Are We Nearly There Yet?: A Family's 8000 Miles Around Britain in a Vauxhall Astra Read online

  ‘You carry Dora bag.’

  Already with a camera, a notebook, my iPhone, a mini computer to write my notes up on and a wallet, I can do without more baggage, but when I try to put the bag in the buggy basket I’m reprimanded, ‘No, YOU carry it, Daddy. YOU do it.’

  After visiting Mary Arden’s Farm we board the City Sightseeing bus. Phoebe and Charlie want us all to sit on the top deck, where they stand on the seats, dodging the overhanging branches that threaten to decapitate them on the way to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. They charge around the deck ricocheting, as the bus rounds corners, off seats and people like giant pinballs. The onboard commentary is drowned by Phoebe’s rival tour.

  ‘Listen to my talk, Daddy. That’s a car,’ she says, pointing. ‘That’s a tree. That’s another tree and that is a house, Daddy. Daddy, do you like my talking?’ Shouting now, ‘I SAID DADDY DO YOU LIKE MY TALKING?’ We’re forced from the bus not by this, but by Charlie, who, anxious to be walking about, protests at his confinement in Dinah’s arms by emptying her purse, that she’s given him for some peace and quiet, on the floor of the bus; which, as it’s navigating a roundabout at the time, spreads the purse’s contents to the four corners of upstairs, forcing Dinah and me to crawl on our hands and knees under the seats of Japanese tourists to pick it all up. ‘Sorry, these are my wife’s keys… If you could just lift your As You Like It goody bag…’

  After the tour I marshal the family to the riverbank, where we board a Bancroft boat cruise. On a pootle up the River Avon we see rowing boats and mini flotillas of ducks. Swans and Canada geese line the banks. Dinah trails her hand in the cool water. Charlie shouts and points at passing wildlife: ‘A DUCK. A SWAN. ANUDDER DUCK. ANUDDER SWAN.’ Phoebe draws more injured rabbits in my notebook.

  ‘That’s lovely, Phoebe. But where’s the other leg?’

  ‘Bitten off.’

  ‘What are the red lines for, pops?’

  ‘Blood. Mummy, do you want a scratched one with one leg, or one with an eye missing?’

  ‘Phoebe, you know that film that Daddy let you watch with the rabbits in it? It was just pretend, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course, I know that.’

  We’re in the hotel’s oak-panelled restaurant listening to a cartoonish Lancashire couple and their ten-year-old son, who for the last twenty minutes have been boastfully debating their knowledge of where it’s safe to drink tap water (‘Now, Tunisia, you must never have ice in your drink…’) while also chronicling their outrage that on their side plates they’ve been given tomato bread (‘Tomato in bread! That’s messing bread about!’). They’ve now moved on to the concept of baggage handling at hotels.

  ‘Now at the Imperial,’ he’s saying, ‘they park yer car for yer, someone takes yer bags. Then when yer get to yer room… they’re there! Tha’s class.’

  ‘It’s weird,’ says Dinah. ‘You say these things to me, I don’t know, like we’re going to buy a house, or we’re going to write a guidebook, and I never think they’ll come off but in the end they almost always do. I think I’m going to start listening more closely to what you say to me.’

  ‘So how’s it going so far?’

  ‘Shitty start.’

  ‘Literally. But overall?’

  ‘Good. Although don’t take this the wrong way…’

  ‘You think we did too much today.’

  She smiles. ‘A bit.’

  I tell her some of what I was feeling in the church. When my mum died thirteen years ago it knocked me sideways, sent me off the rails. A bit of me feels guilty this hasn’t happened yet with my dad. Maybe I’m more grown up, or it’s easier because Dad’s older or the second parent. Whatever it is, while half of me wants to be by my dad’s side living every cough and spit, every new drug, every scan, every appointment with the consultant – the way I did when Mum got sick, the way Penny and Mary are now – the other half of me wants to be as far away as possible to protect myself. I don’t want to see him fade away and I don’t want to risk going too deeply into the black hole of bereavement in case I come out somewhere different and jeopardise everything I have now, like my family.

  ‘OK, why would you lose your family?’ asks Dinah.

