I wanna be a trailer junkie

Mary Wakefield

ON my scooter, droning back home from work along London's Westway, I glanced down over the parapet to my left and noticed, for the first time, what looked like an American-style trailer park squeezed in between the West Cross Route (A3220) and Wood Lane: a concrete field of large, white, rectangular mobile homes with battered corners, surrounded by pieces of plastic furniture.

Over the next few weeks a Polaroid snapshot of these trailers kept floating into my mind. They seemed incongruous but alluring; a piece of Texas in the middle of Notting Hill. I had presumed that the only English answer to the doublewide, road-hog US trailer was the holiday caravan, hauled off for two weeks every 'summer' and parked alongside three plastic portaloos in a marshy field

just off a main road. Suddenly here was the real thing: permanent homes sprouting aerials, satellite dishes, washing lines, patriotic flags and children.

Finding a trailer park round the corner might not be everybody's idea of fun. It takes an inexplicable attraction to the American South and a secret and hypocritical distaste for a certain type of smug, property-obsessed Brit to see the collective charm of redneck punch-ups, heavy makeup, dirty T-shirts, lawn ornaments, cable TV, Wal-Mart, Jerry Springer, beer and corn chips. But trailers are also symbolic of some things everyone must agree are to the good: Carl Hiaasen; whiskey; the countryside, open roads; community, independence and escape.

The Internet offers solidarity for trailer junkies. Since they first appeared two years ago, circulating via email inboxes, a set of 15 haiku on the theme of trailer-park life has been pinned up on countless home pages. There is 'Remorse': A painful sadness/Can't fit big screen TV through/Doublewide's front door. 'Exuberance': Joyous, playful, bright/Trailer park girl rolls in puddle/Of old motor oil. 'Offerings': Tonight we hunger/Grandma sent grocery money/ To Jimmy Swaggart. 'Impounded' tells the sad story of man parted from his trailer: Sixty-five dollars/And a cyclone fence keeps me from/My El Camino.

Which is not to suggest that trailer-worshippers patronise impoverished rednecks. Remember Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 2? A tough, good-looking widower, Detective Sergeant Riggs lives alone with his dog on a deserted pebble beach in a trailer that, although messy, looks inside as if Jasper Conran has been flown in to decorate it. Everything about our hero's situation is designed to suggest a man with no ties. The trailer doesn't mean cheap, it means freedom.

Vot you looking at?' A short, fat ten-yearold with train-track braces had, a few seconds earlier, thrown a knife into the sand at my feet. Which was obviously what I was looking at, nervously. 'Nothing.' The standard reply. Five kids between about eight and 12 were sitting on a 12ft concrete ledge alongside one of the tracks that run under the Westway. It would have been nice to ignore them and keep on walking, but 20 yards ahead my path ran straight into a high wire-mesh fence surrounding a construction site.

I decided on a partial confession. 'I'm looking for the trailer park to see if there are any spaces.' A tiny, ratty little boy squirmed on to his belly and dropped off the ledge on to the ground like a burnt tick. He said, 'Are you the police?' Having decided that undercover police don't stoop to torn-to-shreds jeans and stained anoraks, one of the girls relented. 'You've got to talk to Tom, he's in charge. I don't think there's any room at the moment, but he'll know. Want us to take you?'

On their request, I lifted two of the girls — one thin, one backbreaking — down from the wall, feeling a little jealous. The piles of rubble, roofs, walls and hidden concrete courts make the ultimate playground. There are passers-by to terrorise, and even a riding school, whose arena, deep in fresh sawdust, I could see to my right. High above, the A40 slides past, its underbelly grooved and black, like tyre treads.

The fat boy led me through a narrow passage between the arena and one of the great concrete legs of the flyover on to what looked, for an instant, like a section of country lane. A little further on, a heavy-set blonde was hosing down the entrance to an old stable yard.

Another few metres and we were in the trailer park itself, the entrance cluttered up with the metal torsos of cars without doors or wheels. On either side, the A40 feeder roads slope down like chair arms, but, even so, it was strangely quiet, the commuters' cars just a distant snore. All kinds of mobile homes lay parked in rough rows, from caravans with pulled-across lace curtains to the large trailers called RV Kings. Some were surrounded by white plastic fences, distin guishing personal from communal concrete; others had boxes of plants and reclining chairs bright with Seventies floral patterns on plastic. Perfect.

Tom. distracted from washing his ear, is friendly but firm. 'Yes, it's a great place. It's been here 30 years, and I've been here 12, but there's a waiting list of 15 people, and an average three-year wait per person. If you're prepared to hang on for 30 years, then you bring your own trailer and pay the council £30 to 35 a week rent. All right? Bye.'

Sarah, the stable-owning blonde explained, as she groomed an improbably glossy Welsh stallion, It's just two feuding families who live there. They each own half the park. Whenever a lot becomes vacant, another posse of their children and grandchildren move in. On Sunday afternoons, after several pints, you can watch the two sides fighting, even the mothers, grandmothers and young children.'

Not an ideal setting, then, but still one with many appealing aspects: a community where children can play in a gang, low rent, and the glorious lack of anxious speculation about subsidence and mortgage payments.

But, of course, this is not the whole story of trailers in England. There are villages of mobile homes, varying in character, right across the country. Deanland, for example, is the polar opposite of the Westway park. A 70-acre former nudist colony in East Sussex, it is known as Dreamland to residents. Four hundred 50ft trailers, each costing from £40,000 upwards, house retired or semi-retired couples who are subject to a strict vetting procedure before being allowed in, and who must abide by a long list of park rules. Doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs? Well, there's a bowling green, village shop, pub, restaurant, doctor's surgery, snooker club, choir, line-dancing lessons, and children are banned. After all the prohibitions, it's just a club for savvy pensioners who are united in thinking: sod the kids, let's play bridge.

The British Holiday and Homes Parks Association (01452 526911 or www.ukparks.com) will tell you that there are 170 such parks in England with about 250,000 permanent residents, as well as a good many more of the less organised sort. With house prices now rising beyond even the most farfetched fantasy, trailer parks are at least worth investigating. Whether you're 65 or 25, why not get a couple of friends together and invest in a luxury doublewide, a pair of plastic flamingos, a folding chair, and spend the £500 or so per month that you save in rent on beer?