Анна Томкинс - My childhood adventure from Manchester to Spain 1969

An important legacy from my parents is my taste for travel. Actually that is not a strictly accurate statement. I love being in different places and enjoy experiencing new cultures. I don’t necessarily enjoy getting to them.

One of my earliest memories is of accompanying my father on his rounds. At the time he was an area manager for Security Company and would often have to make late night inspections. Spot checks to ensure the security guards were awake and at their posts at the various business and industrial sites he covered. Often I would accompany my father on these late night inspections (he claimed it was the only way they could get me to sleep) and I would be safely strapped into the front passenger seat beside him.

Dad would keep me entertained by telling me about the places we were driving by, the work being done at the various sites we visited.

He is a natural raconteur. Sometimes he would tell me of the places he had been to in the Middle East and Mediterranean when he was posted overseas by the British army. During his time abroad on active duty, he would take the time out to visit nearby countries rather than spend his leave on visits back to UK. And he had many tales to tell. Vivid tales of his travels in the Holy Land. Of staying with monks in an ancient mountain top monastery, living off bread, goat cheese and wine made by the monks. Tales of his time in Cyprus during the troubles between the Turks and the Greeks (hasn’t there always been trouble between the Turks and the Greeks?).

One day under enemy fire while on ski patrol in the snows of the troodos mountains. The next day to find himself on leave, snorkeling in the rich warm waters around the coast, or enjoying a spot of sunbathing and a cold beer.

Other times he would regale me heroic tales of the Celtic legends of old – Cu Cullen, Finn McCuill and the Red Branch Knights. As a young man he had toured Ireland and England extensively by cycle, staying in Youth Hostels, at a time when the roads were quieter and safer than they are today

These car journeys had a several curious effects on the infant Brian. The most significant was that it spurred me on with a desire to experience these foreign places at first hand. Secondly it meant that even to this day I find it almost impossible to go to sleep before 1.00 AM. Unless of course my wife is prepared to drive me round town in the dark for 2 hours telling me interesting stories. Most unlikely as she doesn’t drive.

A curious side effect was the distorted perspective I developed of the world outside the immediate area of my home. As I was so small (I could hardly be described as a potential high jump champ now, either) it was impossible to see directly out of the car windows. Consequently I became convinced that the world in between the places where the car stopped and I got out; consisted almost entirely of clouds, starry skies, street lights and the occasional disembodied church steeple or high rise apartment block. My head spent so much time at an angle of 65 degrees; it’s a wonder I didn’t decide to become an astronomer.

At the tender age of three, I now had a baby brother and sister for company, and was about to set off on my first long haul travel experience. My father’s best friend from the army had managed to get a job as the manager of a famous hotel on the shore of Loch Ness. The family was invited to be his guests.

Back in the early 1960`s there were no motorways or even major roads in that direction. The trip North from Manchester was set out on with much the same sense of adventure as Marco Polo set out for China. As it turned out, he got there much quicker.

To this day my father insists that mother acts as map reader and navigator on long journeys. I have no idea why. Perhaps it’s because she is so nearly perfect he needs an excuse to shout at her occasionally. God love her, she has absolutely no sense of direction whatsoever. She could get lost in a telephone kiosk. Have you ever done that when you have been really drunk? You know, phoned for a taxi then forgotten which wall to push against to get out. No? Must just be me then.

Anyway take my word for it, Mum is hopeless with directions and she knows it. The time to set off had arrived and Dad handed mum an out of date tourist map of Scotland. She held it in trembling fingers, uncomfortably aware of her total inability to tell a road from a train line. She seemed vaguely aware that anything coloured blue was likely to represent a form of water. A river or a lake maybe. The rest of it could have been in ancient Sanskrit for all the sense it made to her. She studiously poured over the map for about 20 minutes before eventually announcing that she had located our destination on the map and was ready to go. It was felt at the time that the cartoon monster with the name Nessie beside it should have helped her locate Loch Ness sooner. But it didn’t.

Off we went on the roughly 350-mile trip north. We crossed into Scotland near Gretna Green to a big cheer. My first foreign country! Even if it is, albeit somewhat reluctantly, part of Britain.

Then things started to go awry. The British government seems to be pathologically against spending money in Scotland. While the rest of the UK is blessed (some would say cursed) with an extensive motorway network, Scotland has until recently missed out on any such expensive public works, especially the further North you go.

You would think that it was long term Government policy to make travel around Scotland as difficult as possible and thereby keep the semi naked, wide painted hordes of barbarian Scots away from the civilised south. Anybody who has ever visited the holiday resorts of Blackpool or Morecombe during Glasgow holiday weeks would realise the plan was doomed to failure.

