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

by Hatch, Ben

  ‘Really?’

  Even though I’m not absolutely sure about this, I plough on. ‘Yeah, he was working for a local paper in Luton and Dad gave him his first writing job. And you know Inspector Frost? The way he walks – the stop start way he moves, that quick dramatic spin. David Jason got that walk from my dad. That’s my dad’s walk.’

  ‘Really? How does your dad know…’

  ‘And the board game Ratrace, my dad invented that.’ I continue like a school kid in the playground boasting my dad’s bigger than your dad. But I don’t care because suddenly I feel like one of those Janissary warriors from the Ottoman Empire, the captured soldiers from rival religions converted in defeat to the Muslim faith who then become the most loyal fighters of the caliph.

  ‘We were kids and it rained in this cottage we went to stay at. I was about two. He devised the game – sent the board off to Waddingtons. A few years later they nicked it. He hadn’t copyrighted it. They even used the same title.’

  I end up telling them about the day I almost got my mum’s Peugeot 205 blown up in a controlled explosion in the underground car park at Broadcasting House. I’d memorised Dad’s security access code and I left Mum’s car in Dad’s spot on the same day John Major came in to talk to Radio 4 about the IRA’s attempt to blow up 10 Downing Street with a mortar rocket. Security was extra tight and my mum’s licence plate was not on the approved staff list. It was only that Dad happened to be de facto head of the BBC that day as it was a weekend that the memo about the intended controlled explosion landed on his desk. I’d been shopping in Oxford Circus obliviously. The first I was aware of what had almost happened was when I returned home to Dad waiting for me on the doorstep. He communicated with me for a couple of weeks on BBC headed notepaper afterwards. ‘When you have finished with the ice tray fill it up.’… ‘When you borrow my car PUT SOME PETROL IN AFTERWARDS’… ‘WHEN YOU’VE FINISHED WITH YOUR PLATE, WASH IT UP.’

  ‘I think I’ve only just realised what an arsehole I was to him,’ I say. And the room goes quiet.

  Dinah looks across at me. ‘Well,’ she says, with a little cough. ‘Anyway, what have you two been up to?’

  They start to talk about their kids, their plans for the house and getting up to go to the toilet I bounce along walls. Wobbling about in the bathroom, I experience a strange inside-out-like sensation down my dick. I gulp with pain and hear an audible clink. I look down and on a ridge in the toilet bowl there’s a small black object surrounded by light red blood. The blood bleeds into the water and I bend down and fish it out. It’s hard and jagged like a Chinese throwing star. I wash it and place it in a spare contact lens case I find by the sink. I start to feel slightly light-headed now, maybe it’s the sight of all the blood, and have to sit down on the toilet to steady myself. When I do, I notice the tiles on the floor appear to merge into one super tile, the spaces between them vanishing. I have to grasp the toilet roll holder.

  ‘The tiles have become one super tile,’ I say to myself and I start to laugh as the room starts to spin.

  Dinah knocks on the bathroom door.

  ‘Are you laughing to yourself in there? Come on, we’d better go. We don’t even know where the cottage is.’

  I look at the tiles again. One particular tile catches my eye. A swirl of surface grout looks like an eye. It appears to be an eye in profile looking out sideways at me and the tassels on the bath mat look like teeth. It makes me think Picasso was right – a sideways eye is inappropriate lust. I feel pleased with myself for having such an erudite thought at such a weak moment but when I shout this out to Dinah she sounds concerned.

  ‘What’s happening in there? Let me in.’

  I’m sitting on Gemma and Pete’s bed. I have a damp towel on my head; another round my midriff. Dinah tips a glass of water to my lips. I swallow a couple of mouthfuls.

  ‘You all right?’

  I nod.

  ‘Do you feel OK?’

  I nod.

  ‘What happened in there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s that in your hand?’

  ‘This.’

  ‘What?’

  I hand it to her.

  ‘My kidney stone!’

  ‘What!’ She unscrews the lid. ‘That’s your kidney stone?’

  ‘I passed it.’

  ‘You mean… Urghhhh! Ben it’s in my contact lens case and that’s been down your…’

  ‘It’s not your lens case. I found it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the bathroom.’

