Polly Wolff on a mission is a scary, scary thing. I’d only ever seen such determination on the faces of women with prams outside a Black Friday sale. When we couldn’t find anyone within the sealed-up golf course – and god knows we screamed enough and tried to force entry – Polly set off along the coast.
Eventually we reached the static caravan site on the edge of town. ‘Polly, are you bringing me here to murder me?’ I asked, out of breath.
‘This is where Jamie lives.’ Polly’s legs were easily twice as long as mine and I felt like a pug scurrying at her heels, trying to keep up. I was probably just as squashed and snotty too.
We stopped at a caravan that seemed to be held together with gaffer tape. ‘This is where Jamie lives?’
‘I told you you didn’t want to end up like him.’ Polly banged on the door and a white man with dreadlocks answered. I think we all know there’s a special place in hell for them. ‘Hey. Is Jamie home?’
The white Rasta checked her out for a second. ‘Heeeeey, Jammer,’ he called to the back of the caravan. ‘There’s some kids here to see you. You dawg, man. They is like little girls.’
‘Oh **** off.’ Polly went for him and he ducked back into the gloomy little box. Jamie appeared in the entrance wearing a onesie and looking very stoned indeed.
‘What do you want? It’s well early, man.’
‘Why aren’t you at work? What’s happening with the golf course?’
He rubbed the back of his head. ‘They’re closing it, man.’
‘What?’ both Polly and I exclaimed.
‘That dump isn’t making any money. They wanna sell it to developers or something. I dunno. I basically got fired, like.’
‘****!’ both Polly and I exclaimed.
‘What’s it going to be instead?’ I asked. ‘Or will they keep it as a crazy-golf course?’
‘I dunno. I’m going back to bed, yeah.’ Jamie left the door ajar. ‘You can come and skin up with us if you want.’
‘We’ll pass,’ I said definitely. I looked to Polly. ‘What are we going to do? This sucks so hard.’
Polly kicked a stone clean across the park where it barrelled into a neighbouring caravan. Her fists were tight angry wrecking balls. ‘No. No way. They can’t do this. They’re not taking away our crazy golf. Come on.’
Two hours later we were in Polly’s bedroom. All of us. It had taken time and a lot of screaming down the phone but we’d gathered everyone. Beasley was supposed to spend the weekend at his dad’s (although he didn’t seem to mind being summoned), Daisy had skipped a family trip to Grandma’s. Alice and Alex were presumably working on their tedious ‘Look at Our Faux Vintage Life’ Instagram account, Freya had brought her very own book and Nico and Zoë were missing rehearsal.
When we’d first got home, Polly had practically thrown herself at her father who was reading the paper at the kitchen table. ‘Dad! They can’t close the crazy-golf course!’
‘Well, if it’s not making any money they can.’
‘We go there all the time. I spend half my allowance there.’
He pursed his lips and looked disapprovingly over the top of the sports supplement. ‘Polly, you can’t expect them to keep an entire business open for you and your friends. It’s hardly busy on season, never mind off season, is it?’
‘That’s because it needs some work. Like painting and stuff. You and Mum have loads of money …’
‘Polly, you’re not actually suggesting that we buy a crazy-golf course, are you?’
‘Well, why not? What’s the point in sitting on a giant pile of money if you’re not going to spend it?’
‘And what would I do with a golf course?’
‘Uh, run it, obviously. We’ll do it. We’ll run it,’ Polly said, pointing between the two of us. I didn’t remember signing up for golf-course management, but why not.
Her dad actually laughed. ‘You’re going to drop out of school to run a golf course? Polly, that “giant pile of money” you so optimistically speak of is for your tuition fees and, one day, a deposit on a house. Isn’t that what you want?’
‘No!’
‘Oh for crying out loud, it’s like talking to a four-year-old. You’ll have to find somewhere else to haunt.’ He wasn’t going to budge.
Back to the summit in Polly’s bedroom. We filled them in on the day’s news. ‘That’s awful!’ Daisy said, eyes wider than ever. ‘We’ve been going there since we were, like, three. What’ll happen to the Disapproving Seal?’
‘This sucks. They’ll probably build another arcade or something equally lame,’ Beasley lamented.
‘Not so,’ Alex said with authority. ‘My pater works for the council. I happen to know that space has been earmarked for food and drink premises.’
‘You knew about this?’ I asked. We turned on him like a pack of angry wolves.
‘Not at all.’ He held his hands open in peace. ‘I just know Burger King tried to buy the land a couple of years ago, but the owners wouldn’t sell.’
