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| Writers' holiday photos: postcards from my past | Writers' holiday photos: postcards from my past |
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| Penelope Lively | Penelope Lively |
| This deceptively tranquil beach scene is Alexandria, 1942. I am nine, comfortably impervious to the fact that Rommel's army is 70 miles away, advancing towards the Libya-Egypt border. My parents were equally so, it would seem. It is summer, for heaven's sake, and in the summer we always migrated from our Cairo home to a rented villa in Alex, for sea and cooler weather. Never mind that bombs were falling on Alex (Cairo was never bombed), the harbour there being a base of the Allied Mediterranean fleet. Fine: my mother entertained naval officers to beach picnics (iced gin and tonic in thermos flasks); I fished off the rocks, surfed, and collected shrapnel in the garden on lucky mornings when the German bombers had missed the harbour.• Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time is published in paperback by Penguin this month. | This deceptively tranquil beach scene is Alexandria, 1942. I am nine, comfortably impervious to the fact that Rommel's army is 70 miles away, advancing towards the Libya-Egypt border. My parents were equally so, it would seem. It is summer, for heaven's sake, and in the summer we always migrated from our Cairo home to a rented villa in Alex, for sea and cooler weather. Never mind that bombs were falling on Alex (Cairo was never bombed), the harbour there being a base of the Allied Mediterranean fleet. Fine: my mother entertained naval officers to beach picnics (iced gin and tonic in thermos flasks); I fished off the rocks, surfed, and collected shrapnel in the garden on lucky mornings when the German bombers had missed the harbour.• Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time is published in paperback by Penguin this month. |
| Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
| We don't have "summer" in Nigeria, but as a child, I loved the holiday between school years, which we called "long vac", the three months of languor and freedom and days that stretched on forever. This photo was taken in 1985. I was eight. My little brother Kenechukwu was five. We are standing by the front door of our home on the campus of the University of Nigeria. It was clearly an impromptu photo – we are in our "home clothes" and I imagine that we were called in from play to have the photo taken, perhaps by a visiting relative. | We don't have "summer" in Nigeria, but as a child, I loved the holiday between school years, which we called "long vac", the three months of languor and freedom and days that stretched on forever. This photo was taken in 1985. I was eight. My little brother Kenechukwu was five. We are standing by the front door of our home on the campus of the University of Nigeria. It was clearly an impromptu photo – we are in our "home clothes" and I imagine that we were called in from play to have the photo taken, perhaps by a visiting relative. |
| This photo reminds me of long vac. Days filled with possibility. Days of slow-moving boredom. Our househelp plucking mangoes and cashews for us. We ate cashews bent over so that the juice didn't stain our clothes. My mother insisted on a "siesta" in the afternoons, and we were not allowed out until the sun had "gone down". Cooler evenings, running around in the lawn at the back, playing badminton and football with my brothers and friends, falling in the mud, getting so thoroughly dirty that taking a bucket bath afterwards was joyful labour.• Americanah is out in paperback (4th Estate). | This photo reminds me of long vac. Days filled with possibility. Days of slow-moving boredom. Our househelp plucking mangoes and cashews for us. We ate cashews bent over so that the juice didn't stain our clothes. My mother insisted on a "siesta" in the afternoons, and we were not allowed out until the sun had "gone down". Cooler evenings, running around in the lawn at the back, playing badminton and football with my brothers and friends, falling in the mud, getting so thoroughly dirty that taking a bucket bath afterwards was joyful labour.• Americanah is out in paperback (4th Estate). |
| William Boyd | William Boyd |
| The summer of 1962. Wester Elchies, Banffshire, Scotland. It was my first full summer in Britain after a decade spent living in west Africa. I was 10 years old. I was discovering summer for the first time. | The summer of 1962. Wester Elchies, Banffshire, Scotland. It was my first full summer in Britain after a decade spent living in west Africa. I was 10 years old. I was discovering summer for the first time. |
