by Jon Bounds
'Help me! God.'
I pull on my pumps and open the front door, carefully pulling it to but not closed.
'Help!'
It's coming from the other side of the house. I jog through the garden past the bins. I can hear something moving in the scrubby bushes. But when I get there: nothing.
I dodge through the gap down a narrow path of sorts – lit only by the light from the upstairs apartment – and finally come out on to pebbles and can see the sea. I'm alone. It's a special kind of dark where you can see every star in the sky, not something you ever will do in Birmingham. Cities pollute even the night.
I run over the beach, and I fall over something.
* * *
Dreaming. Blue and yellow shapes float. A shout. A sudden pain in my side, a scream and a weight hitting the floor. Not altogether awake, I look around, not quite working out where I am. To my left is Jon, face down, half-groaning, half-laughing. Serves him right.
* * *
I'm roused from sleep by a shout. It's about 8 a.m.
'Jon, I'm off to work.' Dean had said he started early, but I'd assumed that I'd be up by the time he went. I put my trousers on, and have a cup of tea with him as I think about leaving the house.
'It's been good to see you,' he says. 'You should come back soon.'
'I will, mate. Thanks a load for this, it's been good to sleep in a bed after last night.'
'You have a long way to go. I hope you find what you're looking for.'
'I just hope we make it.'
'Help yourself to anything you need, and make sure you check out my private beach before you go – it's round the side of the house and down the path. Each apartment here gets a stretch of beachfront. You're not allowed to own the beach on the mainland, but you are here.'
'I will. I'll go down before we leave.'
And with that we hug, and he leaves me to it.
The private beach intrigues. While it's not exactly next to the house, the idea of having a bit of the waves that is yours alone is something I'm thinking I'd like one day.
I go for a shower, waking Danny and Midge as I pick up my wash bag. I get to the bathroom to find I've not brought my shower gel or shampoo with me, so I use some of Dean's. Rifling through my bag after I'm dressed, I can't find them in there at all, and I realise I've left them in the shower block at the Weymouth campsite. I'm pissed off. They were expensive items, but it could be worse. I stuff my remaining toiletries and my towel into my shoulder bag, leave it by the sofa and make tea for the boys. I want to hurry them up and make the place clean and tidy enough to leave.
Midge is sitting watching breakfast television. I suddenly hugely fancy the female half of the presenting team. Danny complains the milk is off, and I don't fancy anything.
* * *
Dean has gone by the time we get up and Midge is silent in the mornings. He exudes a 'don't fuck with me' vibe, finely honed, I suspect, from years of being a man of below-average height in the swirling crowd of a punk pogo pit. We leave Midge to his ablutions as we head to the 'private beach'. Following a route that may or may not have been through other people's gardens we arrive at a small shingle beach. Over the water I can faintly make out the coast of England, the weird sail of Portsmouth's Spinnaker Tower jutting up over a largely flat skyline. At once I feel very far from home yet am reminded that the world is a very small place.
* * *
We've had to walk across a lawn pregnant with dew – my feet are soaking. Again we look at the mainland and plan our trip back to it. Turns out that we can't get the ferry from Ryde on the ticket I'd bought, so we have to go back across the island to Lymington. Sort of fitting, but it will mean maybe being an hour or so later to Brighton tonight.
* * *
'Jon, is this yours?' I hold up a holdall. The bag wasn't with the rest of our stuff but left in the corner of the living room.
'All my stuff is in the car,' he says, although god knows how he would know that because I have just packed his stuff while he was in the bathroom.
'Are you sure?'
'Yeah, it's probably Dean's gym bag or something.'
Outside, Midge is checking today's route on a tiny map covered in gaffer tape he brought with him.
'Is this yours, mate?' I shout down to the car, holding the bag up for him to see.
'Nah, all my stuff's in the car.'
I know all his stuff is in the car because I had to repack it to get Jon's in, but it was worth checking. I go back inside.
'Are you sure it's not yours, Jon?' Jon looks again and looks at me with an 'I'm not a child, mom' stare. I leave Dean's gym bag where I found it and begin the process of folding myself into my nest. I do a last sweep of the flat. Dean lives in about a quarter of a beautiful, old Edwardian house. I find a bag and ask Danny if it's his. He says no and so does Midge. It's got a towel on top so it must be Dean's gym bag. I place it carefully back where it came from and make sure the electric sockets are all off. After one last confirmation that we've got everything, we reverse off the gravel drive.
* * *
With only a slight chill to the breeze reminding you it's not the bright summertime, we head towards Sandown Pier, the most obvious pleasure pier on the Isle of Wight. We park a couple of roads away from the sea to escape what I presume is mounting parking costs, judging from Jon's frowning face whenever money is mentioned. But the sun is already stark in a clear sky and as we walk down the road to the seafront we are greeted by a flat, azure sea. The memory, even now, is bright and saturated like a cartoon.
