The Dreaded 'C' Word

As far back as memory serves a holiday was when you jumped onto a plane, fighting with your luggage through a busy airport, followed by the battle of the towels every morning as you fought to keep your spot on the ‘good’ sun chairs far away from the shade. If you didn’t’t come back scalded by the sun, your skin peeling and itchy, you would be questioned whether you went away at all.

Every easter we went to my grandfather’s home town in Galway and as we huddled up in our thermal underwear in front of the range, as it was the only source of heating, we had to listen to my father bang on about our summer holidays. He always packed the holiday brochures, each villa looking the same if you asked me, and his calculator. There was a dirty word in our house, one which would make my father’s blood pressure go through the roof…’caravan’. It was the word that my father looked down on. Our neighbors at the time swore blindly that it was the best way to go because it was cheaper, but they had five kids and my father only had my brother and me and, even though he didn’t make a huge amount of money, he wasn’t going to blow it on what he thought to be a subpar holiday.

I loved that house even though there was no TV or anything ‘new age’. It was the type of easter break that all you could do was think and relax. It was a simple place where I learned how to fish off the rocks into the sea. It brought great enjoyment as we had our parents all to ourselves. By day we wandered through the fields and if the sun shone for any length of time, we threw the wellies in the corner and ran to the beach opposite the old, white bungalow my grandfather and his seven siblings grew up in. It was a simple place, a place where we had all the freedom you could muster. I think more fondly of those easter breaks than any summer holiday we ever went on.

Now I can recall that ice box of a house with a smile. The summer of 2020 both myself and daddy got covid during our staycation and nearly killed each other as we self-isolated in our two up two down terrace houses. Daddy happened to be one of those hippies who stayed in caravans on his summer holidays every year and he always came back peeling and itchy. I don’t know what my father’s aversion to the ‘c’ word was but in order to adhere to the state’s guidelines over travel restrictions and our budget we decided to bite the bullet and rented a campervan. Obviously, I didn’t dare tell my father that as his heart wouldn’t be able to take it. My brother told him about the ‘c’ word last year and we had to call a doctor.

Once the vehicle was booked, we both did antigen tests because I didn’t’t think our marriage would survive another bout of covid…especially in a campervan.

I had often told daddy how my family used to spend every easter break all those years ago. He was intrigued. As we didn’t’t have an itinerary, and were able to literally sleep wherever we chose, daddy was eager to visit the old family house and see and do all the things that I did as a kid every easter break.

We decided to break up the long drive to the village of Carna and stay in an air B&B in the city of Galway to keep the magic alive. That night we had dinner in an amazing pub which happened to have traditional music and dancers as entertainment.  Daddy surprised me the next day as we embarked on a holiday of nostalgia with two fishing poles and all we needed housed in a tackle box that still donned its label. We looked like genuine tourists.

As we buckled up, I looked into the mirror on the visor of the campervan to put on some lippy and couldn’t help but notice that I was smiling. I looked over at daddy, his expression mirroring mine. He grabbed my hand after he put the vehicle in gear and kissed it before we were on our way. I nearly went into heart failure as the small country roads meandered into even smaller country roads. We nearly came to divorce as my fingernails cut into the dashboard every time a car advanced towards us from the opposite direction. All daddy could do was pull into the side, praying it wasn’t a ditch, to let the passer by go, all the while I was cursing at him to be careful and thanking God that I had taken out the insurance.

As I was shouting expletives at daddy for hitting the potholes too hard, he was more worried about the diesel situation. He asked with trepidation if Carna was a village that had a petrol station. Being honest it was so far out in the arse hole of nowhere that I actually didn’t’t know. It didn’t’ register that he was trying so gently to tell me that we were almost out of diesel.

As we reached the village with one hotel, two pubs, a church and a post office it suddenly registered as to what he was saying. I hit him on the arm with more force than was meant. He grabbed it and said ouch like a five-year-old girl in a school playground. We parked up near the church and walked the two minutes into what seemed like the twilight zone. I had forgotten that people could still live such primitive lives.

‘Dia guit, conas ata tu?' the man in the shop greeted us. Like most people in Ireland, we could speak a little Irish but it was asking a lot for us to remember the Irish for petrol station. We asked if the man could speak English…just as we would have in Spain. Being honest, his accent made even the English hard to decipher…just as it would have in Spain. In the end, daddy started using his form of sign language. I hit him again. I asked slowly and concisely whether there was a petrol station in town. Thank God there was as daddy’s arm could use a little TLC at that stage.

We were brought to the back of the building which was a post office on a Monday, a library on a Wednesday and a petrol station on a Friday. We were in luck, as it happened to be a Friday. We filled up the tank and indevoured to find the small house by the stream. We must have circled around the village four times, each time stopping to let what looked like the same herd of cows cross the same stretch of road, the farmer giving us a quizzical look as if he had never seen a campervan before.

Once we finally got to the house my jaw dropped as it looked the exact same as I remembered it, only smaller. We had luckily packed the wellies as it was the wettest summer in the past ten years. When I heard that I rolled my eyes and mumbled ‘typical’. We were lucky that such a house was still in the family even though my grandfather had long since passed. We decided, as there was nowhere else to park other than the driveway of the old house, that we would set up shop there and pray that my great great aunt who I  thought lived there, but had never met, didn’t mind. We looked so out of place it was comical.

As I exited the vehicle to stretch, Daddy disappeared into the back of the caravan and produced two mugs of strong black coffee to bury the hatchet over the long arduous journey. I smiled and threw my arms around his neck as an apology, his hands firmly gripping the coffee mugs, and kissed his cheek. I gratefully took the black coffee and showed him the stream across the road from the disheveled house. He laughed derisively at its size. I went to hit him on the arm again but he had moved away just in time.

I tried to look up the times of when the tide was to turn but of course got no signal. We were officially off the grid. Daddy stopped and put his hand to his ear. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him my brow furrowed. ‘I cant hear anything!’ he replied. I smiled. This was going to be a glorious few days.

As we embarked on the arduous journey back into Galway on the last day of our summer holiday, we looked back fondly at how we had spent our time. It so happened that the house was empty so we needn’t have worried about parking the campervan in the driveway. Unfortunately, the last occupant had passed a couple of years earlier. We encountered no one and came across no cars what so ever in the five days we spent in Carna…. except for the shopkeeper when we ran out of fishing tackle. We fished off the rocks every day and every day daddy retched as he took the fish off the hooks and threw them back in the water as I refused to touch them. We went skinny dipping in the cold Atlantic since it was raining anyway and we had run out of dry clothes. We made love in the campervan every chance we got and it made me feel even closer to daddy than I had ever felt.

I look back now at our summer holiday in the campervan with fondness, but nothing we did on that break even came close to sitting in this hospital, waiting to take the first glimpse of our very own ‘covid baby’ for the first time. Daddy looks the happiest I’ve ever seen him and if you ask me, my father does too. Maybe there is something to be said for living like a hippie…...you!

picture from pixabay