The Year of the Ladybird.

Graham Joyce.

To my son Joe, who inspires me to do better.

1.

Lend them no money buy them no beer.

It was 1976 and the hottest summer in living memory. The reservoirs were cracked and dry; some of the towns were restricted to water from standpipes; crops were failing in the fields. England was a country innocent of all such extremity. I was nineteen and I'd just finished my first year at college.

Broke and with time on my hands I needed a summer job. Looking for a way out from the plans my stepdad had made for me, I got an interview at a holiday camp on the East Coast. Skegness, celebrated for that jolly fisherman in gumboots and a sou'wester gamely making headway against a seaward gale: It's so bracing!

But when I arrived in Skegness there wasn't a breath of wind, not even a sigh. The train rumbled in on hot iron tracks, decanted me and a few others onto the platform and wheezed out again. The dirty Victorian red brick of the station seemed brittle, powdery. Flowers potted along the platform wilted and the grubby paintwork was cracked and peeled. I took a double-decker bus mercifully open-topped and I asked the driver to drop me at the camp. He forgot, and had to stop the bus and come up the stairs to tell me he'd pa.s.sed it by. I had to backpack it a quarter of a mile, all in the shimmering heat. I followed the wire-mesh perimeter of the site with its neat rows of chalets and the seagull-like cries of the campers.

I thought I might get a job as a kitchen porter or as a white-jacketed waiter bowling soup-plates at the holidaymakers. Any job at all, just so long as I didn't have to go home. The manager in charge of recruitment a dapper figure in a blue blazer and sporting a tiny pencil moustache didn't seem too interested. He was preoccupied with sprinkling bread crumbs on the corner of his desk. As I waited to be interviewed, a sparrow fluttered in through the open window, picked up a crumb in its beak and flew out again.

'That's amazing,' I said.

No eye contact. 'Tell me a bit about yourself.'

I coloured. 'Well, I'm studying to be a teacher, so I'm good with children.'

One of his eyebrows raised a notch. Encouraged, I added, 'Actually I like children. And I can play a few chords. On the guitar.'

The first bit was true but the thing about the guitar was a good stretch. I mean I knew the rough finger positions for the E, the A and the C chords. Go and form a band, as they said at the time. The sparrow winged in again, picked up more breadcrumbs and fluttered out.

'What's your name again?'

'David Barwise.'

'David,' he said at last. 'Find your way over to the laundry room and tell Dot to kit you out as a Greencoat. Then report to Pinky. He's our Entertainments Manager, you know. He has an office behind the theatre. You know where the theatre is, don't you?'

I'd stuck in my thumb and pulled out a plumb. It was early June and the temperature was already soaring into the high eighties. The kitchen was a sweat at any time. A Greencoat's job on the other hand had to be the prized option. I didn't know too much about it but I guessed you organised the Bathing Belle Parade around the swimming pool; you got to walk around in the fresh air and to fraternise with the holidaymakers.

To get to the laundry room I had to pa.s.s between a little white caravan and a beautifully kempt crown-bowling green. Despite the drought regulations a sprinkler ticked away, keeping the gra.s.s green for the bowling. Outside the caravan was a professionally-painted billboard with a picture of an open palm bearing occult lines and numbers. The billboard advertised the services of one Madame Rosa, 'As Seen On TV', palmist and fortune-teller to the stars. I didn't think I'd ever seen anyone called Madame Rosa on TV.

But the carnival stopped there, and the laundry room was a soulless breeze-block construction behind the offices where Dot, a stressed and rather grouchy woman with grey roots under her thinning bleached hair, toiled away in clouds of billowing steam. I interrupted her in the act of pressing shirts with an industrial iron. I smiled and let her know I needed kitting out as a Greencoat.

'You?' she said.

Maybe I blinked.

She seemed to be able to focus one eye on me while keeping the other eye on her work. 'You could cut your hair and smarten yourself up a bit.'

