Vertical take-off

On Easter Day, it’s as if the whole town has forgotten to put the clocks forward, asleep with the blankets over its head.

It’s grey, cold and deserted save for the woman snatching a furtive fag outside Wetherspoon’s.

There’s a stone-and-a-half of pound shops, a great largesse of charity shops – Mr Tony Blair’s autobiography remaindered for only 50p – a place offering diamante dog coats which on such a tail-betweenthe- legs morning might even be appreciated.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the A2Z guest house has vacancies. The workmen’s club is billing Bucket List – “the band you have to see before you die”.

At St Peter’s church, happily, the welcome and the atmosphere are altogether warmer. They’ve lit a bonfire a couple of hours earlier, though for reasons more liturgical than physical. It must be awfully comforting, nonetheless.

THAT it’s Easter Sunday is almost coincidental. Redcar talks of renaissance, it not of resurrection, nonetheless, and on the back of an 80ft tall, vaguely helter- skelterish, purple and white tower that has become known as the Vertical Pier.

The Rev Rachel Harrison, vicar since last May but already described in the annual church report as “superb”, makes no mention of it in her sermon. Rather she talks of “the element of surprise”.

The church is well filled, the closing hymn – as always it should be on such occasions – Thine Be the Glory.

At the end they give out little chocolate Easter eggs.

The real surprise is that, during the 80-minute service, the sun has put in an appearance. It’s still perishing, though.

Moored on the sea front are the Mary Ann and the Lady Maude, the Nimrod and – of all things – the Easter Morn. A group of elderly men huddle over her side, as if exchanging fishermen’s stories. All they need are a couple of clay pipes (and perhaps a wooden leg) to illustrate a children’s story of the 1950s.

That’s all quite symbolic, too.

After years in the doldrums, Redcar is really pushing the boat out.

IT’S launch weekend for the Vertical Pier, known on Sundays as the Redcar Beacon, a £1.6m construction that’s part of an imaginative £75m municipal initiative to drag the dear, desolate old dump into the tourist age. The promenade is being refurbished, sea defences renewed, the whole place top and bottomed.

Still, indelibly, shades of the 1950s remain. Still the asinine amusement arcades ceaselessly intone the tune about the referee’s father, still Redcar lunches on the hoof, still ice cream posters proclaim the “worldfamous lemon top”.

A bingo emporium has a huge hoarding headed “Their back” – something to do with jackpot cards – and should forthwith be closed down for disservices to literacy.

Yet things change. Down by the now-holed boating lake where once club trips decanted to eat their egg and tomato sandwiches is a futuristic new young people’s centre called Tuned In, and with a youthful exclamation mark, to boot.

The Vertical Pier will chiefly be home to arts and crafts businesses and to a two-floor cafe called Seasons.

Across the road, the Palace Hub has an art gallery with pictures of Skinningrove and other local beauty spots and will soon have a business centre with high-speed connectivity and stuff.

It’s the Vertical Pier, however, which particularly has sent eyebrows rising. Folk queue to get in from the cold, entertained by stilted street theatricals playing Alice in Wonderland and by assorted Easter bunnies who have the good grace to look frozen.

A chilly gig at Redcar for the Tees Valley Jazzmen

That bit’s called Sunshine Corner – a classic triumph of optimism over experience – the promotional literature features penguins. Point taken, but it’s not that cold, surely?

Views from the top are said to be spectacular, especially inland, so great the panorama that admission is rumoured to cost a fortune. “The most I’ve heard is twenty quid, most people reckon a fiver,” says the lift attendant.

Like many of the best things in life, it’s free.

The snag is that anything with “vertical” in the name suggests a necessary head for heights. Some of us don’t have one. I take the lift to the seventh floor – it’s that or 132 steps – essay one quick look and return swiftly to earth.

Redcar looks onwards and upwards.

THE High Street offers shuggy boats and things, food stalls and a four-hour gig by the Tees Valley Jazzmen.

The trumpeters – do jazz bands have wind sections? – wear gloves, a comfort denied Keith Belton, the pianist.

“Bitter, absolutely bitter,” says Keith, 42 years with the band.

A few doors down, a travel agency promotes cruises to within a few miles of the Arctic Circle. “What do we want to go there for? We can stop here for that,” says a window shopper to his wife.

A Polish food stall offers bigos, a sort of spicy sausage and white cabbage stew. It mightn’t be traditionally Redcar, but on such a day it beats the hell out of a lemon top.

Back on the sea front, Professor Brian Llewellyn, from Darlington, had been hired to continue the Punch and Judy tradition begun after the war by his father. Brian first joined him at Redcar 54 years ago – “I think it was twopence” – and is impressed by the changes.

“Yesterday was bouncing. Today’s a bit quieter, but I really do think they’ve forgotten to put the clocks forward. You can’t really expect it to be warm, not at the end of March, can you?”

Mr Punch has been having a lie-in, too, though it’s done nothing for his customary irascibility. “He’s been quite naughty lately,” says the judge.

“Hit him,” says one of the kids.

I’m homeward on the two o’clock, a familiar tune audible from the station platform. Can that really be the Tees Valley Jazzmen playing Oh I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside? As they may never again say in Redcar, sometimes it seems there’s nothing new under the sun.