Sean Lennon’s holidays with his father

Every moment leading up to my father’s death has been permanently etched on the insides of my eyelids, like haunted hieroglyphs on the walls of a sunken sarcophagus. The day my mother told me he’d been gunned down outside our house, I awoke as if from a dream and have been awake ever since.

Because my grandfather was a sailor, my father always felt an affinity with the sea. He bought a house in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, another in Palm Springs, Florida, and another on the beach in Bermuda – the place where he famously circumvented his writer’s block, producing all the songs for Double Fantasy in a final flurry of creativity.

It was in Bermuda that I learnt to swim the sidestroke. I remember splashing vigorously with one eye submerged, the other searching for my father’s approval, his slender frame obscured by blinking rivulets.

In Florida, the seagulls ate stale bread out of my hand; I caught lizards in paper cups and watched their discarded tails twitch cryptically on the warm terracotta terrace.

Most of our summers were spent on the bay in Long Island. We had an old stone house with a swimming pool shaded by rows of oak trees, a vast green lawn overlooking a private beach, and a rickety wooden dock sinking slowly into the sea. It was there that I learnt to skip stones, to make paper planes, to build a fire, to put a worm on a hook, to draw monkeys and to steer a sailing boat.

Tyler and Pam Coneys were an American couple who worked for my parents in the capacity that most of our employees did – that is to say, in whatever capacity was required of them at that moment. Pam, whose honeycomb hair was broomstick-thick, reminded me of Popeye’s wife, Olive: frail exterior with a steel constitution. (She was once ejected through the windscreen of Tyler’s van, and was found walking in a trance miles from where the accident had occurred. She lay in a coma for days – the first time I can remember feeling truly terrified.)

Tyler was as thin as his moustache was thick, and he had the unlikely appearance of a beach-bum Charlie Chaplin. He owned a yachting club on the bay, and it was under his guidance that my father purchased the small green fibreglass sailing boat we named Flower.

It is around Flower’s maiden voyage that one of my most vivid memories revolves. My father, Tyler, our assistant Fred Seaman and I boarded the tiny vessel and set out into the harbour. Tyler let each of us have a turn at steering the boat. My father went first. Then it was my turn. “See that ribbon?” Tyler pointed at a strand of red plastic tied to the mast. “When that ribbon is pointing that way, turn the wheel this way. When the ribbon changes direction, turn the other way.” Simple enough, even for a four-year-old.

The ship’s wheel was cold in my hands, and my father snapped photos furiously with his brown leather-bound Polaroid camera. It is difficult to describe the elation of commanding a sailing boat when you’re four years old, but as the wind swept violently through my bowl-cut bangs, I felt as though I were steering unstoppably into my own unfathomable adulthood.

Then came Fred’s turn. Again Tyler reminded us about the ribbon and the direction of the wind, but it seemed that either Fred had not listened, or that he had been misnamed Seaman. As soon as the ribbon flinched, Fred wrenched the wheel, toppling our boat, and sending us all hurtling headfirst into the turbulent tide. Only Tyler managed miraculously to position himself on the belly of our boat, a triumphant smirk peeking through his moist moustache, his hand outstretched holding a white-and-red life jacket.

As I wondered what my toes might look like to the fish below, I noticed my favourite pair of flip-flops floating swiftly out to sea.

It wasn’t until I considered losing them that I was overcome by a feeling of dread. “My flip-flops, my flip-flops!” I yelped. “Don’t worry,” my father said. “I’ll get you some new ones. Just grab Tyler’s hand.” It seemed that no one realised what a tragedy it was to lose those flip-flops, adorned as they were by my favourite superheroes; they had guarded my feet against sand and stone for the duration of the summer, and my stomach ached at the thought of losing them.

Perhaps it is just coincidence that the man who toppled our boat turned out years later to be the man to topple our family’s trust. For soon after my father died, we found that Fred had been hoarding stolen goods, including my father’s diaries, clothes and some still-missing guitars. I am not sure what happened to Flower, but I can scarcely look at the ocean without wondering where my favourite flip-flops might be.

Sadie Jones, novelist

The memories of our childhoods are kaleidoscopic; they are parts and pieces remade by our adult selves. For all that, they are truthful, or we can rely on them for our own truths at least. The first holiday I really remember may well have been more than one, sealed in my mind to form a chronology.