‘Maybe they finally caved in and sold?’ Beasley said.
Nico didn’t seem nearly as troubled, but then it took quite a lot to ruffle him. ‘I guess we could start hanging out at The Mash Tun. They never ID you guys there.’
‘That’s not the point,’ I said, sounding decidedly sulky.
‘We need to find the owners.’ Polly was striding back and forth over her rug like the general of her own little army. ‘I wonder if we could convince them not to sell or make sure that whoever they do sell it to keeps it as a crazy-golf course.’
‘As if they’ll listen to us,’ Beasley said. ‘Like, why would they?’
‘They would if we put in an offer.’
‘That’s insane,’ Nico said. ‘I had to borrow money off my mum to get the bus here.’
‘He’s right,’ I added, feeling extra gloomy. Alice did a Saturday-afternoon shift at Starbucks and Beasley did a couple of waiting shifts at one of the hotels on the seafront, but that was seasonal. ‘None of us really has any money, and your parents didn’t want to help. I know my mum and dad wouldn’t want anything to do with it.’
Polly actually growled at us. ‘You are all such *******! Sorry, but why aren’t you fighting this? We have to keep the golf course open. It’s our legacy to Brompton.’ She went on: ‘I don’t know about you, but I would have killed myself years ago if it weren’t for that place. I’m not even kidding; I probably would have. But no matter how **** school was or how ***** my mum was being I always had that place to look forward to. I always thought, “At least I’m going to Fantasyland tonight,” and it kept me going. It kept me alive.’ She took a breath. ‘I know we’re all leaving this dump next year or whenever, but it’s the only good thing about the town and there are people like us in the years below. Like that amazing goth girl in Year 10, or the trans girl in Year 8 or that skinny guy who’s always by himself in Year 9. We have to keep it open for them.’
Well, I don’t know about you, but I got a little tear in my eye.
Nico relented. ‘What can we do?’ Polly had recruited him to the cause.
‘We do what we do. We fight.’
We are the Petition Generation. We get angry and we noisily voice opinions but we don’t like paying for things or actually doing things. I’d lost track of the number of online petitions I’d signed. I’d saved gay people in Russia, had environmental activists freed, banned Page Three and released caged hens. In reality I hadn’t done any of those things. I’d ticked some boxes on a website, felt smug and self-righteous and then never gone back to see if I’d made a difference. Well, of course I hadn’t: gay people are still being persecuted and my mum, no matter how many times I beg her to check where the eggs are coming from, doesn’t. There are still boobs winking at me from the magazine racks in Asda.
But now that the petition was mine it felt very different. It was decided that there was no point in utilising all my online friends because none of them were in Brompton and the issue wasn’t theirs – also, I’d hardly spoken to them since I’d started hanging out with Polly and the gang. We all felt that this needed to be local residents.
Alex managed to discover through his dad that the owners were actually part of the same group who ran the pier, which was also losing money (last summer had been a washout). They wanted to focus their energy on the pier and sell the land. Frankly, they didn’t give a tiny rat’s ass what happened to the site as long as it was no longer their concern.
Our petition went as follows:
We, the undersigned, believe Fantasyland crazy-golf course is an important tourist asset in Brompton-on-Sea. We believe Fantasyland provides the young people of the town with much-needed entertainment. It is one of only three local attractions which does not serve alcohol or promote gambling. To close the attraction or redevelop the land would be a great loss to the seafront.
The idea was we would ask the council to step in and run Fantasyland as part of its Parks Programme, either permanently or until such a time that a new owner could take over running the attraction.
This, we felt, wasn’t unreasonable. The council maintained the putting course and boating lake in Greenacre Park and were responsible for the beach, so it kind of made sense, at least to us. We formed a group called ‘Save Fantasyland’ and Beasley knocked us up some pretty professional-looking letterheaded paper. If you want something doing … do it right.
Break times and lunch took on a whole new purpose. We talked the printing shop in town into doing us a discount on some ‘Save Fantasyland’ T-shirts, which we had made XXL to wear over our jumpers on the freezing playground. In pairs we strolled around the school, looking for signatures. ‘Have you signed the petition yet?’, ‘Do you ever go to Fantasyland?’, ‘Help us keep Fantasyland open.’
We were – how can I put this lightly? – bullish. The football team, the pretty girls, the scary girls, the nerds, the musicians, the theatre lot, the emos, the Goths – we interrupted all of their sandwiches. Most people signed the damned thing to get rid of us, to be honest, but that didn’t matter. Of course some people were downright rude: ‘Is it a dyke petition? Will it make me gay?’ some Year 9 boys wanted to know.
