by Jon Bounds
* * *
Midge still isn't quite there with the car. I can feel the engine uncomfortably lurching and, while I need to trust his judgement, I can barely see ten yards of road ahead. In a break in the waterfall, sun sharding from behind a cloud, the landscape looks magnificent and so English. Hills bounce fat trees across the horizon, the hedges and lanes give the vista the impression of a circuit board controlling life itself. I can see an obelisk and suddenly feel deeply connected to the earth, to the past, to a pointless idea of pastoral Englishness.
It's easy, if you've seen enough films, to imagine Arthur and Lancelot materialising out of the mist. It's easy, if you've half-digested as much literature as I have, to imagine them tilting at the overbearing wind turbines which change colour as you flit in and out of the autumn light. And it's easy, if you're a romantic sort, to start to imagine Pier Review as a sort of quest.
I've quizzed Danny about who's who – in the literary sense – on our trip before. I turn my head round to him and his nest.
'Which of us is Sancho Panza? Is it you?'
'The stupidly loyal servant? It's not me. Nor is it you.'
'Okay, what about Hitchhiker's?'
'We haven't got the room.'
'No, the book: who's who?'
'I'm Ford, you're Arthur.'
I'd expected him to want to be Zaphod, but Ford Prefect – reckless, drinking gonzo travel writer – fits, sure. Arthur Dent? Well, there are parallels, right down to the poorly drawn love interest.
'So, Midge is Marvin.'
If the climate of England hasn't changed much in the last couple of thousand years then King Arthur must have been freezing. Maybe the Holy Grail was the Dark Ages' equivalent of a two-bar electric fire.
Falmouth appears not out of a mist but out of this past Englishness, as we drive through a heavily wooded area cut by a brook. I'm just contemplating how Robin and Little John fit into our story when we hit a municipal car park.
I've become responsible for car parking. Midge asks if each place is okay, and I have to check terms and fill the meters. At home I enjoy my abilities to park cheaply and conveniently; it's one dad skill I can master despite my sheer lack of practicality. But after spending time guessing navigation around the dark of Burnham yesterday, I'm pretty much just going to hit the signposts and hope that the driver starts doing more of the decision bits of the drive.
Dan tells me that there's a Kurt Vonnegut quote: 'No matter how good the travel writer, they never tell you about the car parking.' So the Kurt Vonnegut Car Park Rating Scheme is born, each pier to be given a mark out of ten for parking ease and cost. When I later try to find the quote, no reference to it seems to exist anywhere.* Too late. We resolve to print the legend and the scores continue. Falmouth gets poor marks; it's a long way to the pier and not cheap. Coasting into the town we passed a sign, not from god but just as transformative –'Marks & Spencer welcomes you to Falmouth' – and the polished timbers of the new development we follow look like they've been installed to show off organic produce. We skirt past a famous man's chip shop and into the lobby-cum-gift shop of the Maritime Museum. We don't go in; we can't afford it.
* * *
Unfolding myself out of the car at Falmouth is a slow and sore affair but excitement at being outside the car and in the bright weather means I am able to do so without too much complaining. The streets of Falmouth are cobbled near the front where the boutique gift shops and the normal high street are making the transition from middle-class tourist season to welcoming the students for September. The pier itself, as if to add insult to Midge's injured driving hands, is unspectacular, nothing more than a concrete jetty into a clear, green-tinged sea. The harbour is busy, with a large army-grey ship dwarfing everything around it. It looks, to my mind, like when a child plays with different scale toys. A busker plays classical guitar moods, knowing his audience will prefer those to pop singalongs or a 30-minute version of 'All Along the Watchtower'.
* * *
It's not immediately obvious where the town is. The eye is drawn to an expanse of gunmetal grey, a ship we can't adequately describe to each other. Perhaps if we'd been around some educational establishment dedicated to the sea we would know if its purpose was transport or war. We follow the line of the harbour and guess that the flow of uniformed men is them knowing where the action is. The fleet's in town and they've got shore leave.
Frank, Gene and the other one are in our way as we look into a charity-shop window at nautical-themed books. Having failed at buying postcards yesterday, I leaf through a box of old ones in the Oxfam but they're frighteningly expensive. There's something very M&S about the town, a sort of solid and reassuring atmosphere with overtones that you might not find exactly 'with it'. We pass a giant haberdasher's, which isn't only proud to show the Cornish desire for independence from the UK but seems to want to break from Europe too. Cornwall evidently thinks it can take a seat at the big table.
Any table will do us. The pier is flat and uninteresting; little more than an extended walkway between Millets and Superdrug, the street lamps continue as if it's nothing but a pavement for the sea. We walk it and stare across the boats, but there's nothing there that isn't better expressed in the town itself.
FALMOUTH Prince of Wales
Opened: 1905 (Architect: W. H. Tressider)
Length at start: 510 ft (155 m)
Length now: 510 ft (155 m)
Burn baby burn? Nope, but was taken over by American forces during what they would call 'doublya doublya two'.
