“I’m sorry, I didn’t see you,” I say.
A small crowd has gathered and Cronk and Dawn are watching through the window. Not one of my best starts.
“Didn’t see me!” snorts the yokel. “You better have your eyes tested, boy. You want to watch it, Arthur. You should have taken him up to the golf course before you let him have a go. He won’t pass his test if he can’t see proper.”
I could belt the bleeder, but after a few more insults we help him kick the broken glass into the gutter and can get on our way. Cronk’s face is a picture but he stays inside. For the first time since I have been there, Dawn is smiling. What really gets my goat is that Cripps does take the wheel and drive up to the golf course before he lets me have a go. I feel like accelerating to the cliff edge and slamming on the anchors inches from the brink but the poor sod can’t help being like he is so I don’t do anything and meekly drive towards the club house as instructed.
It is about ten o’clock when we get there and he flashes inside mumbling something about “call of nature”. I don’t know what kind of piss house they have in there but when he comes back there is a new spring in his gait and a faint whiff of Scotch around his chops. I don’t pay much attention but not more than half an hour later it is the side entrance of the Metropole and he has disappeared again. I am therefore not surprised when eleven o’clock finds us outside the Admiral Nelson and Cripps asks casually if I would fancy a quiet half of shandy or something. His “something” turns out to be a large Scotch and you don’t have to have an I.Q. of 150 to guess what he spends all his pocket money on.
Marvellous, isn’t it? After all that bullshit from Cronk, I’m driving round with a chronic boozer who can’t last half an hour without having a snifter. Not that it seems to affect him. He looks just as docile and disinterested as he did when I first saw him.
“You have to be a bit careful with the stuff, don’t you?” I ask him.
“Oh yes. But it’s no problem with me. I just have a quick snort occasionally to keep my spirits up.”
“How long have you been with Cronk?”
“Oh, let me see, I suppose about five years. I knew him in the army, you know. He used to work for me then. Very conscientious chap, and behind the gruff exterior, exceptionally kind-hearted.”
“What made you leave the army?”
I can sense that this is a question he would have preferred me not to ask and for a second I wish I wasn’t such a nosey sod.
“Oh, a number of reasons. I was getting a bit old for it. I felt I needed a change, one or two other things. You know how it is.”
I don’t, but I hold back from telling him and we go on to talk about our respective digs and how his landlady’s coughing keeps him awake at nights and her cat gives him hay fever. All in all he is a bit of a sad case is Arthur Cripps.
Lunch is taken in the Red Mullett and is mostly liquid as far as Arthur is concerned and by four o’clock I feel I know the pubs of Cromingham better than the test circuits we have been driving round.
For all the booze he has put away he still seems his normal unexciting self but I am glad when he suggests that we call it a day and I drop him behind the Grand Hotel where no doubt another bar stool is waiting for his arse to polish it.
A small seaside resort out of season is like an empty house. It goes to seed pretty quickly. The paint starts peeling, the signs start drooping, the waste paper baskets look as if they haven’t been emptied since the last visitor pulled out and the dirty postcards begin to turn yellow and peel at the edges. In another five months, the residents will probably start soaking their paint brushes in turps, but it seems a long time to wait.
I park the car and wander around for a bit learning how to lean into the wind like the locals and comforting myself that the air is probably doing me a lot of good. Once you get away from the sea front and the centre of the town, the streets fall into orderly rows of detached bungalows with names like “Shangrila” and “Trade Winds” and they are shooting up like bean stalks. The turves have no sooner been laid in the gardens of Seaview Close than the developers are levelling the foundations for Cromingham Heights. Most of the residents that I can see look like newcomers to the district. Retired, a lot of them, but a few middle executive type families with dad probably working for “Python’s Pesticides” whose “factory in a country garden” is just outside the town. Good fodder for the E.C.D.S. all of them.
I walk back past the closed cafes with their whitewashed windows, and dead bluebottles who never made it to the door in time, and take a turn round the pier. The old geezer who grabs my money looks surprised and irritated to see me and says they close in ten minutes. Through the rusty salt-eroded turnstiles and I listen to my footsteps thudding against the planks and watch the greeny brown water swirling thirty feet below me. It is difficult to imagine anyone coming here for a holiday. At the end of the pier is the lifeboat station and two or three anglers wrapped up like Egyptian Mummys and gazing unemotionally at the spots where their lines disappear beneath a choppy sea. I look round hopefully for some sign of a catch but there is only a tin of rather frayed-looking worms. It is funny, but though I don’t fish because I find it boring, I watch fishermen for hours. It’s the same with cricket.
The wind is now blowing so hard that I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole pier broke away from its moorings and started to drift out to sea. I watch with child-like excitement as one of the fishermen reels in his line, but there is nothing on any of the five hooks—not even a worm. He glares at me if he suspects I might have had a hand in nicking them and I push off back towards the turnstiles. In the centre of the pier is—would you believe it?—the Pier Pavilion, which has apparently been entertaining the masses with Eddy Seago’s Summer Follies, produced by Arnold Begstein, in collaboration with Lew and Sidney Godspeed for Wonderworld Enterprises in conjunction with Mash International. This starred, not unnaturally, laugh-a-line Eddy Seago—star of T.V., stage and screen—which probably means he once appeared in a dog food commercial—Conny Mara, Ireland’s little leprechaun of song, and the “Three Rudolphos” Jugglers Extraordinary. They were supported by Lady Lititia and her talking dogs, a group called “Armpit”, which I recall once having a record that got into the top thirty when you could still fix the charts and “that maestro of melody, the ever popular Harvy Pitts at the electric organ.”
Looking through the glass I can see the chairs lying just where they must have been left since the last audience stampeded for the exits. I wonder where they all are now, Eddy, Conny and the rest of them. Rehearsing for “Babes in the Wood” at Darlington probably, or working their fingers to the bone ringing their agents.
Looking along the coast I can see the lights of another resort beginning to multiply in the fast-falling darkness. This must be Shermer and it occurs to me to have a quick look at it before finding out what special delicacy Ma Bendon is whipping up for supper. I don’t hold any hopes that Shermer is going to be any more exciting than Cromingham but you never know.
Unfortunately, I never find out. Not then, anyway. I’m in the Morris and just pulling up at the junction with the coast road when a Viva screams up from nowhere and draws alongside. You must be in a hurry, I think to myself and I take a cool look at the bloke who is driving. From what I can see in the lamp light he is a good looking bloke with blond curly hair and neat, regular features. He looks like a college boy in an Amercian movie and has the same spoilt, arrogant expression playing round his chops. I take an immediate dislike to him and it must be mutual because he sneers back at me and edges his car into the main road before pulling away towards Shermer with tyres screeching.
Once he is ahead I notice the sign on the roof: “The Major School of Motoring”. So! Someone in the same line of business and not over-friendly with it. Having cut me up at the road junction I expect him to zoom off but the berk now proceeds to dawdle along in front doing about 25 mph. There is a bend about sixty yards ahead but with nothing coming towards me it is perfectly safe to overtake so I put my foot down and pull out alongside the Viva. Immediately blondy accelerates to keep pace with me. At first I think it’s just