I’d like to welcome Rosemary Kaye back. She’s our correspondent in Scotland. Before Rosemary talks about books and holidays, just a reminder that holidays in Scotland and England mean vacations in the U.S. I know you would all catch that immediately, but why think you’re going to read about holidays such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, when she’s talking about what we call vacations?

Thank you, Rosemary!

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Holidays are a rich source of fiction; I recently took part in a Six Degrees of Separation challenge that led me to write about books connected to the holidays, and days out, of my childhood. I was surprised how vividly I remembered those now far off days – an indication, perhaps, of the various authors’ skill in creating a sense of place, and of time. When I was perhaps four or five years old we spent a holiday at Bognor Regis, a most respectable (at least then) resort on the Sussex coast. We stayed at the rather smartly named, but rather less smartly decorated, Riviera Lido Holiday Club.

The worst memory I have of that holiday is the children’s fancy dress competition (a regular feature at British holiday camps of the day); my mother used cardboard boxes and crepe paper to recreate Bertie Bassett, the mascot of Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts.

I was forced into this get up and made to parade round the ballroom with a lot of far more glamorously dressed children. I cried and I cried. My mother eventually realised that one of her boxes was in fact cutting into my thighs so much that I was bleeding. I’d like to pretend that my trauma was such that I never ate another liquorice allsort, but I’m afraid that would be stretching the truth a tad too far.

Decades later, Persephone Press republished a wonderful book that took me back to Bognor.

The Fortnight in September by RC Sherriff, observes an ordinary suburban family, the Stevens, on their annual trip to the seaside. Nothing exceptional happens, but the parents, grown up children and younger schoolboy son are all so beautifully written that this remains one of my favourite books several years after I first read it. Sherriff shows us the inner thoughts of each of the member of the family, all of them decent, kind people, all with their own hopes and worries, as they hire a beach hut, play cricket on the sand, take walks, go to the pub (father only!) and swim.

The Fortnight in September was published in 1931 (and no, I was not there then!), and it is rich with period detail of the kind I have not seen elsewhere. Before reading it I had no idea that people who stayed at a boarding house generally bought their own food, which the landlady would then cook for them – so Mrs Stevens goes out every morning in search of good meat, and a barrel of beer is ordered for Mr Stevens. 

But the world is changing – the parents know that this might be their last holiday with their grown-up children, who are secretly making other plans (but don’t want to hurt their parents), and they all notice (but of course don’t mention) that their boarding house is shabbier than last year, and that their landlady is struggling. But that’s all that happens; at the end of the fortnight, they board the train, go home to south London, and are delighted to see their house, their cat and their garden. It’s hard to explain just how good this book is, but I love it, and I know I am not alone.

When I was a child in London we sometimes had a day out at Brighton; although I was of course unaware of its seedier parts and just wanted to go on the pier (and later to the Royal Pavilion), it was even then a fairly tacky place.

Not everyone has good clean fun in Sussex though. In Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, the focus is on the shady underworld of gangsters, spivs and prostitution. Brighton Rock was first published in 1938 – just seven years after The Fortnight In September – but it gives us a very different take on a seaside resort, and one in which beach, sea and sun are hardly mentioned. Pinkie, a teenage sociopath, has taken over leadership of a gang after its previous head, Kite, has been killed. He in turn murders Hale, whom he believes to be responsible for Kite’s death – but when he realises that a naïve waitress, Rose, knows the truth, he has somehow to prevent her from giving evidence against him. A wife can’t be compelled to stand as a witness against her husband, so Pinkie, who loathes all women, and especially Rose, must marry her to buy her silence. He has, however, not reckoned on Ida, a decent, sensible woman who had met Hale just before he died, and who soon works out what is going on. 

The tension and barely controlled (and often not controlled) violence in this book makes it truly gripping, and – this being Greene – Pinkie and Rose’s Catholic faith is a central force, with its concepts of sin and morality compared to Ida’s non-religious belief in decency and justice. I first encountered Brighton Rock as a teenager, and recently heard it read (on BBC Sounds) by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, who brought tremendous nuance and menace to the story.

Nowadays Brighton is super-smart and cool, a favourite with the LGBT+ community, and home to many of the more ‘alternative’ celebrities. The last time I was there it was overflowing with great cafes and bars. The pier was still wonderful too, and as I had done all those years ago, we and our children got fish and chips and ate them on the train back to London, well satisfied with our trip to the seaside.

We now head westwards along the coast to Cornwall. My mother’s oldest school friend Marge moved there with her husband Sid and their three children. They did this because Sid, a child of the London slums, had once been taken there on a charity holiday, and was so impressed with it he had ever afterwards been determined to go back. In adult life Sid had become a bit of a wheeler-dealer, and eventually bought a big house on the Esplanade at Fowey (above.) There I spent many happy summer holidays. Marge was a very laid back person; she had no rules at all, and was more than happy for me to go off all day, wandering the countryside and clifftops. Marge seemed to live on tea, biscuits, and Embassy Silk Cut, so the arrangements for meals were somewhat different from my mother’s – but I didn’t care, I just loved the sense of freedom and the beautiful scenery. After all, I could always buy myself a Cornish ice cream (topped with clotted cream – which in those days was only available in the West Country, and which you could arrange to be sent to your cholesterol-deprived family back home – at the kiosk on the harbour.

