Wish You Were Here!: The Lives, Loves and Friendships of the Butlin's Girls. Neil Hanson
Читать онлайн книгу.
and remarkably brave, she showed her mum the letter and said, ‘I’m going to go and see his father.’ She’d only ever met him once, and she didn’t even know his address. All she knew was that it was somewhere in Tottenham. I’ll find it somehow, she thought. So she cancelled everything: the cake, the ceremony and the reception, told all her friends and family that the wedding was off, and then set off to London.
She got off the train at King’s Cross, found her way to Tottenham and then wandered around the streets until, by a miracle, she managed to find the right house. She walked up to the door and when she knocked on it, who should answer the door but Bill?
When she saw him, Hilary did a double take and was lost for words for a few moments, but then she said, ‘I haven’t come to see you, I’ve come to see your father,’ and angrily pushed past him into the hall. When she had calmed down a little, they began to talk things over. Bill had changed his mind again and had now decided that he did want to get married after all, but his father sat them both down and offered them some advice.
‘You’ve rather rushed into everything, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you give yourselves a bit more time to really get to know each other and just get engaged instead?’
His words made sense, so that’s what they decided to do, but as Bill sat opposite her on the train back to Bradford, he said, ‘I’m so sorry about the way I’ve acted and what I’ve put you through, but I do know what I want now. So, if you’re willing, I’ll have a word with your dad when we get to Bradford and see if we can put it all back on again and still get married on Christmas Eve, just like we planned.’
If Hilary had any misgivings, she swallowed them and said yes to Bill for the second time. Her father obviously wasn’t pleased about the way his daughter had been treated, and when Bill asked him, at first he just shook his head and said, ‘Oh no, if you really want to get married, you’re just going to have to wait now, at least until Hilary is twenty-one.’
However, he gave in after a couple of days, so they rang the register office and spoke to the cake maker just in the nick of time – with Hilary having cancelled her order, he was just about to cut up the cake he’d made and sell it off! So, as they had originally planned, they got married on Christmas Eve, then caught the next train to London and had a two-day honeymoon at a hotel in Russell Square. They worked in London until the spring and then together went back to Butlin’s in Skegness for the start of the new season.
As married redcoats, instead of a chalet with bunk beds, Hilary and Bill were given one with a double bed in it, and Hilary did her best to make the chalet – their first home together – as cosy as she could. She put up their own curtains instead of the Butlin’s ones, and bought a little paraffin stove (even though it was strictly against regulations due to the fire risk) and used it to boil a kettle for cups of tea.
Halfway through the season, Bill was offered a promotion to deputy entertainments manager, but based at Clacton rather than Skegness. So they moved to Clacton and this time, when they got to the end of the season, Butlin’s offered to keep them on for the winter and sent them to work at one of the hotels they owned, the Ocean Hotel in Saltdean, near Brighton.
It was while she was working there that Hilary met Jimmy Tarbuck, who was also a redcoat at the hotel, and another Butlin’s girl, Valerie, who was to become one of her very best friends. Valerie was a redcoat, too, but was working as an entertainer because she had a great singing voice. She arrived at the hotel two days after Bill and Hilary, and the two girls hit it off straight away. Even though Hilary was newly married to Bill, she and Valerie were always together. Whenever they had time off or a break, they would get together for a drink, a few laughs and a dance. They learned all the new dances that were coming in, like the twist, the Watusi, the mashed potato and the locomotion – at the time it seemed like someone was coming up with a new dance every couple of weeks.
Coronation Street had just started on ITV and they both loved it, so they were always trying to sneak off duty and go to the television room to watch it. The ballroom at the hotel doubled as the venue for the cabaret shows, and Valerie and Hilary were often on duty together operating the spotlights and changing the colours of the acetate filters to suit whatever dresses the singers were wearing. However, the start of the shows coincided with Coronation Street, so, desperate to watch it, the girls decided that they would get two of the guests’ kids to do the lights while they sneaked off for half an hour. Children under the age of twelve weren’t allowed at the hotel, so Valerie said to Hilary: ‘All we’ve got to do is find the two tallest boys’ – they had to be tall to be able to change the filters and operate the lights – ‘and give them the sequence of acetates for the first half-hour, because Coronation Street only lasts half an hour, so we’ll be back before they get any further into the show. Simple!’
They found two tall boys who both jumped at the chance – they’d do anything for the redcoats, and playing with the spotlights sounded like good fun. So after giving them their final instructions, Hilary and Valerie left them saucer-eyed with excitement and went off to the television lounge.
Coronation Street was already hugely popular, its gritty realism, ordinary-looking characters and northern dialect a stark contrast to the ‘drawing-room and French-windows’ settings and received pronunciation of most other television programmes at the time, so a lot of the hotel guests were already in there with the lights off watching the show when Hilary and Valerie sneaked in. They sat down out of sight on the floor at the front and whispered to the guests: ‘Don’t let anyone know that we’re in here, will you? Or we’ll get into trouble!’
‘It was funny,’ Hilary remembers, ‘because a lot of the guests came from the South of England and they just didn’t believe what they were seeing on the screen when Coronation Street was on. They kept saying to us, “It’s ridiculous, people just don’t change the wheels of their bikes in their front rooms,” but we said, “Oh yes, they do in the North. Believe me, we’ve seen it!”’
Their plan worked; the girls’ young deputies did the job perfectly and no one noticed. When the boys went home with their parents at the end of their holiday, Hilary and Valerie found another pair to take over. To start with, all went well again, but one night, they’d only been in the TV lounge for about five minutes when they heard the entertainments manager shouting, ‘Where are they? Where the hell are they?’ And they didn’t need to be told who ‘they’ were. They tried to sneak out but walked straight into him and had to stand there, rather shamefaced, while he tore them off a strip. When he paused for breath, Hilary said, ‘How did you know we weren’t doing the lights?’
He burst out laughing. ‘Because it was like World War Two was starting all over again inside the ballroom. There were searchlights flashing all over the sky!’ The two boys had got bored with just focusing on the performers and had started swinging the lights all over the ceiling, pretending to shoot down enemy aircraft. The audience were in hysterics, but the artists who were performing on stage were rather slower to see the funny side.
As well as working in the Brighton hotel, the girls also went to the various campers’ reunions and promotional visits that Butlin’s held in cinemas, theatres and ballrooms all over the country during the winter. It was just one of the ways they tried to build loyalty in their campers and encourage them to book again the following year. People who’d made friends at one of the Butlin’s camps would arrange to meet up at the reunion, and redcoats would put on entertainment for them. On the Friday night it was like a show night at one of the camps, complete with all the entertainment, just to remind those who had been to Butlin’s what it was like, and show those who hadn’t what they were missing. Then on Saturday morning they would put on a big free film show at the local cinema. ‘There would always be kids queuing up to come in for the show,’ Hilary says. ‘And some of them broke our hearts because they were so poor. You’d see them standing out there in the freezing cold with no coats, no socks, and their little shoes with the soles worn through.’
Hilary and Valerie were always well aware that there were many people who were much worse off than they were, which helped to put any of their own troubles into perspective. A lot of disabled people, especially children, used to come to the camps