Chapter 1 #3
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 and down 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 came this close 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.
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 I knew 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.