Think Speak Run

The frightening sprawl of six weeks stretches ahead of you. The sick feeling in your stomach returns and tightens into knots.
No playgroup, no regular routine, and maybe no holiday away from it all.

This is where I daydream and remember hazy far-off days in North Wales, UK, in the 1980s and ’90s. Being buried in sand up to my neck. Sand and suncream mixing grittily in sandwiches. Seagulls swooping and screaming overhead. The sound of speedboats chugging out of the harbour, ready to bounce across the waves further out to sea. My dad preparing the GP14 for ‘a quick sail’ with our new-found sailing friends. My mum looking up shells and butterflies in her coastal book. My brother getting the orange crab line and yellow bucket ready to go crabbing off the end of the pier. Me rinsing the fishing net, ready for rockpooling. The promise of an ice cream later, dependent on “Ice Cream Points” – I had been good and would have a Tangle Twister. My brother had been naughty, but might yet scoop a Freaky Foot. A Cornetto for my mum, a Mint Feast for my dad. Maybe dinner-at-teatime in a dinner shop (restaurant); if so, I would have scampi and chips or lasagne with the cheese that smelled like sick (Parmesan), or steak-and-kidney pie, trying to give the kidney pieces to my dad on the sly. I would have whatever my brother was having. He thought I couldn’t make up my own mind, always copying him. Maybe he was right.
Then there’d be the drive back to the campsite, a standing-up wash in the brown bowl, sand having been tipped out in soft piles from our deck shoes. It never did seem to come out of my white ankle socks. Then it was on with the pyjamas, and up into the roof of our campervan. I loved lying awake, watching the slanted roof stripes of yellow, orange, cream and brown gradually fade as the summer sun slowly set.

The next day there would be grasshoppers to catch in jam jars, holes poked in the lid to let them breathe. Grass and leaves we had torn up and put in the jars quickly wilted and had to be changed. We always released them with a little sadness, knowing that the holiday wouldn’t last forever, and we couldn’t take them home to England.

I could go on. There were the rainy days when we played board games – Coppit, Snakes and Ladders, Ludo. We painted and read and I tried to write poems about the slate mountain rising purple-grey behind the wagon. There were arguments, tellings-off, soggy lumps of loo roll to be scraped off the wet canvas walls of our toilet tent after storms.
Somehow, writing about it now, I feel more connected to my childhood. Not cut adrift in a foreign land, raising my own kids, a holiday out of the question.
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I have written up a plan. A holiday timetable that I’m pinning my hopes – and maybe my sanity – to. I used to do this in the UK, when we only had four children. The summer holidays stretched unendingly in front of us and I learned quickly that a lack of planning led to a surplus of misery. At least there we had a village library, open Mon-Sat, with pictures for the kids to colour, and Clap, Tap and Rhyme every Tuesday afternoon, even in the hols. We had a garden there, in each house, even though at Hebron we had to be the wall too, as our tiny garden dropped several feet into a car park on one side, and a road on the other, without a wall or fence. So, picnics in the garden, tents pitched with no room to spare, “cooking” with sticks in weed-filled plantpots, playing on the baby climb-and-slide and using it as Pirates’ Headquarters were all possibilities. Hanging laundry in the greenhouse and gathering pine cones from the Conference Centre lawns were also fun games, and there was a good round walk of a mile or so down to the play park, on to the library, stop off at the greengrocer’s and back to the house. I wrote out an entire holiday plan for my friend Jen in 2015, that could be carried out on foot, within our village, at very little cost.
Here in Uganda it is completely different. There are no libraries. Thank God we now have what remains of our container goods, including most of our books. We are our own library. It seems that clothes, toys, jewellery, appliances, music and films were of more interest for stealing and selling on than books.
Of course, having books doesn’t equate to books necessarily being read! Allowing for the fact that all my children may not want to do the same activities as each other, I have tried to write a timetable that will appeal to each of them at different points. There will need to be a certain level of compliance from them for it to work, and this is where the hoping and praying comes in. In all seriousness, I cannot do this without divine help. And I can’t help anyone else 100%. I am (thankfully) not God. I have tried to be the backbone for others before, and have ended up falling woefully short, and being wrung out like a cleaning rag. It is exhausting trying to be anyone’s Saviour, so this is my disclaimer: I am happy to help and to share what I have learned – often the hard way! – in the hope that it will make your holiday and your family life easier. But I cannot guarantee that I will get it right, or that my ideas will work for you. But take heart; this too shall pass. You will not always be a cooking-cleaning-nappy changing-homework helping-wiped out parent. There will come a day (and far sooner than you realise) when all this relentless strain will fade. The kids will be old enough to dress themselves; they won’t get Lego stuck up their nose, won’t need you to cut their nails and wash their hair; won’t need you to help with their science project or remember maths you last did twenty-something years ago. And it’s precisely because that day is coming way too soon that I’m wanting to help you today. So that someday, your kids will look back and start telling their kids the story of ‘I remember when… in August 2018…’ and the bittersweet memories of a holiday survived will come flooding back, remnants of a time that was; scrapbook treasures of tender moments never to be forgotten.