly possible: he had a crate of newspapers delivered to St George’s every day, plus a sack of periodicals.)

  Undeterred by our lack of interest and knowledge, Morley briefed us on exactly what he was looking for: photographs of the grand entrance pavilion at this place called the Kursaal, which was not just an amusement park, apparently, but which also housed a circus, a zoo, a ballroom and goodness knows what else.

  ‘The word Kursaal, as I’m sure you know, Sefton, is German, meaning, roughly—’

  ‘A Cure Hall?’ I ventured.

  ‘Well, yes, strictly speaking. Very good.’ He was always slightly disappointed when others knew something that he thought only he knew. Though he had the considerable advantage of knowing more about most things than most people. ‘Though I think more colloquially we might refer to it as a spa.’

  ‘A spa?’ said Miriam. ‘There’s a wonderful spa in Rapallo. Minty Greene has been. She lost three pounds in three days. But she did have food poisoning.’

  ‘Not that sort of spa, Miriam,’ said Morley. ‘It’s a funfair and amusement park.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Miriam. ‘Though I do rather like the funfair at the Porte d’Orléans.’

  ‘Very similar,’ said Morley. ‘I thought we might do a chapter on the Kursaal in the book: the association of the funfair with the ancient fair and the market square, which is of course the centre of the polis and—’

  ‘Oh, of course it is, of course,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Yet at the same time the funfair as the place where the world gets turned upside down, where one gets whizzed and whirled and de-centred, as it were, which is what makes it so remarkable and so potent a symbol of the modern age.’

  ‘Is it, though?’ said Miriam.

  ‘A place where one is thrilled by machines,’ continued Morley.

  ‘Well, I do love to be thrilled by machines,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Who knows what we’ll think of in the future, eh?’ asked Morley, warming to his theme, and beginning to talk only to himself, as so often. ‘Yet more speed, more intensity, more machine-made experiences. Where technology leads, so our pleasures and desires do surely follow. The Kursaal represents what the future might hold: a world of endless pleasure in which we are forever dodged, shaken up, twisted, helter-skeltered and generally made delirious. A world of perpetual self-indulgence.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about you, Sefton, but you have certainly sold it to me, Father.’

  ‘So that’s decided then. We’ll say a few photographs, some notes and we’ll convene again in the morning and head off, shall we?’

  ‘Very good, Mr Morley,’ I agreed.

  ‘Miriam?’ said Morley.

  ‘And you’ll have solved your mystery by then?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Morley. ‘Won’t be long now.’

  ‘As the monkey said when the train ran over its tail,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Oh, very well then, Father. Anything has to be better than sitting around in Colchester.’

  And so Miriam and I left Morley to draw his improbable conclusions and we drove to Southend in the Cadillac, a journey lasting a good couple of hours but remarkable only for the fact that there was not a cross word between us the whole time: Miriam had apparently exhausted herself in argument with her father. Of course w
e discussed Morley’s theories about the death of Arthur Marden and agreed that the most likely explanation was indeed the most likely explanation, that Marden had died from eating a bad oyster. It was, as it were, an open and shut case.

  ‘I can smell it!’ she suddenly exclaimed.

  ‘Smell what?’ I asked.

  ‘The sea! And I can see it!’

  ‘The sea?’

  ‘Southend Pier!’ she cried. ‘Longest in the country, I believe.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘Certainly something to boast about, Sefton, isn’t it?’

  Southend’s Kursaal is not difficult to find: basically, once in Essex, head for the coast, follow the traffic, and eventually you’ll find it. You can’t miss it: Southend is the Essex coastal destination and Southend is the Kursaal. (Clacton-on-Sea was at that time a distant second to Southend; too far from London for a day trip, before Butlin’s transformed its fortunes.) Once parked we paid our money and passed through the turnstiles, joining the massed ranks of the East End and Essex – couples mostly, done up in their Sunday best, down for the weekend or out for the evening, promenading, enjoying themselves in that rather dutiful way in which the English excel. In the hallowed entrance hall – the dome – there were some depressing-looking children’s rides, ridden by depressed-looking children, and a man in rather worn and ratty tails was plonking away on a grand piano.

