The clouds parted and the sun appeared: 'The beach!' we shouted. Joanna Moorhead recounts a disastrous family holiday to Cornwall that saw her teenage daughter arrive home drunk at dawn, a lost phone, a 12-hour car journey, and two family members flying home the next day.
A Last-Minute Break That Turned Sour
It was a last-minute May half-term break. The cottage, lent by a relative, would be a squeeze for Joanna, her husband, and their three teenage daughters. 'But hey,' she told her unconvinced gang, 'it's near the beach – we'll hardly be inside anyway.'
One daughter had a party the night before; she promised to be home by midnight, and they agreed to begin the six-hour drive at 9am. Said daughter arrived back as Joanna was making her morning tea. She was still drunk, and she had lost her phone.
The Search for the Missing Phone
Much Facebook messaging later, it transpired the phone had been taken by a friend to someone else's house; but no one was sure which friend, or which house, and everyone who had been at the party was now comatose (including the daughter). Joanna's husband, a control freak whose mantra that morning was something like, 'When I say we're leaving at 9am, I mean we're leaving at 9am', was now pacing the kitchen saying this holiday had always been a terrible idea.
Around noon they set off, having agreed an hour-long detour to the house where the missing phone might be. En route, the partygirl daughter was sick out of a back window. Joanna's husband swerved the car angrily into a side road and she raced to the corner shop for bottles of water to clear up the mess. A young couple pushing their perfect baby down the road threw horrified looks. 'Don't worry,' Joanna shouted, 'this will be your life one day.' They averted their eyes and hurried away.
They arrived at the phone house, parked outside, and watched as the daughter swayed unsteadily up the garden path. 'She's still drunk,' said Joanna's husband. As the front door opened, the daughter was sick on the doorstep. Her husband slunk down below the driving wheel. 'You deal with it,' he said.
Traffic, Breakdown, and a Tiny Cottage
An hour later, having mopped up, they were on their way again. Five hours behind schedule they joined the motorway, where the cars were virtually stationary. Joanna's husband, incandescent, said absolutely nothing. Everyone was starving, but no one dared suggest they should stop for lunch.
By early evening they were in Cornwall, but the cottage was near Land's End, so they still had a way to go. 'It won't be long now,' Joanna called merrily from the front. Moments later, the car spluttered to a stop. They ended up in a crowded pub garden at 10pm waiting for the AA, which took an hour to get the car going again.
It was after midnight when they arrived at the cottage, and despite everyone's relief it was immediately clear it was much too small. Joanna's protestations that they would be at the beach anyway evaporated when they awoke next morning to thick fog and driving rain. By mid-morning everyone wanted to be elsewhere, a situation she hoped to improve by taking her husband to the pub for a drink. There, they had a massive row, and he stormed back to the cottage to book a flight home. The partygirl daughter, who had realised the recovered phone was in fact broken, begged him to take her with him.
A Turn for the Better
They dropped them at Newquay airport the next morning, and Joanna and the other two girls went to a cafe. As they watched their plane take off, the clouds parted and the sun appeared. 'The beach!' they shouted. They raced back; every day after that was sunny, and the cottage was now the perfect size. The three of them have returned many times since; Joanna's husband and the other daughter have never been back.
