A Hallelujah Hi-de-hi

Scooped out of the boundary of Exmoor National Park is the lovely old-fashioned seaside town of Minehead, and along its promenade sits a Butlins holiday camp.

Like many Britons these places are enduringly associated for me with a 1950’s kind of what my parents would call rather ‘common’ - harmless all-inclusive fun. I am suprised but pleased that they survive into the 21st century, but I had literally no idea what to expect as a daytrip visitor. I certainly didn’t expect the frankly massive ticket prices displayed in the entrance pavilion. They seemed high considering that from my viewpoint the windswept funfair wasn’t ‘on’ and a Burger King sign was visible.
I hastily introduced ourselves as just visiting artists wanting to have a look about. Once I had assured them we didnt want to film anything, we were waived in, though not without a slight sense of surveyance.

The main space was a vast canvas tent structure accommodating many highstreet shops and eating places. The roof was impressively engineered and satisfyingly referenced the joyful ‘big top’ / camping references of early Butlins.
Children and young familes quietly and politely queued at the Burger King, they smiled at us as we walked around, calm pervaded what had promised at first glance to be my idea of hell.

It transpired we had walked in to a vast Christian conference filling the entire camp, and as today was ‘changeover day’ our slightly bewildered appearance raised no suspicion. The ‘trade stalls’ exhibited everything from Christian banking services to Evangelical rock schools, no hard sell of course as their occupants believed they were preaching to the converted. I discovered that 80’s diva Yazz had transformed into a hip Christian songstress.

Beyond this pleasure dome were the facilties and accommodation for the ‘campers’. I tried to pick up my email but found the wifi was not free.
Eclectic architecture akin to low-rise student housing sat within neat garden spaces. A small sub-Corbusier Modernist pavilion turned out to be a very recent addition, built as a marketing suite for the camp’s proudest achievement – a upmarket timeshare apartment block built in convincing art deco style. An enthusiastic young salesman appreciated our appreciation of the camp’s classier aspirations.

The crowds thinned out as we walked along the oldest accommodation blocks, endearing 50’s bunglalows with deep eaves, being cleaned by East Europeans. To my satisfaction, we noticed through their low windows that some of the Christians had left their beds unmade.

Abruptly, at the end of one of these avenues, stood a small but substantial white-washed chapel of the style one could see in a small Eastern European village. Pan-tiled roof, small bell-tower, checkered floor tiles. We hesitantly entered. Inside, a small table with a photograph of a young woman, but no campers.

Posted Friday 11th April, 2008 at 7:29 pm by Karen

Oral History Archives - the Facebook of the elderly

We return to the Cutcombe Cattle Market to find out what we can about the business of livestock in Exmoor, choosing what we hope to be a quiet morning. Though the auctioneer we had watched in awe that week was out of the office, a Mr Rook makes time for us to speak across his vast and well-worn desk. As wide as he is tall, elderly but in fine fettle, his accent is thick as he summarises the past and future of the market. Part of the site is to be sold off to finance a shiny new market which meets the copious new regulations better than the current tin shed. On the sold land a number of affordable local houses plus a few more expensive ‘open market’ homes will be built. Mr Rook hunts in his spare time, and works - at 80 years old – to get himself out of the house. He appreciates the benefits of the market’s website but cannot use a PC. His well-used dictaphone sits on the desk, its contents waiting to go to the secretary for typing up.

Later that morning in Dulverton we visit a very well-presented but rather too worthy archive of oral history, photographs and some old film transferred to a dud DVD which only plays the one about the ‘Great Freeze”. This means I have to miss out on the alluring film of a wartime parade also offered on the screen menu.

Over at a PC there is a database of the oral history archive – which proudly states “Last update 21/08/2005”. I muse on how oddly - and disappointingly - banal these archives can be, transferable between any aging rural population in the countryside. “Mother was a great cook, father was harsh....”; “We never bought a vegetable”; “People never locked their doors”. And I say that as someone who adores social history.
I decide to idly browse the contributors by name. There are no more than about fifty presented.
Mr (Tom) Rook takes my eye and I find a comprehensive summary of the entire life story of the man whose office I had just been in at the Cattle Market.

Posted Friday 11th April, 2008 at 7:27 pm by Karen

The local colour

The deep local hedgebanks (as they call them in the visitor literature) have an odd, fortified quality about them. On closer inspection I see many are in fact ancient walls of stacked, flat stone now submerged beneath rich vegetation and turf. The surface reminds me of the ‘flowery mead’ seen in medieval woodcuts and tapestries – each leaf distinct in its vernal opulence, a translucent gem-like green. There are delectable nettles, primroses in yellow and purple and all the bruise-like shades in between, butterbur, cow parsley, wild garlic.
Some of these ‘walls’ are even topped with hedgerow plants - a kind of double decker boundary – and these in turn have grown dense, only to be recently ‘laid’ (cut and flattened at their bases), adding a final utilitarian capping.

Our B & B landlady is bleary-eyed from lambing all night with her unmaternal Exmoor Longhorn ewes. Several have died and left orphans whose nocturnal bleats I can hear as I type, even at 10pm. She will need to hand-rear them, bringing them into the warm farmhouse kitchen, out of the unseasonally frosty April night. She and her husband have some air-dried hams hanging from the barn beams. I tell them of our own home curing attempts, some of which had ended horrifically with maggots. We discuss salt and dampness and I admire the 1940’s wardrobe they have converted into a smokehouse.

The local quadbike dealership is the most successful in the UK. Rob pays his staff what are considered staggeringly high wages locally. He makes selling the bikes sound like a piece of cake. On the way out I notice a bike without its familiar ‘shell’, being quietly tended. Its loving owner is working in front of a framed UK championship poster of three anonymous quadbikers, each wearing a helmet and a number. Number two is a heavily sponsored Honda ‘pro’ biker, but number one is the biker here in the showroom.

In the tiny Cutcombe church a Nigel Mansell autobiography remains unsold on the book stand. Their preserves are £1 a jar.

Posted Wednesday 9th April, 2008 at 7:26 pm by Karen