The Most Memorable Holiday Ever (TooWrite Story 3)

This is the final story I submitted to TooWrite. After the downbeat ending of the first and the outright psychodrama of the second, this is no howl into the void - it's a flashback to what I remember about one of those holidays that just goes wrong, wrong, wrong. It becomes the equivalent of your ancestors telling it around the campfire, and as the number of my family who were there will only ever get smaller, it feels nice to have written about it for posterity.

No doubt my re-telling of it gets the details skew-whiff, and it's romanticised as hell, but I like it the way I remember it, because it makes me think about some of the people I love and what my family is, even if some are no longer around to laugh along with us.

The Most Memorable Holiday Ever

By Chris Stanley

The first holiday I can remember was when I was about five. The best holidays were the ones you took as a kid, I always think, and even though this one ended in total disaster, it was special in its own way. Maybe I’ve romanticised it, but there are details that are very vivid – they stick out in my mind like bent nails in a plank of wood.

   We always went away as an extended family, and would do until I was about eleven, when my mum decided that her mother would be alright without her and we ended up staying on a glorified Butlin’s just outside of Folkestone in Kent. That year, my elder sister’s GCSE results came through, and that made for a tense atmosphere.

   On that first holiday, there was me, my parents and two sisters, my mother’s parents and my uncle and auntie. For reasons no doubt decided before I was born, the whole family would climb into two battered cars (one a green Morris Maxi, the other an ecru Lada) and shoot off to a site above a windswept beach where we’d spend two weeks in a trailer tent. I have no idea how big that tent was, as it was sold not long after the holiday in question, but it seemed immense, full of cupboards and cubby holes. I must have driven my mother to distraction.

   When I was five, the destination was Aberaeron, in West Wales. Even the name seems like the equivalent of a wasp’s yellow and black stripes; now it speaks to me of foreboding and disappointment. I haven’t seen it in twenty years, but I have a feeling it’d look exactly the same.

   We must have arrived late on a Saturday afternoon, and inevitably it would have been sunny – that false sense of security can be so cruel. Being five, I was more interested in running about like a maniac full of sugar and digesting potato, annoying all and sundry. No doubt my sisters were lobbing a Frisbee as close to the adults struggling with the trailer tent as they could.

   I have a feeling that my mum was at the end of her tether, no through any concrete memories but just the echoes I see of myself today. Looking at the young children we have in our house now, I can see how mind-bogglingly challenging it is to keep them in control. In holidays before this, I was apparently a terror, falling into a rock pool in Scotland, and trailing snot all down the back of mum’s trousers, fighting sleep, as she tried to catch up on the day. I can almost hear her now; ‘Shut up, Christopher! Go to sleep!’

   But once the tent was up, we were a happy family. We were so of a time, it seems incomprehensible to me. Looking at the photos from that period, we seemed slathered in a Britain past; Mum, with her chunky cardigans and frizzy perm. Uncle, looking like Richard O’ Sullivan, even down to the trunks he wore in the credits for Me and My Girl. My granddad, with the same white vest and brown slacks he owns today, studying the crossword in the paper. And there’s me, on a blanket on dying grass, grinning at myself.

   Aberaeron didn’t hold much in the way of kid’s entertainment, and what there was for adults consisted of a few pumps that would sluice up cheap alcohol. I remember us entering the local tavern, the Eurythmics belting out There Must Be An Angel Playing With My Heart. It’s only now I realise that it’s so vivid because everyone stopped talking to stare at us in silence.

   To tell you the truth, there’s not much more I remember, apart from frequent trips to the horribly stony beach, where my uncle, my sisters and I built a speedboat out of heavy rocks, and we’d all climb in and race along the waves, crashing ominously in front of us. Every day we’d go back, and every day we’d have to partly rebuild it again, but my uncle never got tired of doing it. I hope I’m as patient now I’m an uncle.

   But the one memory that makes this holiday so unique was what happened the night we left, and when I tell you we’d hardly reached the end of our first week, it might give you an inkling of what was to happen.

   It must have been a Thursday evening. It was raining (it always rained after a certain time when we were in that tent; it was compulsory), but this was biblical type rain. A year and a bit later, Michael Fish would be easing fears that we wouldn’t see this kind of weather.

   What happens next comes to me in a series of snapshots, as I didn’t know the full story until years later, when my Mum recounted it at a family do. My sisters and I were huddled into one of the cupboards in the tent, curled up and sleeping. Every so often we’d hear shouting, or a knocking, and wake up to see what had disturbed us.

   It turned out that the Irish Sea was kicking up a massive storm, blowing a near hurricane through the town and ripping the tent away from the trailer. The adults were taking it in turns to hold the tent over the trailer to shelter us, shouting to each other across the wind.

   After two hours of increasing windspeed, my family cut their losses and pulled what remained of the canvas inside, packed up as best they could, joined the trailer to the Lada and did a moonlight flit. Everybody but us kids was soaked to the skin – in particular, I remember my father driving down the motorway in just a pair of y-fronts. We stopped off at a service station on the border, where I accompanied my dad to the toilet and the shop. He bought me a packet of crisps with a dragon on the front – I’ve never forgotten the taste. I‘ve also never forgotten that he was dressed in nothing other than the aforementioned pants and my mother’s pink mohair cardigan with the chunky buttons.

   There have been great holidays, and bad holidays in the years since then, and now I’m in my twenties I’ve stopped going with my parents, because it’s just not the same. But I can assure you of this – no matter the location, the cost, or what I do, I’ll never have a holiday as memorable as that half-remembered, washed-out few days next to the beach where my speedboat still stands.