Confessions from a Holiday Camp Read online

  “Oh, no,” moaned Timothy. “Not again.”

  But he had to …

  When you’re a Holiday Host at Melody Bay Holiday Camp you’re expected to provide most of the entertainment. In whatever fashion the happy campers demand. And some of the demands were distinctly above and beyond the call of duty. Not that Timothy was unwilling to oblige what with Janet, June, Elsie and the rest of them shattering their fingernails on the door of his chalet. And then of course there were Nan and Nat, the Camp owner’s nieces, pursuing their own ideas of female liberation through the shuddering chalets. It was undoubtedly Timothy’s toughest assignment …

  and even better than his hilarious adventures in CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER and CONFESSIONS OF A DRIVING INSTRUCTOR

  CONFESSIONS FROM A HOLIDAY CAMP

  Timothy Lea

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  In which Timmy finds himself on the road again, having been found on the front room carpet with an attractive young lady who called to ask questions about cleaning shoes.

  Chapter 2

  In which brother-in-law Sidney hires Timmy as a Host at Melody Bay Holiday Camp and our hero travels north in the company of Janet, an athletic girl eager to make new friends.

  Chapter 3

  In which Timmy arrives at Melody Bay and gets some idea of the duties expected of him, helped by Avril and a conscientious chalet maid.

  Chapter 4

  In which Timmy becomes involved with the Camp Beauty Contest and Mrs. Married, Elsie, Janet and June – all of whom are keen to do well.

  Chapter 5

  In which life is disrupted by Nat and Nan, big girls with big appetites, with whom Timmy shares an embarrassing experience on the stage of the camp theatre.

  Chapter 6

  In which Timmy’s particular talents are singled out for export to Love Island, the new Mediterranean Holiday Camp for the swinging seventies and in which Timmy is taken in hand by Angela, an experienced air hostess.

  Chapter 7

  In which Timmy gets the lay of the land – known as Carmen – and discovers that the Island’s amenities leave everything to be desired.

  Chapter 8

  In which Sidney arrives to get a grip; Nat and Nan cause fresh problems and Timmy shares a beautiful experience with Marcia.

  Chapter 9

  In which Mum, Dad, and Rosie arrive for a holiday. Rosie conceives an affection for a singing gentleman named Ricci Volare, camp life continues to deteriorate and Timmy offers comfort to a lonely lady.

  Chapter 10

  In which Rosie and Dad disgrace themselves. Timmy organises a Love Carnival which gets out of hand. Dad is clumsy, Sidney loses his temper and we learn that Mum has a secret.

  Chapter 11

  In which an interesting new holiday camp development is outlined and Timmy begins an unusually exhausting journey home.

  Also Available in the Confessions Ebook Series

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  How did it all start?

  When I was young and in want of cash (which was all the time) I used to trudge round to the local labour exchange during holidays from school and university to sign on for any job that was going – mason’s mate, loader for Speedy Prompt Delivery, part-time postman, etc.

  During our tea and fag breaks (‘Have a go and have a blow’ was the motto) my fellow workers would regale me with stories of the Second World War: ‘Very clean people, the Germans’, or of throwing Irishmen through pub windows (men who had apparently crossed the Irish sea in hard times and were prepared to work for less than the locals). This was interesting, but what really stuck in my mind were the recurring stories of the ‘mate’ or the ‘brother-in-law’. The stories about these men (rarely about the speaker himself) were about being seduced, to put it genteelly, whilst on the job by (it always seemed to be) ‘a posh bird’:

  ‘Oeu-euh. Would you care for a cup of tea?’

  ‘And he was up her like a rat up a drainpipe’

  These stories were prolific. Even one of the – to my eyes – singularly uncharismatic workers had apparently been invited to indulge in carnal capers after a glass of lemonade one hot summer afternoon near Guildford.

  Of course, these stories could all have been make-believe or urban myth, but I couldn’t help thinking, with all this repetition, surely there must be something in them?

  When writing the series, it seemed unrealistic and undemocratic that Timmy’s naive charms should only appeal to upper class women, so I quickly widened his demographic and put him in situations where any attractive member of the fairer sex might cross his path.

  The books were always fun to write and never more so than when they involved Timmy’s family: his Mum, his Dad (prone to nicking weird objects from the lost property office where he worked), his sister Rosie and, perhaps most importantly, his conniving, would be entrepreneur, brother-in-law Sidney Noggett. Sidney was Timmy’s eminence greasy, a disciple of Thatcherism before it had been invented.

  Whatever the truth concerning Timothy Lea’s origins, twenty-seven ‘Confessions’ books and four movies suggest that an awful lot of people share my fascination with the character and his adventures. I am grateful to each and every one of them.

  Christopher Wood aka Timothy Lea

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mum was glad to see me when I got back from Cromingham. Just as she had been when I got back from the nick. A bit worried too – just as she had been when I got back from the nick.

  “Everything alright at the Driving School?” she says casually, as I fold my mits round a cup of cha, made as only my Mum can make one – diabolically.

