Ah, childhood summer holidays. Few things evoke more powerful sensory memories: the sticky gloop of a melting strawberry Mivvi. The rasp of Ambre Solaire factor 6 rubbed briskly into sandy shoulders. The distinctive neopolitan ice-cream banding of Celts left out in the sun.
Let me tell you about my childhood summer holiday memories. First, there is the sensation of half an inch of peaty water, slightly warmed by my body heat, swilling around in my walking boots, squelching with every sodden step. Then there is the smarting whip of rain, hitting me full in the face and insinuating itself into my cagoule and down the back of my neck. There is the sight of my father, a mere speck on a distant rocky outcrop, shouting something that is instantly swallowed up by the wind and tauntingly waving the rucksack that contains my Mars bar, and there is my brother, huddled behind a dry stone wall to shelter from the hail on the dreadful mid-third of the ascent of Whernside from Dent (my advice: don't), asking us how to recognise the signs of second-stage hypothermia, because he is pretty sure he has it.
My childhood holidays were, almost without exception, spent in the bleaker, less forgiving corners of the northern British countryside. You know how people say that in their childhood holiday memories, the sun is always shining? In mine, it is always raining, a dense, unrelenting sheet blowing horizontally down the valley, and we are out in it, trudging towards the distant promise of a pub that may or may not be open.
Emma, aged six months in Coverdale, north Yorkshire. My parents loved the harsh beauty of those dale and moor landscapes; the way they make you work for a breathtaking view, the discreet brown birds that populate them. While they were still together, they bought a tiny cottage in a remote village in the Yorkshire Dales, the kind of dour, undemonstrative place where small talk – to the extent that there was any - centred on how many ewes had drowned in the beck that season. When they separated, the number of my holidays spent in rural incarceration doubled: my father continued to take us to Cold Comfort Cottage, while my mother favoured the soggier corners of the Lake District and parts of western Scotland so remote the inhabitants probably had vestigial tails.
The very best I could hope for on these holidays was weather so dreadful that we would be permitted to hole up playing dominoes in a pub for a couple of hours with a Britvic orange and a packet of crisps, while some silent, Starkadder-style men brooded damply at the bar. Any slight lightening of the sky meant a forced march across miles of vertical bog, the receding form of my father barely visible on a distant summit.
Throughout my teenage years, I was sure of one thing if nothing else: I hated the country. Walking for pleasure seemed to me a ludicrously stupid activity, practised only by sadists such as my parents. I hated the abundance of weather, none of it clement, the mind-numbing boredom, the absence of Miss Selfridge and the poor radio reception blighting my attempts to listen to the top 40.
Emma still carried her teenage dislike of the countryside at 21. I hated it with the impotent fury that only a 14-year-old forced to spend two weeks in a shepherd's bothy on the Isle of Eigg (a bleak Hebridean rock outcrop, population 14, not including sheep and deranged holidaymakers) can muster. Every day of that holiday, maddened with boredom, I would walk thunderously down to the cafe and gift shop on the jetty, scattering the tame rabbits nibbling grass under my feet as I passed, and glower at the small selection of fudge and pottery sheep. Then I would stand for a while staring at the phone box, willing it to ring. It never did.
On reaching adulthood, I moved to London and never looked back. Traffic noise soothed me; pigeons were quite sufficient wildlife, a holiday meant exploring another large city. I read and agreed vehemently with the verdict of Adrian on the country in Catherine O'Flynn's novel What Was Lost:
"Axe murderers. Gun owners. Hat wearers. Cows. It's a terrible place. And you know what else? They don't have shops. They have these things called Spars. They look like shops but they don't sell anything except maybe some swede and a packet of custard creams."
On our occasional trips to my father's new, but equally remote country house, my brother and I would huddle gloomily by the kitchen radiator for warmth, holding our mobile phones up to the ceiling in the hope of a scrap of signal and organise rotas to the nearest town for newspapers and coffee.
Fast forward to New Year's Day 2013: I am filming my elder son, 10, running across a deserted stretch of Yorkshire moor to send to my father. His impossibly long legs are springing over the tufts of boggy grass, way ahead of me, his hair whipping in the wind. The sky is an ominous, bruised-grey colour. We are halfway up a gloomy escarpment called Roova Crag and no one is holding a gun to my head. When we get back to the house, pink-cheeked, damp and exhilarated, we make a snap decision: we will come back for our summer holiday.
