What we did on our holidays part 1: the Spanish building site

Inspired by Jonathan Crinklybee's latest... I am only just beginning to realise that my childhood is now part of a different era, and has stories to tell.

I don't remember going on holiday before 1975, but to be fair I don't remember much of anything before 1975. That year was a landmark one: I started school, and we went on our first Foreign Holiday. We went to Majorca in low season, I think October, with some family friends who had children sort of the same age. I think it may have been their first Foreign Holiday too.

The first thing I remember about it is that the hotel we were supposed to be staying in hadn't actually been built yet. I think that was standard practice for the 1970s package holiday, and thinking about it it must have been horribly stressful for my parents, but when you're five you really don't notice these things. We were put in another hotel, and I loved it. I remember the checked bedspreads, the hot chocolate for breakfast, and tasting my first pistachio nut. Other good things I remember include having *lots* of different swimming costumes to wear (all but one of which had been borrowed from my friends), and some fat spiky cactus like plants that grew on the path down to the beach. There was also some spiny grass growing there, and I spent a lot of time snapping off spiky cactus, threading it onto spiny grass and making necklaces to wear with my many swimming costumes. This makes me sound like a little princess but the limited photographic evidence suggests I was a podgy pale kid having fun on a beach next to a building site. And why not.

I wasn't always wearing my many swimming costumes though (which was all more ok in the 1970s) and my #1 Majorca memory is of sudden excruciating pain between my legs. I remember screaming, and fighting with my mother, sudden cessation of pain, and some blood. Some years later I asked her about it and she told me that I'd managed - god knows how - to get a large pointy seed from the tall spiny grass stuck in my little vagina, and the cessation of pain was her hoiking it out. Maybe that's what did for my hymen, of which there was no sign when the time came.

Yeah, so I possibly lost my virginity to a grass seed in Majorca. Good start. Maybe I should count my blessings there was no one waiting outside a front bedroom in Blackpool 11 years later to hoist a bloody sheet up the flagpole as evidence of my honour.

joella