A place of his own
Jeremy Clarke
My father's seaside carpark was a small one — about 100 cars when full — cut into the corner of a farmer's field. The majority of his customers were tanned naturists headed for the unofficial nudists' beach. It was my father's first encounter with naturists. Nudity, whether public or private, was an anathema to him. In 43 years I never saw him naked. I doubt if he ever saw himself naked. To make a moral distinction between himself and his patrons clear to all, my father always wore the optional council uniform of jacket, peaked cap, tie and epaulettes, in full — even during the hottest days of summer,
After six weeks' probation he was issued with a hut. It was set beside the carpark entrance on a specially built concrete plinth with two concrete steps up to the door. My father loved this hut. For the first time in his life he had a place of his own, I would go down there with the dog sometimes and he would be leaning against the door frame of his hut like a house-proud cottager chatting to recently arrived naturists. You could tell that the nudists, bristling with rolled-up windbreaks and furled parasols, were torn between the urgent desire to get down to the beach and expose their genitalia to the elements, and getting to know the extraordinarily contented man with the peaked cap.
My father took his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to arrange the interior of a room according to his own personal taste by doing nothing at all to it. It was enough that it was his, and being surrounded by low-grade pine generously treated with creosote suited his masculine taste. Later, he displayed on a purpose-built shelf various gifts given him by grateful naturists: the three-way torch with flashing-light facility in case he broke down on the hard shoulder at night (batteries not supplied); the astonishingly unfunny paperback of 'politically incorrect' jokes; the flat-chested china shepherdess; the imitation leopard CD holder. Such was the nudists' kindness my father substantially altered his view that they were motivated, whether directly or obliquely, by some kind of sexual perversion. 'It's about freedom,' he'd say, though with a conviction of a man whose conversion has been bought with a handful of trinkets.
Then tragedy struck. My father arrived at the carpark one morning to find that his hut had been burnt down during the night. All that was left on the concrete plinth was a perfect rectangle of ashes, a pair of door hinges and a padlock. I happened to be down there exercising the dog when the police came. It was the hottest day of the year. The policemen had no hats, no ties, no jackets, and their shirt buttons were undone. My father's concession to the heat was a slightly rakish angle to his peaked cap that would have been imperceptible to an untrained eye. While the policemen inspected the scene for evidence, my father continued issuing carparking tickets from his position within the rectangle of ashes. In his opinion, my father told the policemen, the arson attack was the work of a splinter group of hard-line nudists offended by his council uniform. One of the officers reached for his pocket notebook, then thought better of it and replaced it.
Then my father died. He was still hutless at the time. An emergency council meeting was called and it was decided to replace him with an automatic ticket machine rather than readvertise the position. The ticket machine was embedded in the concrete plinth almost exactly where my father used to stand in the doorway of his hut. Also, a black-and-gold litter-bin bearing a possibly intentional resemblance to a treasure chest was fastened to the plinth. As my father hasn't even got a memorial plaque, the concrete plinth, ticket machine and treasure-chest litter-bin are the focus of my remembrance of him. Even now, five years on, I can't pass by on the way to the beach without pausing to imagine him standing in the doorway of his hut in his council uniform.
Last weekend I was additionally struck by the impulse to compose a nostalgic poem. Something, perhaps, along the lines of Thomas Hardy's 'The Self Unseen':
Here was the former door where the dead feet walked in
and so on. But after much mental strife I was forced to abandon the poem at the end of the second line because I couldn't think of anything to rhyme with plinth. I continued on down to the beach where I took off my clothes and walked naked into the sea.
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