My cousin Lillian was an airhead, a stereotypical dumb blonde and, when she got excited, she talked so fast that she was almost unintelligible and, today, she was worse than ever. She was holding a newspaper and gabbling so excitedly that I had to take the paper from her and read the article for myself. She'd actually circled the advert in question and I saw that it was concerning a 'small family run hotel' that was looking for live in staff to work for the summer season. We'd talked about going on holiday together but neither of us could afford that and Lillian was practically hyperventilating as she declared that this would be like being paid to be on holiday.
Ok, a little background. Neither of us had exciting careers; Lillian was just turned eighteen and worked in a corner shop whilst I was almost twenty and worked in the packing department at a local factory. I'd recently broken up with Dave after almost a year and I was feeling pretty low and, like some silly little schoolgirl, I felt that disappearing for a while would teach him a lesson so I didn't need much persuasion.
The hotel was in a town that neither of us had ever heard of and, being that it was 1973, there was no such thing as the internet and, looking at a map, all we found was a small dot but I immediately imagined a small, white washed, two storey building with a thatched roof set in green fields with probably a few sheep wandering around (OK, I admit it, I was a city girl and I'd probably read too many soppy romances).
I told my plans to my parents and my father was instantly against it; he told me that he had worked in the highlands when he was young and he knew how girls were treated and mistreated in such places and I replied "Oh, daddy, that was then and this is now, times have changed and I'm a big girl, I can take care of myself" but my dad just looked sad and asked me to change my mind. I felt terrible; I hated seeing my dad so upset and I almost changed my mind but then I looked at my mother and she was actually smiling.
I'd always loved my mum and I thought that she loved me but, once I left school, she became really cold towards me and I just couldn't understand the change. I thought that, maybe, she'd been living her dreams through me; she'd wanted to be a teacher but that was never possible and I knew that she'd wanted me to live out her dreams but I'd left school at sixteen determined to start putting some money in my pocket. In later years, my husband suggested that my mother had been considered quite a looker when she was young and had performed in amateur dramatics, sang and danced and gained a lot of male attention and that, as she'd got older and her looks faded, she resented me being given the attention that she used to receive but I don't think that's right. Perhaps it was because she still had three of my four brothers living at home but, for whatever the reason, I could see that she was pleased by the idea that I was leaving and that smile on her face made me determined to go.
The main problem that we had with our plans was Lillian's overprotective parents who watched her like a hawk so we were both surprised when they were perfectly happy for her to go as long as I was there to act as a chaperone. Maybe my auntie Cathy had talked to my mother, I don't know. Anyway, just a few days later, we were on a bus heading off and, no sooner were we underway than Lillian confessed that the main reason that she wanted to go was so that she could escape from her parents' watchful eyes and finally escape from her virginity.
It was only a three hundred mile trip but we had to change buses twice and, after ten hours and with a really sore bum, we finally arrived at our destination.
That was my next surprise; I'd somehow imagined that our bus would drop us outside our idealised hotel but, instead, we found ourselves deposited in a vast coach park with dozens of coaches lined up side by side. We retrieved our cases and began humping and dragging them towards the town ( no wheels on suitcases in the seventies ) and discovered that we were in a large victorian seaside resort with well over two hundred hotels and boarding houses. We stopped several passers by to ask for directions but everyone we asked was a visitor and, more alarmingly, they were all elderly. We stopped at a cafe for a rest and a cup of tea and finally got directions and our hearts fell when we were told that it was at least a mile away.
When we finally arrived at the hotel, instead of being small and quaint, it turned out to be a mid terrace, four storey building and looked unbelievably intimidating. We were hot and sweaty and now our arms and backs were aching as well as our bums. All we wanted was a bath and a sleep but we were told that we were expected to serve the evening meal in just under two hours. We were shown to our room in the basement which we were to share with a third girl and, although the room was clean and basic, our beds were actually ancient hospital beds. In total there were three bedrooms to accommodate eight live in girls with a shared bathroom and so unlike what I'd imagined we were coming to. We showered and changed our clothes and, before we knew it, we were serving meals for the first time in our lives. There were no disasters and, after an couple of hours, the rest of the evening was ours.
We went to explore the town and, although there were plenty of pubs, they all seemed to be filled with pensioners which, at first, seemed funny but soon became depressing but we were both exhausted by our long day so we returned to our basement room and quickly fell asleep in our surprisingly comfortable hospital beds.
We were up early and, after serving breakfast, we were shown how to clean rooms and make beds with hospital corners which turned out to be far more physical than either of us expected.
So far, we hadn't met any of the other girls that lived in including the one that we were sharing with although she was definitely using the room because her clothes and personal items were scattered everywhere. I'd mentioned that I'd worked in a bar for a few months so, that evening, I worked on the bar whilst Lillian had the evening off and, after that, we rarely worked the same shifts and seemed only to meet up at bedtime. On top of that, Lillian had met a local called Alan who'd happily relieved her of her virginity and she spent almost all of her free time with him.
I got on well with the other girls apart from our strange roommate who eventually turned up to sleep but never seemed to work and our employers decided that, because I was popular with the guests, I should work almost exclusively on the bar so my opportunities to socialise outside the hotel were severely reduced. I spent a lot of time on my own and felt unbelievably lonely and homesick. There were no mobile phones in the seventies and, even if there had been, no one in my family had a landline so I wrote to my father every day and waited impatiently for his replies although, of course, I never told him how lonely and miserable I felt. I wandered the town on my own and spent too many hours on the promenade staring out across the cold, grey expanse of the sea wondering where my family were at that moment and what they were up to as the ripples whispered about how lonely and useless I was.
I felt totally miserable as I remembered how my father had asked me not to leave and how he'd stood on the doorstep with a tear in his eye but then I remembered the indifference in my mother's eyes and how she'd returned into the house before I'd even reached the garden gate and I was determined not to go home.
