Chicken Kevin

A little while ago, someone I know posted a photograph on Facebook.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about it.

A street.

Some buildings.

The sort of photograph you could probably scroll past without giving it much thought.

Except I knew exactly where it was.

Arnside.

Instantly.

I didn’t have to look for a sign or zoom into the photograph searching for clues. There was just something about that little stretch of road that my brain recognised before I’d even really thought about it.

I commented underneath.

I can’t believe you’re there. I knew exactly where this was.

And then, a few months later, I found myself standing there too.

I’d been away with my friend Dominique, our children all together. Because her children are in school, they had to head home on the Sunday.

We didn’t.

One of the lovely freedoms of home education is occasionally realising that Monday doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go home.

So the girls and I stayed another day.

And on the way home, instead of simply driving straight back, we explored.

Arnside.

Silverdale.

That whole little pocket around Carnforth that had once been such a huge part of my childhood.

As we travelled along those roads, I started getting that strange feeling you get when you drive into somewhere your body seems to remember.

We used to stay at Holgates caravan park in Silverdale.

And when I say we, I don’t just mean my immediate family.

I mean everybody.

Cousins.

Aunties.

Uncles.

My nana and her sister.

The whole extended-family circus descending on a caravan park together.

And I remember it.

Really remember it.

I remember the layout of the park.

I remember the shop and buying fidgets and little toys from it.

I remember the clothes I wore.

Bottle-green Adidas shorts with a lime-green strappy vest top. Brand-new Adidas trainers I’d got from the Adidas shop. My Adidas tennis skirt.

For some reason, those details are still there.

I remember the swimming pool when it was outside.

Then I remember it becoming an indoor pool.

Then came the saunas and steam rooms, and eventually this enormous café appeared on the back of it.

I remember bringing our friends Lucy and James Towey with us one year.

Lucy and I slept in the awning of our caravan.

And then it rained.

Not a little bit of caravan-holiday drizzle.

It absolutely pelted it down.

Everything got soaked.

I remember my mum practically losing a day of her holiday to the launderette, trying to get everything dried out and weatherproofed again.

And then there’s the pitch and putt.

I remember that particularly well.

My cousin Christina and I were playing, and I was getting ready to take my swing.

I’d told her to move back.

More than once.

She didn’t.

And just as I pulled the golf club backwards to swing, Christina stepped forward.

Crack.

Straight underneath her chin.

Even now, I feel like I should clarify that I absolutely did not hit my cousin in the face with a golf club on purpose.

She ran off crying.

Obviously.

She’d just been smacked under the chin with a golf club at full force.

It was bad enough that she ended up having to go to the local hospital and have her chin stitched.

But before I knew how badly she’d hurt herself, I went back towards the pool to check on her.

And that’s when my nana found me.

She thought I’d done it deliberately.

And my nana cracked me across the legs so hard that they stung for what felt like an hour afterwards.

So there I was, having accidentally split my cousin’s chin open with a golf club, already horrified about what I’d done, and now nursing a pair of burning legs because my nana had decided justice needed administering immediately.

Different times.

I remember that too.

Not just the story of it.

The sting.

That’s the thing about these holidays.

They’re not hazy.

They’re incredibly specific.

The green Adidas shorts.

The lime-green vest.

The flooded awning.

The outdoor pool.

Christina’s chin.

My legs.

And I remember the walks.

There was one we’d take up behind the caravan park, through what I remember as a little woodland path, all the way along to a tiny tea room in Silverdale.

At least, I think there was.

Because on this trip, I decided to take the girls into Holgates.

They’d never been before.

We went in and had lunch in the café, and I found myself looking around at this place that was completely new to them and incredibly old to me.

So much had changed.

I found myself mentally laying the Holgates I remembered over the Holgates that was in front of me.

That used to be there.

This didn’t look like this.

I’m sure that was over there.

On the walls were old photographs telling the story of the Holgate family and how the park had grown and changed over the years.

Except I didn’t really need the photographs to tell me it had changed.

I’d watched some of those changes happen.

And while we were there, I decided to ask some of the staff whether the path to the tea room was still there.

They were young, probably late teens, and they looked at me as though I’d just asked them for directions to Narnia.

A woodland path?

