I kept as far away from them as I could. The kippers. I didn’t like the smell at all. Fishy. Smokey. Bony. Delicious I was told. But regardless of my childish thoughts, those kippers were important. They would make sure we were kept safe, said mum. Not that kippers could keep me, or my brother, safe. Of course. That would be ridiculous. But, we were told, the act of giving the box of smelly kippers to the coach driver would keep us safe on our long journey. The driver accepted the kippers; the driver accepted the responsibility for looking out for one well-behaved ten-year-old girl and her eight-year-old brother on their summer coach trip from Aberdeen to London. Of course.
You might be forgiven for thinking a few things here. The first, of course, is what on earth was a responsible parent thinking by putting two young children on a coach for an 18-hour journey to London, from Aberdeen. Mad. Except that this was the 1980s and the world was a little different than it is today. And so were parents. And kippers! Why kippers? I still don’t know. It must have seemed like a good idea to mum at the time.
The coach left Aberdeen bus station early. The journey was long. We would sleep at my aunt’s house tonight, on camp beds in my cousin’s bedroom. But only after a full day travelling the length of the country. We were excited, my brother and I. We both felt so grown up, aged ten and eight. Our suitcases were stowed in the huge boot under the coach. We were stowed by mum in seats on the coach, with a bag of homemade sandwiches between us, jostling for the window seat and fiddling with the air vents.
With the benefit of time, and my rose-coloured spectacles, I have no memory of being bored on the long journey. I remember counting cars. Red cars. Then blue cars. Then yellow cars – there weren’t so many of them. I remember endless games of I Spy with faceless coach passengers. The best part of the journey, of course, were the service station stops. The driver would let the two of us off the coach to stretch our cramped legs, and to fill our lungs with slightly fresher air, along with everyone else, holiday spending money jingling merrily in our pockets. But the kippers made sure that he was extra careful to tell us the time we had to return to the coach by – or we would be left behind. We nodded, we told the driver we understood, and off we went. Alone. Together.
We loved the service stations. There were so many new things to see, and the toilets were nicer than the one on the coach. We thrilled to explore unfamiliar shops and cafes with money in our pockets and no parent to watch us. We pressed the buttons on the arcade machines without putting money in them, and we stood and stared, mesmerised, at the motorway traffic rushing under us from the overpass which led to the service station on the other side of the road. The coach driver told us we weren’t supposed to cross the overpass.
Those kippers, they were good to my brother and I. We were ten and eight. We didn’t watch the time. Of course. The driver did. Waiting in the queue in the motorway service station to buy an over-priced ice-cream, I felt a firm tap on my shoulder. It was the driver, come to find us when we didn’t turn up on time to the coach. We didn’t get our ice-cream that time.
But we did get to London. To the coach station, so different to the one in Aberdeen. So busy and big and hot. Handed over to my aunt, and uncle and cousin who made the trip to meet us. Then a blur of escalators, underground trains and crowds and we made it to their car for the trip in the dark to my aunt’s house, and to our welcome camp beds in my cousin’s room. Home for the next two weeks, until we would make the same journey, in reverse, with no kippers to guard the two of us against our misadventures.