Articles > France with Kids and Campervan

‘A house is like a prison,’ a traveller woman said on the radio. ‘I know, I know,’ I replied. I was driving the van up and down the Stillorgan dual carriageway in order to recharge its batteries, while my three sons attended cubs and scouts. The youngest had left the cassette on overnight after I’d collected him from football training. Initially embarrassed at being collected in something more like an ice-cream van or an ambulance than a family saloon, they had eventually resigned themselves.

I wasn’t sure, at first, how the van, with its pink curtains, would double as a runaround. Several feet higher than in a car, you get a new perspective of the road, with unexpected views. I usually feel like singing when I get past third gear. I’ve never taken to cars - never polished one in my life, yet the van is waxed and tended. Neither have I ever shown much interest in the house, yet the fittings and appliances in the van are a source of fascination.

When neighbours ventured out to look at my new purchase I would turn the tap on and off so they could marvel at the running water, an idiotic grin on my face as if I were a native of some long lost tribe coming across modern conveniences for the first time. The neighbours fell into two distinct camps - those who said they’d love one themselves and those who feared I’d gone beyond the pale. ‘The kids will love it,’ the latter group conceded, inwardly shuddering at the thought of enduring such conditions themselves.

I bought the van in mid-December after an obsessive six months’ search, clocking up 80 hours on a single internet bill, immersing myself in motor home magazines and plotting my route back from Germany after deciding that was the only place to buy one. I’d close my eyes and imagine a camper van parked in front of the house and then one day it was there.

This, of course, was not enough. Winter or not, I wanted to go somewhere. And so I subjected the boys to winter camping, waking to frost on the grass. They endured it better than I did. I’d wake up several times in the night, the cold gnawing through to my bones. We travelled to Reading in the lull between Christmas and New Year so the boys could visit their English relatives. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision taken on a wave of excitement about the new purchase. In Banbury where we stopped off, English caravanners had their temporary homes decked with Christmas lights and flashing neon Santas.

In February we went to Fota Wildlife Park and stayed on a site in Cork, which was just someone’s back garden; the ‘campers’ kitchen’ a tiny shed with a corrugated roof, a table and bench. We washed in cold water. Only on the last day did we realise it actually was hot, we just had never let it run long enough to warm up.

I planned Easter - two weeks in the Peak District - and summer - six weeks in France. When there was nothing left to plan, a vacuum opened up. On the road every day is new and fresh. Surprises awaited us, ad-hoc solutions to find, like attaching Velcro to the bottoms of the curtains so they’d stick to the carpet-lined walls and keep out draughts at night. I could envisage a life, when the children were grown, when I would continue in this manner alone, heading south when it got cold, until I grew old.

Life’s accessories are reduced to the bare minimum in the van. We leave behind the incomplete games piled precariously on shelves, the deluge of washing to be aired and put away, the marked walls that screamed to be decorated, the dust swelling in corners, the brambly garden, the slowly rotting window frames. The view from the camper van window can change from mountains to fields to sea at our whim. Some teatimes, if the weather is fine, I pile the boys in the van and fry rashers overlooking the beach at Sandycove, a 15-minute-drive from the house. As soon as we get in the van, the atmosphere changes. Now and then we just sit in it parked in front of the house and absorb this atmosphere - self-contained, disconnected, womb-like. A place apart, like a church.

I overdid it sometimes. Taking four bikes with us to England at Easter wasn’t worth the effort and the ancient bike rack collapsed, leaving a scrape down the back of the van (which I immediately tended to with paint). We finished the trip on a bleak sheep farm in Anglesey, where the weather took a turn for the worse and the awning blew down. I vainly tried to fold it up in the wind and rain while the children read comics in the van.

As summer nears, the boys aren’t quite so ashamed of the van. Their friends are beginning to envy their planned trip to France. Though planned is a bit of an overstatement. I’ve booked the first site, near Roscoff where we land, and have a ferry booked back from Cherbourg six weeks later.

My eldest son, 12 and my size, has gone off the idea of six weeks in a camper van with his mother and younger brothers. I mention discos and karaokes and good food and young teenage girls vying for his attention. He wavers. What he really wants to do is stay behind so he can go to a summer camp at his school with his friends. He could stay with his father, I suggest. He thinks about it for a while, then decides he might miss something in France.

