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 attempte
d 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.
10. See Chapter 14.
nine
A Sip of Tonic
I warn you not to be ordinary,
I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.
The best speech Neil Kinnock ever made, Bridgend, 7 June 1983
PAP REG DIED while I was writing this book, the last of my grandparents to go. The angina got him in the end, aged 85, but at least he spent these last few years with all his sensory and mental faculties – indeed, Pap could remember stuff from as far back as the early 1920s, like the address where his headmistress lived (the corner of Forfar Street and Harlestone Road) and the specific Meccano set his parents bought him while off school with whooping cough aged six (the A1 set).1 A lot like me really. I have the same instinct to collect, horde and map, make sense of it all by keeping things close, knowing where to lay my hands on them.
They talk about putting your affairs in order. Pap left not a single loose thread. He died before Christmas 2001, but he’d already written out his Christmas cards and passed on the most recent minutes from his Pensioner’s Voice meetings. We all had him down as an organised man, but we had no idea. He had folders and boxes and files back at the house in Lovat Drive, neatly packed with papers and effects, all awaiting collection, as it were. But one of these folders was especially interesting, bulging as it was with memorabilia and cuttings relating to his grandchildren.
Well, grandchild. Me.
This folder seems to confirm what I already knew: that I loomed large in the lives of Nan Mabel and Pap Reg. It’s a regular This Is Your Life: every single hand-drawn birthday, Christmas and Easter card I made for them down the years, letters and postcards I’d sent them, programmes I’d designed for sixth-form productions, local newspaper clippings about me and my drawing (‘Losing out on his art class’,2 ‘Budding artist’, ‘On-the-Spot Caricatures’3), me in the early Eighties local rock band Absolute Heroes (‘This school band is hoping to graduate …’), and me getting my first radio series in 1993 (‘Pop writer
’s adventure on the airwaves’). There are even pages from the NME, including my debut in print – a film review of the yachting thriller Masquerade – from October 1988 (something I hadn’t even got in my files), and the handwritten notes for my best man’s speech at Simon and Lesley’s wedding, 23 March 1987. I don’t know how Pap got his hands on those, but when he did, he probably thought, ‘I’ll put these in the folder.’
There are items relating to the other grandchildren – a cutting about Dean and his radio-controlled cars, one about Simon qualifying as a soldier after 42 weeks’ training at Shorncliffe, and the announcement of Charmaine’s birth – but I’m afraid the bulk of it is me. Now you might say, well of course it is – I’m the one whose cartooning got me in the Chronicle & Echo, I’m the one who knuckled down and made all those Christmas cards for at least ten years – but the truth is not so easy to explain away.
Nan Mabel and Pap Reg systematically spoiled me for the better part of my formative years, not with expensive gifts and lavish feasts (they didn’t have the money) but with attention, quality time and special interest. As the first grandchild of four, I had automatically earned a special place in their hearts without even lifting a finger. For that we can forgive them: it happens, I was a novelty. But I always assumed that the newborn snatch the limelight from the already born. Doesn’t parental – and grandparental – affection unconsciously shift on to the youngest, the freshest, the cutest? Not in our case. Nothing could convince Nan and Pap that Simon or Melissa were as cherishable as me. Pap called me his ‘pidge’. It was short for pigeon: ‘Alright, m’pidge.’ I didn’t hear him call anybody else this.
Where Did It All Go Right? Page 17