  ‘Debussy?’ said Miriam.

  It could have been Debussy, I suppose, but it was in fact a thick and soupy version of ‘I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside’.

  The whole place was rather like that: promising but misleading, disorientating, simultaneously grand and terribly shoddy, a kind of parody of luxury. Beyond the entrance hall you made your way down a passage, like a narrow street, an east coast English souk, thick with jostling crowds, lined with stalls on either side, a confectioner, a tobacconist, a darts stall, a fortune teller – to whom we gave an especially wide berth, after our recent experiences in Westmorland – and then you emerged outside into the sparkling lamp-lit wonders of the amusement park proper, the promised land. Kaleidoscopic colour. Hot fat and sugar. Sticky fingers. Shrieks of pleasure. Candyfloss. Kisses. All the fun of the fair.

  The Kursaal has no doubt long since been exceeded by other amusement parks, but at the time – I think I’m right in saying – it was one of the few places in England, the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool and Dreamland in Margate being possibly the only others, where adults could go to feel like children and where children went to feel like adults; not everyone, after all, can make it to Soho. The Kursaal then was a place in and of itself, unique and vast – twenty acres or more – a pleasure dome, a small town within a town. After just a few minutes of wandering it was difficult to tell where you were, which was presumably the intention: you were trapped in a house of fun, a world of play.

  Purely in the interests of research, Miriam and I visited various sideshows and amusements: the shooting gallery; the carousel; Ring the Bell; the Hall of Mirrors; the House of Horrors; the House of Destiny; the Odditorium; the Aboriginal Village, featuring ‘real life Eskimos and Ashantis’, who I rather fancied were from Southend and outlying areas; and a 3D Last Supper, with moving life-size models set to a musical background of Bach’s Matthew Passion. Miriam’s favourite exhibition was something called the Midget Mansion, a small house built to midget-size specifications, so you had to bend down to see in through the windows, where you could spy a family of very glum-looking midgets seated on midget-sized chairs drinking tea from midget-sized cups at a midget-sized table. It was not, I have to say, a very edifying spectacle, either for the spectators or, doubtless, for the midgets. I took some photographs – and was told that I was not allowed to take photographs. The Lady Lion Tamer, thank goodness, was on a tea break and something called A Grand Giggle was closed but we were able to attempt to Knock the Lady Out of Bed – a task in which I singularly failed but at which Miriam immediately succeeded, the buxom and scantily clad young woman falling at Miriam’s first throw – and we also admired the antics in the Monkey Village.

  It was, if nothing else, invigorating, not least because absolutely everywhere there were people, even on a Sunday night in early autumn, pushing past, jostling, shouldering their way through, flocking to the Palais de Danse (which boasted ‘OFFICIALLY THE FINEST DANCE FLOOR IN ENGLAND’) and to the Bumper Cars, to the Mont Blanc, the Caterpillar, the Jolly Tubes, the Ghost Train and the Petboats, and to all the various other events and competitions, including a play with ‘A Star Cast of Wonder Children’, apparently, and another promising simply ‘Freaks’. ‘Probably one and the same,’ said Miriam, who had taken my hand and was busy leading us towards the busiest attraction of all, the Cyclone.

  CHAPTER 23

  UP AND DOWN AND ROUND AND ROUND

  EVERYONE NOW HAS OF COURSE experienced something like the Cyclone. Indeed in a sense – at least in a Morley sense – the Cyclone is now what we all experience, all the time. (In an article written in the dark days of 1940 but never published Morley, at his lowest ebb, described the twentieth century as ‘a dreamland become a horror, a never-ending rollercoaster of spectacle and event’.) But to experience the Cyclone back then, back when you didn’t know what to expect, when you didn’t even really understand what it was, this thing, some thing you’d maybe read about that they had in Blackpool or in Coney Island, a rollercoaster ride: it was still something strange, something hard to understand. How you had to climb into those little carts, with all the other people climbing into their little carts, how you’re all together but also somehow isolated and apart, and how you have to wait and wait and then finally how it starts moving and juddering forward and you realise it’s too late, that it’s begun and there’s no going back. And the ground beneath you starts slowly inching away, the whole dense glow of the Kursaal opens up before you, and the town, and old England and the vast unarguable sea, and up and up until finally you come to a sudden stop, a pause, the peak of the rackety wooden hill and how everyone is silent – the sheer shock, the pleasure of it – and all you can hear is the sound of the gears grinding and the sounds below, but then an even greater silence descends.