| This photograph was taken at my prep school in the north of Scotland by a young matron called Jean Gilchrist. Unknown to us boys, she was quietly snapping us about our daily business. This particular shot was taken during a midday break when we ran relay races on the gravelled sweep in front of the school house, a former Victorian shooting lodge. A few years ago Jean Mackenzie gave me this album. It's full of images like this – snapshots, photography's unrivalled, essential power. Time stopped, for ever. My summer of 1962 documented in all its guileless candour. | This photograph was taken at my prep school in the north of Scotland by a young matron called Jean Gilchrist. Unknown to us boys, she was quietly snapping us about our daily business. This particular shot was taken during a midday break when we ran relay races on the gravelled sweep in front of the school house, a former Victorian shooting lodge. A few years ago Jean Mackenzie gave me this album. It's full of images like this – snapshots, photography's unrivalled, essential power. Time stopped, for ever. My summer of 1962 documented in all its guileless candour. |
| Amazingly, I can identify most of the little boys in this picture. I am at the top, second from the left. These wonderful 1962 monochrome snapshots are as compelling and evocative as a Jacques Henri Lartigue.• Solo is out now in paperback (Vintage). | Amazingly, I can identify most of the little boys in this picture. I am at the top, second from the left. These wonderful 1962 monochrome snapshots are as compelling and evocative as a Jacques Henri Lartigue.• Solo is out now in paperback (Vintage). |
| Kamila Shamsie | Kamila Shamsie |
| Before London was home, it was summer holidays. Not every summer, but in all the most memorable summers, my parents and sister and I left the sweltering heat of Karachi and made for London. This summer holiday is the first I was old enough to remember, which may give it a particularly gilded edge. | Before London was home, it was summer holidays. Not every summer, but in all the most memorable summers, my parents and sister and I left the sweltering heat of Karachi and made for London. This summer holiday is the first I was old enough to remember, which may give it a particularly gilded edge. |
| 1980: I was seven, my sister nine. Here we are up a tree in Kew Gardens. It's a picture that recalls sharply for me the joy of those summer vacations, the joy of London. These were some of the delights of the city from my childhood: wearing jumpers in the summer; cloudy days; McDonald's burgers; multiple TV channels; a city in which you walked instead of being driven around everywhere by a parent; double-decker buses; strawberries; rowing on the Serpentine; Cadbury's chocolates; movie theatres with all the latest Hollywood releases; bookstores and more bookstores. But most of all: jumpers, in the summer! | 1980: I was seven, my sister nine. Here we are up a tree in Kew Gardens. It's a picture that recalls sharply for me the joy of those summer vacations, the joy of London. These were some of the delights of the city from my childhood: wearing jumpers in the summer; cloudy days; McDonald's burgers; multiple TV channels; a city in which you walked instead of being driven around everywhere by a parent; double-decker buses; strawberries; rowing on the Serpentine; Cadbury's chocolates; movie theatres with all the latest Hollywood releases; bookstores and more bookstores. But most of all: jumpers, in the summer! |
| There are still times now when I might turn a corner and instead of being in London, the city in which I live, I find myself in London, the city of summer holidays. The thrill of jumpers in the summer has entirely disappeared, but I still enjoy cloudy days.• A God in Every Stone is published by Bloomsbury. | There are still times now when I might turn a corner and instead of being in London, the city in which I live, I find myself in London, the city of summer holidays. The thrill of jumpers in the summer has entirely disappeared, but I still enjoy cloudy days.• A God in Every Stone is published by Bloomsbury. |
| Will Self | Will Self |
| This is the extraordinary beach at Mappleton on the Holderness coast of east Yorkshire. I walked the length of the coast from Flamborough Head to Spurn Head in the summer of 2007 as part of the research for my misery memoir Walking to Hollywood. The Holderness coast is the fastest eroding coastline in Europe, losing six feet of its friable loess cliffs every year to the chomping of the waves. My idea was to walk the entire 35-odd miles within six feet of the cliff edge or bottom, thereby taking a route that could never be replicated. All went oddly from the start: I left my maps at Flamborough Head; my boots turned into flesh-eating monsters; and the weather was a weird compounding of bright sun and ghostly sea fret blowing in off the sea. But Mappleton was the strangest section of the walk: here the beach is blobbed with these weird stalagmites of muddy sand, some standing waist-height, and all of them inlaid with brightly coloured pebbles, as if they were the decorative element in some giant and artificial grotto. Then there were old second-world-war pillboxes slow-mo tumbling off the cliff edge on to the beach below – and further on towards Tunstall I cradled a dying seal pup in my arms. Then I met a couple of fossicking Yorkshiremen, and while I was talking to them about disinterring mammoth bones, a huge section of the cliff fell down in front of us with a mighty whumpf! It hadn't occurred to me before – despite the bizarre rubric of my promenade – that I might actually get eroded on. When I finally reached the wavering promontory of Spurn Head, my feeling was that I should get out less.• Shark will be published by Viking in September. | |
