Are We Nearly There Yet?: A Family's 8000 Miles Around Britain in a Vauxhall Astra

by Hatch, Ben

  ‘They were right at the surface, Ben. They could have got out of their tanks.’

  ‘Sorry, I was just sat here.’

  ‘The kids drove me towards them.’

  ‘Kids, you mustn’t drive Mummy towards the turtles.’

  In the cafe, before setting off, the kids busy sharing an Under the Seas kids’ lunch box, we make up when I help Dinah complete a Sea Life Visitor Centre Survey. Under statement five: Queuing spoilt my experience? I cross out the word ‘queuing’ and replace it with the word ‘turtles’ and after this she ticks the box: I Strongly Agree. Thrusting it into the customer comments box, as we head for the car park, she says, ‘I mean it. Someone should warn you how close they are to the surface. That was horrid. Horrid.’

  On our last drive of the day the kids usually fall asleep. It’s when Dinah and I tend to chat. We’re staying in the Rotunda, an iconic cylindrical building next to the Bull Ring shopping centre that’s been refurbished into luxury apartments. We have a penthouse on the twentieth floor and although I know she’s been looking forward to it, Dinah’s uncharacteristically quiet.

  ‘Tomorrow will be better. Come on.’

  ‘It’s not just that,’ she sighs.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘You’ll think I’m being silly.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about Sarah Smith again.’

  Every journalist has someone they trained or worked with who, despite possessing more or less the same level of ability as oneself, goes on to have such a stellar media career, it can’t help but prompt reflection on how you yourself went so wrong with yours. For Dinah it’s Sarah Smith from her NCTJ journalism course in Preston. The story of Sarah Smith, now a high-flying national BBC news reporter, is more poignant as her sister Jacqui Smith was, until the last election, the Labour Home Secretary. Passing by the Smiths’ house in Great Malvern the day before, Dinah had remembered sharing a baked potato there with Sarah Smith and Jacqui Smith and hadn’t quite been the same since.

  ‘Tell me you’re not actually jealous that you’re not the Home Secretary?’

  Dinah laughs.

  ‘No, but it does make you think. We’re in our forties, Ben. It’s a week day. Everyone else is finishing work now, coming home. We’ve seen a clown fish and a few Daimlers in Coventry.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘These are economically supposed to be our most productive years. People are forging ahead.’

  ‘Who’s forging ahead?’

  ‘Everyone we know.’

  ‘Like who?’

  She goes through a list of friends.

  ‘You’d like us to forge more?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m worried. Jacqui Smith’s the same age as me.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘She’s already been in charge of the country’s entire national security. What am I in charge of? Remembering to pack Charlie’s lunchtime pot in the emergency bag.’

  ‘Which you forgot today.’

  ‘Thank you, sensitive husband, for that.’

  I try to persuade her to look at it another way – we’re spending more time with our kids than anyone else gets to do. That’s surely a bonus. But Dinah’s unconvinced.

  ‘But are they even enjoying themselves?’ she asks.

  ‘Not every minute. But they’d still misbehave at home. Of course they’re enjoying themselves. They were cracking up in that mirror maze.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m just venting my spleen. Don’t listen to me.’

  ‘Anyway, imagine how shit you’d be in charge of national security. You crapped yourself about a turtle back there. Imagine a real threat. You’d lock down the country, call a state of emergency just because some pancake tortoise escaped from its hibernation box, never mind al-Qaeda.’

  ‘And I’d definitely go to war with the Galapagos Islands.’

  ‘Yeah, they’d be in big shit.’

  The penthouse has an open-plan living area with designer furniture, Eames chairs and two 5-foot-high tripod standard lamps that within five minutes Charlie’s knocked over. The views over the city are amazing, however, with floor-to-ceiling windows giving on to a wide glass-fronted balcony overlooking Digbeth and New Street train station.

  Before bath and bed we watch Charlie and Lola on the widescreen TV. Charlie’s on Dinah’s lap, Phoebe’s on mine. The episode is about Lola breaking Charlie’s cardboard space rocket from the ‘high shelf’ in their shared bedroom. At the end of the programme as Lola says sorry, hugging Charlie, her eyes closing with pleasure as she clasps his neck, Phoebe says, ‘That bit makes me want to cry.’

