‘There is no remedy for love but to love more.’
Henry David Thoreau
Ours is a swish campsite, and we have a spacious tent. We have two ‘bedrooms’ separated by a bit of canvas, a hob to cook on and a fridge. We have our own little concrete terrace outside, and we’re only a few minutes walk from the beach…
The on-site pool where we’re spending most of our time is pristine. Not big, but newly built. Set on a high point of the campsite, there’s a view of our surroundings beyond the green wire fence and the freshly planted grass, turf squares still visible.
We’re in the southern suburbs of Biarritz, with houses around us, hacienda-style, rust-red roofs, staggered in curving rows and tightly packed. We have ventured into the city centre of Biarritz only once. We had to walk for a long time, got lost, and finally called for a cab. When we got to the centre of town, the designer shops were closed, and there were only a couple of bars open that didn’t serve food. We gorged on crackers and cheese when we got back to the tent.
This campsite attracts mostly French visitors, to judge by the snatches of conversation we hear around us, and there is another clue. For a couple of hours at lunchtime, when the French tend to sit down to eat, we’ve often had the pool to ourselves. Our British lunches, prepared and eaten outside the tent, have been quick and dirty – a fresh baguette with a soft cheese or a tuna salad. I’ve had a doze most afternoons, taking advantage of the quiet, listening to the sound of breezes in the trees or the chatter of passers by though the thin canvas. Now I’m older, I’m good at these power naps. Twenty minutes, and I’m up again, and if our chores are done I might read in the shade, only going back up to the pool as the sun begins to sink.
Our days have drifted lazily by, one melding into another, the ritual of swimming and eating, taking a stroll in the evening, sitting until after dark with wine and pasta and chocolate to follow, and citronella candles on the table. We’ve told stories of other holidays we’ve taken together, just the three of us. When my daughters were young, we went to Cornwall for summer holidays, and sometimes in the winter too, donning wetsuits to plunge into the icy sea on New Year’s Day, staying with friends in rented houses, or camping when it was warmer. We had a VW campervan for a while, and thought ourselves très cool, and more recently we went to what the brochure – printed on recycled paper – called an eco-site. It boasted no pool, no shops, and compost toilets. I don’t doubt we did little harm to the environment by staying in an old bell tent from the nineteen-fifties and eating our food cold because lighting a fire was deemed hazardous at every level, from forest fires to ozone. But when I managed to escape the green paradise and buy myself a much needed bacon sandwich on the seafront, a wasp stung me between my fingers and that tipped me over. I suggested we might go home early and let the planet go hang.
“Do you remember the magic pear, Dad?’ Lilly was spitting wine as she tried to speak and laugh.
‘How could I forget? But I still maintain that I did not snore. I am not a snorer, as you know from the past ten days.’
I’d been rudely awakened by the two of them shaking me in the dead of night to tell me I was snoring, I had indeed asked them to hand me a pear, in the hope that eating something might cure a snore I was certain was only happening in their imaginations. The story stuck.
‘You’d had a lot of wine, Dad. We all had. Don’t blame yourself.’
‘I don’t! The wine was entirely necessary to my survival in that gulag!’
Our last day, and it has come around so fast it’s caught us all off-guard.