Holidays At Grandma’s

A Memory of Felixstowe.

Memories are the garnish of our later years...

During my extreme youth, the closest we ever got to a summer holiday was a week spent with our maternal grandparents. My father would trundle us through to their near-seaside town in the family car; a vehicle of indeterminate age that he had lovingly restored, but to which he had never added a rear floor. We could see the ground whistle by beneath us as we hurtled along and my siblings balanced their feet on a single plank, slightly narrower than the chasm below.
Seat belts and child safety seats had not yet been invented, so I, the youngest, would be propped up on the back seat; my personal space (an invention of the distant future) invaded by suitcases and sundry luggage so that I didn’t fall through the gaps. At four, I could hardly be trusted not to let a foot slide through beside the plank.
On long journeys, I would be expected to yell “I feel sick” in plenty of time, so that my father could pull the car over onto the verge, halt, get out and remove all this extraneous packaging so that I could climb over into the front of the car and get out before throwing up. Ha! Ha! Ha! Get real...
Any parent unfortunate enough to have learnt the true meaning of the phrase ‘projectile vomiting’ will understand that because I suffered from carsickness, I was not a popular motoring companion. My family was not keen to travel anywhere with me, and that made my parents’ regularly impecunious state hardly an issue where holidays away were concerned.

Unwelcome relations
My father would unceremoniously deposit mother and two girl children (my brother was already at a boarding school from which he seldom seemed to emerge, since there were all sort of holiday activities for boy-child edification, arranged by Duke and country) with all our various luggage, on the pavement outside my mothers’ childhood home, give my mother a tight-lipped peck on the cheek, tell us he would: “See you next week”, get back into the car and drive off.
I never really questioned this strange behaviour until I was in my teens, by which time my older siblings had explained that the deep (and enduring) love my parents felt for each other was not replicated in the generation ahead, on either side of the family. It was a sad fact, it seemed, that my South African father’s mother (his father had died when he was in his teens) thought my mother an inferior being; lacking in style and gentility and certainly not good enough for her little darling.
Since my mother’s father was mayor of the town in which they lived, this censure appears, even now, to be somewhat flawed. My mother was, in fact, very ‘jolly hockey sticks’ and able to mix comfortably and entertainingly with virtually anyone to whom she was introduced. She was, though, incredibly lacking in vanity and I never saw her use a facial product other than lipstick and “A dab of powder, to take the shine off my nose.” Her moisturiser of choice was a popular hand cream and was cheap. This apparently led her mother-in-law to believe that ‘refinement’ had passed her by.
My mother’s parents, on the other hand, had apparently destroyed all the letters written by both of my parents, to each other, while they were courting. This had increased their young desire to make a life together, to the point where my mother ran away from home and refused to speak to them for several years. They had married without parental consent; set forever to lie contentedly in the twin beds they had made.

Generational compensation
By the time the last of her three children was growing up, my mother had obviously decided that
there is no hell quite like two warring daughters moping around the house all summer long and had made an uneasy peace with her parents, hence the annual, week-long visit that culminated in five days at the nearby seaside. They had still not come to terms with my father.
My sister, at eight, was fairly large and lumpy, while I, four years her junior was, to all intents and purposes, a spoilt brat who spent most of my time in tears. I might not yet have reached the lumpy stage (it came with time), but neither of us was particularly prepossessing and I can imagine that my grandparents must have suffered us with great fortitude. It probably took them all year to get over us!
We had never encountered the ‘silver’, a toast rack, salads or separate towels for each family member. Our young lives revolved around baked beans on toast, worn grey serge (that had been made over by hand by my mother to fit each successive child) and handed down boys’ pyjamas.
My regular, particular memory of my youth involved me sitting over an unfinished supper until it congealed on my plate, with my parents refusing to let me go to bed until I had finished it. I seldom did and was used to greeting most mornings with the same plateful shoved unceremoniously in front of me, only escaped eventually because schooling was compulsory. Life, in general, was not a snapping, crackling bowl of Coco Pops!

Rarefied culture
The rarefied atmosphere of my grandparent’s home was extremely intimidating. We grew up in a series of RAF houses, each of which had the same of everything. The house in England was a perfect replica of the one we had previously occupied in Scotland. They were the same design, had the same curtains, cutlery, crockery and sofa (in various states of wear). What’s more, all the friends living around us occupied identical houses, the only difference being the mirror imaging of semi-detachment.
My grandparents did things differently, had imposing furniture with floral, Sanderson linen slipcovers and a house in which I regularly got lost! The ceilings slanted towards the eaves. There was a silver salver in the hallway, where the outgoing and incoming post was left each day. No wonder it had been so easy to stifle young love.
We breakfasted together around a dining table, in a civilised group, where my sister could no longer get away with an after-meal grace of: “ForwhatwehavereceivedmaytheLordmakeustruly-thankfulAmen” (as she slid to the floor from a very high chair that would now be termed a ‘bar stool’, in our own RAF breakfast nook). Everything was far more gracious, more ordered, at Grandma’s. In hindsight, I imagine that that week of the year was no more comfortable for my mother than the other fifty-one. We must have shamed her horribly.

