The end of a childhood holiday. The cases packed with almost as much sand as clothing. The sticks of rock for neighbours and mates, rattling in the car boot like artistic representations of rhubarb or celery. The bruise on the knee; there’s always a bruise somewhere from a childhood holiday. The wistful glance at the sea, glancing back, mirrored.
And once, in the early 1960s, the sudden change of mind. My mother and dad and me and my brother had been for a week in Bridlington. I’d bought a toy robot that shuffled along and my knee-bruise was from a sudden trip on a side street looking for a comic shop we all had a vague memory of but never found. We were about to get in the car when my dad, for reasons I can never explain, decided that we could stay another two days. This was a quieter era before smartphones of course, so he couldn’t have got a message from the office saying he wasn’t needed for a while.
Somehow, I decided years later, he must have known beforehand that we could stay longer but had been undecided about staying on until the last minute. The forecast must have been good, or maybe the prospect of the office was bad.
We all sat in the car, unsure of what to do next. We’d emptied the caravan we’d rented and tidied it up and we were just about to go to the office and hand in the key. My dad said, ‘I’ll just ask if we can stay a bit longer. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
We drove to the office. The morning sun shone with uncomplicated promise. The bruise on my knee seemed to be fading. My dad went into the office and seemed to be gone a long time, long enough for the bruise to fade even more. My mother looked at her face in the vanity mirror on the sunshield and added more lipstick. My brother stared into the North Yorkshire air.
My dad came out of the office looking disappointed but hopeful, which is perhaps a look we should all carry throughout our lives. ‘We can’t go back to that caravan, it’s booked out to a family from Kidderminster,’ he said. I don’t know why he or any of us thought the Kidderminster detail was important, but we did. ‘But the man says we can have another caravan. I’ve got the key here.’ He held up the key and it shone in the sun. I bet the Kidderminster Usurpers didn’t have a shiny key. ‘He says it’s a bit small but we’ll all fit in no bother.’
The caravan was at the edge of the field and it looked like a toy one or one that you might use in the reconstruction of a crime scene. ‘Small’ seems too long a word to describe the caravan; the key was almost bigger than the door.
My dad opened the door and the caravan interior did the opposite of looming. Renaissance artists living in this caravan would have had difficulty portraying perspective or light as it appeared to have neither. ‘It’ll be fine,’ my dad said breezily, as he squeezed through the door like a giant in an animated film. We followed him in and stood very close to each other in the kitchenette which was more of a kitchenetteette. We were so close we were almost standing behind each other even though we were standing beside each other. We went into the living area and my dad pointed out a bed that seemed to be crouching in the corner of the ceiling like a spider. ‘That’ll be where you sleep,’ my dad said. He pointed to a narrow strip of fabric under a window. ‘That’s a settee and it can also be your bed,’ he said to my brother, who looked unimpressed. ‘We’ll go in here,’ he went on, opening the door to a bedroom from a doll’s house.
My dad thought it would be OK. My brother said he wished he’d brought a cat to see if he could swing it. My mother wasn’t sure. I climbed into the bed and although it was a really tight squeeze because I was a fat lad (what my mother called ‘stiffish’), I quite liked it. Earlier in the summer, goaded on by my mates Keith and Geoff, I’d managed to climb into a rabbit hutch and tell the lads it was quite comfortable in there. At least, it was until they locked the door and went home to watch Fireball XL5 and I started to blubber and my mother had to come and liberate me. This bed felt a bit like that but without the lock and the tiny cannonballs of rabbit poo.
‘It’s too small,’ my mother said, really just articulating what the rest of us knew all along. Half of me, at least half of me, wanted to stay. My brother looked relieved, or he would have done if there’d been enough space in the caravan to arrange his features into a relieved look.
My dad said he’d take the key back and we trudged to the car. The holiday was really over now. I started to cry because I felt that, with a bit of give and take and a lot of breathing in, we could have managed.
My dad disappeared into the camp office and, again, was gone for quite a long time. I sobbed quietly. My dad reached into his pocket and flourished a magnet, one of those traditional magnet-shaped ones, and gave it to me. ‘I know you wanted to stay but here’s a magnet from the camp shop,’ he said. An unusual but effective sentence as it stopped my crying. All the way home I kept using the magnet to pick up a paper clip that my dad had found in his pocket. ‘Little things please little minds,’ my brother said. He was right.
Years later I visited Kidderminster and was convinced that some of the people I passed must have been the family that took our caravan. I wished I’d got a magnet to pull the buttons off their coats and the grips out of their hair. Some bruises never fade.