Skegness

Mean! moody !.......and a pain in the bum!

For the last four years I have entered the BBC Radio Lincolnshire Write a folksong for Lincolnshire competition.

The first year I entered it, I won the best performer prize. The next three years - I've been pretty unsuccessful. I regard that as a pity - Lincolnshire is my home county and I love the memory of it . When I get near to Boston and the Holland flatlands with its enormous sky lies before me - then I feel I am home, and my songs are conceived with a great deal of sincerity.

Anyway this year I had a back-up plan. I decided I was going to write a song about the brash exciting seaside resort, Skegness. And I figured - even if the competition judges hated it - who knows someone else might like it.

Imagine my delight when Skegness authorities got in contact with me almost by return, and said they were going to give the song a special page on Skegness website.

To celebrate this little success, I have recorded a special version at Willy Jackson's studio in Leeds (home of the Kaiser Chiefs, Embrace and many other great Leeds bands!). And its this version you can hear now!

And I'm going to put a few pictures on the page that are reminders of the Skegness of my childhood.

The first Skegness picture below features my sister Susan, my cousin Bernard and I sat on Skegness beach. Bernard (in the sailor suit) was altar boy material, however he got drawn into a nefarious plan that day that involved digging a large hole, weeing in it a great deal, and then persuading the unwary to wash their sandy feet in our wee.

Our favourite victim was a posh lady who trilled to her husband, George this water is lovely and warm.......

My sister Susan, me, my cousin, Bernard

Bernard and I would invite people wash their sandy feet in the hole we'd been weeing in all day.

The next picture features one of sisters first boyfriends - Brian Jones. Brian was, to me, a much admired elder presence. He lived near us on Witham Bank and went around the neighbourhood shouting "BOING!" and he knew and taught me many poems that went on to influence my oevre of writing, classics like:-

The cow kicked Nelly in the belly in the barn

and

Cowboy Billy had a six foot willy.

My Mother took a dim view of his poetical leanings, and the relationship was doomed from then onwards.

Susan with an early admirer

Lumley Road down to the Clock Tower, I'm smelling fish and chips!

The pier at Skegness was a great favourite. A few pence could provide hours of not so innocent fun - one arm bandits, what the butler saw machines, rolling pennies......

In our fevered imagination it was Las Vegas and a scene from Maverick rolled into one. There was loud pop music everywhere, bingo stall hustlers, a weird steeplechase game, stalls selling winkles and prawns and cowboy hats and all kinds of silliness. Bear in mind we were kids who went to school in the days when you had to sit there and shut up - here on Skeggy Pier, all the sanctions were relaxed.

At the end of the pier was a theatre. To reach it, you had to walk quite way until the you could see the sea lapping underneath your feet. The sea is often a fair way out in Skegness.

I can only recollect going to one show at the end of the pier, and my mother disapproved of the comedians 'near the knuckle' humour. The comedian was dressed as a woman, and he got his biggest laugh with the line -'he touched me with his bargepole!' I think it was this line that upset my mother.

Underneath the pier was a horrific exhibition of the Japanese Prisoner of War experience. Complete with photographs of war criminals being hanged and POW's being decapitated. Strange to think that the war was only as distant to our parents as Tony Blair's first government is to us now. When Bernard and I (seven and eight years old) sneaked away from our parents and into the exhibition - the man on the door took our sixpences and let us through the turnstile.

Going on the Pier! Wot a good idea!

My Mother, Grandmother and me on Skeggy Pier

On the beach and down the front at Skeg would be the Wrates photographers. Wearing a stripey blazer, and with a huge box camera strapped to them - these guys took dozens of photos every day.

Above is the cover of of the souvenir folder you got with you photo, in the unlikely event of you actually buying the photograph.

Below is a Wrates picture of my Dad - newly returned from the war and taking my sister Susan for a donkey ride.

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