Twenty-five degrees, and a pony

The request was written on the sofa on a Sunday night, by committee. Dad typed. "We have two weeks," he wrote, and read it out, and everyone agreed that this was true. Mum added twenty-five degrees. Dad added the shore. Mum added playgrounds and somebody in a matching T-shirt running games, every other stop, and a farm in between. The six-year-old, who had been listening from under a blanket, added a pony. Dad, who is a fair man, typed that too.

Nobody asked for a place. Other families ask for places. My family asks for a temperature, and the reason is me. I have a big bed at the front, a small one at the back that is a table by day and not much of a bed by night, and a leak. I do not have a bathroom. On a dry day I am a bedroom with good curtains. On a wet one I am four people and a board game in a space designed for the board game.

Claude thought about this for a while and came back with Denmark, where the forecast for the fortnight sat at twenty-four and twenty-five like a cat on a warm wall. It had found four campsites with room on the right nights, a big one, a farm, a big one, a farm, and put them on a map with the dates already filled in. Nobody mentioned the pony. I noticed that nobody mentioned the pony.

The first campsite had a pool, three playgrounds and an animation team of young Danes in yellow T-shirts. It also had a pitch between two hedges and, along the path opposite, a row of camping chairs. Dad reversed me in on the fourth attempt. He said the hedge was closer than it looked. The hedge was exactly as close as it looked. The chairs watched with interest. One man nodded at the end, which was worse.

At seven every evening the yellow T-shirts held a mini-disco by the pool. The three-year-old went once and decided it was the best thing that had ever happened. She could not go alone, so Dad went, every night, front row, doing the actions to a Danish song about a chicken with the concentration he normally keeps for hedges. By the fourth evening the row of camping chairs had moved to the pool. They were the same chairs. They had started to clap.

The farm was the other kind of place. Six pitches in an orchard above a beach, a box for the money, hens. The farmer looked at Dad, looked at me, and fetched his tractor. He towed me into the orchard himself, level, first time, while Dad stood by the people carrier with nothing to do and nobody to watch him not do it. I believe it was the most restful ten minutes of his year.

In the second week the forecast changed its mind. Rain was coming in from the west, straight over the last farm. Mum asked Claude again. Claude found another farm two hours up the coast, where the sun meant to stay, checked it had room, and moved us. Two hours, for me, is two hours and a bit. I did it at eighty, as I do everything.

← After the rain. Number four used to be somewhere wetter.

The new farm had a pony. Nobody had asked for one in so many words. Strictly, somebody had.

People say a holiday is about where you go. For a caravan without a bathroom it is about where you can stand. The playground at seven in the morning, the grill at dusk, the disco, the beach where the six-year-old decided everyone would swim. None of it happens inside me. So the plan started with the sky and fitted the campsites in underneath, which, between us, is the right way round.

← Not our pony. Same expression.

On the last morning Dad hitched me up in the farmyard. There were no hedges and nothing to reverse, but a hitch can still be watched, and the pony came to the fence to watch it. He did it first time. The pony did not clap and did not nod. It was the only spectator he has ever had who did not laugh, and he mentioned it twice before the border.

P.S. In fourteen days the leak did not get a single drop to work with. It seems almost disappointed.

I'll get there. At 80.
Elfriede

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