The foundation stone was laid by the future George V, who was Prince of Wales at the time.
With both a gift shop selling cards and a post office, we know we can't put it off any longer. We pick up a wodge of postcards and go into the post office, doing the maths in the queue.
'May I help you?'
Already, after only a day, me and Jon are a little creased around the edges.
'Please may I have 385 second-class stamps,' says Jon.
She blinks. '385?'
'Yes, please.'
And with that she goes to count them out. Jon looks in his wallet and asks me 'Will this be enough?' holding up a tenner. Quick maths not being a strong point, I nearly answer yes, but the cashier says 'that's £138.60.'
When we were setting up our website for donations to fund the trip we were deciding what relatively low-cost things we could offer to people giving us different amounts. For the fifty-quid tier I had had an idea.
'How about for fifty quid we offer to write them a postcard from each of the piers?'
'I don't know, that could be a huge hassle,' said Jon.
'Don't worry, no one will give us that much anyway.'
But people did. Nine people did. Thankfully we talked two of them out of having the postcards, but that still means on that first morning, in a traditional pub with a jukebox set to 'dad rock', we have to handwrite the first 28 of 385 postcards.
* * *
We take the nearest option, the Prince of Wales pub right opposite the pier. Daytime drinking is something I enjoy even more than the classic night out. It's relaxed, there's no pressure to find the trendiest spot or the best band, nothing to keep looking over one's shoulder for. You just slowly become detached from the world and more connected to your companions. Stella Artois, breakfast of champions.
Note that at this point I didn't pick Stella out of a vast selection of ales because I like it; it doesn't taste nice. It just tastes of something, which the other lager options don't. For all the town's 'not just any' organic pretence, the pub doesn't seem overwhelmed with imported or local treats. It seems to be the other type of M&S, the comfortable beige. In Weston we got posters of kitsch flashbacks – The Three Degrees, The Wurzels. Here, the handwritten whiteboard above the urinals promises Edison Lighthouse, so obscure that it's more quiz question than smirk-inducing. I remember their hit and suspect they may be local.
We pass a brick kiln chimney and a sign for a ploughing match as we head t
hrough much Englishness into Devon.
* * *
Paignton is two and a half hours away from Falmouth. Not that it bothers me much, having made my own little nest in the back seat. There is an art to back-seat travel, a Zen, a state of near-ignorant bliss that must be held onto by, ultimately, letting go. Being in the back seat you're powerless. Free of driving and navigating duties, you couldn't affect the journey even if you wanted to. The front seats can't hear you even if you had an opinion, so you might as well just leave them to it. Years of bus travel and a childhood escaping into books from my siblings on long journeys also means I have no problem reading while moving. Also, it helps that I have a peculiar quirk of my physiology which means that I fall asleep on any car journey longer than ten minutes. So the really long journeys, for me, are naps punctuated by listening to Radio 6 and writing postcards, and on more than one occasion, both at the same time.
* * *
We are existing in an eternal present of potential disruption and disaster. I'm not a good traveller. I'm not fatalistic about what might happen to us – at least not yet – but I worry. I get nervous. What if the car breaks down? None of us has any mechanical knowledge. But public transport wouldn't have been better for me. Sit on a train, is it the right train? Is it working? Have I got the right ticket? What if it doesn't stop at the right place? What if it breaks down, what if… I can't relax. Not until all decisions have been taken from me, which is sort of why I can cope a lot more easily with the regimented 'watch-the-screens' nature of travel by air. I mean, they're actively trying to make sure you don't get on the wrong plane, and the consequences of a breakdown require less thinking than having to spend the night on Crewe Station.
* * *
I have always found the idea of the 'English Riviera' comical, the sort of gentle self-mocking humour that we British would pride ourselves on if we weren't so gently self-mocking. But looking out at the white buildings in the distance, sprinkled on the cliffs and framed by a sailor-blue sky, I can see it. Just. Paignton front isn't big or littered with shops. The buildings facing the sea are almost exclusively hotels punctuated by a few pubs and, because it's the end of the season, they are pleasingly empty.
* * *
People are on holiday in Paignton. Not many, and no one glamorous, but there is definitely still a holiday atmosphere. The esplanade is punctuated with shelters that betray pragmatism in the face of more recent PR sheen – the palm trees, the 'your trip, your way' slogan. Paignton, the shelters say, is in England and, as such, at some point the wind will lash rain horizontally at you, the pensioner. You, they say, will be grateful for the glass lovingly etched with obscenities, the hard and overly polished bench, the proximity of the litter bins. You will be grateful as it's free and you can stare out to sea for free. You may sit, until it's time for tea back at the guest house.
