The White Horse and the Purple People Eater
My love for the arts did not grow in a vacuum. Quite the opposite. You could say it was hot-housed or hardwired into me. My dad was a librarian. My mum was an English teacher. Our uncle Richard was a farmer, but also an accomplished actor. Two of our cousins staked out their own careers in the theatre. My great aunt was a famous author published in among other places the New Yorker.
Closer to home, my brother was the musician in the family. My sister Christina became a published author many years before me – she has more stories published than me, in magazines and anthologies with higher reputations and larger circulations. My other sister, Mary, used to write plays that her and Chris and Tim would perform as children to an invited audience of friends and family. I was too young to do anything other than crawl around in the background.
Tim and Chris recorded their own radio show – decades before I tried my hand at being a DJ – which again I was too young to contribute anything more than keeping a watching eye over the proceedings as they acted out a range of invented characters, putting on silly voices. They’d make great collectibles now, those tapes. Maybe one of them was buried in that tin at the bottom of the garden. Maybe it was found years later, played to the bemusement of whoever dug it up. It’s nice to think so, but I highly doubt anything like that ever happened.
So, as can be seen, I've hardly been ploughing fresh ground here, as with most things in my life.
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Southend was a perfectly acceptable and unremarkable place to grow up in. It benefited from its proximity to the sea and its easy access to London. We lived near to a small, but picturesque park, with the exoticism of black swans and a Tudor manor house that was at one point home to the local library. There were ducks too and a goose that followed you around and hissed menacingly as it approached you. There was the park keeper, a perennial figure of fun in 1970s culture, who’d chase away rowdy schoolboys if they were playing ball games in areas where they weren’t supposed to.
There was a larger park a further ten minute walk away, more prosaic, but with space for football, cricket, tennis courts and a boating lake where you could hire out rowing boats. If that wasn’t enough, the seafront was only a few hundred metres beyond that. Stony beaches. Crazy golf. The Golden Mile, an over-caffeinated drag of amusement arcades vibrating to the sound of penny slot machines and space invaders. All the establishments had their names up in neon lighting – Circus Circus Circus, Fun City, Monte Carlo and the like – so that after dark it became its own spectacle.
On weekends, boy racers would commandeer the seafront and race around in souped up cars, disrupting normal traffic. Bank holidays saw skinheads and rockers arriving for fights that would spill over in ugly scenes across the beaches. Better to stay at home then or head for somewhere quieter, perhaps among the quaint cockle sheds and pathways of nearby Leigh-on-Sea.
The library moved out of Southchurch Hall Gardens and into a plain building on Lifstan Way. It was here I made my first foray into science fiction, borrowing volume after volume of E.E. Doc Smith’s famous Lensman Series. It stimulated my young brain and was doubtless responsible for the low grade space epics I scrawled into cheap notebooks purchased from the local Co-op department store.
Lifstan Way was also home to The White Horse. This was a famous local pub of the time, although I’m not sure I ever went there myself. Pubs were everywhere, although it may have been quantity over quality – I had cricket watching, real ale drinking friends who later described Southend as a perpetual beer desert.
Local to us was The Castle (where I was to get a bout of food poisoning that ultimately helped to end my failing university career). Further along the seafront you had The Liberty Bell, a small but friendly establishment nestled tightly among the tackier environs of The Golden Mile - I celebrated my 21st birthday there, although celebrate is perhaps an exaggeration. There was the Cork and Cheese, where during my brief postal career we might assemble before an evening shift.Southend United’s ground was well served for pubs too, but wisely I never frequented any on match days. There was The Blue Boar and The Spread Eagle within spitting distance of each other.
As for nightlife, I couldn’t really say. I was not likely to be found night clubbing. There was Tots (Talk of the South), which was probably long past its sell-by date by the time I grew up, but was a prominent feature of the 70s seaside nightlife. Meanwhile in nearby Rayleigh they had the hip alternative hang out that was Crocs, famed for housing two live crocodiles in tanks by the club’s main entrance (surely a cruel and unusual punishment for these creatures). Later – sans crocodiles – it rebranded as The Pink Toothbrush where me and my friend Dave went to see Killing Joke play. One of us had to lie about our age to gain admittance and after 2 or 3 support acts, Killing Joke didn’t emerge on stage until after midnight and we missed half their set as we ran back to Rayleigh station to catch the last train home.
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In the 1970s, chain businesses had yet to take a stranglehold on the town centre. There would be Boots and WH Smiths and the Co-op (then a department store rather than a supermarket), but also the locally owned Keddies and The Golden Disc, Parrot Records and Guy Norris.
Southend was a perfectly acceptable and unremarkable place to grow up in, but after I’d left I only returned there the once. It doesn’t hold a place in my heart, but neither would I disown it. I don’t think I can say it formed me. I’ve not set stories there and I’ve not commemorated it in song. If I’d made it to be famous, they probably wouldn’t have erected a blue plaque on the house where I grew up. But I liked the parks. I enjoyed the seafront, the wholesome parts and the tacky parts in equal measure. The surrounding towns and villages. Hockley Woods. Hadleigh Castle. The sandy beach at Shoeburyness where one winter it was cold enough for part of the sea to freeze over.
I still retain many of the buildings in my head, a strong sense of the geography. I can picture myself walking along Riviera Drive on my way to the local train station. There are two young women in a small car, driving towards me and waving as I set off for a week away to visit my brother (then resident in West Sussex). I still don’t know who they were. It’s little moments like that, or the Friday lunchtime ritual of chips from the chippy by Churchill Gardens (I’m listening to A Guy Called Gerald’s Automanikk album on cassette on my cheap knock off Sony Walkman) or summers in the back garden as a child building a tent out of old curtains, that I remember. These memories and so many more. Random. Of no consequence. Of no interest to anyone else but me (or sometimes not even to me).
Life is mostly small moments. It’s natural that you forget them, but if you dig deep enough it’s surprising how many of them are still there. Locked in a loop, a camera inside your head filming it all, like you’re the star of your very own version of The Truman Show.
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