  ‘You put it in Gemma’s contact lens case!’

  ‘It’s good news. I don’t have to go back to hospital.’

  ‘I think we need to get you out of here.’

  Dinah transfers the half-asleep kids into the car seats and I’m coming down the stairs myself, feeling slightly better, when I hear Gemma say: ‘Not at all, Dine. Blimey, I’d be all over the place, wouldn’t I, Pete? I needed a week off from work when my mum broke her leg.’ Then she laughs at something Dinah says. ‘No, don’t worry. I think it’s funny. I’ve got loads of them. But why does he want to keep it?’

  We’ve assumed Simonsbath is near Bath, maybe because it has the word Bath in it, but punching it into the satnav, it’s a shock to discover it’s two hours away. It’s 9 p.m. and we don’t have the owner’s number or a proper address for the cottage we’re staying in, which in the blue folder is unhelpfully called, ‘The Cottage, Simonsbath’. With the window open to sober me up, Dinah drives over the Brendon Hills, great steep climbs in second gear before slow precipitous descents. She belts through Exmoor National Park. It’s the longest drive of the trip but they’re the fastest B-roads we’ve seen. I nod off. When I wake Dinah asks if I’m all right.

  ‘No tiles merging.’

  ‘No.’

  She laughs.

  ‘You were probably just exhausted. Any more blood?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Better.’

  ‘Go back to sleep.’

  Simonsbath is a small blink-and-you-miss-it village of two hundred or so people close to the Somerset-Devon border. It’s past eleven when we arrive and we’ve still no idea where the cottage is. The only lit building to ask for directions at is the Exmoor Forest Inn. If that fails, it looks like we’re sleeping in the car. Dinah goes into the pub and comes back out a few moments later. The Cottage, it turns out, is right opposite us. We can see it from where we’re parked. We cross the road – on the front door the owner’s left us a note about where to find the keys. Downstairs the cottage is normal – a living room, a dining room and a small kitchen – but upstairs the doors to the two bedrooms and the bathroom are shoulder height. They’re like something out of Alice in Wonderland and even Dinah at 5 foot dead has to duck to get through them. She puts Charlie to bed, changes into her nightie and is downstairs waiting for me on the sofa when I come down from settling Phoebe.

  ‘Bed or telly?’

  ‘Telly.’

  ‘You sure? How are you feeling?’

  ‘Much better.’

  ‘You gave me a fright back there. I’ve never seen you that out of it.’

  ‘What did Gemma and Pete say?’

  ‘They were just concerned.’

  ‘Sorry about the lens case.’

  She laughs.

  I take the lens case out of my pocket.

  ‘I want to make a collage when we get home. Put all sorts of things in it from the trip to tell the story. The kids will love it – the press passes for Santa Pod, some of Phoebe’s rabbit pictures, a page from the blue file. Photos and…’

  ‘You’re not putting that in there.’

  I laugh.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s disgusting, Ben.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We watch an old Iron Chef episode on a random cable TV station. It’s sort of Ready Steady Cook meets Ainsley’s Meals in Minutes gon
e mad. A bloated William Shatner in a ridiculous purple robe is the host.

  ‘It’s a battle of seasonings, skillets and fire,’ he shouts. Twenty of the ‘world’s top chefs’ fight cooking duels, the crowd going insane as ingredients like tomato, basil and coriander are read out, and Shatner, whose face is visibly sweating under his bulk, shouts, ‘TURN THE HEAT UP.’ As the meals are prepared, two commentators in an overhead studio with head-mikes comment in the chatty yet imperative way they do for NFL games. The chefs, dressed in national costumes or scary outfits like WWF wrestlers, say things like, ‘I don’t know, it’s like my whole life has been leading up to this moment.’

  After it’s finished I fetch Dinah’s water and we go upstairs and in the bedroom, Dinah says: ‘The best couples complement each other. One offers something the other can’t. You straighten out my scattiness, and I stop you worrying about things like hypochondria and your dad.’

  ‘We’re like a jigsaw,’ I say. ‘Our two pieces fit well together.’

  ‘But the jigsaw changes shape over the years,’ says Dinah. ‘Our edges alter over time, adjusting to the changing edges of the other person.’

