Read Online That's Another Story: The Autobiography by Julie Walters - Free Book Online Page A

tone, brighter and healthier, with a tight, warm glow, but above all I looked as if I had been somewhere exciting and exotic. It was in the sixties that people started to take holidays to Spain and so gradually suntans, which were very rare after a holiday in an English seaside resort, began to be something of a status symbol. In our own street, the first people to go abroad on a regular basis were a family at the bottom end of Long Hyde Road. They were an attractive lot, in a flashy, television-advert sort of way, living in a largish corner house with a big, yellow Ford Consul parked outside, a pretty blonde mother and daughter and a darkly handsome father and son. But what set them aside from the rest of us was that at least once a year they would go off somewhere, looking similar to everyone else, and return a couple of weeks later as another species: bronzed, relaxed, transformed into world travellers.
    The Walters, however, took their yearly week away within the confines of the United Kingdom and came home looking much the same as when they left. We holidayed in Wales and, like a lot of Birmingham folk, we went to Tenby and Sandersfoot, camping with a couple of other families. We had caravan holidays in Weymouth, Margate and Weston-super-Mare, and even now the smell of Calor gas takes me right back there, snuggling down under the covers on a narrow bunk bed, in the cosy, farting, giggling intimacy of a night spent in such close proximity to the whole family.
    My earliest holiday memory, when I must have been about eighteen months old, was in the west of Ireland, visiting friends and relatives on my mother’s side of the family. We stayed at a farm where there was no electricity and my memory is of my mum getting me up to wee, hovering over a big jam jar in the middle of the night, by candle light, and it not being a great success, but the holiday location I most remember was Blackpool. We would save up for weeks, collecting coppers in an old biscuit tin, and then all five of us would pack into our Ford Esquire car, the roof-rack piled high with a motley collection of suitcases, wrapped in an old piece of tarpaulin and tied on with rope. We would head off on a journey that probably took about six hours as there were no motorways. I always had to sit in the middle, my two brothers on either side, and Kevin, who was generally on my right, was invariably carsick.
    There were a couple of mysterious remedies employed to stave this off. One was a small chain that was suspended from just underneath the rear bumper, on the right-hand side, and the other one was Kevin having to wear a brown-paper vest. As neither worked, the smell of vomit, petrol fumes and cigarette smoke was the perennial olfactory accompaniment to these journeys, my brother insisting on the last - the cigarette smoke, that is - claiming that it would prevent the first. So my father, having been given the excuse to smoke continually, did so. We spent the whole journey in an eye-watering fug, my brother with his head stuck in a carrier bag, retching and belching, and the rest of us playing I Spy through the smoke, and eating the cheese-and-tomato or ham-hock-and-salad sandwiches that my mother had made before we set out, handing them out to my father as he drove and over her shoulder to us in the back. The game of I Spy would stop on the approach to Blackpool, if it hadn’t been stopped already by a fight or boredom, and would be replaced by ‘The first one to see the tower!’ and then, ‘The first one to see the sea!’
    We holidayed in Blackpool three times during the latter part of the fifties and we always stayed at the same place: number 26 Empress Drive, a bed and breakfast that was run by a Mrs McGinn. Empress Drive was a quiet, residential street, each side of which was lined with neat, terraced, Edwardian houses, mainly with bright-white fronts, well-kept privet hedges and gleaming windows, and where nearly every other house was a B and B. Inside,