I’ve bought 15 bags of bark, on special offer at the garden centre, to cover the soil and keep it maintenance-free. After six weeks in France I don’t want to come back to a jungle. I’ve arranged for the lawn to be cut every two weeks while we are away. This summer migration is forcing me to pare down and lighten up, ready for flight.

Driving to the garden centre I was impressed with how easily I handled the van. The first few weeks after I bought it I was terrified, going miles out of my way in search of parking or turning places. Finding first gear was still a little tricky, but I used both hands and generally got it first time.

I’ve bought several DVDs for the France trip, planning to put up the table and secure the laptop to it with Blutak so it doesn’t slide to the floor at every corner.

Finally I hear the van’s service is finished and what I thought were little extras, worth getting done, have brought the bill up to four times what I expected to pay.

Colm helped me wash the van today and we flushed out the water tank. The weather has turned cold with fierce showers that pelt like hail. I feel a smug satisfaction in knowing I am taking them away to a better climate. I’m stocking up on dried food for the cats and allowing grocery stocks to deplete. I’ve cancelled the milk. I’m holding off from planning routes and places to stay in order to experience a real leap into the unknown, an escape from the timetable that pins down term time: football, swimming, drama, gym, tennis, French, Cubs, Scouts, piano, guitar, orthodontist, football training, football matches, parties, youth club. In France we’ll be able to forget what day of the week it is.

I’ve put an IRL sticker on the back of the van and screwed on new cupboard handles.

Sam’s primary class is preparing to disband. His reading light fell onto his mattress the other night and smouldered a hole through it. Watching him being a tree in the school play, I imagined an alternative scenario with him swathed in bandages in a burns unit. His room is now off limits, an independent republic of hardened orange peel and single dirty socks. What goes on in the rest of the house does not register in Sam’s world. His affinity lies with the radio station he plays full blast and which blots out all other sound.

Seven thirty on the morning of departure. The sky is murky and the wind howls. It could be mid-October. The leaves have lost their sheen and already litter the green in front of the house. The children are still asleep and I feel strangely calm. Our going away seems as natural as birds migrating for summer. Everything in the house is out of season now – redundant school books, lunch boxes, uniforms, ill-fitting school shoes, calendar scribbled with reminders.

I have packed well. Everything is in its appropriate cupboard, not a suitcase or bag in use. Only the two bikes on the back and the Portapotti betray the fact we’re going on holiday. In one cupboard is six weeks’ supply of summer clothes for four people – admittedly not much. Under the passenger seats are DVDs and music tapes, phones and phone chargers. Under the driver seat, tools, plug adapters and spare cupboard door handles. Above the passenger seats, table and chairs, rain coats and fleeces. In the upstairs bed section, sleeping bags, sheets, blankets. Under the back seat, the awning. We have books, toiletries, medicines, curtains, cutlery, crockery, pans, torches. The feeling of being so completely self-contained within a few square feet is as comforting as a hug.

I look at the Portapotti and decide at the last minute to disguise it as a seat. I rush inside and tear off an elasticated corner from the sheet Sam burned, then grab a small tapestry-covered square cushion from the settee. I tie the sheet round the Portapotti and put the cushion on top. Et voila, le dernier cri in home décor.

The rain pours on the drive to Rosslare. ‘Aren’t you glad you’re leaving all this behind?’ I say irritatingly to Sam.

It’s cold in Roscoff the next morning, though the sun is shining. The site, booked months in advance, is uninviting, the waterslides closed. The children shiver in the pool. We play mini golf instead - paying €12 for the privilege. There is no beach nearby, only mudflats. When we are greeted by pouring rain the next morning I suggest we move south.

We picked a site in Tregunc, found the nearest beach and parked the van overlooking the sea. There’s never any need to worry you’ve left something behind when, on even the shortest trip, you have all your belongings with you. Returning to base is confusing, though. Coming back to the camp site we found ourselves looking out for our van, only to realise we were in it.

Sam has sulky patches but his face has lit up more often than I remember in Dublin recently. And there are arguments. I was going to keep a record one day but gave up at around midday. Up until then there had been an argument between Liam and Colm about who would get the last of the Frosties. Then between Sam and Liam about who would read the Harry Potter book. Then between me and Sam about him never washing. Then between Colm and Liam about who would put the eggs into the egg boxes at the Casino supermarket.

