Flowers on the Grass (23 page)

Dickie had been along to the pool to feel the temperature of the water. Some small boys were fooling about on the edge, and Dickie scuffled with them, pretending to push them in and letting them try to push him, bracing himself, delighted with his strength against their insect struggles.

Above their shrieks, Barney called: “Hi, Dickie! You’ve got to take a car to the station to meet a bloke—publicity or something.”

“O.K.” Barney had probably been asked to do it himself. People were always shouldering things off on to Dickie, but he did not mind. The small boys clamoured to come, too, and one climbed up his back and clung like a starfish, for children were not in the camp a day before they discovered that they could do what they liked with the Blue Boys.

Dickie could not take them in a staff car because of the insurance, so he gave them sixpence each for ice-cream and went off to the garage.

When the train came in, Dickie stood on the platform prominently, displaying the “Gaydays”, which was written in an arc across his chest, like the name of a fisherman’s boat. The Green Girls did not have it on their sweaters in case it led to suggestive remarks, for Gaydays camp was, as the slogan tacked up in Captain Gallagher’s office put it, “Clean, healthy and moral as a family circle”.

A thin, youngish man with untidy dark hair and loose legs dropped out of the train and stood uncertainly, looking at Dickie with some suspicion. Dickie advanced, gave him a hearty handshake and took over his bag, swinging it easily as they walked to the car. He liked the look of him, but then Dickie liked everybody on sight and tolerated even those who palled on further acquaintance.

This Mr. Brett had come to do some sketches for publicity. Dickie did not like the tone of voice in which he referred to “Happy campers”, but the man was an artist; that was why he looked a little crumpled.

“Sorry I look a bit scruffy,” Mr. Brett said. “Got involved in a party last night and missed the last train, so I had to jump a lorry to Middlesbrough of all God-awful places. Any hope of a bath at your concentration camp?”

“Oh, sure. Boiling water all day and all night,” said Dickie, as proudly as if he stoked the boilers himself.

After they had checked in and collected the cabin key, they
walked past one of the milk-bar cafés, and Mr. Brett peered through the big glass window, which was steamed over from the crowd inside.

“There are people in there drinking something
hot”
he said. “It couldn’t be coffee?”

“Coffee, tea, chocolate, anything you like. People have snacks all day long here, in spite of the whopping meals. Stimulates the juices, I suppose, to want more. That lot only had breakfast an hour ago.”

“I didn’t have any breakfast,” said Mr. Brett wistfully, like a child outside a sweetshop.

Inside the air was thick with steam and gabble and the smell of wet clothes, for it had rained that morning and campers always made straight for the tea urns when they got wet or cold. Several people sitting at tables or waiting in the queue at the counter hailed Dickie.

“Hey, hey!” he called back, giving them his catch cry. Each Blue Boy had one of his own, which campers soon learned, and threw back to them in full-throated recognition at every opportunity. Barney always said: “Watcher”; Larry’s was: “Hullo, folks”; and Kenny, who crooned, which gave him a stake in the States, said: “Hiya!”

“Hey, hey!” As he passed among the crowd, Dickie slapped men on the back, chucked girls under the chin, winked, laughed knowingly at a couple sitting very close, did Thumbs Up, and the Victory sign—all the little tricks he had learned to do to keep the party gay.

When they were sitting with their coffee, Mr. Brett asked, not disparagingly, but with the fascinated disbelief of someone studying pond life: “Do you have to go on like that all the time?”

“Like what?”

“All that Hey, hey, and-” He winked and jerked his head and went click-click out of the side of his mouth.

“More or less. Keeps things going, you know.” A girl at the next table thought Mr. Brett was clicking at her, and pretended to put her nose in the air, but Dickie could see that she was looking sideways down it to see if there was any future. Even when he was talking to someone, he was aware all the time of what the crowd was doing. You had to learn never to be monopolised by one person, since you belonged to everyone. While he talked with Mr. Brett of the things he might sketch,
people passing by kept greeting him, ruffling his hair, teasing him.

“They like you,” said Mr. Brett, still with that air of viewing the wonders of nature.

