by Dave Spikey
She greeted us with a stern, ‘Are you half board?’ and my dad couldn’t resist the golden opportunity and came out with the classic (if misplaced), ‘Well, we’re not very interested to be honest.’ He thought she’d see the funny side. Do you recall the witch on The Wizard of Oz? Enough said because her stony face never cracked and just got stonier as she followed it up with the equally tempting, ‘Have you got reservations?’ Dad wisely resisted the urge and said, ‘Yes, under the name of Bramwell,’ even though I know that he was dying to say, ‘Yes, we wish we’d booked somewhere else.’
It was a dismal, humourless place and so boring that I had to send down for another Bible (He dies in the end). I remember that there was a confusing sign in the hallway that read: ‘Please be in bed before I am.’ The landlady caught me ridiculing the sign to my sister Joy and snapped at me, ‘It’s “Please be in bed before one am.”’
Blackpool was great. We’d go on the beach most days with our brand new buckets and spades, make sand pies and have a ride on the donkeys. (Q: What do donkeys get for their dinner at Blackpool? A: Half an hour.) A tip about choosing your donkey – always take one from the middle because they do tend to lean against each other in a line, and so if you take an end one, sometimes they will all fall over. We’d walk down the promenade and the piers to see ‘Uncle Peter’s’ junior talent show and maybe visit Blackpool Tower and the Pleasure Beach. My grandad always called Blackpool Tower the ‘Fairy Shite’ because when we used to get to the resort, I’d shout, ‘Look, Blackpool Tower!’ and my grandad would say in his broad Lancashire accent, ‘Aye, it’s a fairish height,’ and then laugh at his own perennial joke.
One of my favourite days in Blackpool was at the boating pool on north shore, where you could drive a proper motorboat, have a ride on the small funfair, or catch crabs by tying a mussel to a piece of string and dropping it to the bottom of the pool. We used to catch dozens of them; I say ‘catch’, when in fact what happened was that they climbed onto the mussel for a snack and we just pulled them up. Some of them were huge and would climb out of our buckets to terrorize all the small children, mums and grans. We’d empty them back in the pool at the end of the day.
Sometimes, we’d take a tram up the front (have you ever taken a tram up the front, Mrs? Oh, a Ken Dodd moment there). We’d go to Bispham (hilarious place name for a kid – Biz-Bum) or Fleetwood for a day out. My gran was terrified of the tram lines and she once asked a tram driver, if she stood on the tram line, would she get electrocuted, and he replied, ‘Only if you cock your other leg over that wire up there.’
On the Friday night before we came home on the Saturday, Dad would take us all to the ‘Café Royal’ and we’d have chicken and chips. I loved that.
We got a car when I was about ten, I think. My dad and Uncle Brian (not a real uncle, just a good family friend; we had dozens of pretend uncles and aunties when I was growing up and all as good as the real thing – they’d do anything to help), who was also a painter and decorator, had decided to set themselves up as an independent self-employed business (‘no job too small’). Of course they needed transport, and so purchased a Skoda Estate car, which was that strange sort of dirty-underpants colour with a contrasting blue passenger door (as they do). My dad was learning to drive and my Uncle Brian was teaching him. I can’t remember if Dad had actually passed his test when he decided we should drive to North Wales for our holiday week. We were so excited – we were going abroad!
It was to be the first (and most eventful) of many wonderful holidays in North Wales. I’ll always remember that inaugural journey for all sorts of reasons: the stunning beauty first of all; I’d never seen hills and valleys and so much green on that scale as we drove the long way round, through Ruthin, round Lake Bala, passed ‘Swallow Falls’ and down the winding road through the mountains by Betwsy-coed … And what else happened on the journey? Oh yes, the brakes failed as we hurtled down a particularly treacherous stretch towards Ffestiniog! Instinctively, Dad pulled on the handbrake and somehow steered us into an inviting pub car park, where we rolled to a halt. Unbelievable. We waited for the AA and they came and fixed the problem (I think! The memory is a bit blurred). It was a rubbish car and when we came to a big hill, which happened quite a lot as we made progress to the coast, us kids had to get out and walk up because the car wouldn’t make it to the top fully loaded.