  And then it’s that moment, the moment when you know something is about to happen, something unavoidable: the thing you know is always coming. That moment. And I remember Miriam turning and looking at me and her eyes were wide open and she was unsmiling and it felt as though I might almost look within her and see what she truly was inside: defiant, terrified, gleeful, expectant. And then – then it feels as if something has snapped, as if a cord has been cut, and you start falling. Down and down and descending down and it feels like you might crash through the whole machinery and go plunging into the earth itself. Miriam is screaming. Everyone is screaming. The speed is increasing by the second, the wind is pushing up against you, the bumps and shakes as the coaster twists and turns and you keep falling down to earth, nothing to stop you, and it feels as if something were moving through you – life itself passing through you. And then the sound of the grinding again as the whole thing begins to slow and suddenly it’s over, the whole pointless dizzying experience, almost as quickly as it’s begun.

  We sat there for a moment, hands still gripping the metal bar in front of us.

  ‘Shall we do it again?’ said Miriam.

  And so we did. And again. And again. A part of me wished we could ride the Cyclone for ever, Miriam beside me, that we would never be separated and never grow old and that nothing bad might ever happen except the sensation of the ride and the thrill of the moment. But eventually of course Miriam grew tired of the Cyclone and the Tannoy announced the last ride of the Wall of Death and so we joined the crowds heading for the last show of the night.

  The Wall of Death sits like a big wooden barrel under its own spotlight, scratched and scarred, perhaps twenty feet tall and double that in diameter. It was overrun with people. We climbed up the wooden steps as others were making their way down, up to a parapet surrounding the top of the barrel, the
whole structure shaking slightly as we did so.

  ‘Do you think it’s safe?’ asked Miriam. ‘I’m sure it’s safe,’ she reassured herself.

  Dozens of people were standing two or three rows deep, staring over the edge down into the wooden drum below.

  ‘He’s just coming on,’ said the man beside Miriam, and sure enough at that moment a big heavy door opened in the side of the Wall. Cries went up as the rider stepped through and banged the door shut behind him and acknowledged the crowd; he went over to his motorbike, and people were going wild. It was Billy Ball. Billy Ball of Hopwood, Son & Payne. I’d forgotten entirely that Billy was the stunt-rider.

  The Wall of Death is like a one-man Cyclone, on the horizontal. After a few revs of the engine Billy started some slow counter-clockwise laps round the bottom of the Wall, leaning further and further over until suddenly, imperceptibly, he’d somehow gone from the vertical to the almost horizontal. It was incredible; Morley later explained the physics to me, which was something to do with friction and centrifugal force – or was it centripetal? Or both? Basically, whatever it was, it meant that instead of going crashing down on the bike Billy was able to come corkscrewing up to the very top of the wall at a terrifying speed, before slowly corkscrewing back down to the bottom again. And up and down, up and down, racing round, cutting the engine, dropping down, roaring up again, an entirely monotonous yet surprisingly satisfying spectacle. The whole place was shaking, the crowd cheering and shouting, the noise was incredible and the speed quite terrifying: it was as if the bike were heading directly for you. To my amazement the crowd at the front were reaching out to touch him, which would surely have knocked him off, and some lads were even throwing pennies, presumably with the intention of doing damage to the bike. The whole thing felt incredibly dangerous – not least because the structure was swaying slightly as the bike accelerated again and again, the front tyres flicking the safety wire that ran around the rim of the Wall. Yet for all its obvious dangers the performance was like a well-crafted story: there were peaks and troughs and surprises. First Billy rode with both hands. Then one hand. No hands. For the finale he even put on a blindfold – and for the encore to the finale he wore the blindfold and rode backwards!