What on earth has happened? How have I gone from rural refusenik to this monstrous creature, voluntarily wearing "performance fabrics" and showing genuine interest in the behaviour of small brown birds? How have I – horror - turned into my parents?
Partly, it is age treacherously dimming my memory and nostalgia supplying the golden glow that the weather never did. Then there is the new pull that nature seems to exercise on me and many of my friends in our middle years. Television and the internet, with their instant wildlife gratification, have been our gateway drug – programmes like Springwatch or Channel 4's Easter Eggs Live and my favourite webcam of a pair of gloomy peregrine falcons laconically dismembering baby rabbits high above a windswept greyish field. All have reignited my long-dormant fascination with British nature in a way that makes it almost inevitable that I want to go back out there and see it for myself.
Emma, aged 10, in Coverdale. But it is also the experience of having children of my own that has catapulted me back to the earlier part of my childhood, neatly leapfrogging the gloom of my teenage years. As my children get big and physically adventurous, I have remembered how wonderful it was to be 10 in that wild landscape and how much freedom it gave me: exploring the moors on my own, scrambling up dry brooks, running down hills, finding stones and sheep skulls and fossils. My boys are city kids who get precious few opportunities to be alone and adventurous, and I wanted them to experience that. Instead of sodden, resentful misery, I have found myself remembering the magical bits: my father finding a dipper's nest at the Askrigg waterfalls and hoisting me on to his shoulder to peep over the rocky overhang at the chicks. Swimming in the shockingly cold pools of the river Cover. Happening on wobbly newborn black-faced lambs, still slimy and frail. Sitting on the edge of full, fast streams and peaty tarns and chewing blades of tall marsh grass.
I am not alone. Many of us, it seems, are compelled to reproduce the patterns of childhood holidays whether or not we actually remember enjoying them at the time. "I was dragged to the middle of nowhere in Ireland every summer," says one similarly afflicted friend. "Wet, damp, dull. Now I'm subjecting my kids to the same. Why?"
She has no clear answer, but some powerful force sends her back there.
Another has just returned from a weekend in the West Highlands, on a leaking air mattress in the teeth of a howling gale, trying to replicate the "Swallows and Amazons" holidays of her childhood. "I like the idea of returning to the same place over and over every summer. It leaves quite a poky imprint on the memory bank."
Interminable, hot car journeys, enforced museum trips, midges or sunburn: whether or not our childhood holidays were objectively delightful, they exert a huge imaginative pull, taking us back to a vivid time when six weeks (or indeed a fortnight on Eigg) felt like an eternity. For me, it is those Dales landscapes: the wildness, the moments when a shaft of sunlight pierces the cloud cover and turns the fields, criss-crossed with dry stone walls, brilliantly, supernaturally green.
I talk to my father, slightly sheepish, about my conversion. He is gracious and does not mock, which is more than I deserve: the thought of my boys discovering the Dales delights him as much as it does me.
"I remember one summer when you were six or seven," he says, dreamily. "Every evening you'd ask to go out and climb Penhill. You used to run up to the summit."
I remember that summer too, actually. I remember the untypically warm early evening weather, my dad's excitement at the pair of merlins circling slowly over the long, flat summit. I remember scrambling over the bouncy heather and coarse grass, startling ungainly pheasants, resting for a minute on a sun-warmed rock and sharing my dad's lukewarm flask of water. Now, after years of barbed jokes and mock resentment, I know the incredible pleasure of watching a joyful, hardy child run free ahead of you, and I can imagine what it must feel like when that child is replaced by a drooping, angry teenager who only leaves the house under sufferance, slouching behind you with a blue-eyeliner scowl, shivering in unsuitable footwear.
So we are going back and my dad is joining us to show my boys the places I half remember: the river bed with all the fossils, the otherworldly landscape of the limestone pavements at Ingleborough, the waterfalls I climbed before mutating into a sullen teenage ingrate. I have got my cagoule and sensible boots and I am going to invest in some binoculars to get a better look at all those mysterious brown birds, the curlews and snipe and plovers. It will probably rain solidly for the full two weeks, but I can't wait. With a bit of luck, I reckon I've got about three years before the children hate me.
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