My father's finest hour

may, in his own mind, have been during his service as a minesweeper skipper in the 1939-45 war, giving orders while all about him were vapourised by the Luftwaffe. But I prefer to recall a few summer days at the end of the 1960s when the Kinks came to stay at the hotel he kept in a then very remote corner of Cornwall.

It is fortunate indeed that the memory of the incidents themselves remains pretty clear because, actually, I cannot be sure quite when it was. My best guess is that it was between '69 and '71 because by the following year, when I was 10, we had moved.

Back to the hotel. It was a few miles from the Lizard, a few miles from Helston, a few miles from RNAS Culdrose, in a one-street village where the road petered out on a beach with a church on one side and a links course behind.

My father dressed beautifully. Grey suits with Navy tie or, more casually, Tattersalls shirts, with ties, cords or twill pants and a fawn cardy and tweed jacket. One day in the season, two E-Type Jags purred onto the gravel, their fat tyres like big paws crunching and churning the stones. Some people got out: a couple of blokes, a couple of blondes, various ragamuffin kids. Words were exchanged and they went upstairs and occupied at least a couple of double bedrooms.

My father came in, ashen-faced. "The Kinks are here. How awful. The bloody Ginks in my hotel." I had heard of them and knew about what was then called the Hit Parade and Radio 1, though wasn't allowed access to either. Now I wonder why a band riding the wave of fame should come to such a flea-bite of a place and can only assume that it was for that very reason: to get away from dedicated follower of fashion-type sickmaking adulation, which must pall fairly rapidly for anyone in showbiz with something between their ears.

I can't say what they did during the day but I know they were back in the late afternoon and, I am guessing, adjourned to the boozer next door for sundowners because the hotel did not have a bar. Always behind the times, my father felt that a drinks licence was, like en-suite facilities, somehow below the salt. Anyway, they came back for dinner, the Kinks, joining the rest of the guests for prawn cocktail, which was served in a mixture of salad cream and ketchup, deep-fried plaice with chips, frozen peas and grilled crown-cut tomatoes, tinned peaches and evap milk, coffee or tea, cheese and biscuits. They seemed happy enough.

All went well for a few days until my father came into the flat at the back where we lived and said he had had to choke off one of the Kinks women for letting her child block the toilet with paper. Worse was to come. I went out of the back door later that day to see him on the lawn giving one of the men, who I now assume was Ray Davies, what for because he had been smoking a huge cigar in the garden and knocking divots out of the side lawn while practising his golf swings. And because he had long hair.

I don't think they stayed around for long after that. The Jags purred off and we were left with the Bosomworths from Sutton Coldfield and their like - the ordinary sorts who came back year after year.

With an acute sense of timing, my father sold the hotel early in '72 for the huge sum of £9,000. A few months later there was a property boom.

All of the above trickled out because a Kinks CD found its way into the player.

I should like to know what Mr Davies thought of his stay.