| Diana Athill | Diana Athill |
| This photograph is rather a poignant one. It was taken when I was 89, by which time "summer" no longer meant adventures in Greece or Italy or the Caribbean, but it did mean gardening, a pleasure I discovered in my 60s that became a passion. In a small London garden I could do everything with my own hands. In this larger Norfolk garden I was lucky enough to have help, but I still quite often got my hands into the earth, and loved every minute of it. Gardening resembles writing or painting: while doing it, you are completely absorbed, and if, like me, you are an amateur, it is always a miracle when something you planted actually grows. Now I'm too wobbly to do it. I have a little balcony for plant pots, and a big garden to look at and be critical of, but proper gardening – never again. So when I look at this photo I think: "You lucky old bag, how I wish I was still you!"• Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir is published by Granta. | This photograph is rather a poignant one. It was taken when I was 89, by which time "summer" no longer meant adventures in Greece or Italy or the Caribbean, but it did mean gardening, a pleasure I discovered in my 60s that became a passion. In a small London garden I could do everything with my own hands. In this larger Norfolk garden I was lucky enough to have help, but I still quite often got my hands into the earth, and loved every minute of it. Gardening resembles writing or painting: while doing it, you are completely absorbed, and if, like me, you are an amateur, it is always a miracle when something you planted actually grows. Now I'm too wobbly to do it. I have a little balcony for plant pots, and a big garden to look at and be critical of, but proper gardening – never again. So when I look at this photo I think: "You lucky old bag, how I wish I was still you!"• Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir is published by Granta. |
| Howard Jacobson | Howard Jacobson |
| This is my son Conrad and my granddaughter Ziva loving life on a Spanish beach six summers ago. I doubt I could find a comparable photograph of myself. Summers have always saddened me. The sun comes out and I think of death. I can't satisfactorily explain this. Maybe it's that inevitable climatic drop in spirits Wordsworth describes: "As high as we have mounted in delight/ In our dejection do we sink as low." Only I sink before I mount. | This is my son Conrad and my granddaughter Ziva loving life on a Spanish beach six summers ago. I doubt I could find a comparable photograph of myself. Summers have always saddened me. The sun comes out and I think of death. I can't satisfactorily explain this. Maybe it's that inevitable climatic drop in spirits Wordsworth describes: "As high as we have mounted in delight/ In our dejection do we sink as low." Only I sink before I mount. |
| Perhaps there's embarrassment in it, too, as though I am ashamed to be seen letting myself go in the way summer expects us to. I love this photograph of Conrad and Ziva, anyway, for the uninhibited joy they show. Yes, this is how summer should make us feel. And I am relieved to see I have not passed on my accursed melancholy gene.• J (Jonathan Cape) has just been longlisted for the Man Booker prize. | Perhaps there's embarrassment in it, too, as though I am ashamed to be seen letting myself go in the way summer expects us to. I love this photograph of Conrad and Ziva, anyway, for the uninhibited joy they show. Yes, this is how summer should make us feel. And I am relieved to see I have not passed on my accursed melancholy gene.• J (Jonathan Cape) has just been longlisted for the Man Booker prize. |
| Julie Myerson | Julie Myerson |
| I'm 13 years old, standing somewhere round the back of Henstead Hall, the miraculous, dilapidated country house hotel where we stayed for a glorious fortnight every August. | I'm 13 years old, standing somewhere round the back of Henstead Hall, the miraculous, dilapidated country house hotel where we stayed for a glorious fortnight every August. |
