After the war our Dad came back home to Winson Green, and said that he wanted to make up for all the time he had missed by taking his sons on holiday. He said he would take up where he had left off before he went to fight for England and the British Empire. My brother and I wondered what he was talking about, as we could not remember him taking us anywhere before he went to Egypt. Except sometimes to The Grapes pub, where we would wait outside for hours, munching a bag of crisps, bored out of our screw, and stamping our feet if it was cold. We could always have gone home, because the key was on a string through the letterbox and you could get at it with your fingers and pull it through the hole. But then we would have missed out on the crisps, and we didn't want to do that. When Dad came back from the war, he was different somehow. For a start off, he looked brown and healthy looking instead of fat and white. And he talked to us, which he didn’t do before he went to Egypt and saw the Pyramids and fought the Germans and that. He brought us some tins of sweets, and cartons of cigarettes and a cloth thing with a camel on it, to hang on the wall. But Mom didn’t hang it on the wall, she didn’t like it, and she said fags were disgusting. Anyway, to carry on with the story, Dad never took us anywhere before he left us for the Army and went to Egypt, wherever that was.
Well one night after Dad had had a few pints, he said that we were going to Bewdley on the River Severn, on a camping trip. Just him and his two sons, and then as an after thought he said, and the Missus. Dad said that Mick and I would learn a bit about life in the open air, like he had. I often wondered what that meant, and he never told us. Mom said that he just wanted us to suffer like he had living in a tent and that she would have thought he had spent enough time in tents overseas, and would prefer to stay at home in the comfort of his own bed. And the fresh air in Winson Green had always been all right for our family, so why go to the River Severn. That surprised me, what Mom said about the fresh air, as every year I had to have one of those sticky things stuck on me chest because the doctor said it was weak, especially when the fog came down, and you couldn’t go to the pictures. Mom said that she didn’t particularly want to live in a tent, with rabbits and bugs and things creeping all over you all night. But Dad said that we had to go, all of us, so there.
Dad said that he would borrow our Uncle Charlie’s motor bike combination. It was a 'Borough' and Dad said that it had taken Uncle Charlie many hours of overtime at Lucas’s in Great King Street Hockley to buy it. It was a source of freedom for the family, to get out of Winson Green into the country, and fill our lungs with good clean air, Dad said. No one else in the family had a motor bike or a car, except for Uncle George - he was a big shot at the Austin Motor Company and lived in Sheldon, and they had a bathroom and a front room. Uncle Charlie had a tent pitched permanently at Bewdley by the River Severn, Dad said, and Uncle Charlie had to rent the ground for the season, whatever that meant. Uncle Charlie was a blonde man, short, like all my uncles on my father’s side, and I liked him best of all. He used to give me a manly handshake when he saw me, and slapped me on the back, but not too hard. He was a foreman at Lucas’s. He had been in the Royal Artillery during the war and was a lance corporal and had been to Egypt with Field Marshall Montgomery and together they had beaten Rommel.
The trip to Bewdley was a very exciting time. Mick and I sat in the sidecar of the motor bike combination, while Mom tried to look regal sitting astride the very small, hard rubber pillion behind Dad. Dad insisted she wore a leather helmet and big goggles to protect her in the event of a high speed crash?. Her hat and goggles made her look really funny. Mick and I thought it was very comical when we got to Bewdley and Mom insisted on borrowing iron beds, mattresses and lino from the camping stores to put on the grass inside the tent, instead of rubber mattresses. Dad said that we were going to rough it, but we had more beds in the tent than we had at home. And we laughed our socks off watching Mom’s first attempt to light the Primus stove while trying to maintain her dignity. With her face sooty from paraffin smoke and a heap of spent matches around her, she prodded the stove with a bent needle, crying? It won’t start, Bill, the bloody thing won’t start.
My brother Mick and I learned to swim in the River Severn that wonderful lazy summer. The water flowed gently smooth, clean and warm. We played cricket with the other children who were camping on the site. Dad showed off with his bowling, mostly missing the stumps, and the ball sometimes went into the river. We didn’t get much hot food cause Mom or Dad could never get the Primus stove going properly. Sometimes we went to the village for tea, but there was still rationing on, so there wasn’t much food or variety to buy. One night we went to the local picture house in Bewdley, a small brick building that had a tin roof. We saw Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, and at the end we all had to stand up for the anthem, feeling all warm and patriotic like, and sing God Save the King'. I didn’t know all the words and just opened and closed my mouth and pretended to sing, just like I did in assembly at school.
That summer I fell in love with a pretty girl called Janet who had a flower in her blonde hair. She was nearly eleven years old and always held the hand of her younger brother. She had round wire gold glasses on that kept slipping down her nose. She wore a green dress and long white socks with black shiny shoes. Mom said that shoes like that on a camping site were ridiculous, but I liked them. Janet kept looking at me and smiling, and my chest felt funny and I felt giddy. After that night at the pictures I never did see Janet again, although I thought of her many times when we went home. The warm languorous days of that holiday seemed go on forever and gently slipped into a week and then we had to go home. I will never forget the camping trip that Dad took us on after the war when the bombing had ended and the killing stopped.
Story Location: Kidderminister
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