One consequence of having mathematicians as parents was a rather niche holiday habit. I grew up thinking all families summered at the Golden Sands rest home of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, or toured Ivy League universities in a Ford Country Sedan. But in the rare years when no academic institution could be persuaded to fund our travels, like all middle-class families we went camping.
Family dynamics change dramatically on holiday because different skills are required. Mr Fixit and I get on much better when we’re abroad because he doesn’t speak any language except English. He is, however, usefully fluent in engines, oil filters and anything else to do with cars. When we travel, I do the talking, while he undertakes the more lowly jobs of driving, paying the bills and saying “no” to any hotel with patterned wallpaper.
In my childhood, Mum was in the driving seat, literally and metaphorically. She helmed the heavy five-seat Rover with its slippery leather seats and folding armrests, with my dad beside her and the three of us sliding and squabbling in the back. In a right-hand-drive car on French two-lane roads – populated in those days by ancient tractors spilling hay and Citroën DS saloons given to sudden turns of speed whenever a car with foreign plates appeared in the rear-view mirror – his job was to lean out into the oncoming traffic and tell her if it was safe to overtake. It was a hazardous partnership, but not nearly as hazardous as letting him drive.
On these trips, we normally headed for France, as it was closest and my mum liked the wine. Food was another matter. Younger readers may struggle to believe this, but back then we ridiculed the French for having to drink bottled water, with its sulphurous taste and gassy bubbles, while we British gloried in Bazalgette’s legacy of clean water on tap. French (unsalted) butter went rancid after two or three days in the hot boot of a car. As for French bread – as I’ve written before, you couldn’t trust it beyond the first day. What good was that?
So, on top of the ancient suitcases in the boot, we carried a string bag with English butter (salted), English marmalade (what heathen has jam for breakfast?) and a couple of tins of Spam, as my dad doesn’t like cheese, and you never knew what the French might have put in their so-called paté.
That dealt with breakfast and lunch, but it left the problem of supper. As Dad spoke some French, our normal evening routine was to hunt down the cheapest local restaurant and order the cheapest set menu, times five. Even now, I recoil from carottes râpées. Once, when we’d had the same supper at the same restaurant three nights in a row, Madame took pity on us and offered us what they were having instead, which turned out to be a lot nicer, until we discovered we were eating bunny rabbit.
But the year we camped in Scandinavia, we were stuck. In Sweden and Denmark, my father could make an educated guess at the menu, which didn’t help much as it was always herring, and he doesn’t like fish either. But Finnish, with no cousins apart from Estonian and Hungarian, defeated him. We tried going into a restaurant, peering closely at the other customers’ plates, corralling the waitress and pointing with five fingers towards the only meal that looked edible. Believe me, that’s a trick you can only play once.
So the next night, it looked like we might starve – until my mother pulled out her string bag and tumbled on to the damp grass by our tent an arsenal of tins and a Primus stove.
“What are those?”
“I’ve no idea – they lost their labels soon after the war. But they’ll be fine. It’s just a bit of rust.”
From memory, we dined quite well that night on stew and plums, not necessarily in that order. But we never went camping again.