| It's just after breakfast and my sisters and I have been let loose to roam. Behind me through an open window comes the sound of the kitchens: pots and pans, a transistor radio, women laughing, perhaps the sound of a bird trilling – the cook kept a real, live tame thrush in there. Meanwhile, all around me, out of sight of the camera, are pens containing sheep, goats, lambs, as well as chickens, ducks, cats and rabbits. In a minute I'll be sent to the kitchens to collect our pre-ordered packed lunch (hard-boiled eggs, floury baps soggy with sliced tomato and processed cheese, all wrapped in greaseproof paper, an apple or a banana). Then we'll go to Covehithe or Benacre where we'll walk a mile or so through cornfields to reach an almost deserted beach still – sinisterly – strewn with graffitied pillboxes left over from the war. The pinafore I'm wearing I made myself – cherry print, sewn in needlework in a hot classroom on a Singer machine – and I like it because it makes me feel like a girl in a book. Pinned to my hat there's a felt strawberry that I made from a pattern in Golden Hands magazine. The wooden beads on my wrist are bought with money earned from clearing out a neighbour's rabbit hutch. | It's just after breakfast and my sisters and I have been let loose to roam. Behind me through an open window comes the sound of the kitchens: pots and pans, a transistor radio, women laughing, perhaps the sound of a bird trilling – the cook kept a real, live tame thrush in there. Meanwhile, all around me, out of sight of the camera, are pens containing sheep, goats, lambs, as well as chickens, ducks, cats and rabbits. In a minute I'll be sent to the kitchens to collect our pre-ordered packed lunch (hard-boiled eggs, floury baps soggy with sliced tomato and processed cheese, all wrapped in greaseproof paper, an apple or a banana). Then we'll go to Covehithe or Benacre where we'll walk a mile or so through cornfields to reach an almost deserted beach still – sinisterly – strewn with graffitied pillboxes left over from the war. The pinafore I'm wearing I made myself – cherry print, sewn in needlework in a hot classroom on a Singer machine – and I like it because it makes me feel like a girl in a book. Pinned to my hat there's a felt strawberry that I made from a pattern in Golden Hands magazine. The wooden beads on my wrist are bought with money earned from clearing out a neighbour's rabbit hutch. |
| I'm in my favourite clothes, about to start what is pretty much my ideal summer's day, so why the frowny face? Now I think about it, the photo could be from either 1972 or 73. If the former, then my mother is, in a matter of days (and unknown to us), about to leave my father. If the latter, then this is our first post-divorce holiday back at Henstead without her. My father – who never forgave her – probably took the photo. I would have been anxious to please him, to make everything all right. But then again, I was a nervy, secretive girl and the expression on my face wasn't necessarily a sign of what was going on in my head or my heart.• The Quickening is out now in paperback from Hammer. | I'm in my favourite clothes, about to start what is pretty much my ideal summer's day, so why the frowny face? Now I think about it, the photo could be from either 1972 or 73. If the former, then my mother is, in a matter of days (and unknown to us), about to leave my father. If the latter, then this is our first post-divorce holiday back at Henstead without her. My father – who never forgave her – probably took the photo. I would have been anxious to please him, to make everything all right. But then again, I was a nervy, secretive girl and the expression on my face wasn't necessarily a sign of what was going on in my head or my heart.• The Quickening is out now in paperback from Hammer. |
| Jackie Kay | Jackie Kay |
| Recently, my friend the poet Nick Drake and I took my 83-year-old mother and my 89-year-old father on holiday to Ullapool. From there, one day we went on an extraordinary drive west past Norman MacCaig's Loch Assynt through mythical, meteorological landscape, past Lochinver to a beach in Achmelvich where my parents had taken me on my first holiday, a few months after they adopted me. My Dad was visibly moved to be back on this isolated beach. He said: "I didn't think I'd get to see this beach again." | Recently, my friend the poet Nick Drake and I took my 83-year-old mother and my 89-year-old father on holiday to Ullapool. From there, one day we went on an extraordinary drive west past Norman MacCaig's Loch Assynt through mythical, meteorological landscape, past Lochinver to a beach in Achmelvich where my parents had taken me on my first holiday, a few months after they adopted me. My Dad was visibly moved to be back on this isolated beach. He said: "I didn't think I'd get to see this beach again." |
