Are we there, yet?

So here I am again, driving down the Route de Soleil, trying to map-read in the boiling heat while behind me, screams and yells of head-splitting volume and frequency are gaining in intensity. “I’m bored!” “He hit me!” “You hit me first, snotface!” mingle with the unctuous tones of Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter. We’ve had this bloody tape on a loop for the past six hours, and I long to stop it just to get the volume down but even in full cry my children shriek even louder the moment it’s switched off. The back seat is an ash-tip of discarded crisp packets, empty water bottles, sweet-wrappers and sun block lotion.

Hurrah for the hols! Or rather, not. I don’t know a single parent who actually looks forward to this seven-week period of summer purgatory, especially those of us trying to work for at least part of the day. Utter, stomach-clenching dread is the usual reaction, especially if one or more of your children flatly refuse to do any holiday courses. But if it’s bad enough at home, where you have a number of resources from the blessed local library to the DVD player, going away on holiday is off the Richter chart on the stress scale. Every year I can feel a sort of scream of desperation and frustration building up inside me like steam in a kettle. By the time we are actually en route to whatever house or cottage we have rented for a fortnight I am actually waking up at night shouting “No!” Because holidays are hell, utter hell, and every year I can barely stagger through them.

Of course I adore my children, and vice versa; and of course I love playing with them. So does their father. They have powerful imaginative lives, adventurous spirits, and brave hearts. It ought, therefore, to be possible to avoid what Larkin called “the forgotten boredom of childhood”. Dream on. These qualities can keep a 10 year-old occupied for two hours, but won’t last 40 minutes with a younger one. The demands for company, attention, treats and organised games are relentless. Like dogs, they need serious exercise every day for at least an hour, which in the summer heat means either the sea or a pool. This in turn means that you get woken at dawn by demands for a swim. Forget those languorous lie-ins you had before kids arrived, this is more like boot camp for parents.

A holiday deprives you of almost all the resources of home so that even if you pack a bag full of books and story-tapes, even if you empty the local supermarket of felt-tips and craft materials, you will still be faced with the nightmare of full-on parenting. My children have all the force of my personality plus the energy of someone thirty years younger. I can buy exclusively organic food, give them only water to drink, attempt only the most soothing activities and stories, and it makes not a blind bit of difference. Without the draining effect of school, they’ll still be firing on all pistons until the small hours. A number of my friends pack Calpol just to ensure their children go to sleep; others swear by antihistamine tablets and syrup. I’ve tried both, without success. They love being on holiday so much they don’t want to miss a single hour of it, which is lovely for them but shattering for us. Every evening it takes an escalating series of bribes and threats to get them into bed so that my husband and I can have about two hours of real holiday, i.e., talking quietly to each other about grown-up subjects before we collapse.

If I could have a holiday before my holiday, it might be different. The fact is, we take ours at the hottest time of the year, in a strange place, and at a peak of stress and exhaustion. Where my kids have been able to chill at home, or tire themselves out playing with other children, their parents are taking this break after a frenzy of clearing the decks at work and home. In addition to all the usual stress, I’ve got a new novel, Love in Idleness out at the end of this month. An update of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it has three children concocting a love potion to slip the adults in their lives while on holiday. Alas, my two are so entranced by this idea that they are now mixing potions of their own. Any rented holiday accommodation is now likely to be severely stained, scarred or blown up. I wonder whether I should be packing straightjackets alongside the blackout material for the windows, wasp-sting removers, earplugs and rose-tinted spectacles. I’m definitely packing Valium.

How did our parents manage it? Perhaps they didn’t. I have vague memories of the whole family singing sea-shanties to pass the interminable journey-time; of threats to leave us by the side of the autobahn if we didn’t stop quarrelling; of being sick. Yet every summer, we would drive 1000 miles from London to Italy, without any of the incidents that seem to haunt us now. There was the time we crashed the rented holiday car because we were all laughing so hard at a tape of Francesca Simon’s Horrid Henry that we didn’t notice the road had a bend in it…. There was the time we discovered that the pool for which we’d paid a fortune was infested by wasps, which stung our terrified children repeatedly…. There was the house whose stone walls are now indelibly covered in my daughter’s name because she had just learnt to write. Last year, we rented a house in France through a company called French Affair that was so hot and so hideous that we turned round and drove back 600 miles rather than spend another 24 hours there. Alone, we might have endured it, but with children it was out of the question. With children you find yourself buying battery-operated fans just to keep them quiet for twenty minutes; you inflict yourself on the poshest hotel you can afford because it might have cable TV; you drive a hundred miles to see another family with kids in order to have a break from your own. You have no choice but to spend, spend, spend. We need a holiday to get over our holiday more than ever. But how can you have one when the two people you love best in the world are chained to you like lunatics?

Some people, in order to solve the problem of containing seemingly irrepressible childish energy, go on holiday with their friends and relations. This is what the family does in my novel, and researching it underlined the wisdom of never inflicting your holiday persona and indeed your children on other people. Even if your kids and theirs don’t end up fighting all the time, it’s a short cut to falling-out as adults. Just to be on the safe side – and because there are, occasionally, patches in which we really are having a wonderful time – we’re sticking with them.

The Guardian, July 2003

Ten tried and tested tapes to keep 6-12s quiet when a little touch of Harry in the night fails….