In fact, the only aspect of our lives that didn’t follow this upwardly mobile trajectory was the type of holiday we booked.
Anthony simply wouldn’t consider travelling overseas, you see. He had a deeply ingrained distrust of foreigners, based on a selective view of history that included, for instance, the French collaborating with the Germans, but excluded the Resistance; that included the Blitz, but excluded Queen Victoria’s German mother. Foreigners were by nature incomprehensible but, more importantly, they were untrustworthy.
Our holidays, therefore, took place in Cornwall, Devon or Scotland. If I’m being honest, being full of Scots as it is, even Scotland was seen as something of a challenge.
That’s not to say that these trips were unpleasant. With the exception of the few occasions when Marge came along, they were actually pretty enjoyable.
We’d rent a flat somewhere, or, in the later years, a cottage, and by day we’d take the kids to theme parks or the beach, and by night we’d eat in the most expensive (but not too foreign) restaurants we could find.
Funnily enough, both our best and worst holidays ever were taken in exactly the same place: Blackpool Sands, down in Devon. We even stayed in the same cottage both times.
The first trip – the good one – took place in August 2016.
Ant had been working all hours on a huge housing project out in Whitfield. He never wanted to talk much about his job, and I think it pleased him to imagine that what he did was beyond the capabilities of my tiny woman-brain to understand. But he did work hard, I could see that, and whatever it was that he was up to, it involved a lot of late-night wining and dining of various members of the planning committee, and even taking them away on lush weekend breaks.
The deal had been signed mid-June, and he’d been paid his commission in July, so, to celebrate, he booked a luxury holiday home for our August holiday – Beach Cottage, in Blackpool Sands.
The drive from Canterbury to Devon took almost six hours, and we did the entire journey non-stop.
One of Ant’s many rules was that he didn’t like to stop during a drive. No matter how far we were travelling, any request for food, or to wee, or simply to stretch my legs was met with stony-faced refusal. The only exceptions were if the car needed fuel (this, I’d pray for) or, during one of the rare trips when Marge was with us, if it was she who’d requested the stop. Even then, the break would last less than ten minutes, the strict minimum required to dash in, go to the loo, buy a sandwich, and sprint back out to the car.
These non-stop journeys had become more difficult since the girls had graduated from nappies, and in the early days I’d tried protesting that Ant was being unreasonable. As this made him so furious that he drove even faster, it turned out to be entirely counterproductive. Instead, I developed a technique of clambering over into the back to stick a potty beneath one or other of our children as Ant continued to thunder down the motorway. I always hoped that he’d be pulled over and told off for putting our lives in danger – hoped that a policeman could make him change his ways – but though we got some strange looks from the occupants of nearby vehicles, it sadly never happened.
By 2016 I’d perfected a far safer technique of denying the girls anything to drink for five hours before the journey, thus dehydrating them to the point where they wouldn’t even ask to use the toilet.
It was dark by the time we reached Devon and, as the moon wasn’t up yet either, you couldn’t see much. The only clue as to the presence of the sea nearby was a gorgeous iodine smell hanging in the air.
I woke up extra early the next morning and crept from the bed to check on the girls. Ant was still snoring, and I hoped that he’d sleep in until lunchtime.
I’d never much enjoyed Ant’s morning moods, but lately I suppose you could say that I’d shifted to a strategy of minimising contact at pretty much any time of the day. So holidays were, in that aspect at least, more challenging than the rest of the year.
The girls, too, were fast asleep, stretched blissfully over the covers, so I slipped out on to the patio. The air was fresh and the sun was just rising. Through the trees I could make out a swathe of blue horizon.
I padded barefoot across the lush lawn – it felt as soft underfoot as a carpet – to a gap in the bushes, where I gasped at my first glimpse of the beach down below, a vast, golden crescent sandwiched between the grey-blue of the sea and vibrant green fields. I sighed and smiled to myself. I just knew that this holiday was going to be a good one.
And it was! The sun shone every day for two whole weeks and we basically lived on the beach, eating burgers and chips from the beach café at lunchtime and straying no further than nearby Stoke Fleming in the evening.
Ant would spend the day wandering back and forth between the beach and the cottage, as if he couldn’t quite decide where he wanted to be. He never could sit still for more than half an hour. But other than his habitual irritation if any of ‘my’ responsibilities – the four Cs of childcare, cooking, clothing and cleaning – were perceived as unfulfilled, he was as relaxed as I’d ever seen him. In fact, the only time he shouted during the entire two-week holiday was
