Faith - Lesley Pearse [63]
‘It doesn’t look so bad now,’ Laura remarked. ‘Let’s have some music, that might cheer us up.’
She turned on the transistor radio Lena had given them, and the song playing was ‘Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying’ by Gerry and the Pacemakers. They looked at each other in astonishment, and started to laugh.
It was the laughter that summer which Laura remembered better than anything else. The caravan might have been damp and cramped, the food in the cafe awful, and when it rained they got daubed with mud. But the girls were back together and they both felt light-hearted after all the intensity of the previous year.
The holidaymakers were in the main quite poor and rough, but they were out to enjoy themselves and they appreciated anything Laura and Jackie did for them. The girls never did think up the brilliant games to play with the children that they’d intended, it was just rounders, team games or reading them stories. But mostly the weather was good, and people went off to the beaches even when it wasn’t. By the time they came over to the club room in the evening, they were more than happy to play a few games of bingo, musical chairs, or pass balloons from one pair of knees to another, as long as they had plenty to drink.
There was a band who played twice a week, and a DJ on the other nights, and the girls would encourage everyone to sing along. They also ran a talent competition each week and these were invariably hilarious, with children singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ or some old drunk trying to be Jim Reeves. During the whole summer they never found anyone who had any real talent. But the holidaymakers loved it, just as they did the Pirate Nights, when they put a patch over their eye and painted a moustache on their upper lip, or the Twist competition which everyone from three to eighty took part in.
But the best fun for the girls took place late at night. There were many like-minded young people working in the area for the summer, from chambermaids to waiters and bar staff, and they soon found them, plus the more affluent men who sailed in and out of Brixham on yachts.
Mostly they gathered at a small drinking club in the town, and as neither Jackie nor Laura was keen to have a regular boyfriend again for a while, they played the field, enjoyed the attention they got and didn’t take anything too seriously.
It was the best of times. The worst they did was to give a few men false hopes, and suck up to the holidaymakers so they’d tip them when they left.
But the real value of that summer job to Laura was that it gave her the confidence she so badly lacked and opened up her mind to other possibilities. She had only been to the seaside a few times in her life, and then only to Southend and Brighton. She hadn’t known that Devon was so beautiful, and the rolling hills, thatched cottages, rivers, moors and woodland enchanted her. But she had also shone a lot brighter than Jackie with the holidaymakers, for she knew how ordinary working-class people thought, and what they wanted and needed.
Suddenly she was aware of her own potential, that she was no longer ‘Stinky Wilmslow’, the plain, skinny girl that no one wanted. Someone at the holiday camp had dubbed her ‘Lovely Laura’ and the name stuck not only with everyone she met there, but in her own mind. She realized she didn’t have to wait for a man to come along to fulfil her dreams; she was quite clever enough to do that herself.
Both she and Jackie felt bereft at the end of the season when they had to say goodbye to all the friends they’d made in Devon. They dreaded the prospect of the London rush hour, the tedium of a nine to five job, when for the whole summer they’d never known what would happen next, and grown used to fresh air, lots of exercise and freedom.
They talked about it endlessly as they helped out giving the caravans a final clean. They were determined they wouldn’t go back to boring office work; they both wanted exciting jobs. They thought of going abroad, but as neither of them had a passport, that would take time to organize, and in