The Year of the Ladybird

It was 1976 and the hottest summer in living memory. The reservoirs were cracked and dry; some of the towns were restricted to water from standpipes; crops were failing in the
fields. England was a country innocent of all such extremity. I was nineteen and I’d just finished my first year at college.

Broke and with time on my hands I needed a summer job. Looking for a way out from the plans my stepdad had made for me, I got an interview at a holiday camp on the East Coast. Skegness,
celebrated for that jolly fisherman in gumboots and a sou’wester gamely making headway against a seaward gale:
It’s so bracing
!

But when I arrived in Skegness there wasn’t a breath of wind, not even a sigh. The train rumbled in on hot iron tracks, decanted me and a few others onto the platform and wheezed out
again. The dirty Victorian red brick of the station seemed brittle, powdery. Flowers potted along the platform wilted and the grubby paintwork was cracked and peeled. I took a double-decker bus
– mercifully open-topped – and I asked the driver to drop me at the camp. He forgot, and had to stop the bus and come up the stairs to tell me he’d passed it by. I had to backpack
it a quarter of a mile, all in the shimmering heat. I followed the wire-mesh perimeter of the site with its neat rows of chalets and the seagull-like cries of the campers.

I thought I might get a job as a kitchen porter or as a white-jacketed waiter bowling soup-plates at the holidaymakers. Any job at all, just so long as I didn’t have to go home. The
manager in charge of recruitment – a dapper figure in a blue blazer and sporting a tiny pencil moustache – didn’t seem too interested. He was preoccupied with sprinkling bread
crumbs on the corner of his desk. As I waited to be interviewed, a sparrow fluttered in through the open window, picked up a crumb in its beak and flew out again.

‘That’s amazing,’ I said.

No eye contact. ‘Tell me a bit about yourself.’

I coloured. ‘Well, I’m studying to be a teacher, so I’m good with children.’

One of his eyebrows raised a notch. Encouraged, I added, ‘Actually I like children. And I can play a few chords. On the guitar.’

The first bit was true but the thing about the guitar was a good stretch. I mean I knew the rough finger positions for the E, the A and the C chords. Go and form a band, as they said at the
time. The sparrow winged in again, picked up more breadcrumbs and fluttered out.

‘What’s your name again?’

‘David Barwise.’

‘David,’ he said at last. ‘Find your way over to the laundry room and tell Dot to kit you out as a Greencoat. Then report to Pinky. He’s our Entertainments Manager, you
know. He has an office behind the theatre. You know where the theatre is, don’t you?’

I’d stuck in my thumb and pulled out a plumb. It was early June and the temperature was already soaring into the high eighties. The kitchen was a sweat at any time. A Greencoat’s job
on the other hand had to be the prized option. I didn’t know too much about it but I guessed you organised the Bathing Belle Parade around the swimming pool; you got to walk around in the
fresh air and to fraternise with the holidaymakers.

To get to the laundry room I had to pass between a little white caravan and a beautifully kempt crown-bowling green. Despite the drought regulations a sprinkler ticked away, keeping the grass
green for the bowling. Outside the caravan was a professionally-painted billboard with a picture of an open palm bearing occult lines and numbers. The billboard advertised the services of one
Madame Rosa, ‘
As Seen On TV
’, palmist and fortune-teller to the stars. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone called Madame Rosa on TV.

But the carnival stopped there, and the laundry room was a soulless breeze-block construction behind the offices where Dot, a stressed and rather grouchy woman with grey roots under her thinning
bleached hair, toiled away in clouds of billowing steam. I interrupted her in the act of pressing shirts with an industrial iron. I smiled and let her know I needed kitting out as a Greencoat.

‘You?’ she said.

Maybe I blinked.

She seemed to be able to focus one eye on me while keeping the other eye on her work. ‘You could cut your hair and smarten yourself up a bit.’

I bit my lip as she unearthed a set of whites for me – trousers and shirts – plus a green sweater and a loud blazer, candy-striped green, white and red. She dumped them on the
counter.

The sizes were all hopelessly wrong, and I protested.

‘Yeh, you tell ’em,’ she said, turning back to her labours with the iron. The contraption made a huge hiss and she retreated into her cave behind a cloud of steam.

Clutching my new clothes, I was directed to the staff chalets. I say chalets, with its suggestion of delightful beachside cabins, but they were just a row of shaky, plaster-board rabbit-hutches
with a communal shower and toilets. It was all pretty basic. Each ‘room’ had just enough space for two narrow cots, with a gap of about eighteen inches between them, and a pair of
miraculously slim wardrobes.

But I was happy to be by the seaside. It meant I didn’t have to work with my stepdad. It was a job. It paid cash, folding.

One of the beds was unmade and a couple of shirts hung on wire hangers in its frail partner-wardrobe. It seemed I had a room-mate, but aside from a whiff of stale tobacco there were few clues to
give me any hint about his character. I unpacked my belongings and changed into the whites I’d been given.

