The Hunstanton Lawn Tennis Tournament has become an annual fixture in the Young household. Known as ‘Wimbledon-on-Sea’, the week-long competition takes place on the Norfolk coast in August and attracts hundreds of entrants. I’m not a contestant myself, but my two youngest are and five years ago my wife won the ladies’ doubles, meaning she’s now much in demand with the Norfolk silver foxes hoping to enlist her as their mixed doubles partner in the junior vets. This year she got as far as the semi-finals, which pleased the 59-year-old KC she was playing with, and was the runner-up in the women’s round robin.

Don’t be fooled into thinking Caroline is Hunstanton’s answer to Annabel Croft. Yes, the tournament is played on grass, but that’s where its resemblance to Wimbledon ends. Anyone can enter, which means the standard is variable. My 15-year-old son Charlie was astonished to discover he was seeded, having done respectably last year, only to be knocked out in the second round. In the mixed doubles, 16-year-old Freddie was assigned a partner who’d never picked up a racket before.

The tournament is both professionally organised and unpredictable, which is part of its charm. Contestants are expected to suppress their inner John McEnroe. There are no umpires, so good sportsmanship is at a premium. What’s striking about it is not the quality of the tennis, but the fact that it’s so Sloaney. In 2002, Tatler listed Hunstanton as a mainstay of the summer season, and it attracts hordes of privately educated teenagers, who refer to it as ‘Hunst’n’. For the duration of ‘tennis week’, the locals batten down the hatches, hoping the packs of drunken youths sweeping through the coastal villages after midnight, looking like extras in The Walking Dead but with costumes by Jack Wills, will pass by without setting fire to their wheelie bins or urinating in their front gardens. It reminded me of a Piers Gaveston debauch at Oxford in the mid-1980s, except this lot are baying for ketamine and molly instead of broken glass.

A few days before kick-off, the organisers put out a statement urging the attendees not to repeat the hooliganism in Brancaster and Thornham that had marred the competition last year. ‘On at least two nights, a gathering of around 300 teenagers, ranging in age from 12 to 18, gathered unsupervised at the playing fields in these villages, some with alcohol which led to some very unacceptable behaviour that brought the reputation of our tournament into disrepute,’ it said.

A group of these ne’er-do-wells assembled to watch Freddie and Charlie in the first round of the boys’ doubles. Their opponents had the mullet haircuts that marked them out as public schoolboys, and every time they won a point their mates cheered wildly. It was 9.30 a.m. and I got the impression they’d been up all night. My lads kept their cool, winning the first set 6-2, at which point one of the other pair threw down his racket and unilaterally forfeited, much to the annoyance of his partner. All told, it wasn’t a great advertisement for a £30,000-a-year education and, not for the first time that week, I congratulated myself on not having spent a penny on my own children’s schooling.

In fairness, that was the only bit of bad behaviour I witnessed and there wasn’t any evidence of class tension between the second-homers and the year-rounders, some of whom entered the tournament. That may have been because they were politically aligned.

Most of the toffs I chatted to were Tory Brexiteers, as are most of the townsfolk and villagers. Not only is the local MP a Conservative, but in 2016 Leave voters in the borough of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk outnumbered Remainers two to one. The two groups also have a love of tennis in common, which goes a long way to paper over any cracks. Observing Caroline and her tennis friends, I’ve noticed that their devotion to the sport has a quasi-religious aspect, with the local club taking on the role that the church would have played not so long ago. Even political differences are swept aside as they worship at the net.

Freddie wanted to get back to London to pick up his GCSE results on Thursday so I drove him and Charlie home, leaving Caroline and her mum behind in our Airbnb. She was still going strong in three different categories, so couldn’t leave. Alas, there was to be no silverware this year, but I imagine we’ll return in 2024. I may even enter as a ‘senior vet’, the polite term for ‘old geezer’. I’ve no hope of partnering Caroline – the KC has already bagged her.

But even with the noisy public school brats, Hunstanton makes for an enjoyable week by the seaside.