Pier Review

by Jon Bounds

  'That's not a pier,' I say to no one in particular.

  TORQUAY Princess

  Opened: 1894

  Length at start: 780 ft (238 m)

  Length now: 780 ft (238 m)

  Burn baby burn? In April 1974, fire gutted the pier-head building 'The Islander', which was demolished to deck level.

  Agatha Christie often roller-skated down it as a child, then very little happened. Not even a single murder. Apart from those of fish.

  'That's not a pier,' Dan says.

  'It isn't the pier, Dan, it's the harbour wall – the pier is down the road.'

  Like Weston, I know the place but haven't been on the pier. But there's not much to know; the only pleasures available on this outcrop are fishing and sitting. Almost everything else is 'prohibited', as the well-worn signs tell us: including roller skating, as previously practised by the young Agatha Christie. All those perfect murders in her head and a little bit of roller skating was probably the biggest transgression she made. It's an empty place, far from the notional centre of town. We don't spend too long there and are quickly hunting for somewhere to take a rest and a drink.

  We're not stopping here overnight; there's another pier in Devon to take in and we're going to go as far as possible into the night before making camp, literally. In a tent. This is something I'm trepidatious about. Camping to me means music festivals, fire, drink and drugs. On holiday, beds are holiday camp or hotel. But we have to do this as cheaply as possible: the budget has room in it for the essential seaside B & B experience and we're trying to wangle a night at the holiday camp of our youths, but camping or mates' floors are all we can expect on the rest of the trip.

  The hotels of Torquay are something I know very well indeed. Until a few years ago, I spent every Easter weekend in one of the town's multitude of mid-sized three-stars. A combined football team and social club outing with little imagination put in to the destination – and, to be fair, a main interest in getting away en masse to have fun rather than explore new places – means I've been here year after year.

  If you've not stayed in one, I should point out that they're more boarding house scaled up than Grand Hotel scaled down. The carpets are heavy and dark, surfaces glossed, doors either heavy and banging or suspiciously light. Where sunlight streaks into the rooms, it illuminates a flurry of dust. All the bedspreads are furry, and the breakfast fruit is heavy and slightly fizzy with fermentation. They are mostly family-run and the staff are stretched just that little bit too thin to keep everything on track. The same guy who is overly familiar with your hung-over breakfast will be helping you prepare tomorrow's headache way after midnight in the hotel bar.

  We often took over the whole place, even overflowing a few people into next door, so we didn't experience the quiet, forlorn afternoons that you might think you'd get in places like these. You've seen Fawlty Towers and the big takeaway is not the farce inside but the sepulchral dampness to every outside scene. I've not sat in stifling, shared TV lounges, nor been thrust into uncomfortable mealtimes with strangers.

  'I suppose you're wondering what gathered us all here,' says Midge to the waitress in Bar Mambo. To say she doesn't hear him is to be kind to them both, but Danny picks up the thread and fills her in. I'm not sure either of my compadres has any real designs on her; she's attractive if nondescript, much like the seafront we can see from the bar's balcony.

  * * *

  We exchange the usual banter about who's drinking what. The barmaid mimics our accents, wrongly, so Midge tells her about the project and she completely blanks him, not even recognising that he's spoken. Midge waits a few more seconds and goes to sit on the patio. I opt for a different tack.

  'Your pier is rubbish.'

  'Sorry?'

  She was asking for clarification, not forgiveness, so I tell her about what we're doing.

  'Oh, it's not MY pier,' she says dismissively. She does this a lot when talking about Torquay. There's a little movement of her shoulder as if she is shrugging off any responsibility for the place. Originally from Highbury in London, she moved to the coast to escape what she called 'a very abusive relationship'. She leans on the word 'very' and it hangs in the air for a few seconds.

  'What's the main difference between London and here?' I ask, trying to move the subject on. It is kind of sweet how long she thinks about it, like I've asked her something she obviously thinks about herself a lot anyway.

  'I think it's the morals.'

  'What about them?'

  'For example, friends back home would never start going out with an ex of yours once you finish with them. But here they see nothing wrong with it.'

  I go to ask if this has happened to her recently but the expression on her face makes the question redundant.

  'There's less people down here, it's bound to get a bit incestuous,' I offer.

  'They're all like that.' Quickly, with a shade of bitterness.

  'By the way, you were wrong about our accents. The one that you did is a Black Country accent, it's different to a Brummie's.' At this point I want to change the subject. 'People from the Black Country speeak loik thees, yaam alroit babs?' I say, drawing out my speech and mangling the vowels like our attic-monster cousins to the north. She laughs, I smile.

  'How is that different to how you were speaking before?' At least she is laughing.

