And these elaborate security measures fueled my curiosity. What exactly was going on in there? It was no use my peering through the chain-link fence — all I could see at this Butlin's were the Boating Lake and the reception area and some snorers on deck chairs. Clearly, it was very large. Later I discovered that the camp was designed to accommodate fourteen thousand people. That was almost twice the population of Minehead! They called it "Butlinland" and they said it had everything.
I registered as a Day Visitor. I paid a fee. I was given a brochure and a booklet and Your Holiday Programme, with a list of the day's events. The security staff seemed wary of me. I had ditched my knapsack in a boardinghouse, but I was still wearing my leather jacket and oily hiking shoes. My knees were muddy. So as not to alarm the gatekeepers, I had pocketed my binoculars. Most of the Butlin's guests wore sandals and short sleeves, and some wore funny hats — holiday high spirits. The weather was overcast and cold and windy. The flags out front were as big as bedsheets and made a continual cracking. I was the only person at Butlin's dressed for this foul weather. I felt like a commando. It made some people there suspicious.
With its barrackslike buildings and its forbidding fences, it had the prison look of the Butlin's at Bognor. A prison look was also an army-camp look, and just as depressing. This one was the more scary for being brightly painted. It had been tacked together out of plywood and tin panels in primary colors. I had not seen flimsier buildings in England. They were so ugly, they were not pictured anywhere in the Butlin's brochure, but instead shown as simplified floor plans in blue diagrams. They were called "flatlets" and "suites." The acres of barracks were called the Accommodation Area.
It really was like Jonestown! The Accommodation Area with the barracks was divided into camps — Green, Yellow, Blue, and Red Camp. There was a central dining room and a Nursery Center. There was a Camp Chapel. There was also a miniature railway and a chairlift and a monorail — all of them usefuclass="underline" it was a large area to cover on foot. It was just the sort of place the insane preacher must have imagined when he brought his desperate people to Guyana. It was self-contained and self-sufficient. With a fence that high, it had to be.
The Jonestown image was powerful, but Butlin's also had the features of a tinselly New Jerusalem. This, I felt, would be the English coastal town of the future, if most English people had their way. It was already an English town of a sort — glamorized and less substantial than the real thing, but all the same recognizably an English town, with the usual landmarks, a cricket pitch, a football field, a launderette, a supermarket, a bank, a betting shop, and a number of take-away food joints. Of course, it was better organized and had more amenities than most English towns the same size — that was why it was popular. It was also a permanent fun fair. One of Butlin's boasts was "No dirty dishes to wash!" Another was "There is absolutely no need to queue!" No dishwashing, no standing in line — it came near to parody, like a vacation in a Polish joke. But these promises were a sort of timid hype; England was a country of modest expectations, and no dishes and no lines were part of the English dream.
It was not expensive—£178 ($313) a week for a family of four, and that included two meals a day. It was mostly families — young parents with small children. They slept in a numbered cubicle in the barracks at one of the four camps, and they ate at a numbered table in one of the dining rooms, and they spent the day amusing themselves.
The Windsor Sports Ground (most of the names had regal echoes, an attempt at respectability) and the Angling Lake were not being used by anyone the day I was there. But the two snooker and table tennis rooms were very busy; each room was about half the size of a football field and held scores of tables. No waiting! There was bingo in the Regency Building, in a massive room with a glass wall, which was the bottom half of the indoor swimming pool — fluttering legs and skinny feet in water the color of chicken bouillon. There was no one on the Boating Lake, and no one in the outdoor pool, and the chapel was empty. The Crazy Golf was not popular. So much for the free amusements.
"Yes, it is true, nearly everything at Butlin's is free!" the brochure said.
But what most of the people were doing was not free. They were feeding coins into fruit machines and one-armed bandits in the Fun Room. They were playing pinball. They were also shopping for stuffed toys and curios, or buying furs in the Fur Shop, or getting their hair done at the Hairdressing Salon. They were eating. The place had four fish-and-chip shops. There were tea shops, coffee bars, and candy stores. They cost money, but people seemed to be spending fairly briskly. They were also drinking. There were about half a dozen bars. The Embassy Bar (Greek statues, fake chandeliers, red wallpaper) was quite full, although it was the size of a barn. The Exmoor Bar had a hundred and fifty-seven tables and probably held a thousand drinkers. It was the scale of the place that was impressive — the scale and the shabbiness.
It was not Disneyland. Disneyland was a blend of technology and farce. It was mostly fantasy, a tame kind of surrealism, a comfortable cartoon in three dimensions. But the more I saw of Butlin's, the more it resembled English life; it was very close to reality in its narrowness, its privacies, and its pleasures. It was England without work — leisure had been overtaken by fatigue and dullwittedness: electronic games were easier than sports, and eating junk food had become another recreation. No one seemed to notice how plain the buildings were, how tussocky the grass was, or that everywhere there was a pervasive sizzle and smell of food frying in hot fat.
In that sense, too, it was like a real town. People walked around believing that it was all free; but most pastimes there cost money, and some were very expensive — like a ticket to the cabaret show that night, Freddie and the Dreamers, a group of middle-aged musicians who were a warmed-over version of their sixties' selves.
If it had a futuristic feel, it was the deadened imagination and the zombie-like attitude of the strolling people, condemned to a week or two of fun under cloudy skies. And it was also the arrangements for children. The kids were taken care of — they could be turned loose in Butlin's in perfect safety. They couldn't get hurt or lost. There was a high fence around the camp. There was a Nursery Chalet Patrol and a Child Listening Service and a large Children's Playground. In the planned cities of the future, provisions like this would be made for children.
Most of the events were for children, apart from whist and bingo. As a Day Visitor, I had my choice of the Corona Junior Fancy Dress Competition, a Kids' Quiz Show, the Trampoline Test, the Donkey Derby, or the Beaver and Junior Talent Contest Auditions. The Donkey Derby was being held in a high wind on Gaiety Green — screaming children and plodding animals. I went to the talent show auditions in the Gaiety Revue Theatre. A girl of eight did a suggestive dance to a lewd pop song; two sisters sang a song about Jesus; Amanda and Kelly sang "Daisy"; and Miranda recited a poem much too fast. Most of the parents were elsewhere — playing the one-armed bandits and drinking beer.
I wandered into the Camp Chapel ("A Padre is available in the Centre at all times"). There was a notice stuck to the chapel door: At all three services prayers are being said for our Forces in the Southern Atlantic. I scrutinized the Visitors' Book. It asked for nationality, and people had listed "Welsh" or "Cornish" or "English" or "Scottish" next to their names. There was a scattering of Irish. But after the middle of April people had started to put "British" for nationality — that was after the Falklands War had begun.