We are trundling home as I write these words.
It is dark. The children are in the back of the van. Oliver is on his bunk, half dreaming, half looking at a game on his new phone. Lucy and the lodger are curled up on cushions at the back, reading and occasionally yawning, they will both be asleep before we get home. Mark is driving, and I am beside him on the furry cheetah-skin seat writing to you.
The sun has just set, and the sky is slowly sighing from rosy-gold just above the horizon, fading slowly to black in the east. We are just leaving the sea behind after the happiest of days.
We woke to brilliant sunshine, and a man from the council milling about the car park. He did not shout at us for being rascally overnight regulation-breaching campers, but laughed and helped Mark work out how to use his card to put another day ticket on the van. He came back later to see if we were having a nice time and stayed for ages and told us all about his holidays in France.
The sun was so warm and lovely that we dug all of Mark’s tools out from the locker at the back and he spent ages sitting next to it on a rug, barefoot in the sunshine, wiring the electricity so that difficult things like the microwave and the drill would work. I sat on a little stool and painted flowers on the new door that Mark had put over the filling hose for the gas tank. People came past and said cheery things to us, or waved as they passed, and we thought what a lovely place the world was.
The lodger arrived to join us at lunchtime, there not being enough room for us to have a lodger in the camper van. She and the children buzzed off to their Krav Maga class, and Mark and I went for a walk along the beach.
The dogs charged about, jumping over waves. Roger Poopy accidentally jumped in a pool which was deeper than he thought, and had a surprise sinking and first swimming experience. We rolled our trousers up and paddled in the warm water and watched the little fish darting about. The sunshine sparkled on the waves and a gentle breeze puffed along the water’s edge, and everything was perfectly perfect.
We held hands and wandered slowly back, and talked to people who wanted to be friendly because we have got pictures on our camper van. Then we curled up contentedly in our bunk and had a little snooze before it was time to collect the children.
They were bouncing with happiness and the thrill of becoming savage killing machines.
They had bitten and kicked and punched and jabbed and fought. They were exhausted. They had learned how to defend themselves against being attacked with knives, and with iron bars, and from being strangled, and when somebody has pinned them to the ground.
After we had fed them we went for a last walk, and they demonstrated their new unarmed combat techniques on one another for our benefit, and then on us, for theirs. I lasted about six seconds before I was lying on the floor groaning, having not managed to land a single punch. Mark lasted a bit longer, and only managed to bring Oliver down in the end because Oliver was trying not to hurt him.
The dogs did not like it very much at all, and galloped about barking their heads off and trying to oblige everybody to desist. They were quite effective at this. Being leapt upon by a wet dog does tend to distract you from whatever you are doing.
I would not pick a fight with any of them. Especially when I watched Lucy and the lodger fighting one another. Believe me, it was not an activity in which I would have liked to participate.
Lucy is now going to go back to her genteel girls’ school covered in bruises which she has acquired in fights.
I am very pleased indeed. I will never need to be the sort of parent who worries about murderers when their precious chick goes off to university.
The Krav Maga teacher said that she was very good at it, and that she would be able to be an instructor when she was older. She wasn’t terribly interested in that but thought that she would very much enjoy becoming a bouncer on a nightclub door.
I do like having daughters. What delicate little flowers they have all become.
