Pea: Of course it matters. It shows what our family was like, the cracks running through it.
Danny: Sounds like trouble brewing, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty more where that came from. Now, shall we backtrack a bit? I bet you want to hear the story of how Cathy and John met, don’t you?
Cathy: I was nineteen when I met John. He was ten years older. My parents weren’t happy about it, and I didn’t understand it, because I was an adult in the eyes of the law and ten years didn’t seem like a big deal to me then.
John: We met in a pub in town. She told me she was twenty-one, I think. But when I found out that she was nineteen, it didn’t really bother me. She was mature for her age. I never really noticed the age gap.
Cathy: He came over to where I was sitting with a few of my friends and he looked straight at me and said he would like to buy me a drink. I didn’t have a lot of confidence,and I always thought I was one of the least pretty in the group, so the fact that he’d picked me and not any of my friends really meant a lot.
John: It all happened fast, really. We went out a few times and within six months we were engaged.
Cathy: He told me about the park very early on. Everyone knew Wildworld. Everyone had been. I thought it was pretty cool, I think. I mean, I was young and it was the early seventies and I was just glad he didn’t have a typical corporate job. What could be more exciting than a theme park?
The wedding was small and it felt rushed. Do I wish I’d waited? Perhaps. But you can’t do that, can you? You can’t imagine yourself a whole different life. If I hadn’t married him, I wouldn’t have the children I have, and my life might have been better, of course, but it might have been worse, too.
John: It’s easy to look back on a marriage that’s ended and say, with hindsight, that it wasn’t the right thing to do. But you don’t know that when you’re young, do you? I thought Cathy was the most beautiful woman in the world and I wanted more than anything to make her my wife.
Cathy: Yes, I loved him. Of course I did. I wouldn’t have married him otherwise. But I was naïve, and I didn’t know much about the world, or about what I could expect from a husband.
John: It’s hard to pinpoint when it started to go wrong. There’s never just one thing, is there? We just stopped being nice to each other, stopped being patient andmaking time. Started to let our irritations show. Now and again, and then always. Until it really wasn’t clear what we were doing together.
Cathy: By the time the whole AJ Silver visit happened, things were pretty bad. With the park, with our finances, and with our marriage. I think neither of us wanted to admit it. We’re both stubborn, and we don’t like to admit defeat. And there were the kids to think about. I used to think that if we could just get through another handful of years together, they’d be grown up and it wouldn’t hurt them so much if we split. But that’s no way to think about your life, is it? Gritting your teeth and getting through it.
John: Look, Cathy was a hippy, right? I knew that from the start. And I was no free spirit. I didn’t see that causing problems in the early days, but it did. We were fundamentally different. She liked to go with the flow and I worried endlessly. When we started to get in trouble, financially, Cathy would say that everything would work itself out and there I was, lying awake at night, trying to see a way out of it. It drove me crazy.
Cathy: John’s drinking was a big factor.
John: Look, I had a drinking problem later on. But not then. Cathy’s parents didn’t touch booze and it was always an occasional thing for her. Back then, I’d say I just liked a few beers of an evening, a glass or two of wine with dinner.
Cathy: He never opened a bottle of wine without finishing it, and then he’d always open another.
John: When all the stuff with AJ Silver started, we were on the rocks. We were hanging in there, just about, but I think we both knew where it was headed.
Cathy: I can tell you exactly when I knew it was over. It was a few weeks before the call from AJ Silver’s people, and we were eating dinner. The kids were both off out somewhere and it had been a while since it had been just the two of us, and I realised that I didn’t have a single thing to ask him or tell him. I didn’t have anything to say to my husband. That’s never good, is it?
Danny: From first meeting to the end of a marriage in five minutes, there. Now, there’s someone else I’d like to introduce you to, and that’s Alex. He’s not a Hunter, but he was Pea’s best friend and he was around so much that he was practically part of the family. Now, Alex Robb is obviously a household name these days, rarely off our TV screens and one of the most successful presenters of our time, but back then he was just Pea’s friend Alex. Here he is, telling us about that friendship.
Alex: We’d been friends for, let’s see, at least ten years. We just started playing together at school, pretty early on, and then we were a pair. When we were eight or nine, people mostly split down gender lines where friendships were concerned. The boys would chase the girls and vice versa, and there was a lot of competition. Girls are stupid, boys smell, that kind of thing. And I wondered whether it would happen to Pea and me, but it just never did.
Pea: Everyone noted pretty early on that my family was a bit… odd. My mum was kind of a hippy, and Dad used to turn up at school looking wild. Covered in grease fromfixing rides. I didn’t have the right clothes, either. I mean, I had school uniform but it was always a bit wrong. Like all the girls would have pale blue and white gingham dresses in summer and mine would be navy and white because Mum had found it in a charity shop. Or I’d turn up in knee-high socks when everyone else had switched to ankle socks with those little frills on them, as if by secret committee.
You’d think having your own theme park might be the sort of thing that could make a child really popular, I guess. With me, it was kind of used against me. People said Wildworld was rubbish, that they’d rather go to Alton Towers.
Alex: Oh man, Wildworld was absolutely a perk of our friendship. Pea and I used to spend every weekend there, just hanging out. I remember the first time she invited me. We were only about seven so my mum took me, and Pea met us at the gate and waved us in. There was a queue of people waiting to pay and they all had their mouths hanging open when I was ushered through. I felt like I was famous or something. Ha. Pea’s mum was with her, and she was wearing these rainbow dungarees and I honestly thought that maybe she was performing as a clown or something. I didn’t know, then, that that was just how she dressed. We went all over that day. Every ride. Pea just made her way past the queue, pulling me along behind her, and the ride operators would all smile at her and nod for us to get on. It was the best day of my life up to that point.
Sebastian: Alex and Pea were always together. I mean, always. At school, after school. Weekends, too. I didn’t have a friend like that, one that I was with all the time, soI often felt like I was on the outside. Mum and Dad were a unit, and Pea and Alex were another unit, and then there was me. I didn’t really mind. That’s just how it was.
Alex: I was in and out of that house a lot, but I never saw much of Sebastian. He was one of those people who marched to the beat of his own drum, you know? He kept himself to himself, shut himself up in his room, drawing for hours on end.
Cathy: I always thought if we had two children, they’d play together. But Alex was there so often it felt like we’d got three, and three is never an easy number for friendship, is it?
John: Why are we talking about Alex? He wasn’t part of the family.
Danny: Alex may not have been part of the Hunter family but he plays a big role in everything that followed, so it’s worth introducing him early on. Now, when I talked to the Hunters, something that came up over and over was their financial situation. Let’s hear what they’ve got to say about it.
John: We’d never had a lot of money, and the kids were used to that. Clothes were often hand-me-downs. And we never went on days out, because I was always working, and besides, they had access to an actual theme park all day every day.
Cathy: I often felt guilty about the things we weren’t able to give to the children. Lots of people were starting to go abroad on package holidays, but we just didn’t have the money for it. We had this old Volvo and the exhaustwas always just about falling off. There was never enough money to get a new one, so we just kept fixing the things that went wrong and hoping for the best.
