Pauline Nevins

I stood with my back to the garage door and watched our travel trailer slowly being driven down the driveway and out of the gate by a lovely couple from Marysville. We were the original owners of the 2005 camper with the menacing name of “Prowler” scrawled in large letters over the face of an amiable tiger.

My husband, Jim, was more sorry to see the trailer go than I. He, like his late father, has difficulty letting go of things. I once told my mother-in-law she and I need never worry that our husbands would one day trade us in.

Jim and his family have a long and loving relationship with camping trailers. Many summers they’d haul a tiny Aristocrat trailer up winding Highway 50 to an open field in Hope Valley. The men (my husband, his father and grandfather), would go fishing in the trout streams, and the women (my mother-in-law and I) would loll outside the trailer waiting for the men to return and for the fish fry to begin.

Jim’s French Basque grandfather, lovingly called “Poppa” by all, emigrated from the Pyrenees at age 16. He introduced the family to the camping area having driven herds of sheep from Clements in the San Joaquin Valley to grazing land in the foothills.

My early experience with travel trailers was different. My first home as a teenage mother and wife – in that order – was a caravan, the British word for travel trailers that didn’t travel. They were mostly inexpensive sea-side holiday lodging rented by young families. Or, as in my first home, parked in a lido in Wilby, a village a few miles from my mother’s house.

Lidos, recreational areas with outdoor swimming pools, sprung up in the 1930s. In my schooldays, a visit to Wilby Lido was the closest I came to a holiday by the sea. I'd jump on the green double-decker bus, my hand-me-down swimsuit rolled up in a small towel, for the three-mile ride down Northampton Road to the village. My friends and I would spend all day jumping in and out of the pool – nobody knew how to swim – then sprawl on the grass sucking on an ice lolly, one of the few items from the concession stand we could afford to buy.

My first husband and I stayed on the grounds of the former lido during a winter that was one of the most bitterly cold on record. It was dubbed “The Big Freeze.” The snow was so deep in parts of England that newspapers pictured milkmen delivering milk on snow skis. Our little caravan had no running water. In the freezing cold, I lugged buckets of water from a communal tap to heat on the tiny stove for bathing, cooking and washing cloth nappies for my 4-month-old baby. Sounds miserable. But I had a place of my own and was happy.

When I said caravans didn’t travel, I overlooked those that were home to the Romani people. I’ve recently learned that “gypsy” – a term I grew up using – is an ethnic slur. I didn’t know back then. I know now.

Romani people would appear in our street from time to time. The women wore their long brown hair in plaits, pinned on top of their heads. They carried baskets filled with clothes pegs, ribbons and other odds and ends. The men walked alongside a horse and cart and shouted out for donations of scrap metal. Their skin was almost as brown as mine.

They lived in clusters on farmers’ fields and as such were “different,” subject to bigotry and stereotyping. I believed the ugly tales told about the Romani – that they were thieves, and when they weren’t stealing your stuff, they would steal your children. With eight squabbling children, I honestly didn’t think my mum would have cared if a couple of kids had gone missing.

While I was sucking my ice lolly, neighbors who had more money headed to Butlin’s Holiday Camp, a resort in Lincolnshire. I wouldn’t have been so envious had I been able to time travel forward to 2015 and read the hilariously grouchy book, “The Road to Little Dribbling.”

The author, Bill Bryson, an American living in England, describes Butlin’s Holiday Camp, the place I yearned to visit.

Bryson writes: “It seemed extraordinary to me – barely within the limits of credibility – that people paid to go to them. Campers were awakened by a loudspeaker in their room, which they could neither turn off nor turn down, summoned to meals in communal dining halls, harried into taking part in humiliating beauty contests and other competitions, and ordered back to their chalets to be locked in for the night at 11 p.m. Butlin’s had invented the prisoner-of-war camp as holiday, and, this being Britain, people loved it.”

I told you it was a grouchy book.