  A tear rolls down her face.

  ‘Ah, pops!’

  ‘She’s not crying, is she?’ says Dinah.

  ‘Yes. That’s so sweet.’

  I stroke the back of Phoebe’s head.

  ‘To stop myself I do this.’ She widens her eyes and boggles them at me. ‘I do it really hard and the tears go away.’

  She pops her thumb back in. I give her a cuddle.

  It’s my turn to read Charlie and Phoebe a story tonight. Charlie bounces on my stomach laughing, Phoebe lies beside me with her thumb in. My heart sometimes feels like it will burst for them both. The love has a strange fleeting intangibility about it and seems always to disappear and be converted into the past even before I have properly grasped it.

  After they’re asleep, in the oak-floored living room sipping wine, making my notes, I say to Dinah: ‘I think we’re going to have to be more circumspect around Phoebe.’

  Dinah looks up.

  ‘I think there has to be no shouting in front of her. I’m not saying this has anything to do with it but she’s very sensitive. You saw her tonight.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And her eczema’s flared up again. Maybe it’s stress.’

  ‘Don’t put that on me.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘That’s really unfair.’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s you. I’m saying us and it might not even be anything to do with it.’

  ‘Point taken.’

  I change into my pyjamas, and put on one of the fluffy dressing gowns left for us in the bathroom. Dinah does the same. But we can’t relax. There are trendy designer books lying around about architecture and modern living like The Phaidon Atlas and a book called 21 Stories (the number of floors in the Rotunda) containing sentences such as this: ‘The rotunda has become a constant, sometimes subliminal presence in my life. It lives in the psyche of the city and its innate congenital knowledge…’ Yeah, we want to say, but the curtains are too thin in Charlie’s bedroom so he keeps waking up, the trendy chrome tap fell off in the bathroom just now, and when the washing machine’s on it shakes the apartment so much it feels like we’re in a rocket on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral.

  ‘You’re right about the shouting,’ says Dinah, later.

  ‘We’ll argue in note form.’

  ‘Rip out pages from notepads and pass them to each other,’ she says.

  We watch an episode of Mock the Week. Dinah says to me when it ends, ‘We still love each other, don’t we? We’re not one of those couples who get divorced after the kids leave home. I know we argue but it means nothing.’

  ‘No, we hate each other,’ I say.

  She smiles.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll still be travelling when they’ve left home. We’ll have plenty to do.’

  ‘Of course we will,’ she says.

  We move on to the balcony. There’s a distant squeal of train wheels from New Street station. The city stretched before us is a mass of orange lights. Dinah puts her arm round me.

  ‘This is nice.’

  ‘There’s something satisfying about being this high up.’

  ‘It must be a throwback to Neanderthal times – some dormant gene, being able to see your enemies approaching,’ I say.

  ‘The prey you’re stalk
ing. It makes you feel safe.’

  ‘Tomorrow will be better,’ I tell Dinah.

  ‘Remind me again why we’re doing this?’ she asks.

  Dinah was approached by Frommer’s after her name was mentioned to the UK commissioning editor who was looking for potential guidebook writers prepared to travel with young families. We were broke. My novels had dried up, and in the economic downturn Dinah’s freelancing had taken a battering. It was also the last summer before Phoebe started school. We wanted to make it special. Almost three and a half years ago, after Dinah’s maternity leave ended, it made financial sense for me to stay at home and look after Phoebe while Dinah returned to work full-time. Mistakenly believing I could carry on writing ‘because babies sleep most of the time’, I was Phoebe’s main carer for over a year before Dinah went freelance. It was me who saw her crawl the first time. I witnessed her first steps, her first smile. I was bitten by her first tooth. I remember once explaining this experience to a friend with a career that meant he spent weeks away from his kids. He assumed I felt marginalised, emasculated somehow or at the very least cheated by the way things had worked out. And in truth in the early days I had sometimes felt like this. But in many ways, although looking after Phoebe and later Charlie has been difficult, it’s also been the most rewarding experience I’ve ever had, and one I was still not quite ready to surrender to anyone else. That’s ultimately why we took on the guidebook. No tag-team parenting for a summer. All of us together for five months. ‘Still think that way?’ laughs Dinah.