“Oh well,” Dickie grinned. “They like to see someone else fooling about. Saves them having to do it themselves.” He thought Mr. Brett was a bit superior, but he would soon come round. They always did, even the aldermen’s wives, who had arrived in a body and stayed in a body for three solid days until they began to filter about to see what their husbands were up to.

“Watcher!” The door banged open and Barney came in through the café, jokes flying off him in all directions like raindrops from a shaking dog. Everyone laughed, even those who could not hear, for Barney was comic. They knew that as they knew the rising of the sun. Whatever he was saying must be a scream. He stopped by Dickie’s table, but did not sit down, for the Boys were not supposed to congregate too much on duty.

Dickie introduced Mr. Brett. “He’s up for the week-end to draw some pretty pictures for publicity.”

“Right,” said Barney, “he can start with me.” He stuck a hand on his chest and struck the pose of a Victorian statesman, for, although Mr. Brett was not a camper, Barney could never stop gagging. It came as naturally to him as showing his best profile did to Larry.

Barney was a huge, bear-headed man with a ruddy skin, a chest expansion that could break string, and a laugh, it was said, they could hear on the Dogger Bank on a clear day. He was the most popular of all the Boys, for in spite of his ribaldry he had a healthy, family quality. He could get away with anything, even slightly risqué stories, on which he was able to raise a dividend laugh by slapping himself with a noise like a pistol shot for having been so unbridled. Like Dickie, he was a regular Blue Boy, returning year after year. What he did in the winter no one knew. If you asked him, he would say that he was kept by a woman, or went to jail, or played the back legs of the horse in pantomime at Llanfairfechan. Never the same answer twice.

Larry, who was in his second year, had been working for a model agency out of season. Dickie had seen his face in haircream advertisements and illustrations to magazine articles about Love. He did not have to be especially comic or athletic.

He just had to be around with his smile and his eyelashes, in and out of the pool all day long when it was warm enough, for he looked his best in swimming trunks. Pete was the one for those who took their games seriously. Everyone wanted to be on his side at hockey, and each week a new tennis racket was presented to the camper who took most games off him in a single. John was popularly known as Spring-heeled Jack. A whirl of colour with his red hair and bright blue jersey, he did acrobatics at the concerts, led flocks of bicyclists round the countryside and organised romps in the gymnasium when it was wet. Kenny, who was long and Latin, carried his accordion almost permanently strapped round him, like a part of his anatomy, and could be found striking up Old Favourites in any part of the camp. When the bars were full, he would wander through with his teeth agleam, playing “Black Eyes” and “Sous les Toits.” It lent a Continental air.

Dickie was the youngest of the Boys, although he was older than he looked. He was not very tall, chunky, bounceable as sorbo, with snub features and fluffy blond hair which he wore ungreased, by order of the management, since he was the ingenuous boyish type. Girls were always falling in love with the Blue Boys on and off during the season. It was always the older ones who fell for Dickie, the plainer, shyer, last-hope ones, and sometimes after they went home they knitted him socks and pullovers. Although he had to go about pretending to be madly susceptible, kissing any girl who won a prize or had a birthday or came in late to lunch, and begging to be held down when he saw a choicely-filled swimming suit, Dickie was not really interested in the seductive campers. He hadn’t time, with so many others less seductive claiming him.

He had a real girl-friend once—not a camper, for you were not allowed to have even mild liaisons with them. This was a girl he met at the Ideal Home Exhibition, where she was demonstrating cooking oil. Frying chips all day long, poor kid, with all the biggest queues to cope with, since it was free food. When Dickie took her out to supper, she could never bear to have anything fried, and turned her head away if he had anything cooked in fat. She was always a little sharp w|th him, and he persuaded her to come to the camp in the summer, so that she could see him in his glory. She came, and that was the end of it. She did not like him kissing other girls and not being free to spend all the time with her. On the fifth day she talked
him into a first-class row in the passage between the bath houses, said that she liked him better when he was selling Nocurl Lino, and left the camp two days before her time was up, although she had paid in advance. Afterwards, Dickie persuaded the accounts department to refund her the money. Barney said he was a craven worm.

The cabins at Gaydays were set in blocks of six, radiating out from the central buildings where the dining-hall and theatre and lounges were. As Dickie led Mr. Brett along the concrete paths to B.39, a piercing wind harried them at every gap between the blocks.

