Summer Holiday

It was around this time of year in my childhood that my family would set off for what we called the summer holiday.

Photo by Heather McKean on Unsplash

In the British tradition, this was a trip out of town that would last for two weeks and, in the days before cheaper air tickets made foreign travel available, would invariably involve a stay at the seaside. We never visited a different city for the holiday, because we were Londoners and why would we want to spend two weeks exploring a different metropolis? We never visited the countryside because … well, I’m not entirely sure why we didn’t, but we didn’t. So the seaside it was, with buckets, spades, and swimming costumes, and confident, if reliably unrealistic, expectations of rich blue skies with a fat and jolly sun beaming benignly through not a wisp of a cloud. We children looked forward to it all year around. How our parents felt about the prospect of spending two weeks with five children removed from friends, cousins, library, public swimming pool, and Broomfield Park, is something we never thought to question. But we five were thrilled at the prospect.

We would began planning where to go around the middle of spring. Annually, we children would beg to be taken to Butlin’s, the large chain of holiday camps where the staff wore red jackets and were unremittingly cheery, there were dodgem cars on the property, and an unending stream of competitions for titles such as Knobbliest Knees and Most Glamorous Granny; annually, we were both outraged and baffled when our parents failed to leap on the suggestion with delight. When I was small, we would stay with a safely Catholic family called O’Brien, who ran a boarding house somewhere in Sussex, had a dizzying number of children themselves and went to Mass with us on Sundays; but as our family had increased we had outgrown their space and were forced to venture out, rosaries close to hand and eyes narrowed warily in suspicion, beyond our Papist fastness and into England at large.

We never again found a place there that we liked well enough (or, it is entirely possible, who liked us well enough in return) that we would visit twice; but over the years we did see more or less all of the Southern English coast. We saw Sussex and Kent and Hampshire and Somerset – where we drove past Bath and my mother mentioned Jane Austen and I, having seen her books in the library, asked if she were the one who had written Pride and Pre-Judice, and my parents and sophisticated elder brother laughed, which was a fair cop, but so did my grubby younger brothers, about which I remain bitter – and Devon and Cornwall, where we walked for what felt like miles to what we were promised would be King Arthur’s castle, but turned out to be just a collection of ruined walls, with not a knight or a wizard or a round table in sight. We saw a lot of seaside and built a lot of sandcastles. But in order to do so, we first had to get there.

Our family car was a battered grey Vauxhall Velox, known, affectionately to us if less so to the street in general, as the Cronk, and real estate inside it was hotly contested. To secure a seat beside a window was optimum, or failing that, to snare a seat beside a person who had grabbed the window but was smaller than you; points were lost if you landed next to the one who fancied himself fashionable and would entertain himself by warbling his way through the Top Ten with ringing enthusiasm and varying accuracy of key; more still if you found yourself between that person and the youngest, who always wanted to go to sleep but must be kept awake at all costs so that he would be able to sleep at night while our parents were enjoying a glass of wine; the worst fate of all was to be stuck in the middle of the front seat with our father’s tweed-clad left elbow digging into one ear and our mother’s sensibly cardiganed right digging into the other, adult conversation booming incomprehensibly overhead, and, inside, a sea of solitary desolation dragging the spirits to a watery doom.

Wherever you were seated, I cannot in candor claim that the conversation during the journey was harmonious. To the horror of both of my parents, neither of them what you’d call imperturbable at the best of times, whoever was sitting by the window would insist on rolling it down to expose their face to the breeze: if they did this on the traffic side, my mother, who inhabited an inner life of glorious and bloodthirsty technicolor, would be convinced that a bus would roar past that would rip their head from their shoulders; if on the hedgerow side, my father, a townsman to his bones, would conjure spikes of grass leaping maliciously from the perfidious country lanes with the specific intent of inserting themselves directly into the center of an eyeball. “They can do wonderful things with glass eyes these days,” he would prognosticate gloomily.

My father was also afflicted when driving the family car with the need to be constantly reassured that he had not somehow run over and killed a pedestrian without noticing. Yes, you are correct, this was indeed an unusual personality quirk, and one which I now know to have been a classic symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; but back then, we had no textbook explanation for this gruesome requirement and certainly no guidance on how to deal with it: we were simply told that Daddy was an unusually virtuous individual who was more concerned than most people with the wellbeing of his fellow man, and that it was our moral as well as filial duty, at every single crossroads we passed, to notify him in tones of bright alertness that, no, he had left no bloodied corpse lying mangled on the road in our wake, and yes, we were sure, and yes, we had checked, and yes, of course we’d turn around to check again, yes, right around, not just our heads but our whole bodies so that we could view the entire sweep of the road, and no there still wasn’t, and oh look, here came another crossroads and the hunt for random neglected corpses was on again. Fun times.

After ten minutes in the car, we would be hungry; after two hours, we would be starving and it would be time to stop for lunch. This was by no means as easy a proposition as it might have seemed. Of the seven in our party, three were semi-feral, four presented a raging battleground of conflicting dietary demands, and very few were capable of communicating with each other for any length of time without dissolving into either raucous cackles of laughter or bloodcurdling howls of fury. Time after time my father would stop the car outside a country restaurant and walk in to check out the lay of the land, until at last he found an accepting harbor: he was a tall and handsome man, and I now imagine that many a winsome waitress’s heart might have skipped a beat to see him sauntering in unaccompanied, only to fall with a thud when he described the contents of his car outside.

At last, lunch would have been located and consumed, the long drive completed, and we would have arrived at our destination.

Well, almost.

There was no GPS in those days, and a talent our entire family shares is the ability to get lost in the best laid-out of spaces. Around and around the small seaside town we would drive, passing the beach, and the fish and chip shop, and the shop that sold buckets and spades and – ooh! – colored handheld windmills, passing everything, it seemed, but the address we were looking for: the youngest would be crying, and the fashionable one would be onto his nineteenth rendition of Something Tells Me I’m Into Something Good, and I would be screaming at the fashionable one to give us some peace or I’d kill him, and my father would be hot on the hunt for corpses, and my mother would be shouting at us all that we’d never have survived the War, when at last we’d declare defeat on the search and stop to ask for directions.

My mother would round on us all a basilisk glare that would freeze even the youngest into terrified immobility. Then, assuming with the speed of Superwoman the persona of a mild-mannered matron, she would wind down the car’s window.

“Excuse me,” she would coo at a passerby in a tone we children had not heard since our last dental appointment. “Would you be so kind as to give us directions? We seem to be lost.”

Directions noted, the passerby profusely thanked, and soufflé-light pleasantries exchanged, she would wind up the window and we would all revert to our previous selves.

“It’s all part of the fun of the holiday,” she would snap, darkly, as Armageddon broke out again.

Even we would find our way eventually, the luggage would be unpacked (how had we fit it all into the car? I now wonder), and, most importantly, the location and times of Mass at the nearest Catholic church ascertained, and it would be time to begin the vacation.

The English seaside vacation. Rife with rainstorms, thunderstorms, seeping drizzle and stinging wind, goose-pimpled flesh, sandy sheets, family fights, kicked-over sandcastles, upset stomachs, jellyfish stings, and, on at least one occasion, an emergency trip to the hospital for a broken arm. For two whole weeks.

My parents were not perfect people; to be honest, I wouldn’t even describe them as particularly good parents. But I hope now that, as a reward for the summer holidays alone, they are enjoying at least a corner of Parent Heaven. At least for two weeks of the year.