20th July 1981
Terry Towelling and Andalucían heat are not natural bedfellows, especially when you throw vomit into the mix
20th July 1981.
A day that always stayed with me. In fact, until 1994, it held the distinction of being the most memorable day of my life, though I suspect I’ve not sold it very well here, until it was replaced by an even greater day, that also happened to fall in July. While I tend to regard myself as more of a winter person, in that (short) shortlist of greatest days of my life, several summer days continue to linger in there.
A decade later, 20th July 1991, I found myself in a God-awful summer security job as the Docklands was being built, which I’d thought was a good idea, the kind of thing students were meant to do with their summer, earn a bit of cash doing what was meant to be a cushy job. It was far from cushy, and it was a hot summer. Working twelve-hour shifts, mostly outdoors, it remains the last summer where I acquired a suntan. Anyway, I haven’t even completed my 1991 anecdote. I meant to write that ten years on, I was looking back at the 20th July 1981, my memory of it fresher than it is today, as you would expect, and it still held up as the-then greatest day of my life. It was also one of the first occasions when I was old enough to recall what I’d been doing a decade earlier, something that to me that day, seemed like an incredible milestone, another staging post on the road to becoming a fully fledged adult, a journey I was never in any hurry to make. The sun-tanned useless security guard of summer ’91 would’ve struggled to comprehend that three full decades later, I’d be looking back forty years at the same date.
So, 20th July 1981. It was a Monday. My record of having not missed a single day at school for three years came to an end as my dad had us miss the last week of school to send us to Spain. I don’t know why he did this. I’m assuming the prices would be more expensive the following week as the summer holidays kicked in. Being quite anal, I was proud of my school attendance record and disappointed it was ending. Also, this meant I wouldn’t get to say ‘goodbye’ to one of my best friends at the time, Lee, who was leaving the school after his dad, a publican, had decided to briefly leave the pub trade and move the family to Kingsbury. Not having a house phone in those days, I would lose touch with Lee for almost a year, until the following spring I embarked upon an epic and incredibly exciting search rifling through the telephone directory at a friend’s house in search of Lee’s new address and number.
I’d never again come close to putting together an attendance record as formidable as the ’78-81 era and by the time secondary school came round, certainly in the final years, my attendance rarely got past 60% as I competed, strongly, with my year’s other elite level bunkers. I wonder if as my dad decided to pull us out of school a week early, my superb attendance record came up. Where they even aware of it? Surely if they had been, the decision would’ve been a tougher one to make?
It was the summer of THAT Royal Wedding, of course. A Republican before I even knew what it meant, I didn’t care for it. I was happy to be missing the Royal Wedding nonsense (at the time I didn’t know I’d still have to sit through it on Spanish TV). Looking back now, I’m relieved I wasn’t in the UK that summer. The introvert in me, even now, shudders at the prospect that I might’ve been forced to attend some Royal Wedding street party. When I find myself thinking at how my life has disappointed me on too many occasions, I’d do well to remember that at least I got through this life avoiding a Royal Wedding street party.
I remember getting up really early that morning, 6am, my parents’ normal start time for work, but obviously not for us kids, and brushing my teeth with Aquafresh toothpaste which had recently become a staple in the family bedsit.
A minicab then picked us up at 06:30hrs to take us to Gatwick and I recall my dad talking non-stop to him on the way there. While he was an awkward character, one of several traits I inherited from him, I didn’t acquire his Ustinov-like raconteur qualities. I remember marvelling from the backseat at my dad’s incessant chatter. He was on fire that morning. My dad wasn’t coming with us. He wasn’t one for holidays, his dislike for them something which, again, I would find myself matching in my later years. Maybe that’s why he was so chatty that morning? He was exciting to be having a break from all of us. I wouldn’t have been surprised. He was a decent dad, he loved us, but as well as not being cut out for marriage, I’m not sure he was really suited to being a dad. He loved his fitness activities, his books and his paintings. I think us kids just got in the way and as someone that is too comfortable in their own company, I can relate to that.
We were all kitted out in our new C&A clothes that summer’s day, ready to meet relatives in Spain’s Deep South that hadn’t seen us since we were toddlers. Unfortunately for me, this meant wearing a horrendous green Terry Towelling top, not too different to the one in the image here.
Mine was just a brighter green. And it was itchy.
Bloody hell, it was itchy.
And that was in London. The itching would come into its own once we touched down in Malaga.
I’m not sure I’ve ever worn a more uncomfortable top but worse was to come. After an exciting flight on a Spantax that took off from Gatwick Airport (here’s my ticket),
we arrived, my mum, younger sibling and I, at Malaga airport. The border with Gibraltar was still closed in those days and wouldn’t reopen until 1985. This meant we faced a 90-minute drive from Malaga to Puente Mayorga, within sight of Gibraltar, in searing heat. I was struggling in the Terry Towelling.
Picked up at Malaga airport by a cabbie friend of my mum’s, my sibling and I sat in the backseat, taking everything in on the drive, both already wilting in the heat. And then, at some point on that journey, and I remember this clearly, my sibling turned to face me, and then vomited all over my Terry Towelling top that was already clinging to me in that heat. It wasn’t so much that they vomited on me that bothered me, though of course it did rattle me. It was more the fact that they specifically turned their head to their right, where I was sat next to them. Which they knew. It was as if, despite the nausea overwhelming them, they’d had enough time to decide where they were going to be sick and thought, ‘I know. I’ll vomit on my brother.’
The Wikipedia entry for Terry Towelling informs us, ‘This is a woven fabric with long loops that can absorb large amounts of water.’ You could puke to its absorption capabilities.
It might well have been the most uncomfortable car journey I’ve ever experienced. In that scorching Andalucian heat too, my child-torso encased in an itchy Terry Towelling top now covered in vomit. That is how my mum’s relatives greeted me when we finally reached Puente Mayorga.
I never wore Terry Towelling again.
Footnote:
Until tonight, I never considered how awkward the in-car vomit might’ve made things between my mum and her friend, the cab driver. Did she pay him extra for that? Did he waive it away as it was our first trip in five years? I’ll never know now.
Twitter: @1607WestEgg
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