Where Did It All Go Right? (23 page)

A chain reaction occurred if one among the three of us chucked – the smell would set the other two off. Sometimes it was like Charlie Caroli in the back seat of that car. They tried to get us to take nasty pink travel-sickness tablets – the sinisterly named Joy Rides – but none of us would swallow. Or indeed ‘chew’, as it laughably suggested on the box (the very box which described these acrid dots as ‘pleasant tasting’). Dad once inventively gave me a Joy Ride sandwich, with the pill held between two chalky but much-loved Refresher sweets. I secretly flushed the Joy Ride down the toilet and noisily crunched the sweets in front of him. It fooled no-one, and I forever put myself off chalky sweets. Honestly, it’s a wonder they took us further than Weedon.

One year, we made Dad pull over so early in the mammoth journey – because we felt ‘a bit sick’ – he furiously
forced
Simon and me to take a Joy Ride each, there and then on the hard shoulder of the M6 with the lorries whipping past us. I went first, chewing it like a man and insisting to Simon, ‘It’s not that bad’ (oh, but it was). Simon stoutly refused and promised not to feel sick any more. We drove on. Neither of us was sick again, or at least not until the traditional layby at Llangollen. Simon and I piled out of the car and ran down the incline of the adjoining sheep field.
There
, I surreptitiously removed the half-chewed Joy Ride from my shoe, where I had in fact secreted it back on the M6. The very sight of it loosened my lunch and I quietly vommed on the grass without Mum and Dad even knowing.
²

Travel sickness was a downward spiral we could never escape from. The thought of Joy Rides made us sick; the thought of being sick made us sick; being sick made us sick. My guess is that the ‘travel’ and the ‘motion’ had nothing to do with it. Not one of us was even queasy on the drive home, even though the journey took just as long. Having said that, we generally left later: desperate to squeeze every last drop out of Wales on the way there, but not as bothered on the way back – one year we casually left on the Friday afternoon at 4.30, having been to the beach in the morning. Nobody felt sick; the miles flew by. The psychology of the return journey has never been satisfactorily explained to me, but it holds in adult life, and on other forms of transport: it always seems easier coming home, no matter where you are or how long you’ve been there.

Even if the car still smells of sick from the outward journey.

Wait a minute, we’ve been to Wales and we’ve come home already, bronzed only by the coastal wind and about half a dozen holiday specials richer. There was, mercifully, more to holidays than being sick out of car windows.

* * *

We self-catered on the same peninsula in North Wales from 1972 to 1979 inclusive, eating the same food we ate at home except for the occasional holiday-only treat like a burger in batter from the chip shop at Morfa Nefyn or a takeaway Wimpy on the seafront at Pwllheli. Cold beef sandwiches were the traditional extravagance on the days we went to Black Rock Sands at Llanbedrog. Kunzel Cakes were often broken out too. And flat eggs.

It might not have seemed like much of a holiday for Mum, self-catering – after all we self-catered all year round – but she didn’t seem to mind. Yes, she was still cooking our tea, but she was doing so in a farmhouse nestled in the majestic vistas and clean air of Wales. For the first four years we stayed in exactly the same spot just shy of a tiny village called Llithfaen (found midway across the biceps of the peninsula). We stayed in two different properties rented out by English ex-pat Mrs Roberts on a farm called Tyn Cae – irresistibly close to ‘Tin Can’ in our heads, which is what we called it – first, the more modern, added-on bungalow, later the original farmhouse. Then, when she sold up after the summer of 1975, we moved down the lane to another farmhouse, Bryn Celyn Isaf, owned by Mr and Mrs Williams, an authentic Welsh farm couple we could barely understand. We stayed there for four more years running, each as idyllic as the last. Same place, same two weeks in July, same holiday effectively, but it suited us down to the ground.

Other, more adventurous, thrill-seeking families went on package holidays to Spain and came back burnt umber. Uncle Brian and Auntie Janis went to Disneyworld and Cape Canaveral and drove on the right-hand side of the road. The Caves went sailing.
³
Even Nan Mabel and Pap Reg flew to Canada to see Nan’s sister Doll, and to the chi-chi Channel Islands too. But we were happy in North Wales, sitting in the car in the driving rain, looking out at the unyielding Atlantic, eating fudge and doing quizzes. And to prove our undying love for Llithfaen and Pwllheli and Black Rock Sands we went back every year for the best part of a decade. These were the best holidays in the world.

