Family Holidays 1 – Caravans
If the smiles in the snapshots are any indication then our family holidays, at least when I was a plump baby or chubby toddler, were pretty jolly affairs. In various different mediums; black & white, Polaroid and faded technicolour, the family pose happily against various backdrops; sandy beach, pebbly beach, forest or mountain. All in exotic foreign locations; Spain, Italy, Switzerland, the Isle of Man, Largs.
Then, at some point in the 1970s, possibly not unconnected to my growing ganglyness and hence my growing unsuitability for stuffing into overhead lockers to save the price of a seat, we started to take holidays in England.
I suspect that my parents were actually trying to toughen us up. Worried that all that sunshine, sand, fun and the relaxed attitude of foreigners to the serving of wine with dinner to the under tens, Mum and Dad decided that the ideal holiday destination for us was the 1950s.
Time travel technology not being available they decided on the next best thing – caravan holidays.
Today, anyone misguided enough to collect a handful of Sun tokens to put towards their £1 weekend break in a caravan park will probably have the image of a modern static caravan with microwave, sky telly, carpets and a mains toilet.
Well forget that. We’re talking 1970s here. The static caravan was basically a big beige tupperwear box. Kitchen utilities were limited to a stove with two settings: ‘keep cool’ and ‘incinerate’. Excitement was whatever back issues of Commando comic you had remembered to bring along and what porn you could forage around the site and the flooring was one of two colours – dung flecked with fly-shit black, or green faded to dung flecked with fly-shit black. The telly was black and white and there were large notices forbidding the use of chip pans.
I occasionally wonder if dad had some contact at the Met office though, because the holidays we took were blessed with the kind of weather normally associated with places called ‘The Devils Anvil’ in Spanish. Great for the beach and sales of camomile lotion, which I was ritually slathered in every night as my sunburned skin popped blisters like bubble-wrap, it turned the interior of the caravan into something resembling that sweat-box Alec Guinness stumbled out of in ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’.
What effect such heat would have had on an interior toilet Christ alone knows. Luckily, that was one worry we did not have, because in the 1970s an inside toilet was an optional extra in a caravan just as it was a luxury in a 1950s house. Instead we had the ‘toilet block’, a truly ghastly structure of rotting concrete that, even when the weather was turning the countryside as brown as the caravans themselves, remained damp.
While most of my specific holiday memories are blurred and, appropriately, faded as an photograph left in the sun, three caravanning occasions do stand out.
Devon, 1975. Sun, sea, sand, buckets and spades. I spend the days investigating rock pools and the nights caked in camomile lotion, gently radiating the same amount of heat as a three bar electric fire. I can’t recall if it was a rare dull day or a family excursion for the hell of it, but we went to Torquay cinema to see…Jaws.
Now I’m not sure if this actually counts as abuse, but taking a kid not yet out of short trousers to see that film while on a seaside holiday had a pretty profound effect. The benefit of not being out of shorts was that it was a lot quicker to soak them with your own piss in fear at the thought of ever going near the surf again. After a day of scanning even the rock pools for fins, my parents showed a masterly understanding of psychology and bought me a rubber shark of my very own. Some might say it was the ability to show control of the totem of the thing I feared that got me swimming again, I say it was so I could re-enact the scene where Robert Shaw gets eaten with my new shark and old Action man.
The Lake District 1979. My older brother tolerates my staying up with him to watch, on the B&W telly the B&W movie ‘Night of the Demon’. This is still just about my favourite horror film, mainly because you don’t actually see much of the demon, it’s all suspense and suggestion. My younger self though, was terrified, especially at the thought of something lurking…between the caravan and the toilet block. That’s right, no loo in the caravan.
I was too scared to own up to needing to visit the toilet block. Even when promised use of a torch. Frankly, you could have put a fucking tommy gun in my and not got me out there. God knows it wasn’t anything as mundane as peados and wierdos I was worried about (the kids back then on the caravan park were gargoyles, all scabs and snot – you’d have to be a sicko indeed to go after one), it was a sixty foot fucking fire demon. But my bladder kept me awake, giving me more time to get wound up, until I hit on a cunning solution.
What I learned was this – peeing into a plastic basin in the dead of night in a tiny bedroom in a silent caravan sounds like a fucking roll on a snare drum at the Last Night of the Proms. It almost drowned the noise of my brother laughing in the next room.
Great Yarmouth, 1982. An enormous caravan site, so big it had rough neigbourhoods. The attractions of the beach, the site pool and the many delights of the town were as nothing compared to my chief delight – haunting the arcade and thumbing my pocket money ten pence at a time into the Star Wars arcade game – the one with the wire graphics where you actually got to sit in the cabinet and pretend you were in an X Wing.