My family were in Jamaica and building a house there. It was a small house on top of a hill a few miles from the sea, seen across the shortened perspective of hills that were dark-green with jungle and bush. The house was at the top of a steep, partly unmade road that hairpinned and climbed unreliably, with occasional villas hidden round the stony, overgrown bends of their driveways. My father wanted a home in the country of his birth, near his brother and his wife and not far from the house where he was born.

The two things that I remember from that year are the filling of the pool and my parents’ wedding. I seem to recall that the pool and house must have been ready in time. But that’s not right, because there was a house-warming party that followed the building of the pool, not the wedding, and surely there weren’t two parties that summer? Two summers then, but memory ties them together and I can’t seem to separate them. There are probably more than two in the kaleidoscope, different years, different days and feelings.

The wedding was on a blazing, blowy day and I remember the pages of the preacher’s Bible flicking over in the wind as he struggled to keep his place. I remember my mother smiling all the way through – a sort of secret smile between her and my father. She had a white cotton dress and bare feet; we all stood outside by the pool.

I was 6, or near it, and felt proud of myself in a dress with an elasticated bodice across my bony chest, promising other thrilling adult bodices later on. The dress had small, reddish-pink flowers. After the service, my mother jumped into the water, and then my sister and I did too. The white dress billowed out, puffed up hugely by the pool, absurd and naughty. I remember hilarious glancing joy.

The songs of those years, or that year, were played on a big, black cassette player that sat on a cane-and-glass table in the house. The songs were Raining in My Heart by Buddy Holly, lots of Al Green, Bob Marley, Roberta Flack, Gladys Knight and one of them, or somebody else, singing, “I can see clearly now the rain has gone.” Hours were spent twisting Biros in the cassettes, clumsily spooling the brown shiny ribbon back into the tape.

There was no rain that day, the wedding day, but there was so much rain in Jamaica, so much rain I remember, that those rainy songs described the feeling of it – the thick leaves dripping on to happiness, the sun glaring on to homesickness – perfectly. They told the sun and shade of the place.

The house-warming, as I recall it, was rained out. The guests arrived at that party – as at all Jamaican parties – slowly: survivors, drenched, having abandoned their cars at the bottom of the hill, or pushed them against spinning wheels, determined to reach the rum and curry goat at the top.

Denied the view and lazy admiration of the new house, everybody crowded inside with the songs, curry goat, rice and peas and rum and rum and rum, and I, as I recall myself, sober and 6, sat under the table with the leftover food as the adults danced and walked around me, at the best party I have ever been to.

Vince Cable, politician

I grew up long before people started to worry about carbon footprints and pollution. As a child, I adored big, smelly steam trains, fast cars and the amazing new aircraft which appeared in the skies of postwar Britain – Meteors, Comets, Vulcan bombers. But serious travel was for other people. My parents never travelled abroad or wanted to. Air travel was inconceivable.

My earliest holiday memories were not of airports but of York’s vast, curving station full of steam and noise from the engines. The journeys to Filey, Scarborough and Bridlington seemed interminable, while I was itching to get on to the beach with my bucket and spade. But I was fascinated by the trains.

In late childhood, my friends and I migrated around the North of England searching out rare engines in smoke-filled sheds. There was excitement if not glamour in the sulphurous atmosphere of the engine sanctuaries of Gorton in Manchester and Blaydon in Newcastle, where we went hunting for exotic numbers not seen on the main routes.

Spotting aircraft gradually replaced spotting trains and I developed considerable competence in identifying the silhouettes of military and civilian aircraft. But I did not go anywhere near an aeroplane until I was 23 and flew to Africa to take up a job in the Kenyan Treasury.

It was not that I was unused to foreign travel. I had travelled the world by train, boat, bus and car – across the former Eastern bloc and Soviet Union twice, through Iran, Afghanistan and the Indian sub-continent. I had just never had need to board an aeroplane.

So I vividly remember the anxiety as we trundled along the runway at Heathrow on take-off; the sense of privilege as I consumed a bog-standard, economy-class meal as if it were tea at the Ritz; the wonder of floating above clouds; and the mounting excitement of the slow descent into Nairobi across the desiccated Rift Valley studded by the bomas or enclosures of the nomadic pastoralists.

