Joy Rides
I’m allowed to get my vest wet!
Simon Collins, Black Rock Sands, North Wales (1975)
OH, HOW WE dreaded going on holiday. A cloud of misery hung over our heads for weeks beforehand. It was worse than having a dentist’s appointment or an exam. We used to feel sick just thinking about it. Even the approaching end of term (‘We break up, we break down, we don’t care if the school falls down etc.’) was tainted with a sense of doom and gloom.
It wasn’t the holiday itself, you understand – that was a guaranteed two weeks of fun, fresh air and free gifts – it was the journey from Northampton to North Wales. Six hours it took us in those dark days before bypasses and Happy Eaters: two junctions north up the M1 then along the M6 to Telford where we were forced back on to soul-destroying A-roads for the rest of our grey odyssey, via Shrewsbury, Oswestry and Chirk; a faint cheer from within Dad’s Viva as we passed the ‘Welcome to Wales’ sign on the A5, the traditional leg-stretching stop-off at a layby in Llangollen, then we pushed on into Snowdonia on the A494 past the glinting Bala Lake and towards Trawsfynydd via the even more windy A4212; triumphantly, we passed through the mental checkpoint of Porthmadog and rattled down the Lleyn Peninsula past Llanystumdwy to Pwllheli – just in time for breakfast. Sorry, did I not mention we used to set off at 3 a.m.?
A six-hour car journey would test the patience and digestive stamina of any kid, but having to be turfed out of bed at 2.30 a.m. when it was dark and cold and wrong was never going to start the holiday with a smile. You see, the Collins family always went to Wales on Day One of the school holidays, as if it were a race – this meant we were hitting the M1, M6 and A5 at exactly the same time as every other unimaginative family with a roof rack in the country. Thus, the only way to ‘avoid the traffic’ (every dad’s dream) was to set out at such an ungodly hour that we only met lorries along the way. Lorries, and hundreds of other families with roof racks who’d had precisely the same idea.
The first year we went to Wales – 1972, when Melissa was still a baby – we ran slap bang into a carnival at Porthmadog, which must have doubled our already swollen journey time, and I’m sure Dad vowed there and then, gridlocked between floats, clowns and people in national dress, to leave a bit earlier next year.
Thus, 3 a.m. became our most extreme start time, although in later years it relaxed to 4 a.m. and even 5.30 a.m. Either way, the central heating would be off – I always remember my teeth physically chattering, which was at least good training for the fortnight to come – and we would have to whisper and creep about so as not to disturb Jean and Geoff and the kids next door, adding to the stark, Colditz-like unreality of the situation. In a game attempt to reduce the misery of this midnight flit, Mum and Dad would buy us a holiday special to read and keep it from us until the start of the journey, as an incentive not to dread the whole thing. Dad would tantalisingly place our holiday specials – a Frankie Stein and a Battle, let’s say – on the back shelf of the car while loading up the night before, which meant we could look out of the kitchen window and see them, beckoning us. Did this trick make setting out on the miserable six-hour journey any better? Of course not. It was pitch black at 3 a.m. and we could only make out the pages by the yellow lights of the motorway moving across the comics – massively frustrating, and of course guaranteed to bring on motion sickness before Telford.
These days families travel in minibus-sized ‘people carriers’ with bags of ergonomically designed leg-room and luggage space. The 1970s Vauxhall Viva, though a family car, was very much economy class. A people crusher. Shoehorn three kids in the back, including one in a strap-in baby seat, and you’ve barely got enough room to stash the plastic potty and the I-Spy books. The potty was for throwing up in, although I don’t recall any of us ever doing anything so neat with our unwanted guts.
Travel sickness blighted our every car journey. One out of the three of us was sick every time Dad drove more than 500 yards.1 On major journeys – Wales, Yarmouth, Ilfracombe, Blackpool, Weymouth – Mum and Dad would carry a big bottle of water in the boot for the express purpose of wiping our inevitable sick off the upholstery. Mum recalls with a shudder the time Simon and I vomited in stereo, one out of the driver’s side window, the other out of the passenger side. I can only hope that it looked spectacular to the driver behind us, like a display by the Red Arrows perhaps.
A chain reaction occurred if one among the three of us chucked – the smell would set the other two off. Sometimes it was like Charlie Caroli in the back seat of that car. They tried to get us to take nasty pink travel-sickness tablets – the sinisterly named Joy Rides – but none of us would swallow. Or indeed ‘chew’, as it laughably suggested on the box (the very box which described these acrid dots as ‘pleasant tasting’). Dad once inventively gave me a Joy Ride sandwich, with the pill held between two chalky but much-loved Refresher sweets. I secretly flushed the Joy Ride down the toilet and noisily crunched the sweets in front of him. It fooled no-one, and I forever put myself off chalky sweets. Honestly, it’s a wonder they took us further than Weedon.
