Tyrants in Tuscany or house party hell

It sounds such a good idea, doesn’t it? There you are, gazing longingly at the villas, farmhouses, castles and cottages you could rent for your summer holiday, but they’re too large and too expensive. You can only afford half the price – or a third. Asking another couple, or a brace of pals along seems like a perfect way to lessen the financial burden, strengthen the friendship and ensure a constant flow of entertainment during waking hours.

Or perhaps you are dreading your children’s boredom, on being left alone together for a fortnight. They’ll miss their friends, you’ll miss yours, so why not ask them to come on holiday with you? Or you’ve got to know someone really delightful, and want to get to know them better. They ask you to share a week, or a fortnight with them at this charming farmhouse in the Dordoigne, this luscious lakeside residence in Lucerne, a safari in South Africa, an adventure in Australia. You sign up for the house party, with all the hopeful naiveté of a contestant appearing on Big Brother.

How can you tell that what you’re signing up for is a potentially hellish experience that, far from strengthening your friendship, lightening your chores and saving you money will do the opposite? The couple who seem easy-going in England turn into tyrants in Tuscany, ogres in Greece and fiends in France. How could you have known that X and Y, who back home seem so civilised and charming have such revolting habits as urinating in the swimming-pool, appearing semi-clad at breakfast and getting drunk on plonk at every opportunity? How could you know that the Z’s children will wake at 5.30 every morning, throw a tantrum because Italian Coco-Pops don’t taste the same as British ones, and kick a football at the castle’s antique mirror?

Two summers ago a pair of ideas collided in my head as I was watching a play in Regent’s Park Theatre two summers ago. The play was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and while I was laughing at the way my children, then aged 6 and 8, immediately identified with the fairies’ mischievous interference in mortal love, I suddenly recalled a conversation I’d had with a friend who had just returned from house-party hell.

“It wasn’t just the meanness over the shared food and chores,” she said, wearily. “It was their children. Our kids go to bed at 8pm, but theirs were still flitting about at 10. Not only did we never have a meal in peace, they wandered everywhere.”

Just like the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I thought, and as the idea of writing a modern version of Shakespeare’s best-loved romantic comedy suddenly took wings, I realised that its setting had to be that of a house party. No other modern setting offers such a potential for mischief, accidental or intended. I began collecting stories from friends, and friends of friends. Immediately, a boiling geyser of rage erupted. The most mild-mannered and reasonable of beings had been nurturing feelings of disappointment and outrage, sometimes for years, at the way their planned fortnight in paradise had gone so badly wrong.

The best-selling children’s author, Francesca Simon, recalls a recent holiday worthy of her hero, Horrid Henry.

“We rented a Spanish house advertised in the New Statesman for what seemed like a wonderfully low rent – it worked out at about £50 a week each. The setting was gorgeous, but when we got to the house, we realised why they were asking for so little money. It had no plumbing. Not only could we only drink, wash and cook in bottled water, but when you needed the toilet you had to go down into an olive grove and take a rake….Seeing other people’s leavings wasn’t great, and we all smelt terrible. Don’t believe that you don’t notice not washing after a few days – you do.

“That was bad enough, but I made the mistake of only bringing two Barry Unsworth novels to read, and our friends had brought none. So I lent one to the husband, and then found that while I’d whipped through the first, he was reading his very, very slowly. I became convinced he was doing this on purpose, and used to follow him around to see if he was ready to swap. If I even touched what was, after all, my book, he became really annoyed, while I was apoplectic with desperation. He thought I was being rude, and I thought he was almost daring me to take my book back. It was such a small thing, but it really affected our holiday and relationship. It’s also meant that now, I pack about ten books, just in case.”

Annabel Brown thought that she and her husband had solved the problem of how to avoid the boredom of holidaying with a 3-year-old when she discovered a much-liked colleague in the City had a daughter the same age. He suggested they rent a villa in France together, and it never occurred to Annabel and her husband that such an intelligent, sensible man could have chosen someone very unlike himself.

“When the car we were sharing arrived at the holiday house, the wife hopped out and raced up the drive on her high heels, then raced back and shouted to her husband,
“ I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I’ve chosen our bedroom!”
Then she turned to us and said, “We get first choice because I did all the work of finding this place.”
We were astounded. The house did have one splendid bedroom with an ensuite bathroom, and we didn’t mind having the less nice ones but we’d never have behaved like that – we’d have offered to do turn and turn about.”
They discovered they had gone on holiday with a control-freak. The first night, as they say out on the terrace enjoying a glass of wine and the fabulous view, their colleague’s wife turned to them and said,
“ Right, I think we all ought to go to bed now it’s past 11 because my son will be awake at 7.15, so we’ll need to breakfast at 7.30 in order to get a god two hours play on the beach in before my son’s nap.”
“ We just looked at each other, unable to believe our ears,” says Annabel, “When we woke at 9, we found a terse note on the table saying, Very sorry not to see you at breakfast. We met them coming back from the beach, and she said, ‘Well, I hope you’re not going to be late for lunch.’ And so it went on. She insisted on a kitty of £50 each, but when in desperation we tried to go out for a meal, feeling we couldn’t stand another evening with her, she said, ‘I hope you’re not taking the money from the kitty, I’ve already bought the food for tonight.’ Her husband had an agonised smile on his face all the time, unable to say anything out of loyalty. We all shared interesting professional lives, but all she could talk about was nurseries, clothes, the fat man on the beach. I suppose she felt miserable and left out, but she had her revenge. By the end of the holiday, my husband thought he was going to punch her on the face. We kept telling each other, only another two hours, only another two hours…and then at the airport, our flight was delayed four hours. Rather than spend any more time together we went out onto the boiling tarmac, and sat there until our plane took off.”