  ‘I don’t know. What happened before.’

  Dinah and I split up for a while after my mum died.

  ‘That was different, Ben.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘You were a bit of a twat then,’ she says.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re not any more.’

  ‘Such praise.’

  ‘You know what I meant, Ben.’

  ‘I have ceased to be a twat. That’s good news. Should I make an announcement? Put an ad in The Times. Ben Hatch would like it to be known he is no longer a twat. Births, deaths, marriages and people who are longer twats.’

  ‘Have you exhausted that one?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Good.’

  I ask for more wine. It comes. I top up our glasses.

  ‘You never know what will happen when someone you love dies. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘I see. And this is why we had to go to Nash’s House even though it wasn’t child friendly? And is that why you were cross with me for having shortbread cake in the cafe? Because it’s what your dad would have done – got stroppy because everyone wasn’t marching to his orders. That’s your way of feeling close to him, acting like him?’

  I think about this.

  ‘I do feel my dad growing inside me.’

  ‘You’re nothing like your dad. You always say that.’

  ‘I think I’d like to be now.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ says Dinah.

  ‘The good bits. The nice bits.’

  ‘Please don’t get up at six tomorrow.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d be able to.’

  The waiter comes over. We sign for the bill and, as we get up to go, from the neighbouring table we hear him moving on to underwear. ‘It’s not lazy – it’s common sense because I can go fifty-seven days wi’out a change of underwear. I’ve got a hundred and two pairs of boxers and fifty-seven pairs of socks. Now, if I had more socks…’

  CHAPTER 5

  Draft Copy for Guidebook:

  On May 14 1796, Edward Jenner performed the first successful vaccination for smallpox, the cancer of its time, a disease accounting then for one in ten deaths worldwide. Smallpox, around since ancient Egyptian times, had wiped out the Aztec civilisation, killed one in three children in England and claimed the lives of, among others, Queen Elizabeth I, Mozart and Abraham Lincoln. The disease attacked lungs and the blood, covering sufferers in hideous blisters, making beauty spots and women’s veils must-have eighteenth-century fashion accessories.

  Jenner (1749-1823), a country GP, noticed, like many others had before him, that milkmaids rarely contracted the disease. He wondered if it was the less virulent cowpox they caught from cattle which protected them. To test his theory he infected his gardener’s eight-year-old son, James Phipps, with cowpox and once he’d recovered, with smallpox. The boy survived, a mass government-led immunisation followed, and by 1980 smallpox was eradicated from earth save a small sample kept in an Atlanta lab. It’s estimated Jenner’s work saved half a billion lives.

  We’re at Edward Jenner’s former home, a grade II listed Queen Anne mansion in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. The kids are tearing around Jenner’s recreated study wearing the stick-on smallpox blisters we bought them from the gift shop while Dinah and I are marvelling that, despite saving more lives than anyone in human history, Jenner still found time to be the first person to notice that a) hedgehogs hibernate and b) birds migrate south for the winter. Not only that, it was Jenner who revealed the precise way cuckoo chicks use a hollow in their backs to hoof rival eggs from their host’s nest, while also laying claim to being the first man to fly in a hydrogen balloon.

  We’re walking from Jenner’s study to the Temple of Vaccinia, a small thatched outhouse next to the house,
where Jenner inoculated the village poor for free.

  ‘Wow,’ says Dinah. ‘I think I love Jenner. What an incredible achievement.’

  ‘I know. Can you imagine what half a billion people looks like? What’s that, five thousand Wembley stadiums full of people? And think of all these people’s children and the generations of their children. Half the world’s population is probably down to Jenner.’

  ‘Actually, I meant the hedgehog thing,’ says Dinah.

  ‘You are joking!’

  She pulls a face.

  ‘Of course I am, you dozy twat.’

  We pass a gallery of pictures of smallpox victims that a couple of Jenner volunteers are gathered round. The faces of the sufferers are so raised and distorted with blisters and welts they look barely human.

  ‘Look at my face, Dad,’ says Phoebe.

  ‘Oh no, Phoebe,’ I say. ‘What’s the matter with your face? Look at Phoebe’s face, Mummy.’

