Sea  tractor, Burgh Island

What I Did on my Holidays

We returned from our holiday on Sunday. We had a lovely time and indeed I felt quite tearful at coming back to routine life. We had two days in Bath, two days in Burgh Island, Devon, a night at my sister Kath’s in Bognor and then three days in Chichester, with both sons joining us. You couldn’t ask for more.

I won’t bore you with a diary of our activities, but I will say that Burgh Island is quite an experience. The Burgh Island Hotel is a small and luxurious place with impressive 1920’s Art Deco fittings. It is situated on a lump of land which can be reached by walking across the sand when the tide is low, but is an island when the tide is high. During the latter periods, the hotel provides transport in the form of a sea tractor. It has been used as a location in many film and television pieces, but is perhaps most famous for the filming of Evil Under the Sun, with David Suchet turning in the usual magnificent performance as Hercule Poirot. It is an appropriate location, since Agatha Christie had stayed at the hotel on occasion, and apparently had the inspiration for several of her novels there, including And Then There Were None (originally entitled Ten Little Niggers in less enlightened times).

It was also the location for the denouement of Catch Us if You Can, a film shot in black and white in the nineteen-sixties, starring and featuring the music of The Dave Clark Five. This film is about a stuntman and a glamorous model who play truant from an advertising shoot, pinching a Jaguar and driving away, with the advertising Svengali figure supposedly in pursuit. It is a road movie, charting the fugitives’ journey from London down to Devon and meeting some strange characters and events on the way. It is not a jolly romp like A Hard Day’s Night, and at the rather poignant end, the young couple are parted, with the sinister advertising eminence winning the day.

But never mind about that now. It got me thinking about some holidays in the past.

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I may have mentioned in a previous blog that we had a series of marvellous family holidays in 2007. One of these was a few days in a rented flat in a cul-de-sac in Warkworth, a picturesque and historic village on the river Coquet in Northumberland. We had just come from a family wedding up in Scotland, and now there were just the four of us, Linda, myself and the two boys, then aged eleven and thirteen, a mile from the beautiful Northumberland coast in this rather prim and proper village.

Before I continue, I should say something that I feel a bit shy about, having recently undergone training at work in unconscious bias and in equality, diversity and inclusion. I realise it is an unfair generalisation, but I have noticed over the course of my life that Scottish women seem to have an impressive capacity for indignation and disapproval. This becomes relevant later.

We arrived in Warkworth on a Sunday evening. The instructions for the flat we had rented said that parking was available in the cul-de-sac, and seeing no prohibitive signs to the contrary, I parked our Ford Mondeo (a sort of civilian version of the Chieftain Tank) in the close.

The next morning, we were eating breakfast when there was someone hammering at the door. A little, officious-looking chap stood on the doorstep.

‘Is that your grey car in the close?’ was his morning greeting. He wasn’t your stereotype of a Geordie with an impenetrable accent and an egalitarian outlook. His voice connoted southern privilege.

‘Yes, the Ford,’ I replied.

‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to move it. The parking in the close is for residents only.’

‘Oh is it?’ I replied, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see the sign. Where is it?’

‘There isn’t a sign,’ he blustered, ‘But it is understood that the parking in the close is for residents only.’

‘Really?’ I maintained a friendly but surprised tone, ‘When we hired this place, we were told that whoever was staying in this flat could park in the close.’

‘No,’ insisted my new friend, ‘That does not apply to temporary residents or people on holiday.’

‘Really?’ my conversation was not at it most exuberant.

I thought, shall I argue the toss? But then I thought, we are here for a week’s holiday. We don’t want to spend it tiptoeing around people I have told to go and **** themselves. So I said, ‘OK, later this morning I’ll move the car.’

‘Thank you very much,’ he said, ‘No hurry, as long as you move it today.’

He took his departure. When he had gone, I regretted that I had omitted to say something else to him. Strangely, it wasn’t, ‘Away ye go and bile yer heid.’ What I felt I should have said to him was, ‘By God, mate, you’re lucky it wasn’t one of my sisters who answered the door to you.’

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Earlier in 2007, in what we used to call Holy Week, we joined a major extended family holiday in the Peak District. We were staying in a little house in the village of Hope, and various of my siblings, their kids and partners were staying in rented farm premises above the village on the slopes of Win Hill Pike. We could see their house from our back garden, but it was a good half hour’s walk there. We had numerous lovely walks that week, and hilarious post-walk meals and drinks, made more fun by the large numbers of relatives and friends. I think when we walked the Mam Tor horseshoe, there were eighteen of us plus a dog.

At one point, Linda, myself and the boys went to an outdoor gear shop, I can’t remember what for, but when we came back we pretended to the rest of the gang that we had met James Taylor in the shop, where he was buying a woolly hat. This received more credulity than it deserved because they all knew that James Taylor was scheduled to perform in the Oval Hall, Sheffield, in a few weeks, and my son Bill and I had tickets (another treasured memory that I might tell you about another time). It caused some consternation when we admitted that we had made it up.

But that was another lovely holiday. Unusually for Easter week in the Peaks, there was glorious sunshine for six out of seven days. We had some marvellous walks: Win Hill Pike, Kinder Scout, Stanage Edge, Froggatt Edge… One of the first ghost stories I ever had published (Changed Upon the Blue Guitar: in Tales the Hollow Bunnies Tell, edited by Kevin Hillman, excellent value from Amazon) was inspired by that holiday. I also wrote a poem about it. It is a bit of doggerel, but I think it captures the mood.

Hope Valley, Easter 2007

Brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles

Walk the loop, eight miles all told.

Sunlit hills over Hope and Edale,

Green and azure, afternoon gold.

 

Sitting in the garden in the Woodroffe Arms,

Two generations drink beers and eat ice cream.

Circling and protective, the hills cluster round.

Safe in the valley now, stretch out your feet and dream.

 

Brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles,

On Kinder Scout, in strength and mirth,

Where years ago in mass trespass

The people took back English earth.

 

Sitting having dinner in the Cheshire Cheese

The teens and the twenties are rowdy, throwing chips.

Outside, the darkness descends on the valley,

Outside, the mist starts to cluster in the dips.

 

Brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles

See the world from wood and hill.

Stanage Edge and Froggatt Edge,

Church and farm and watermill.

 

Sitting in the car, back to work and home.

Goodbye to brothers, sisters, hilarity and cheer.

Aunties and uncles, nephews and nieces,

Go forth in peace, Jerusalem next year.

 

                                         

                                            The Pilchard Inn, Burgh Island