We eventually got to Ffestiniog and the slate mines and dropped down into Porthmadog, before approaching our destination of Criccieth. In my mind’s eye, I can see it now as I saw it then, and recall the amazement of travelling along that coast road and then following the road around the bend created by a headland and there it was, Criccieth. The sun was shining and the small waves on the sea in the near-perfect bay glittered its reflection – and there on the headland was a castle! A real-life castle. I was dumbstruck. I’d somehow found my way into a ‘Famous Five’ book. We returned to Criccieth and surrounding villages for many years after that, and every time that first sighting of the bay always lifted my spirits.
The beaches and coves were so different than Blackpool (well, obviously). ‘Blackrock Sands’ beach was immense and there was beautiful ‘Whistling Sands’ beach, where, if you walked barefoot, the sands would actually whistle underfoot. Around Criccieth there were rocky coves to explore and Cadwalader’s ice-cream parlour. We nearly always visited Ty Newydd, Llanystumdwy where David Lloyd George lived and died, and we’d walk up the river and sit on the rocks and dangle our feet in the water.
Another day out would be to Caernarfon, which has a stunning castle right by the harbour there, but some days I’d just go off with my dad and try to catch trout in the small stream behind the house we’d rented in Chwilog. My dad said he could tickle trout – a traditional skilled way in which to catch them, which involves submerging your hand in the river and slowly moving your fingers in a tickling motion; for some reason known only to trout, they swim over your hand because they are attracted to this particular action and then you very, very quickly flip them up and out of the water. Sounds simple. Isn’t. After two hours, I persuaded Dad to take his strangely blue hand out of the stream and try a fishing rod instead. I suggested that Welsh trout probably weren’t as ticklish as the English ones anyway.
When I got married for the first time, aged twenty, there was only one place I wanted to go to for my honeymoon: Criccieth. Problem was that I couldn’t drive, so my mum and dad said that they’d take us to the B&B we’d booked for the week. And so it was that, the morning after the wedding, we got into my mum and dad’s sky-blue Vauxhall Viva EUT 613C and took that same journey that I’d taken as a ten-year-old.
The B&B was fabulous and the landlady persuaded my parents to stay for an evening meal before they drove back. They stayed and I am not joking when I say that that meal was stunning. So stunning, in fact, that my mum and dad decided to stay for a couple of days. And the landlady gave them the bedroom under ours! Happy honeymoon.
Sex Education
Gran: We didn’t have time for sex in my day; we were too busy having babies.
DEWEK WIGBY TAUGHT me some swear words and rude jokes. The first one he told me went like this:
Dewek: What’s the difference between light and hard?
Me: Dunno, what’s the difference between light and hard?
Dewek: You can go to sleep with a light on.
(I laugh loud and hard. Too loud and hard: Dewek knows I don’t ‘get’ it.)
Dewek: You don’t get it, do you?
Me: Yeah, course I do.
(So straight away he told me his second joke.)
Dewek: What’s the difference between an egg and a wank?
Me: Dunno.
Dewek: You can beat an egg.
(I have no idea what this means, but laugh manically.)
Dewek: You don’t get it, do you?
Me: Yeah, course I do, because you can beat an egg, can’t you? Beat the egg, yeah.
Dewek: But you can’t beat a wank.
&nb
sp; (I laugh again, now a little hysterical.)
Me: I know! You can’t … so that’s funny as well. So that’s really two jokes, isn’t it? It’s brilliant.
You had to say that you ‘got’ stuff, didn’t you? You didn’t want to be seen to be a wimp, immature and inadequate, so you lied. Do you remember that a lot of jokes at school involved nuns? Like the one where the Mother Superior goes into the convent bedroom at night and shouts, ‘Right, girls, candles out’ and you hear ‘pop, pop, pop’ (that noise you make by inflating a cheek and ‘popping’ it with your finger). I didn’t ‘get’ that joke for years – I said I did, obviously, but I didn’t. There was loads of stuff I said I knew about at school that I didn’t. You know in Biology when you got given pond water and had to look for amoebas and spirogyras? I always said I saw them, did you? I even drew them in my science book, but I never did see them though, not ever. Not one.