  One of the Jenner volunteers looks round just as Phoebe whips it off. ‘Only joking, Dad! It’s just pretend. I haven’t really got smallpox. LOOK! It’s just the sticker you bought me.’

  ‘Phew-weee. That’s lucky, Phoebe.’

  Staring at the volunteer, who’s looking pityingly now at the children for having parents like us, I add, ‘Because I thought for a moment, Phoebe, the raised lesion was a precursor to sub-conjunctival bleeding, fever and respiratory failure. Time to move on, kids.’

  I smile at the volunteer.

  ‘Bring your smallpox pustules with you, guys.’

  Outside Jenner’s house, Dinah says: ‘OK. Two choices. Berkeley Castle, which you have to go on a guided tour of, and this is bearing in mind the kids are knackered and will go mad, that there are probably loads of steps, and one of us will end up carrying Charlie the whole way round and it’s also already 4.30 p.m. so they’ll be late for bath and bed. Or we could go back to the hotel to watch telly?’

  ‘HOTEL,’ shout the kids.

  ‘Can’t you give me more of a clue what you prefer, love?’

  Dinah laughs.

  ‘Actually, though, I still prefer the castle.’

  The kids groan.

  ‘Only kidding! The hotel FOR TELLY!’

  A belt up the M5 later, we’re lying in a line on a double bed, munching complimentary ginger biscuits and watching CBeebies at the Cheltenham Chase, a business-orientated hotel within sight of the famous Cooper’s Hill, where around forty foolhardy thrill-seekers are annually stretchered to hospital after chasing a wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down a vertiginous 2 in 1 gradient.

  We watch Chuggington, SpongeBob SquarePants and Underground Ernie, after which in the bath before dinner Phoebe tells me a little more about Mr Nobody, a tiny invented character only she can see, who at home lives in an empty wine bottle in our recycling basket in the kitchen, but who sneaked into the boot, to come away with us on the trip.

  ‘He found some space in the boot, did he? Did Mummy smuggle him in with her shoes?’

  Dinah smiles.

  ‘Yes, and do you know what else, Dad?’

  ‘What, pops?’

  ‘He brought his whole family with him.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She nods vigorously. ‘Brother Nobody, Sister Nobody and Mummy Nobody. He did.’

  ‘I thought they had jobs. How did they get the time off?’

  Back home Phoebe’s already told me Mr Nobody and Mrs Nobody both have mini computers and tiny chairs and work in the study beside me and Dinah on our desktop.

  ‘They’re on holiday. Of course, they’re on holiday. Why wouldn’t they be on holiday? AND do you know something else about Mr Nobody?’

  ‘What’s that, pops?’

  ‘He’s writing a guidebook for Frommick’s. He is.’

  I laugh.

  ‘Not Frommer’s?’ asks Dinah, smiling.

  ‘No, Frommick’s. It’s like Frommer’s. But it’s Frommick’s. He’s writing a guidebook and he has to take loads of pictures of Sister Nobody and Brother Nobody and visit museums and castles and drive for miles and miles every day.’

  I look at Dinah.

  ‘And is that fun for them?’

  ‘They get biscuits, of course it is.’

  Dinah takes the kids downstairs to satiate whatever appetite they have remaining after the two packets of ginger biscuits, while I edit the photos and write up my notes. An hour later, after we’ve put them to bed, alone in the restaurant, Dinah and I go through our highlights so far.

  ‘I think we can be nostalgic already, don’t you?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘OK, funniest moment?’

  ‘Definitely the look on that volunteer’s face today when Phoebe whipped that smallpox blister off.’

  ‘That was great. The sanctimonious little shit. OK, most interesting place?’

  After Stratford-upon-Avon we’d backtracked through the Cotswolds. We came through Oxfordshire, did a little bit of the Chilterns and then bombed down into Gloucester on the Welsh border. Highlights have included an afternoon at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s former home, the acrobats at the middle-class Gifford’s Circus in Stroud (no lions, and dried fruit handed out while queuing to get in) and an Oxford college tour. So far we’ve only had one argument, at the Ashmolean Museum, which happened after I accused Dinah of following an Italian man from the Arthur Evans Prototype gallery into Dynastic Egypt. ‘Love, I didn’t follow anyone.’

