Sunday Rest in Great Yarmouth

Sunday 18 August 2002. It's a day of rest because that's what Sundays on holiday in Great Yarmouth were all about when I was a kid. Admittedly journeys down from (at the time) Rochdale took a lot longer in the early to mid 1960s than they do now, but even so, we left Blackpool the previous day early in the morning and had got here in the afternoon.

The lack of motorways in the 60s was one factor and the other was Dad's Ford Popular 100E which had windscreen wipers that were driven not by electrics but by the vacuum caused by the downstroke of the pistons. Fine when the car was at rest, but as the accelerator was depressed to make the car move, air got through the carburettor and there was little or no vacuum and therefore no moving windscreen wipers. Driving through pouring rain was something of an adventure... A very slow and long adventure if you wanted to see where you were going.

Trips to Great Yarmouth in those days started around 11:00pm or midnight. We would stop at Newark for breakfast and carry on to get to Great Yarmouth late morning.

First thing every morning Mum and Dad would get us up early in the morning to go for a morning coffee at the tea huts on the Promenade walk before breakfast. We would be there somewhere between 6:00am-6:30am every day. Now they don't open until later so there's no chance of a visit before breakfast, but even so it was our first point of call every morning straight after leaving the B&B.

A mug of coffee both then and now meant a heaped teaspoon of Nescafe in the mug with steam-heated milk near boiling point poured over. No water. Sheer bliss. How the coffee shops have got away with making coffee take so long and requiring vendors to be called Baristas is totally beyond me. As is the ridiculous strength that many people drink coffee these days.

As kids we would be dragged by the hand to the huts, still half asleep and suffering slightly from shock at having been got out of bed so early. But once there (admittedly probably with a glass of milk rather than coffee in the days before adolescence) we would look eagerly through the ever-present magazine racks that were filled with American comics, Batman and Superman had been going for a while but my own favourites were Marvel Comics, whose own super heroes were just starting to appear - The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Iron-Man, Hulk and Thor... Walking up Regents Road almost every second shop had racks of these outside. We would spend a fortune on them...

First thing in the morning you would see greenkeepers pushing manual lawn mowers to cut the grass on bowling greens every single day, each micron of new growth disappearing daily to leave a velvet surface, carefully done corner to corner to leave stripes of different shades of green. There were so many bowling greens and putting greens in the sixties. There were still a few bowling greens now, but sadly the putting greens, as we were to find, had gone.

The cinema was showing Men In Black II, Spider-Man and Austin Powers Goldmember. So at least Spidey still had a presence! In the past this had been a theatre. We had seen Cilla Black there one year almost at the start of her career and also one year Rolf Harris at the height of his popularity, well before scandal ruined his career.

This is where we were staying - the Shemara on Wellesley Road. The same family owned one of the tea huts on the Promenade so it became natural for us to frequent their hut for our coffees and perhaps a sandwhich at lunchtime. This was Sunday though, so the hotel served dinner at one o'clock. We had limited time to do much that morning.

Also staying at the Shemara were a family from Bedford or somewhere round there - two brothers and two sisters, three of whom looked late 60s or 70s and they had brought their mother on holiday with them. One of the brothers had his daughter with him. Phyllis, one of the sisters had a wicked laugh and no teeth... We used to see her and sometimes the two brothers at the beach hut in the mornings.

There was also a family with two sons from Lincolnshire who were very nice. The father and oldest son were always at the beach hut in the mornings and we used to sit with them. Then there was another family with two boys who, in everything they said and did, came across as gormless people raising gormless kids... I don't think they were all that unintelligent - they just chose not to use it... Favourite phrases included "Oh yeah... never thought of that..."

Sundays in Great Yarmouth normally included a walk to look at the docks on the River Yare, but for some reason Miss Franny wanted to go looking for the Scholl sandal shop if it was still there. Given that it was every husband's favourite shopping day - Sunday at a time when most shops would be shut - I went along with it. It was still there. It was shut...

In the afternoon we wandered up the Promenade to the Model Village, but there was the odd rumble of thunder every now and then so we thought we'd leave a proper visit for another day as the buildings within the village were a bit too small to shelter in. Sure enough, by mid to late afternoon it started to pelt it down with rain and we made for Regents Road and somewhere for an evening meal.

Great Yarmouth 2002 Index