The trousers were baggy at the waist and long in the leg; the shirts at least one collar size too big. I had a sewing kit in my bag, something I thought I’d never need, so I turned up the
trouser cuffs to shorten them and though I didn’t make a great job of the sewing, the cuffs stayed up. It left me baggy in the crotch but I had a good belt to keep my trousers aloft. At least
the candy-striped blazer was a rough fit. I gave myself the once over in the mirror on the reverse of the door. I looked like a clown. I tried out a showbizzy greeting smile in the mirror. I scared
myself with it.

I’d been told to meet Pinky in the theatre. I passed through an impressive front-of-house built to emulate a West End playhouse, with a plush foyer of red velvet fabrics and golden ropes.
Billboards proclaimed a range of theatre acts with gilt-framed professional black-and-white head shots. One giant picture had a wild-eyed man called
Abdul-Shazam!
in a tasselled red fez
pointing his fingers at the camera in mesmeric fashion. His eyes followed me as I passed though giant doors leading into a hushed auditorium. I made my way down past the shadowed rows of red velvet
seats to the front of the stage where I could see a small light illuminating an old-style Wurlitzer organ. The organist was studying some music scores while a second man in a blue-and-yellow
checked jacket looked on with a doleful expression.

The heyday of the British holiday camps had slipped. The age of cheap flights had arrived and holidays in the guaranteed sunshine of the Costa Brava had dented the industrial fortnight
supremacy. It all felt time-locked. The doleful man glanced up at me as I proceeded down the aisle, and I felt he, too, was time locked, maybe in the 1950s. His hair was pressed into a permanent
wave that had crawled to the top of his forehead before taking a look over the edge and deciding to go no further. He held an unlit cigar between his fingers and his eyebrows were perpetually
arched, as if he were so often surprised by life that he had decided to save himself the energy of frequently raising and lowering them. ‘Let’s have a look at you then,’ he
said.

I stepped into the light shining from above the Wurlitzer.

He took a puff on his unlit cigar. ‘Christ,’ he said.

Pinky Pardew – real name Martin Pardew – was the Entertainments Manager. He governed the camp jollies: the Children’s entertainment; the daily timetable of events; the Variety
acts in the Theatre; the bingo, the darts and dominos; the singalong in the saloon; everything occupying the campers’ time from 9.30 in the morning until 2 a.m. that didn’t involve food
and alcohol. It was a busy programme of enforced bonhomie. He was also boss to an Assistant Stage Manager, the Children’s Entertainer and the team of six Greencoats – three boys and
three girls. I’d arrived at the right moment to replace a Greencoat who’d quit. Good timing.

He stared at me glumly, cigar wedged deep between his fingers, his eyebrows still arched high like windows in a locked village church.

‘I think whoever had these before me,’ I said seriously, ‘must have been a bit overweight.’

It got a snort from the man at the organ. He was of only a slightly more contemporary cut. He wore a black turtle neck shirt and his hair was trimmed pudding-bowl style, like one of the Beatles
when they were still shocked at their own fame.

‘All right,’ Pinky said. ‘We’ll see if we can improve on that lot. Tomorrow. Meanwhile you’re just in time for lunch at the canteen. Then at two o’ clock
you’ll find a bunch of lads waiting for you on the football field. Referee a game, will you?’ He rummaged around in the pocket of his chequered jacket and brought out a silver object on
a string. ‘Here’s your whistle. Try not to use it. Who are you?’

‘I’m David,’ I said. I shot out a hand expecting him to shake it. It was a nervous gesture I instantly regretted.

Pinky looked at my hand as if he hadn’t seen one before. To my relief he then conceded the handshake. But it was a brief gesture before he turned back to the man at the organ. The musician
tapped out three quick rising notes on the keyboard. Pa-pa-pah! I took that to be theatre-speak for
thanks, right, g’bye
.

The staff canteen thrummed and clattered. A few faces glanced up to take in the new boy, but returned to their conversations without paying me much attention. I felt clumsy and
I knew I looked uncomfortable in my ill-fitting ‘uniform’. I slid my tray along the rail and two ample but deadpan ladies from behind the counter loaded my plate with leek soup and a
dollop of cod in white sauce.

All the tables were occupied with chattering staff and the only empty chairs would have me crash some intimate group. Except for one table where a couple in white cleaners’ overalls ate in
sullen silence. The male hunched over a bowl of soup looked pretty rough, but two chairs stood empty at their table. I went for it.

‘Mind if I sit down?’

They didn’t even look up at me.

My cheeks flamed. The buzz of canteen conversation diminished. I got the strange sensation that everyone else eating there was suddenly interested in my progress. They all continued to talk but
with less animation; they flickered glances in my direction but looked away just as quickly. The tension in the room had ratcheted up out of nowhere, but everyone was pretending nothing had
changed.

The man bent on ignoring me had a close-crop of tinsel-grey-and-black hair that reminded me of the alpha-male silverback gorilla; and though he was still hunched over his soup bowl, he had
frozen. His spoon, having ladled, was arrested mid-path between dish and lip. I switched my gaze to his partner, a much younger woman maybe in her late twenties. The palm of one delicate hand flew
to her face, but then she too was immobilised. Her brown eyes were opened in alarm, though her gaze was tracked not on me but on her partner.

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