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squelched up and down the linoleum drumming up business on the telephone. She had one with an especially long flex. Or else she would stalk between the caravans, hunting the tradesmen who were meant to be toshing the place up, making it lickety-spick for the next load of work-pummelled urbanites who came to Cliff Top for their week or two of ozone and salted air.
    Like all children whose parents are employed in the tourist industry, my life was divided into the ‘on’ and the ‘off’ season. The off season belonged to school and rain hammering on the corrugated roof of the sun porch, while the on season to belonged to the holidaymakers and their children. My mother had many regulars who came back year after year, and I was always accepted by them. It was a friendly atmosphere for a young child, with little to disturb it. As an only child I had my mother's undivided attention, the full force of her complacent love. And then there were also the aunts.
    Old Sidney had had four daughters, all of whom had married wispy and ineffectual men. The whole bunch, aunts, their men-folk and assorted cousins, descended on Cliff Top every year for their two weeks of holiday. Indeed, in the early seventies during the worst of the slump, when even ordinary working-class families were all bound for the Med, I think it may have been my aunts’ custom that really kept my mother's business afloat. I can remember muttered discussions at night in serious, adult tones:
    ‘What would you do without us then, Dawn?’
    ‘Aye, what would y'do? You'd be on your uppers, lass, with Derek all gone to pieces, like – and that tubby brat of yours gobbling owt in sight.’
    The aunts were like caricatures of my mother, such was the family resemblance. While Avril may have been thicker in the waist than Dawn, and Yvonne was perhaps prettier than May, all four of them had the same broad, sincere faces, chestnut eyes and mousy hair. They also painted their faces up in the same naive manner, adding cupid bows of lipstick to the powdered flesh above their lips.
    It was like having one big four-headed Mummy when the aunts were in residence. They gathered us up in a giggling ball of blood-relatedness. During the off season my mother's smothering affection was often cold-tempered by financial chills – she would snap at me, deny me love and withdraw the physical affection I craved. During the winter I sometimes became the failed husband she had, rather than the demon lover she had always desired.
    But each summer it all came right again. She would lie around with her sisters drinking beer, eating scallops, whelks, mussels and cockles. They would all smack their lips – sometimes in unison. Whenever a child got near enough to this recumbent maternal gaggle it would be grabbed and kissed, or raspberries would be blown on kid flesh, sticky with ice-cream and gritty with sand.
    When the aunts and cousins were in residence I ran free. Together with my cousins I would plunge down the steep steps to the rocky beach. Then we would make our way along the undercliff walk to Brighton where we would ride on Volks Electric Railway, or play crazy golf, or thud along the warm boards of the West Pier. In the pier arcades, antiquated mechanical Victorian tableaux were still in place. These were cabinets, in which six-inch-high painted figures, animated by a heavy penny, would jerkily reenact the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, or the hanging of Doctor Crippen. The shingled beaches along the front at Brighton rattled and crunched with the exertions of many thousands of rubber souls. There were motor launches, rentable for a shilling's cruising on the oblong lagoons beneath the esplanade at Hove. Further along still, towards the ultima Thule of Shoreham, there were the salt-water baths of the King Alfred Centre. My favourite, situated as if in open defiance of the laws of nature, up a steep, magnolia-tiled stairway.
    We would often stay out until way past dark.
    The scents of