The sun sets on a briefly hot spring day and welcomes in the smell of cheap meat charring over too-hot coals. I sit on one of only a few picnic benches that doesn’t have kids sprawled across it, sipping the can of “Multipack: not for resale” Coke I’d bought in the caravan park shop.
I plan to make it last, wondering who of the many people meandering around are holidaymakers and who are locals; who is passing through to enjoy the long Easter weekend and who’s here out of necessity, collateral of the fact there are not enough rooms and flats and houses in Cornwall to go round. It isn’t long before a lad in his twenties slows enough to ask if I have a light.
“Beautiful morning.”
I smile and pass him my emergency lighter, the one I keep in my backpack, despite not being a smoker, for situations such as these.
“Warm for once.” He lights his rollie, puts the lighter onto the wooden table and sits down. “And not mizzly, nobody likes the mizzle.”
I agree. “Gets in everything.”
“Yep, totally does. My van has a roof so thin it might as well be clingfilm.”
I start to laugh, then apologise.
“Mate, you’ve got to laugh, it’s all you can do. I’m Gary by the way.”
Gary tells me that he’s been living on the site for the past 18 months. “Maybe more,” he shrugs. “It’s hard to remember one week from the next.”
I want to ask him how he ended up here, but have a feeling he’s going to tell me soon enough, and he does.
“Things used to be good, I used to live in a flat in Looe — you know the ones that look down on the river?”
I nod.
“Them, top flat, just a bedsit but it was inside you know? Like proper inside.”
“Nice view.”
“Nice view, and a kitchen and a shower. But then the landlord wanted to do it up, so he turfed us out for a week, all five of us in five bedsits, and then he said the lease was up.”
“Was it?” I ask.
“What?”
“The lease, was it up?”
Gary started to laugh, “What’s that word that means looking back I should have done something?”
“In retrospect?”
“Yeah that’s it. In retrospect I should have signed a lease, but none of us did, so now I’m here, with a go-bag waiting for the next time someone calls the police.”
“What happens then?”
“I get the bus to the next site along.”
This is common practice in Cornwall. Renting rooms and flats without a contract is supposedly simpler for everyone, but because it’s a cash-in-hand practice, there’s no way to pin down any statistics, because there aren’t any. It’s easier for someone with little cash to opt for the quick-fix option of renting week by week, simply because they can’t afford to dish out a chunk of cash for a deposit or one month’s rent. These people tend to get paid cash-in-hand, frequently moving around the coast to follow seasonal, unregulated work, like fishing or jobs related to the tourist industry.
The real winners from this situation are of course the landlords, who rent out their rooms, flats and even houses to the highest bidder, which in the warmer months are the tourists, and lots of them.
“Could be worse,” continues Gary. “My uncle sleeps in his car in the long-stay car park up the river there.”
“So what is van life like?” I ask.
“Shit.” He finishes his cig and stands. “More than shit, the walls sweat all through the night. When it rains you have to wear headphones, and when it’s hot you feel like a fucking sardine wrapped in foil on one of these fucking barbecues.” He looks around at the holidaymakers and sighs, before walking off.
The Instagram-friendly image of the summer traveller ideal, known to most as “van life” couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s often no space for matching pretty-picture homemade cushions and curtains (the mould from constant condensation takes care of the pretty anyway), and there’s no place for tangling fairy-lights and dangling pot plants or a designer coffee machine, because all your life belongings are crammed into the one tiny space. The average size of a single-skin caravan is 2-2.5m wide, barely any room to swing a cat, if caravan parks allowed you to have a cat, or a dog, which they don’t.
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