Family HolidaysBack in the 80s when my Dad got made redundant (hello Dad!), he spent all the redundancy money on one of those big motor caravans.
Us kids loved it, apart from when my sister threw up on my sleeping bag, but looking back I'm not so sure my mum did. There was a certain tension every time the big van was even mentioned, let alone driven around France for weeks on end with her still having to cook and do all the washing.
What went wrong, what went right, and how did you survive the shame of having your family with you as a teenager?
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chthonic, Thu 2 Aug 2007, 14:33)
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Caravan Tales Part IDevon, 1975. Sun, sea, sand, buckets and spades. I spend the days investigating rock pools and the nights caked in camomile lotion, gently radiating the same amount of heat as a three bar electric fire. I can’t recall if it was a rare dull day or a family excursion for the hell of it, but we went to Torquay cinema to see…Jaws.
Now I’m not sure if this actually counts as abuse, but taking a kid not yet out of short trousers to see that film while on a seaside holiday had a pretty profound effect. The benefit of not being out of shorts was that it was a lot quicker to soak them with your own piss in fear at the thought of ever going near the surf again. After a day of scanning even the rock pools for fins, my parents showed a masterly understanding of psychology and bought me a rubber shark of my very own. Some might say it was the ability to show control of the totem of the thing I feared that got me swimming again, I say it was so I could re-enact the scene where Robert Shaw gets eaten with my new shark and old Action Man.
(, Tue 7 Aug 2007, 20:57, Reply)
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