A Bright Nostalgia – 9 Writers Share Their Happy Childhood Holiday Moments

For me, childhood holidays are memories of daytrips to the nearby beaches of Tramore, Annestown and Bonmahon in Co Waterford, just a few miles from where I grew up in Waterford City. Tramore was always a highlight with the excitement of the bumper cars in the Amusements, and a carton of chips never tasted as good as they did for me on the beach, wrapped in a towel and surrounded by sandcastles. I found out what made these writers happy on holidays …

Little Nuala on hols

Nuala O’Connor’s fifth novel NORA (New Island), about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was a Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times.

“I grew up in west Dublin and our summer holiday was, mostly, a week in Ireland, in places like Connemara or West Cork. A few times we flew across the Irish Sea to the Isle of Man – where my parents had honeymooned – and, once, we took the ferry to England.

Memory being what it is, those holidays are now a collage of scene-flashes: sandstorms lashing bare legs in Blackpool by day; and, by night, the twinkle of its tower, as exotic to my ten-year-old self as the Eiffel Tower, which I’d yet to see. I conjure images of myself beachcombing the strands of Ireland’s west coast, my blue raincoat a protection from the breeze; the cheery thatched cottages dotting the boreens; my devotion to Walter Macken’s books, to steep me even further in the wonders of Galway.

I can almost feel the heat of a Wexford July, and my sister Nessa and I whizzing on our bikes to a beach in Wicklow. When we got to Clogga, we found tiny jelly orbs, most likely Sea Gooseberries; we christened them ‘globules’, which become our special word that summer, one we repeated endlessly, in any context.

I remember being awed on the Liverpool ferry when asking actor Ron Moody for an autograph. I was shocked to find him nothing like Fagin, the role he played in Oliver! A favourite film. Why did he look so ordinary, just like anybody’s Da? Where was the mad light in his eyes?

My own children’s holidays are a mix of Ireland and sunny spots in Europe; they enjoy more waterparks, more paid-for fun. But there’s undeniable magic, for any kid, in a damp beach day, poking in the sand for treasure, lungs puffed with clean Irish air.”

Molly, Sheila and her sister, Alice

Poet Molly Twomey has just released her debut collection of poetry – Raised Among Vultures. Molly’s summers were spent in Clonea, Co Waterford, where she became best friends with a girl called Sheila …

“Every summer, Mam would stuff her Volvo with duvets, baked beans and spaghetti, all our T-shirts and shorts crumpled into bin bags, and our dog Scamp, who’d inevitably vomit in the boot. Our family had a mobile home in Clonea, and though it was only 25 minutes from our turf of Lismore, it felt like a different country, different life. I made friends from Tipperary, Dublin, the UK, but my best friend was Sheila from Wicklow. We met on the swings; I was two, she was three. Sheila and I spent each summer doing flips on the monkey bars, setting up sweet shops where we resold crisps and Jelly Tots for a 20p profit. On the beach, we searched rockpools for star fishes and buried each other nose-deep in the sand. When she wasn’t there, I’d sit outside her mobile waiting for her to come back.

Sheila had this wild, frizzy hair that I adored, it would barely tuck under a bandana and a comb could get lost in it. One summer, she bought a straightener and I used to sit and watch smoke rise from her scalp. Suddenly, she had this huge bag of make-up and potions that I was so ignorant about. It was soothing to watch her gloss and dab, almost meditative but I knew she was growing up faster than me. In teenage land, a year in age is the difference between legging it for the playground and sharing cigarettes behind the chipper. Though we were destined to spend a few of those summers apart, Sheila will always be my favourite part of Clonea. Each year as the honeysuckle blooms and the swallows return, as cars stuffed with beach towels and buckets clunk along the road, she will always be who I miss and think of.”

Melatu-Uche Okorie’s short story collection, This Hostel Life, was shortlisted for the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards in 2018. On her childhood holidays, Melatu fell in love with Lagos, Nigeria.

“Growing up, most of my summer holidays were spent in Lagos State. I was born in Enugu State, in the Eastern region of Nigeria, and so most of my growing up was done there.

The summer holidays were called ‘Long Vacs’ back then, and usually, my two elder sisters and I would spend some of it in Lagos with our dad. At the time, we had a second home in Lagos where my dad stayed when he had business in Lagos.

The memory of the Long Vacs’ are especially strong in my mind as my sisters and I spent them mostly with our dad alone. He had the care of us all day and a dad’s parenting can be different from a mum’s. He was more laidback which we loved as kids. On the nights when he was free, he would put us in his car and take us on long drives, crossing the long mainland bridge (it’s known as the third mainland bridge now) from our side of town to Lagos Island.