One year, we made Dad pull over so early in the mammoth journey – because we felt ‘a bit sick’ – he furiously forced Simon and me to take a Joy Ride each, there and then on the hard shoulder of the M6 with the lorries whipping past us. I went first, chewing it like a man and insisting to Simon, ‘It’s not that bad’ (oh, but it was). Simon stoutly refused and promised not to feel sick any more. We drove on. Neither of us was sick again, or at least not until the traditional layby at Llangollen. Simon and I piled out of the car and ran down the incline of the adjoining sheep field. There, I surreptitiously removed the half-chewed Joy Ride from my shoe, where I had in fact secreted it back on the M6. The very sight of it loosened my lunch and I quietly vommed on the grass without Mum and Dad even knowing.2
Travel sickness was a downward spiral we could never escape from. The thought of Joy Rides made us sick; the thought of being sick made us sick; being sick made us sick. My guess is that the ‘travel’ and the ‘motion’ had nothing to do with it. Not one of us was even queasy on the drive home, even though the journey took just as long. Having said that, we generally left later: desperate to squeeze every last drop out of Wales on the way there, but not as bothered on the way back – one year we casually left on the Friday afternoon at 4.30, having been to the beach in the morning. Nobody felt sick; the miles flew by. The psychology of the return journey has never been satisfactorily explained to me, but it holds in adult life, and on other forms of transport: it always seems easier coming home, no matter where you are or how long you’ve been there.
Even if the car still smells of sick from the outward journey.
Wait a minute, we’ve been to Wales and we’ve come home already, bronzed only by the coastal wind and about half a dozen holiday specials richer. There was, mercifully, more to holidays than being sick out of car windows.
* * *
We self-catered on the same peninsula in North Wales from 1972 to 1979 inclusive, eating the same food we ate at home except for the occasional holiday-only treat like a burger in batter from the chip shop at Morfa Nefyn or a takeaway Wimpy on the seafront at Pwllheli. Cold beef sandwiches were the traditional extravagance on the days we went to Black Rock Sands at Llanbedrog. Kunzel Cakes were often broken out too. And flat eggs.
It might not have seemed like much of a holiday for Mum, self-catering – after all we self-catered all year round – but she didn’t seem to mind. Yes, she was still cooking our tea, but she was doing so in a farmhouse nestled in the majestic vistas and clean air of Wales. For the first four years we stayed in exactly the same spot just shy of a tiny village called Llithfaen (found midway across the biceps of the peninsula). We stayed in two different properties rented out by English ex-pat Mrs Roberts on a farm called Tyn Cae – irresistibly close to ‘Tin Can’ in our heads, which is what we called it – first, the more modern, added-on bungalow, later the original farmhouse. Then, when she sold up after the summer of 1975, we moved down the lane to another farmhouse, Bryn Celyn Isaf, owned by Mr and Mrs Williams, an authentic Welsh farm couple we could barely understand. We stayed there for four more years running, each as idyllic as the last. Same place, same two weeks in July, same holiday effectively, but it suited us down to the ground.
Other, more adventurous, thrill-seeking families went on package holidays to Spain and came back burnt umber. Uncle Brian and Auntie Janis went to Disneyworld and Cape Canaveral and drove on the right-hand side of the road. The Caves went sailing.3 Even Nan Mabel and Pap Reg flew to Canada to see Nan’s sister Doll, and to the chi-chi Channel Islands too. But we were happy in North Wales, sitting in the car in the driving rain, looking out at the unyielding Atlantic, eating fudge and doing quizzes. And to prove our undying love for Llithfaen and Pwllheli and Black Rock Sands we went back every year for the best part of a decade. These were the best holidays in the world.
To start with we hedged our bets and went on two, shorter holidays, a week in a caravan park in Yarmouth on the tacky east coast in June, and a week at Mrs Roberts’s in Wales in July. A year later, we sensibly threw our lot in with the sheep and put the slot machines behind us. We made our own entertainment in Wales, and that’s why it was such a valuable experience every summer. The family that plays together, and all that …
Compare and contrast a day in Yarmouth – a breathless round of fairground rides, pennies in slots and ticket stubs – with a day in Wales – perhaps a game of cricket on the beach at Pistyll and The Fenn Street Gang before bedtime – and you start to see how character-building the Welsh holidays were. We wanted for very little: some stumps, a tennis ball, a stick, a bucket, a kagoul, a deck of Top Trumps.4 It was like being down the field, except it was up the field and the allotments stretched for as far as the viewfinder could see.
