A Comedian Dies

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FEED: Did you have a nice holiday?

COMIC: Oh yes, what a week it was. Only rained twice — once for three days, once for four.

Sun ’n’ Funtime at the Winter Gardens, Hunstanton, was, according to the posters that faded on bus-shelter walls and the brochures that were shuffled onto boarding-house coffee tables, ‘A Summer Tonic, Music and Laughter for All the Family’.

The queue that Charles Paris and his wife Frances joined that wet Tuesday afternoon in September looked as though they could do with a tonic. In most cases an oxygen mask would have been more appropriate. Their average age was about seventy-nine and they had the washed-out look of torn bunting clinging to the grille of a drain. These were the dream-realizers, enjoying either a seaside holiday or, in some cases, the life sentence of retirement by the sea.

The Winter Gardens reflected their air of bewildered decay. Maybe once the iron framework had boasted brighter colours than the local council’s chlorine blue paint, which fought a losing battle against the encrustations of salt and the eruptions of rust. Maybe once the white planks which filled in the lower parts of the frame had not been pitted and scratched and aerosoled with lewd invitations. Maybe once the windows had not been mended with flapping strips of polythene and none had rattled, puttyless, like old teeth in shrunken gums. But in 1977 the Winter Gardens was a building which had given up the will to live.

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