| They'd arrived here in 1962 from Lochinver in their old pale-green Hillman Commer, which had an American-style front seat. My brother sat between them in the front, and I was in the carrycot in the back. At that time, even getting to Lochinver was a bit of an adventure, my dad said. There were two roads and I think we took the bad road. Then we took the winding road to Achmelvich and there were the three caravans sitting on top of the turf. When the sea wind blew, the caravan would shake. At night, my mum and dad meted out a half-bottle of Talisker as the rain tap‑danced on the roof. My mum remembered there being a real problem trying to dry my nappies. She said that they didn't manage to get Zinc ointment till they reached Inverness. | They'd arrived here in 1962 from Lochinver in their old pale-green Hillman Commer, which had an American-style front seat. My brother sat between them in the front, and I was in the carrycot in the back. At that time, even getting to Lochinver was a bit of an adventure, my dad said. There were two roads and I think we took the bad road. Then we took the winding road to Achmelvich and there were the three caravans sitting on top of the turf. When the sea wind blew, the caravan would shake. At night, my mum and dad meted out a half-bottle of Talisker as the rain tap‑danced on the roof. My mum remembered there being a real problem trying to dry my nappies. She said that they didn't manage to get Zinc ointment till they reached Inverness. |
| One night we all set off up the hill towards Lochinver and the skies opened up, and we got caught in a downpour; it was rattling down and the Welsh family from the caravan next door came and rescued us. I remember nothing of any of this, obviously, but I love the circles life makes, and how precious the holidays are now, and the way that I can take them back to this place with the magical beach and the bright turquoise waters, to the kind of golden sands that people don't necessarily associate with Scotland. Time, gallantly for me, has gone into reverse gear, and I do the driving and sing along with them as they sing in the back of the car, looking out at the window, admiring the land, the lochs. Airports would be hell now for them; it is just as well that Scotland is beautiful. On the way back to Ullapool, my dad kept trying to fathom the map, and saying repeatedly to Nick, "There's a problem with the scale."• Red Dust Road, a memoir, is published by Picador. | One night we all set off up the hill towards Lochinver and the skies opened up, and we got caught in a downpour; it was rattling down and the Welsh family from the caravan next door came and rescued us. I remember nothing of any of this, obviously, but I love the circles life makes, and how precious the holidays are now, and the way that I can take them back to this place with the magical beach and the bright turquoise waters, to the kind of golden sands that people don't necessarily associate with Scotland. Time, gallantly for me, has gone into reverse gear, and I do the driving and sing along with them as they sing in the back of the car, looking out at the window, admiring the land, the lochs. Airports would be hell now for them; it is just as well that Scotland is beautiful. On the way back to Ullapool, my dad kept trying to fathom the map, and saying repeatedly to Nick, "There's a problem with the scale."• Red Dust Road, a memoir, is published by Picador. |
| Mohsin Hamid | Mohsin Hamid |
| Summer of 1978. Stanford, California. Last day of school. Age six. For me, summer will always be synonymous with summer holidays, those glorious weeks after one school year ends and before the next begins. I haven't been a student in a long, long time, but this photo of my mother and me, with classes over and a seemingly endless stretch of fun, lazy days about to begin, captures the way I still feel about summer, a half-lifetime later, as my daughter nears the age I was then.• How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is published by Hamish Hamilton. | Summer of 1978. Stanford, California. Last day of school. Age six. For me, summer will always be synonymous with summer holidays, those glorious weeks after one school year ends and before the next begins. I haven't been a student in a long, long time, but this photo of my mother and me, with classes over and a seemingly endless stretch of fun, lazy days about to begin, captures the way I still feel about summer, a half-lifetime later, as my daughter nears the age I was then.• How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is published by Hamish Hamilton. |
| Simon Callow | Simon Callow |
| I spend pretty well every August at the Edinburgh Fringe festival at the Assembly Hall; July is spent rehearsing. The stage door, so to speak, has the greatest view of any stage door in the world. Beyond that gate is a view across the city, down to Firth of Forth. Sublime; and the city is filled with happy people, bent on pleasure, which for many of them means seeing up to six shows a day. All this refreshes and renews me better than any beach, valley or mountain. | I spend pretty well every August at the Edinburgh Fringe festival at the Assembly Hall; July is spent rehearsing. The stage door, so to speak, has the greatest view of any stage door in the world. Beyond that gate is a view across the city, down to Firth of Forth. Sublime; and the city is filled with happy people, bent on pleasure, which for many of them means seeing up to six shows a day. All this refreshes and renews me better than any beach, valley or mountain. |
| • This article was amended on 4 August 2014. An earlier version referred to Mapplethorpe in east Yorkshire. That has been corrected to Mappleton. |
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