From the back seat of the car, my sisters and I would gaze at the lights from the skyscrapers or try to keep count of the cars that zipped past us. Lagos nightlife never stopped. If New York is a city that never sleeps, Lagos is a city where people never stop moving. The buses, the cars, and the people were constantly on the move.

I fell in love with Lagos then, and that love was one that would last for many years.”

Shrabani Basu

Shrabani Basu, bestselling author of Spy Princess – the true story of WW2 SOE Agent, Noor Inayat Khan – remembers family holidays with her adventurous father in Eastern India.

“My father always had a travel bug. He was a man of simple tastes, but one of his precious possessions was his Yashica camera with which we kids were regularly photographed. One weekend when I was around ten, he announced that we were going to visit some of the ancient sites associated with the Buddha in Eastern India. My elder sister had her head firmly in a glossy teenage magazine, my younger sister was a gurgling toddler of 18 months, and my mum was just trying to keep up with my father’s impulsive plans.

Day One was spent visiting Bodhgaya, the original site where the Buddha received his enlightenment as he meditated under the Bodhi tree. Day Two was when our real adventure began, as we headed off the tourist trail for the ruins of the ancient university of Nalanda, built in the fifth century AD. Once it attracted Buddhist scholars from around the world. From Nalanda, we travelled to Rajgir, where there was a sculpture of the Buddha right on top of a steep hill. The only way to get there was on chair-ski. This was just a single chair with a pole and no securing bars. You just hung on for dear life. We were the only tourists there and probably looked a sight: my mother in her sari balancing on the ski chair, my elder sister screaming with fright as the chair rocked and swayed over the sharp fall below, and my father, holding my baby sister on his lap, still determined to take pictures of us. I remember my father, turning around, baby and camera firmly in his grasp, to take a photo of me. I was sure I was going to lose both of them that day. But we all lived to tell the tale. Somewhere in the family home in Delhi is an album with the black and white photographs of the beautiful hills, the sleeping Buddhas, and the family clinging precariously to their ski chairs.”

Author of Costa nominated Big Girl Small Town, Michelle Gallen, has just launched her second novel, Factory Girls.

“One summer, my parents took me and my five siblings for a week-long holiday in a guesthouse in Galway. This was the height of glamour for us kids as we’d never been further than a caravan in Donegal. For the first few days, everything was sublime: the landlady – Mrs White – welcomed us with open arms; the sun shone; we played for hours on the beach and gobbled up sandy ham sandwiches and warm lemonade. But midway through the week, drizzle, an ocean mist, blanketed the city. We spent a day confined indoors, playing cards and driving our parents mad.

That evening, my youngest brother, who suffered from croup, began to wheeze. We played quietly in the living room as his breathing worsened and my parents did their best to give him ease. Mrs White dropped by to say hello just as he’d gone blue (an emergency we had grown quite used to since his birth). Mrs White panicked and called a doctor, then sat with my parents, telling them about a child she’d lost years before. When the doctor arrived, he glanced at my brother, then asked ‘Where is the child’s inhaler?’ My parents were taken aback: they had never been prescribed one. The doctor grumbled and administered some Ventolin to my brother, and shortly afterwards, his breathing eased and his skin flushed pink. The doctor told us my brother had severe asthma and the damp sea air could kill him.

The next day, Mrs White cried as she waved my parents off early with some life-changing, life-saving Ventolin, a happy wee boy, and five very disappointed children whose passionate pleas to be left in Mrs White’s guesthouse not just for the rest of the week, but for the rest of their lives, had gone unheard.”

Bestselling author Liz Nugent has fond memories of childhood holidays spent with her grandmother in Skibbereen.

“Back in the dark ages when I was a child, very few people went abroad on summer holidays. We all went to Granny’s house, whether that was next door or in Gweedore. I was lucky enough to have a granny that lived in Skibbereen.

Those were the days when travelling was fun. My mother put my little brother and I on a train at Heuston Station, usually in the care of a nun. We spent all of our holiday pocket money on sweets on the way to Cork city, from where Granny would collect us and drive the eleven hours it took in her Fiat 127 to get to Skibbereen. We always had to stop for ice cream on the way, but never in Bandon, because, Granny said ‘they took the king’s shilling during the famine’.

Granny had lots of spare bedrooms, so my little brother and I got a room each, instead of having to share one like we did at home. In Granny’s house there were rules, and there was a schedule and a routine. Mass on Sundays came directly before lunch at Granny’s table in the West Cork Hotel. We were hushed during the Angelus and the six o’clock news, but all other television programmes were banned except The Waltons. Bed-time was 8 o’clock. Granny’s next-door neighbours were the O’Regans, a large family who welcomed us as if we were their own.

