Holidays - 1

The first holidays I remember weren't called 'holidays' but 'leaves', my father, as a senior European employee of a British company in colonial East Africa, being entitled to three months every three years - though this later became every two years. While a leave was a holiday, it also enabled my father to spend some time in the company's London offices catching up with colleagues and discussing the firm's direction in its East African operations. However, what I suspect he most enjoyed was time spent in English pubs while my mother amused my brother and me - picture is from our 1949 leave.

That the leave was so long was because, before air travel came within our budget, we had to travel back and forth to England by sea, and the shortest journey, through the Red Sea and Suez, took four weeks, giving us a month in England. Needless to say, I hated these leaves since we spent our time moving from one fusty relative to another, occasionally also staying with my parents' friends or in damp boarding houses....

....in a cold, wet country with miserable beaches - like this one at Hastings which, as well as being shingle instead of sand, had lumps of tar all over it from ships cleaning out their fuel tanks.

Even the wide sandy beaches at Yarmouth didn't appeal: it seemed insane to be on a beach fully clothed and unable to go in for a swim because it was so cold.

The one part of these leaves which I did like was the sea voyages, usually via Suez but once via Cape Town, a journey which called at Durban, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, St Helena, Ascension, and the Canary Islands. The highlight of life on the Durban Castle, however, was the ice cream served on deck at eleven each morning.

As well as the regular 'home leave' - sometimes called 'long leave' - my father was entitled to 'local leave'. I don't recall how long this was, nor do I remember going anywhere on local leave, so perhaps this lapsed when home leave was changed to every two years.