How I survived a holiday from hell

Sunday morning. On a particularly busy section of the A2 – our old car hemmed in by transcontinental lorries, all apparently in desperate need to reach Dover – the Citroen C4 begins to lose power. Even with my foot to the floor the speedo continues to drop – 30, 25, 20 – while behind me truck drivers help out as best they can by tooting horns and waving fists.

“There seems to be something wrong with the car,” I tell my wife.

“What do you mean?”

By now we are doing a rather unconvincing 15mph; even if we maintain this speed, we’ll miss the 12.15 ferry and as the car is still decelerating, black diesel smoke expels from the exhaust as if the C4 was a demented mechanised squid. Even 15mph seems, now, optimistic.

“I mean we’re losing power. I can’t go any faster.”

“Are you sure you’re in the right gear?”

I think about responding to this question, which from where I’m sitting – the driver’s seat – doesn’t seem particularly helpful, but think better of it. After all, our two children are in the back, oblivious, noses to screens, their exposure to Anglo-Saxon confined, ironically perhaps, to visits to Irish relatives.

Now I spot an exit ramp which we ascend more by momentum than anything and limp along to the outskirts of Dartford, where the car finally throws up its hands in a huff and gives up the ghost. Our French holiday, which we have been anticipating with relish (or, if we’re honest, counting down to in desperation) for months, is less than an hour old and we’ve broken down.

In Dartford.

It’s not that I have anything much against Dartford, it’s just we don’t want to be in it; we want to be driving to Dover, boarding our vast ferry, streaking through the russet fields of Normandy towards our final destination, a detached house with swimming pool just outside Paris whose inhabitants have somehow convinced themselves that our crumbling N19 terrace represents a fair home swap for the next fortnight. Which means not only are we unable to move forward – we are unable to go home.

My wife and I each try to contact the ferry firm’s customer service number; as my mobile usually cuts out after half an hour on hold this takes a while, though at least I receive regular assurances that my call is important to the company although, sadly, they are experiencing exceptionally high demand right now. When my wife finally reaches a human voice they try to sell us a new ticket for later today; we decide against it. The ferry firm suggests we call back when we know when we want to travel – as if we had a choice.

It’s baking hot in Dartford; there are no shops, the only pedestrians in tracksuits, jogging. After a few hours huddled under a tree staring resentfully at the still-sulking C4, an RAC van attends. The mechanic – thirties, implacable, somehow unknowable – sits in the passenger seat and asks me to pull out into oncoming traffic to ascertain the problem: this bizarre request throws me, and somehow, despite the reverse sensors, I reverse into his van, which makes him gasp in shock – and our kids vote the funniest moment of the day.

After a few more hours, during which we remain huddled beneath our tree as the RAC man stares into the bonnet and scratches his head, he approaches with the demeanour of a doctor bearing bad news.

“Bad news, I’m afraid,” he says, which at least allows me to congratulate myself on so successfully reading his body language. “The main shaft on the EGR valve’s impacted negatively on the carburettor’s mainframe glatch nozzle. Which means the AED function on the Z-thrust’s expediating Vorsprung Durch Technik.”

Or something like that; car engines have never been my... thing, TBH.

“So what you’re trying to say,” I say to the RAC man, “is that it’s f***ed.”

The mechanic’s face lightens, glad his diagnosis has been so successfully interpreted. He goes on to explain that the whole engine will probably need removing, polishing, possibly replacing, and implies that even then our troubles will barely have begun. What we have on our hands here, he seems to imply, is an ex-car.

“I can arrange a tow,” he says at last, grudgingly. “Where do you wanna go?”

This presents problems. It’s a Sunday, which means our local garage in London will be closed; we are unable to go home, due to our Parisian incumbents; and obviously we can’t expect a tow all the way to Paris – can we...?

“No,” says the RAC man, rather abruptly for my tastes.

I can think of only one other possibility: my nan’s place in Cheshunt. Nan has been in a residential home since her dementia worsened, and the house is yet to be sold; it has the added bonus of a drive, is close to both the M25 and our garage, and best of all – I have a key.

Obviously, all of these perfectly satisfactory reasons are lost on Daughter, 14, and Son, 11; to them all that matters is that instead of our driving towards Dover, we are instead being towed anti-clockwise round the M25, our final destination no longer Paris, but Cheshunt. Or. as I shall rather childishly refer to it from now on: C’unt.