  “Fine, ma,” I say, equally casually, trying not to let my expression reveal the death struggle of my shrivelling taste buds. “I’ve decided it’s time I moved on to something else, though.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, ma. It was good experience but I feel like a change and Cromingham was a bit dull.”

  “I thought you’d settled in.”

  “Yes ma, but—”

  “I do wish you would find something a bit permanent. Your father and I get quite worried about you sometimes. You’ll never get married at this rate.”

  Marvellous, isn’t it? Another step on the way to National Health gnashers and my old age pension. Get married, settle down, have children, drop dead.

  “I don’t particularly want to get married, Mum.”

  “Well, you want a decent job, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Mum.”

  “Well then.”

  “Yes, Mum.”

  There is no point in telling her about how my career as a driving instructor ended: agro, needle, nudity. You want to protect your old Mum from things like that, don’t you? I pick up the paper and glance at the headlines, evincing less interest than Germaine Greer being shown round a brassiere factory. Apparently the police have found two half-naked birds and a bloke in a stolen Rolls Royce on Cromingham Golf Course. Funny that.

  I toss the paper aside and thankfully gulp down the last of the tea. By the cringe, there are enough dregs at the bottom of the cup to tell the fortunes of Lana Turner’s bridesmaids.

  “Well, whatever you do,” grinds on Mum, “I wish you’d get a steady job. Look how well Sidney has done.”

  Odious Sid is my poxy brother-in-law and always dragged in to conversations of this type as a symbol of what hard work and a bit of nous can do for you. In fact Sid is a bit stronger on the latter than the former, though you can’t point the finger at him for that – two is nearer the mark with Sid. He and I were partners in a window cleaning
business until he got a bit too close to a girl I was thinking of getting spliced to. In fact “a bit too close” is putting it mildly. He was so close he was touching her in about half a dozen places. In her dad’s garden shed, too. I still get a red flush every time I think about it. Mum and Rosie, she is my sister, don’t know about that little incident, though I keep the threat of revelation dangling over Sid’s nut like the sword of Dan O’Kleas.

  “How is Charlie Clore, then?” I say trying not to sound too bitter.

  “Don’t be bitter, dear,” says Mum. “Just because Sidney has taken his chances—”

  I start choking at this point and it’s not just because Mum’s omelettes taste like they have been made with Great Auks’ eggs.

  “Don’t gulp your food, dear,” continues Mum, “I was always telling you as a child. Now where was I? Oh, yes. Sidney. Do you know what he is doing now?”

  “Six years in The Scrubs?”

  “He’s working for Funfrall Enterprises.”

  She makes it sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury so I am obviously supposed to be impressed.

  “Oh yeah. And what’s that?” In fact, I can vaguely remember having heard of it but I don’t want to let on to Mum.

  “You know! They own all those Dance Halls and Holiday Camps and Health Centres and things. You’ve seen the Miss Globe Contest on the tele?”

  I have too. Like an explosion in a dumpling factory with dialogue by Andy Pandy.

  “He’s taken over from Michael Aspel, has he?”

  “No, no. He’s nothing to do with beauty contests—”

  “You can say that again.”

  “—he’s tied up with the holiday camps. Promotions Manager or something. He’s doing terribly well.”

  I can imagine it, too. Jammy bastard. Well we all know what goes on at holiday camps, don’t we? Just Sidney’s cup of tea. Timmy’s too!

  Maybe Mum is a mind-reader.

  “Perhaps he could help you find a job, dear?”

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so, Mum,” I say, turning down the idea on principle. “I think it’s about time I found something for myself. How are Rosie and the kid?”

  I soon learn that Rosie and little nephew Jason are full of beans and now living in their own house in tasty Streatham. Sidney’s cup must be over-running right down to his Y-fronts. After a few more painful details of his new car and their holiday in Majorca I am forced to escape by switching the conversation to the unsavoury subject of Dad. I learn that the man who contracted out of the rat race because the other rats objected is still filling in some of his waking hours down at the Lost Property Office. Plentiful evidence of this fact is provided by a quick butchers round the walls of the ancestral home of the Leas. Dad is what you might call a collector. What you might also call a grade one tea leaf. Moose heads, stuffed fish, millions of umbrellas, enough binoculars to supply the Royal Box at Ascot. All saved from the incinerators – so he says. I reckon that most of the stuff was left on public transport because it wouldn’t fit into the dustbin.

  The pride of Dad’s collection can be discovered in the hallstand underneath the telephone directories – we don’t have a telephone but Dad is prepared for this eventuality. Here can be found all the porn that Dad and his mates down at the L.P.O. know will never be claimed. The tattered, drool-sodden fixes of a brigade of plastic-macked sexual fantasists: “Kinky Kats on the Rampage”, “Corporal Ecstasy”, “Leatherworkers’ Handbook”, full of dead-eyed girls with tits like policemen’s helmets, who look as if they should know better – and have certainly known worse.

  Not that I want to sound as if I’m always writing to Malcolm Muggeridge about it. I have never been able to resist a quick flick through Dad’s library and it’s to this that I retire when Mum has cleared away the breakfast things and toddled off to the launderette.

