Growing up in the 1980s, summers were always the high point.
At the time, it didn’t feel like it. Friends flew off to Spain or Portugal, returning bronzed and worldly, while we stayed stubbornly, defiantly English. Devon. Dorset. Villages that sounded, even then, like they belonged in storybooks.
We would drive for hours to the West Country, windows wound down by hand, the warm air thick with the smell of cut grass. The lanes narrowed the further we went, hedgerows rising like green walls on either side, brushing the car as if trying to turn us back. And then, just when you thought the countryside had swallowed you whole, the sea would suddenly appear—glinting, impossible, a sheet of light beyond the fields.
We stayed in cottages with thatched roofs and flint walls, low ceilings and rooms that always felt slightly damp, but reassuringly so. Days were simple. Castle ruins where we scrambled up crumbling towers. A dog somewhere nearby, panting. And always a shingle beach, with a melting 99 ice cream in hand.
Lunches were ploughman’s in pub gardens, the tables sticky with spilt cider, wasps circling with quiet menace. Cream teas followed—clotted cream and jam in careful balance, also under siege from wasps. Supper, inevitably, was scampi.
Back home in Surrey, the map of those years feels like it was lifted from the pages of a boyhood adventure: mucking about on Poohsticks Bridge in Ashdown Forest—the inspiration for Winnie-the-Pooh. Chartwell, with its umbrella tree, was Winston Churchill’s home, but for us it was just another corner of the countryside we grew up in.
Going out still felt affordable then. There was the The Spotted Dog, or a Friday-night treat from the Golden Palace — prawn crackers and crispy duck after the cinema. And for special occasions, the Beefeater, where sophistication meant a chilled glass of Asti Spumante.
But more often we stayed in. An Indian takeaway and Viennetta. We’d all sit together watching The Two Ronnies or The Dame Edna Experience, plates piled high with Chicken Biriani and poppadoms, the room hazy with Dad’s pipe smoke, laughing at the same jokes.
But those years weren’t just summers.
From 1989 to 1994, life revolved around The Oratory—a contained world up on a hill in the Chilterns, with its own rituals and landmarks. The Stoner Arms for my confirmation lunch. The Crooked Billet at Stoke Row. The Beetle & Wedge by the river at Moulsford. Even a trip to TGI Fridays in Reading felt like stepping into America, all neon and noise—a different universe entirely.
In 1991, everything shifted.
Mum’s cancer diagnosis came like a sentence no one quite knew how to read. I remember the train journeys more than anything—jumping on at Reading with no money, ducking into the loo to avoid the ticket inspector, heart hammering with a mixture of fear and determination. Visiting Mum after another dose of chemo at St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington—where Fleming discovered penicillin—always with the quiet question hanging there: what if this is the last time?
Around the same time, Dad began to unravel. It didn’t happen all at once—more a slow loosening, as though something essential was slipping out of place. By 1992, it had a name: depression. The man I knew seemed to disappear. Instead of his daily ritual of making himself immaculate for a day in the City, he would stay in bed until noon. It was as if something inside him had simply snapped.
I became ill too—glandular fever, another kind of mystery illness that feels like the body quietly shutting down. Everything felt slightly off-kilter in those years, as if the world I’d known had tilted a few degrees and never quite righted itself.
And yet, life carried on with a kind of reckless normality.
That, more than anything, is what I remember: how everything could be quietly upended, and yet the surface of things kept going.