I knew right off the bat that we’d need exclusive use, that we couldn’t have him just roaming around a theme park while it was open to the public, so I had a look at what we could offer to pay and I started making calls. The big parks weren’t interested in the offer – said people would lose trust if they closed to the public for that long. And then I stumbled upon Wildworld.
Cathy: I was stunned. I had to stop myself from asking why she’d chosen us. But all I could think about was how something like this could get us out of a hole, financially. So I asked practical questions. How long would they need to use the park? Six weeks. What were the dates in question? They were in May and June, mostly term-time, so it wouldn’t even interfere with the summer holiday, which was our most lucrative time of year. What sort of budget did they have in mind?
Maggie: I could tell she was blindsided when I made the offer. It made me wish I’d gone in a bit lower.
Cathy: I had to ask her to repeat it.
Maggie: She did ask me to repeat it, yes. I was tempted to lower it. But she seemed like a nice enough woman, and Iknew we’d make the money back with some merchandise, no problem. So I said it again. Two million.
Cathy: Two million pounds. I said, ‘Where do we sign?’ Maggie laughed and said that it wasn’t quite a done deal just yet. She and AJ’s brother would be flying over to assess the place. Could we accommodate that? I said we could, and she said she’d be back in touch. I put the phone down, feeling like I’d just woken from a dream. When Pea came in, I must have been staring into space, because she gave me a funny look.
Pea: I remember her saying, ‘You won’t believe it, Pea!’ Then she sent me to get Sebastian and find Dad. Told me to get everyone in the office as quickly as I could, because she had something to tell us all.
Cathy: It took a while to convince them.
John: Had I heard of AJ Silver? I think I knew that song about ice cream that was on every time you walked into a shop. I couldn’t have picked him out of a line-up, though. And it was this kid, this famous, American kid, who was going to save us?
Pea: I thought she must be joking, but then I couldn’t work out why she would be. It was just too bizarre a story to have come up with. AJ Silver. Here. At Wildworld.
Cathy: John made me tell them everything I could remember from the call, over and over. And then he made this noise, this sort of cheer. It was the first time I’d seen him look happy like that for weeks. Months, maybe.
Sebastian: I asked whether we were going to say yes. It seemed to me like it would be a massive upheaval, and I didn’t know whether we needed it.
John: I made it very clear that this wasn’t something we were going to say no to.
Cathy: I stressed that it wasn’t a done deal. I explained about Maggie flying over from LA – John did a little clap when I said LA – with AJ’s brother.
Pea: I asked why his brother. I thought that was weird. If only I’d known.
Cathy: I guessed his brother was coming because he knew what AJ liked but wasn’t as busy as him, and that it would be easier for him to travel without getting mobbed. I’d seen the Beatles at a tiny hall in the sixties as a kid. I knew what teenage girls were like.
Pea: I called Alex straight after we dispersed. It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to me, to us, and I needed to hear his reaction to know how I felt about it. He went quiet after I told him. He said his name a couple of times. ‘AJ Silver?TheAJ Silver?’ And then he was screaming and laughing and telling me this was the best thing he’d ever heard and he couldn’t wait until those bitches at school found out. Later, when I was lying in bed, I repeated that to myself. Those bitches at school. He meant Nicole Waddington and her friends. Kelly and Fay. They’d had it in for me for years, and I guess Alex thought this was like getting one up on them.
John: I was on a high for days. I wanted to get some champagne, but Cathy said we should wait until it wasmore certain. I think she still thought it might come to nothing. At the time, I would have felt absolutely devastated if it had. But now? Now I wish we’d never heard from Maggie McGee again.
Pea: The next morning, Mum and Dad said we should keep it to ourselves until it was all signed, and I looked down at my cornflakes and hoped they wouldn’t know I’d already told Alex. Within a week it was all over school. I was in PE one day when Nicole threw a netball at my chest and said, ‘I heard you think AJ Silver is coming to your sad little theme park.’ Her friends laughed in this mean, high-pitched way. ‘As if,’ one of them said.
Sebastian: I didn’t tell a soul. Why would I?
John: It’s hard to keep a secret when it’s something huge like that, isn’t it? You tell one person and then they tell someone else. It was a small town. It was impossible to keep a lid on it. I had to call a meeting in the end, because nothing was getting done. I told the staff I could confirm the rumour was true. Nothing was definite, but the wheels were in motion. The atmosphere was electric. I reminded them that we had a park to run. They all filed out, and it was business as usual for a while.
Pea: The rumour wouldn’t go away at school. You have to wait for something bigger to come along, but there wasn’t going to be anything bigger than this, was there?
Danny: I tracked down Pea’s old headteacher, June Pears, to ask whether she heard the rumours.
June Pears: I’d been a headteacher for twenty years, and I knew a thing or two about teen heartthrobs. When you’rearound teenagers that much, you get to know who the big stars of the day are. And I’ll tell you what. I hadn’t ever seen so much excitement about anyone as I saw about AJ Silver in those mid-nineties years. Even I could see that he had something. Underneath the baggy jeans and the floppy hair, he had these eyes that made you feel like he was looking just at you. I remembered what it was like to be a teenage girl. All those hormones. I understood. So when I first heard the rumour about him coming here, coming to Wildworld, I just laughed. He was from LA. He might as well have been from the moon. But it didn’t die down the way unsubstantiated rumours usually did. After a couple of weeks, I called Pea Hunter into my office and asked what she knew about it. She squirmed a bit, and then she told me it was true. Or that it was half true, and his management were coming over to have a look at the place. I think my mouth was hanging open. She’d never been in trouble, and she wasn’t the sort to make up lies in the headteacher’s office. I let her go, and I just sat there behind my desk for five minutes or more, thinking about the absolute carnage this would cause, if it ever came to pass. Little did I know.
Cathy: I bought one of his albums. Pea laughed her head off, but I just wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Once, I picked Sebastian up and I’d forgotten to turn it off, and he looked at me with absolute disdain. ‘Mum, this music is for pre-teen girls.’ I told him I was just curious. I listened to that album from start to finish three times, and I didn’t connect with it at all. It was manufactured pop, with meaningless lyrics and synthesised sound.
Pea: I couldn’t wait for this visit to happen, to be honest. Because then we would know one way or the other, and things could go back to normal if he wasn’t coming. And if he was… well, I didn’t know what would happen then. But at least it would be a definite fact and not just something people thought I’d made up to make myself sound interesting.
In one way, I wanted it to happen. Because Dad had looked so happy since the call, whistling and bustling about the place like a younger man. Mum, too. Plus, I was fifteen and I was desperate for anything to happen, like all teenagers are. But another part of me just wanted it to be over.
Sebastian: It was all anyone talked about for weeks, and it was just boring, to be honest. When Mum told us Maggie had called again, and that the visit was set for the following week, I was just glad it might soon be over.
John: We all went into a kind of meltdown when we heard the visit was booked. Ever since that first call, I’d been tarting the place up as best I could. Giving some of the rides fresh paint, getting the staff to pick up every last piece of litter, but when we had the dates, it was so real, and it felt like what I’d done wasn’t enough. I started working late into the night, giving all the rides a really thorough going over, making sure they were all serviced and running smoothly. We had this one chance, and it could change everything, and we needed to make sure we didn’t blow it.
Cathy: John worked himself into the ground in the run up to the visit. I did what I could, too, of course. Smartened up the office and made sure the house was looking its best.Pea was excited, I think, but she didn’t really show it. One night, the week before they came, I said to her that it was okay to be enthusiastic about something, even if it wasn’t quite your thing. She just shrugged.
