It would be around 1970, in fact I’ll tell you exactly what year it was because The Stones “Brown Sugar” was in the charts and on all the music stations, wait here while I visit Wiki…
It was 1971, August 1971, the holiday in the elephants graveyard.
Our dad was nothing if not adventurous, for most people the words “summer holiday” conjured up visions of Blackpool or Scarborough or another British holiday coastal resort that was less than 70 miles from your home for 98% of the population had still never ventured out of the country at that time unless they had served their time in the war, or similar.
But our dad had a new car, an Austin 1800, in beige, for all cars were beige in the 1970′s, it was the law.
Our dad had an Austin 1800 and he wanted to drive it forever, so he booked a holiday in France for us, Brittany to be precise, Dinard to be exact, or just outside Dinard actually, in an elephants graveyard.
Ralph wasn’t so sure, but Ralph never was so sure when it came to driving, his Hillman Avenger barely made it beyond the end of his street without getting lost for Ralph was forever lost and it was ever so fortunate for him that he worked within walking distance of his house – if ever he needed to drive anywhere he followed behind our dads car.
1971 and the elephants graveyard holiday also saw the introduction of a wonderful new invention – the roof mounted holiday box.
Ever since the car had been invented it had been internationally recognised that a car could not ever be built that would take all of the luggage that your average woman needed to take with her on a two week holiday and ever since the car had been invented men had had stand-up arguments at the end of the driveway on the day of their departure, pleading and imploring their wives to limit themselves to just the eight suitcases and four overcoats, all to no avail.
So Cyril-over-the-road had invented the great roof mounted holiday box, had contacted a carpenter and got him to build one out of plywood with a lid that clamped on and everything.
What was it ?
Imagine your car with a standard roof rack on it.
Now imagine a wooden box, two feet high and five feet square, bolted onto your car roof rack – fifty cubic feet of storage space on the roof of your car – now just imagine how many overcoats and shoes your mum could take on holiday with her, especially if you were camping in France.
The really brilliant thing about Cyril-over-the-road’s incredible roof mounted holiday box was that you didn’t need suitcases at all, you just put your clothes and everything else into the box then clamped the lid of the box down – bobs your uncle.
It did have one major drawback though, well actually two, but we discovered the first major drawback before we’d even set off for after filling the box to its fullest capacity, even having to sit four kids on the lid in order to clamp it shut, we then tried to lift it onto the roof of the car – a dozen circus strongmen couldn’t have lifted that box onto the roof of the Austin, so we had to empty it in the driveway, put the box on the roof, then one of us climb up there while the rest passed all of our mothers gubbins up to him.
The second major drawback occurred at the ferry port when the matelots who direct the cars into the hold of the ferry gaped in astonishment at our heavily laden Austin 1800 with its incredible holiday roof box invention, for the ferry car section was not designed for cars of such height and we had to be directed to the middle part of the ferry with all the big trucks – the first Austin 1800 to ever be officially classed as an HGV.
Arriving in France late that evening we drove directly to our campsite with Ralph’s Avenger clinging to the bumper of the Austin as if his life depended on not losing us, for indeed it did.
We found the campsite within minutes for it was only a spit and throw away from the port of St Malo, our great French holiday adventure found us venturing deep into that foreign country by a margin of at least five miles, we were nothing but intrepid in those days of carefree abandonment.
By this time it was dark, and raining and our dad scurried off through the storm to find the campsite owner, returning with a small man in a sou’wester holding a torch with which to guide us to our pre-erected hire tents, we retired within them for some of Ralphs Long Life beer ( a new experience for our fifteen years of age, our dad having declared that it was about time we started “supping” despite our mothers protestation) and thence a restless nights sleep in foisty sleeping bags – another new experience.
We awoke to hear Ralph knocking on our tent door, or at least unzipping our tent door for of course you cannot knock on canvas, not very loudly anyway. Ralph always awoke early, he blamed his days in the Royal Navy and the fact that he’d been on the groundstaff at the famous Headingley cricket stadium for so long, early days, sailors and gardeners go hand in glove apparently.
Ralph was concerned, he asked where our dad had booked this camp site, our dad had found it in the classified adverts in the Sunday People of course, where else would a person find a camp site in France from ?
Ralph told our dad he’d better come outside and have a look, so we did.
Whereas the previous night had been dark and stormy, this morning was bright and sunny, and for the first time we could see the full extent of our French camp site home for the next three weeks.
It was a quarry.
Or rather it had been a quarry, now it was an abandoned quarry, a perfect circular quarry, a hundred or so yards in diameter with sheer walls of fifty or so feet of height towering above us.
Never admit your mistakes was a creed that my dad had lived his whole life and so he instantly re-assured Ralph that he had known it was a quarry all the time and that it “would make a lovely sun trap” and in this Ralph could not argue for even at this early hour the sun was baking our fair white skins as if we had been basted and placed in an oven.
And at that moment Ralph made the comment that we still speak of, Ralph is the only surviving member of the party from our parents generation and I promise you now that every time we meet we will mention this phrase within the first five minutes…
“Its like the bloody elephants graveyard kid…” he muttered.
And our dad laughed, and us kids laughed, we didn’t know it then but this was a moment that would be remembered for ever and written down in a blog on the yet to be invented internet 38 years later.
The elephants graveyard ?
There is a very, very old black and white Tarzan film, one of the original Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films which centres around the myth that you never see a dead elephant, the myth insisting that when elephants know that their time is nigh they go on a great journey across jungles and savannas until they come across a huge cliff that spans the continent, and in a gap in this cliff face, unknown to man, is a space not unlike the quarry in which we camped in 1971 which is full of centuries worth of elephant skeletons – the elephants graveyard.