(When I say “we” are towed, I should add that the RAC van being only big enough to take two of us, my daughter and I are taken, along with the forlorn car; my wife and son are forced to wait beneath the tree in Dartford for another half hour for the second van to materialise.)

Nan’s house having been empty now for over a year, my first job on arrival is to turn on the water. This can only by accomplished by using a two-foot rusting metal fork apparently dating from the Viking era to turn the stopcock. Unfortunately the stopcock is two feet down a dark, earthy well hidden by a plant pot by the front door, and the two RAC vans are still parked up nose to nose so their drivers can presumably swap notes on awkward tows through the ages. Judging by their expressions and puzzled questions the two RAC men found it weird enough that we chose to be towed to an abandoned house miles from anywhere; how much weirder if I now appear with a metal implement and begin poking around in the ground like a demented water-diviner?

In the meantime, we manage to find the electricity switches beneath several veils of cobwebs and it seems the TV at least is still working. If the place still has wifi, at least we can...

No wifi.

***

As “experienced” parents, Wife and I long ago hit on a great way to persuade one’s brood to go to the pub: tell them it has wifi. If the house you’re in already has wifi, turn it off and explain it’ll probably be fine later. So we adjourn to the Crocodile, a large pub set back from the road with play areas, benches with parasols and, this being Essex-lite, tattooed men labouring under the impression that what the world really wants to witness as the world has a cool drink is a sunburnt lout with no top on.

By the time we leave the Croc – having conducted, it must be said, only cursory research into the availability of ferries, Eurostars and rental cars – we return to nan’s place, which seems if anything more cobwebbed than before, and spend the evening playing cards, drinking, and explaining to our children why all this will seem hilarious one day.

I must confess it does seem a little bit odd, to be staying – camping, almost – in a house I have known since a baby half a century ago; so many happy memories, fading photographs, in a house I once thought vast and grand but now see as it actually is: a solid little end-of-terrace on a council estate where youths huddle in alleyways and St George’s Flags hang limp – not that there’s anything wrong with that, Ms Thornberry.

For the first time in 50-odd years I sleep in my grandmother’s bed; as my nose hits the pillow I can smell her distinctive scent, and it seems wrong, somehow, especially as she’s still alive, in her tiny room in a drab care home in Todmorden, that Wife and I are here in her place. I sleep badly, uneasily, my dreams anything but profound.

***

Monday. The sun is shining and as I rise Wife is on the phone to Garage Ali, who agrees to check over the car. Wife then calls the RAC to arrange delivery of a complimentary car from a hire firm we can use to get around these vast, empty suburbs till ours is fixed. The hire car will be delivered within two hours, the hire firm promise; things are looking up.

On Garage Ali’s advice, I convince the RAC that because they were unable to tow us to a garage yesterday they must do so today. Yet another van turns up and tows the C4 down the A10, me in the driver’s seat, indicating when the van ahead indicates, following his line. It’s all rather soothing, though not quite as soothing as relaxing by a Paris pool with Wodehouse. Soon we are in the locale of the garage, which lies within a warren of scrap yards and scary garages tucked behind North Middlesex Hospital. At the garage my man Ali seems unfazed by the EGR valve issue, but then, not much fazes Garage Ali.

“Um... if it looks like it’s going to cost a LOT... can you call me first?” I ask. After all, the C4 is advanced in years, and due to the fact it runs off diesel Sadiq Khan will probably manacle himself to the bumper if we try and drive into town. Garage Ali assures me the repair isn’t difficult, so I shake his hand and walk through possibly the ugliest square mile of north London in search of the train station.

After what seems a very long time I arrive back in C’unt to find Wife on the phone, her tone less relaxed than it has been formerly. It seems the car rental firm the RAC use for complimentary cars got the date wrong and have booked us in from tomorrow; now, they promise one will arrive by three. We wait all day: the car finally arrives after several increasingly terse phone calls at 6pm. The car rental manager has come along for the ride but seeing my wife standing by the gate with her arms folded in a very Kirkby way sends out a new hireling as a sacrificial lamb to face her wrath. There seems little point driving anywhere now so we adjourn to the Croc. Again.

***

Tuesday begins much like Monday began, perhaps like all C’unt days begin: sweaty, frustrating, yet not without hope. Garage Ali assures me his repair is almost complete and will call back soon; no point therefore on driving the hire car anywhere, so we spend the morning playing cards and wishing we were in Paris.