I bit my lip as she unearthed a set of whites for me trousers and shirts plus a green sweater and a loud blazer, candy-striped green, white and red. She dumped them on the counter.

The sizes were all hopelessly wrong, and I protested.

'Yeh, you tell 'em,' she said, turning back to her labours with the iron. The contraption made a huge hiss and she retreated into her cave behind a cloud of steam.

Clutching my new clothes, I was directed to the staff chalets. I say chalets, with its suggestion of delightful beachside cabins, but they were just a row of shaky, plaster-board rabbit-hutches with a communal shower and toilets. It was all pretty basic. Each 'room' had just enough s.p.a.ce for two narrow cots, with a gap of about eighteen inches between them, and a pair of miraculously slim wardrobes.

But I was happy to be by the seaside. It meant I didn't have to work with my stepdad. It was a job. It paid cash, folding.

One of the beds was unmade and a couple of shirts hung on wire hangers in its frail partner-wardrobe. It seemed I had a room-mate, but aside from a whiff of stale tobacco there were few clues to give me any hint about his character. I unpacked my belongings and changed into the whites I'd been given.

The trousers were baggy at the waist and long in the leg; the shirts at least one collar size too big. I had a sewing kit in my bag, something I thought I'd never need, so I turned up the trouser cuffs to shorten them and though I didn't make a great job of the sewing, the cuffs stayed up. It left me baggy in the crotch but I had a good belt to keep my trousers aloft. At least the candy-striped blazer was a rough fit. I gave myself the once over in the mirror on the reverse of the door. I looked like a clown. I tried out a s...o...b..zzy greeting smile in the mirror. I scared myself with it.

I'd been told to meet Pinky in the theatre. I pa.s.sed through an impressive front-of-house built to emulate a West End playhouse, with a plush foyer of red velvet fabrics and golden ropes. Billboards proclaimed a range of theatre acts with gilt-framed professional black-and-white head shots. One giant picture had a wild-eyed man called Abdul-Shazam! in a ta.s.selled red fez pointing his fingers at the camera in mesmeric fashion. His eyes followed me as I pa.s.sed though giant doors leading into a hushed auditorium. I made my way down past the shadowed rows of red velvet seats to the front of the stage where I could see a small light illuminating an old-style Wurlitzer organ. The organist was studying some music scores while a second man in a blue-and-yellow checked jacket looked on with a doleful expression.

The heyday of the British holiday camps had slipped. The age of cheap flights had arrived and holidays in the guaranteed sunshine of the Costa Brava had dented the industrial fortnight supremacy. It all felt time-locked. The doleful man glanced up at me as I proceeded down the aisle, and I felt he, too, was time locked, maybe in the 1950s. His hair was pressed into a permanent wave that had crawled to the top of his forehead before taking a look over the edge and deciding to go no further. He held an unlit cigar between his fingers and his eyebrows were perpetually arched, as if he were so often surprised by life that he had decided to save himself the energy of frequently raising and lowering them. 'Let's have a look at you then,' he said.

I stepped into the light shining from above the Wurlitzer.

He took a puff on his unlit cigar. 'Christ,' he said.

Pinky Pardew real name Martin Pardew was the Entertainments Manager. He governed the camp jollies: the Children's entertainment; the daily timetable of events; the Variety acts in the Theatre; the bingo, the darts and dominos; the singalong in the saloon; everything occupying the campers' time from 9.30 in the morning until 2 a.m. that didn't involve food and alcohol. It was a busy programme of enforced bonhomie. He was also boss to an a.s.sistant Stage Manager, the Children's Entertainer and the team of six Greencoats three boys and three girls. I'd arrived at the right moment to replace a Greencoat who'd quit. Good timing.

He stared at me glumly, cigar wedged deep between his fingers, his eyebrows still arched high like windows in a locked village church.

'I think whoever had these before me,' I said seriously, 'must have been a bit overweight.'

