dancingthroughchaos

VACATION TIME by Frank Hutt

Good-bye little desk at school, goodbye, We’re off to the fields and the open sky. The bells of the brooks and woodland bells Are ringing us out to the vales and dells, To meadow-ways fair, and to hilltops cool,  Good-bye, little desk at school.

Good-bye little desk at school, good-bye, We’ve other brave lessons and tasks to try; But we shall come back in the fall, you know, With ever a laugh and never a sigh- Goodbye, little desk, good-bye!

The final bell of term has rung, the gates have been flung open and thousands of children have streamed out with the excitement engendered by the mere thought of the long summer holidays.  While we can acknowledge that it may not all be sunshine for some – where five or six weeks of home doesn’t present a pleasant or positive prospect – the vast majority have been looking out of the classroom window, longing for this moment for the past month.

I happened to find myself walking through the local park on the first day of the school holidays and challenged myself to think back to that end-of-term feeling of yesteryear.  What was I anticipating then?  Which thoughts tumbled round my head, awaiting realisation in the coming days?

I remember the liberating euphoria of considering a whole six weeks – and it seemed an age back then – in which there would be no early morning alarm; no wasting time waiting for buses that were often late and sometimes didn’t come at all. Homework-free afternoons and evenings beckoned with promises of light evenings, bike-riding, sleep-overs, playing games and enjoying the great outdoors unfettered by the demands of school bells and timetables.

For me, every summer included a fortnight with my grandparents in Devon.  That meant sweet peas in the bedroom (the smell still makes me cry) and a special themed cake made by my ever-loving Granny (we had farms, sandcastles, ponies with horse-jumps, a swimming pool – her imagination always provided something new).

It meant days spent in fields with farming friends  – harvesting, milking cows, learning to drive a tractor, riding a horse, collecting eggs, eating farmhouse teas that came straight out of an Enid Blyton novel, while crammed around creaking, worn and laden farmhouse tables.  It meant walking by the River Otter looking for kingfishers, grey mullet and otters; days at the beach (my Dad was an inveterate studier of the tides to ensure we visited at optimum times): splashing in the sea, jumping waves, making the trek to the ice-cream shop, peering into rock pools, admiring complex castle constructions, eating picnics and coming home, sun-kissed and shattered with half the beach carried in our hair and between our toes.

Then there was the mandatory Holiday Bible Club week, run by our Baptist Church.  Mornings of singing, Bible stories, puzzles, worksheets, orange squash and currant buns followed by crafts.  I could run home for lunch and be back in good time for the afternoon activities: the famous Tramps’ Tea Party (everyone had to wear the [literal] ‘sack’ one year or another), games in the park, the annual trip to Chessington Zoo, when they still had polar bears and the best high slides in Surrey.  Later we’d pile on a coach and visit Littlehampton, a stony beach (not a patch on Sidmouth) and admire the big boys who were brave enough to go on the Whirlitzer, some of whom turned a fascinating shade of green. 

Best of all was the afternoon Treasure Hunt when ‘helpers’ dressed up in a variety of disguises and we trooped around the village in small groups trying to find and identify them all: the old lady with a shopping trolley wearing a shockingly bad wig; the man behind the newspaper in the park who was the Minister; the bespectacled and head-scarved woman at the bus stop who never actually got on any of the buses; the district nurse who was a local maths teacher and the suited business man who was actually my sister.  All manner of creative personas manifested themselves, much to our ill-concealed delight as, with shrieks of laughter, we tried to be the first team back to the church hall with all the suspects found; their names signed off on our battered clipboard.

Those three weeks usually had a week before and after to make up the six, giving time to be outside; watch an old Hollywood film on a rainy afternoon; venture out to buy new supplies for the coming term or record the top twenty from the radio on to well-worn cassette tapes.  One of my favourite treats was waking early, thanks to my body clock, watching the dust motes dance in the sunlit shafts penetrating the gap in the curtains for a while, then venturing to the kitchen to make a plate of marmalade sandwiches (Paddington would have approved) and creeping back up the stairs, into my warm bed and munching them while reading a book.  Bliss.

Having indulged myself with plundering the memory banks of yesteryear, I began to wonder how I would feel if, before me now, I had six weeks of pure leisure without responsibilities, deadlines or diarised commitments.  For an instant I felt my spirits soar, but the feeling slipped away like quicksilver.  The demands of adulthood may never present quite such a vista of self-indulgent, spontaneous pleasure again.  That’s not to say we can’t look forward to the days ahead.

Indeed, I am already looking forward to a niece’s wedding, my mother’s 93rd birthday, a trip to South Africa and my son’s wedding there, all within the next four weeks.  It’s not the same, but perhaps it’s not supposed to be. 

They say the past is ‘another country’, but it’s a treat to pay a short visit there every now and again. Thank goodness for family photos!

[Some images from Pixabay & Unsplash; mostly from our family archives]