  ‘We’re different people from the ones who first met,’ I say. ‘The secret is road trips and going out for meals. This is when we adjust our edges.’

  ‘And watching William Shatner sweat,’ she says.

  ‘Road trips, meals out and watching William Shatner sweat; they’re vital to us.’

  ‘And I definitely can’t put it in my collage?’

  ‘You definitely can’t put it in your collage.’

  CHAPTER 28

  St Enodoc Hotel lies across the estuary from Padstow in the Cornish town of Rock. Rock, once a rundown fishing village, is today nicknamed Kensington-by-Sea. The Rothschilds holiday here, as do the Sainsbury family. Hugh Grant comes and princes William and Harry have been known to land at the local helipad opposite the golf course to water-sport at Polzeath beach. In our sub-post office back home they sell Sunblest. At the one in Rock you can buy quails’ eggs. The St Enodoc is a boutique hotel. You can tell this from the clear glass vase of bright green apples on the reception desk. The hotel playroom is full of scary posh children who say things like this: ‘She’s got our pram. It was Hermione’s. It’s called stealing and it’s wrong and you can go to jail and we’re going to tell our mother when she gets back from her pedicure.’

  This week we’ve followed the rocky North Devon coast south into Cornwall. We’ve visited the Arthurian Centre in Camelford, the site of the sixth-century Camlann battlefield where King Arthur was mortally wounded, and where I discovered Hatch is a common Cornish surname and that more than likely I’m a Celt, a fact that’s been allowing me irritatingly to refer to all Cornish people as ‘we’ and anything in the county as ‘our’. As in, ‘Dinah, have you tried our clotted cream?’ We’ve been to Gnomeland at Watermouth Castle in Ilfracombe, a witchcraft museum in Boscastle and the kids have cast spells in Merlin’s cave beneath Tintagel Castle.

  Everyone in Padstow over the age of eleven looks like Prince Harry. They have the same ruddy complexion with that messy spiky crop on top, and wear three-quarter-length designer surfing shorts and brandy-striped rugby shirts worn collars up under some puffy gilet emblazoned with the name of a public school. The town’s nickname is Padstein after celebrity chef Rick Stein and so far we’ve seen: Stein’s Patisserie, Stein’s Gift Shop, Stein’s Deli, Rick Stein’s Cafe, Rick Stein’s The Seafood Restaurant, St Petroc’s Bistro, and Stein’s Fish and Chips. It’s like he’s some megalomaniac slowly taking over the world beginning with gastro outlets selling freshly caught fish in Padstow. Who knows, maybe in a few years’ time he’ll have shed his chef whites altogether and will be in some military-style tunic sat in an elaborate underground bunker system beneath Tintagel Castle threatening to release some perfectly prepared, and garnished with parsley, nuclear weapons on the unsuspecting world whilst menacingly stroking some very lightly cooked turbot.

  Several kids, their legs thrown over the harbour wall, are armed with crabbing lines and buckets. Dinah heads off to look for a school uniform for Phoebe (she starts school the day after we’re back) while I buy a net and walk down the concrete slipway to the water’s edge with the children. The harbour is full of brightly coloured fishing boats. Seagulls screech overhead. I show Phoebe and Charlie how to fish, leaving the net in the water, waiting for the small brown fish to grow used to its presence and when they’re an inch or two away, running the net towards them and jerking it sharply upwards. It’s something my dad taught me. Charlie, on his haunches, is wearing a white hat and a slightly too baggy

  Hawaiian shirt, which, with his rolled-up trousers and his chubby legs, from behind make him look like some short, eccentric, aged, wealthy American – a sort of J. Peabody III. He peers into the net with utter concentration to see what Phoebe’s bagged. Occasionally he races up the ramp and, for no reason, suddenly does a two-footed jump. Sometimes he puts a fisted arm out and runs full speed – his superhero pose. ‘To the rescue!’ he shouts, in his deepest voice. There’s an old man and his wife sitting on a bench in the sunshine a few feet above us, shopping bags at their feet, and I feel a tremendous pride when I notice they’re unable to resist watching my kids.