  I am not disappointed. There, beneath the 1968 A–D nestles “Wife-swapping, Danish Style” with a cover that leaves nothing to the imagination, not even my particularly fevered article. The inside is even worse, or better, according to your personal tastes, and I am beginning to crowd my jeans when there is a sharp rat-tat on the front door. Cursing under my breath, because Sven and Brigitta and Inga and Horst are just beginning to forget about the open sandwiches. I stuff the magazine under a cushion and do a ‘mum through the lace curtains’.

  Standing on the front door step is a pneumatic brunette of about twenty-five, carrying a map board and chewing the end of a pencil as she examines our door-knocker. She is not at all bad and in my present keyed-up condition could be a lot worse. Pausing only to make sure that my eye teeth are not showing, I speed to the front door and hurl it open.

  “Good morning,” says my visitor with practised cheeriness. I note that her eyes are making a lightning tour of my person and allow myself a similar liberty with her own shapely frame.

  “Good morning,” I say.

  “I am doing some research for a company called Baspar Services and I wondered if I could ask you a few questions about shoes.”

  “Shoes?”

  “Shoes. It won’t take very long.”

  Take as long as you like, darling, I think to myself, wincing at the discomfort her too-tight sweater must be causing her tempting tits.

  “Come inside, we don’t want to stand out here on the doorstep.”

  The girl looks a little doubtful.

  “Is your wife at home? I’ve got some questions for her, too.”

  This is obviously a ploy used to discourage potential rapists. Funny how my expression always gives me away.

  “Oh, I’m not married,” I say jokily as if the whole idea was too funny for words, “but my mother is doing the washing.”

  I don’t say where, so she trips over the threshold and I steer her on to the settee in the front room. This puts her at a disadvantage because generations of Leas watching tele, or grappling before it during power cuts, has forced the springs down to floor level. One either sinks without trace or perches on the edge. My guest starts off by doing the former and then struggles uncomfortably into an upright position revealing a good deal of shapely leg which I pretend not to see. In reality, I am finding it difficult to control myself because the adventures of my Danish friends are still firmly rooted in my mind.

  “Well, let’s get down to business,” say Miss Shapely-Thighs, briskly. “First of all, how many pairs of shoes do you have?”

  She chews the end of her pencil and I could do without that for a start.

  “Sixty-nine,” and her eyebrows shoot up.

  “I mean six—er—yes. I think it’s six. Sorry, I don’t know why I said that.” I don’t either. I have this terrible habit of saying what I am thinking, sometimes. Very embarrassing.

  “Six,” she repeats and makes a tick on her questionnaire. “When did you last buy a pair?”

  Talking of pairs, I think that’s a lovely set of knockers you’ve got there. I wouldn’t mind doing a few press-ups on top of that lot.

  “About a month ago,” I say.

  “Where did you buy them?”

  “At the shoe shop. I can’t remember the name. Maybe it’s on them. I’m wearing them, you see.”

  We smile at each other as if it’s all terribly funny really and I wrench one of my casuals off and gaze hopefully into its interior. Nothing, except a shiny brown surface and a lived-in smell I would not try to sell to Helena Rubinstein. I put it on hurriedly.

  “I think it was that one down by Woolworths. It was in the High Street, anyway.”

  “Can you remember how much they cost?”

  “About a fiver I think. Shoes are diabolically expensive these days, aren’t they?”

  I throw that in because it is about time I started showing a bit of initiative. Horst and Inga would have had each other’s knickers off by now on half the wordpower.

  “Terrible,” says the bird, “and it’s not as if they’re made to last.” She flexes her calf muscles and indicates some disintegrating stitchwork before re
alising that I am casing her joints and snapping back to being Miss Efficiency.

  “Do you have any wet-look shoes?”

  “Three pairs.”

  “What colours?”

  “Two black, one brown.”

  “How do you clean them?”

  “I breathe on them,” I say, fluttering my lips at her. “And then I rub them over with a duster.”

  “Have you ever used an aerosol?”

  “Only my sister’s hairspray.”

  “On your shoes?”

  “No. I was trying to stick Mum’s Green Shield stamps in with them. They got left out in the rain and all the glue came off.”

  There doesn’t seem to be a column on her questionnaire for that so she gives a little sigh and gets on with it.

  “I meant an aerosol shoe spray,” she says. “They’re specially made for wet-look shoes.”

  “They cost a few bob, don’t they?” I say suspiciously.

  “How much do you think?” She sounds all eager and her pencil is poised expectantly.

  “Oh, about five bob, twenty five p, forty seven rupees, or whatever it is, these days.”

  “What is the most you would be prepared to pay for an aerosol shoe-spray?”

  “I’m quite happy with breathing on them like I do at the moment.”

  “But supposing you wanted to buy an aerosol.”

  “But I don’t.”

  Not vintage Noel Coward, is it? And certainly not getting me any nearer a dramatisation of “Wife-swapping, Danish Style”. It’s a shame really because she’s a lovely bird, even if she does seem married to her craft.

  “You must get a few passes made at you on a job like this,” I say chattily. “Have you been doing it for long?”

  “Six months,” she says. “Now try and imagine that you do want to buy an aerosol. 20p? 25p? 50p?”