To start with we hedged our bets and went on two, shorter holidays, a week in a caravan park in Yarmouth on the tacky east coast in June, and a week at Mrs Roberts’s in Wales in July. A year later, we sensibly threw our lot in with the sheep and put the slot
machines
behind us. We made our own entertainment in Wales, and that’s why it was such a valuable experience every summer. The family that plays together, and all that …

Compare and contrast a day in Yarmouth – a breathless round of fairground rides, pennies in slots and ticket stubs – with a day in Wales – perhaps a game of cricket on the beach at Pistyll and
The Fenn Street Gang
before bedtime – and you start to see how character-building the Welsh holidays were. We wanted for very little: some stumps, a tennis ball, a stick, a bucket, a kagoul, a deck of Top Trumps.
⁴
It was like being down the field, except it was
up
the field and the allotments stretched for as far as the viewfinder could see.

Directly behind the bungalow was a serviceable hill walk with a rocky outcrop at its peak which we christened The Crag. We went up The Crag every year, a family expedition captured on the grainy Instamatic. Simon and I would naughtily sing the words
‘in and out the sheep shit/in and out the sheep shit’
(trad. arr.) as we dodged the pellets, running ahead of Mum and Dad – and Nan Mabel and Pap Reg if they’d joined us for a few days, as they habitually did, as if to make it seem even more like home from home.

At the peak, action man Simon would play at mountain climbers on the imposing Crag itself with his jeans tucked into his football socks and a length of rope slung manfully over his shoulder. I threw bits of slate off the top and watched them smash.

The sun did occasionally shine in July in North Wales, but it was wise not to rely on it. We spent a lot of the fortnight in the car, as I remember it, or else sheltered behind a windbreak on the beach, poles knocked into the ground with rocks. Even during the apparent long, hot summer of ’76 it rained and I caught a chill. But we didn’t care, as long as there were fish fingers for tea and the prospect of dam-building tomorrow at Aberdesach or Dinas Dinlle.

It would seem pertinent at this point to admit that in eight years we didn’t ever really fully embrace the Welsh language. Instead, we mashed its evocative, lyrical beauty to fit our unsophisticated Northampton mouths. Llithfaen was simply ‘Lithvan’ for as long as
we
stayed there, Pwllheli was to us the rather comical ‘Puwelly’. Not once did we pronounce Nefyn correctly as ‘Nevun’ – it was Neffin to the Collins family for two weeks every summer. I daren’t tell you how we pronounced Trawsfynydd and Llanystumdwy for fear of sinking further still into a caricature of imperial ignorance. Alright – Transfinnywinny and Lanstuddymuddy.

Let us off. I don’t imagine a Welshman could pronounce

Cogenhoe,
⁵
Towcester
⁶
or Duston.

* * *

We were in love with Wales. The hills, the crashing waves, the tell-tale snags of wool on wire fences, the treacle toffee, a bottle of Coke and a packet of crisps on the wall in the garden of the Victoria Inn, the Welsh words for gents and ladies,
⁷
the walks, the drives, the white sand, the card games, the occasional jellyfish, the tiny cinema in Nefyn where Dad took us to see
Live and Let Die
in 1975, the walk across the golf course at Morfa Nefyn, a drop scone from Mrs Williams, feeding the chickens with Mr Williams, playing on the rope swings, running with Meg the sheepdog, eating steak and kidney pie at the Sparta Café, reading James Herbert’s
The Rats
and being too scared to have it on my bedside table at night, the glow-in-the-dark Moonlighter Frisbee, rock pools, Mum seemingly having her hair done every other day in Pwllheli, rain cascading down the spiral stone staircase like a waterfall in the tower at Caernarfon Castle, Simon being told by Mum he could ‘get his vest wet’ at Black Rock Sands and charging into the sea wearing it … these are all memories made in Wales.

