This week's Sepia Saturday prompt photograph shows a happy family striding along, carrying suitcases - heading for a holiday perhaps? Cue for me to share my family, setting out in the car for our holiday in the 1950s.
We
lived outside Blackpool, the famous English north west seaside resort, but for
our summer holiday we travelled to Bournemouth on the south coast,
where a close friend of my mother (known as Auntie Phyllis) had moved
to open a hotel.
It
was a long journey, before the days of motorways, through industrial
Lancashire. My brother and I (below) hated crossing the swing bridges over the
Manchester Ship Canal at Wigan and Warrington with visions of the bridges swinging around whilst we were on them. We would crouch down behind my
parents' seats and hide our eyes.
With my brother , c.1948
Another journey was crossing
the hills of the Pennines through the Peak District to visit my aunt and uncle in
Sheffield, passing over the Snake Pass, or in the Lake District
going over the Kirkston Pass - we must have seemed such wimps, but we
hated the twisty roads and sudden drops below us, so it seemed safer not
to look out, until we reached safer ground.
A family group with my auntie Fran in the middle - with my Uncle Fred at the camera.
This was long before the days of electronic games , Walkman and I Pads - I don't think we even had a car radio. To pass the time, we did the usual car games of I Spy, I went to the seaside or the market , and bought A ...B..C ...etc.. ,and making up silly sentences from the registration numbers of cars MXD - Mummy kisses Daddy and also making up silly songs. My father was a commercial traveller (sales rep.) for the Beecham Pharmaceutical Group and one ditty we came up with was: (I still remember it!)
There was a hermit in the hills
Living off his Beecham Pills
He ate two in the morning
And two at night
To make him feel so merry and bright.
We
usually stopped somewhere for a picnic, prepared by my mother. One
notable time, she excelled herself by making chicken pieces instead of
the usual sandwiches and a fruit tart - and left them all behind at home in the
pantry! We
had to stop somewhere and find a cafe for lunch. My father got the
blame here, as he was always chivvering us get a move on and get away, whilst m,y mother eas seeing to everything domestic. We returned home a week later to discover the food covered in fur! Like all children, the excitement of going away quickly turned to boredom and the perennial question was voiced "Are we nearly there?"
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Once there - we enjoyed ourselves!
With
my mother. Every summer she made me a new sun dress and I remember
this one in green and white polka dots, with shoulder straps on my
dress and a bolero to go over it.
It must be a photographic quirk that Dad appears so sunburnt, because he did not lead a particularity outdoor life.
My brother enjoying a paddle in the park stream - he usually got his clothes soaked!
But of course at the end of it all, we had the long return journey home to make - with our usual cry - "Are we nearly there"
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Sepia Saturday give bloggers an opportunity
to share their family history through photographs.
A perfect take on the prompt with just the right photographs! :) Before the more direct route of Interstate highway I-80 was built over Donner Pass in California's Sierra Nevada mountains, our family's camping trip to Lake Tahoe took 6 hours so there was a lot of "Are we there yet?" type questions. And we pretty much played the same car games like the A, B, C challenges about anything we could think of, or we counted how many out-of=state license plates we saw. We also sang songs like "99 bottles of beer on the wall", "The ants go marching", "Be kind to your web-footed friends" (sung to John Phillip Souza's "Stars & Stripes Forever") & the like. Mom & Dad sometimes joined us with "The ants" & "Web-footed friends", but not so much the "99 bottles" Later, using I-80, the trip was reduced to 4 hours. Either way we always stopped at a favorite cafe along the route to have breakfast being that we set out on the journey in the wee hours of the morning so we could get to the lake by 9:00 in order to get a good camping spot in our favorite state park.
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