It got a snort from the man at the organ. He was of only a slightly more contemporary cut. He wore a black turtle neck shirt and his hair was trimmed pudding-bowl style, like one of the Beatles when they were still shocked at their own fame.

'All right,' Pinky said. 'We'll see if we can improve on that lot. Tomorrow. Meanwhile you're just in time for lunch at the canteen. Then at two o' clock you'll find a bunch of lads waiting for you on the football field. Referee a game, will you?' He rummaged around in the pocket of his chequered jacket and brought out a silver object on a string. 'Here's your whistle. Try not to use it. Who are you?'

'I'm David,' I said. I shot out a hand expecting him to shake it. It was a nervous gesture I instantly regretted.

Pinky looked at my hand as if he hadn't seen one before. To my relief he then conceded the handshake. But it was a brief gesture before he turned back to the man at the organ. The musician tapped out three quick rising notes on the keyboard. Pa-pa-pah! I took that to be theatre-speak for thanks, right, g'bye.

The staff canteen thrummed and clattered. A few faces glanced up to take in the new boy, but returned to their conversations without paying me much attention. I felt clumsy and I knew I looked uncomfortable in my ill-fitting 'uniform'. I slid my tray along the rail and two ample but deadpan ladies from behind the counter loaded my plate with leek soup and a dollop of cod in white sauce.

All the tables were occupied with chattering staff and the only empty chairs would have me crash some intimate group. Except for one table where a couple in white cleaners' overalls ate in sullen silence. The male hunched over a bowl of soup looked pretty rough, but two chairs stood empty at their table. I went for it.

'Mind if I sit down?'

They didn't even look up at me.

My cheeks flamed. The buzz of canteen conversation diminished. I got the strange sensation that everyone else eating there was suddenly interested in my progress. They all continued to talk but with less animation; they flickered glances in my direction but looked away just as quickly. The tension in the room had ratcheted up out of nowhere, but everyone was pretending nothing had changed.

The man bent on ignoring me had a close-crop of tinsel-grey-and-black hair that reminded me of the alpha-male silverback gorilla; and though he was still hunched over his soup bowl, he had frozen. His spoon, having ladled, was arrested mid-path between dish and lip. I switched my gaze to his partner, a much younger woman maybe in her late twenties. The palm of one delicate hand flew to her face, but then she too was immobilised. Her brown eyes were opened in alarm, though her gaze was tracked not on me but on her partner.

I looked back at the man. 'I didn't want to crowd you. There aren't any other seats.'

At last, at long last, he lifted his bony head and gazed up at me. His complexion was ruddy and weathered, all broken surface capillaries. The whites of his cold eyes were stained with spots of yellow. He blinked in frigid a.s.sessment. Finally he offered the briefest of nods which I took as permission to sit down. I unloaded my soup and my fish and leaned my empty tray precariously against the leg of my chair.

The man's wife I took the wide gold band on her finger to mean that they were married relaxed a little, but not completely. She glanced at me and then back at her husband. Meanwhile he put his head down and continued to eat, reaching all the way round to the far side of his dish, digging back into his soup before raising his spoon to his mouth. His sleeves were rolled. Naval tattoos, faded and discoloured on the pale skin beneath the dark hairs of his arms, flexed slightly as he ate. Between the lower finger knuckles of his fists were artlessly tattooed the words LOVE and HATE in washed out blue ink.

I started in on my leek soup.

'First day?' I heard him say, though he appeared to growl right into his dish. His voice was a miraculous low throaty rasp. Southern.

His wife looked at me and nodded almost imperceptibly, encouraging me to respond.

'Yes,' I said brightly. 'Trying to work out where everything is. Get the hang of things. You know? Got lost three times already.' I laughed. I was a bag of nerves and I knew it and he knew it. I coloured again and I hated myself for it.

He lifted his head at last and looked from side to side as if an enemy might be listening. It was like we were in prison. Almost without moving his lips he croaked, 'Keep your head down. Be all right.'