Ali rings: the car is fixed, the damage to our wallets lower than expected. He’s even fixed new windscreen wipers. We drive the posh hire car to Tottenham, thank Ali profusely, form a convoy of two to return the hire car to Enfield, go back to my nan’s to switch off the electric and water and put the cobwebs back in place, and call the ferry company about changing our ticket.

Problem. It seems we should have made the call within 48 hours of calling to explain we couldn’t make the 12.15 on Sunday. Unfortunately no one told us this at the time, 49.3 hours ago. Wife explains all the manifold reasons why the company had better do its utmost to get us on a boat that evening. Company agrees. We set off.

Our journey clockwise round the M25 is uneventful, though of course there’s nothing wrong with that – face with the choice between an uneventful and an eventful trip round the M25, clockwise OR anticlockwise, most would probably plump for the former. In fact we make such good time that we reach Dover ahead of schedule and are waved onto an earlier boat – which means we don’t have time to purchase a GB sticker or put those funny flaps on the headlights, but never mind. We drive into the boat’s dark bowels accompanied by a strange scraping noise that I do my best to ignore. As we park in a lane – even this made more complicated by the French ferrymen, who hilariously keep pretending I’m about to crunch other cars – we look under the wheels to find the whole undercarriage is hanging by a thread. I try to yank it free, succeed in only oiling my hands, and we spend the voyage fretting about the 300-km drive ahead. I explain to Wife that a car’s undercarriage has little purpose; she seems inclined to demur. To avoid a row I take Son, 11, out on deck and we see a vast thunderstorm broiling ahead. Storm in Channel: continent almost cut off.

Disembarking at Calais at dusk, rain falling hard, the many large trucks surrounding us on all sides rather unforgiving, we set out for Paris, accompanied by the sound of the car’s underside scraping. By now the thunderstorm we noted from the deck has grown in intensity and vast lightning streaks shoot across the sky, illuminating the whole of France, spectacular, immense, but great fun to witness. Until the rain starts.

By “rain” you’re probably assuming I mean those soft little drops which sometimes cause English people to tut resentfully (and which we miss so much in its absence), but this thunderstorm rain and our English rain are as remote as Jacob Rees-Mogg and logic. This rain falls in the form of fist-shaped bullets; or rather, it doesn’t “fall” so much as “streak” horizontally at full force into the windscreen, our brand new wipers totally unable to cope, and so much water on the road my feet get soggy as I realise, too late, the vital importance of a car’s undercarriage.

Eventually the rainstorm grows so severe we slow to 30, 25, 20mph... Even the lorry drivers hemming us in on all sides (including above) slow to around, ooh... 90. Finally we take refuge in a lorry park until the cloudburst dissipates. The vast storm slows our progress to such an extent we don’t reach our destination on the other side of Paris until the early hours of Wednesday.

Still: we made it!

***

Wednesday. I’d hoped to spend the day relaxing with Wodehouse, but Wife insists we get the undercarriage fixed so we can drive to the nearest Carrefour, neither of which are high on my list of priorities. Luckily the mechanic who comes to fix the C4 speaks better English than any of us speak French (not hard), and indeed better English than the Dartford RAC men, and after hoisting the C4 onto his truck he rips off the undercarriage with pliers and kindly presents it to us before dropping the C4 back on the drive and driving off. Perhaps, I think, we could take the undercarriage home in the boot of the car and Garage Ali could fix it back on? Well, no, of course not: it won’t fit.

It now turns out the nearest “proper” Carrefour (for reasons unclear, Wife won’t entertain a Carrefour Express) is a 30-minute drive on various hectic Paris peripherals, most of those minutes spent swearing at other drivers in good old Anglo-Saxon and being flashed for reasons unclear, possibly linked to Brexit. The whole scenario is uncannily like a scene from my own comic novel, Kidology – one that was rejected so much that in the end I self-published, to great acclaim. From my nan.

By the time we reach home with supplies (beer, mostly, and wine) we are all quite exhausted and agree it might be best to get an early night. At least next morning, Thursday, we shall wake up in our new house, our car repaired, the fridge well stocked, and swim in the pool – which even has an inflatable crocodile, which seems rather apt. I suppose.

Woke up this morning and it was absolutely lashing down. Good job I have Wodehouse.