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‘I remember the holiday we took every year as a family’

Jun 01, 2018

Brian remembers the holidays he used to take with his family as a young boy. Source: Pixabay

Funny isn’t it, the way we form mental images in our minds, of places we have been or even places we have lived. More often than not those images are wildly inaccurate or overindulged.

I recall going on holiday with my parents before World War II, to a little town called Paignton in South Devon, England. The place they always stayed at was a private home offering holiday bed and breakfast facilities, owned by Mrs Collins, a lovely lady with a delightful Devon accent. We went there for years, in fact Mum and Dad had been going there long before I was born in 1935 — they weren’t very ambitious about trying new places — and I remember her house, in my young mind, as being near the top of a hill, which to me appeared to be almost a cliff, quite terrifying!

Then the war came and the visits to Paignton came to an abrupt halt, until 1946, when Dad once again made his regular booking with Mrs Collins and off we went, during the school holidays, to renew our acquaintance with both the town and the lady who would be looking after us. When we arrived there, I was quite stunned to see what a short road The Gurneys was, and how the slope of the hill had reduced by a good 50 per cent. Of course, at 11 years old I was about twice as big as I had been on our last visit and I’m sure that had something to do with it.
But not everything!

I have found (and I hope I’m not the only person to have experienced this) that most of the things I haven’t seen, or experienced for a period of years, always tend to seem smaller, or more simple, or not as colourful, or not as interesting as they used to be when they were familiar to me. People of course have usually changed anyway, through age and circumstance, so I tend not to include them, except for one interesting point, which is in fact a direct opposite to what I am writing about.

The last time I was in England, about 10 years ago, I met up with a group of very old friends who I hadn’t seen for about 60 years; kids I had grown up with as a pre-teenager in Horfield and at school. At first, when we met, it was like being with total strangers, but surprisingly, after 10 minutes or so, the friends I knew stated to emerge from these strangers, so that all those years just fell away. The most surprising thing to me was that in every case, their body language was exactly the same as it was when we were young; a gesture here, a voice inflexion there, a raised eyebrow or a special laugh, one of the few instances where change had not occurred. That really completed the picture for me, and I almost felt like a schoolboy again.

Another change that has dawned on me in more recent years is my changed attitude to my approach to life. There was a time when I used to indulge in many activities that I would now consider to be dangerous, to be avoided if at all possible. I mean things like cliff climbing, caving, long hikes, and swimming as far as I could out to sea and then hope I had enough strength to get back to shore again, an effort that involved a distance of about 3km each way (the fact that I am writing this indicates that I always made it back!). Gliding too was a great sport of mine, but flying again recently, after a break of some 30 years, I find I don’t have half the confidence I had in my flying days, when I used to loop-the-loop and all sorts of other (allowed) stunts.

No, change does have a habit of creeping up on us, when we are least expecting it, until you suddenly find that you can no longer pick up that pen you just dropped on the floor as easily as you have all your life. In fact, the very act of dropping the pen is something new, which has to be got-used-to, along with ladders being a positively dangerous thing to attempt to climb.
It’s all named by one horrible phrase — “getting old!”