What this taught Annabel was that, much as you might like someone you must know them really well, and have “an affection that is great enough to overcome your irritation.”

Even knowing people well does not help, for as Kathy Lette points out. A regular guest of John Mortimer’s in Tuscany, she says, “The weird thing about house parties is that, due to the English climate, you have probably never seen most of your friends unclothed. When we arrived at our first Italian house party, the pool at our villa looked like Baywatch gone wrong. It was the Brit version, complete with weedy white legs, wobbly thighs and beer bellies all boiled red in the sun like the exotic salamis I’d just seen in Siena’s market.”

The novelist Jane Thynne adds that if decades of friendship are not to go up in smoke over the washing-up rota, you must make sure that you all start from a level playing-field.

“We had brought along a nanny, as had one of the other couples, to stay at what was described as a “chalet in the grounds”. It turned out to be a garden shed with no electricity. The nannies were deeply fed up, hated France and left us shopping lists requesting “normal” food. They hated the isolation, so we lent them the hired car, which they crashed. They refused to look after the kids of the nannyless couple, so we had to look after them – and ours, because then our own children wanted to be with us too..”

The luxury of a nanny on holiday can turn out to be a mixed blessing. Kathy Lette says,
“ The Italian countryside reeks of death. Owls killing rabbits, housekeepers killing mice, wives killing husbands caught fondling the nanny. When she dragged her husband outside we pretended his screams of agony were from the regular scalping we were always getting from the low beams of the villa. With no telly and only one living area, none of us could escape the drama. Holidays, like men, are rarely long enough but occasionally one does pray for vacation interruptus.”

It isn’t just other adults who cause friction. Many people start to share their holidays with other families, and this is the biggest powder-keg of all. Different policies on child-rearing are bad enough, but it’s far worse once they’re old enough to invite friends to stay.

“I have a 9-year-old son who is a Just William sort of boy,” says Caroline Baker, a TV producer. “He wants to be out doing things, and has to be bribed to read books. There was a boy at school he liked, largely, I now think, because they played Top Trumps at break-time. I invited him to come and stay with us last summer, only to find that this boy was quiet and bookish and wanted to stay indoors all day. My sons kept saying furiously he was a show-off for wanting to go to visit the ruins of Pompeii, and his guest became more and more withdrawn and miserable. Instead of the lovely time I’d planned for both boys – and myself – I found myself saying through gritted teeth, ‘James, can’t you go outside and play water-pistols with my son for a bit?’ It was foul for him, foul for my son and such a nightmare for me that after the first week, I rang his mother half-way and said could I put him on the next plane back home.”

It is women who usually bear the brunt of this, for as Joanna Trollope observes, “it somehow falls to women on holiday not only to do most of the work but also – far more difficult – to be responsible for everyone’s various and arbitrary happinesses. Add to that the fact that almost all self-catering accommodation requires you to try somehow to replicate even basic domestic life in extremely inconvenient circumstances and it’s no wonder women talk to yearningly about ‘rest.’”

Even worse is the holiday you spend with teenaged children. Many stories I heard involved plans of Byzantine complexity trying to accommodate Tasha’s yearning for jet-skis with Chloe’s love of Renaissance art and Jake’s determination to hang out at the local disco and bring girls they’ve scored back home at 3 am. Like Tony Blair’s son Euan, whose drunken antics while on holiday two years (check) ago attracted some censure, they can show off to their peers while on holiday in ways that embarrass their parents and alienate grown-up friends. Alternatively, children from different families can find, like the latest book in Anthony Horowitz’s wonderful Alex Rider series about a teenaged James Bond, that being on holiday together has ruined a promising romance.

I remember once sharing a house in Portugal with another couple of dear friends. They were quite happy to stuff their toddler with sweets and let her veg out all day in front of the TV; I had brought a bag of about 50 picture-books to read to my 18 month-old. I found myself getting increasingly censorious of my poor friends (whose toddler’s vocabulary did suddenly increase by about 100 words) while they became fed up with this demon queen of education, and wanted to chill out by the pool instead. We managed not to row, but there were some tense moments in which my husband would pile us all into our rented car and drive us to the beach to defuse matters. I love these friends dearly, but each of us saw aspects of the other that made us realise we were not suited to going on holiday together again.

One poor friend of mine with three children, claims that “practically every party we’ve been on has its own special disaster. The worst was probably when we rented a villa in the South of France with two other families, including 5 children under 6. My husband nabbed the best room, which was separate from the rest in another wing. However, it was above the kids’ dormitory, so we were woken at 5.30 am. While the other parents slumbered on, we were woken with requests for juice, games, etc.

“Meanwhile, both the other couples were experiencing marital difficulties. Every night, the other two women would stay up until 2 am drinking and slagging off men, while their husbands would rise at 6am to look after the kids.. At the end of the holiday, one of the couples had separated and are now divorced.”

And this, in the end, is why I am so suspicious of friends who insist on going house parties together. Holidays are for recreation in the most literal sense: it’s a time for taking stock of who you are, what your family is like, what your relationship with your partner has become and how your children are developing. It’s one thing to share a house when you’re all young and fancy-free – when, in fact, you have your eye on someone and hope they have theirs on you – or when your professional life is all about making contacts. But it’s quite another to share your precious fortnight of leisure with other couples and other families once you’re over 30. A number of acquaintances have told me about how they go away with the same family every year, and how successful it always is, and I find myself wondering, Is your marriage really that dead? IS your work really so all-consuming? Do you really not want to have those deep, rambling conversations with your children that enables you to really get to know them as people? What are you so afraid of discovering about yourself? Because love can only be discovered and renewed in idleness, and in private, and not with your friends and relations – not if you want to keep them.

The Daily Telegraph, July 2003