  ‘The good-looking guy with the man-bag. You followed him.’ ‘Ben, I’d never follow a man with a man-bag. I hate man-bags.’ ‘Well, you followed him into Dynastic Egypt. I saw you.’ ‘I went into Dynastic to look at some ancient cursive script, my love.’

  ‘Then you followed him to the sandstone shrine of Taharqa. You tagged him all the way to the Renaissance. You stared at him through that violin case exhibit. You spent ages at the Adoration of the Shepherds because he was there. Then you followed him into the Malley Gallery.’ ‘I was following Charlie. I was worried about the stairs.’ ‘God knows what you were up to in Treasuries when I had to double back for Phoebe. Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Sorry. This is so funny,’ she’d said. And even the argument had ended well. ‘You think I was following a man with a man-bag. In a way it’s really sweet. Come here, you jealous fool.’

  ‘I bet I know what your most interesting one was,’ says Dinah.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Blenheim Palace. Standing in the room Churchill was born in.’

  ‘That was amazing.’

  ‘Do you want to know what mine is?’ Dinah pastes some cheese onto a cracker. ‘It’s not an attraction. Is that allowed?’

  ‘It’s allowed.’

  ‘Aylesbury.’

  ‘Ahhh. Being back in The Ship?’

  She nods.

  ‘Me too, actually. And seeing the house.’

  I met Dinah on The Bucks Herald newspaper almost twenty years ago. We’d just finished our training and sat opposite each other at a desk overlooking Exchange Street just off Aylesbury High Street. We shared a phone – ext. 233 – and became friends over lunches in The Ship discussing the parish council meetings she’d skived off, and the quotes I’d embellished. She covered the satellite village of Princes Risborough. I was the main man in Wendover. All the reporters went out Thursday nights when the paper went to bed – drinks in The Ship Inn, Yung Ying chips and curry sauce under the John Hampden statue and a taxi home. Often Dinah took a cab back to the house I shared with Buster to watch one of his ‘helicopter movies’, as she called them, where she’d regale us over the action shots of Jean-Claude Van Damme about the celebrities she didn’t think deserved their fame like Emma Bunton from the Spice Girls (‘Just because she’s got horse teeth. And she doesn’t even look like a baby – I look more like a baby and I’m bubblier.’). When we kissed for the first time in The Ship Inn, ‘Blackbird’ by The Beatles played on the jukebox.

  A few weeks later – sooner than I’d probably ha
ve chosen – she moved in. Buster had just landed a job presenting for the forces radio station, BFBS, and was relocating to Germany so I needed ‘someone to cover the rent’, as, Dinah joked, I put it so romantically. She slept in my brother’s old room for a week until one morning after another night in The Ship, this time deploring The Corrs (‘Silly Irish sisters dancing on tiptoes.’ ‘You’re thinking of Michael Flatley’s Riverdance. That’s line dancing.’ ‘I know what I’m talking about – they spend too long on tiptoes.’) she woke up under my duvet. Dinah was the first girlfriend I’d lived with and there was a thrill to the novelty of this dynamic: deciding which side of the bed to sleep on, who should put the bins out. We enjoyed apportioning responsibilities. I was Head of Security – locked the doors and closed windows at night and remembered to leave lights on when we went out. She cooked and cleaned, and seemed to relish this, dressed in rubber gloves and an apron with a picture of a teapot on the front. We competed at game shows – Fifteen to One, University Challenge, The Krypton Factor – and I came to realise something; that you didn’t always need to go to the pub with your mates to have a good time. You could have just as much fun ringing programmes in TV Quick magazine with your girlfriend, working through a bottle of red wine, looking forward to a packet of Maltesers cooling to marble hardness in the fridge ready for the post 9 p.m. watershed movie, hopefully about the outbreak of a deadly disease threatening mankind.

  ‘Tring Road,’ I say.

  She breathes in and sighs. ‘It knocked me for six a bit.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Even thinking about it now…’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  I take a sip of wine and, when I look up, Dinah’s curling a tear from her eye with an index finger.