The practical objection to a holiday in the United Kingdom is simple: it costs more for four people to stay in a decrepit seaside town for a few days than it would to fly to Spain. This is an inexplicable and unavoidable fact – and I am a cheapskate.
Beyond that, both adults in the family travel so often the idea of being home is actually more seductive than any other option. I mostly just want to be on the boat. But still, if you call it a holiday, you must fill up the time with some activities that are not part of the daily routine.
On the first official day of our vacation we walked to Cineworld to catch a matinee showing of High Society. This remake of The Philadelphia Story was definitely a bad idea; casting Bing Crosby in the Cary Grant part? Frank Sinatra in place of Jimmy Stewart? Grace Kelly where Katharine Hepburn should be? Appalling, really – but then they also decided to make it a sort of quasi-musical with Louis Armstrong and his band providing narration, which made up for the rest.
Seeing it on the large screen was also quite a treat; the theatre was nearly empty so nobody minded as we giggled through the film. Though the sexual politics of the original script seemed both more banal and more sinister, as depicted by Bing in his cap.
When Grace, addled with a hangover, about to marry one man and in love with ol’ Bing, thinks that she has slept with Sinatra, she says (to paraphrase): I’m an unholy mess of a girl!
Bing replies (I’m approximating as I did not take notes) now that isn’t even good conversation. This is hilarious, and adds a twist to all of my childhood memories of his boring family Christmas specials.
The elder child has limited reserves of energy because of her illness (for those of you following that narrative track she has been diagnosed and it won’t kill her, so we feel deeply relieved and very lucky), but the youngest was amenable to joining us on some excursions.
We took him to the Museum of Zoology, the Whipple, the the Sedgwick, and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. We are not the sort of parents who march children around, forcing them to appreciate things, and we never bother with the activities museums (wrongly, in our case) imagine children will enjoy. We just drift and offer interpretations when asked; this is much easier when the museums are free and empty, as was true in all of the facilities we visited.
Our son, who at age eight stands as tall as my chin, is a studious sort of child. He is quiet and conscientious and made a complete tour of each room before declaring an opinion, which usually displayed some piece of arcane scientific knowledge I did not know he possessed. A few hours after we left the zoology museum he asked to go back to see one of the skeletons; he wanted to make a sketch and needed the real model to assure that his depiction was anatomically correct. And yes, he does use all of these ten cent words.
I remember being chided for having a large vocabulary as a child – I guess it is just a genetic predilection. My son looks like Byron but acts like me; the girl is my clone but acts like her father (either one, they are…. similar). Byron and I wandered around shivering in the excessive air conditioning, looking at the taxidermy specimens, while the boy very patiently completed his drawing.
Of course, all of the social activity meant that my email slid out of control again, but this is a consequence of holidaying. Byron had to sneak off to check his. He texted me on the boat with the news from the states, which was grim, made grimmer by the immediate media focus on gas prices.
As the days passed and the trauma increased we both retreated into a state of repressed depression. We couldn’t talk about any of it because our son is too sensitive to deal with news of this nature, particularly given that he knows we live on the edge of the Fens. It has already occurred to him that the town could be flooded, but he feels reassured by the fact that we live on a boat. He knows that I would collect him before being washed downstream.
I tend to wait until after a crisis passes to be upset, but this spring and summer were awash with sorrow over the tragic death of a colleague, the wrenching loss of a beloved aunt, yet another cousin diagnosed with cancer, the bombings in London, and sundry other things I have not yet had time to think about.
The news from New Orleans hit me hard, and by that I mean in every traumatized neural pathway, every broken bone, every scar. Whenever people weren’t looking, I was crying.
It is hard to maintain a facade of calm and competence, but I believe that it is necessary to try, in part because I know that life offers an unending supply of sadness and you have to create the little bits of happiness on the margins.
I decided to take everyone out on the river. I needed petrol, which requires a three hour journey to the marina at the Fish and Duck. We sailed through countryside: flat, endless fields, sheep, cattle, herons — this is the best part about living in England. Life on the boat is serene, even when it is mucky and hard.
The children lounged around in the cabin or sat on top of the boat reading. Byron and I took turns steering, which gave me another chance to be astonished by my newly found physical strength, as the rattle and pull of the engine shook up my ruined arm without a hint of pain.
It was too sunny for me to be outside, but I put on my straw hat (there has been some debate as to whether it is actually a hat, or a decorative planter) and slathered the exposed bits of my body with sunblock every fifteen minutes. By the end of the first day I was literally filthy, covered in dirt and spider webs and streaks of grease.
I think it is safe to say that I have never before, in my entire life, been dirty. My mother reports that I was even pristine as an infant – insisting on changing clothes if a speck of food soiled my dress. It was quite honestly amazing to find myself, at age thirty-four, piloting a canal boat through rural England, covered in grime.
We bought diesel at a pub older than the country we are citizens of and set off for Ely, where we found a mooring on Lavender Walk. It is nice to live in a place where your surname is considered normal. It was too late to visit the Cathedral or Oliver Cromwell’s house but we walked through parks and churchyards as the sun set.
You know all of those religious paintings in American churches, that show fantastically unimaginable light streaming through clouds? It looked like that.
We settled down for the night as a lightning storm rolled into to town, lighting the sky above us, and fell asleep to the sound of rain hitting the water.
After a (for the adults) hugely entertaining visit to the chandlery Byron did assorted repairs on the boat to prepare her for winter. For some reason Ely has a large population of Muscovy ducks, and a very strong and menacing contingent of swans. At one point there were fully ten gathered at the hatch, and I had to close it against the lunging beaks. Before I moved here I would not have believed it, but swans are scary.
The trip home to Cambridge took most of a day, with minor stops at pubs and to fish my hat out of the water. We met some very interesting people going through the locks, and moored at home just as the light disappeared.
On the last day of our holiday we took a bus to Milton Keynes, and from there a train, to reach Bletchley Park. For anyone concerned with the history of computer science, code-breaking, or WWII tradecraft, visiting the huts at Bletchley is akin to a religious pilgrimage.
This does not happen to fully describe either of my children, who enjoyed looking at the Enigma machines and then spent the rest of the day hanging out on the playground.
Byron and I wandered around in a daze, trying to see as much as possible. The complex, for obscure reasons, offers a model railway and toy museum along with the diplomatic telegraphy hut, the war pigeon display, and a huge room crammed with Churchill memorabilia. Oh, and they also have a photography museum.
It was the oddest and somehow most endearing assemblage I’ve seen in this country. Though I haven’t traveled much.