Smashing place, but how did we justify going back to the same map reference every year? (In 1980 we went mad and tried Jersey for the first time. It was so good we went back there every year for the next decade!) First, everybody went on holiday to the same place in the Seventies. I have anecdotal evidence of this. After all,
who
except for the rich could afford to experiment? In 1975, just to be adventurous, we decided to stay for one week on the island of Anglesey, then move on to Mrs Roberts’s farmhouse for the second week. OK, so Anglesey was in North Wales and it looked out on to the same bay as Nefyn and Aberdesach, but it was still new, still a relative voyage into the unknown. On arrival that fateful Saturday morning, it quickly became apparent that Mum was far from satisfied with the house we were to stay in (I remember there were flies all over the lounge window – I described it as ‘tatty and horrible’ in my diary), so the decision was made. We drove away, back over the Menai Strait and into the Wales we knew. It was as if this was our punishment for trying somewhere new. We ended up calling Mrs Roberts from a phone box and she put us up in the bungalow.

Two years later, we attempted once again to go off-piste, booking a second self-catering holiday in Ilfracombe, Devon. Same story: arrived (after a six-hour drive, during which Melissa won the sick cup), inspected the place, deemed it uninhabitable, turned around, drove all the way back to Northampton. It’s not that Mum was picky: compared to the homely farmhouses in Llithfaen, this place was cold, musty and unlived-in with ugly bedspreads. What’s worse, it had been recommended to us as a nice place to stay by a friend of Mum and Dad’s. This was a holiday with all the good bits taken out, leaving just the six-hour car journeys, with a short break between to view a damp house. Melissa was sick on the way home too.
⁸

When we made the momentous decision
not to go to Wales
in 1980, we might have been compensating for all those years conservatively pounding the same tarmac on the way to the same beaches
with
the same sandwiches packed in the same beach bags. In fact, we were beaten into submission by Nan Mabel and Pap Reg, who had been singing the praises of Jersey for some time. Plus, Dad had a decent bonus from work, so we could afford to go a little upmarket. It was the start of a new decade, and we were going to cross a major body of water for the first time in our lives. (Actually, I’d been across the Channel in 1978 for that French trip, but this was our first time abroad as a family.
⁹
)

Perhaps fittingly, it began with a four-hour car journey, from Northampton to the port at Weymouth (so far, so familiar). Then a seven-hour ferry trip, during which something magical happened, as if to mark the paradigm shift: only one of us was sick, and it was Dad.

Crisps and grapes mainly. ‘B’ deck. I’m sure it was as much of a shock to him as to the rest of us, and it revealed a welcome chink in his mortal armour. No longer was he a god, he was a man. A man who smelt of sick. When we arrived, exhausted and crumpled by what was the best part of a day’s travelling, at the Merton Hotel in St Helier, Jersey, we didn’t feel like the sort of family who would stay at a hotel at all, but this feeling of inferiority (alright, inappropriateness) soon passed. We settled into our new lives almost immediately.

On the face of it, Jersey wasn’t
so
different to the Lleyn Peninsula – it was rural, they had animals in fields (albeit cows), it occasionally rained (although less occasionally), and what we did in the daytime was drive to beaches and sit behind a windbreak banged in with rocks. I was 15 now, so holiday specials held less allure – transplanted by
Mad
magazine and horror novels – but Simon and I continued to play together, tennis balls and frisbees. However, the change in our holidaying pattern was profound and irreversible. We were staying in a hotel. Waiters brought us food with French names. There was a pool. There were
other people
.

Dovetailing perfectly with my hormones, Jersey proved itself a place to meet girls.
¹⁰
Holidays suddenly got sociable. Mum and Dad – for the first time ever – made friends on holiday, buying rounds in the ballroom, swapping addresses, that sort of caper. In other words, from 1980 onwards, our tastes became more sophisticated. We demanded more from the fortnight. Nightly cabaret in the ballroom, bingo, discos, the hotel photographer laying out his wares on a trestle table each morning in the lobby. We never looked back. We stayed at the Merton right through the Eighties – I even joined them there when I was at college – and it’s such a family-friendly place, always improving, that Simon and Melissa have been back with their kids. Three generations having a great time. Pampered. Corrupted by luxury.

Me? I’ve reverted back to type. My idea of a perfect holiday now is a rented cottage in Ireland. Driving, walking, reading, sitting outside pubs. I even mispronounce the place-names. I expect I’m trying to recapture the cut-price, easily-pleased, self-catering, all-weather paradise of Wales. But that would take a plastic potty, a
Buster
holiday special and some Refreshers. Some things are best left in the past.