Schools are breaking up for the long hot summer! This moment when I was a teacher was the most important date in the school calendar.
My children and I were off! My husband couldn't take an entire six weeks off work so sometimes he only managed a couple of weeks.
At first his two weeks were at the beginning and end but as the children grew we were able to get ourselves there.
We camped. A lovely igloo tent was easy for me to get up and was eventually replaced by a small caravan .
It was always Cornwall we aimed at....on the north coast for the surfing.
On breaking up day at my school there was a traditional staff versus pupil rounders match. I arrived home hot and sweaty after running several rounders....but that didn't stop us...I'd left everything ready and after a good meal we were off!
We drove through the night to avoid the massive road blocks and arrived often at dawn where our first sight of the sea was hailed with huge joy.
The camp sites were often not open so more than once we slept on the beach...
I look back to those times with some astonishment. I must have been very fit.
We spent our six weeks surfing and only went home on the last day before term started. Money was always tight but I kept enough cash to pay for our petrol to get home...
These days of eating onion butties and being extremely hard up are precious memories now. I didn't worry about not having much in reserve and somehow we always managed to get home intact to arrive very brown and glowing with health and counting down the months till our next trip!
I treasure these memories now and when I go into St Mawes to find no parking places I grin....they are all here...and I thank God I'm not just a seasonal visitor!
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1 comment:
Sometimes memories are all that we have. I remember holidays with the children in Southern Germany, in a caravan, close to the River Moselle and the Vinyards, where wine tasting was free and the food was lovely. Not sure that the children enjoyed it as much as the adults, as they trailed behind us. But there was plenty for them as well, just needed to overcome the language barrier, and children in that context seem to be able to communicate quite well, while German children (and other nationalities there) seemed to speak good English, learned from a young age in school. I was the only one with any rudimentary German, mixed with my better Flemish (it was close to the Dutch, Belgian and French borders) so got by everywhere. In fact, I was complimented on speaking High German, which was in fact a mix of flemish and german in that place.
Being a transient family, moving between countries meant holidays in disparate places. Belguim, where we lived had some lovely holiday places, and Holland was close by. In the seventies, we didn't really think of jetting off to foreign climes the way people do today, what was on your doorstep was accessible and viable.
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