For the first two weeks of August 1965, the Banks family had been on their annual holidays. There was nothing unusual in that; they went every year at the same time, his father’s annual factory shut-down fortnight. What was unusual that year was that they went to Blackpool—much further afield than their usual trip to Great Yarmouth or Skegness—and that they took Graham Marshall with them.

At fourteen, Banks was of an age when he found wandering around a seaside resort with his parents embarrassing, and riding the donkey on the beach or playing with a bucket and spade no longer held any appeal. As Graham’s dad had just started on a large building project—his work being far more seasonal than Arthur Banks’s—and it didn’t look as if the Marshalls would get a holiday that year, financial arrangements were made and Graham was allowed to accompany them.

Visit Blackpool! See the Famous Tower! Hear Reginald Dixon at the Mighty Organ! See the glorious Golden Mile! Go to a star-studded Variety Show on one of the Three Piers! Have hours of Family Fun at the Pleasure Beach!

It might as well have been the moon.

At some ridiculously early hour in the morning, because that was when they always set off on holiday, they would have piled their cases into the back of Arthur Banks’s Morris Traveller, a popular sort of estate car with a wood-frame rear, and headed north on their long journey, no doubt arriving tired and cranky, but in good time for tea, at Mrs. Barraclough’s boarding house. Bed, breakfast and evening meal at six o’clock on the dot, and woe betide you if you were late. Mrs. Barraclough was a large, forbidding presence, whom Banks remembered even now as dressed in a pinny, standing with her thick legs apart and her arms folded under her massive bosom.

Banks saw that he had recorded the weather every day at the top of his entry, and as holidays went, they had done quite well: nine days of at least partial sunshine out of fourteen, and only two and a half complete washouts. On the rainy days, Banks and Graham had hung about the amusement arcades on the Golden Mile, he noted, or on one of the piers, and played the one-armed bandits and pinball machines. One rainy Sunday afternoon they spent watching the old war films that always seemed to be showing on rainy Sunday afternoons, patriotic films with titles such as The Day Will Dawn, In Which We Serve and Went the Day Well?

On overcast days they would wander the prom, eating fish and chips from newspapers or boiled shrimp from paper bags and go hunting through the town’s few secondhand bookshops, Banks looking for Sexton Blake novelettes (he had bought one called The Mind Killers) or Ian Fleming novels, while Graham went after Famous Monsters magazines and Isaac Asimov stories.

One night they all went to the Tower Circus, and Banks noted in his diary that he found Charlie Cairoli’s act “very funny.” They also took in a variety show on the North Pier, with Morecambe and Wise providing the comedy and The Hollies the music.