His wife was looking at me now. Her beautiful brown eyes blazed at me. But behind them her expression seemed to be saying something else.

He pushed his empty soup bowl aside and sucked on his teeth before reaching for his plate of fish. His wife quickly b.u.t.tered a slice of bread and set it before him. She had long elegant fingers. Her extreme delicacy and prettiness was a shocking contrast to the coa.r.s.eness of her husband. He took the b.u.t.tered bread and between strong fingertips coloured like acorns with nicotine he folded and squeezed it. After swallowing a mouthful of fish he leaned back in his chair and said, 'Don't give 'em nothing.'

I had no idea who he was talking about.

He shot a glance through the window and spoke out of the side of his mouth. 'Don't lend 'em any money. Don't buy 'em a beer.'

I was about to say something but his wife flared her eyes at me again. Very wide. She was warning me not to interrupt him.

'You can lend 'em a cigarette. A cigarette is all right. One cigarette. Not two. One cigarette is all right.' Then he looked back at me again. 'Don't tell 'em nothing they don't need to know. Nothing. Be all right.'

Then he bent his head over his cod in white sauce and ate the rest of his dinner. The conversation was over. His wife looked up at me briefly and this time her eyes said there you are, then.

Football I could do. When I got down to the bone-hard and dusty soccer pitch there were about twenty enthusiastic lads waiting to be organised so I divided them into teams and let them have at it. I lavished them with uncritical praise and if they fell over I picked them up. If they got roughed up I pulled them to their feet and told them what a great thing it was they were so hard and that good footballers needed to be tough.

When it was time to finish I noticed Pinky and another tall, slightly stooped man watching, both with folded arms, from the side of the pitch. I gave a blast on the whistle to end the game, collected the ball and walked over to them. Pinky introduced the man to me as Tony. I recognised him as the fez-wearing figure on the billboard in the foyer of the theatre. Abdul-Shazam! Though in real life he looked no more Arabic than do I.

Tony or Abdul-Shazam gave me a wide professional smile and pumped my hand. 'You'll do me, son. Pick 'em up, dust 'em down. Up you get and carry on. Like that. Like it. You, son, are now officially on the team. Come on. Coffee time.'

Pinky excused himself and Tony whisked me to the coffee bar. There he charmed a couple of free and frothy espressos out of the girl behind the counter. He introduced me to her and said something that made my face colour. When we sat down he proceeded to brief me.

'Everything son, you do everything. It's all in the programme. You get Sat.u.r.day off every week, changeover day. Meet in the theatre each morning at 9.30 sharp. Check in, cover the bases. Can you sing? Dance? Tell a funny story? Just kidding son, just kidding. You check the bingo tickets, get everyone in the theatre, give the kids a stick of rock every five minutes. Been to college, haven't you? You can write, can't you? Write down the names of the winners of the Glamorous Grandmother comp and all that. A monkey could do it, no offence. If you're chasing skirt, make sure you share yourself round the ugly ones, because it's only fair. Smile all the way until October. That's all you have to do. A monkey could do it.'

'What happened to the last monkey?'

'What?'

'The one I replaced.'

Tony looked up and waved wildly at a family pa.s.sing by our table. His face was like soft leather and it fell easily into a wreath of smiles, like it knew the lines into which it should flow. His skin was super-smoothed by remnants of stage make-up. 'Howdy kids!'

'Shazam Shazam!' the entire family shouted back at him. He looked pleased.

When they'd gone I reminded him of my question.

'Look, don't worry about a thing.' I don't know why he said that because I wasn't worried. 'Any problems, see me, except when there's a problem, see someone else.' Then he burst into song, crooner style, throwing his arms wide and turning to the campers seated at other tables. The answer, my friend-a, is a-blowing in the wind-a, the answer is a-blowing in the wind. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose very loudly. Everyone laughed and I did, too, for reasons I didn't quite understand.

He drained his cup and stood up. 'You're back on duty in one hour. Bingo in the main hall. After that, theatre, front of house.'