Anyway, back to Dewek Wigby, who wouldn’t let me off the hook with the egg-versus-wank question …
Dewek: Go on, then, what does it mean?
Me: You can beat an egg. Because you can, can’t you? Beat it up, like.
Dewek: It means, you can beat an egg, but you can’t beat a wank.
Me: I know! And that’s funny as well, ’cause you can’t beat a wank so …that’s like two jokes in one.
Dewek: You’ve never had a wank, have you?
Me: Yeah, I have … I’ve had nearly four.
So then it’s straight home and get the dictionary out. Turn to the ‘W’s … ‘Wank’? ‘Wank’? Where’s ‘wank’? Ah, here it is: ‘A stick that when waved about causes magic.’ What? Oh no, that’s ‘wand’.
‘Wank’ wasn’t in. Most of the words Dewek taught me weren’t in, although I did find one, which was ‘shag’ – but the elation of finding it was tempered by the confusing definition offered: ‘Shag, a seabird of the cormorant family.’ Some time later, Mary Hilton asked me if I wanted a shag and I said, thanks, but I’d nowhere to keep it, and really she should find somebody with a big pond as it was one of the deepest divers of the cormorant family. And then there’s feeding it. Think of all the fish – and I only got five bob pocket money and two and sixpence for my paper round.
As it turns out, the ‘S’ section has quite a few rude words in it: ‘screw’, ‘scrotum’ and ‘spunk’, which means ‘spirit’, apparently! There’s also ‘sperm’ and ‘semen’ – names for the special seed.
‘Spunk’ is a great word, isn’t it? I once got into trouble in English when we were learning about onomatopoeia; the example always given is ‘ping pong’ because it really does sound like the sport in action. The class were asked for other examples and I offered up ‘spunk’ because I think it’s tremendously onomatopoeic, as I demonstrated to a stunned-looking Mrs Woodcock. ‘SssssspppppppppppppUNK!’ Say it and really emphasize the ‘p’. It did not warrant one full week’s detention in my opinion.
Anyway, having been told these jokes and learned all these dirty words, naturally the first thing I did was to repeat them to my little sister Joy – and my parents overheard. I received a good hiding and had my mouth washed out with soap and water, but it was also decided that, based on the words I was using, it was time that I was taught the facts of life.
(Actually, it wasn’t time; I was only nine, I didn’t know what the words actually meant and anyway, at that age I had more important things to worry about. For example, if I stood on a nick, I’d marry a stick! And a beetle would come to my wedding and I’m pretty sure that didn’t mean Paul McCartney.)
And so it was that it fell to my dad to explain where babies came from. He was rubbish.
Dad: Do you know about the birds and bees?
Me: Er, yes.
Dad: Good. (Exits.)
I remember thinking, ‘What the hell was that all about? Birds fly about, make nests, tweet, and bees buzz around and make honey. What can he mean? What is his point?’ I asked my mum and she made him have another go.
This time he mumbled a lot and basically told me this: ‘A man passes his special seed to a woman.’ Right, so I had this vision of a man holding out his hand to a woman and going, ‘Here you are,’ and she says thanks and puts the special seed in her cardigan pocket. So this special seed then – maybe it’s bird seed – maybe that’s where the birds come into it? Just need the bees now. So far, not so good.
Then I thought he said, ‘The seed swims to her room.’ That’s what it sounded like. So now we have a special seed that can swim upstairs to her room – and let’s be honest, that is special.
Lastly, he said that once there, the seed swims into her egg. So let’s get this right: it’s got to be Easter, a special seed has swum into her room and got into her egg; don’t know which egg; does it have to be a specific egg, maybe a Creme Egg?
Confused? You bet.
The sex subject was rarely raised again – until two years later when I started secondary school and my dad took me to one side and gravely told me that I should always wear a condom or I would catch some terrible disease. In retrospect, I now know that I took him too literally, but he did say, ‘Always wear a condom,’ and as I didn’t want to catch a terrible disease (who would?), I started wearing condoms. Admittedly, it did make me a subject of ridicule in the showers after PE, but I always just smiled to myself and thought, ‘You’ll not be laughing when I’m the only one here without smallpox.’
