Family Holidays at Home and Abroad

Imogen has been back at school for a couple of weeks and we are already drowning in projects, homework and deadlines. There appears to be no gentle start to the school year. I can recall it being very different..... For at least a week we worked on the one simple assignment - a written piece with drawings that had the tittle 'What I Did On My Summer Holidays'. If you were fortunate enough to be from a relatively rich family you had much more material to work with:- A trip to relatives, a day at a fair or a week away somewhere. If you were a poor kid you either had to develop a good imagination or you had to use lots of descriptive words to make hanging out in the street with the boy across the road sound appealing.
Some teachers used this kind of assignment to make every Monday pass quietly..... You would arrive at your desk on Monday to find your journal. Here you would write under the heading 'What I Did At The Weekend'. The poor kids were still penalized. I remember my brother being astonished when an account of his weekend was changed beyond all recognition. He had asked for help with the spelling of the word RUSSIA. As he had difficulty with the R-sound the teacher thought he said WASHER. Adam then wrote about a trip to the cinema to see the film 'From Washer With Love'. At the time his writing abilities were lacking and a journal entry could resemble a series of random letters and spaces rather than an actual sentence. This journal entry had been corrected so that the trip to the cinema became an account of a repair being carried out on the washing machine. I am sure this incident has affected him deeply - he has never written about James Bond films again.
My parents did a fine job of providing me with material to write about in my journals (I'm still able to write about it after all these years). My father specialized in taking my brother and I to places where no English schoolchild had ever been before. Although we begged and begged for the spring-break meccas of Spain there were to be no wet tee shirt contests on the Costa-Del-Sol for us. Instead we travelled through Scandinavia in the family car which had to be air-lifted to Oslo or we visited friends in remote parts of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria that my father had known as a student. We travelled to places that had no guide books,translatable menus, credit card machines or souvenirs. Gift buying for friends was always a nightmare. Fortunately my mother was always able to find menthol cigarettes and cold cocktails. You could make up what ever you wanted about these places in your back-to-school writing assignment because nobody had ever been there to dispute your stories. And we never had any spelling corrections from the names of towns because nobody had ever heard of them.
As my own family grew up we tried to plan holidays that struck a balance. We wanted to give the children some exciting experiences but we also wanted some good old fashioned fun and there is no place better to find this kind of fun than the Southwest of England. Devon and Cornwall will provide a family with lovely beaches, many good hotels and the chance to wear anoraks for at least five days in a row. The good old fashioned fun has to be found whilst you are freezing cold on a beach and your hotel room is draped with wet clothes. You can not rely on English weather.
One summer we went to stay at the Headland Hotel in Newquay, Cornwall. This is a deluxe hotel that sits on the cliffs overlooking Newquay which is Britain's surfing capital. It is a huge place built in 1900 it has history,views, children's programs and a very grumpy owner. It is where they filmed 'Witches' the Roald Dahl story. When we were there only some of the rooms had been renovated, very few guests were staying there and we were all able to drink together in the hotel bar prior to the evening meal. We exchanged stories of our days and offered to lend each other dry clothes when family supplies were running low.
On one fine day the men from two of the families who were staying at the Headland took all the children for a day of mackerel fishing. The young Mum's were left to sunbathe in peace all day long by the pool. Between the sun loungers there was an ice-bucket on a stand which held a bottle of Blue Nun Liebfraumilch. This was indeed the height of luxury. Those women were the envy of the rest of us as we sat in the sand building sand castles and drank warm coke. The fishermen returned at the end of the day with not only tales of the large one that got away but strings of mackerel. There must have been fifty of these very oily, strongly-flavored fish. They were kissed and hugged by tipsy wives and congratulated by the rest of us. The hotel agreed to cook all these fish for breakfast the next morning so that we could all enjoy this Cornish fayre. We all enjoyed the breakfast and brought the men pints of beer in the bar that evening only to find out that the whole thing had been a complete scam. The day's fishing had been disastrous, they had felt not even a nibble. Not wishing to be thought lacking by anyone back at the hotel they had pulled into the local fish market on the way home and purchased all the mackerel they had to offer. They discarded the plastic bags, strung the fish onto a line and bribed the children to insure their silence. They marched home to a heroes welcome. I can not remember if we asked for our pints of beer back when we learnt the truth.