I’m Desperate, Dan!

As we walked on the beach in Manuel Antonio this morning, the sun’s rays on my shoulders took me back to my earliest memory of summer holidays with my parents. It was 1966, and we were staying at my aunt’s boarding house in Rhyl, North Wales. My Uncle Fred had died the year before, and at his funeral, my parents had promised to come and stay with my Auntie Madge the following year.

The boarding house (which my aunt and uncle had bought after my uncle was injured in a mining accident) was on Seabank Road, which was close to the beach, and also close to the fairground which was one of my favorite places. Rhyl was one of two working class seaside resorts (the other being Skegness) that had strong connections with Derbyshire’s mining community, with both towns having Miner’s Holiday Camps, which were rather grim-looking places where miners could take their families for a week of fun in the sun, with room, board and 3 square meals a day. I’m guessing that Uncle Fred and family had spent some time there at some point, and decided that would be the location for their new life.

Looking back to that time, it’s also my first memory of quality one-on-one time with my dad. He was a store manager with Fine Fare (it was still probably about 5 years before they started building supermarkets) back then, but for about a year or so, he didn’t have a specific store. Instead, he was a fill-in manager, roving from store to store on a weekly basis. Looking back, I think it was a way that the company could test him to see if was regional manager material. He was very good at what he did, but being on the road meant that he was away a lot of the time (or got home long after I’d gone to bed), and so I think that my mum put a lot of pressure on him to go back to running a local store.

So back to that holiday in Rhyl in the summer of 1966. What I remember both fondly and distinctly was our daily walk before breakfast to pick up a newspaper. Throughout his life, my dad was always fond of horse racing and when he was on holiday, he liked to study form and then later visit a betting shop to place a small bet (usually a double, treble or round robin; he always enjoyed that compounding effect when they all won). This was something that my mum didn’t really approve of, except when he won (which he did quite often) and then she’d me more than happy to enjoy his winnings.

I clearly remember the walk to the paper shop, as I’d be holding my dad’s hand and trying to stretch out my steps, so that I only stepped on each paving stone once. It’s funny how you remember the touch (or lack) of your parents, isn’t it? Neither of my parents were overly expressive in that way, and so the times that they did hold or touch me are seared into my memory. For my mum, I can only clearly remember one time that she hugged me (when I was 4 or so), and so when I think of that, I’m instantly back in that moment – we’re in the kitchen in Seanor Lane, I’m standing by the clothes dryer and my mum was wearing a dark blue cotton dress with big white polka dots. She was standing and pulled me to her, and I remember the softness of the cotton against my face, that clean laundry smell in my nostrils and her arms around my shoulders and back. The moment seemed to go on for ever, but still not long enough, and then that distance that her ‘bad nerves’ put between us was back.

At the paper shop, my dad would let me choose some sweets or a chocolate bar for later, but the highlight of the day was that he’d let me select a comic. Back then (I don’t know they still do it, or whether any of them still even exist), all of the traditional UK comics (e.g. Beano, Dandy, Topper, TV Comic, etc.) used to publish summer specials. They were a larger format and usually were at least twice as thick, with most of the comic strips having a summer theme. They were usually printed on better paper too, and cost four or five times as much as the regular comic, and so I felt very special when my dad would let me get one of them every day.

By the time our holiday was nearly over, the pickings were generally slim. They’d have either sold out of some of the specials, or the ones they still had were ones that I’d already read. When I found myself choosing something like Valiant (which was a war / adventure comic full of lines like “Take that, Fritz!”), I knew that I was scraping the bottom of the barrel and that it was time to think about going home.