The Confessions Collection. Timothy Lea
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someone, has also thoughtfully enclosed a postcard of the Esplanade at Cromingham which looks not unlike the Esplanade of 132 other resorts, though achieving a certain distinction by the quality of the colour register which is such as to give the effect of a 3D film seen without glasses.
I make my arrangements quietly and secretly and can then achieve total surprise and discomfiture when I announce that I am pushing off. Mum can’t believe it and even Dad looks a trifle cast down. The night before I go he takes me out for a drink, which is totally unheard of, and hardly says anything the whole evening, which is likewise.
“Good luck, boy,” he says, squeezing my arm as we say goodnight. “I’ll miss you.” I think the miserable old sod really meant it.
The next morning I take my sandwiches which Mum has wrapped in grease-proof paper, refuse her tomatoes because I know they will get squashed, and stride off to Clapham South tube station.
It’s funny, but now that I’ve fixed everything, I don’t want to go.
I change trains at Norwich and up till then the landscape has been flatter than a witch’s tit. After that it is flatter. Ploughed fields stretch away to the horizon and there are occasional lines of straggling trees pinning down the hedgerows. Farm buildings glint from behind the trees but they seem outnumbered by church towers. There must be one for every man, woman and child in Norfolk. Above all looms the sky, totally dominating the earth, the clouds sweeping in like waves on a vast and deserted beach.
The effect on me is depressing. Without a few houses around I feel as exposed as a spare prick at a whore’s wedding and there is something about the increasingly bare landscape and slow unhurried progress of the train that makes me feel I am coming to the edge of the world. Now the fields give way to marshes, pock-marked by brackish pools, and the trees disappear. Soon, I think to myself, the marsh will disappear and we will continue over, into and under the sea without anyone making a move to save himself. We are on the train of the doomed! (It just shows what watching all those late-night horror movies can do to your imagination.) I had hoped that the trip would be enlivened by the presence of a nymphomaniac lady of quality going up to visit her titled husband who had been paralysed from the waist down in a car accident. Unfortunately, once again we seem to have got on different trains and I am forced to blunt my imagination on hordes of yacking schoolgirls who invade the train as it approaches Cromingham. If not desirable, they are at least reassuringly not of the spirit world.
“So I says to ’im, git you your ‘ands off my knicks,” says one of them enthusiastically to a friend in an accent I can hardly understand. With them chattering like starlings and increasing evidence that man has contributed to the landscape, I begin to cheer up and look out hopefully towards the sea. I have been a few times with Mum—day trips to Brighton, Eastbourne and Hastings when I was a kid—and I remember the kick I used to get when I suddenly realised that the great blue line running along the horizon was the sea. Unfortunately, today it is a great grey line and what I see through a sudden dip in the landscape is barely distinguishable from the sky. I know Cromingham is next because British Railways have thoughtfully provided a map to which someone has added a piece of chewing gum and the word ‘dump’ next to my destination; no doubt one of my fellow-travellers who is now confiding to a local friend that one Clint Seago, fortunate owner of a Honda motor bike, “be a bit of all right”.
The marsh gives way to dry land again, thus ending my last fears, and buildings begin to appear beside the track as the brakes slam on. I notice that the trees cower away from the sea and their topmost branches are twisted in on themselves like the arms of a beaten boxer trying to protect himself from a hail of blows. When I flick the sandwich crumbs off my lap and struggle out onto the platform I can see why. The wind has an edge on it like a razor and must have been gathering speed ever since it left Norway. I can understand why all the locals scuttle off at an angle of 45º to the vertical. Also why their skins are tanned a kind of golden brown not far short of mahogany. You don’t have to breathe here. Just open your mouth and let the wind rush through every hole in your body.
When I get to the station entrance it is in time to see what I imagine is the only taxi in East Anglia disappearing inland and the last schoolgirl paddling away down the hill towards the town. An inquiry about buses is met with the same puzzled amazement that might have greeted a request for a camel.
I eventually manage to ring for another taxi and settle down to wait, looking over the rows of flint-studded cottages to where clumps of caravans sprout along the cliffs like toadstools. Very few of them seem to be occupied and I’m not surprised. You could freeze to death up there if this weather is anything to go by.
All in all, speaking my mind, and not mincing my words, the place has about as much appeal as an old age pensioners’ nudist camp and I’m seriously considering catching the next train home when my taxi arrives. The driver takes one look at my Hardy Amies original and has me summed up immediately.
“You want the camp?” he says.
“Holiday or army?”
“You can have either.”
“I don’t want either, thanks.”
“Python’s, then?”
“Pythons?” I query, my mind boggling.
“Python’s Pesticides. Look, what do you want?”
He seems irritated, as if there are only three reasons for coming to Cromingham in November and he has mentioned all of them.
“15 Ocean Approach, please.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Bendon, isn’t it? You a relation of hers?”
“No. I’m going to lodge with her.”
“Oh, I didn’t think you looked like family. From London, are you?”
“Yes.”
“We don’t get many folk down from London at this time of year.”
“Maybe they don’t like getting the third degree from complete strangers.”
If this ruffles him he doesn’t show it.
“What are you here for?” he says, letting out the hand-brake slowly.
“I’m joining the driving school.”
“You’ve come all this way to learn to drive?”
“Yes. Princess Margaret told me it was the best in the world.”
His expression doesn’t change and he nods his head.
“Which one?”
“The Queen’s sister, of course; which one do you think?”
“I mean which driving school?”
This is a surprise because I hadn’t thought of there being more than one.
“The East Coast Driving School.”
“Oh yes.” He nods his head again and suddenly lapses into silence.
“How many driving schools are there here?” I ask eventually, unable to restrain my curiosity.
“Just the two. The East Coast and the Major.”
“Which one do you reckon is the best?”
“I dunno,” he says, his expression not changing by the flicker of a muscle. “You’d better ask Princess Margaret.”
We are driving along the front now and below me the sea stretches away like cold porridge, only less enticing. The beach has a generous helping of shingle and is divided into sections by an orderly procession of breakwaters disappearing into infinity as if the effect has been achieved with mirrors. I can see one lunatic sitting against a concrete ramp with a thermos flask in his hands, otherwise the beach is as empty as the collection plate at a Jewish wedding. Quite where all the birds that Sid was talking about are