More Mablethorpe …

… Not that much, just a couple of things hanging over from my recent blog about summer jobs, hot dogs, broad expanses of sand and distant seas.

First off, there’s the music. I’ve already mentioned the local Shadows-sound-and-look-alikes, Trek Faron and the Unknowns [whatever became of … ] but not the sounds of that summer in general, in particular. There seemed to be music everywhere: not through headphones, as it would be now, but from the dodgems, the amusement park, booming out from the juke box in the restaurant below the dormitory where we slept. It was – the summer of 1962 – a pretty good year for music; pop music; the charts; music on the edge of changing, tilting [see the Beatles sneaking in there] from a mixture of fairly basic rock ‘n’ roll, novelty numbers and sentimental ballads, towards something  potentially more interesting.

A Top  30 [or so] assembled from the Mablethorpe juke box might have looked, alphabetically, like this …

• A Picture of You : Joe Brown
• Bobby’s Girl : Susan Maughan
• Break It To Me Gently : Brenda Lee
• Breaking Up Is Hard To Do : Neil Sedaka
• Can’t Help Falling in Love : Elvis Presley
• Crying in the Rain : The Everly Brothers
• Desafinado : Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd
• Do You Wanna Dance : Cliff Richard
• Don’t Ever Change : The Crickets
• Dream Baby : Roy Orbison
• Duke of Earl : Gene Chandler
• Hey Baby : Bruce Channel
• I Can’t Stop Loving You : Ray Charles
• It Might As Well Rain Until September : Carole King
• Let There Be Love : Nat King Cole
• Love Me Do : The Beatles
• Love Letters : Ketty Lester
• Return to Sender : Elvis Presley
• Sealed With a Kiss : Brian Hyland
• Sherry : The Four Seasons
• She’s Got You : Patsy Cline
• Softly As I Leave You : Matt Monro
• Speak To Me Pretty : Brenda Lee
• Speedy Gonzales : Pat Boone
• Sweet Little Sixteen : Jerry Lee Lewis
• Teenage Idol : Ricky Nelson
• The Locomotion : Little Eva
• The Wanderer : Dion
• Twistin’ the Night Away : Sam Cooke
• Walk on By : Leroy Van Dyke
• What a Crazy World We’re Living In : Joe Brown & the Bruvvers
• Ya Ya Twist : Petula Clark
• Your Cheating Heart : Ray Charles

As I say, not a bad list at all, but there are three songs that I remember most from that summer and which seemed to be playing on the juke box more than most: one, the Nat King Cole, was pleasant if little more, but lifted by a deft arrangement featuring George Shearing’s piano; the other, a true monstrosity, was Pat Boone’s Speedy Gonzales, with its high-pitched intrusions in cod-Mexican falsetto. An abomination.

The third was Brian Hyland’s Sealed With a Kiss. Well, it was summer and even in Mablethorpe the evenings could feel romantic, the sun sinking slowly down over the wide horizon. I remembered it, some of it, some twenty five years later, when writing Last Summer, First Love, the second of my books in the Pan Heartlines series of teenage romances. [Look, a guy has to eat!]

Set, yes, in Mablethorpe, it’s the touching story of true love between Lauri, whose last summer it is, helping out in her mum’s café before heading off to be a nurse, and Mike, a student working on the hot dog stall. The names [and a whole lot more] were changed to protect the innocent.

 

 

 

Summer Jobs 2 … Mablethorpe

Towards the end of my second year at Goldsmiths’ College, where I was following a teacher training course specialising in English and History, I saw the ad amongst others pinned to the student notice board. Students wanted for Summer Work in Mablethorpe: thirteen weeks, all lodging and other expenses paid. Mablethorpe? I didn’t have a clue. The library had a map.

With no other plans, thirteen weeks by the sea seemed appealing; and, having made enquiries, the pay was decent – with food and lodging thrown in, especially so. With any luck, I’d be able to save some money for the coming year. I signed on.

There were around twenty of us from all over the country, some returning for their second or third spell. We slept, most of us, in a vast dormitory room above a self-service café and restaurant facing out towards the concrete promenade, the beach and the sea, although most days you had to take the sea on trust. Our meals we collected from the café along with the customers, or, if it was after hours, cooked ourselves, with access allowed to all supplies other than the steaks.

 

We were part of a small empire that seemed to control much of the town’s entertainment and other facilities: dodgem cars, slot machines, hot dogs, ice creams. In particularly busy times, we would be deployed as necessary; otherwise, we each had a particular job and mine was working on the hot dog stand. Which meant helping to serve and take the cash in the afternoons and evenings and peeling a large sack of onions each and every morning. It took until Christmas for me to get rid of the smell of onions from my fingers.

Despite working long hours, we did have a reasonable amount of time off, some of which I spent strolling on the sand dunes or along the beach. I can’t remember ever walking as far as the sea for as much as a paddle, never mind a swim.

 

Things picked up when I got to know Shirley, who worked in a little cabin in a corner of the car park, dispensing cups of tea to travellers exhausted by the drive over from Nottingham or Doncaster. On my evenings off we went bopping to Trek Faron [Farron?] and the Unknowns – Trek a potato picker by day and singer & guitarist by night, his band a pale imitation of The Shadows – or to the local cinema, which had very desirable double seats in the balcony, though rain on the corrugated iron roof had a tendency to render the dialogue inaudible. And one day we caught the bus to Lincoln to see the Cathedral – I’d been reading Lawrence – The Rainbow & Women in Love – and been taken by his description of first seeing the spire from a great distance. Which we did.

My friend, Shirley, on our day trip to Lincoln

Somehow, I managed to wangle a weekend off and arranged to meet a friend from Goldsmiths at the East Coast Jazz Festival, which was taking place a short distance up the coast at Cleethorpes. This was prime Trad Jazz time, and we ended up staying in the same B&B as Bob Wallis and His Storyville Jazzmen, who had a couple of Top 50 hits featuring Bob singing old music hall type songs in a gruff Yorkshire-inflected Cockney – “I’m Shy, Mary Ellen, I’m Shy” and “Come Along Please” – this even though their stage outfit made them out to be Mississippi riverboat gamblers.

The festival was not all traditional jazz: Tubby Hayes was on the bill, along with Bruce Turner and Johnny Dankworth, but my especial favourites were the Alex Welsh Band, joined on this occasion by the irrepressible George Melly.

George Melly w. Roy Crimmins (tbn) Alex Welsh (Tpt) Bill Reid (bs) Archie Semple (clt)

There is, believe it or not, more to say about Mablethorpe, but, like the sea, that will have to wait for another day.