Not A Patch on Going Hopping

In the nineteen forties and fifties People didn’t go on holidays nearly as much as they seem to nowadays. One good reason for several years was obviously the war but I’m not sure that people like us holidayed a great deal in the nineteen twenties and thirties either. Some in the community who were designated by my mother as Better People than us, Mrs Frost of Springhead Road for example, were determined to ignore the war and courageously set off in 1941 for their annual week in Broadstairs, or Folkestone often to visit relatives. In Mrs Frost’s case it was the sister who conveniently ran a guest house in Hastings but on this occasion her plans were ill fated. The reason for this was we found as she breathlessly relayed the story to the curious customers in Hilda Simms’ corner shop, that she had been targeted by a Dornier just overhead when she and her sister were about to step into Plummers. They were almost gunned down where they stood and would have surely perished if it hadn’t been for a brave little Spitfire, rising up above the enemy plane and giving chase. Later her nephew told her that the Dornier had fallen into the sea and the Spitfire had done a double victory roll to cheers from the onlookers on the blustery seafront below. After that experience which grew ever more dramatic with each retelling, Mrs Frost paid more heed to the fact that we were a country at war and decided to put all thoughts of holidays on hold for the duration.

It was all very well for people like the Frosts, I was told, whose income was very well supplemented by the piano lessons given in the front room after school each day, but those of us further down the social scale could only contemplate such extras once the Holidays with Pay Act was passed in 1938 whether or not a war was on the horizon. Even then it benefited only those workers whose wage rates were fixed by Trade Boards and were thus awarded one week on full pay, no questions asked. This was seen as a great step forward. By 1948 a couple of our neighbours spoke of booking a week at Butlin’s in Clacton. The Scutts family who lived at the top of Springhead Road quite close to The Leather Bottel had actually been there twice according to Barbara who was in my class at St Botolph’s. However, Barbara was known to exaggerate. Rita Jenkins confidently told us that she was being taken to a place called Skegness which was miles away and her mother was busy sewing her two new summer dresses. I began to seriously hanker after the undoubted glamour of a holiday camp!

The first such camp was opened by John Fletcher Dodd at Caister-on-sea in 1906 and called, unimaginatively, Caisters. Nobody I knew ever talked of going there so I have no idea what it was like but the one run by the entrepreneurial Billy Butlin at Clacton sounded most attractive. My father got a week’s paid holiday along with everyone else at Bevan’s Cement Works and after a great deal of argument, with my mother maintaining that she would prefer to have a day here and a day there such as Southend-on-Sea and Whipsnade Zoo, Clacton began to be discussed and then quickly discarded once it was realised that all campers were expected to join in the Fun. Apparently we were a family who were not especially good at Fun and so, disappointingly, a week was booked in a boarding house at Ramsgate instead. We paid for bed and breakfast, a cot in the room for my brother, one bath each during the duration of our stay and no eating fish and chips in the room.

I no longer remember a great deal about that week except that it was not an unqualified success and the sun did not come out until the day we were leaving. My mother complained a lot about it being impossible to wash and dry nappies and berated me each morning for not eating the breakfast that had been paid for but I was a picky eater and not keen on anything that contained obvious globules of fat which I was always told was the Goodness in the meal and which I most decidedly did not believe. There seemed to be a great deal of Goodness in the slices of black pudding and fried bread on my plate. The grim faced landlady was clearly not overly enthusiastic on her chosen profession and once the guests left the premises after breakfast the front door was firmly locked until five pm when they were reluctantly allowed to return, minus fish and chips and without making undue noise.