I was hooked. So much so that the next time I was in the air, it was at the controls. Somewhat impetuously, I decided to invest my meagre savings in flying lessons. I was a truly awful pilot who loved the risky manoeuvres and simulated crash landings but never mastered the basic safety routines.

I hadn’t appreciated, until I started, that flying has very little to do with looping the loop and everything to do with meticulous drills – memorising, without fault, the numerous checks of equipment and instruments – and careful journey planning.

Flying a small, single-engined plane is not just more complex but more physical than driving a car. There is an extra dimension – up and down, as well as forward/back and left/right – and responses can be unpredictable depending on wind and air currents – more like yachting. I gradually got the hang of it, but was prone to error.

I obtained a licence at the third attempt, having scared the wits out of two examiners as well as my teacher. My flying adventures became the source of some mirth among the professionals at the club bar, though I had the satisfaction of seeing my rather smug instructor banned from flying after crash-landing while drunk.

When, at last, I was let loose on solo flying, I almost didn’t return from my first expedition round Mount Kenya. I managed to choke off the engine shortly after take-off from a bush landing strip and had the never to be forgotten experience of the undercarriage clipping the trees below.

But I experienced and enjoyed the miracle of flight over some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.

Since leaving East Africa, I have never flown solo again. Nonetheless, the little boy’s excitement at fast travel remains.

Emma Freud, presenter

My first holiday was spent in the same place as my second holiday? also my third, fourth, fifth and then keep on going for 47 years. I’ve spent virtually every single vacation of my life in a small seaside village in Suffolk.

My father’s family fled Hitler’s Germany in the Thirties and moved to the village for every school holiday. I lived there every school holiday, and now my children spend every school holiday rampaging through the same house and streets and village in which I grew up. It’s nice there.

My many siblings and I romped through our days with a gang of about 30 village children who ran barefoot and entirely parent-free. As a small child it was all very “enidblyton” (now an official adjective thanks to all the children’s clothing catalogues) – swings on the village green, picnics on the sandy beach, torturing crabs in the creek, taking the ferry to buy fish and chips and chips and chips and chips. And in the evenings, almost as a religion, the gang played a game called Cockyolly. Sort of Hide and Seek with attitude.

As we got older, Cockyolly gave way to Run Catch Kiss – played with equally religious zeal. And eventually Run Catch Kiss morphed into True Dare Double Dare Love Kiss Promise.

This emperor among games took place in the Barn, a big thatched farm building near the village shop, which contained about 100 bales of hay. And, er? That was it. These were the rules: boys gather at one end of the barn, girls at the other. Girls go first, obv. Each girl chooses a boy and then ventures forth into the maze of hay bales till they find a private cranny. At which point, there ensues?. Seven Minutes of Heaven.

After the allotted time, the unfortunate soul who had been left unpaired (normally my cousin, Charlotte) would shout the legendary, heart-sinking phrase, “Seven minutes is up”, and we would emerge from the hay, a little less young, a little more rumpled, and ready to play again instantly with a new partner.

This time the boys chose. And so it continued for about 3 hours, pausing for 21 hours of annoyingly necessary sleeping/eating/playing/eating/swimming/eating/cycling till we played again. And again. And again. And, oh yes, again.

The remarkable thing about Seven Minutes of Heaven, apart obviously from absolutely everything, was that in all my many, heady, blissful memories of those countless, endless evenings, there was never any feeling of jealousy. We would drift from boy to boy (and once I think, a girl) just working out what on earth the whole boy/girl thing was all about – but without believing that any of our partners were our sole right.

Pretty obvious, I suppose, when you consider the game’s name – it hardly encourages a lifetime’s fidelity – but still remarkable that it really was all so fabulously commitment-free.

The other great joy was that, for a girl who had enjoyed far, far, far too many of those seaside chips, the whole enterprise was a crucial confidence boost – which in the end lasted a lifetime.

The boys didn’t seem to mind that I was as wide as I was high – there was nothing in the rules of the game that said fat kids couldn’t apply. As long as there were roughly the same number of boys as girls, you were going to get lucky. Even if you ended up with little Jimmy Haycraft, who wore orthodontic braces?

And it meant that, while my prettier, thinner, sassier, cooler schoolfriends spent their summers in Europe, golden-tanned, beautifully dressed and dreaming of snogging boys, we wore crap dungarees, froze our bottoms off in the North Sea, but snogged for Britain – and France – seven minutes at a time.