'Are my glasses straight?' I look at Jon after ten minutes of trying to adjust them.
'Yep, it's your ears that are fucking wonky, you ugly bastard.' The severity and shock of the abuse is of course directly proportional to the level of friendship.
* * *
Whether it's the sun, the early morning or the fact we're nudging ever further south, Sandown is bright and seasidey. It's busy and we just sort of stop when the town starts to fill out, thinking that the pier can't be far. The place is bigger than we think, and we pass real shops and tourist ones. Cafes waft noise and bacon as we hurry down a sloping alley to the front – it's good.
* * *
A jogger goes past. I wait the appropriate distance before saying:
'I think I would jog, but you never see a jogger smiling, do you?'
'It ruins the knees,' says a deep Geordie accent. We look around to see a friendly witch, dressed in a shabby, black raincoat and mad skirt.
'I've heard that.' I smile at her, for fear of being turned into a toad.
She laughs like I've told a joke and because mine and Jon's pace has slowed to allow her to overtake us. We watch as she walks ahead, still chuckling. All three of us turn to each other with raised eyebrows and head towards the pier.
* * *
I've been worrying that we're not talking to enough people to get a true flavour of the places we're visiting. I'm reading Priestley and have been thinking that also, in a way, I'd like to do more reporting, like in Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier.
* * *
Sandown Pier has been through the usual cycle of deterioration and rejuvenation, including a disabling during World War Two. The most recent issue was a fire in 1989, which ripped through the pier and caused nearly £2m worth of damage.
In 1989 I was 11 and I liked to spend my weekends with my nan. This was partly because, as the first-born grandchild, I was worshipped like Mithras the golden-born and fed steak and chips for every meal, but mainly because my nan would take me to work with her. She worked in the Penny Arcade (known as that by everyone not least because of the 7-ft-diameter backlit penny coin on its front) at Lickey Hills in Rednal, also known as 'the Doss' by the local bikers who used it as a meeting place.
I remember the bikers well: a nice bunch of guys that smelt of patchouli oil and grease. They all cheered when I showed them my smile lacking the two front teeth, and when I got into a fight with my brother that resulted in a scrape on
my arm. The smallest one let me sit on his bike and gave me a cloth patch with a panther on that I still have to this day.
I grew up in and near the arcade as my aunties and my mum also worked there. No visit would be complete without visiting 'Gran', the owner's mother who lived upstairs. To be honest I never enjoyed visiting Gran, because her flat smelt musty and of slightly off milk but she always gave me a 50p coin. Even better, to get to her flat you had to go through the back room, which was a mad professor's workshop of wires, games with their guts out and facades of clowns hanging in the dim light. Never getting to explore the cavernous workshop floor of the arcade properly must haunt me, because it's a background that my mind regularly drags up in dreams.
After being in the arcade all evening the owner would close up by tripping the main electric switch, turning the machines off all at once. The weird thing was that you could still hear them; all the whistles, jingles and electric barks would ring in your ears. Ghost noises.
Occasionally on this trip I hear one of those ghost noises from my youth, a certain sequence of beeps, three bars of a song that jog a memory. But it is only on Sandown Pier that I see a side-scrolling arcade game, a favourite of mine, the four-player Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Just seeing it in its original casing flips me back to my childhood, a time of ice-cold cans of Cherry Coke from the machine that stood by the pool tables, and of swiping money from the fruit machine one of my aunties would be playing to get enough money for a go on Street Fighter. Jon nudges me with a sharp 'come on', as if he hasn't been doing a weird little thing every time he encounters an image of Elvis, which, surprisingly, turns out to be incredibly often owing to the amount of Elvis poker games, fruit machines and grabbing cranes that appear in the arcades of Britain's coast.
SANDOWN, Isle of Wight
Opened: 1879
Length at start: 360 ft (110 m)
Length now: 875 ft (267 m)
Burn baby burn? A fire caused £2m of damage on August Bank Holiday, 1989.
At the bottom of the pier several bathing machines were installed in the 1890s, and it was in Sandown that Lewis Carroll wrote 'The Hunting of the Snark', which includes the lines:
The fourth is its fondness for bathing machines,
Which it constantly carries about,
And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes –
A sentiment open to doubt.
The theatre – now an arcade – was the largest on the Isle of Wight and hosted The Nolan Sisters, Jimmy Tarbuck, Gene Pitney, Jasper Carrott, Diana Dors, Roy Castle, Cannon and Ball, Jim Davidson and Matt Monro, amongst others.
As we tell people who ask – which is nearly everybody – we're not going to Wigan. There isn't a pier there. Sandown has one, though, and it's 'A whole day's fun in one!' according to the sign there. Nonsense, we'll prove that you can do nine in a day.
In the arcade, Danny indulges his Snake Plissken fantasies, pistol-shooting on a machine where you win tickets for a correct hit. You can imagine him in a post-apocalyptic New York fighting for his life. Until the roughly printed tokens collect round his black boots. A day's fun indeed. We get going.
