Chapter 94

We had a late breakfast at a small café on the way to the station, and left Bristol just before lunchtime on Tuesday, having another pretty good journey home, with only a few minutes wait for the connection at New Street.

The countryside that had been so green and lush a fortnight earlier now appeared dry and thirsty; the wheat and barley were ripening well and it looked as if harvesting would be early this year, but the pastures and grass verges were definitely beginning to go brown from lack of rainfall.

Dad was just getting out of his car as we turned into our road, he spotted us walking along the pavement and stood there waiting until we got to him, then hugged both of us.

“Thanks for the postcards – you look like you’ve had a really good holiday!”

“We did, thanks. Great to be home, though! Have you all been okay?”

“Everyone’s fine – come on in, your Mum’s dying to see you.”

He helped us off with our rucksacks at the back door, and we moved on into the kitchen.

My brilliant mother had seen us arrive and had immediately put the kettle on; she gave us a welcoming hug then set to making the tea. Our first mug didn’t touch the sides going down; she had anticipated that, and had already topped the pot. Told you she was brilliant!

We thanked my parents for the loan of the camping equipment; Mum expressed her delight that the thermos flask was still intact, even if it did now need a quick soaking in Steradent to remove the tannin stains from the silvered glass.

Dad laughed as we described how I had dropped the first fried egg in the sand and called me ‘Butterfingers’; then he admitted that in their camping days, they favoured soft-boiling the eggs and then shelling them while still hot.

“You might have told me that little trick!”

“Sorry, Jon, but you have to admit that having suffered from your mistake of not taking a proper eggslice, you now won’t ever forget again.

He was almost certainly, and annoyingly, correct (as always). There’s nothing like a bad or embarrassing experience to make you learn a lesson properly.

Over our evening meal (after first loading Mum’s washing machine and setting it going), we chatted away to my parents, telling them all about our holiday and how much we’d enjoyed being able to swim in the clear waters, which were quite unlike our muddy-brown North Sea. They were very impressed with our sun-tanned faces and arms, though of course we didn’t volunteer the full extent of Julie’s brown bits!

Julie got Dad going beautifully when she described how I’d cruelly forced her to eat clotted cream teas, and wouldn’t let her get up from the table until every crumb had gone.

“And he made me do it four times!”

Dad, who never could resist a fresh scone and jam any more than I could, looked decidedly envious! Mum decided to tease Dad a little.

“I know dear, he’s a little beast sometimes. I’m afraid that he takes after his father, always thinking about filling his stomach, no thought for others!”

The sideways grin she gave Dad showed that she was joking, and he chuckled at her gentle dig. He did like his food, almost as much as she liked to see him enjoying it.

They were both chuffed with their tea-towels – Mum did wonder out loud if she could over-embroider it so that it said “I wish Jen and Jon were like that bird”, but laughingly claimed to have been misheard when I questioned my inclusion.

I had apparently scored mega brownie points by sending postcards to my grandparents; they didn’t get many letters other than bills, so had been delighted with our cheerful news.

Julie and I spent some time with my grandparents the next day; they told us again how pleased they had been to receive the postcards, and were also very happy to have a stick of Lands End Rock as a souvenir, though I had to break it up into small suckable pieces, using Grandad’s carving steel as a hammer, so that they didn’t have to risk their false teeth in crunching it. I helped Grandad dig up a root of new potatoes in his garden; he was fine with sticking the fork in and breaking up the soil, but he freely admitted that he couldn’t bend down to pick up the produce as well as he used to.

All three of my grandparents were slightly slower and a little more careful getting about; I spotted a new grab handle outside Grandma Shaw’s back door to the garden, which she told me Dad had recently fitted to steady her as she opened the door and went up the step. She told us that she’d found the very hot weather a little trying.

“It wouldn’t have done your Grandpa any good either; he always was a bit short of breath after being gassed, and although he liked a bit of sunshine, it would have been far too warm for him these last few weeks.”

She made us a cup of tea and served up a plate of home-made shortbread. Julie made her chuckle by describing the cream teas we’d devoured.

“I can imagine! We honeymooned in Devon, you know, just a week in Torquay, it was all we could afford, and there was a lovely tearoom we went to every afternoon. Smashing scones, home-made jam, and then we’d walk along the promenade for a couple of hours before we went back to our lodgings for our tea. Happy days!”

I was pleased to see that Grandma did remember it with pleasure rather than sadness; she was actually a fairly tough old bird, as that generation was, and she fully realised that a lot of women of her age had either never been married, or had been widowed at a much earlier age. Yes, after nearly fifty years together, she still missed Grandpa, but she saw a lot of her daughter (my Mum), had many friends in town, and was pretty independent.

That evening after tea, Julie and I borrowed the Mini to go over to the factory to see the rest of the gang and take the twins their post. Mum produced a coffee and walnut sponge for us to take with us.

“That will keep them reasonably quiet as you tell them what a wonderful time you had sunning yourself on the beach and eating all those cream teas, while they were back here working their little socks off!”

She was grinning at me as she said it, so I don’t think that she really thought that I was quite that tactless! Okay, it probably was a hint not to be too triumphant about how great our holiday had been.

The caravan was locked and empty; I strolled off to the vegetable line where I found our friends still working. It looked like they had very nearly finished, so they had a word with the supervisor and they knocked off while the other people kept going – to my practised eye it didn’t look like much more than ten minutes worth of boxes for four workers. We all headed straight back to the caravan; as Julie and I were just visiting, they said that they were going to have their showers later, when we had gone.

