47. ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME…SUMMER HOLIDAYS IN THE 70s

The absolute very first time I remember going on holiday was to North Devon in the late 60s or early 70s. In fact, it could easily have been the late 70s or early 80s instead for that matter because we went to the same place every year. Everyone did in those days. One summer we went to the next bay along for a change but Mum & Dad felt that was quite enough excitement for their lifetime so we reverted back to our usual place the following year.

Compared to our kids, we weren’t used to choice when we were growing up. Viewing entertainment was 3 TV channels not several hundred and nothing was ‘on demand’ – you were just grateful to get a half-decent signal from your TV aerial which, if you had a portable telly, sat on top of your set and you wiggled it until the picture finally appeared, usually just as the credits for your programme started to roll. There were no cinema multiplexes so, if you wanted to see an action film at the pictures and they were showing Love Story, that’s what you watched. There weren’t 25 different varieties of coffee and tea in our day either. Arabica beans were what posh people had with their Sunday roast and elderflower & thistle were things you tried your hardest to avoid treading on during a walk. We got what we were offered. That’s it.

We never flew anywhere on holiday (though we heard that the jet-set took flights to somewhere called Torremolinos which sounded very exotic). Instead, we loaded up the car (this was a time when family cars were normal-sized and would probably fit in the boot of one of today’s MPVs) by hauling our suitcases onto the roof rack and hoping they’d stay in place with a bit of tarpaulin and some bungee cords which Dad would nick off my bike and forget to put back afterwards, ensuring my satchel flew off the next time I rode to school and ended up under the wheels of a Vauxhall Viva.

Heading off on hols, there was no Sat Nav so we used something called a map (and not a google one which talked to you from the palm of your hand) which invariably led to the family-favourite car game of guessing who was to blame when we got lost or took a wrong turn. It was always Dad’s fault even though mum had the map and to suggest otherwise from the back seat meant missing a turn the next time the tin of boiled sweets was handed round.

With the only other light relief coming from announcing in unison the moment we crossed from one county into another (we’re in Shiteshire…..NOW), car journeys were hell for kids in the 70s. There were no commercial radio stations which played songs from the Hit Parade so we had to listen to one of the BBC options and, in those days, parents tended not to be hip enough to tune into Radio One so instead we got Jimmy Young (who, as far as we could tell, rarely lived up to his name). Nowadays, kids listen to Elton John on their AirPods while their parents throw some shapes to the latest Dua Lipa track from the Spotify playlist they’ve paired with the car stereo.

There were no gadgets or mobile phones to keep us occupied (the Rubiks cube didn’t count) so we played I-Spy. For hours. If we tried to read or draw something, one of us would be sick. My mum put a yellow potty in the back of the car just for this eventuality. Unfortunately, it was the same yellow potty which all 3 of us had learned on as toddlers (back then, being potty-trained involved an actual potty) and that fact alone would make us feel far more sick than the car journey ever did. Between toilet breaks, sick stops and hunting for whichever petrol station offered the holographic wildlife cards or football coins I was collecting, any journey to go on holiday took nearly as long as the holiday itself. No wonder we kept on asking whether we were there yet.

Once we got to the hotel, we’d head straight to the beach regardless of the weather (I may have rose-tinted glasses but wasn’t it always sunny for our summer holidays in the 70s?). We didn’t have Factor 50 then – our version was Factor 0 and useless – so we’d stay out all day and were burnt to a crisp by the time we got back to the hotel in the evening. Luckily, there was no such thing as skin cancer in those days although we’d heard enough about our kitchen appliances causing a hole in something called the Ozone layer that our mum would give us a slap whenever we left the fridge door open for any length of time.

Days on the beach were always fun with lessons in domestic violence followed by a dose of animal cruelty. Dad would take us to watch a Punch & Judy show where the bloke would slap the woman over the head with a truncheon and tell the assembled fathers ‘that’s the way to do it’. We’d then be plonked on top of some malnourished and over-worked donkey to be ridden around in small circles for a couple of minutes while it crapped in the sand behind us. It wasn’t exactly the Grand National.

After that, we’d stage games of cricket where Dad would invite nearby families to participate in the hope that he’d have someone to go to the pub with later. My sister was supposed to be wicketkeeper but tended to go crabbing in one of the rockpools instead (which, for the avoidance of doubt, was fishing for crabs with a small net).

We’d take so much kit down to the beach it was as though we were on a jungle expedition. Nowadays, people saunter down with a small backpack and, within minutes, have managed to assemble four chairs, a table, a couple of paddle boards with built-in lycra wetsuits and a gazebo with running fresh hot water. In our day, it would take all morning to hammer in our moth-eaten windbreak while making several trips to the car to fetch some rusty deckchairs, the cricket bat & stumps and a couple of wooden surfboards which tended not to float very well. We didn’t need the wetsuits though. Hard as nails in those days.

There was always a child-hating sod who drove the ice cream van, turning on his musical jingle only at the last minute and then accelerating away as soon as we started racing towards him with enough cash for a 99 or strawberry mivvi. No wonder child obesity was a rarity in our day. If we weren’t chasing ice cream vans or running after cricket balls hit miles away by competitive dads, we were haring along the beach with a kite you could hold in one hand rather than one which required a harness or towed you out to sea (at least not on purpose).

And before we left to go home, we’d be forced to write postcards which would arrive at their destination several days after we did. This was an exercise on par with Xmas card-writing and took up most of our last day. The postcards tended to be poorly-printed aerial photos of the beach where we would mark our position with a biroed X but Dad would get some of the saucy seaside ones to send to his mates (usually well-endowed women complaining that their ageing husbands get a little stiff in the mornings – the cards, that is, not his mates).

We only used to have one holiday a year and it was in the UK – we didn’t get to enjoy several short Euro breaks, a skiing trip, a safari and a fund-raiser to save the turtles in Costa Rica – so leaving would always be a time for sadness….not least because we knew we had Jimmy Young, yellow potties and polyester seats chafing the backs of our sun-burned legs to look forward to on the way home. Salad days.

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Next: ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME...FREE TIME IN THE 70s

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