Years later I played Star Wars Rogue Leader on the gamecube. The graphics are astonishing, the sound fantastic but…where’s the cabinet, the smell of sea and sweaty kids high on chips, rock and candyfloss and where oh where is the slot for the ten pences that, in comparison with the coin today, were like manhole covers?
Then, at some point in the 1970s, possibly not unconnected to my growing ganglyness and hence my growing unsuitability for stuffing into overhead lockers to save the price of a seat, we started to take holidays in England.
I suspect that my parents were actually trying to toughen us up. Worried that all that sunshine, sand, fun and the relaxed attitude of foreigners to the serving of wine with dinner to the under tens, Mum and Dad decided that the ideal holiday destination for us was the 1950s.
Time travel technology not being available they decided on the next best thing – caravan holidays.
Today, anyone misguided enough to collect a handful of Sun tokens to put towards their £1 weekend break in a caravan park will probably have the image of a modern static caravan with microwave, sky telly, carpets and a mains toilet.
Well forget that. We’re talking 1970s here. The static caravan was basically a big beige tupperwear box. Kitchen utilities were limited to a stove with two settings: ‘keep cool’ and ‘incinerate’. Excitement was whatever back issues of Commando comic you had remembered to bring along and what porn you could forage around the site and the flooring was one of two colours – dung flecked with fly-shit black, or green faded to dung flecked with fly-shit black. The telly was black and white and there were large notices forbidding the use of chip pans.
I occasionally wonder if dad had some contact at the Met office though, because the holidays we took were blessed with the kind of weather normally associated with places called ‘The Devils Anvil’ in Spanish. Great for the beach and sales of camomile lotion, which I was ritually slathered in every night as my sunburned skin popped blisters like bubble-wrap, it turned the interior of the caravan into something resembling that sweat-box Alec Guinness stumbled out of in ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’.
What effect such heat would have had on an interior toilet Christ alone knows. Luckily, that was one worry we did not have, because in the 1970s an inside toilet was an optional extra in a caravan just as it was a luxury in a 1950s house. Instead we had the ‘toilet block’, a truly ghastly structure of rotting concrete that, even when the weather was turning the countryside as brown as the caravans themselves, remained damp.
While most of my specific holiday memories are blurred and, appropriately, faded as an photograph left in the sun, three caravanning occasions do stand out.
Devon, 1975. Sun, sea, sand, buckets and spades. I spend the days investigating rock pools and the nights caked in camomile lotion, gently radiating the same amount of heat as a three bar electric fire. I can’t recall if it was a rare dull day or a family excursion for the hell of it, but we went to Torquay cinema to see…Jaws.
Now I’m not sure if this actually counts as abuse, but taking a kid not yet out of short trousers to see that film while on a seaside holiday had a pretty profound effect. The benefit of not being out of shorts was that it was a lot quicker to soak them with your own piss in fear at the thought of ever going near the surf again. After a day of scanning even the rock pools for fins, my parents showed a masterly understanding of psychology and bought me a rubber shark of my very own. Some might say it was the ability to show control of the totem of the thing I feared that got me swimming again, I say it was so I could re-enact the scene where Robert Shaw gets eaten with my new shark and old Action man.
The Lake District 1979. My older brother tolerates my staying up with him to watch, on the B&W telly the B&W movie ‘Night of the Demon’. This is still just about my favourite horror film, mainly because you don’t actually see much of the demon, it’s all suspense and suggestion. My younger self though, was terrified, especially at the thought of something lurking…between the caravan and the toilet block. That’s right, no loo in the caravan.
I was too scared to own up to needing to visit the toilet block. Even when promised use of a torch. Frankly, you could have put a fucking tommy gun in my and not got me out there. God knows it wasn’t anything as mundane as peados and wierdos I was worried about (the kids back then on the caravan park were gargoyles, all scabs and snot – you’d have to be a sicko indeed to go after one), it was a sixty foot fucking fire demon. But my bladder kept me awake, giving me more time to get wound up, until I hit on a cunning solution.
What I learned was this – peeing into a plastic basin in the dead of night in a tiny bedroom in a silent caravan sounds like a fucking roll on a snare drum at the Last Night of the Proms. It almost drowned the noise of my brother laughing in the next room.
Great Yarmouth, 1982. An enormous caravan site, so big it had rough neigbourhoods. The attractions of the beach, the site pool and the many delights of the town were as nothing compared to my chief delight – haunting the arcade and thumbing my pocket money ten pence at a time into the Star Wars arcade game – the one with the wire graphics where you actually got to sit in the cabinet and pretend you were in an X Wing.
Years later I played Star Wars Rogue Leader on the gamecube. The graphics are astonishing, the sound fantastic but…where’s the cabinet, the smell of sea and sweaty kids high on chips, rock and candyfloss and where oh where is the slot for the ten pences that, in comparison with the coin today, were like manhole covers?
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