  Hotel staff have recommended St Minver fete so we spend the afternoon there. It’s a traditional village affair with a modern twist. There’s welly-wanging (Hunters, of course) and a soak-the-banker sponge throw, while Phoebe wins a cuddly toy on the human fruit machine, which consists of three teenage girls from Winchester public school sat in a line at a table going ‘ya ya ya’ and then each holding up a lemon, some cherries or a slice of melon.

  The Orange Bomber is a Heath Robinson contraption made of wood designed to test cricketing skills. For 30p you get to throw two wooden balls at a metal plate. If you strike it, a magnet decouples, sending a basket of oranges toppling over. The aim is to catch the falling oranges. You have to throw and start to run at the same time to succeed and, although it looks easy, almost everyone fails. Large crowds form and there’s something wonderfully English about the spectacle. Advice, encouragement and good-natured abuse are shouted from the sidelines.

  ‘Hugh, you couldn’t catch a cold. Give it up.’

  ‘Underarm, Marcus.’

  ‘The boy’s in flip-flops. Take the flip-flops off, Fortescue.’

  We have a two-bedroom suite with views across the Camel estuary. The thin tongue of tide is out and fishing boats are marooned on their keels. We’re on our balcony eating a picnic dinner when there’s a commotion outside. People are gathering on the terrace outside the main restaurant beneath our window, staring across the estuary.

  ‘Come here, love, something’s happening,’ and as I shout this, out of the clear blue sky nine Red Arrows roar over the headland in tight formation. They race diagonally left to right, passing so close overhead that at one point I can see the red jacket of one of the pilots in the cockpit.

  ‘Kids! Quick!’

  I stand behind Phoebe. Dinah picks up Charlie. The planes return trailing red, white and blue smoke behind them.

  ‘Wow!’ shouts Phoebe.

  ‘What is that?’ points Charlie.

  The planes soar high and part in two swathes over the estuary. They disappear and return, the two groups flying towards each other, upside down and low over the masts of the lopsided boats, before peeling away at the last moment with a sonic whoosh. They come together one more time, tip their wings and soar away.

  Phoebe hops up and down. ‘Where are they, Dad?’

  ‘They’ve gone, sweetheart.’

  ‘Awwwww. Are they coming back?’

  ‘There must be an air show nearby. They’ve probably gone there. Do you know what they’re called, guys? The Red Arrows. You were very lucky to see them.’

  Charlie, his eyes still on stalks, runs around the room holding his arms out like wings.

  ‘Did you know that was going to happen?’ asks Dinah.

/>   ‘No.’

  ‘We could have been anywhere.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But we were actually looking out of the window at exactly the right time.’

  ‘On a sea-facing balcony.’

  ‘Why were they doing that at the end? That funny thing with their wings.’ Phoebe tilts her arms backwards and forwards.

  ‘They were waving, saying goodbye.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that was the end of the show or maybe someone important is in town.’ I wink at Dinah.

  ‘What?’

  I look at her knowingly. ‘You’ve been craning your head round every time a helicopter lands all day, love.’

  ‘I don’t fancy Prince William, Ben. How many times? I was looking out for him out of curiosity. I’d have been the same if it was Theo Paphitis. Do you think I fancy him? You know what I’m like with celebrities.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ I tell her, and she laughs.

  We’re mucking about in the jacuzzi bath after the kids are in bed playing James Bond games. ‘So long, Mr Bond,’ Dinah’s saying, leaning over and gradually turning up the jets to maximum and, still spasming in the bubbly froth pretending to be electrocuted, I ask her: ‘What would you do, though? Imagine it. Prince William tries to get off with you.’

  ‘I think I’ve missed my chance now, love.’

  ‘Just imagine it, though. You’re in the queue at Di’s Dairy and Pantry and he comes in to buy some Stinking Bishop. He’s leaving Kate. She’s not down to earth enough for him. He wants you to come to a party on his yacht and tell him all about Widnes and the ICI chemical works.’

  Dinah laughs. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘OK, not Widnes. He wants to talk about something else.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go. I don’t fancy him.’

  ‘Course you’d go.’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘I bet I can come up with a scenario where you would.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘OK, you find out he’s been tracking you down for years.’

  She laughs.

  ‘He’s been tracking you down ever since you met him at the opening of that spinal thingy at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.’