Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  Sandra returned to find a man in a cloth cap and a woman with no teeth hopping youthfully in front of the stall. The upright crabs, having sensed a window of opportunity, had hurled themselves off the edge of the stall and were scuttling for their crusty lives between wellies and moon boots in a bid for freedom. The good people of Bolton, unaccustomed to such crustaceous attacks, had also fled, missing another window of opportunity around the other side of the stall as Pat had sanctioned an emergency plan of four trays for a fiver plus a free bag of tandoori chicken in a bid to woo the fleeing shoppers.

  The crabs were eventually herded together but not before word had got out that Pat’s stall should be given a wide berth. Trade that day remained slack. Worse than that, the other stallholders had gained enough ammunition to goad him in the Ram’s Head for a very long time.

  At the end of an unprofitable day, Pat’s ruddy cheeks were scarlet, his mood black.

  ‘Pat, can we have a word?’ said Joy. Pat grunted and kicked a box of chicken legs towards the freezer for their fourth frosty sleepover.

  ‘We’ve bought a bar in Tenerife,’ I said. Pat stopped kicking and looked up. His eyes narrowed and his cheeks glowed furiously. He was in no mood for jokes, especially if they were on him.

  ‘What d’you mean you’ve bought a bar? A toffee bar maybe. How can you two buy a jeffin’ bar on three quid fifty an hour.’ He turned his back and shooed us off with a flick of his hand. ‘Piss off. I can’t be doing.’

  ‘So we’re going to have to hand in our notice,’ continued Joy.

  ‘You’re serious?’ We waited for an explosion after the pause. ‘Do you want a barman?’ Pat had turned round again. He was looking from me to Joy and back again. We both let out a nervous laugh.

  ‘No, I’m pleased for you. You’ve both worked hard. We all had a bet on how long you’d stick it out when you first came working here. We gave Joe one day and you two weeks. Didn’t think you’d both hack it. You proved us all wrong. Just let me know a week before you’re leaving so I can get someone else in.’ He turned round and shoved the chicken with his foot as we strode off. ‘Oh, and don’t forget,’ he shouted, ‘if you do ever need a barman…’

  When the rest of our stall colleagues heard the news, they were sceptical. They expected to see us reappear at one of the other stalls further down the market selling mixed bags of sweets or bundles of low-grade toilet rolls.

  The send-off on the last day was full of warm-hearted well wishes. Old fish innards and chicken bits were cheerily stuffed down our clothes and we were both forced to wear rabbit carcasses on our heads for a good deal of the day.

  A couple stopped in front of the stall with mouths agape. They both had matching lilac shell suits and absurdly orange-tinted tans. ‘Why have you got rabbits on your heads?’ asked the man, understandably bemused.

  ‘Because it’s our last day,’ answered Joy.

  ‘Oh,’ he replied, as though this was a reasonable explanation.

  ‘Why are you orange?’ said Joy.

  ‘It’s called a suntan, love,’ said the lady.

  ‘Oh I see. Been away?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve just come back from Tenerif-ey,’ smiled the lady.

  ‘More like Shirley’s Sunarama on jeffin’ Hardwick Street,’ muttered Pat as he passed behind carrying a box Terry had just delivered.

  ‘Tenerife!’ exclaimed Joy.

  ‘Yes, we own a villa out there. We try to get over as much as possible, you know, to get away from this frightful weather.’ Her voice had suddenly jumped up a couple of social classes to underline her ownership status. ‘Have you been?’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said Joy brightly. ‘We’ve bought a bar restaurant there. We’re moving in a few days. Maybe we’ll see you there.’

  ‘Yes... you might well,’ answered the woman faintly. The exclusivity of her status was in danger of being cheapened by a market trader of all people! She didn’t like it whether it was true or not. The woman was no newcomer to the market and had been on the receiving end of teasing before. You couldn’t blame her for doubting that a couple of fishmongers wearing rabbits on their heads had bought a business on her island.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ said Sandra at the end of the day. A solitary tear dropped onto a bag of peeled king prawns. ‘Here, take these,’ she blubbered. She checked if Pat was looking and handed us the seafood as a farewell gift.

