A good holiday for children? Well, obviously, one with plenty for them to do: kids’ clubs, climbing walls, archery lessons, circus-skills sessions, grinning play leaders in Day-Glo T-shirts…
Hang on a second. Doesn’t all this strike you as a bit frantic? And that perhaps the modern parent’s urge to keep the kids entertained at all times has more to do with our sense of guilt than their needs? We do it at home: quiz an average middle-class child and you’ll find their weekends have become a tightly timetabled round of organised activities, being ferried from drama classes to swimming lessons to parties (always with an entertainer, naturally). And then we go on holiday and do it all over again.
It’s a frenzy of over-structured overstimulation, a sort of collective Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and I’d had enough of it. What would happen, I wondered, if we took Molly, five, and Conor, three, and plonked them down somewhere with lots of forest, maybe a meadow or two, and a lake. And nothing else. No clubs, no water slides, no interactive displays, nothing organised, laid-on, planned out or approved by local health-and-safety officials.
My wife was unconvinced. ‘What will happen,’ Jaqui said, ‘is that first they will go out of their tiny minds, then they’ll drive us out of ours. Let’s at least take some DVDs and the laptop.’
No way. We were going cold turkey – and I’d found just the place to do it. Lake houses are a bit of an institution in Sweden. There are thousands of ’em. As the rest of Europe decamps en masse to broiling resorts on the Med, the Swedes while away their surprisingly warm summer months (July temperatures are similar to those in the Algarve) in the pristine bosom of mother nature. Perfect.
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The silence hits you; a quiet so intense it sets your ears ringing. This isn’t the middle of nowhere. It’s at nowhere’s outer limits Of the thousands of options, I’d gone for Stenebynäs, a remote farmstead with four traditional wooden houses scattered over 90 hectares. It’s a couple of hours from Gothenburg, through increasingly dense and depopulated forest. The moment I turned off the car engine, I wondered what on earth I’d done. The silence hits you immediately, a quiet so intense it sets your ears ringing. This isn’t the middle of nowhere. It’s at nowhere’s outer limits. Our house was pretty, though, and the location stunning. From the veranda, all we could see was lake, wooded rolling hills and sky. For an hour or two, the kids ran around excitedly, exploring the meadow, the lake shore, the jetties. Then came the moment I was dreading. Molly’s face took on a quizzical look, and she wandered over.
‘Dad,’ she said, ‘what are we going to do here?’ I didn’t have an answer prepared. It came to me unbidden, from some deep, dark place in the collective Dad unconscious.
‘You will just have to make your own entertainment.’ It had finally happened: I had turned into my parents. No, my grandparents. Soon, I’d be sending them to bed without supper and putting them up chimneys. (It’ll toughen them up.)
There was silence for a moment while she chewed this over. She frowned, then opened her mouth and said, ‘Daaaad...’
‘Bedtime!’ yelled Jaqui from the veranda. Saved by the bell. I could sleep on it.
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‘She’s disappeared,’ Jaqui said early the next morning. I rushed to join her in the children’s bedroom. It was true. Her brother lay snoring, but Molly wasn’t there. We ran downstairs. Nobody. Out to the meadow. Empty. As we raced down to the lake shore, I was starting to sweat.
There she was: stark naked in the cool air, chest deep in tea-coloured water, talking to herself. Hearing us, she looked up. ‘I’m a mermaid,’ she said. ‘Watch my dance.’ Anyone who’s not a parent will be forgiven for throwing up at this schmaltz. Anyone who is might understand why we sat down by that lake and watched our daughter prance around the reeds in the pale morning light, believing she was a supernatural being, and were entranced.
And over the next few days, we discovered exactly what kids do when they have nothing to do. They splash about. Not in a heated, indoor wave pool, but in cold, brown water with a bed of reed roots and squelchy mud that oozes between your toes. It has never been cleaned, and is presumably full of fish excrement. They don’t care, and neither do you.
They climb mountains. To us, the rocky outcrops that stud the area (their favourite was no more than 10m high) might just be convenient lookouts, but to them they’re a cross between Everest and Narnia. They make friends. The other three houses at Stenebynäs all harboured children of various ages, and ours were soon disappearing off with them for longer and longer periods.
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They explore. They take risks. They fall over and get stung by nettles and roll down slopes and tumble out of trees and pick blackberries and make daisy chains and have arguments and catch frogs and generally assert their independence. They turn wild, and it’s a joy to watch.
Grown-ups turn wild, too, in their way. Like the kids, you have to make your own entertainment, and it consists of fishing, walking, gathering mushrooms and messing about in boats. You slow down fast.
After a few days, I was capable of staring for a full hour, open-mouthed, at the darting pattern of ripples that the breeze etched over the surface of the lake. I was approaching my personal nirvana, a sort of Zen idleness.
On the final evening, we took the kids for a long row in the sturdy clinker-built dinghy, then walked slowly back from the jetty across meadows strewn with wild flowers, chatting all the way. I tried to pay full attention, to be in the moment, but I couldn’t stop myself thinking: nobody has a right to be this happy.
We grilled meatballs on the barbecue, got the children to bed, then sat sipping aquavit on the veranda, watching the purple bruise of sunset spread slowly over the sky.
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‘See?’ I said. ‘Nobody went out of their minds.’
‘Don’t be so sure,’ Jaqui replied. ‘I heard you mumbling to yourself today. But yes, it’s been great for the kids. Like I said, they need less entertainment, not more. It’s all in their heads. They just need the space to let it out.’
‘Hang on, you didn’t say that…’
‘The best thing for adults is the silence, though, isn’t it? You can almost hear it. Let’s just listen to it.’
And we did.
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Go independent
For the real back-to-nature deal, you want a house deep in the forest by the water, with no more than three or four houses nearby. Any more and it’s a holiday camp – not the same thing at all. At Stenebynäs (00 46 531 33168, www.stenebynas.se), in the hilly district of Dalsland, two-bedroom houses cost from £900 a week. Fly to Gothenburg from Stansted or Edinburgh with Ryanair (www.ryanair.com); from Heathrow with SAS (0871 226 7760, www.flysas.com) from £110 return; or from Birmingham or Manchester with City Airline (0870 220 6835, www.cityairline.com) from £191 return. Ebookers (0871 223 5000, www.ebookers.com) has a week’s car hire from £218.
Go packaged
Try Simply Sweden (0845 890 0300, www.simplysweden.co.uk), Nordic Experience (01206 708888, www.nordicexperience.co.uk) or Taber Holidays (01274 875199, www.taberhols.co.uk).