Free A Young Man's Passage by Julian Clary

forbid, a flashback sequence. A while later we’d hear the front door slam, which meant Uncle Gordon had gone to the pub, and I could return to the kitchen to do my homework, although I spent most of my time studying the blue tits and listening to the clock tick.
    The acrimony between them continued beyond the grave. Wyn had been plagued with a weak heart for many years and when I was 16 she collapsed and died while on her way to see the doctor. As next of kin, we needed Gordon’s permission to erect a gravestone, and this he refused to give. We had to bide our time for several years until he expired too. The final irony was that he was then buried in the same grave as her.
    Auntie Wyn was a frequent visitor to St Mark’s Road. She loved coming along to the regattas, where the family would have a picnic on the riverbank and cheer me on. Then we’d go home and play Kaluki. She had cataracts, though, and couldn’t really see the cards, let alone the boat races. When she finally had them operated on she could see even less for a few weeks and had to wear thick dark glasses while she recovered. We took her to see the rhododendron and azalea display at Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park and her head swivelled in amazement at the pink and purple flowers.

    AS WE GREW older and no longer suffered from carsickness (I once vomited in my father’s jacket pocket on the way to Norfolk), our summer holidays became more adventurous. We borrowed a tent and after a trial weekend in a forest near Guildford, where my father and Frances mastered the art of erecting the aluminium tent frame and hammering in the tent pegs, we loaded up the trusty Zephyr and set off for the Costa Brava, heading for a resort called El Delfín Verde.
    We caught the cross-channel ferry to Dieppe and travelled through France, eyes peeled for the GB sign on passing cars. ‘There’s one!’ we’d cry, and all wave happily, reassured that we weren’t the only intrepid adventurers in what seemed like a far-off foreign land. Beverley was horrified by the French hole-in-the-ground toilets and refused to use them, graciously agreeing to ‘go’ behind a haystack in the countryside instead while we all waited in the car. As she primly emerged, scurrying back towards us, two days’ worth of effluence finally ejected, a plume of steam was seen curling skywards from behind the haystack, rather giving the game away.
    The fortnight’s vacation was done on a strict budget (‘About 50 quid,’ my father recalls) so there were no overnight stops in hotels. After a long day of driving and waving at fellow Brits, we’d find the nearest campsite and erect the tent and the beds, and lay out the sleeping bags. The stove, utensils and food would be next and then my mother would attempt something imaginative with a tin of frankfurters.
    We awoke one morning to the steady hum of a torrential downpour, a common feature of our holidays, wherever we were. We hadn’t bargained for this on our training weekend, and while my father and sisters slid around in the mud in their flip-flops, folding and rolling up the sodden tent as best they could, my mother and I took refuge in the car, occasionally winding down the window to tell them to hurry up.
    Our conspiracy to amuse ourselves by annoying my father was not very kind, but it was fairly relentless. Generally he’d go along with it, shaking his head in mock disbelief at these two Queens of Sheba who declined to do any of the hard labour involved in a camping trip for five in foreign climes.
    Boiling eggs for our tea that night she handed him a seriously fractured one.
    ‘I’m afraid yours cracked, Peter. And your toast burnt, too. Most unfortunate.’
    ‘Thank you!’ he’d say, laughing gamely. ‘Dear oh dear . . .’
    But we arrived at our Spanish resort in the end, found a delightful spot under some pine trees and began the holiday proper. We baked in the sun, swam in the sea and chortled at our northern English