We would be taken by Daimler, a chauffeur in uniform, to Victoria Station my siblings and mother, a housekeeper and I, to begin our journey to France. That was in the early days before my mother took to driving herself. The train to the port, exciting! We were off to the place I loved best. My mother’s sandwiches, hard and uninviting. The ferry, excruciating and vomitous, how awful the stink of puke in the rocking toilets, doors swinging, a tiny cabin or seats on deck, I would always hurl over the side. The train to Paris, exciting again! The Paris metro, terrifying, my mother shoving limp tickets in our hands, the barriers snapping our legs, my sister’s suitcase always too large to fit. Running for the sleeper, the train just caught and all night to love the journey south, heaven! Unless, due to less of us, my mother’s refusal to buy the sixth bunk brought a large and stinking Frenchman in to watch us change our knickers under sheets. But the sleep, the lovely hurtle and gentle drift into night broken only by the snap of the blinds as morning released a sudden change in view. The earth! Red, the window open, the smell of pines, and our father there to meet us. And then it changed, the trains forgotten, the chauffeur and Daimler replaced by a Citroen with my mother at the wheel. She hated motorways, the blur, the paege, the driver’s seat on the wrong side. She loved maps and A-roads and Romanesque churches. We would go to Chartres, that spire appearing over flat fields. We would stop in Cluny and press our faces to the railings of the grand stables. We would crash. One summer an overturned coach shut the motorway sending everyone onto our route, it was raining, we were late, the hotel gave away our rooms. We slept in a carpark next to a church whose bells rang out every hour as did the car horn due to my mother’s legs which were looped through the steering wheel, the only place to put them. I slept on the green suitcases in the boot, the same place I was the next day when she dozed off on a mountain road and hit another car head on. I flew to the front. We survived, the headlights didn’t, the last of that twisting tarmac done in black. How different from my father who was never late, never hurried, never left anything to chance. Every summer he would pick one of us to be his companion on a very different journey south, myrtle cakes at motorway service stations, a detour through Switzerland playing spies in expensive hotels, his Porsche serviced and clean. We would arrive with my mother like survivors of a blizzard, he would greet us in ironed shorts, not a hair out of place, the lucky person smiling with him, never me.
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Holy shit this had me biting my nails. Was anyone hurt?
Gradually playing catch up on all the ones i haven't had the usual time to read day by day..........again reading this one I'm hit by your wonderful ability to paint a picture that draws me in completely to be there too in all those scenes!! It's great knowing i've got a little library of further adventures to join in on as I catch up with the others after this one!! xxx