BUCKETS AND SPADES 2035 AD
by Anton Wills-Eve
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/tourist-trap/”>Tourist Trap</a>
tourist destination prompt.
BUCKETS AND SPADES, 2035 AD
“Oh, mummy, look! The sea. And a big match stick going up into the air at one end.”
Her mother laughed.”Anita, that’s not a matchstick it’s Blackpool Tower. It’s famous. All the poor working class people used to go there for their summer holidays because there were donkeys on the beach and they lit the whole town up at nine o’clock at night. And look, see that bit going out into the sea for miles, that’s called Blackpool Pier. There are games and things all down one side of it. Or so I’ve been told. I’ve never actually been on it myself.”
Ten year old Adam then asked, with a puzzled frown, “But why aren’t there any working class people playing at being tourists there now? Maybe that beach is all pebbles and you’d hurt your feet?” His father, behind the wheel of their Rolls Royce, chipped in. “No it’s not that, Adam, it’s just that nobody works in England nowadays. We don’t have factories or Northern families any more, their not allowed by law. Well not in England. No, the last government banned them and gave them one thousand pounds a head to go to Europe for three weeks every August so there’d be room for the illegal immigrants to have a good time in between working on the fiddle and not paying taxes. Well, we have to be good Christians and look after the destitute somehow.”
Adam was still very puzzled. He wondered what the plastic bucket and spade were meant for. He’d been given them when the Rolls entered “Blackpool, Gateway to the Sea”, nobody had told him what to do with them. He asked his mother about this. “Oh it’s all part of the fancy dress holiday we are having this year. Because daddy is rich, very rich, he has to wear a Fez when driving so we won’t be mistaken for English people. Especially in this hot bed of starving Lancastrians. If they thought we really were rich, white, English Christians our lives up here would be a nightmare. In fact I think we had better be getting back, don’t you Dear?” she suggested to her husband.
She did not have to. he had already turned back towards the exit to the motorway sign posted ” London and the South. Rich people only.”
Anton Wills-Eve
Anton's Ideas 
Good write, and yes, it was like that. I was perhaps 5 years old and we stayed a week in Blackpool, bed and breakfast. It was all a working class family called afford from the East End of London. I have very faint memories of the donkey, even have a photo of fiveyear old me on a donkey. Photos of dad dressed in the clothes of the day, somewhere in the early fifties, sitting on the beach in a deck chair with bare feet in the sand. It was all so different, but it was a week away from the East End trot. And I used my bucket and spade on the beach, we all did. Perhaps the first time I saw the sea.
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Fascinating! I was born in 1942 on the Thames in Buckinghamshire and moved to East Sheen SW14 in august 1945. Blackpool was just somewhere on the radio. from 45 to 60 my mother was critically ill so holidays were always @ my uncle’s estate near Balmoral. My intro to the sea was brighton in1953 with family friends but only once. we moved to Paris in 1960 univrsity there and then my career kept me out of england as a resident for 20 years.if i had the choice i’d still live in Lucca or Rome for the rest of my days.
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