The awning, a huge tunnel tent affair which clips onto the side of the van, has remained in its storage space under the double seat. Though no longer than an estate car, the van provides enough sleeping space for the four of us. Liam sleeps across the driver and passenger seat, bridged by the table top and covered with a makeshift mattress. By hanging a blanket down from the roof, he can partition himself off and have his own ‘room’.

Sam is ‘upstairs’. He lacks headroom but this doesn’t seem to bother him. He can look down on all of us, has side windows through which to view the world, and a skylight to the stars.

In the middle of our second night at Tregunc the sky lit up. A boom of thunder resonated in the pit of my stomach and set the grill pan rattling. Rain pelted down on the roof like cascading pebbles. I sat up in panic. Another flash of lightening and a crash of thunder and I was on my feet, peering through the curtains at the deserted field. We were in a metal box with gas bottles, connected to an electrical hook-up point. If we were hit, would we explode? I could already see the charred remains and the newspaper headlines.

We woke to grey skies and drizzle. ‘Don’t worry, kids,’ I told them. ‘We’ll just have to go a little further south to find the good weather.’ This became a mantra of the holiday.

As we moved on, the weather got worse until, just south of Lorient, the windscreen wipers could no longer cope and the wind threatened to blow us into the path of oncoming traffic. The wind was picking up speed, bending trees almost to 90 degrees.

A three-star campsite advertised ‘animations’- lotto, karaoke. A pool with waterslides looked desolate under the grey sky, its artificially blue surface ripped by gusts. A young man greeted us and an older woman took our details. She looked outside with concern.

‘I’ve never seen wind like this, not in all the time I’ve been here,’ she said. ‘How long is that?’ I asked. ‘Twenty years,’ she replied. ‘Never seen anything like it, not in summer, anyway.’ ‘Wasn’t there a storm last night?’ I asked. ‘No,’ the man replied. ‘It was sunny all day.’ ‘There was a storm where we were,’ I said. His look accused me of bringing it with me. He handed me four wristbands for the pool. ‘For tomorrow,’ he said, smiling and with a Gallic shrug.

This site, near the industrial town of Lorient, was full of French families on modest incomes with a taste for chips and bingo. We were the only foreigners. The storm that night was nothing compared with the night before, though I jumped a couple of times as blown-off branches struck the windscreen.

The main headlines in ‘Ouest-France’ the next day read: ‘Violent winds sweep coast’; ‘Tents ripped away, campers evacuated.’ Photographs of people in fleeces and rain gear looking miserable and shocked accompanied an article which ran, ‘campers whose tents and caravans risked being crushed by falling trees were given refuge in a sports hall. Families from the city of Lorient went home.’ The mayor, aptly named Victor Tonnerre (Thunder), ‘deplored the cases of fallen trees and flooding in his commune.’ The paper went on to report ‘More rain in one morning than is usual for the whole month of July,’ and ‘55 litres of rain per square meter and gusts of up to 130 kilometres per hour.’ There were pictures of flattened tents held down by bicycles and more groups of refugees awaiting evacuation. ‘Quiberon campers pack up,’ said the headline.

We had not done too badly considering the devastation at camp sites only a few miles to the east and west. Though the pool was cold, a weak sun shone and the children were enjoying the waterslides, warming up in hot showers afterwards, although Sam developed a cold that was to accompany him to his new secondary school.

I went to look for Sam to see if he would like an ice cream. I’d last seen him at the pool, where now I could only find his towel, goggles and trousers. Then out of the corner of my eye, and only after being alerted by Colm, I saw him, sitting at the end of a sun loungers, leaning forward, elbows on knees, shoulders broad under his red T-shirt.

‘Sam has found some friends,’ Colm said. Around him were half a dozen French teenage girls. I picked up Colm’s and Liam’s clothes, leaving Sam’s behind and started to walk back to the bar. As I passed Sam our gazes crossed for a split second and his look turned into one of pained horror. I walked on as if I didn’t know him, having correctly deciphered his silent plea.

I spotted him over the next few hours, having barely moved an inch, though he had taken off his shirt as the sun warmed up. He was on the edge of a group, which now also included French boys, all a little older than Sam. Though on the edge, he was nevertheless part of it. He didn’t seem to be actually engaging with anyone and his almost total lack of French must have been a disadvantage, but he was hanging out with teenagers.

The holiday was picking up and the forecast was good.

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