One of my dad’s great joys when we went on our holidays to the coast in the 1960s was to send off for a route map from the AA. This was in the days when, as far as our family was concerned, the AA was as much a vital part of the social fabric as the BBC or the NHS. It was the days when people still saluted the AA man as he drove by on his motorbike.
The route map would arrive a few weeks before the trip and my dad would spend ages planning the trip with the AA map open on the table next to at least one atlas and maybe an Ordnance Survey map or two so that he looked like he was plotting a military operation. I guess in some ways he was, because he had been in the Royal Navy for many years and had served in the Second World War. In 1965 we were only twenty years after the ceasefire and the conflict loomed hugely in everybody’s cultural and political imagination even if, like me (because I was only nine in 1965) we weren’t able to articulate it in that way.
From the vantage point of the locked-down and Zooming spring of 2021, my dad sending off for what was in effect a paper satnav seems prehistorically quaint. The year in question we booked the first of our many holidays at the Tan-y-Marian Guest House in Llandudno and even the method of booking the break seems like something a dinosaur might have done. We had no telephone (I assume the Tan-y-Marian had one) so my dad wrote to the guest house asking if they had a room free on the dates in question. The guest house wrote back and said that they had. My dad wrote back and asked if he could book the room. The guest house wrote back and said that he could. My dad wrote back saying that he would like to book the room and asking if they would like a deposit paid by cheque or postal order. This went on for weeks and became a kind of epistolatory novel that very few people would admit to wanting to read.
So for our family the sending and receiving of mail was an integral part of any holiday, it was the starting gun that the clicking of the letterbox fired. And we were off. Very slowly, in a blue Ford Zephyr with the registration number UHE 8.
At least two days before the holiday the AA route map would be positioned behind the clock on the mantelpiece in the front room next to the wall through which we could hear Mr Page next door practising the piano. Whenever I think of those yellow AA route maps, they always have a soundtrack of chapel hymns and that is why. ‘Hills of the North, Rejoice’ in particular.
Then, on the morning of the trip, once the car had been packed up and the picnic had been prepared and the stove had been tested, me or my brother John would be sent to fetch the route map and the holiday could start properly because as my dad once said, ‘The holiday begins when you leave the house on the first day’, which is something I’ve believed ever since.
Except on the day we went to the Tan-y-Marian the route map wasn’t there. The clock was there, the mantelpiece was there. Mr Page’s piano was there, altering the air. But the route map wasn’t. I went to tell my dad and his normally cheerful and optimistic face fell. ‘It must be there!’ he said, his voice rising an octave and cracking like a dropped side plate. He went into the room to check for himself: clock, mantelpiece, Methodist hymn several choruses in. No route planner.
My brother had a bright idea, which seemed bright for about as long as he spoke then it burned out more or less as soon as it left his mouth and sat there smouldering. ‘We could use the map book and I could navigate us,’ he said with a teenager’s confidence. My mother shook her head. ‘You get car sick anyway,’ she said, ‘and that would make it worse.’ It was true. Even a short trip to the shops made him bilious. The family method of controlling the sickness, which had something to do with a belief in the movement of static electricity from the car to the body, was for my brother to sit on a folded copy of the Daily Mirror, preferably on the page with the Donald Zec column on. It did seem to work intermittently, but only for about the first thirty miles. It was certainly the case that if he’d been following our journey across the country on the map and then glancing up at road signs, even Donald Zec couldn’t help. Or Cassandra. Or Jane. My mother didn’t fancy it; she was a nervous passenger anyway, often believing that the car was about to crash or at least develop three flat tyres simultaneously. I would have liked to have had a go but I was too young to be trusted. It was a huge and crushing problem because my dad always wanted to know where he was going and now he didn’t know where he was going, or rather he knew where he was going but he had absolutely no idea how to get there.
He looked behind the clock again as though it was some kind of Tardis and the passage of time would somehow have made the map appear. It hadn’t.
My dad was a practical person and not one to despair for very long. He took a roll of white paper out of the adding machine he sometimes brought home from the office and declared that he was going to recreate the route map for us. My mother put the kettle on and my brother folded up a couple of Daily Mirrors ready for the trip.
It’s a picture of domestic harmony, so I won’t disturb it by pointing out that later that day, just as we were about to set off, we found the route map in the glovebox of the car.