  Pat immediately shouted us over. ‘You three, over here now!’

  ‘Shit,’ said Sandra. ‘Might be needing a job meself now.’

  ‘We all clubbed together and bought you something for the bar,’ said Pat. The others were standing around watching. He handed us a box. Inside were an elaborately framed dartboard and two sets of darts. ‘I bet your bar doesn’t have one of those, does it?’

  ‘No, I’m sure it doesn’t,’ I said. ‘Thanks Pat. Thanks everybody.’ We were touched that Pat had taken the trouble to arrange a going away gift, irrespective of the fact that the price tag signalled Whitakers of Bolton had unwittingly donated it.

  Pat had spared us a final end of day clear-up. We were keen to get home to start packing. There were only three days to go before we were due to fly out and suddenly it seemed like we had a mountain to climb. I wasn’t ready, neither physically nor mentally.

  I had intended visiting the haunting ground of my schooldays in Glossop. Subconsciously I wanted to be in a place where anxiety, responsibility and financial burden had yet to surface. I wanted to recapture those carefree feelings of walking to Su’s at lunchtime when the biggest decision was whether to have batter bits with my chips.

  I wanted to stand outside the Surrey Arms where my first serious relationship was sealed with a long kiss, when nothing in the world mattered apart from spending every minute of every hour with Lesley Allen. It was a sensation that I desperately wanted to recapture to clear the whirlwind of emotions currently wreaking havoc in my head.

  I wanted to go to Old Glossop at the edge of the Pennines, to wander into the hills and gaze over Derbyshire life. It was there that I always had time to think, safe in the knowledge that at home my mum would have cooked my tea, washed my clothes, been to work and still have the patience in the evening to devote all her time and love to my brother and me. She was the one who had absorbed the anguish of teenage angst, soaked up the grief of broken relationships, made all the plans for our better future whilst my dad busied himself in making a career, always miles away from his real responsibilities. I could see now that my Dad had passed down his commitment-aversion genes. I too had developed a phobia of being trapped in a situation with no means of escape.

  But my nostalgic journey was not to be and I continued with the material aspects of emigrating. Packing for a new life involves a bit more than throwing in a few shirts, a pair of flip-flops and a good book. Everything that I had collected had some meaning and each time I was coerced into taking things out of my suitcase to throw away it felt like another nail in the coffin of my life to date.

  Despite the wrench of packing for a new life and packing up my old one all was going according to plan until we got a phone call from our gestoria, the person who was sorting out the paperwork for us in Tenerife. ‘Slight problem. I can get work permits and residence permits for the two lads as joint owners, but not the girls. I’ve just found out the only way we can make them legal is if you’re married, in which case the wives automatically become residents. You’ll all have to get married, quickly.’

  As much as our hearts were racing at the thought of swapping the two-tone grey of Bolton for the multi-coloured hues of a life in the sub-tropics, Joy and I were adamant that marriage was not a thing of convenience. The threat of wedding chimes set off alarm bells and we said no. The whole move was in jeopardy once again.

  Even Faith was disappointed. They had already agreed to get married if it meant we could still go ahead with the plan. They were not amused at our refusal.

  ‘We’re prepared to sacrifice so much and you won’t budge at all,’
complained Faith at an emergency meeting.

  ‘We are not being told when to get married,’ I said. ‘We’d rather forget the whole idea.’ Secretly, although I loved Joy, I had no intention of getting married at all, ever. My parents had got divorced and I was not convinced that wearing top hat and tails for a day whilst paying for a knees-up for distant relations was the key to an eternal romantic union.

  In the meantime, David and Faith frantically set about organising their wedding, convinced that we would change our minds. It was only amidst a flurry of international phone calls between Jack and our gestoria that she admitted she may have been a little over-emphatic in using the phrase ‘have to get married’. We could still go ahead with the move but the legalisation process would take a lot longer, that’s all. The risk was that, in the meantime, should Joy and Faith get caught without either work permits or family connections they would more than likely be deported. Naturally my brother and his wife-to-be were a little miffed at this eleventh-hour revelation but it was too late to back out, so they proceeded with their big day anyway.