‘Yes. It will make you gay,’ I responded. ‘Just sign it or I’ll tell everyone you have a pseudo-penis like a shrivelled olive.’
I got the signature.
Polly was in hysterics. ‘I can’t believe you said that! It’s really hard not being able to punch people.’ Polly had decided to go on a charm offensive to get the petition signed. She hadn’t maimed anyone in days. Quite an achievement.
We attached copies of the petition to the noticeboard outside the main hall and in the sixth-form entrance area. We appealed to teachers, dinner ladies and even the head teacher.
On a weekend we took to the high street. Although people mistook us for charity muggers – those tabard-wearing monsters who try to wrestle your bank details from you outside Primark – if we engaged people they were happy to sign. Most people had no idea Fantasyland had shut down and seemed genuinely disappointed. ‘Oh, that’s a shame. I used to take my kids there when they were little,’ was what we heard a lot, or ‘Aw, man! I used to go there all the time when I was a kid.’ Fantasyland wasn’t only ours, it belonged to the town. Even those who weren’t there three nights a week had such fond memories of the place. It was a good, positive, harmless thing and the town was better with it. It wasn’t clogging arteries or damaging livers or emptying wallets. Like anything harmless it had been an easy target. Evidence Exhibit A? The local library, Daisy once told me, is now a Poundland.
Daisy did a great line in ambiguous foreboding too. ‘At the moment, the land could be used for anything,’ she’d say with doe eyes. ‘I mean, they could turn it into a toxic waste dump for all we know.’ That got a few more signatures, and wasn’t strictly a lie.
I sensed there was something going on behind Polly’s fervour. Something beyond her rousing speech about preserving Fantasyland for the waifs and strays of Brompton in years to come. I asked her about it as we petitioned outside the pie and mash shop near the harbour. ‘What’s this really about, Polly?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Saving the golf course. You texted me at seven thirty this morning and it’s Saturday.’
‘It’s like I said … that place kept me going. It still keeps me going.’
I narrowed my eyes and played devil’s advocate – a role precisely no one gets thanked for playing. ‘I love the golf course too, but only because you’re all there. You could put us somewhere else and we’d have just as much fun. All the freaks and geeks in Year 9 will find somewhere else to go.’
Polly shook her head. ‘It’s more than that.’ I knew it. ‘That place, for most of my life, has been the best place. My mum used to take me when I was little and she always let me win. She used to be pretty good fun. **** knows what went wrong. Then when I was cutting, I used to go to distract myself, keep my hands busy. It means the ******* world to me, that place.’
I said no more. Now it made sense.
Zoë and Polly, now officially A THING, made a banner on some old bedding and tied it to the chained-up gates of Fantasyland. It was a crappy-looking thing – sub-One-Direction-concert standard – but it worked. On the Saturday afternoon, as Alice and Alex were petitioning anyone who came to try to play golf, a photographer from the local Gazette arrived. At least we hoped he was a photographer – a slightly crumpled old man with a camera turned up to take a picture of us in front of our banner.
Luckily for us, he wasn’t a sexual predator, and our picture appeared on the third page of the paper the following Monday morning. ‘I got one!’ Polly ran up to where Daisy and I were waiting in the corridor to go into French. ‘Look, look, look!’
‘Let me see!’ I leaned over her shoulder and saw us lined up outside Fantasyland, making the ‘sad’ faces the photographer had told us to do. GOLF-CRAZY TEENS CAMPAIGN FOR PARK REOPENING. Polly looked incredible with her serious face. I looked really confused, which was less great.
‘We all look so good!’ Daisy squeaked. ‘Like a pop band.’
I laughed. ‘I look simple.’
‘You do not,’ Polly said. ‘The piece is ******* awesome too. The journalist is so on our side … listen: “With so few activities for young adults, some residents are concerned teens will be left with no choice but to loiter in the streets.” That’s good. That means the council will have to listen to us.’
‘We should get some hoodies and start drinking cider in cul-de-sacs or something.’ We were still laughing when Mr Wolff appeared.
‘Oh there you are,’ he said. ‘I just read your piece in the paper.’ I couldn’t tell if he was angry or not. ‘I have to say, I’m really impressed, girls. I can smell the teen spirit.’
‘Oh god, Dad, no.’
‘I mean it! You’re doing a great thing for the community. I’m proud.’
She hid it pretty well, but underneath the scowl, I could see Polly beaming.