Beach days
After breakfast, we would collect our swimming costumes and congregate next to the car, female adults with picnic baskets, the makings for endless cups of tea and the odd sun hat. Granddad was big, bluff and hearty, with the sort of barrel chest that made his mayoral chain pale to insignificance, on those occasions it was worn. He would carry his briefcase and the newspaper, drive to his office, and allow my mother to slide into the seat he had just vacated to take us off to the seaside.
The journey took us past endless fields of acid-yellow flowering mustard and ripening, golden corn. The edges of the cornfields were scattered with bright, red poppies and massed, royal blue cornflowers, an enchanting sight. At least Granddad’s car (which had a moveable armrest between the two front seats; the height of luxury to a four-year-old) also had back windows that opened to allow me easy access to fresh air whenever I felt nauseous.
The first sight of the beach engendered great excitement. It looked so picture-perfect, with its neat row of brightly coloured bathing chalets, each with four neat, wooden steps down to the beach. The beach...well the beach was not such fun. Most English beaches and sand are not familiar with each other.
Instead, they are generally made up of large pebbles, which, although worn smooth by the ocean, are not easy to walk on and scrape the skin off any bodily area with which they come into contact. The water was freezing; modern pesticides had not yet eradicated obnoxious flies and bees in their buzzing hordes, the occasional ice cream would not stay in its cone until I had time to eat it and the waves were huge and desperately frightening because (dare I admit it) I could not yet swim.

Swimming lessons
My mother was a gym mistress and her greatest disappointment in life was probably bearing three children who showed no particular affection for sport. Having nurtured easier relationships with her beloved son and the middle child (my sister), she had somehow managed to get them off to water-safe starts.
I was different, difficult and absolutely useless in the water. She would hold me up with one hand as I lay (snivelling) in the water on my tummy. Just as she exhorted me to put my face in the water straighten out and “Kick,” a wave would bash me off that life-saving hand. Little did I know that she was a good enough swimmer for both of us...she did not swim for pleasure; simply to dutifully teach me. And the sad fact is; I trusted her not one whit!
Swimming lessons invariably ended with her shouting impatiently and me screaming blue murder as she stomped off for yet another cup of lifesaving, sanity-reviving tea, whilst I discovered (once my sobs had reduced to audible, punctuated, snotty sniffs) that there is not much to entertain oneself on a beach with no sand and with water one is too scared and too cold to brave.

The obligatory nap
Each year, that week would be reduced to five, hot, scratchy, sunburned days of unutterable boredom, with no books to read, a crotchety mother and a disapproving grandmother. A school friend of my mother’s would join us at the beach, with her two children, both similar in age to my sister. She had company; I had none. Holidays, it seemed, left much to be desired.
We ate cold spam (tinned meat of indeterminate origin), lettuce and quartered tomatoes every day for lunch and drank milk (a big treat in still-rationed UK) for morning and afternoon tea. If I was miserable enough, I was forced to lie down on a bathing-hut bunk and sleep; a virtual impossibility with three grown women gossiping around me and a many generations of damp sand layering the covered coir slab beneath me.
I probably whined more on holiday than I did at home, a record it was considered hard to beat. We washed ourselves clean at a tap before entering the sanctum of Granddad’s fine car and returning to pick up the patriarch from his office, every afternoon.

Saving graces
The best time of the day, in fact, was evening. My grandparents had a glorious back garden, long and narrow, in the style of most suburban English plots. As they had aged, they had allowed more and more of the garden to grow wild, only cultivating a narrow flower border and a rose garden near the house, with a circle of lawn beyond that. Behind the lawn and the tool shed, was a wondrous secret, overgrown field where I could hide and repair my emotional wounds.
The only supper I was ever offered at Grandma’s was two Ryvita biscuits sandwiched together with butter. This I was allowed to take into the garden before I bathed and went to bed. Clearly, the entire household was, by then, so fed up with me, that they hoped I might get lost or kidnapped by the fairies at the bottom of the garden!
For an hour every evening, until I heard my name called, my holiday was perfect...until I could wait with glorious anticipation in the driveway, next to an untidy stack of family luggage, for my darling Daddy to chug around the corner again.

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