My Idea of Fun by Will Self Read Free Book Online Page B

seemed to pay off. Come summer there were more guests. More than half of the static caravans would be filled. The older people – middle-aged or elderly couples – Mother would put up in what she grandly termed the ‘PGs’ Wing’. In the mornings I would catch sight of them, their unfamiliar nightwear rendering the sun porch sanatorial, as they processed to and from their allocated bathroom.
    Mr Broadhurst wasn't there to see the fruit of his business acumen, for come Easter he would be off, winging away like some portly and confused migratory bird, to different climes. Or at any rate that's what I imagined for him – he wouldn't tell me where he went. He wouldn't even hint at it.
    ‘Where d'you go in the summer, Mr Broadhurst?’
    ‘That, my lad, I am afraid I am not at liberty to disclose. My perennial peregrinations are perforce secret. All in good time – should you appear worthy of my confidence – I will divulge elements of my itinerary.’
    However, far more affecting than Mr Broadhurst's seasonal leave was the impact on my home culture of the improved management of Cliff Top that he had bequeathed. This amounted to a paradigm shift in the social status of my mother's household. As Mr Broadhurst became more familiar to us, more heavily entrenched in the winter seaside, so my mother upped herself. It was as if, with the failed father gone, she was once again free to resume an aspirational trajectory. Dinner became lunch and tea became supper.
    ‘There'll be more guests again this summer,’ I remember my mother saying, setting the femurous receiver back on its pelvic cradle and closing her bookings ledger. ‘That extra advertising Mr Broadhurst suggested we do has certainly paid off.’
    More guests meant that there was more money; and more money meant better clothes, new caravans for the site and new interior decoration for the bungalow.
    Kitchen and carpet were fitted. A central-heating system replaced the gas fires’ bleating and the controlled explosion of the geyser. The winter mornings, when in darkness I would bolt from the warm confinement of my bed to dress in the kitchen, became instant memories. Nostalgia for a simpler, more technically primitive age.
    Once the bungalow was vitalised people started to come by for drinks, rather than simply having drinks when they came by. There was also an alteration in the ambit of my mother's socialising, for the drinks people tended to be the parents of my schoolfriends at Varndean Grammar. They were a cut above the shopkeepers and tourism-purveyors that I was used to. Their business was more elevated, further removed from the raw stuff of exchange. Their conversations with my mother referred to a world where the ambiguity of the relationship between value and money was greatly appreciated.
    The people who had had drinks when they came by, well, they were a distinctly odder crowd, including Madam Esmerelda, the thyroid case who had the palmist's concession on the Palace Pier. Her boyish friend was an old circus midget called Little Joey, who still wore his stage clothes (‘It's all I have, you see, Sonny Jim, unless I want to wear kids’ gear'), Norfolk jackets in screaming plaid, topped off with a Derby hat. Joey and Esmerelda's talk was colourful, peppered with the showbusiness expressions of an earlier age. It was set against types such as these that Mr Broadhurst was able to insinuate himself into my life, without appearing quite as aberrant as he might otherwise.
    I will say one thing for my mother. I will grant her one, severely back-handed compliment. And that is: that as we ascended the greasy pole of English class mobility together, she seldom embarrassed me. For, if her great fault was the almost-sexual intimacy with which she blanketed me in private, her great asset was the preternatural sensitivity she showed towards me in public. She never patronised me or made me jump through the hoops of propriety the way that I saw other children forced to by