It was the West Pier with its magnificent Victorian dance hall, severed from the beach by violent storms and left to rot as a tantalizing and expensive perch for gulls who could alight the moment the whole thing collapsed into the sea - or burst into flames, as it would in 2003. It was fights on the beach between the Mods and the Rockers, though the bottles and knives and motorbikes had all but disappeared a quarter-century before. Brighton for me was The Who singing Quadrophenia, most of which I’d heard them perform live in London that year. I was teaching in England the year after graduation and, while seeking escape from my classroom ineptitude and those nagging existential matters that come with being 22, the seaside resort became for me what it had been for generations of middle-income and working-class Britons: a day-trip haven from daily cares a cheap dalliance with sunshine, ocean breezes, romantic possibility and the limits of one’s own imagination.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |