Confessions from a Holiday Camp - An Introduction

Many of you will already be aware that I used to work on a holiday camp. The introduction to my previous series 'Adventures of a Hitchhiker' covered this matter to some degree. I spoke about the bold, adventurous people I met from all sorts of places. People who were looking for some fun and adventure in their lives just as I was.

It's a very free and radical environment when you're working among lots of young people who are all looking for a large slice of life. Hardly a day goes by without someone getting up to some kind of shenanigans somewhere.

There were characters such as the mushroom munching lifeguard who used to sleep on duty, hiding behind his sunglasses. The Filipino bar man who would smoke a moth for you. The entertainments manager that made John Inman look like Mr Macho. The pot washer who slept in the bushes. The snorkelling turd retriever. The list goes on.

There were incidents, accidents, successes, failures, moments of madness, moments of clarity. Madcap tales about madcap people in a madcap place. Sure some of the things we did were naughty but to the best of my knowledge no one came to any harm. 

Those days working and living on that holiday camp for 4 summer seasons as a very young man in the early to mid 90's were some of the best times of my life. I didn't know then just how much impact the time I spent on that holiday camp would have on me. 

Those days came at a time when I was looking for something new, something fresh and exciting. I was only 19 and had recently broken up with my first serious girlfriend. It felt like the end of the world at the time but it would make me brush myself off and move on boldly into the future with my newly found determination. I would leave home for the first time to seek new experiences and to escape my heartbreak.

I was on my lunch break at the restaurant I worked at in Wigan when I noticed an advertisement in the 'Hotel & Catering' magazine. 'Waiters required at Croyde Bay Holiday Camp in beautiful North Devon' it said on the advert. I had nothing better to be doing at the time so I applied thinking I would hear nothing of it. To my surprise, I received a letter only a week later with a start date in two weeks and travel instructions.

I was working as a chef at the time, mainly on the starters. I'd worked myself up from the pot wash whilst still at school and at college afterwards. They were good to me and had employed me and looked after me since I was 15. I had said on the holiday camp application form that I was a waiter, experienced in silver service at a high quality restaurant. The quality restaurant bit was true. The restaurant was good. I would definitely eat there. It's still the best pizza I've ever tasted. I used to make the pizzas sometimes but could never re-create the same thing at home with the same ingredients. It's all about the oven. Anyway I digress. Thing is I'd said I had this waiter experience and I had none at all. The restaurant owners helped me out by letting me swap jobs for the last couple of weeks and they gave me some waiter training before I left them.

Devon was a place I'd heard of but knew very little about. I couldn't have named a single town or city in the county although I could point it out on a map. I knew it was a rural county, famous for it's cream. 

The county I come from, Lancashire, is very different to Devon. Or at least the corner of Lancashire that I grew up in, Wigan, is very different to Devon. It's a tough, urban environment, famous for coal mining and rugby league.

The big sport in Croyde Bay is surfing. Surfing was something I thought happened in other countries. It came as a complete surprise to me to find people surfing in the UK. I'll be sure to tell you about my first surfing experience among the stories in this series.

Surfing was just one of the surprises I would encounter in this new place. A place where I didn't have to keep looking over my shoulder. A place where I could be relaxed and find myself by losing myself in an alien culture.

Some of the people in these stories are my friends to this day and I visit regularly. Indeed I found myself once again living in that area for a couple of years fairly recently. It is a place that will always live in my heart. Because of this, some of the names and details will be altered in the interest of privacy.

Thanks for reading friends.

First episode coming soon.

STEEMONKEY🐒