  * * *

  There's inevitably something of nostalgia to the place for me. I can see roughly the place in which I once drank myself stupid before breaking my collarbone, and I can see the spot up the high street where my dad was more excited than I think I've ever seen him to spot Don Partridge, 'King of the Buskers', busking. Don, I was told, had a top-five hit with a song called 'Rosie'. I don't think the version my dad sang had the correct version of the lyrics, but I'm happy to have it circling in my head anyway.

  As we pass the penny arcade, I do a double-take as I am sure I see keyboard raconteur Rick Wakeman going the other way. That completes the feeling of things past.

  * * *

  I notice that we've lost Jon. Looking around, I see him standing in front of one of the few gift shops on Torquay's front.

  'What's the matter, mate?' I ask when I get over there, trying to follow his gaze into the window of tat.

  'Is that even allowed?' he nods towards the figures, admittedly not really seen in the melting pot that is Birmingham.

  'Oh yes, Jon, you're allowed to have them now, but they're just called "gollys".'

  'So they're not golly…'

  'Nope, just "gollys" now, Jon,' I interrupt. 'Keeps the jam company happy.'

  We drag ourselves away from the shop. Luckily it isn't open or I believe one of us would be in possession of half a dozen gollys in various poses, and perhaps a bone china Daniel O'Donnell teapot.

  The road to Teignmouth from Torquay is mostly coastal and, at one point around the strangely named Labrador Bay, the road throws you from the top of a hill, the foliage breaks, and the view punches you in the eye. A reddening sun is low and fat in the sky, as the sea breaks underneath and begins to take on some of those red tones. I wonder if you ever get desensitised to the beauty of a view like that. Can it become so mundane it would barely be worth breaking your stride for? And if you never do become desensitised – if such an appreciation is hardwired, then what is the evolutionary point? Why has this seemingly useless trait been passed on?

  * * *

  Not far up the road, Teignmouth Grand Pier is well kept. It's faced by an impressive columned building and guarded by a couple of concrete and magnolia toilet blocks. The whole place has a spic Edwardian vibe. Our second pint on the astroturfed balcony over the marina at Torquay has put us a little behind and the buildings on the pier here are closed, as are those toilet blocks.

  TEIGNMOUTH

  Opened: 1867 (Architect: J. W. Wilson)

  Length at start: 700 ft (213 m)

  Length now: 625 ft (190 m)

  Burn baby burn? Some years after fire destroyed the Castle
Pavilion, it was turned into a go-kart track in the sixties.

  Not too long after the opening, Arthur Ryde Denby bought the pier and planned to relocate it to Paignton. However, because of structural problems, a new pier was built at Paignton instead and Teignmouth was restored. Joseph Wilson, who designed Teignmouth Pier, also designed another one at Westward Ho! but it had to be demolished after only two years.

  Teignmouth is a pretty seaside town, but the pier is closed and the locals are wary of us. We walk under the pier, as it seems the only other appropriate thing to do. 'If you can't go on it, you go under it' is immediately the rule.

  * * *

  I attempt to take an arty photo of the stilts cross-hatching the horizon, but am distracted by a sound of splashing. The tide may be lapping quietly, but the noise is Danny having a piss up against the sea wall as deep inside the heart of the pier as he can. I join him. It's a long ride to the campsite and we've already started drinking our booze float.

  Dan rang to confirm our pitch while we were back in Torquay. It's at some isolated place about as far as we can possibly reach tonight. Apparently there's a bar, which means we now want to get there as soon as possible.

  * * *

  We have decided that this one is as 'done' as we are going to get it. Anyway, we have no idea where the campsite is and it is looking like we won't arrive until dark, so we head off. The only hope of navigating to the campsite is by satnav, although I sense the relationship between Midge and the machine is on rocky ground. It's the little clues you pick up on that give it away, like Midge telling it to 'fuck off' whenever it speaks, or him referring to it as 'that fucking thing' whenever it is mentioned. I check the postcode on our spreadsheet and Jon puts it in. We don't notice our mistake until much later.

  The journey is buoyed by our drunken hubris. Me and Jon take it in turns to play music at each other, trying to make each song better than the last, a kind of music-geek Top Trumps.

  * * *

  There's something in our make-up that's never more delighted than when we show people something they don't know – educating them, I suppose. We're plugging our phones alternately into an aux jack, the scratch and pop between selections reverberating through the car, and we're slowly turning them up and up like DJs towards the end of the night.

  I cut a swathe through maudlin indie of the nineties, Danny has some obscure Australian hip-hop from his trips working there. It's okay, but I will each song to finish once we've had verse and chorus – music as information. Most songs are too long. Only 'Won't Get Fooled Again' by The Who is too short and I'm saving that for Brighton.

