John: I loved that Volvo. Good, reliable car, that.
Sebastian: I wouldn’t say we were poor, exactly. I think a lot of kids these days are kind of spoiled.
Pea: Money was tight. I was very aware of that. Sometimes I’d ask Dad if Wildworld was doing all right and he’d always run a hand through his greying hair and then fix on a smile and tell me things were fine.
Kids at school were brutal if you didn’t have the right stuff. We had these occasional non-uniform days and I’d stress for weeks about what to wear. About what I had that was right, or at least right enough to let me go unnoticed. The last thing you wanted to do was stand out.
Sebastian: I don’t remember anyone at school talking about money, or what we were wearing, or any of that. It wasn’t a fashion show, was it? We were there to get an education.
Pea: I had these trainers once, and I thought they were just like the ones everyone else had, the ones people were talking about. For once, I couldn’t wait for the next non-uniform day to come around. When it did, I paired my flash trainers with some jeans and a Naf Naf jumper and a denim jacket. I knew double denim was where it was at. I walked into school thinking I was it, and two minutes later Nicole Waddington pointed at my trainers and burst out laughing. Said they were fakes and my mum had probably got them from the market. The thing is, shehadgot themfrom the market. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with that.
Danny: Nicole Waddington. Remember that name. She’s going to make a comeback.
Cathy: Things were steady for most of the eighties, but from about 1991 onwards, there was a slide. I don’t know what it was. People always said we must be raking it in. There were hundreds of people there day in, day out. But none of them considered all the outgoings. The staff, the upkeep of the rides, the electricity, the cost of bringing in new rides so there was always something to shout about. The outgoings really stacked up, and gate numbers dwindled. 1992 was worse than 1991, and then 1993 was worse again. John was drinking a lot. I was trying to hide how worried we were from the kids.
Sebastian: This whole narrative about Dad’s drinking is a bit of a mystery to me. Yes, it became a problem in later years, but back then I don’t think it was. I think they’re looking back on it with the knowledge they have now of what came later, if you see what I mean.
Pea: Sebastian lived in his own little world. He didn’t pick up on some of the stuff I did.
John: 1994 was a good year. I really thought things were picking back up, that we’d have an upward trajectory from there. But then 1995 was bad again. I had to take out a couple of loans, make a few people redundant, and it was tough. Some of them had been with us for years and years.
Cathy: John used to get up and pace around at night. It was like when the kids were small and we’d walk up anddown the landing trying to get them off to sleep after a night feed. John used to say, back then, that I’d wear out the carpet. And I lay in bed listening to him going up and down, wondering what he’d say if I said the same thing to him then. We didn’t joke or laugh much by then. We didn’t have much to laugh about.
John: It broke my heart to do it but I looked into how much we might get for the place, if we sold up. The irony was, the longer we kept going and the numbers kept dwindling, the lower the selling price would be. So I thought it might be in our interests to sell up as quickly as we could. I went to see Dad. Mum was gone by then and he was in a nursing home. Dementia. When I brought it up, he set his jaw and said Wildworld stayed in the family, no matter what.
Cathy: I went to my parents to ask for help. I don’t think I ever told John. I wanted to present it to him as a fait accompli because I knew he’d feel emasculated by it. My parents lived half an hour away, and on the drive I repeated the speech I’d come up with over and over.
Mum opened the door to me and said, ‘Well, this is a surprise,’ as if I never went to see them, when in reality I made sure we got over there at least once a fortnight. I drank half a cup of weak tea and then rolled out the speech. My dad’s eyebrows started rising early on and just kept going, disappearing under his hair. It would have been funny if I wasn’t so stressed.
I was almost finished when Dad put one hand up to get me to stop. I waited. And then he said they would have a look at their finances and see if they could move some things around. I was grateful; it sounded promising.I stayed for lunch, and on the drive home I felt lighter than I had for weeks.
Dad phoned three days later, and I stretched the cord to pull the phone into the downstairs loo, shut the door. He said that they could lend us two thousand pounds. It was a drop in the ocean, not enough to make any real difference. But I couldn’t say that, could I? I thanked him and tried to keep the tears out of my voice. When it arrived in our joint account, I’m not sure John even noticed.
John: We camethisclose to closing, we really did. And then, out of nowhere, the call came.
Cathy: That call. We thought it would save our lives.
Danny: Right, let’s get to it. It’s time to hear about the call from AJ Silver’s management that came out of the blue and changed the Hunters’ lives forever.
John: It was a Tuesday afternoon.
Cathy: I think it was a Wednesday.
Pea: I didn’t hear about it until afterwards. I would have been at school when it happened.
Cathy: We had this little office that I was based in during opening hours. It was a glorified shed, really, but it was where people would come if they had any problems, from losing a rucksack to losing a child. Usually, when the phone rang, it was people asking for our opening hours or admission prices. But not that day.
I was surprised to hear an American accent. We did get some international visitors, but not many. It was a woman, and she said she was calling from Los Angeles,and that her name was Maggie McGee and she was the manager of AJ Silver. Had she got through to Wildworld theme park?
Now, if I’d had a bit of time to think about it, I probably would have known who AJ Silver was. I mean, his face was everywhere. But off the top of my head, the name didn’t mean anything.
Maggie: I’m pretty sure that, when I made that first phone call, Cathy had no idea who AJ was, but she hid it pretty well.
Danny: The woman you’ve just heard for the first time is Maggie McGee, manager to the stars. She’d been looking after AJ Silver for a little over a year at this point, and had gone from managing a roster of celebs to just looking after him as his career snowballed.
Cathy: She said that she was in an unusual position. That was when Sebastian stuck his head around the door. I put a hand up to tell him to wait, asked Maggie McGee very politely if I could put her on hold for one moment. ‘AJ Silver?’ I asked. ‘Who is he?’ And Sebastian said, ‘Mum, he’s, like, the most famous pop star in the world.’ He turned on his heel and left then, no doubt to go back to the house and start making his way through a loaf of bread. He didn’t want to know why I’d asked. I took a couple of deep breaths and went back to the call. Apologised. Maggie sounded like she was smoking a cigarette. She told me that AJ Silver had an extensive UK tour booked for the following year, 1996, and he had requested exclusive use of a theme park for the duration of his trip.
Maggie: Was AJ Silver a pain in the ass? Of course he was. He was a kid. But what you have to understand is that, back then, that kid was a licence to print money. He was idolised, all over the world, and anything we put his face or his name on sold in the millions. So when he came to me and said he wanted to stay in a theme park when we did the UK tour, I had to work really hard not to roll my eyes. Because he could have got rid of me just like that. And I knew that I would never find another him.