The seaside for me meant sticks of rock and sometimes candy floss, brass band music and pebble beaches. I was not at all eager to go on the enforced walks along The Front in gale force winds and longed to be back in York Road playing Hopscotch with Molly. I feared and detested the wheeling gulls, suddenly of an infinitely more massive variety than those that circled the Gravesend promenade. Their eyes seemed permanently fixed upon me and whatever it was that might be edible about me yet they observed my small brother in a much more benign fashion. Even then and only in his second year of life, his joy at their presence was palpable as he stretched out plump infant arms towards them making earnest sounds in a baby argot that they half seemed to acknowledge. Their hostility was reserved mostly for me so when walking I kept as far away from their sea wall perch as possible and concentrated my thoughts on the ice cream I had been promised. But all ice cream cones appeared to cost sixpence in Ramsgate which was Daylight Robbery and so put on hold in favour of fish and chips. Although eating fish and chips on the beach should have been fun it turned out not to be because of the ongoing proximity of the scavenging gulls. I found myself once again being mercilessly harangued on account of food, this time for not eating my allocated piece of battered hake which was what the avian predators were intent upon taking ownership of. And so I cried bitter tears of frustration and misery and told my long suffering parents that I hated holidays and never again wanted to have one.

By way of compensation and what now stands out as an island of excitement was being taken into a bookshop and being told by my father that I could choose a book to read and to keep. This certainly did not happen very often because I was expected to get all my reading matter from the local library except at Christmas and birthdays when I was sometimes bought second hand books from Gravesend Market. I didn’t mind that they were second hand because having my own collection of books was wonderful and made me feel important as I read them again and again. I can’t actually remember any other time when a book had been purchased, pristine and immaculate from a proper bookshop. My father strongly recommended Tales From Shakespeare by some people called Charles and Mary Lamb or A Child’s History of England by Charles Dickens but to his dismay I firmly rejected both of these ideas and instead spent a long time deliberating the various merits of The Enid Blyton Book of Fairies as opposed to the The Enid Blyton Book of Nature. I finally chose the latter which at six shillings and sixpence also turned out to be Daylight Robbery. All in all it was not a successful holiday which was a pity with it being our very first and my mother said she would be glad to get back to her own bed and holidays were not all they were cracked up to be. What’s more she wouldn’t be making the same mistake again and would never have believed the price of things in Ramsgate. She would certainly not complain about Gravesend and Northfleet prices again. If the truth be known, a week by the sea wasn’t a patch on Going Hopping and that was a fact.

When we got back to Northfleet, however and people began to ask how our week away at the coast had worked out, I was surprised to find that far from revealing how disastrous it had been she chose to wax lyrical about it and said we were already considering booking for the following year. We might even book early to be sure of getting a good room in the afore-described and previously much maligned guest house. When I protested that I thought she had hated the experience just as much as I had I was told to Button my Lip because that was no business of anyone else. Only my grandmother and aunts were told the truth and it did not seem to surprise them with Old Nan making comment that Ramsgate and Margate were much overrated and she had never held with them and would sooner go to Southend any day where both the weather and the whelks were glorious. And she agreed that as true as she stood in our kitchen none of these new-fangled seaside guest houses with their fancy prices were a patch on Going Hopping!
Such a disaster was never to happen again and the following year, my Uncle Harold who had become a senior foreman at Dusseks in Crayford and had no fears about using the telephone for the purposes of making holiday bookings suggested that the entire family should try a week at a place called Swalecliffe at the Hilltop Campsite to be precise. My Grandmother immediately approved and said it was not far from Herne Bay and within easy reach of Whitstable and the delights of everything that Pearsons had to offer and that was a place she remembered well from donkey’s years ago. Three chalets and two caravans were duly organised to be shared between us and walks to Tankerton to try the icecream together with visits to Whitstable for oysters and chips were already being excitedly discussed. We four were to occupy one of the caravans which turned out to be called Victoria and was situated directly opposite the much more desirable chalets appropriated early in the piece by Old Nan and various aunts and cousins. The second caravan, called Waterloo, was bigger and generally more impressive than ours and four teenage cousins had immediately taken possession of it. This did not meet with my mother’s approval of course but the occupying youths maintained that their heights demanded more room than Victoria offered and then even my father looked affronted.