“Interesting study for future historians,” Mr. Brett said, clenching his teeth. “Why atomic age man always built his communal pleasure resorts on the bleakest parts of the coast.”

Dickie did not mind a bit of wind. He was used to it, and he was fit. His one real interest during the winter was keeping himself in trim for the next summer. He walked at least five miles every day in any weather, circling Battersea Park at great speed, played golf every week-end in Richmond Park, haunted the Y.M.C.A. gymnasium, and kept his smoking down.

No one could deny, however, that there was seldom a windless day at Gaydays, but Dickie was not going to have anyone calling it bleak. “Healthiest climate in the world,” he said, quoting the advertisements with conviction. As the next gust came between the cabins, he threw out his chest and breathed deeply. “Invigorating.”

“Yeah. Like a cold bath.” Mr. Brett swore and huddled his coat round him. These office workers. Dickie was sorry for them. Mr. Brett had been given a double cabin, with one bunk above the other. He stood in the doorway looking in, like a dog inspecting a new kennel. “Who sleeps on the top deck?” he asked, with a resigned air of being surprised at nothing now.

“Who would you like?” asked Dickie. “We aim to please.” He laughed, and a monstrous woman who had been listening from the next cabin laughed, too. She and her husband, in overcoats and hats, were sitting under a string of washing in the porch. Two babies played round them, one wearing nothing but a vest and the other nothing but knickers, and another child staggered about in corduroy leggings, several jerseys and a woollen tam-o’-shanter rising off the top of its head like an ill-fitting kettle lid.

“Hey, hey, Dickie,” the fat woman said, and the children echoed: “Dickie! Dickie!”

“Going to be our neighbour, dear?” she asked Mr. Brett. “You’ll have to get us to show you the ropes. Been here five days, we have, and feel we’ve been here all our lives, don’t we, Tom?” Her husband grunted peacefully. He was enjoying his holiday.

“Only a couple of days, I’m afraid,” Mr. Brett said, and Dickie was relieved to find that he was not going to be stuffy with the other campers. He stepped back from his cabin and stood looking at the family with his head on one side, smiling faintly. “I’ve got to make a few sketches,” he said; “and, I say, would you mind if I start on you, just as you are now? ”

“Well!” The woman tweaked at the skirt that had ridden up over her thighs when she sat down. “What do you say, Tom?” Her husband grunted.

“I’ll just get my things out.” Mr. Brett went into his cabin, and Dickie followed him.

“But look here, Brett,” he said. “I was going to show you all round the camp—the places you’ll want to draw. The pool, the kiddie’s playground, the ballroom, the Olde Taverne bar-”

“I’m supposed to do pictures of happy campers,” Brett said. “This lot’ll do for a start.”

“Yes, but I mean-” began Dickie. He knew about publicity. He had not worked in films for nothing. The family next door was hardly the type, but he would not say that. He was already afraid that Brett might be going to laugh at people, not with them. “I thought you were going to have a bath,” he said.

“Well, I will,” said Brett impatiently, tipping his case upside down on to the lower bunk to get at his sketch block. “But I want to draw this first while I’ve got the urge. I don’t often get it these days. You go and organise somebody else, there’s a good boy. I’ll find my way around. I might even find the Olde What’s-it bar. Meet you there for a drink before lunch.”

“Thanks,” Dickie said, “but I don’t. Got to keep fit, you know.” He kept off drink during the season because he knew himself too well, and knew that he would never stop at the two gins and a couple of pints which was the Blue Boys’ ration on duty.

Mr. Brett took the chair out of his cabin and settled on the other side of the path. Dickie automatically squatted down to the eldest child and asked it what its name was. It goggled, chewing at something which was choking up its mouth.

“What’s he eating?” he asked the mother, who was sitting for Mr. Brett like a petrified mammoth, only the great black bow on her hat quivering.

“Tassel off his tam,” she answered out of the side of her mouth. “He will have it, sew it on as I will. Michael’s got his tassel, again’ Tom. Take it away from him.” Her husband grunted peacefully, tipping his hat forward in a holiday attitude, although there was no sun.

“Come on, old chap.” Dickie held out his hand and put on his Uncle Dickie voice. The child gave a woolly yell and retreated, knocking over the baby in the vest, who screamed.