A tea room?

They had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

I tried explaining it again.

You went up behind the caravan park. There was a path. You could walk all the way along it and eventually you came to this little tea room.

Nothing.

Nobody had heard of it.

And because they were so completely baffled by what I was describing, I actually started questioning myself.

Have I made this up?

Had there really been a secret little woodland path behind Holgates that led to a tiny tea room in Silverdale?

Because I can see it.

I remember walking it.

It’s sitting in my head alongside the outdoor swimming pool, the shop, the caravans, the flooded awning, Christina’s chin and the clothes I wore.

But apparently I’d reached the point in life where my childhood memories were older than the people I’d just asked to verify them.

The girls knew Arnside already.

We’d been through before as an extended family — my mum and dad, my brother, his wife and children, me and the girls — on our way to Lake Windermere for a boat trip.

But they’d never known it in the way I did.

And they’d certainly never sat in Holgates while their mum mentally reconstructed a caravan park from decades earlier around them.

For them, it was somewhere new.

For me, I was sitting in the middle of decades of memories.

While wandering around Arnside, I saw The Ye Olde Fighting Cocks pub. 

And immediately thought of Chicken Kevin.

Years ago, the entire family had gone there for a meal.

Everyone was around this enormous table.

Aunties.

Uncles.

Cousins.

My nana and her sister. 

My cousin Stephen had brought his girlfriend Andrea away with us.

She and Stephen were completely besotted with each other. Proper young love. She’d even come on the family caravan holiday and was staying with Stephen in the awning.

We were all deciding what we wanted to eat when Andrea announced her order.

“I’ll have the Chicken Kevin.”

Chicken.

Kevin.

She meant Chicken Kiev.

The table erupted.

Absolutely nobody was letting that go.

And apparently neither has my brain.

All these years later, I can look at a photograph of that pub and I’m straight back at that table.

Chicken Kevin.

Still funny.

Still there.

Along with the Adidas shorts and the flooded awning and the outdoor swimming pool and the shop and the woodland path and my mum spending half her holiday trying to dry everything we owned.

They’re all still there.

And then I remembered that photograph I’d seen on Facebook.

The ordinary street in Arnside I’d recognised immediately.

So I stopped and took a photograph of my own.

I sent it to my brother with one question.

Where do you think I am?

His reply came almost immediately.

Arnside.

Of course he knew.

And that’s when I realised we’d all done exactly the same thing.

Someone else had taken a photograph of an ordinary street in Arnside and I’d recognised it immediately.

Then I’d stood in that same place, taken my own photograph and sent it to my brother.

And he had recognised it immediately too.

There are places that become so familiar that you don’t need the landmarks.

You know the pavement.

The angle of the buildings.

The way the road bends.

Something about the light.

Perhaps you don’t even consciously know what you’re recognising.

You just know.

The girls and I spent a lovely day wandering around.

At one point we sat outside a shop and ended up chatting with a couple of the shop owners. Somehow the conversation turned to home education, and they were genuinely interested and excited for the girls when they realised this wandering Monday was, in its own way, part of their education.

And I loved that.

Because I’d taken them through these places partly because I wanted to show them somewhere from my childhood.

But they weren’t experiencing my childhood.

They were making theirs.

I have Silverdale and Arnside.

Holgates.

My cousins.

My nana.

Bottle-green Adidas shorts and a lime-green vest top.

An outdoor swimming pool.

A completely sodden caravan awning.

A golf club connecting with my cousin’s chin.

The sting across my legs afterwards.

A woodland path to the cafe. 

And a pub table full of people crying laughing because someone accidentally ordered a Chicken Kevin.

They’ll have their own version.

Things I’ve probably already forgotten about that day that, for some inexplicable reason, their brains will decide to keep forever.

Maybe they’ll remember the people outside the shop.

Maybe they’ll remember wandering around Arnside with Mum on a Monday when everyone else was at school.

Maybe they’ll remember their first lunch at Holgates while I sat there telling them stories about what it used to look like.

Maybe they’ll remember something I didn’t even notice.

And perhaps years from now, someone will post an entirely unremarkable photograph of a street in Arnside.

And one of my girls will look at it and know exactly where it is.

Before they’ve even worked out how they know.