In Good Company: When There Are Grey Skies
The skies were grey, but Enid Blackburn's thoughts were on a holiday in the Isle of Wight.
The skies are grey and the gardens look washed out yet I find this a hopefully exhilarating time of year.
There’s a lot of work to be done in that favourite armchair. Gardeners can fill their pipes and browse through the growing manuals. Scholars can pause before the shock of their mock-exam results. Lady bowlers can contemplate intriguing new ways of camouflaging their bulges, and our holiday deposit is on its way to the Isle of Wight.
Before long I shall be able to start all my days with a copy of the holiday promises propped up against the coffee pot. I am a sucker for the brochure prophecies. ‘Wonderful unrivalled views,’ ‘heated throughout,’ ‘nestling under a cliff,’ are all guaranteed to set me reaching for a stamp. Somehow I never work up the same interest in the foreign brochures, the photos all look alike to me. Open any page whether it is Ibiza, Malta or Portugal, you see the same tall white blocks set against turquoise sky with a swimming pool or two featured in the foreground. Even the swimmers look identical.
When I was young we never pored over brochures. Until we saw the tip of Blackpool Tower sail into the top corner of our train window, we lived on our memories from the previous year. We did not have to wonder what sort of bed and board awaited us, every year we visited the same digs, a homely board residence tucked between a row of look-alike doors and windows on a narrow back street.
Every morning we had a long bout of spade trailing before we reached the prom end of Lytham Road, and our daily ride through ‘Fairyland,’ a child’s delight of illuminated clockwork elves and fairies at two old pennies a time. By the time we had crossed the tramlines and queued for deck chairs – it was usually dinnertime.
Since I had my family, we have often holidayed in sea-front cottages. You, the children, beach gear and food can be on the sands for 8.30. Dinner can seem a painfully long way off – sometimes. When we do discover the idyllic we are reluctant to part. When all the family went along, we couldn’t stop going to the Pembrokeshire coast. In the same way we never face the disastrous twice. At the moment Rhyl, Bridlington and Devon are off our list.
Rhyl – because we discovered our ‘superb luxury flat’ was as desirable as our rabbit hutch. Brid made our son bawl for a week. We blamed it on Bridlington anyway, that and our landlady’s face. She could do frown and disgust, but she had never mastered smiling.
Devon was a great disappointment after Wales. Our ‘sea view’ also included a railway line, go-kart circuit and caravan site.
Being able to holiday early and late season is an advantage we often share with pensioners. One such lady kept me on my toes for a week when we stayed in adjacent caravans at Lydstep Haven. Every morning I watched her brush out her hair rollers and powder her nose before the early toilet trip. Me, the original ‘Woman in a dressing gown,’ was still trying to gather enough co-ordination to plug the kettle in.
By the time I looked fit to face my public she was already pegging out her smalls. When her husband emerged at mid-day, shopping was completed, and a delicious smelling lunch was on the table. A picnic tea, which they liked to eat on the headland above the bay, was packed in the boot followed by a stroll to the pub, then a coastal breather hand in hand, and so to bed. This is one vital ingredient holiday brochures leave out – a good mate.
