A First Look...

From VOYAGE TO THE END OF THE ROOM, by Tibor Fischer (Counterpoint, Jan. 2004, 1-58243-297-X, $23.00)

"At the age of twenty-one I'd never been abroad.

It wasn't a desire to stay in Britain, or a desire not to travel. My childhood holidays had always been fun. Full of expectation we would all jump into the car. My father would be getting settled in the driver's seat, my mother would be inspecting me and my sister in the back. Julia always sat on the left, I always sat on the right. We would be laden with our holiday amusements (comics, music, nibbles, new clothes), often purchased months before and issued only on departure. We would be fiddling with these as our parents made the final checks (newspaper delivery deactivated and so on). Seat-belts would be meticulously adjusted.

'Ready?' my father would ask the back seat as if our participation in family decisions was vital.

'Ready,' Julia, as older sister, would report first. 'Ready,' I would confirm. The car would then gently trundle backwards down the drive. Julia and I had an important job keeping an eye out for approaching traffic.

My father would wait for the all-clear before reversing the car out to the far kerb; the engine would subside as he manhandled the steering wheel and then a jolt as he hit the accelerator aggressively to signal that the time for adventure had come and we were on our way.

These departures were deeply primeval: the family together, moving off nomadically, supplied for any eventuality (hunger, thirst, injury, boredom).

Second gear, however, was as far as my father got, since it was only three hundred yards to the Travellers' Rest Hotel, where we spent all our family holidays. When Julia and I were very young we didn't go on holiday because we didn't have any money, but when Dad became a departmental head we went away once a year, but we never went anywhere but the Travellers' Rest.

My mother wasn't very happy about this (that the hotel was in the same street as our house was the hardest part for her to bear) but Julia and I didn't mind and my father wouldn't consider anything else.

The arguments my father mustered in favour of this destination were, in retrospect, not unreasonable if not entirely convincing: why waste time and money travelling? Did anyone enjoy being stuck in a car for three or more hours at a time, worrying about bodily functions and screaming about the right turning? At the Travellers' Rest you could read the menu and converse with the staff with few linguistic hurdles. Above all, the advantage of the Travellers' Rest was that if you forgot something or wanted to check the post, you could simply stroll home, something
you couldn't do if you were on the coast or abroad. We could go on holiday but still see our friends.

Holidays, my father asserted, were for shedding responsibility. For Mum not to cook, for him to sleep in. For me and Julia not to have to make our beds. For all of us to indulge in liberties. The Travellers' Rest was a grand old family house, so the facilities weren't earth-shattering, but there were two arcade machines, a mini-golf course, a badminton court (albeit heavily involved with nature), and a bird-bath sort of swimming pool; but when you're twelve these are exciting. As were the boys.

The talent wasn't much at the hotel, because it was small and the regular customers were unimportant businessmen and husbands with surprise divorces. But there was some action. One summer, for example, I met an Egyptian called Mohammed. 'Everyone in Egypt is called Mohammed,' he had sulked. Mohammed was two years older than me and more interested in Julia, and Julia was interested in him, but because of that she relentlessly ignored him, and so Mohammed and I spent a lot of time together, which made Julia hop around in rage, out of sight.

At Mohammed's instigation we ended up playing stripchess, which, with hindsight, I suppose he chose because it eliminated the element of chance that strip-poker contains. Mohammed was confident he'd win as he was older and I was a girlie. I'd hardly ever played chess but I beat Mohammed five times in a row; he was so furious he pulled a basin off the wall in the gents' and stopped talking to me.

My mother didn't give up on foreign travel. She took evening classes in Spanish for a couple of years in the hope of using her need to practise the language as a blackmail tool. My father agreed to go to Spain if she could hold a conversation with a waiter in a local Spanish restaurant. She failed the test. Many years later my father confessed to me. 'It wasn't surprising the waiter didn't understand your mother's Spanish. He was Turkish.'

He didn't see the point of travel. He went abroad only once. Mum's parents gave them some ferry tickets to go to France. The ferry docked in Boulogne and Mum was forced to check into the nearest hotel to the port where they spent the weekend, eating at the nearest restaurant, drinking in the nearest bar and shopping in the nearest shop. On the crossing over, it had been foggy and choppy and, looking around from the deck, my father could only see disquieting waves in every direction. 'It's a bloody ocean,' he said. 'No, it's not the ocean,' reproved one of the French crew. 'I know an ocean when I see one,' insisted my father.

Nine months later I was christened Oceane. So I was abroad, in France, at a very tender age, but I didn't see anything and I don't have any memories to speak of."