As we approach the docks at Yarmouth, the petrol warning light comes on. We've been told that the prices are significantly higher on the island, so we decide to wait until we're on the mainland – but it still worries me and I try to manoeuvre my line of sight so I can tell just how much petrol is left. The queue is longer than we anticipate and I worry that the engine idling will burn away the last few drops of our juice. It's warm and the music in the car is loud.
* * *
As we board the ferry what I presume to be one of the officials in a luminous yellow jacket holds up a sign that says 'All Must Appear In Judgement Before The Seat Of Christ', but we don't see any other signs on the ferry about it so we sit on the deck and write postcards instead.
CHAPTER FIVE
JEKYLL AND HYTHE
I don't recall seeing a garage near the port on the mainland – I don't recall seeing anything much – so I suggest we trust the satnav and program it to take us to the next pier via the nearest petrol station. It takes a few minutes to kick in and then directs us back the way we came into the town.
It takes a while and it's starting to become evident that we're running on fumes. Midge is cheerful for once. He casually said 'okey doke' to a guy telling him where to park on the ferry and was mortified with embarrassment. The teasing he got for it seemed to perk him up, possibly made him feel a bit more part of the gang. After a few missed turnings we make it to a Shell garage and fill right up. It's over 50 quid.
After a bit longer we're a little confused about the way we're meant to be heading. Logic suggests we should now double back on ourselves and head roughly east, but we're not. I check the 'dashboard Nazi', as Midge has taken to calling the satnav, and it's saying we've a four-hour drive ahead of us. I'd given up with postcodes after our experience the other night. The postcodes of piers aren't that useful anyway: you hit the sea, you've gone too far. I'd just typed in the name of the next town assuming we'd be able to find it.
It all looks okay, until I click through and read the map.
We're going to Hyde. Hyde somewhere by Manchester.
Not Hythe near Southampton, just up the coast. The one with a pier. We reprogram. Half an hour. That sounds more like it.
Almost every road we follow is a narrow one, boxed in by hedges. I ponder what the countryside would have looked like before the various enclosure acts, what would have bordered the way, how we would have found a path. The consequences of setting off in the wrong direction would have been a little more important. We make Hythe in good time and hurry through the tight pedestrianised streets to the seafront, spotting the thin and fragile pier framed as it is by the back of a car workshop. This side of the pier is the back garden of the Lord Nelson pub, and they are very insistent that you are not to go through the bar to get to the pier. As transitory types, the urge is to just ignore and plough on, but something about the gentle, slow nature of the town – it's busy, not bustling, low-rise and heavy – means I don't want to do anything to ruffle anyone. We retrace our steps and work round to the real entrance.
* * *
Hythe has the oldest pier train in Britain and since we, the British, invented history, that means it's the oldest in the entire world. Which explains why the entrance looks like a tiny train station, a small hut for the ticket booth and all the signage branded like any rural station. The train itself leaves every 20 minutes but, as we have no time to wait, we walk the 700 yards to the end.
* * *
It's not very warm, but the sun is bright enough. Something of the town reminds me of Bournville on the outskirts of Birmingham, a place that manages to appear twee on the surface despite being within a huge conurbation and existing purely because of the huge factory it was built to serve. Bournville was built by the Cadbury family to house workers for their chocolate factory; it's very nice too – sports facilities, trees, social club and so on. The head Cadbury did it not because it was cheaper than finding a small orange tribe to kidnap, but because his Quakerism led him to believe it was possible and desirable to improve the lot of the workers. It's a little paternalist for my liking – especially its no pubs rule – but well enough intentioned and the place is quite nice. I doubt many chocolate workers can afford to live there now. It's a particular type of middle-class place harking back to the fifties.
Quakerism, I announce, is 'jazz religion'.
'It's free-form, Dan, man finding his own path to God… It's not really been that popular since the thirties.'
Danny isn't interested. And there's no one else to talk to on this walk to the pier end. The pedestrian doesn't get much width and the railway track is separated only by a thin rope propped up at intervals by splayed poles. In the huts at the end we can feel some movement underfoot, so we quicken our step, but not heavily, lest we fall through.
HYTHE
Opened: 1881 on New Year'
s Day (Architect: J. Wright)
Length at start: 2,100 ft (640 m)
Length now: 2,100 ft (640 m)
Burn baby burn? Nope, but a drunk boat captain did collide with it.
Has the world's oldest pier train (which is an official Guinness World Record).
From the end of the pier a ferry service once ran to Southampton. The only things there now are two large waiting rooms. One of these is empty and, by the looks of it, derelict. These long huts have rotting wood and extremely suspect floorboards. The waiting room that's open to the public has tables running around the edges and one down the middle, all holding all manner of nick-nacks and whojamawhats. The sort of treasure that looks delightful and eclectic at first glance but on closer inspection contains not one thing that you would want to own.