The Family Holiday

Trips to Devon for holidays were always quite daunting. It took two days to get there (must have been pre-motorway era). We had a Ford Corsair, but as there were five in our family and I was the youngest, I had to sit on the lumpy bit in the middle of the back seat. There wasn't anywhere for my feet, which had to dangle down each side of the drive shaft lump. Between the two front seats was a handy storage box with hinged lid, which my father called, 'The Sweety Mine'. In it was a plethora of boiled sweets. To keep us quiet, we were given a constant stream of these. Unfortunately, my mother's driving was rather erratic, and when she did an emergency stop (which seemed to happen more often than one would expect) I nearly always swallowed the sweet whole. It lodged in my throat, causing me to choke and I generally thought I was going to die. My father would offer soothing comments, like 'it will be fine in ten minutes', which it was, apart from the bruised feeling it left. My father was a chain smoker, and refused to open any windows in the car, so the whole experience was not improved by spending hours in a thick fog of tobacco smoke. Maybe that's why my mother did so many emergency stops, she couldn't see properly. Added to this, he always wanted to find something better to listen to on the radio, and constantly twiddled the tuning knob, so the car was full of crackling, white noise.

When we arrived with Grandad in Devon, we slept in a strange room with no furniture, and a make shift washing line across it, from which hung several pairs of very holey socks. I was fascinated by these, and the lighthouse we could see blinking in the distance.