Back then the roads were lousy with few signposts. We seemed to be perpetually stuck behind slow moving lorries. It was slow going indeed.

Despite our early morning start, darkness had descended and the weather had closed in. Heavy rain affected visibility so that it was easy to miss a signpost on the unlit roads.

Every town or village we came to dad would bark out the place name and the phrase “which way next?” Mother was clearly becoming more and more flustered and less sure of our position.

At one point we had reached quite a large town. As we drove through the center we noticed mother looking frantically about the place through the windows. Dad assumed she was looking for a place name so that she could tell him exactly where we were and how far we had to go.

Dream on sucker!

She had actually spotted a bus terminus and was desperately praying that she could locate a bus showing “INVERNESS” as its destination that she could follow. Obviously she was not praying hard enough. We were still 200 miles from our destination and inexplicably heading West instead of North.

Two hours later with the rain beating a heavy metal drum solo on the roof, the road got even worse. At least before it had been fairly straight. Now it twisted and turned and became even narrower. We were the only vehicle on the road, no longer hindered by lumbering wagons.

“Are we lost?” I asked unhelpfully.

My father was muttering under his breath and glancing daggers at the map bearer in the front passenger seat.

“Have you any bloody idea where we are woman?”

“Yes, yes I think so”, she said with a definite lack of conviction.

“We should be coming up to a major junction where you take the left turn.”

“There, there it is!” she announced, a note of unexpected triumph in her voice.

The car turned sharply left, descended a steeply sloping concrete slipway, and came to rest axle deep in the icy waters of the Irish Sea.

Oh, how we all laughed! Actually nobody laughed. Dad was banging his head monotonously on the steering wheel (at least he wasn’t banging mums head on the steering wheel) and we were contemplating life as part of a one-parent family. Mum was pretending not to exist. Well you would, wouldn’t you?

We did eventually make it to Loch Ness and my parents did eventually start speaking to each other again. Nine months later I had another baby sister. Sandy has also inherited our taste for travel. As a research doctor and lecturer she travels the world, attending symposiums and presenting research papers. This has helped her to amass the finest collection of Hard Rock Café commemorative cocktail glasses known to man, and I am very proud of her.

In the following few years we discovered much of Britain together as a family. Mostly it was by way of days out at the weekend, blackberry picking, and picnics in the gardens of historic houses. That sort of thing. Dad changed his job and joined a food distribution company as a salesman, which meant a pay rise and a company car. We also had a couple of summer holidays at holiday camp in North Wales, which I particularly enjoyed. I learnt to swim one year and earned my first ever “certificate of achievement”. I was seven years old and I still have the certificate – is that anally retentive or what? I put the certificate on my bedroom wall and when we went back the following year I pretended I still couldn’t swim so that I could get another one. Sad but true.

However much fun these times together were, you could always tell that Dad wanted something more. Something just a little bit different. Something really, really foreign.

One fateful day, dad came home late from work. On the back seat of the car were a big canvass sack and a collection of aluminium poles.

“And this is what exactly?” enquired Mum.

“It’s a tent darling. Family sized.”

Clearly this was not the fully automatic washing machine that the overworked mother of four had been hoping to get with Dads annual bonus.

“Bill, can I have a word with you please. Away from the children.”

There followed a hushed but heated debate off to one side.

“Where did you get it?”

“One of my customers let me have it cheap. His kids are too old to want to go camping anymore, but he says they had lots of fun weekends away all over the place”.

“I don’t care how cheap it is, take it back. I am not going to spend my weekends sleeping on wet grass, watching my kids going rigid with boredom in some field in the middle of nowhere, while you and me slowly go blue from hypothermia. Apart from that I hate insects, you know I do.”

Dad was not to be deterred. “OK we will try it out for one weekend and if you are still not happy, it goes back. Fair enough?”

“Oh come on mum. I’ve never been camping before”. John had appeared at Dads side. Like the last minute arrival of General Blucher’s men at the battle of Waterloo, victory was clutched from the jaws of defeat.

“Ok. Well try it. But if I get the flu, it goes back .No discussion”.

The new tent was taken into the garden for an immediate trial run. Dad’s customer had given him directions for assembly scribbled on the back of a beer mat, so it took us ages to put the thing up. Finally it was done. The bloody thing took up most of the garden, and was the size of a Victorian summer house. The roof was so high, only mum and dad could reach it.

That night the five of us slept in the garden under piles of blankets. We loved it. Mum called us a bunch of bloody idiots and slept in her own bed. But being mum, she was there for us first thing in the morning, with bacon, eggs, tea and toast. You need a good start to the day when you’re sleeping outdoors, she advised.