My mother was definitely Put Out but she said so only to my father who pointed out that if she hadn’t agreed to Harold doing the telephoning more claim could have been made to one of the sea-facing chalets. He was perfectly capable of making a telephone call if needs be and that was a fact. Then they had the kind of argument I had become in recent months accustomed to which generally resulted in tears and a long silence followed by my father storming off on his bike. Later I was to understand that he then had a habit of meeting a Fancy Woman at the Ingress Tavern in Stonebridge Road where they had Shrimp Brand beers and was said to have even contrived the conflict in order to keep these appointments. On this occasion, however, he had little chance of doing so as the campsite at Swalecliffe necessitated a rather complicated journey back to Northfleet. Instead he stalked determinedly over to the clifftop and navigated his way down to the cold, windy, pebbly beach and sat hunched against one of the groynes.

Swalecliffe was not by any means perfect and couldn’t be compared with Going Hopping but nevertheless our annual holiday for a number of years was to involve the Hilltop Campsite which over time became more acceptable and gradually we were able to rise through the hierarchy somehow and ensure that we occupied one of the cabins rather than Victoria or even Waterloo. Overall each member of the extended Constant family found these sojourns by the sea infinitely preferable to boarding houses in more salubrious parts of the Kent coast. The campsite afforded a great deal more freedom and tolerance for the kind of familial behaviour that came naturally to us, sing songs and beer drinking after dark for instance, and the occasional robust altercation. To be sure it was conduct that sometimes earned disapproval from other campers and caused comments about Diddicais, but in later years even that would be seen by my brother as eccentric and quaintly tribal.

Things were to remain that way for a number of years with a regular group migration of the Constant aunts complete with spouses and offspring from Crayford and Northfleet for the annual invasion of Swalecliffe. 1954 was the fateful year when Aunt Mag, the sister who had always been closest to my mother, suddenly announced she wasn’t going to go to that Hilltop Campsite again now that their Margaret was getting married and their Ann growing up so fast too. In fact her Harold had booked for them to go to Weymouth that year, to a very nice boarding house on the Front. A first floor room with All Found and as many baths as you wanted. They might give Hopping a miss too because it wasn’t as if they really needed the money now that Harold had got his promotion to Foreman in Chief down at Dusseks.

My Aunt was never to be forgiven for this particular piece of perfidy because she had announced it out of the blue and as Bold as Brass with not a thought that her widowed sister might like to join them because by then my father had been dead for several years. Oh No never a mention but that was Mag all over. She had never really been one to consider the feelings of others and you only had to think back to that time at Margate before the war and the way she had behaved about the borrowed shoes to get the measure of Mag. Anyway we wouldn’t have gone with her even if she’d gone down on bended knee, not for all the tea in China. As far as we were concerned Mag could stick her holiday plans in Weymouth where the sun didn’t shine! I mean who would want to go to a dead and alive hole like that anyway? And as for giving Hopping a miss that year, well you could have knocked my mother down with a feather when she said that. She could be a crafty cow at times and it didn’t do to trust her and she’d always been one for putting on airs and graces when she’d no reason to. Her Harold liked to throw his weight about too if the truth be known. Well we could go down Hopping on our own couldn’t we? We certainly didn’t need Mag nor Harold to hold our hands, promotion or no promotion because we were perfectly capable!

And in the end that’s what we did, on one of the special Hoppers’ Trains from London Bridge that left in the early hours of the morning carrying hundreds of pickers to Paddock Wood, Faversham and Maidstone to the Hop Gardens. We didn’t know it at the time but it was the last season of the special trains because the need for hand pickers was fast coming to an end. Old Nan and Little Violet came with us because it turned out that they hadn’t been invited to Weymouth either, not that they would have gone even if that cow Mag had begged them to. As we settled into our train journey Old Nan, never slow to lay criticism where it was due observed that though she said it herself, Mag, her first-born, was at times All Fur Coat and No Knickers. As for that good for nothing Harold of hers, that silly bugger never knew whether he wanted a shit or a haircut. But you couldn’t help some people. They wouldn’t be told!