  ‘No way. Boarding school for her when we get back… Course I do.’ ‘Poor Charlie’s ears in that stand.’ ‘I know, and Phoebe was cute on that huge bike.’ A glass of wine later, we admit we quite like the apartment after all. Half a bottle down we’re flicking through The Phaidon Atlas, talking about the gaping-mouth style living rooms of the Netherlands’ Sound Houses and the playful design of Peckham Library. We’re using phrases like ‘innate congenital knowledge of the design’, and arguing about the ‘clean lines’ of the new EDF tower in Paris.

  At midnight we turn in but I wake shortly afterwards feeling like someone has pressed charged heart paddles to my chest. I’m sweating, out of breath, gasping for air. The covers are stuck to my back. There’s still an image from my dream burned into my mind like a date stamp. The yellowness of Dad’s skin.

  Dinah’s looking at me holding her heart.

  ‘Ben, you frightened the life out of me!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What’s the matter? A nightmare?’

  I nod. I sip some water. My heart’s still pounding.

  ‘I thought you were having a heart attack.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘You’re sweating. You all right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Come here. Two nights in a row.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I think you need to see your dad.’

  CHAPTER 7

  Draft Copy for Guidebook: Springing to prominence during the Industrial Revolution, Birmingham – the former city of a thousand trades – now prefers to remind visitors it has more canal miles than Venice, more trees than Paris and is home to the brand new science museum Thinktank, which includes an IMAX cinema and planetarium, as well as a wildlife room where you can hear the various calls of the urban fox including hunger, fear and ‘yippee I just found a whole Zinger Burger in the bin outside Moor Street Station’. At Cadbury World, meanwhile, you’ll learn that tens of thousands of Aztecs died at the hands of brutal Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, but that on the upside their defeat and extinction as a people led ultimately to the Curly Wurly. At this working chocolate factory you’ll be rained on by Cadbury chocolate, see a giant Cadbury egg larger than a house, get to write your name in Cadbury chocolate, and in fact become so brainwashed by Cadbury chocolate that, opening a Nestlé manufactured KitKat for lunch, you might become as seriously scared as we were that a factory hooter will sound, and that you’ll be suddenly swooped on by a team of purple and white uniformed Oompa-Loompas and maybe dunked in a tempering vat.

  That’s not to say, of course, that the whole bashing out of rivets side of things isn’t well catered for in the Midlands. It is. In Ironbridge Gorge, Telford, there are ten separate attractions dedicated in such detail to the Industrial Revolution there’s an actual museum of tar, the Tar Tunnel. If you visit one of these make it Blists Hill Victorian Town, a recreated industrial town, where we got to hang out in a Victorian pub and also saw unruly schoolgirls being rebuked for wolf whistling through a gap in the hoardings at Balfour Beatty builders working on yet another Industrial Revolution themed museum (the Museum of Rivets, The Museum About A Machine That Makes A Massive Clanking Noise – who knows?).

  We’re supposed to be visiting the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral but on the way, stopping to buy bottled water in Bromyard, Worcestershire, we see the sign: the Bromyard Museum, Time Machine and Coffee Shop. ‘A museum, a time machine AND a coffee shop!’ We google it and are now faced with a tricky choice: Mappa Mundi, the thirteenth-century map of the world and treasure of medieval England, or The Bromyard Museum Time Machine and Coffee Shop, which has original Thunderbird and Stingray puppets in realistic studio settings and a jumper belonging to Sylvester McCoy.

  Entering the museum through mocked-up Tardis double doors we descend into a labyrinth of underground rooms. Modern museums, bitten by minimalism, tend to be chrome, smoked glass, and interactive computer screens aimed at relaying the minimum amount of stupid-proof facts that attention-deficient visitors can absorb. Here displays are pleasingly handwritten, lengthy and personal and some of them are about Troy Tempest. ‘This was the first colour TV series ever. It was fantastic,’ one sign reads. There’s a full-size David Tennant model next to a 6-foot Cyberman and, of course, the ‘rare Sylvester McCoy pullover worn during Remembrance of the Daleks’.

