The House We Called Home: The magical, laugh out loud summer holiday read from the bestselling Jenny Oliver. Jenny Oliver
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he stood up and slotted the doll back on the shelf, pausing for a second, his hand resting on a Buy One Get One Free sign. ‘Shit,’ he muttered under his breath.
Stella and Jack were halfway back from the fishing lake when the car broke down. The petrol gauge had been bleeping on empty since they left the house but a trip to the petrol station was in the opposite direction to the lake, and Jack had assured Stella that the Nissan Qashqai can run 43 miles after the needle hits empty on the dashboard. The lake was only ten miles away. Unfortunately, Jack hadn’t factored in a key road on the route being blocked by a lorry pouring concrete for building works and a diversion which then led off into a winding country lane maze outside Stella’s jurisdiction and unnavigable because iMaps wouldn’t load on either of their phones. When they finally got back to countryside she knew, they were out of petrol.
‘We should have got the sat nav fixed,’ Jack muttered, slamming the car door.
‘Or,’ Stella said, standing in the passing point where they’d managed to crawl to a stop, ‘we should have got some petrol.’
Jack didn’t reply. Just sucked in his cheeks, visibly fuming.
Stella scratched her head, looked around to get her bearings. It had been so long since she’d lived around here.
‘Which way?’ Jack said, his phone map still just a frustrating grey grid with a blue dot.
Stella shrugged. ‘Well, the house is that way.’ She pointed slightly to her right. ‘But the quickest route would be straight ahead to the sea and then along the cliff path. So up there.’ She pointed towards the high verge beside them that flanked the road. Jack looked dubious but didn’t argue, clearly still furious with himself about the petrol.
Heat bore down on them as they climbed. The humidity was reaching its peak. Stella slipped on the grass in her flip-flops. Her long blue skirt and white vest were not meant for trudging walks. Midges buzzed round her head.
She felt like she was walking through one of the polytunnels she’d watched out of the window of a coach journey once through the arid wasteland of southern Spain. It was years ago, in the early days of having Sonny when she had no clue how much sun the pale new skin of a baby could handle. Sonny had spent the week squeezed like a fat little sausage into an all-in-one sun protection suit and hat with a white baby-sunblock face. She’d watched other children running about naked. She remembered running about naked herself, but the sun was more dangerous now because of global warming – that’s what she’d read on Mumsnet when she’d googled it before they left. But then one of the posts had warned of babies having vitamin D deficiency nowadays because they were overly protected from the sun. She remembered sitting looking perplexed with Jack – both of them, she knew, secretly remembering the holidays when they could lie back for a nap or nip off to the bar for a beer. Jack did actually nip off to the bar for a beer, and alone with the sand-eating sausage baby, Stella had started to write, scribbling in the back of the paperback she had naively taken to read, and Potty-Mouth was born. The first column was called, ‘Holiday? What holiday?’ The first line: ‘I never believed anyone when they said a holiday with kids was “same shit, different place”. I thought they were just miserable bastards. They were. They had kids.’
She’d actually quite enjoyed the holiday in the end – staying up eating tapas while Sonny snored in the buggy in just his nappy, watching him giggle at the sea and be cooed over by grannies – and the article had gone full circle, ending on a high note but certainly not scrimping on the grizzle. The Sunday broadsheet magazine that she wrote for occasionally had run it, delighted by the angle – their readers loved a shocked snort with their weekend brunch, a nod of retrospective agreement ‘I wish we’d been able to say things like this in my day’ or a pass of the page over the table, ‘read this, it’s like that time it rained in Mallorca every day and the twins got chicken pox’. A flurry of letters arrived in uproarious response – some full-blown thank yous from people just relieved that someone else was finding it all as bad or worse than they were, others who didn’t find her funny at all, she tried her best to ignore those, because Potty-Mouth was hired.
Over the years her column had lost an inch to advertising space and a new editor had made it clear that the readers wanted the grizzle. The best of the bad bits wrapped up in a witty package that took just over three minutes to read.
‘I’m sweating,’ said Jack as he hiked the final few feet up the hill. The verge dotted with spiky gorse bushes and pink heather.
‘Me too.’
Jack wiped his brow with his T-shirt. Dark hair pushed up off his forehead. Face still rigid.
They stopped side by side at the top. Below them the scene dropped into fields of sheep and crops. Rows of cabbages and corn. A tractor was backing into the farm, then further out past a golf course and caravan park was the sea. Glinting and familiar. Pale as the sky. Stella inhaled through her nose, felt her shoulders drop slightly.
Jack shook his head. ‘This is madness. We’re miles away.’
Stella rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not that bad,’ she laughed, his annoyance working to deflate her own.
‘It’s pretty bad,’ Jack said, sweeping his arm to take in the endless view.
Stella shaded her eyes with her hand. ‘Well, look, that’s the Goldstone Caravan Park,’ she said, pointing at the rows of white static vans in the distance. ‘And the leisure centre.’ She squinted, gesturing to the right of the vans, to an ugly grey concrete building. ‘Once we’re there, we’re pretty much almost home.’ It was the distance between them and there that was the worry. ‘We just have to get across all those fields.’ She grinned.
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