Every year, Dickeburgh Parish Council paid for all the schoolchildren in the village to have a day trip to Great Yarmouth, our nearest seaside resort. Mum would take us; Dad would be left behind to manage the shop. And every year, from the moment we all piled aboard the four Chenery coaches hired for the occasion, clutching our brown envelopes containing the 2/6 spending money given to each child, until we returned travel stained and weary, my unceasing mantra was, according to Mum, ‘I wonder what Daddy is doing now…’ I was not happy until I had bought a souvenir to take home for my Daddy.
Other than that though, I do remember those days as being great fun: in my memory (though I’m sure not in reality) the sun always shone, we spent the day on the beach, in the penny slot machine arcade and at the Pleasure Beach, which was what would, in these days of Thorpe Park and Alton Towers, be seen as a very tame affair. There were boats which you could steer round a circular man-made lake, the ‘Gallopers’ on which you could pretend you were riding a real horse, a few roundabouts and my favourite: The Snails, a sort of mini-roller coaster for kids.
Years later I returned with my own children, eager for them to have the same childhood delight that I had had – only to find that, though The Snails had survived, they were far more interested in the newer attractions such as the log flume. Oh well, that’s progress I suppose.
The day at Yarmouth would not have been complete without having our photographs taken holding tame monkeys. Again, not something you see at the British seaside nowadays – probably some fool law about animal cruelty – but in those days there were tame monkeys, often dressed in clothes, on leads held by owners who either strolled the sea front or resided in booths on the lookout for gullible parents who would pay good money to let their child hold the animals while a camera was pointed at them, and would then buy the resulting photograph.
At the end of a long, happy and usually sunny day, the coaches would disperse dozens of tired children, often being carried or piggy-backed home by almost equally tired parents who bore the dribbles from the stick of rock still stubbornly being eaten all down the back of their necks with consummate patience.