But it’s the beaches I remember the most. Tragumna, Owenahincha and Barley Cove were all within the reach of the Fiat 127. One day at Tragumna beach, a young couple got a little too amorous for Granny’s liking and she went over and battered them with her rolled-up Cork Examiner and called them a disgrace. It was utterly thrilling. Granny was slightly to the right of Mary Whitehouse when it came to personal morality. I adored her.”

Eva Verde with fellow ice cream fans

Debut author of Lives Like Mine, Eva Verde, is of dual heritage. Identity and class are recurring themes throughout her work. She remembers Stephen King and the Salisbury Plain.

“I was twelve the year we holidayed in the West Country. Mum booked our trip a week before the official school holidays, and before the days of getting fined for going away during term time. This was the only way we could afford a family break, which was how Mum sold it to the headmaster every year, when he lectured how detrimental it was to our education. She said this was nonsense, mentioning the boardgames and films that often filled those final days before school was officially out for summer.

That year, Mum claimed our break away was educational, because en route we planned to visit Stonehenge, somewhere I grew more obsessed with the closer we got. That Stonehenge was 5,000 years old was also mindboggling to me, and being the intrigued, industrious little writer even then, I began coming up with stories involving all sorts of mysticism; druids and Ley lines … Now is probably a good time to mention I was also influenced by and reading an awful lot of Stephen King.

My Stonehenge adventure started with being carsick; indigestion from eating an apple while racing through King’s novel – IT – which had nothing to do with reading while the car was in motion, of course. Convinced something heinously supernatural was heading my way, I even tried staying in the car, emerging only when Mum really gave me something to fret about – the druids would’ve been disgusted by the price of the ice-creams.

Ice-cream did help, but my imagination went spiralling again in our musty old holiday rental, convinced the sorcery of Salisbury Plain had returned with us; the way Mum mysteriously boiled our dinner dry, the strange suitcase under the bed full of trendy holiday clothes – if you last vacationed in 1926. And the mirror, that fell clean off the wall of the bedroom in the middle of the night ….”

Award-winning author of Cornish fiction Liz Fenwick was six when her mother took her to Washington DC

“That trip is vivid in my mind. It was cherry blossom time, but it wasn’t the cherry blossom, the Lincoln monument or even the private tour of the White House that stayed with me. It was the underground subway that runs between the key buildings that is the sharpest memory. We were using this subway because a friend of my father was a member of the cabinet. These shuttle cars between the key buildings like the Capitol were open-topped. I remember it clearly because Mr Volpe whispered to me just before the shuttle set off, ‘Watch now, all the ladies will hold onto their heads so that their wigs don’t blow off.’ Sure enough he was right and my mother quickly did the same. It was 1969 and women wore wigs. Of all the things on that momentous trip that silly moment remains the brightest. Somewhere there is a newspaper article about my visit with Mr Volpe with a photograph of me on the Capital steps and in Mr Volpe’s office, but sadly I don’t have it.”

Holidays in Curracloe continue: Marianne is buttering bread, her back to the camera

Marianne Lee is the debut author of A Quiet Tide – a fictionalised account of the life of botanist Ellen Hutchins. Marianne spent childhood holidays in Curracloe, Co Wexford.

“The caravan swung behind the car along twisting country roads. When we eventually arrived, we found its cupboard doors had sprung open on the journey, and the clothes inside had slid out onto the floor into a pile.

This week in Curracloe, Co Wexford, always proved something of a busman’s holiday for my mother: six children to be fed, washed and at least generally supervised. Dinner prepared on two gas rings; dirty dishes ferried in a basin to the communal washing-up station. Yet she seemed invariably happy.

When my father eventually undertook his annual ‘great swim’ – as dads tended to do, he wrote his own rules, swimming into the horizon, instead of parallel to it, as we had been instructed until he was nothing but a pale dot in the blue – we knew then that he, too, had succumbed to the magic of holidays.

Children running down the dunes, screaming with joy, legs whirling beyond control towards the sea; afterwards, I’m the oldest and tallest, shivering behind a towel, lips blue-tinged, hair snaking wet. Plucked from our land-locked hometown, we acclimatised quickly to caravan park life. Shy eyeballing of other children led to fast friendships. Games went on until twilight descended, and we could scarcely see the ball, the racquet, the bat. On rainy days, I hid in the car, sucking smoky bacon-flavoured Hula Hoops from each finger while reading Virginia Andrews. At the Winning Post amusement arcade, I stuffed myself with too many vinegar-soaked chips and later vomited them up again to the wailing of The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’; the song still makes me queasy. Years later, I walked Curracloe beach in autumn; a biting wind drove away any lingering echoes. The famous beach is beautiful still: wide, pale gold, unspoiled as in memory.”