Country Road, Take Me Home
Lace Stitch Cowl in Coolree “Ocean Green” 100% Baby Alpaca
(chunky/bulky)
Last week, a short trip along winding country roads led to an area I don’t know so well …
“…I've probably been here before… childhood day trips... nowhere the length and breadth of the country we didn't get to”, I remarked.
“Excursions!”, my travel companion said. "We had them too!"
Our annual family excursions would have had fewer parallels, I expect however... even in the '60s and '70s when taking a family holiday was becoming quite a thing. Spread over a period of seven or eight years, my wonderful culture vulture mother dragooned my father and us children into week-long road trips in our grassy green Irish countryside in June - just before high tourist season and slap bang mid high hay fever season (from which I suffered)(badly)(but rated as a consideration pretty much by nobody in those days). Her urge to have us all commune with ancient historical sites was too great to be resisted, and threw my father - never an explorer by nature - on the horns of a dilemma - On the one hand, as a confirmed home bird, he found being away for more than a day abhorrent, but his equally impassioned attachment to cars and driving pulled him a different way. Then there was his unshakeable faith in my mother and all her decisions and so of course he acquiesced - every year he agreed, but you could see that as soon as he did, he immediately began to regret it.
Therefore for a week in June, milk and newspaper deliveries were cancelled and neighbours alerted to guard our home against burglars, arson, floods, subsidence & so on… my father anticipated disaster on pretty much an hourly basis... Separation anxiety mounted as the car was loaded up with us, our one black suitcase, picnic paraphernalia, deck chairs, swimming togs and striped toweling tubes to get changed under on the beach - we drove from one end of the country to the other, so there was always a beach.
My mother always forgot something and had to run back. My father always put on his Polaroids (bought for their honeymoon in - amazingly - Madrid) and began to fume, while I, the youngest, began to do what I could to occupy and hold a reasonable portion of the middle of the back seat, my placement as lowliest in the pecking order. In the opinion of siblings at least. And then the holiday would begin in earnest.
My beloved father, through his Polaroids, literally just waking up to the fact I had made off with his camera.. And actually, this sliver is one of very few shots I have of him -he took the photos and was seldom in them... Unfortunately it can't be seen either that he always wore a suit, even on the beach (not as peculiar seeming then as it would be now)
If ever a book were written for a family, The AA Guidebook was for us… nothing today could possibly equate to the unanimous confidence inspired by that black-and-yellow logo... Even in a time of certainties, the AA was certainty squared: its guidebook had road maps you could count on and vital breakdown backup service information for my father. It had lists of AA approved guesthouses and hotels with rock solid star ratings where you could stretch out flat on beds and read (in a position other than sitting bolt upright)(to avoid being jabbed by neighbouring elbows), and where meals could be taken at proper tables (as opposed to picnics on the move) -- A few hotels on the list might conceivably even have television, which we didn't at home. And most importantly, for my mother the guidebook had everything known about historical sights and exactly how to get at them - which mattered in an era wholly innocent of interpretative centres. And so we hurtled along at breakneck speed all day and often into the night, covering as much ground as we possibly could, guided by the AA. When trouble broke out in the back seat - and it often did - my father would roar:- did we want to make him crash or what, and my mother would whip out another book entitled Fun On Wheels, which was just about as much fun as it sounds actually.
Child of the sixties - actually I had a leather eye patch and braces on my teeth too round then but can't find a photo..
My father’s primary motivation was all about pressing on and getting back home, which in fact dovetailed well with my mother's insatiable need for ever more sights and ever new facts...the faster we went, the more we saw.. On any given night, we never quite knew where we’d be, which is why we didn’t generally advance book guesthouses, hotels or meals. It wasn’t always easy to find places which could take the whole family: this caused some front seat squalls. My mother's navigational style did too – my father was pained that she didn't care for driving - he'd even got her a driving license before you needed to do a test, and faithfully renewed it each year in the hope that one day she would learn. She didn't - not then, at least - which is possibly why forewarning about upcoming turns wasn't a priority for her at all, and often we arrived at a destination violently - skidding up and jamming on with my father foaming at the mouth - in front of yet another beehive hut, round tower or megalithic tomb. We'd spill out of the car on, say, a mountain top into the inevitable low-lying cloud, wind and rain of June in the furthest-flung corners of Ireland; my mother would read to us from the AA Guidebook and instruct us in the doings of erudite monks, marauding celts and who-knows-what neolithic motifs from the year dot....
When she was finished, my father would have calmed down enough to take a photo, involving a lot of calculating of distances, angles and focus. His subject matter would become unruly again and get yelled at again as photography was another thing he took seriously - He treasured his camera almost as highly as his car, and my badly lit replicas, taken on a broken phone from contact sheets are no true representation of his skills. Then we all piled back in the car once more and hurtled onward to the next site through mountain goats and boulders and bog... The only thing to voluntarily slow him down and make his heart sing was an occasional encounter with an electricity turbine or a well constructed aqueduct in the wild, or even just a bridge that interested him. That would animate him enormously, and we'd probably stop to take photos there too (did I mention he was a civil engineer?)
If we covered all the anticipated ground and got back home a day or so ahead of schedule – possibly in the middle of the night - it was viewed as a feat. We never much went in for marching in step, but even so there was some level of awareness that this approach to holidaying might have been construed as odd by those outside the family, and so we lay low for a day or so until the time came that we were actually due home...and when newspaper and milk deliveries could resume and normal life could start again.
Keeping hair short was said to strengthen it....although strengthen it for what I was never quite sure... I suspect nuns put that about, but a lot of parents believed, and so for a long time I got the same haircut as the boys.