Memories of Clacton

I have very fond memories of Clacton-on-Sea. In 1974, newly married, my wife and I needed somewhere to live. I had a job at Essex University, and she was teaching in Colchester. We had two offers of accommodation: an idyllic cottage in rural St Osyth—a real love nest at £65 per month—or a three-bedroom semi in Clacton at £39 per month. I had been a student for six years, my wife for four, and we were both bankrupt with crippling overdrafts. We just could not afford to pay the 50% premium so, with some reluctance and apprehension, we opted for Clacton.
 
The house was on a main road and there was no central heating, but it had a very long back garden of the sort that an enterprising gardener could use to feed his family. I did grow some tomatoes, just in time for a snowstorm on 2 June 1975… But Clacton was charming. There was a pub nearby, and a very pleasant old-fashioned shopping area where we were able to purchase items almost unknown to us as students—pâté, French bread and cheese, and wine… There was a tailor’s shop with ‘Hamish Macbeth’ over the door, and a delightful ‘odds and ends’ store with its wares spread over the pavement. We watched a box set of Wagner operas recorded at Bayreuth marked up at £30, reduced to £20, reduced to £15, finally ending up at £5, at which point I bought it… Having some ready money at last, I had built a HiFi system, and the Wagner got a good workout although I would tear my hair out trying to eliminate the cracks and clicks from static on the records and was never able to eliminate them.
 
There was a local cinema which we visited regularly. Every programme included an advert for a local car mechanic “Dennis’s Auto Spares”; consisting of a man in a white coat checking the oil on a car; did car mechanics ever wear white coats? On one occasion, and for reasons that escape me, we went to a double-bill porn show: Deadly Weapons followed by Flesh Gordon. The protagonist in Deadly Weapons was one ‘Chesty Morgan’, in possession of gigantic—apparently genuine—blue-veined breasts which she would use to suffocate her victims. In the other film, Flesh Gordon, Dale Ardour, and professor Flexi Jerkoff visited the planet Porno ruled by Emperor Wang to find out why Earth was being attacked by a deadly sex ray; they were promptly attacked by a penisaurus… You get the idea.
 
The one source of heat in the house was a coal fire in the front room. I would sit in front it for hours on end crunching the numbers for my thesis on what was then a technological marvel, an HP-21 calculator with a red LED display, using Reverse Polish Logic, and having trig and log functions. In 1974 it had cost £80—more than two months’ rent—but since this was before PCs, it was an essential tool for science research.

We needed to get the chimney cleaned and I spotted a chimney sweep on his bike near the house. I ran after him and asked for his name and details; he was a Mr Ashdown…
 
The house was old. Once, returning from the pub I decided to see if the obsolete gas light in our bedroom was still working. I turned on the tap and was met with a loud hiss… We did some painting, and on using a blowlamp in the kitchen, I managed to bring down a fair chunk of thick plaster from the lath and plaster ceiling. Our kindly next-door neighbour showed me how to replace the lath and plaster with plasterboard—virtually all of which he did himself—and skimmed the ceiling with thistle plaster. A very good neighbour indeed. Unfortunately, I managed to upset him some time later; we had a fancy-dress party, and I came as an angel. Around midnight, I attempted to fly off the front wall and woke my neighbour up with the merriment. He eventually forgave us.
 
I have nothing but good memories of Clacton-on-Sea. I am sad to see several less than charitable comments about the town and its inhabitants in the media, now that it has become the epicentre of the latest political firestorm. The Reform mantra seems to be that if the Clacton voters elect NF again, notwithstanding Count Binface, that vindicates whatever misdemeanours he may or may not have committed. Shame on you Farage for bringing the townspeople of Clacton into undeserved disrepute.