Then he was gone.

2.

And the white knight is talking backwards I was an Alice in Wonderland. It was a world I knew nothing of, hyper-real, inflated, one where the colours seemed brighter, vivid, intense. I was excited to be working there, being a part of it, but the truth is I felt anxious, too. It wasn't just about being an outsider, it was the strangeness of it all. Many of the staff I met were odd fish. I had a crazy idea that they all had large heads and small bodies, like caricature figures on an old-style cigarette card.

Back in my tiny room on my first night I lay awake for hours. Of my room-mate there was still no sign and I was wondering what I'd done in signing up to this place. I was over-stimulated by the day's events and sleep didn't come. I lay in the darkness with my eyes wide open.

At some point I put the light on and got out of bed. The toilets and showers were at the end of the staff block. It was about 3 a.m. and I decided to take a shower to try to relax. When I got back to my room I dried myself off and decided to take my clothes still in my backpack and hang them in the slim wardrobe.

When I'd done that I sat down on the bed and took the photo from my leather wallet. It was a small black and white photo, maybe three inches square with a thin white margin. The photo-chemicals were either unfixing or the picture was over-exposed. Either way the shot was of a seaside scene. The subject was slightly blurred but a muscular man, maybe in his twenties, wore dark bathing trunks and smiled back at the camera. The wind whipped his hair across his eyes so you couldn't fully see his face. He stood with arms akimbo and behind him the sea frothed and foamed at the sand.

The man in the picture was my biological father. I turned the photo over in my hand. On the back of it someone had written one word in pencil. The pencil had faded just like the photo, but it was still easy to read what was written there: Skegness.

One word. It was a word I'd peered at many times, as if it were code or a mantra or a key of some kind. My father had taken me to Skegness when I was three years old I don't know where my mother was at the time and I was told he'd suffered a heart attack on the beach. I was with him at the time, though of course I had no memory of these events. Later my mother married my stepfather. This was the only photograph I had of my father. I'd stolen it. I don't even know whether Mum knew I had it, though she might have guessed.

I'd found the photograph when I was old enough to snoop. It was in a tin box kept at the foot of my mother's wardrobe. In the box were various doc.u.ments like birth certificates and some old costume jewellery plus a series of postcards. There were photograph alb.u.ms in the house so I knew instantly this one was rogue. I quickly figured out this was my natural father. At some point in my teens I took and kept the photograph for myself.

It was not as if we had never discussed my biological father. Any time I asked I would get some basic biographical details and the same account of a tragedy that took place on a beach. The account was always consistent and unvarying.

'Why on earth would you want to go there?' This was my stepfather, Ken, when I announced I was going to Skegness to look for seasonal work.

It's an extraordinary thing. If my mother had dropped the dishes on the floor or they had turned to gaze at each other meaningfully, I could have understood it. But when I said that I was going to Skegness they instantly announced their serious displeasure by not doing anything. Ken was eating his fried breakfast and Mum was at the sink. I'd been back from college for just two days. The fact that they made no movement made no eye contact either with each other or with me tipped me off to the fact that I'd just lobbed a grenade.

Ken gazed down at his breakfast, carefully sawing through his bacon and sausage with his knife. His blond eyebrows seemed to bristle over his red, weathered face. Mum rinsed a plate and shook the droplets from the plate as if they had to be counted.

Finally she spoke, but still without turning to face me. 'But Ken's got you good work with him.'

Ken was a builder. He usually had a number of projects going on different sites. I'd worked for him before, mostly as a ladder-monkey and errand boy. It was okay but unless you like running up and down a ladder and whistling at pa.s.sing girls once every four hours it was dull. 'I know that, Dad,' I said. Sometimes I called him Ken and sometimes Dad, without particular intention. 'But I want to do something different.'

'How much are they paying you?' he wanted to know. 'It won't be much.'

'I haven't even got a job yet,' I said.

'Why there?' Mother said.