But the shelters also face inwards, offering a view of a scrubby patch of grass and flat hotels. I take a snap of an old couple huddling in the shelter from across the lawn. They look content. Happy, almost. They look okay with the past and okay with the present. I'd like to reach that stage one day.
PAIGNTON
Opened: 1879 (Architect: George Soudon Bridgman)
Length at start: 780 ft (238 m)
Length now: 740 ft (226 m)
Burn baby burn? In 1919 the pier head and buildings, including a billiard room, were destroyed in a fire and never replaced.
1880 saw a full-cast performance of HMS Pinafore by the D'Oyly Carte in the pavilion: it was retitled HMS Pinafore on the Water for the occasion, although that seems a bit of a tautology.
The pier is mostly arcade, a sight even I will become slightly bored by. The arcades today are the same as those of my youth. Of course the 'wild west shoot-out' still exists but it's bookended by handgun video-game machines where you have to foil zombie bank robberies or kill every bad guy by shooting them specifically in the crotch. One-armed bandits have now become 'fruities' and, despite the themes, they all have the same pattern of lights and sporadic belts of annoying music. The grabbing games and other derivatives of old bunko carny games never change. They may be reskinned or filled with whatever passing fad is sneezed up into the public consciousness, but they're still just a rigged weak crane grabbing at a meerkat that's too heavy to be carried by it.
* * *
I pop back into the arcade and spend my two tuppenny pieces on a Star Trek coin waterfall machine. It's original Star Trek. Kirk and Spock stare across the heavily patterned carpet, their minimal, utopian space future further away from here than anywhere. Yet it's somehow very apt.
Devon is a long way from Cornwall, but things are going to become easier. I can see Torquay from Paignton Pier, and I spend a lot of time looking through the structure: across the railings at the future and through the decking planks to the deep past. These are the directions you can look without being depressed by the unloved mini-go-karts, the unfired guns on the shooting range or the unbounced trampolines. Those on holiday in Paignton just now are not bouncers, shooters or goers. Slightly symbolically, a tatty raven sits atop a deserted stall.
* * *
We dutifully reach the end of the pier, stare into the distance and leave. As we head back to the car I catch the eye of an old man as he peeks from under his anorak to lick an ice cream. He smiles, genuinely happy as the toggles whip around in the wind and he shuffles closer to his wife in a matching anorak who he's sharing the ice cream with.
* * *
When I said I could see Torquay from Paignton I wasn't just guessing that the next outcrop of civilisation on the coast was our next destination. Torquay is almost close enough to smell, if it weren't that most seaside towns smell the same, and I know the place very well. I can recognise the front quite easily: it's empty of interest almost all along the way; a sea wall plaited with white painted railings and well-kept but uninteresting lawn fringing.
I've been to Torquay, I calculate, more than 30 times. Many of them I can't remember or they have slipped into each other the way memories do, but the indiscrete indiscretions and excursions do form a good map of the town. I know where to go to get drunk, to bet on football and horses, to take romantic early-evening strolls. And to park, in theory. However, each turn of advice I give Midge results in nothing more than a loop back around to the stone-walled front.
* * *
Torquay is a six-minute trip up the road and we're in good spirits because we've broken the back of the travelling that day, so me and Jon get stuck into the crème de cassis from a care package of out-of-date booze given to us by someone who knows us too well. It tastes like cough medicine with an aftertaste of coffee, and seems to be impairing Jon's instructions to Midge because, despite his claim of having been to Torquay 'loads of times', he is leading us in several circles up and down some near-vertical steep hills.
'Try this one,' shouts Jon, and Midge dutifully swerves the car and the contents of the back seat, now a finely tuned organisational mess, shift on top of me for the third time.
'No, this one.' Again the road offers no parking. I hear a little humph from Midge as he decides to ignore Jon entirely and we head over to the opposite side of the front and follow the parking signs.
* * *
The prom here is featureless, as is the bulk of the town, its hotels and guest houses, its utilitarian shops and wide ordinary streets wedged over sturdy cliffs. The cliffs are stark, look manmade and divide the stay from the play. They provide blind corners and one-way systems, and we eventually give up and park in a costly council space across the marina from the pier.
* * *
Torquay seems pleasant, but small, more of a harbour village than a town, one that has enjoyed close to 120 years of tourism but always maintained the haughty standards of the Victorians and, later, the emerging, aspirational, middle-class Edwardians. The Pavilion Shopping Centre is a great example of this. Stark and defiantly white, it's an almost unbearable fiddly mixture of classical forms and lines, with pil
lars and plinths, and art nouveau metalwork. Every available surface is decorated with pineapples, trees, cherub faces and natural forms. It's a building built for the serious business of whimsy and to complement the empty pier.
Torquay's Princess Pier is wide and flat, the end connected to a curving wall built out from the bank of the natural harbour to create a marina that is filled with various yachts and other forms of marine propulsion so far out of my realm of experience that the whole thing might as well be a unicorn stable.