  Thus, on a blustery Saturday less than three months since the original business idea had surfaced, and in the presence of a select nearest and dearest, my brother and his girlfriend duly whispered ‘I do’ at a registry office in Salford. The bride, in an inauspicious display of doom and gloom, draped herself from head to toe in flowing black with matching bonnet, boots and mood.

  The dashed affair was completed in traditional fashion: the hat competition was won by Aunty Beryl who managed to force an astounding union of millinery and garden mesh; confetti and insults were hurled with equal verve; tearful emotion became more contagious in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol consumed; and opposing relations were loudly hailed as potential new friends whilst quietly cursed as pains in the neck.

  All the hellos quickly turned to goodbyes as the last drops from upturned bottles of Beaujolais dripped onto white linen. The following day we were leaving England to start a new life. The honeymoon was already over.

  CHAPTER 3

  To wake up in the morning and realise that this is the day every aspect of your life will change forever is, to put it mildly, a tad daunting. Try as I might, I couldn’t get back to sleep to delay the inevitable. A tinge of excitement at the start of something new was overshadowed by a cocktail of worry: anxiety that it was too late to stop the momentum; fear that we were stepping into the unknown and into a huge debt that would be hung round our necks for a good number of years; and panic that we had lost something – vital paperwork, passports, our minds. Yesterday I had gained a sister-in-law. Today I was to gain a new life, new identity and new prospects. Excitement and anxiety see-sawed continuously. A life with fish seemed years ago and my thoughts were now racing in one direction, towards what lay ahead. Final packing and the drive to the airport were incidental, a fuzzy montage of checking, re-checking and re-re-checking. I felt like an obsessive-compulsive.

  Money? I patted my pocket. Phew... or was it? I thrust my hand into my pocket and let out a sigh. Yes, money. Was it all there though? Had I dropped some? I remembered pulling the keys out of my pocket to give to Joy. Were some of my hard-earned fish funds lying invitingly on the wet pavement outside Joy’s mother’s house? I pulled out the wad and counted it again. All there. Or was it? Had I counted it wrong? I pulled it out again. 10, 20, 30, 40... ‘Pack it in. You’re going to lose it.’ She snatched it from my hands and folded it in her purse.

  I was surprised just how calm she was despite having just waved goodbye to her mother. Joy had an inner strength and a practicality that was beyond me. When the going got tough, whilst I’d look for my coat, Joy would take hers off to wade right in. For her, avoiding trouble and strife was not an option. If she set out to do something she would continue unfalteringly in a straight line until the mission was accomplished. I would veer right and left haphazardly trying to find a way round the hard work and confrontation. Some would call it lazy, I preferred creative meandering. However, creative meandering was not an option now.

  David and Faith were to catch a later plane via Madrid so they could accompany Mal the cat on his journey. They would meet us at the bar tomorrow.

  As the taxi neared Manchester Airport my nerves called a brief truce. The general mêlée and the whiff of aviation fuel transported me to a time when personal responsibilities involved nothing heavier than returning to the house with the same clothes I went out in and not being caught with a finger up my nose.

  This airport ‘buzz’ started the day my brother took possession of our first aircraft registration book. We both had an alarming lack of hobbies during our junior school years, a situation that our mother set about rectifying with no little verve and haste. Horse-riding lessons had gathered pace until we both outgrew the pastime – literally. My brother and I were not lacking in stature during our pre-teens. Our assigned ponies, unfortunately were. Short horse plus long rider equals public embarrassment. Merrylegs and I had to part.

  Judo was an equally short-lived pastime. Although our mother took great enjoyment from getting us out of the house on a Saturday morning so she could hoover in peace, the appeal of handing over money to a man who repeatedly threw us to the floor soon waned.

