WE ARE going to Vichy this summer, for the third year running. We did have a plan to go round all the main parts of France, but got stuck in Vichy because we liked it so much. I think its wartime reputation is a bit unfair: not all the people were the wrong kind of French, they just happened to have a good telephone exchange and live in a nice spa town that wasn’t Paris. So it seemed a good place for the Germans to set up their puppet regime.
I love the town’s history, and the fact that Simenon went there to write his novel Maigret à Vichy. I try to read one of the Maigret books every summer, in French. My French isn’t very good, but Simenon I can just about manage. So Maigret à Vichy, at Vichy, is bliss. And there’s the bonus that you are unlikely to bump into Alastair Campbell or anyone else from Westminster. You have to be very careful in France at this time of year — the place is awash with MPs. We were staying in a rather shabby hotel in Orange a few years back when Sean Woodward, who was then communications manager for the Conservative party, came across us and tried to sweep us up to his magnificent villa. Apart from the fact that we were trying to have a holiday away from work, it would have looked bad if I’d been found cosied up with a spin doctor.
When our boys were younger, we used to spend summers in the Lake District, messing about with boats and playing Swallows and Amazons. I’ve always had a bit of a thing about sailing, partly due to Arthur Ransome and partly because I was brought up in landlocked Oxfordshire, which I think is about as far away from the coast as you can get.
I always fantasised about sailing, and when the boys were young, I had a few lessons on a reservoir near Heathrow, then we started dinghy sailing on Lake Windermere and Ullswater. Now I’ve progressed onto bigger boats, and every year I hire a yacht with my brother and go on some sort of coastal adventure. The boys came with us until fairly recently, and provided useful cover. But now we have to admit that these holidays are really more for us than the children, who for some reason have gone off to chase girls.
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When I was a boy, we used to go to Burton Bradstock, in Dorset, every summer. We stayed in this extraordinary place run by a group of people called the Christian Contemplatives. There were all these lovely wooden cottages, spread out on what was meant to be a religious retreat, and they crocheted all their own clothes. In return for paying almost nothing to stay in this beautiful place, all we had to do was go to chapel on Sunday and listen to them speaking in silvery voices, dressed up in all their crocheted finery.
During the war, it was thought a likely spot for invasion, so it was covered in tank traps. For little boys, this was unimaginably exciting. As far as we were concerned, the war was still on. We kept an eye out for Germans and played soldiers against the backdrop of the peace-seeking setup.
The first time I went away by myself was when I was 16. I ventured into enemy territory to spend six weeks on a German foreign-exchange trip. I stayed with a family in Frankfurt and found it all terribly exciting. It was in 1960, so only 15 years after the end of the war, and there was a definite sense of history.
A couple of years later, I went to America, sailing on the Queen Elizabeth en route to Washington, where I spent a gap year working and travelling with a couple of people I met through an advert in The Washington Post. We drove right across the country, to San Francisco. I was there when Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech, and I returned feeling I was definitely grown up because I’d done all those things.
I used to have a system of working out if the BBC was winning when it sent me on foreign trips, or if I gained overall. If I went away and got to see the pyramids, say, then I’d be one up, but if they sent me abroad at Christmas and I was away from the family, then the BBC would take all those points and more.
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There are some places, too, that have been tainted by my work experiences there — like Cyprus, where I was really frightened. I haven’t been back. But I’ve also had some very good times, for instance when I was in Cannes, covering the European summit, and John Major announced he was going to put himself up for election. I had this fantastic backdrop to this terrific domestic story. Overall, I think I am definitely the winner.
John Sergeant talked to Lizzie Enfield