P ostscript . •
By CYRIL RAY You would never think it, to look at the two of them, but Frinton-on-Sea and Walton-on- the-Naze are already adminis- tratively, if not sociologically, one—an urban district of 9,571 men, women and children at
the last count. Now, the Essex county planning officer proposes to make a town- ship of 21,000 people out of them (or out of it, according to whether you look at it, or them, the eye of the local government officer or the sociologist). Lots of council houses and a 11,,, shopping centre at Frinton, with two more "rint;trY schools and a secondary modern. This was something like the news of the Harrods take=over, and I reacted to it as I did ,4'ne, for the first time in my life, and only a 1:cW weeks ago, awed at my own presumption, .. took a room at the Ritz. and found that they'd left a ditty, wet towel in my bath. When I was a boy, and a spell on the sands at Blackpool or ;In more prosperous times—at Douglas, 10M. aS the summit of my Wakes-Week ambition, the that of the neighbours' kids, the pages of Sall I6111er. the Bystander and the Sketch were sttll of toddling and be-nappied Hons. building _and-castles (modelled, no doubt, on their an- cestral homes) under the watchful eyes of their nannies on the sands at Frinton. And for the tfelniit of any of that generation of Old Frin- q.7,1ans. (those that, having reached my age, are
alive), who are eager for even a second-hand
Huckle still sells ice-cream cornets on the green,' I was bidden. He doesn't—I nudged my way there last Saturday, traffic-jam by traffic-jam, to record what Frinton was like before the council houses go up and the jacquerie moves in.
Change and decay in all around it is already possible. to discern. In the not as yet recon- structed main shopping street there are more eating-places offering fish-and-chip, steak-and- chip and egg-and-chip teas, served from 3 p.m., than there arc small shops calling themselves 'boutiques' (you can buy Kitticat and K.eepaway at a 'Pet Boutique') and as many as there are dress and arts-and-crafts shops trading tinder one Christian name: June, Margot, Amanda, Lesley, Fleurette and--so help me--Dorothee,.e acute e and all. 'Delhi' is an OK name, no doubt, for one of the beach huts that stand in two unbroken ranks between the groynes and the greensward (yes. greensward: the official notice-board reads, 'No Picnicking on the Greensward'), but I'm nothing like so sure about 'Bethel.'
saw one tall, elegant and handsomely horse- faced mum, her child's pram being pushed by a patently non-indigenous young woman, half her height, twice her width, two-thirds her age and excessively hairy— picked. no doubt, so as not to put too great a strain on daddy and, sig- nificantly, not a nanny but an au pair girl--a Frinton family bravely coming to terms with a changing world. But although there were others such--and some of the au pair girls on the beach, suitably attired, a good deal more distracting to Your Correspondent---1 was also aware of day trippers in cloth caps and collars and ties, with trousers rolled up, who had been paddling among, if not exactly with, the bantlings of the high-born.
Not that it's become anything like Walton-on-
the-Naze, only a few yards of unmade-up road away, where the beach is a good deal more crowded and the streets more noisy, where there's a pier and a fun fair, where the picture post- cards are louder and funnier, and where those dads and mums who don't go in for comic hats take now and again to wearing each other's. But people are coming to Frinton who once upon a time wouldn't have, and some who used to stay there as children themselves don't take their own children there: since my visit I've met two such families (though one had more of a Bognor Regis background), both of whom tell me that what they do for their holidays is to go, in one case abroad, and in the other to Aldeburgh, send- ing their children to a Butlin's holiday camp with their nannies: 'There's more for the children to do. and nanny adores it.'
So I don't think, somehow, that when Frinton is three times its present size, and has to find all-the-year-round digs for the teachers at the secondary modern, instead of summertime apart- ments for the holidaymaking haute bourgeoisie, it'll be quite such an upheaval, whatever some may think, as the transfer of power in 1947. Much will already have gone the way of Mr. Huckle's ice-cream cornets. There'll just be a greater incidence. I'm sad to think, of that most English of all sights, that I came across yet again in Walton-on-the-Naze that very afternoon— some fifty free-born Englishmen and women queueing in the street, patiently and uncomplain- ingly and even--it seemed--respectfully waiting at 4.25 p.m. for the café at which they had booked a char-a-bane tea-party to do them the favour of opening its doors. I've no doubt that they'd still have been made to wait there if if had been raining.
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