BAREFOOT IN THE SAND IN BLACKPOOL

I was fifteen years old and I was planning a trip to Blackpool with my mates Bards and Smalesy; we were an inseparable trio whose nights out mainly consisted of wandering around the mining village where we lived and ending up at the fish shop for some chips with bits on. The pit bus would pass like an image of a world that would never change because this was the 1970s and there were certainties scattered between the loud revolutions and thinking that excited our young and impressionable minds.

In a complex domestic arrangement, Bards lived with his grandma near Barnsley and his parents lived in Blackpool; this was so that Bards could finish his schooling and not have his education disrupted, which made sense to us all as an idea because living with your grandma felt like fun and she certainly didn’t mind him being out eating chips on a school night.

One Monday evening he announced that his parents had invited us to stay in Blackpool for a few days and that his dad would come and pick us up and take us after school on the coming Friday. I was suddenly overcome with an emotional and romantic idea: ‘I’ll tell you what, lads,’ I said (imagine my voice still breaking, still tinkling like glass, still warbling like a harmonica under water), ‘let’s stay up all night and walk to the beach to see the sunrise.’ They nodded and then Smalesy said, ‘And let’s do it in bare feet.’ Ah, the early 1970s: history’s tie-dyed bucket, half full of hope.

At Maison Bards, we decided to do the all-night adventure on our third night; the first night was spent hunting for decent chips and avoiding gulls. Of course the chips were excellent because we were by the sea but of course we said they were inferior because we were teenagers from Yorkshire. The second night we thought we’d just stay in watching Dr Who on TV because, yes, we were teenagers from Yorkshire. On the fourth night we’d got tickets to see the hippy musical Hair at the theatre; it seemed that Bards had convinced his parents it was a family saga about barbers, which was fine by us because we were looking forward very much indeed to the nudity. It was the Age of Aquarius, you know; we could pretend we were seeing the show and the sunrise in California.

Bards’s parents were fine about us wandering down to the beach on our own in the early hours, although his dad did say, ‘If any coppers stop you, tell them you’re looking for Ripley’s Believe It or Not!’ We nodded sagely. I was a big fan of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in the American comics I bought. We decided to leave the house on our sunrise pilgrimage at 4am, something that we thought would feel like a moment in a beat poet’s diary. We never thought to check what time the sun actually rose, of course. That kind of detail never occurred to us.

We all found staying up late a bit of a strain. We took turns at guessing what time it was and we were crushingly disappointed when it was 11.48pm not 2am but eventually 4am arrived as though it was on the last carriage of a slow train and we set off through half-dark streets to the sea. Our excitement was volcanic and epic, no doubt stoked up by our lack of sleep. We were going to commune with the sand and the water. Our bare feet would snog the waves and the feeling would be so exquisite that we wouldn’t be able to tell The Other Lads about it when we got back home but we’d try, oh yes we’d try.

We took our shoes off when we left the house and carried them along like talismen. I remember, all these years later, that it was unpleasant. The pavement was rough and sometimes sharp and there were meandering archipelagos of dog detritus to tack past. The sea called to us; or was it the shout of a man who had lost the name of his B&B somewhere in the back of his brain’s wardrobe?

My feet really hurt but the sky was experiencing a pre-sunrise lightening. We got closer and closer to the nirvana of the beach. A police car slowed and stopped and a copper wound a window down and stuck his head out. He looked like Fancy Smith in Z Cars. ‘Lost your shoes, boys?’ he asked nonchalantly. We held our shoes up and he nodded. ‘Where are you off to?’ he asked. There was no urgency in his voice but I was scared. A gull laughed uproariously. ‘We’re going to Ripley’s Believe It or Not!,’ I squeaked, dropping one of my shoes. ‘I believe you,’ he said, either winking or blinking.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, now just called Ripley’s like a nightclub in Derbyshire, is a place where you can experience oddities and cracks in the universe; originally based on a strip that appeared in American newspapers, it’s now a franchise of books, magazines and museums like the one in Blackpool. If you want to see shrunken heads or find out whether turkeys can blush or not, then Ripley’s is for you. Outside Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in those days there was a tap that appeared to be suspended in mid-air but from which, amazingly, water appeared to gush. (My italics.) I’d seen this on TV and was eager to witness it at first hand, like a Druid would be very keen to catch a glimpse of Stonehenge. We walked, our feet getting increasingly ragged, towards the tap. It was, in my memory, about 5am. The sun was not yet up but the sky was smouldering a little. The tap wasn’t turned on. We gazed at it and we spotted a clear Perspex tube going from the tip of the tap to the floor. So that was it; so that was the trick or, being charitable, the clever device.

My soul felt like my feet; scraped and grazed. A little shard of innocence fell away. Then a minor miracle happened: the tap was turned on by something automatic in the depths of the building and the water splashed and we could believe again that we couldn’t believe it. We turned towards the sea. ‘Have they really got nowt on in that Hair?’ said Bards, using the word ‘that’ in the Barnsley way. We assured him that it was true, tuppence and all. We walked towards the sea. We felt the balm of the sand between our mucky adolescent toes. We gazed at the sky. We thought there was something wrong with the sun; it was refusing to rise even though the sky was clear and it was getting quite light. Yes, you’re right. The sun rises in the East and Blackpool is in the West. We were halfway through the first act of Hair gazing at a naked bottom when we realised that.