Rhyl

This was something I couldn't resist writing to send to my local paper, when at the end of a rubbish article one of their proper paid writers had written about Rhyl, they asked "What are your memories of Rhyl?"

It’s nice to hear that Martin Tideswell believes himself to have spent so many idyllic childhood holidays revelling in Rhyl’s multifarious delights. I am happy to report that I have only visited the seaside location he purports to have such fond memories of on two occasions. I say “purports to have,” as I suspect that many retrospectively happy childhood memories are acquired more latterly; as one looks back with a rose-tinted and age-dulled idea of nostalgia and adult expectations. Of course all childhoods are happy. Everyone says they are. Sitting in a boiling hot car being mercilessly bullied by one’s siblings whilst being dragged to yet another stately home? Best days of my life.

Luckily for me, I spent most of my holidays in smugly middle-class rented cottages in rural Dorset. I actually have a photograph of my family in the hamlet which served as location for St. Mary Mead in the 1980s adaptation of Miss Marple – a settlement which could be twinned with Rhyl in a “most ironic twinning” contest. However, despite my usually genteel upbringing, on two occasions I found myself in a part of North Wales which had neither a museum of traditional industries and crafts, nor a castle. Yes, Rhyl. My Nan had a caravan there, and occasionally one or another of my siblings and I were dispatched with a friend to spend a week there in the summer. I went there when I was nine. Only I apparently didn’t have any friends, and spent the week alone (well, with my Nan and her partner, obviously, but let’s just say that their major motivation in buying the caravan was, it seemed, its proximity to the inexpensive beer in the club). I was too young to go into the town (such as it was) alone. A massive road lay between the caravan park and the beach, and evidently nobody could be bothered to take me across it. I was a painfully shy child, so spent all my time playing in the on-site amusement arcade, unable to pluck up the courage to talk to another child. And that was the story of my better holiday in Rhyl.

My next excursion to the Delight of Denbighshire came at the age of twelve. It was 1991 – one of the more disappointing years of my life. The childhood sense of wonder had deserted me, but I was yet to discover the consolatory influence of cider. My older sister also came along with me this time, and between us we have since been able to muster up two memories from this, the longest week of either of our lives. Memory One: Making a collage from other people’s cigarette ends, whilst listening to tapes of the Manic Street Preachers and Jane’s Addiction on my sister’s stereo (a device painted with lurid pink gloss paint) on the windswept and deserted beach. Memory Two: Overhearing a man and woman in a shop talking about the gentleman’s bid to trace his deceased mother. He was not, it transpired, attempting to locate a late lady who had given him up for adoption many years ago. Nor was he searching for her final resting place. It turned out he was looking for the disembodied spirit of his departed predecessor, who he had “thought might be in Abergele.” (He’d been for a look. She wasn’t.)

To this day, hearing Morrissey’s seaside themed lament “Every Day Is Like Sunday” takes me back to that August week of 1991, most of which I seem to have chosen to erase from my memory in much the same way many people who have undergone appalling traumas do. Either that, or there is literally nothing to remember about it other than the two incidents detailed above.

I didn’t eat any chips out of cones. I went nowhere near the Sun Centre. I had no camaraderie with any fellow Stoke-on-Trent dwellers. I didn’t read The Sentinel. Luckily, a couple of weeks later I went on holiday with my parents to a farmhouse in South Wales. If nothing else, Rhyl had given me a new and enduring appreciation of castles, museums, historically interesting pubs, and stately homes.