  It was thus with some poorly disguised horror that we announced to friends and family that we had joined the ranks of dumbfounded young (and not so young) anoraks on the viewing gallery at Ringway International Airport.

  Any airport now instantly invokes memories of sipping tepid Vimto from within the deep safety of an oversized snorkel jacket hood. At regular intervals the sound of rain pattering on polyester would be drowned out by the exciting screams and whistles of a jet taking off or landing no more than a few hundred yards away. Screwing my eyes up I would read the registration number out to my brother with a mouth full of egg mayonnaise sandwich.

  ‘Bvhee, voy, phthee, thow, thow, thuren.’

  My brother, adept at translating my gobbled observations, would then meticulously scan through our handbook checking for BYC 227.

  ‘Nope. Already got it,’ he would announce more often than not. Occasionally I would sneak a glance at the more accomplished spotters’ records. Their pages always seemed to have more entries than ours. Written notes and scrawled observations filled their pages. ‘It’s not a competition,’ my brother would remind me. Even then I remember having feelings of inadequacy; too few numbers, not enough equipment, tiny thermos flask. We had no short-wave radio to listen to the mysterious dialogue between pilots and the control tower. It was something that we always aspired to but that was what plane spotting and most other ‘collecting’ hobbies were about. It wasn’t about having, it was about wanting. Even the fully loaded top dog of the viewing gallery would watch enviably as a bulky piece of metal lifted itself from the rain-stained tarmac of monotony to head for unimaginably more colourful skies beyond our horizon. We all wanted to go, but this was the closest a pale 11 year old, with just enough money for a bus ticket home and a two-pence piece for the rusty observation binoculars was going to get. I should have realised then that I would always be striving for more. Contentment was forever going to be sadly beyond my grasp. It’s not unhappiness or dissatisfaction at what you already have, more of an obsession with not wanting to miss out on another opportunity that you know is out there.

  ‘Opportunistic’ was one of the terms that my dad had used to describe me after he had divorced us. It was a rare acknowledgement that he had taken enough interest in his sons to warrant making a judgement and even then it was in the form of a written word on his suicide note. I was more taken aback by the fact that I had received a personal letter from him than the fact that he had taken his own life.

  After all of his years of searching for something away from his family he had come to the jolting conclusion that his can of contentment was forever going to be perched on a shelf just out of reach. I was intensely aware that I was shopping with a list that was potentially as unattainable.


  Joy’s father, Arthur, had arranged to meet her at the airport to say goodbye. Urgent business had called on the day of his daughter’s emigration. Bolton Wanderers were playing Tranmere Rovers in the Third Division playoffs at Wembley. As soon as the fat lady started singing Arthur had promised to make all haste back north to wave us off. Unfortunately (unless you’re a Tranmere fan of course) Bolton lost 1–0 and the post-mortem took a lot longer than expected. This, combined with a particularly popular day for enjoying the M1 meant that the final boarding announcement came well before Arthur.

  ‘We’d better make a move,’ I suggested. I had bid my farewells to my Mum and stepfather at their house. Similarly with Joy’s mum, Faye. Even though Joy was primarily the instigator of the idea I still felt a pang of guilt at having been partly responsible for the decision that took her away from her family. She was the youngest of five offspring, the only girl. I sensed her mother in particular was not overly happy that her daughter had fled the nest for a distant land.

  Faye and Arthur were traditional parents who had cemented a close bond amongst their children. Their four sons all lived within two miles of each other and were regular visitors at the house. I felt like I was stealing Joy from this nurtured and protected environment and risking her happiness two thousand miles into the unknown. Although Joy was initially the most excited about the idea, I sensed that she still got her lead as to whether it was a sensible idea from me. If I had said no, she’d have been just as happy.

  Joy continued nursing a paper cup of coffee, gazing towards the airport entrance. ‘I can’t go without saying goodbye to Dad.’ Her eyes had started to well up. ‘Two more minutes. He’s probably broken down.’ Just as she finished the sentence, Arthur burst through the doors puffing and panting.