AT a time when anyone with an overdraft can scoot merrily about the globe, the joys of a holiday in a caravan at Trecco Bay fade with the setting sun.
I'm told that the site is now depressingly regulated, with each 'module' allotted the same space in a pre-planned grid.
This is far from what I was used to as a boy in knitted bathing trunks.
Modern caravans even have windows and do not move around in a night-time gale like cockroaches.
Over-50s may be the only people to remember the 'miners fortnight', when pitmen from the South Wales valleys decamped to Porthcawl with their families for the annual caravan holiday, still sporting traces of subterranean grime.
Caravans were then lodged haphazardly among the dunes, as though flung there by some god moved to anger by the prospect of a display of mass hedonism - if gorging on Canadian waffles, then new to these shores, and pints of warm
Hancocks bitter could be so described.
Trecco Bay and its neighbouring plot, Coney Beach, for all their litter-blown disarray, were like the Riviera for those of us as yet unaware of the social inequality that already enabled others to regard
Channel-hopping (that's the English Channel) and the Mediterranean as commonplace.
This, in turn, gave the lie to the image of miners as relentlessly Bolshevik. Perhaps the quietude of the blue-veined guy in the caravan next to us saw his lot as unalterable and his two weeks on the South Glamorgan
coast as a vacation ordained by Fate.
Some years later I would toy with the idea that this was the lifestyle a miner would adopt even if the country were being run solely for his benefit and against the interests of the toffs who worked in offices and regularly took holidays abroad.
To deny this proposition was to suggest - heresy of heresies - that working class existence was merely a halt on the railway to prosperity and that the middle class, in renouncing the workingmen's club, dominoes and spitting in
the grate, had progressed to finer things.
Which is why I'm not willingly affiliated to either of them, or to any other club with rules and 'acceptable' codes of behaviour which one transgresses at one's peril. I think my grandfathers, both of them miners at one time, would have understood.
But Porthcawl in summer was not the place to hear working class icons talking politics any more than it was ideal for scouring rock pools for signs of marine life. The muck we put into the sea always returned with interest five hours later. To crabs, desperately procreating, it was
Armageddon twice a day. Pursued by incoming detritus, some of it offering a vague lesson in the facts of life, we headed for the funfair, Coney Beach's cakewalking, chairoplaning, heltering, skeltering pride and joy.
I remember two things about that fair in detail - being taken to watch Newport heavyweight boxer Dick Richardson train for what was to be his notorious title fight with Brian London in the Coney Beach ring (described by Argus man Willis Huntley at the time as the most shameful episode in the
history of British sport), and a sidestall game which I've spent thirty minutes trying to condense into the following paragraph.
Twenty-five contestants in front of a toy racecourse rolled wooden balls up a slope while, depending on which holes the balls dropped into, their 'horses' jerked towards the finishing post to win a prize.
My father won once and claimed to have hit on a system for rolling the ball into the highest-scoring hole. But his success was never repeated.
As we strolled back to the dunes, we were met by a scene not far removed from an encampment of Donegal tinkers: each caravan was pinpointed by a thin light, wet knitted bathing trunks sagged on poles to shapes beyond imagining
and happy families glowed in the dark around fires made from driftwood.
Then they invented the aeroplane and travel agents.
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