Amalfi or bust!

Dad inherited the car. A white, or off-white, Morris traveller. You know. The one with the wooden trim. I don't remember how old it was but it was in immaculate condition. Grampa looked after it impeccably. I used to have to start it with the starting handle because he didn't want to use the battery. It used to annoy the hell out of him when nan scratched the windscreen with her diamond ring when she was wiping it.

Anyway. It was summer 1977 and me, dad and Neal (one of my brothers) were going to drive down to Amalfi. We were going to take our time and do the whole thing on spec. I don't remember much about the drive from north Devon to the port and I don't remember which port we went to. I figure that it must have been up on the south-east coast because we drove through Picardie when we got off at the other end.

It was in Picardie - in Reims to be precise - that the whole grand plan came crashing to a grinding halt. We were driving through Reims and were crossing a crossroads when a car hurtled into the side of us ... or was it the other way round. It must have been us who drove into his side. Why? The Morris was a write-off.

It was towed to a garage and with what French I'd learned in my five years at comprehensive school, I established that the fella reckoned that it would cost more to repair than it was worth.

What did we do? We got the train to Paris and decided to spend a few days there instead before heading home. We wandered around until we found a little boarding house in Rue Faubourg St Denis. It looked like a perfect city centre spot.

After we'd had a bit of a kip and freshened up, we stepped out for the evening. Get something to eat. My incredibly naive, 17 year old eyes were on stalks. The street was lined with extremely good-looking, provocatively dressed young ladies all asking me if I was interested in a little quality time. Made I smile, it did.

We did only stay a couple of days. Saw the Eiffel Tower, the Notre Dame and all that good stuff and lived on baguettes with whatever took our fancy to fill them. Then, dreams in tatters, we got the train back to Calais (I think it was) for the boat back to good ol' Blighty.

Now I'm starting to wonder if the odds - or the Gods - aren't stacked against me. We got home about three weeks before anyone was expecting us home and without grampa's precious car. He'd had it for years with ne'er a scratch on it. Dad had had it a couple of months and written it off.

Amalfi remained an unreachable mirage.

Strangers in a strange land

We arrived in North Devon at around Easter 1969. We stayed in a little village called Lee in a bloody awful place called Chapel Cottage that would have had the Ghostbusters working overtime. We finally ended up in a village called C'martin on the North Devon coast in a house where, for the first time, we had not only one indoor toilet but two and a bedroom each; at least in the winter.

Grampa and Nan followed us down a couple of years later and bought a little terraced house just up the road.

Grampa played the sax and the clarinet in whatever local 'big band' he could get to. I adored both him and his music. I used to sit listening to him practice for ages at a time. I'm told that he wanted at least one of us to get into music and that was me. I'd started the violin when I was eight years old and, while my mother screamed at me to practice, grampa coaxed me and egged me on.

He was my idol. A gentle man. A man with an eye for the girls who didn't mind showing it, even when nan was around. He loved the Sunday western on BBC2 and I used to sit between his knees in front of his armchair and watch the western with him. Poor bugger would often fall asleep half way through - a post-prandial stupour after nan's mountainesque Sunday lunch.

Me, dad, grampa and my nearest brother would be in the living room while mum, nan and my sister were in the kitchen. Apartheid? Of a sort. I seem to recall that grampa would sent me into the kitchen to ask nan to make him a cup of tea. Those were the days ... when men were men and women were glad of it.

As I got older, he branched out in the musical instrument stakes. He taught himself the cello so that he could join a very amateur string ensemble with me. It seems to me with hindsight that he did all he could for me and I would have done anything for him.

As the muses would have it, he died in October 1976 when I was 16. I was gutted. I wasn't even allowed to pay my last respects. Whilst I concede that my interest in women and beer were starting to wax at about that time, his death ensured the end of my violin career, if career it could ever have been. I gave it up and turned to hedonism ... if in a rather naive and harmless form.