Directly behind the bungalow was a serviceable hill walk with a rocky outcrop at its peak which we christened The Crag. We went up The Crag every year, a family expedition captured on the grainy Instamatic. Simon and I would naughtily sing the words ‘in and out the sheep shit/in and out the sheep shit’ (trad. arr.) as we dodged the pellets, running ahead of Mum and Dad – and Nan Mabel and Pap Reg if they’d joined us for a few days, as they habitually did, as if to make it seem even more like home from home.
At the peak, action man Simon would play at mountain climbers on the imposing Crag itself with his jeans tucked into his football socks and a length of rope slung manfully over his shoulder. I threw bits of slate off the top and watched them smash.
The sun did occasionally shine in July in North Wales, but it was wise not to rely on it. We spent a lot of the fortnight in the car, as I remember it, or else sheltered behind a windbreak on the beach, poles knocked into the ground with rocks. Even during the apparent long, hot summer of ’76 it rained and I caught a chill. But we didn’t care, as long as there were fish fingers for tea and the prospect of dam-building tomorrow at Aberdesach or Dinas Dinlle.
It would seem pertinent at this point to admit that in eight years we didn’t ever really fully embrace the Welsh language. Instead, we mashed its evocative, lyrical beauty to fit our unsophisticated Northampton mouths. Llithfaen was simply ‘Lithvan’ for as long as we stayed there, Pwllheli was to us the rather comical ‘Puwelly’. Not once did we pronounce Nefyn correctly as ‘Nevun’ – it was Neffin to the Collins family for two weeks every summer. I daren’t tell you how we pronounced Trawsfynydd and Llanystumdwy for fear of sinking further still into a caricature of imperial ignorance. Alright – Transfinnywinny and Lanstuddymuddy.
Let us off. I don’t imagine a Welshman could pronounce
Cogenhoe,5 Towcester6 or Duston.
* * *
We were in love with Wales. The hills, the crashing waves, the tell-tale snags of wool on wire fences, the treacle toffee, a bottle of Coke and a packet of crisps on the wall in the garden of the Victoria Inn, the Welsh words for gents and ladies,7 the walks, the drives, the white sand, the card games, the occasional jellyfish, the tiny cinema in Nefyn where Dad took us to see Live and Let Die in 1975, the walk across the golf course at Morfa Nefyn, a drop scone from Mrs Williams, feeding the chickens with Mr Williams, playing on the rope swings, running with Meg the sheepdog, eating steak and kidney pie at the Sparta Café, reading James Herbert’s The Rats and being too scared to have it on my bedside table at night, the glow-in-the-dark Moonlighter Frisbee, rock pools, Mum seemingly having her hair done every other day in Pwllheli, rain cascading down the spiral stone staircase like a waterfall in the tower at Caernarfon Castle, Simon being told by Mum he could ‘get his vest wet’ at Black Rock Sands and charging into the sea wearing it … these are all memories made in Wales.
Smashing place, but how did we justify going back to the same map reference every year? (In 1980 we went mad and tried Jersey for the first time. It was so good we went back there every year for the next decade!) First, everybody went on holiday to the same place in the Seventies. I have anecdotal evidence of this. After all, who except for the rich could afford to experiment? In 1975, just to be adventurous, we decided to stay for one week on the island of Anglesey, then move on to Mrs Roberts’s farmhouse for the second week. OK, so Anglesey was in North Wales and it looked out on to the same bay as Nefyn and Aberdesach, but it was still new, still a relative voyage into the unknown. On arrival that fateful Saturday morning, it quickly became apparent that Mum was far from satisfied with the house we were to stay in (I remember there were flies all over the lounge window – I described it as ‘tatty and horrible’ in my diary), so the decision was made. We drove away, back over the Menai Strait and into the Wales we knew. It was as if this was our punishment for trying somewhere new. We ended up calling Mrs Roberts from a phone box and she put us up in the bungalow.
Two years later, we attempted once again to go off-piste, booking a second self-catering holiday in Ilfracombe, Devon. Same story: arrived (after a six-hour drive, during which Melissa won the sick cup), inspected the place, deemed it uninhabitable, turned around, drove all the way back to Northampton. It’s not that Mum was picky: compared to the homely farmhouses in Llithfaen, this place was cold, musty and unlived-in with ugly bedspreads. What’s worse, it had been recommended to us as a nice place to stay by a friend of Mum and Dad’s. This was a holiday with all the good bits taken out, leaving just the six-hour car journeys, with a short break between to view a damp house. Melissa was sick on the way home too.8
When we made the momentous decision not to go to Wales in 1980, we might have been compensating for all those years conservatively pounding the same tarmac on the way to the same beaches with the same sandwiches packed in the same beach bags. In fact, we were beaten into submission by Nan Mabel and Pap Reg, who had been singing the praises of Jersey for some time. Plus, Dad had a decent bonus from work, so we could afford to go a little upmarket. It was the start of a new decade, and we were going to cross a major body of water for the first time in our lives. (Actually, I’d been across the Channel in 1978 for that French trip, but this was our first time abroad as a family.9 )
Perhaps fittingly, it began with a four-hour car journey, from Northampton to the port at Weymouth (so far, so familiar). Then a seven-hour ferry trip, during which something magical happened, as if to mark the paradigm shift: only one of us was sick, and it was Dad.