It was around age ten that my body chemistry started to change and I began to notice things that had previously gone unnoticed. I remember being enthralled by the sight of two dogs doing it in our front street and asking my mum what they were doing, thus presenting her with an ideal opportunity to explain to me the basics of sex and procreation. She passed on the chance and instead told me that they were dancing. Dancing! Inevitably, the first school disco I went to I nearly got expelled. I asked Christine Hargreaves to dance and she said yes, so I said, ‘Turn around, then.’ She was surprised – but even more surprised at what happened next!
Then my body began to change: well, a small part of it did. The first time was very, very embarrassing, happening as it did at the school sports day with our proud parents watching. My first hard-on wouldn’t have been so bad if, say, it had happened during the egg-and-spoon race. It would have been equally okay if it had popped up during the sack race – but no, it happened as I had hold of Christine Hargreaves’s ankles at the start of the wheelbarrow race.
Erections regularly popped up first thing in the morning on the bus going to school. The throbbing of the engine as it turned over at every stop worked its way up through my feet and legs to my groin. There is a recognized term for this, which is ‘Diesel Dick’. And I’d sit there praying that it would go down before my stop, but it never did, so there was always the risk that if I stood up suddenly, I could overbalance and pole-vault off the back platform of the bus.
So there I was, just turned twelve. I realized I would have to do my own sex ‘research’ to get to the bottom of the special seed versus egg thing – and exactly where did my five-times-a-day stiffy fit into the equation?
I’d started looking more closely at naked women in books and magazines. Not in the ‘dirty’ mags, which were always displayed on the top shelf at the newsagents (which was confusing in itself, because my mum had warned me that if I played with myself, it would stunt my growth; so how did people ever reach them?). The nudey women I looked at appeared in publications which were included in my paper round.
I especially looked forward to Thursdays, because a bloke on Greenmount Lane got Amateur Photographer, and about one week in four there would be a naked lady in there in an ‘artistic’ pose, illustrating the use of light to create a soft and sensual image. I also delivered National Geographic, which often had the bushmen of the Kalahari on the cover – and the bushwomen inside! Oh yes, completely starkers with nipples you could hang a coat on. Next week: the first pictures of a lost tribe from Peru who haven’t heard about clothes. Brilliant. I also learned an obsc
ure fact from National Geographic, which was that your female giraffe sometimes gets so bored during sex that she wanders off. I had a girlfriend like that once.
I progressed onto soft porn; well, my mum’s Gratten catalogue: lingerie section. Big women in corsets, middle-aged women in industrial bras, and my favourite – the knicker page. This page was split up into a grid of 5 × 5 photos of girls wearing knickers. The photos just showed the knicker area and a bit of midriff and upper thigh – how sexy is that?
I did wonder how they got those shots. I thought that they might have one of those passport photo booths, and the girls jumped in quickly one after the other, having just the knicker area photographed, then jump out, change knickers, back in line and pop, in again.
As well as being very arousing for a twelve-year-old, it was also a bit of a puzzle trying to guess from the brief snaps (sorry) which model was wearing which knickers – sort of a ‘Match the Snatch’. I was always disappearing into the bathroom with my mum’s catalogue.
‘What are you doing with that, David?’
‘Just looking at the Scalectrix, Mum.’
It was round about that time that I noticed that my ‘girlfriend’ Mary Hilton had changed. Changed a lot! Her nickname was ‘Bubbles’. You know how little girls with short blonde curly hair are usually called Bubbles? Well, that wasn’t the case with Mary; we called her ‘Bubbles’ because she would not blow her nose. Anyway, it suddenly struck me that Bubbles had grown up. We were sat in my front room, I was doing my Meccano and she was holding my nuts and I thought, ‘Wow! Hang on! She’s a woman! She’s got winnebangos and everything!’
My mum obviously noticed what was going on and thought that it was time I learned a bit more about sex and relationships. Her way of doing this was to lend me one of her Mills and Boon-type books. It was called Cruel Desire and it was very confusing.