Nostalgia Ain't What It Used To Be...
...But Then, It Never Was
“What we enjoy, and not possess,
Makes rich or poor.”
- William Henry DaviesThough I was born in Salford and lived there until I was twelve, I always consider the part of the Lancashire coast known as “The Fylde” to be home, because this is where I spent my teenage years and those years are so important in shaping who we feel we are.
Following my dad’s death, my mum re-married but my stepfather died a few months before my eleventh birthday and my mum had to find ways to support us. She did that by working in a pub owned by friends of hers. In the morning she’d clean the pub and, in the afternoon and evenings, she’d serve behind the bar. I spent a lot of my time there; in the school holidays I’d accompany her to work in the morning and often help by stocking up the bar from the cellar. It was a real, old-fashioned boozer. There were three bars: the small snug was where you would find old ladies with their stout or port and lemon; there was a main bar where couples and families came, it had plush seats and an upright piano; and then there was the main pub itself where people, mainly but not exclusively men, came to get drunk.
My mum would polish and hoover and, every once in a while, wash the frosted windows of the pub when the water ran thick and brown from the tar of a hundred thousand cigarettes. Friday and Saturday nights were almost always spent upstairs in the pub while my mum worked downstairs. Here she met a man fifteen years her junior who found out that she had insurance money from the death of her second husband and came up with cunning ways to help her spend it. The first thing that he needed to do was to split her from anyone who might help her. She agreed to run away with him to Blackpool. This was despite the fact that her love was returned by way of punches and kicks as often as with anything else. It was two years after my stepdad died that she took her car and a few possessions and ran off to the seaside with this man and with me in the back of the light-blue Ford Escort, not really knowing what came next.
What came next was Blackpool, we went to stay with my Auntie Mabel while we looked for somewhere to live. At the time that seemed quite reasonable to me, she was my auntie, why wouldn’t we go there? Well, she wasn’t my auntie because she was my mum’s sister or even because she was married to my mum’s brother. Auntie Mabel was my dad’s little sister. My mum turned up on the doorstep of her late husband’s little sister with her son and some bloke she’d met in a pub and Auntie Mabel took us in. From my perspective now, that’s incredible.
We found a place to live, a holiday flat in the town of St Anne’s-on-Sea, Blackpool’s posher next-door neighbour. This was not like anywhere else that I had ever known, not that I had much in the way of experience. The road that our flat was on led to the sand dunes and the beach. The road running at right angles to this appeared to be lost somewhere in the 1950s. There was a chemist’s shop with big multi-coloured bottles in the window, a bakers called The Buttery and a milliner. I mean, Christ on a bike, a milliner? I was a boy from the back streets of Salford and now I lived two minutes’ walk from a beach and a milliner. We didn’t stay in that flat for long, moving into other furnished flats in the area, but I did live around St. Annes-on-Sea until I was eighteen, so they were important years and I got to know the Fylde coast better than I knew anywhere else.
So now, many years later, I had the chance to visit Blackpool again. I drove but was meeting someone who was arriving by train and I had arranged to collect him from Blackpool North train station. That meant going into Blackpool itself. Not only did I grow up nearby but before that, when my dad was alive, this was where we spent our summer holidays. I guess I’d have been five the last time we did that but I still have some memories of those holidays: the coach from Salford, spotting the Blackpool Tower, rides on the donkeys, walks on the piers, building sandcastles on the beach, sandwiches for lunch with the emphasis very firmly on the sand, staying in the same B&B every time.
I arrived at the station only to receive a phone call from my friend to say that his train was delayed, well, of course it was, it was a train; that’s what trains do. I went into the station to ask where best to park as the spaces out front were only for twenty minutes.
“Oh, you can move yer car round t’back into t’ staff car park.” The gentleman behind the desk suggested. “Then y’can move it back to t’ front when y’mate gets ‘ere.”
I asked if it was just possible to pay and leave the car where it was. This was a question which had never been asked before, no-one had ever offered to pay to stay in the free twenty-minute spaces. After a little discussion amongst the staff, it was decided that this fell within the rules of the railway company and was, indeed, possible. Even though it was highly irregular, people offering to give them money. As this was not a situation which had arisen previously, there was no sliding scale of charges and it was determined that the only option open to me was to pay for the entire day, even though I’d only be there about ninety minutes. The price for the full day, for the whole twenty-four hours was set by their head office and there was no leeway. I would be forced to pay three pounds.
I was advised against such profligacy by my new friend and financial adviser and, again, was offered a free spot in the staff car park. When I announced that I would, instead, accept the charge of twelve and a half pence per hour and, what’s more, would pay in cash, I was looked at in the way people must have looked at Bill Gates when he announced his intention to give away sixty billion dollars.
So, the car stayed out front, I even funded the cost entirely from my own savings, and I had a look around Blackpool. This wasn’t the Blackpool that I’d known as a young boy, this wasn’t the Blackpool that I’d known from adolescent trips to the Pleasure Beach and the arcades, it wasn’t even the Blackpool that I knew from teenage visits to nightclubs. This was the alternate Blackpool, like the alternate Hill Valley from the 1985 where Biff knows the sports results. In fact, that was what it reminded me of most, an alternate 1985. Boarded up shops; guest houses offering bed and breakfast for £15 a night; graffiti; the cinema now a drag show; a heavily-shuttered pawn shop; Bargain Beer; King Kebab; and tattoo studios. Not what I remembered from thirty years before, in the real 1985. J.B. Priestley felt much the same way about the place when he visited in the thirties but expressed his thoughts on it so beautifully by saying that the early inhabitants must have understood almost immediately that even though its location was charming, charm was not for them and they decided to take a step in the contrary direction. They’re still stepping in that direction and seem to have picked up a fair head of steam.
By the time I reached the Winter Gardens, though, at least there were places that I recognised. Behind the Winter Gardens stood the Tower and beyond that, the promenade and the brown Irish sea. Walking down that way put me back into my alternate 1985 with the Viva Vegas Diner, Bar & Grill and the Wedding Chapel which appears to share a building with the tourist information office. I’m sure it’s lovely, getting married in an odd-shaped box on Blackpool seafront, it’s just new to me, I guess. I walked past Fizzy Duck’s Sugar Factory – no, I’ve no idea either – and Poundland and Harry Ramsden’s, to the tower. Outside it now, there is something called The Comedy Carpet. The promenade is paved in catchphrases and rubbish jokes from comedians who have appeared in Blackpool over the years. Still, one small part of it did remind me that: “Nostalgia is not what it used to be. But then, it never was.”
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