The Tent, the Bucket and Me by Emma Kennedy

Author:Emma Kennedy [Kennedy, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2010-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Fruits de Merde

‘Let’s go on a road trip!’ suggested Brenda. ‘You know, a proper one. Where we take ages getting somewhere and then take ages coming back. But coming back a different way. So we see more things. Let’s do that.’

‘When you say “ages”,’ said my dad, who was peeling a potato, ‘how long do you mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered my mother with a shrug. ‘Three weeks?’

‘So, like a week to get to a place, a week at the place and then a week coming back from the place?’ asked my dad, thinking out loud.

‘Yes!’ nodded my mother. ‘Exactly like that. And the other thing about making it three weeks,’ she added in a whisper, ‘is that if anything goes wrong, then you know, we’ve got more time to try and forget about it.’

We were now so used to disasters happening to us on holiday we were actually factoring them into our plans. A three-week holiday sounded enormous and exorbitant but due to a government review the previous year that had given teachers an incredible 30 per cent pay increase which had been followed with a 29 per cent pay rise in 1975, somehow my parents were rolling in it. ‘We’ve saved a hundred quid this month!’ Dad would squeal, shaking his head in disbelief. For the first time in their lives, my parents had money to burn. And burn it they would.

Brenda, who had long fantasised about sun-kissed balconies with stunning views, had seen an advert in one of the Sunday papers. It was for the holiday village of La Presqu’île in Port Barcarès, a small town in the South of France just shy of the border with Spain. She had sent off for the brochure, elated by the prospect of a proper bed and no communal showers and, after a quick five-minute flick- through its silky pages, had ordered my father to book a studio flat sharpish. ‘It hasn’t just got one restaurant, Tony,’ she had gushed, throwing open the relevant page and tapping it with some urgency. ‘It’s got two!’

Dad, on the other hand, was in charge of the tour there and back again. He was in his element: any excuse to stare at maps all day and he was in ecstasies. He spent hours writing down place names, making lists, rearranging them, crossing some off, adding new ones. He even worked out mileage between stops, calculated petrol cost and gave each town a star coding according to ‘things of natural and unnatural interest’.

‘When you say “unnatural interest”,’ asked my mother during the family presentation, ‘what do you mean by that?’

‘Anything man-made,’ explained my father, who had pinned his map of France up on a cork board and was pointing at it with a wooden spoon. ‘So that would include the cathedral in Orléans, the amphitheatre in Arles and the palace in Fontainebleu. As opposed to the things of natural interest, by which I mean the Loire river and the Camargue. And also the Pyrenees.’

‘I see,’ nodded my mother.

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