We greeted each other properly in the privacy of the caravan lounge, hugs and/or kisses all round. I handed Adrian his batch of Private Eye and he grinned his appreciation.

“Thanks! I wanted to catch up with Lord Gnome and Mrs Wilson’s Diary. Now I’ve just got to find the time to read them!”

Sheila seemed a bit on edge, not her usual forthcoming self, Julie spotting it immediately.

“Are you okay, Sheila?”

“Mum’s very keen that we nip home for the weekend, but we don’t want to let Mr Johnston down.”

Julie caught my eye. I realised that she wanted to suggest something that needed my agreement, thought for a split second, and then nodded my consent. Julie’s ideas almost always worked out well, and I trusted her with my heart, so anything else was a given.

“Jon and I have got a few spare days – we could come back and cover for you?”

Sheila visibly relaxed. Even I could tell that she had been trying to pluck up the courage to ask us the favour, but was really reluctant to interfere with our remaining time together before I went up North and Julie disappeared into deepest darkest Hampshire.

“Would you? Really?”

The love of my life glanced at me again, and I smiled my approval of her proposal. I did have one question, though.

“Do the newcomers know that Jen and I are brother and sister?”

The four of them looked at each other. Jen answered.

“Shouldn’t think so, we haven’t mentioned anything like that to them, just that we’re all friends. We were very careful not to say anything about the twins, just in case they got seen together.”

“So it won’t be a problem if I share your bed?”

There was more looking around. She grinned.

“It’d be a damn sight easier if you were here all the time, so, fingers crossed.”

“And no issues about us jumping into your beds as soon as the twins are out of the way?”

“Don’t think so; all Sheila has to do is say that you’ll be taking their places and staying here, and then they can’t say anything, can they?”

There was time for a little bit more chat about our trip to Cornwall; on this occasion we did volunteer the fact that we’d tried a little bit of nudity while sunbathing, and there were knowing smiles from our friends. The twins reminisced a little bit about the holiday they’d spent with their cousin Sian two years earlier while her parents were abroad, aided and abetted for a while by Julie while Jen and I worked at the factory. They’d been very lucky, in their eagerness and inexperience of outdoor nakedness, not to get their naughty bits badly sunburned.

The caravan door opened, and their four new caravan-mates came in.

Adrian did the honours; the two lads were Chris and Doug, the girls Claire and Rebecca. There were a few moments of chaos in the small space while we all shook hands, and then we all sat or perched somewhere while Sheila poured out the tea and Adrian cut and passed round the cake.

Well, it turned out that we’d wasted our breath anticipating the sleeping arrangements while the twins were away. It didn’t take very long at all for our plans to get blown out of the water; I’d say about twenty seconds at the most. Claire was the one who did it.

“I like the suntans! You must be Jen’s brother – Mavis said that you’d sent her a postcard from Cornwall saying that the weather was great?”

My mouth responded correctly, my brain was meanwhile busy saying bugger! Bugger! BUGGER! bugger! Bugger! BUGGER! that they knew. I didn’t dare look at the others; I knew that Julie and Hamish had been looking forward to sleeping together again, and I wasn’t happy that I’d miss out on some time with Jen and Sheila.

Well, as they say, in the anglicised version of Robbie Burns, “The best laid plans of mice and men, often go awry“. (Though the old Scots ‘gang aft agley‘ is more attractive in its own right.) Or in more modern parlance, “Few plans survive first contact with the enemy“.

I could tell that the others looked dismayed, but it didn’t show on their faces enough for a stranger to be able to tell. We were all furiously thinking, though!

I couldn’t see a way out – we’d probably have got away with sharing beds as friends approved by the absentees as long as the sounds of passion weren’t too loud and prolonged, but now that they knew that Jen and I were siblings, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that we could even try. Bugger!

We kept up the conversation; Julie adroitly switched it to asking where they had been on their Interrail trip. They were very enthusiastic about it – they admitted that by the end of the month they were very pleased to stop constantly travelling, but they’d had a great time and seen much of Europe – they’d even climbed Vesuvius and visited Pompeii!

“Will you do it again next year?”

They looked at each other.

“Probably, assuming that we can afford it! It may be the last chance we get for a long holiday for a while, if ever again.”

Julie nodded in obvious agreement. (She was all too conscious that as soon as I started work, I was probably never going to get more than two weeks off at a time, which would leave her a wee bit adrift in the summer with her six weeks of school holiday. We’d discussed this when she had decided to go into teaching; in due course it meant that she’d be able to look after our children in the school holidays, and in the short term we expected that she’d either find some sort of temporary job or use the time around our house and garden, when we got one.)

Then we’d all finished our tea, so I picked up the empty cake plate and the tupperware container, we said goodbye to our new acquaintances, and Jen and Sheila walked with us to the Mini to see us off, which gave us time for a short private conversation.

Julie did of course already have a possible solution to our little setback.

“Why don’t the four of us commute while the twins are away? I mean, would your Mum let you borrow the Mini again? We could stop off in the hayfield for a bit of fun after work, and then go back to your folks to sleep, and then nobody will be any the wiser? Jen, you and Hamish could share your bed at home as you usually do, and then Claire and the others will have nothing to gossip about!”