— Over there, madam! Do you see it? Crouched behind that hummock.
— No … Where!
Cy began groaning and jumped up into the air again. This time he remained in view and came stumbling towards the lady. His bare feet were filthy with mud and his hair looked like a bird’s nest. She was standing stock-still as if she knew a hunter had her in his rifle sites and she must freeze or perish. Cy roared and spat a potato skin at her. She obliged him with a scream.
— Shooo. Shoo, you nasty, smelly thing. Get away from me. Go on! No, wait, wait, is that a boy, is that a poor little boy under all that disgusting mess?
The boggart turned around and ruthlessly showed her its bare backside. Behind her Jonty and Morris were now helpless with laughter. The woman screamed again and lifted her skirt and began to totter speedily over the moor back towards the town. She was still screaming when she reached the promenade. Suddenly Jonty was running after her.
— Bugger it! Hey, missis, the shilling! Stop, you haven’t paid. You owe us a shilling. Tell everyone you saw a genuine boggart and who showed you …
From the next customer the boys made sure to take payment first. The resulting sherbet was delicious and did a fine job of ridding his tongue of the terrible taste of un-scrubbed potato, but Cy was certain that he could still smell the shit on himself for the whole of the next week, even after several baths, and that guests in the hotel were covering their faces when he leaned past them to ladle soup from the tureen into their bowls in the dining room.
When the local boys tired of acting as tour guides some of them would try to outrun the Bore for bets, that sweeping tidal wave created as two Atlantic currents, one from the north of Ireland and one from the south, met up and converged in the direction of Morecambe’s shore. Cy, having a healthy respect for the sea, which had casually robbed him of his father, considered this scheme to be ridiculous and foolhardy in the extreme, did not mind saying so, and would not participate in any wager. The Bore came in faster than a grown man could sprint, let alone a penny-pinching stump-legged junior. It was one of the fastest tides in the British Isles and on more than one occasion every year lifeboats were sent out to collect a drowning soul who had underestimated its maritime throttle.
Morris Gibbs’s older brother, Terrance, was perhaps the most fortunate of all the youngsters in town trying to make some pocket money. He had been wading around barefoot and dredging cockles from the sandy rocks with his father and Morris out on the Jacky John Skears one day when he trod on something wriggling and writhing and he found the eel. The Eel. Not just any eel, for it took all three of them to yank the beast from the sand hole it was hell bent on squirming into. It was a monster, a creature that rivalled all the sea-devils and sturgeon and Greenland whales and curious, unnamed specimens ever tossed up on the shore for unsuspecting Morecambrians to find. It was the granddaddy of all eels. The struggle to catch it was for many years to come a frequently told yarn in the Gibbs home, Mrs Gibbs remained ever sad not to have been able to dice it up and have a preposterously large spitchcock fry, Mr Gibbs adding inches to the beast with every retelling of its capture, not to mention fangs, prehistoric spines and red eyes made of rubies. As legend was soon to have it, Morris’s dad had been busy with the pronged rake that day while Terrance was emptying bucketloads of fish into the cart. Morris was giving the silty-covered horse her nosebag of oats and adjusting her blanket when Terrance let out a yell so loud both brother and father thought he’d stepped on a Portuguese man o’ war. The eel was coiled in a puddle of water in a depression in the beach next to a boulder, trying for all its slippery life to make that boulder a shield above it. Terrance had already begun to wrestle it out when the two came over to help. Thus ensued a battle of Argonaut proportions. Boots were dug in. Sludge was shovelled out. Waists were grasped and hauled. The Gibbs men finally prevailed. It turned out to be sixty-four inches long, and nineteen inches in girth, the largest eel ever found and recorded in Morecambe history. For the whole summer long Terrance took it round the pubs and the promenade and charged a penny a look at the creature, concertina-snug in a large glass jar, which had once held Edmondson’s pickled eggs. Alive or dead it was hard to say, but the eel impressed many a man and distressed many a lady that summer. By the end of the season, much to his younger brother’s envy, Terrance had enough money for a brand new shining bicycle from Lancaster.
The sand-bred citizens of the town seemed born with a sense of what might make their fortunes. If there was a tale to be told or a whimsy to be shown or a skill to be extorted, very possibly only the Lord God himself could put a stop to it in Morecambe Bay. In summer, copper coins shuffled through the pockets and purses of townsfolk faster than they could be counted by the tellers in the bank. Professional entertainment was bigger business still, and on the occasions when he and Reeda were invited along by guests of the hotel to the shows Cy marvelled at what was on offer inside the pavilions and gardens, what strange and exotic talents could earn a decent wage. There were male impersonators and jugglers, vaudevillians, dames and geishas, ghost train operators, acrobats and circus ringmasters. Grease-coated-throated men ate fire and then drove home in brand-new cars. At the monkey castle blue-bottomed primates swung from the rafters and chattered loudly amongst themselves while the crowds bought and tossed them nuts and peel. Miss India Rubber, contortionist extraordinaire, could put both legs behind her shoulders so her backside was cushioning her skull and then walk crab-like from the stage of the Taj Mahal to the end of the western pier and back again — she would patrol through the crowds after the show with her live boa constrictor, letting it sit on the shoulders of dare-devil boys and girls for another extra penny from their parents. It was rumoured that she was so wealthy she owned a flat in the city of Manchester which was home to not less than one thousand poisonous snakes and spiders imported from the Amazon. Fat comedians with cigars in their mouths shook the bellies of the visitors with gags about mothers-in-law and brothels. And there was that favourite rude old chestnut as the curtain went up to commence every show:
— Where are we all tonight, ladies and gentlemen?
— More-cambe.
— And is there more come here ladies and gentlemen? Ooh sorry Sally-Ann, that’s a bit naughty, isn’t it?
Short of a visit to the towers or the museums of London, and within the bounds of imagination and reason, there was nothing more thrilling and funny and silly that turned a profit to be found anywhere outside the chuckle-creased corners of the bay.
In March of 1917, sometime between the hours of ten and eleven at night, a faulty fuse sparked on the western pier, inside its most majestic building. The little smoulder gathered strength and in the strong sea breeze it spun into a persistent glut of flame. Then the fire, suddenly very confident, spread to the ground-floor ceiling of the structure and lay upside down across its rafters. The great pavilion of the Taj Mahal went up in a blaze the likes of which the town had never seen before. The golden dome of the building shone in the darkness as reddish flames leaped upwards from the wooden strutting of the deck. Within twenty minutes the fire had created a bright Pharos of light to alert those not yet abed and to wake those who were. Cy pulled back the curtain of his window. He’d been reading when an undefined patch of light, out of keeping with the glare of the streetlamps on the promenade, caught his eye. His mother at her window saw wings of orange curving up the sides of the main dome, mimicking its shape, tormenting it with the authority to destroy it. Both ran to the front door, knocking awake their guests. An opportunistic buzz quickly went through Morecambe. It soon reached the back end of the town, those properties without a view of the fiery pavilion, through to the slums of Moss Street and the train station, all were invited to the show.