I’m sure I’d hardly recognise Fowey now, so popular has it become with monied Londoners. Catherine Alliott’s A Cornish Summer, is full of these affluent people – but is surprisingly engaging, and good fun. Flora, an artist and the divorced single mother of public schoolboy Peter, is invited to her ex’s family’s lavish clifftop home to paint a portrait of her ex-father-in-law.

What she doesn’t know until she arrives is that also in residence will be her ex-husband, Hugo, his lovely new wife, their perfect children, and Hugo’s best friend, Flora’s arch enemy Tommy, complete with leggy blonde Janey Karachin. This is very much a story of how the rich live, but it is also full of well-developed, believable characters and a plot that races along almost as fast as the yachts in the annual regatta. Much as I wanted to loathe these entitled, pampered people, I loved every minute in their company. Alliott brings various threads together to lead us to a convincing and satisfying ending – a great read, and one you certainly don’t have to be on a beach to enjoy.

Continuing the Cornish theme; a book by an author I’ve probably mentioned before, the late Janie Bolitho. Bolitho’s series about widowed artist and photographer Rose Trevelyan is also set in Newlyn – but Rose is nothing like Catherine Alliott’s Flora. 

In Betrayed in Cornwall, the fourth book in the series, Rose tries to find out what happened to her friend Etta’s son Joe, who is found dead beneath a clifftop path – with a bag of heroin at his side. Joe was well liked, a respected fisherman and a good son to Etta, but the police think that even if he wasn’t taking drugs, he must have been supplying them.  There’s also the problem of Joe’s sister Sarah, a teenager who won’t tell anyone where she goes, and who then disappears completely. Meanwhile a wealthy incomer couple come back from holiday to find their home stripped off a valuable art collection – is there a connection? And who is the married man with whom Etta is having a clandestine affair?  Rose’s on-off partner, Inspector Jack Pearce, warns her to keep out of the case, but of course this is the last thing she’s going to do, and eventually they both help to put the pieces together and find the reasons behind Joe’s death.  

When I was a teenager, my mother and I had a very good holiday in Shrewsbury. I had never been anywhere quite like the Welsh border counties of Shropshire and Herefordshire, which in those days were quite remote. I have a clear memory of taking the bus somewhere, and seeing farmers’ wives, on the way to market, waiting in the early morning mist with their wicker baskets. We also ventured into Wales to visit the Alternative Technology Centre outside Machynlleth – now a major eco-centre, but then in its very early infancy, having been started in 1973 at an old slate mine at Llwyngwem.

Much later my daughter lent me her copy of Frank Cottrell Boyce’s brilliant children’s book Framed, which is actually based on a true story, though the plot soon moves into the realms of fiction.

Dylan, a 9 year old boy, helps his father run their failing petrol station and garage in Manod, a run-down Welsh village below a disused slate mine. Dylan worships his Dad and loves his family and community, but times are hard, especially when their petrol supplier stops delivering.

When a stranger turns up in a BMW 5 (Dylan knows his cars), together with three sidekicks in a Nissan X Trail and two Toyota Hi Aces, the whole village is agog – none more so than Dylan, especially when he discovers that the boxes the men are unloading into the old mine contain neither drugs nor toxic waste but works of art. Why they are there, and what happens next, form the plot of the book, but the story is about so much more than that. It’s about a young boy who always looks on the bright side, and who has no greater wish than to see his family thrive and his village prosper. 

It’s also hilariously funny. Dylan describes the local residents – from ‘Daft Tom’, a grown man who tries to hold up the garage wearing his Ninja Mutant Turtles cycle helmet (Tom’s mum wants to report her son to the police, but Dad instead offers him a job) to the Misses Sellwood, who live on a farm halfway up the mountain;

‘Miss Elsa can drive but she can’t see. Miss Edna can see but she can’t drive. So what they do is, every Wednesday, Miss Elsa drives and Miss Edna steers. It’s not so risky on the mountain road because no one lives there apart from them, and Mr Morgan’s sheep. But when they hit the High Street, they are a Menace to Society.’

He talks about his school, his annoying sisters, his long-suffering mother, and the village shops;

‘..unisex hairdressing at Curl Up N Dye…. Mr Davis’s butcher’s shop, which has ‘Always meat to please you, always pleased to meet you’ written over the door…This isn’t strictly true, as he’s never pleased to meet you.’

Dylan is naïve and sometimes gullible, but he’s kind, optimistic and believes in the essential goodness of people; his generous heart shines through.

Frank Cottrell Boyce is such an exceptional writer that his books are just as enjoyable for adults as for children. The story flies along, the characters are wonderful, and I can’t recommend Framed highly enough.

Cottrell Boyce is a prolific author and screenwriter for films and TV. Another of his children’s books, Millions, won the Carnegie Medal – for which Framed was also shortlisted. With Danny Boyle, he wrote the storyline for the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics.

I’m sure we had other holidays, but these are the ones I remember most. Later on I discovered Ireland, and a whole host of books remind me of my first visits to that magical country. For now though, I will stop. Where did Americans take their summer vacations (or was everyone, as we are led to believe, sent to Summer Camp? And what was that like? [To me it sounds horrendous, but I’m sure more ‘normal’ children enjoyed it!]) I’d love to hear about everyone else’s memories.

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Thank you, Rosemary. It’s always so interesting to read about about our differences, and even the books that we don’t see. I’ll be commenting about my childhood holidays, and I hope others do as well. Thank you for taking the time to let us travel into your past with you.