Crisps and grapes mainly. ‘B’ deck. I’m sure it was as much of a shock to him as to the rest of us, and it revealed a welcome chink in his mortal armour. No longer was he a god, he was a man. A man who smelt of sick. When we arrived, exhausted and crumpled by what was the best part of a day’s travelling, at the Merton Hotel in St Helier, Jersey, we didn’t feel like the sort of family who would stay at a hotel at all, but this feeling of inferiority (alright, inappropriateness) soon passed. We settled into our new lives almost immediately.
On the face of it, Jersey wasn’t so different to the Lleyn Peninsula – it was rural, they had animals in fields (albeit cows), it occasionally rained (although less occasionally), and what we did in the daytime was drive to beaches and sit behind a windbreak banged in with rocks. I was 15 now, so holiday specials held less allure – transplanted by Mad magazine and horror novels – but Simon and I continued to play together, tennis balls and frisbees. However, the change in our holidaying pattern was profound and irreversible. We were staying in a hotel. Waiters brought us food with French names. There was a pool. There were other people.
Dovetailing perfectly with my hormones, Jersey proved itself a place to meet girls.10 Holidays suddenly got sociable. Mum and Dad – for the first time ever – made friends on holiday, buying rounds in the ballroom, swapping addresses, that sort of caper. In other words, from 1980 onwards, our tastes became more sophisticated. We demanded more from the fortnight. Nightly cabaret in the ballroom, bingo, discos, the hotel photographer laying out his wares on a trestle table each morning in the lobby. We never looked back. We stayed at the Merton right through the Eighties – I even joined them there when I was at college – and it’s such a family-friendly place, always improving, that Simon and Melissa have been back with their kids. Three generations having a great time. Pampered. Corrupted by luxury.
Me? I’ve reverted back to type. My idea of a perfect holiday now is a rented cottage in Ireland. Driving, walking, reading, sitting outside pubs. I even mispronounce the place-names. I expect I’m trying to recapture the cut-price, easily-pleased, self-catering, all-weather paradise of Wales. But that would take a plastic potty, a Buster holiday special and some Refreshers. Some things are best left in the past.
1. Dad tells me that on the long drive to Yarmouth in 1973 we made him stop the car at Thrapston, which can be no more than 12 miles out of Northampton. That was our record.
2. On the subject of secretion: I overdid it with some chocolate-covered fudge once in Wales and shoved the last piece behind Melissa’s car seat rather than admit I had been greedy. It stayed there until Melissa was old enough not to need the seat any more, or Dad changed cars, whichever came first.
3. Remember that Uncle Allen Cave was a builder and self-made man who was encouraged to spend large sums of money before the end of the tax year. Somewhat conspicuously, he had a boat, and in later years a Jaguar XJS for dry land. And a full-size snooker table in a full-size snooker room (which he had, to be fair, built himself).
4. International Super Cars and Tennis Aces I recall being particular favourites.
5. ‘Cooknoe’.
6. ‘Toaster’.
7. Dynion and merched, I think. The only Welsh – apart from croeso (welcome) – we learned in eight years.
8. Our reward on the drive back was a consoling sit-down Wimpy. The Wimpy hamburger remained magical to us because we so rarely had one. How can a Big Mac hold the same spell today? It can’t. I have a feeling the burgers we ate on the front at Pwllheli weren’t Wimpys per se. We called them Wimpys just like people call vacuum cleaners Hoovers. I ate my first ever true Wimpy in 1973, when we were taken out for one as part of Paul Cockle’s birthday bash. (I rather sweetly describe the place as ‘the Wimpy bar’ in my diary.) It was here that I first encountered the mouth-watering menu: the Wimpy Brunch, the Shanty Brunch (fish and chips), the Brown Derby (doughnut and whipped cream) and that coiled sausage (never had one of those). The ‘Wimpy’ we had in Pwllheli was from an outdoor stand, cooked on a flat grill while you salivated. It was eaten sitting on a wall or a bench, and tasted all the better for that. And at least Mum didn’t have to cook it.
9. Simon and I were the first Collinses to travel by air. In 1983, Mum and Dad decided in their customary benevolence that the pair of us could fly to Jersey while they took the car over on the ferry. (‘Twats!’ as I rather unkindly wrote in my diary.) I had a Bacardi and Coke on the plane and thought I was Spandau Ballet.