Strong Tastes But I'm glad also that the taste of
East Enders is still robust and that Southend has not moved too abruptly out of its former character. Here we slosh on the ketchup, brown or red, and enjoy chips with everything. And why not? The wooded gardens under the Royal Terrace (favoured by the gentry before Brighton moved into the lead) abound in strange metal flowers, large gnomes and disneyesque bunnies. A vast turquoise bowling alley straddles the pier. The coloured picture postcards still happily celebrate with a renewed Cruikshankian fervour the simpler lusts of mankind. Delectable odours of hamburger and onion drift from the garish shop- frontage into the nostrils of Bisto Kids who no longer have to content themselves with sniffing. In the replica of the Golden Hind in the basin by the pier there is a fine chamber of horrors where the attentions of the Spanish Inquisition may be vicariously endured. We have strong tastes in Southend. Across the road, next to the House of Fun and the Nudist Camp, there are more fiendish tortures enacted by life-size work- ing models. Who's for being eaten alive by rats, plunged into boiling oil, stretched on the rack, subjected to the death of a thousand cuts, goody- goody? Open stalls creak under mountains of rock, in sticks of stupendous size, but also moulded in the form of cuties in bikinis or, more simply, of shapely legs each topped with a tasty garter. Mylo's, Monte Carlo, Billie's, Happi- drome—the fun fairs are bulging. A lemon sun squeezes at last through the overcast, and the cries of the bingomasters float towards the smacking waves: 'Fifty-four, blue; on the red, fourteen'; and the serious middle-aged mums furrow their brows. A little farther east are the soaring rides of the Kursaal; and farther still, away behind the workaday bridge that carries coal from the pier to the splendid gasworks, lies genteel Thorpe Bay, where the bathing is good and the sailing dinghies cluster and flutter like mayflies.
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