  * * *

  There don't seem to be any rules to the game we are playing. I suppose a new esoteric song beats an older one, but all can be trumped by Fleetwood Mac's 'The Chain'. A song that's made even Midge's moderately light foot bear down on the accelerator just a tad, followed by whoops from us, his pissed cargo. But encouraging someone who, the day before, admitted that he doesn't see too well in the night to hurtle down country roads isn't our only mistake. The thing about a satnav is that it insulates you from the journey. By taking the responsibility for navigation, it turns the outside to background, severing your link to direction and reducing the driving to a video game. We don't know we are going in the wrong direction. It isn't our job to know; it is the confident-sounding robot's sitting on the dashboard.

  * * *

  Louder and louder, and shorter, and more plug-removal pops, and we're getting close to our camp and Midge is visibly ready to stop.

  * * *

  When that little robot tells us 'you have reached your destination' in the middle of a village nowhere near a campsite, we scratch our heads. We check the postcode again. In fact, Midge, checking the postcode again, realises our mistake. The danger of having one drunk dyslexic shout the postcode to another drunk dyslexic in the dark is obvious now, but late o'clock in a truly random village in the south-west of England is no time for recriminations.

  * * *

  No recriminations. Danny is very dyslexic. He read the address out to me. I programmed it in. I had to have remedial spelling lessons at school but have spent most of my working life dealing with words. I do have problems with tables, syllables and forms – which has led Danny to diagnose me as dyslexic too. Which means I can't blame him and he can't blame me.

  Midge can't blame either of us. Not only would it be politically incorrect, he's also sort of our employee (unless the Job Centre are reading this). It's tense. We carefully, with the poise and deliberation only drunks can command, reprogram the route and there are no sighs of relief as it tells us there's more than an hour to go. We turn, Midge huffs and puffs. We go up another private road, a steep gradient. There's a smell that may be the countryside, or it may be the engine. I pray for cowshit.

  * * *

  One piece of luck is that I'd spoken to someone from the campsite on the phone that day and, despite the booking office closing at 7 p.m, they were very relaxed about us arriving late, pitching our tent and paying in the morning.

  * * *

  It's pretty much pitch black apart from spots of artificial light in the middle distance as we finally take a sand-splattered side road and dune-ish hillocks guide us to the entrance. There's only one other tent pitched. We drive the shortest distance past required for modesty and park up on the slope by a bramble-strewn hedge. Nothing has gone wrong in the last hour, but we've not been talking, music switched to the implication-free radio. The only respite from the studied silence has been a strained plea for a stop, any stop, for a piss.

  Danny isn't in a great mood. He's not really looked at the tent we've got as yet and isn't quite sure how to put it up. He and Midge start to spread the canvas out and look puzzled at the various lengths of metal. I can't really help – my camping experience is limited to falling back stoned into the cheap Argos dome tents at music festivals, whereas this is proper scout stuff. I decide that discretion is the better part of pitching camp and stand back, looking helpful and eager.

  * * *

  For those that have never camped (a shockingly large number, I'm finding out) there are certain conditions that make putting up a tent difficult. Sobriety, or lack thereof. The wind doesn't help either – essentially you are trying to nail a large sail into the ground. Putting a tent up in the rain is miserable but not difficult, but putting a tent up at the top of a hill in the tail end of Hurricane Jeffrey without paragliding into a caravan is an exercise in soul-crushing frustration. Having seen the tent before also helps, but as I only borrowed the tent for the trip too much time is spent with a torch in my mouth trying to decide which three of the 14 poles are slightly larger than the others.

  * * *

  There's a rough wind pulsing the groundsheet and a drizzle forming in the air. If I look away from the static caravans and away from the two tents, my view is empty of life. Scrubby fields fall away to the sea; the air is salty and wet. I feel I want to be alone and start rummaging through my brain for words to comfort me. I pull out Auden's 'Roman Wall Blues' and recite it to the happy campers. It's a sad poem of loss and longing that will pull us closer together. W. H. was the Morrissey of his day, still ill after all these years.

  * * *

  Soft ground is a bonus, but one you don't get at a caravan site. Site owners tend to level out a field with hard rocks and shale before covering it with soft dirt. The upshot is me pushing the pegs into the ground with the palm of my hands, now bruised and bleeding from bending the metal things once they sank a couple of useless inches.

  Putting a tent up becomes the work of seconds when everybody knows what they're doing. My only help was Midge, who had pissed off in a grump because of the extra hours our satnav mistake had cost us, and Jon, a man so insulated from this sort of thing that he had to be told to bring a towel and whose idea of helping is to recite poetry while I bite down on the pegs in my mouth. I later find out I have chipped one of my teeth.

  * * *

  I finish a desol
ate piece of Auden and I'm about to follow up with A. E. Housman when I gather that the clanging of poles and tent pegs is more urgent than perhaps is needed.