It is good to know that the 3G Kili Climb is a family trip. Only families with a teenager are allowed to go, so there will be other teenagers to share all the excitement with the youngest member of 3G. Not that he lacks experience of travel. Compared with his Grandma Sheila and me at his age he has already crammed a lot of travel into his lifetime. At his age the only foreign country we had visited was Holland.
We went there in 1950 when I was 4 and Sheila just 3. Sheila remembers our car, a little green Austin 7, borrowed she thinks from our grandfather, being lifted in a big net on to the deck of the boat that took us from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. We stayed at a hotel near the beach at Scheveningen, making day trips to Amsterdam, the town centre of the Hague and Marken which today is linked to the mainland by a causeway but was then an island in the Zuiderzee (Southern Sea). There we went into an old fashioned fisherman’s cottage and dressed up in national costume.
Our parents bought us two pairs of clogs there which for the rest of our childhood hung on our bedroom wall, a reminder of our only foreign experience. The souvenirs our parents brought back were paintings. Whereas I have absolutely no memory of the green car I do remember going into dark shops with cavernous anterooms and seeing mysterious dark paintings hanging on the walls or propped up on the floor. This one was my favourite.
Of course we have foodie memories, the smell and taste of raw herring eaten at the harbour and the first rusks since we were babies at hotel breakfast. Our first taste of chewing gum and the stern warning: “Don’t swallow it or you will DIE”. We didn’t swallow it but seem to have misbehaved in other ways. Sheila remembers being put out of the car for bad behaviour. “I remember seeing the car with you all in it disappearing up the road without me – a long flat road. I was surprised when it turned up again to pick me up a bit later”. I remember us playing on a deserted beach with wet sand and no adults around (Sheila says they were on the veranda outside the hotel watching us which I suppose is a good thing). We were having a great time climbing in and out and over the huge basket chairs placed on the sand and then a Dutch woman scolded us.
Whatever Oscar sees or hears when he climbs Mount Kilimanjaro, I can guarantee, he will remember for the rest of his life.