Nightclubs #2

Before I became a hippy and started going to the Pea House (see previous story), the bikers and I developed the inexplicable habit of travelling five miles away from town to a place on a holiday camp. This sounds boring, but it didn't seem like it at the time....

The club was actually a large complex with two discos, a theatre and one sinister, coffin shaped swimming pool. This was only open for special bookings, yet its convenient location meant people were regularly pushed in every Saturday night on their way to the bar. The clientele were a curious mix of holiday makers, teddy boys, bikers and trendy poseurs. Occasionally celebrities like Bob Monkhouse would join the melee after their stint in the theatre.

The music reflected this mix, as teddy boys circling their acrobatic stars rubbed shoulders with Bryan Ferry lookalikes and stumbling middle-aged drunks. The DJ was a hippy with a wig.

We had to replace our leather jackets with more conventional 'gear' just to get in, and would think nothing of the ten mile ride in winter, with little more than shirts and trousers on. Carrying five or six pints of lager, the ride home was unwise.

But this is humdrum. Although the habit was good enough in 1973, I won't ever forget the highlights. Sometimes cramming eight people in an Austin 1100 to get there, a teddy boy trying to kill himself in the toilets by submerging his head in a basin of water, celebrating my 21st birthday with alcoholic poisoning, and coming off the bike one night with a muddy rear tyre.

My scrubbed legs were stuck to the sheets when I woke up the next day, but I was lucky compared to one friend.

He decided to ride forty miles home in winter without jacket or gloves. His parents, had to take him to hospital with suspected frost bite.

There we go.