Travellers’ Tales 2: Another one Drives the Bus

In the last couple of years of the last century and the first couple of years of this, when the kids were still of primary school age, we went on a few camping holidays in France. We would take the car over on a ferry and bring it back with the kids’ feet up on cases of wine and boxes of French cheese.

Before I tell you what these holidays were like, let me tell you what they were NOT like. They were not like the camping holidays I had occasionally as a young fellow in Scotland, throwing up the tent in pouring rain, on a hillside with rocky soil which bent the metal pegs as you hammered them in with a half-brick found among the other rubbish which littered the site. Staying in a threadbare, khaki-coloured tent in which one might imagine, to quote the late Victoria Wood, that a scoutmaster had been arrested in 1956. Campsites with the most rudimentary of facilities, the lavatories in particular being horrifically disgusting. Putting on extra clothes to retire for the night, to keep out the cold.

These holidays were in hired tents that you didn’t have to put up yourself, great big things with separate sleeping chambers with beds in them, proper cookers and all the rest of it, on French campsites with decent facilities. It is true that these facilities invariably included the pissoir in full view of the world and his wife, but otherwise no complaints, and a quantum leap from the sort of camping I was used to from my youth.

On the first of these occasions, we were at a site in the Vendée, about half way down the Biscay coast, and our friends Clare and Alistair Tripp and their kids were staying at a neighbouring site, about fifteen minutes’ walk away. Sadly (desperately, bitterly, sadly), Clare is no longer with us. She was a great friend to Linda. Alistair and I used to refer to the two of them them as Edina and Patsy, as they were always up for mischief, almost on an AbFab scale, when they got together.

Anyway, one night we were all in the Tripps’ campsite bar, quaintly named ‘Le Pint Pot’, and there was karaoke. Linda and Clare put intolerable moral pressure on Alistair and myself to contribute to the entertainment. On looking through the options, I found that the only song available with which I was sufficiently familiar to attempt with any confidence was The House of the Rising Sun, a big hit for The Animals in the 1960’s. Because of the key in which the backing music played, I was compelled to either sing it in a reedy nasal whine, or attempt to reproduce Eric Burdon’s rasping bass. I decided to go for the latter, and I think it was a mistake. I didn’t exactly get the bird, but as PG Wodehouse said, I could feel the beating of its wings. Poor old Alistair gave the company the Right Said Fred number, Deeply Dippy.

Whatever life throws at you, you can always console yourself that you haven’t sung The House of the Rising Sun in Le Pint Pot, St Hillaire de Riez, Vendée, France.

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Our Tom was just a tiny little guy, still pre-school on the first two of these holidays. He managed to cause us some consternation a couple of times. Like Just William, he has always had the ability to make himself scarce without anyone quite knowing when exactly he left the company, and he once disappeared in Mont St Michel. This is a very busy tourist destination, and it was as populous as a cup final. I informed an official and she and I set off in search of him, with her walkie-talkie relaying sightings of him, first in the lower refectory, then in one of the upper chambers. We dashed through corridors and up and down stairs, and found him after only a few minutes, but they were a few minutes I do not want to relive.

On another occasion, he locked himself in the lavvy of a restaurant in Concarneau, and the man had to take the lock to bits with a screwdriver to let him out.

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A few years later, the Taiwan Ministry of Health invited me to speak to the first International Asian Conference on Cancer Screening, and with amazing generosity, funded not only myself, but all the family to come out to Taiwan for a week. After the two-day conference, the speakers, organisers, and their families if they wished, were taken on a bus tour down the east coast of Taiwan.

There was a tour guide who spoke English, and indeed was quite loquacious, but with an idiosyncratic turn of phrase. When we visited a village with a traditional flooded rice paddy round it, she was describing the civil engineering convention whereby the village's sewage fed into the paddy fields, providing nourishing manure for the crop. Her exact words were, ‘And the piss and shit fall down and the rice grow big and strong.’

We spent a lot of time on the bus, and it could have been a bit tedious, especially for the children, but the bus had a karaoke system. Once again, I was called upon to do my stuff, and I gave them Danny Boy, and the Platters’ hit, Only You. Professor Wang regaled us with King of the Road, and it was interesting to hear how he negotiated the alveolar consonants in ‘Trailer for sale or rent…’ Professor Wang was also a card sharp of considerable dexterity, and he kept the kids amused with very impressive magic tricks.

Towards evening on the first day, the tour guide told us a joke, as part of some banter with the bus driver. It essentially went as follows: a priest prayed to God, ‘Dear God, please give me a break. I live in this dark, windowless hovel with a stone floor and the bus driver seems to have a much better life than me, living in a big comfortable house with a lot of windows and so on.’ And God said in reply, ‘That is because when you are praying, everyone is sleeping. But when the bus driver is driving, everyone is praying.’

I felt sure that was the wrong punch line. In my view, the conclusion should have been God saying, ‘That big thing with the windows isn’t his house. It’s the bus.’           

Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan, now sadly diminished by climate change