  ‘Does it actually say rare?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Like there are other less collectible cardigans belonging to Sylvester McCoy?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘That’s brilliant.’

  On another wall I show Dinah a picture taken in 1969 of the two owner brothers we met upstairs in the cafe, posing with their boyhood Action Men.

  ‘And you haven’t even seen Billie Piper’s pyjamas yet?’

  The giddiness increases when we come across a rare ‘sexed doll’ (it has genitalia) from 1860, and a scary-looking Armand Marseille bride doll with four even-sized fangs.

  ‘A dolly with fangs. It’s just so random here.’

  ‘And earnest.’

  ‘Earnest and random – the best combination.’

  ‘Do you know what, I think if we actually came across Jon Pertwee gaffer-taped to a chair I wouldn’t be surprised.’

  We find a citation on the wall discussing how one of the two brothers met fictional astronaut Captain Paul Travers, the commander of the spacecraft Zero-X in the 1966 film Thunderbirds Are Go, in Coventry. But in ‘Miscellaneous Toys’, hysteria taking a grip, I have a disturbing thought.

  There’s been a spate of world news stories about creepy imprisonments in cellars. Nobody’s been down to these rooms since we arrived. The museum’s not on our itinerary so nobody knows we’re here and there’s no mobile reception.

  ‘Stop it, Ben,’ says Dinah, laughing.

  ‘Why are you laughing, Mummy?’ says Phoebe.

  ‘Because Daddy said something funny.’

  ‘Stop laughing, Mummy.’

  But we can’t because now it makes sense, the seemingly innocent ‘everyone guaranteed to be exterminated’ line we read upstairs. The fact the brothers didn’t seem interested in our Frommer’s credentials.

  ‘We’ve been lured here.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘They’re probably dressing up as cyborgs right now. They’ll come down the stone steps any minute to torture us when we fail to answer trivia questions about Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons correctly. “Please
, let me go. I told you, I don’t know who became a target for the Mysterons’ powers ofiretro-metabolism in the ‘Fire at Rig 15’ episode of 1985.”’

  ‘Ben, stop it! They’ll hear you.’

  ‘When they tire of our inability to find merit in Joe 90 we’ll be killed, papier-mâchéd over and turned into Dick Tracy or a life-sized model of someone from Blake’s 7.’

  ‘Mummy, stop laughing.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. Come on, love. I think they’ve had enough.’

  ‘Inkberrow,’ says Dinah, reading from the blue folder. The blue folder is our bible. It’s ring-bound and contains sixty typed pages in date order detailing everything we’re doing over the five months, from attractions to meals out and hotel stays. The blue folder’s so vital, and would be so devastating to lose, we have two copies, which like the US president and his vice president, never travel together. While the first blue folder (Blue Folder One) goes everywhere with us, the second (Blue Folder Two) stays permanently in the roof box. ‘Inkberrow. That might be fun. That’s the village where The Archers is based, isn’t it?’ Dinah asks.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Ahhhh, did you put this on the itinerary for me?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Thank you, love.’

  ‘It’ll make some box copy, won’t it?’

  Dinah’s such a fan of the Radio 4 farming drama, it’s not unusual for her map reading to be punctuated during the show’s broadcast with intermittent cries from the passenger seat of things like this: ‘It’s a Northumberland pig, what does he expect?’ Or, ‘Chris, for God’s sake, you’ve your farrier exams to think of.’

  Whereas I’m bruised from smug farmers’ sons in the countrifled Buckinghamshire village of Cholesbury making fun of my childhood inability to distinguish haylage from silage and because ‘Ha ha ha, he doesn’t even know the reversible plough counteracts downhill soil slippage’, Dinah, brought up in the industrial town of Widnes, sees it all more idyllically.

  The focal point of Inkberrow turns out to be The Forge Shop, where we stop to buy our lunch and a Barney magazine for Phoebe.

  ‘If this really were Ambridge she’d be Susan Carter from the village shop,’ Dinah informs me in the bread aisle about the woman behind the till.