After several phone calls to our tour operator, we had been squeezed on board the hovercraft and were heading back to ‘Blighty’ having cut our camping holiday short. I felt like whipping out the Union Jack flags and waving them vigorously from the deck as we pulled out of Calais. After ten days away in a caravan, regular downpours and far too many sausages on the barbecue, I’m excited to be heading back to Dorset.
A nice English voice welcomes us on board and tempts us all with a full English fry-up from the café. Thankfully, we had stopped in a French service station earlier that morning and gorged on our final ‘pain au raisins’ so the children were willing to give the fried egg and hash browns a miss. As we cruised along, I noticed it becoming a bit choppy. “Can I have my wrist bands?” asked our six-year-old daughter, convinced that their very presence on her small wrists would keep the sickness at bay. No sooner had I put them on, her face became pale and she began to whimper. I scooped her up and made a mad dash to the nearest loos, only to be greeted by a friendly member of staff filling up the sick bag dispensers. “The best thing to do is to lie flat on the floor,” said the nice lady. I glanced down at the floor, and politely disregarded her sea-fairing words of wisdom.
As the hovercraft began rocking more vigorously I too began to feel waves of sickness. Alarm bells rang with the prospect of the mother getting ill too and I mentally fought off the sickness. Meanwhile, my daughter was rapidly flagging. I suddenly remembered my naval father-in-law and sea doctor father’s tips on looking at the horizon, so I hauled my little girl on deck. We sat on a bench beside numerous other pale-faced mothers comforting their ill children, whilst clutching sick bags. There we sat in the driving rain for 2 hours, shivering with cold. My daughter held her head in the bag, whilst I fixed my eyes on the grey horizon thinking of the green ‘static’ hills of Dorset. The decks were littered with green-faced bodies on their way home from their fun-filled holidays.
Finally, we began slowing down and people let out weary cheers as we spotted the beaches of Studland. Faces around us regained their colour and suntans gradually reappeared. We stumbled back to our seats with a distinct smell of disinfectant in the air. My husband was sitting with our green-faced five-year-old on his knee, holding a couple of sick bags in his hand. The Toddler was curled up like a cat on the seat beside him. As the boat came to a standstill, we breathed a sigh of relief. We had made it. Our holiday was over and we were home.
