As far as summer holiday rentals go it should have been so perfect. A characterful French gite with blue shutters and a sweeping lawn that went right down to a rugged coastal path hugging the sea.
OK, so this was the Bay of Biscay and not the Med. And everyone knows it rains most of the time in Brittany. But when I booked this holiday house several years back to celebrate my husband Keith’s birthday, I visualised our children frolicking in the pool while we sat on the vast terrace sipping rosé and scoffing saucisson.
That was the idea anyway. But then I decided – mainly to help with the extortionate cost of the two-week rental – to invite another couple and their two children along. Why not share the love, I thought? The more the merrier.
How wrong could I be.
I now know that the one thing guaranteed to ruin any holiday is not sunburn, midges or dodgy plumbing, but making the idiot decision to share your holiday home with another family.
Even if you have known them for ages. Even if you thought they were good friends because your husbands play golf together and you bitch about them playing golf together over regular lunches. Even if your children have been best friends since nursery and have pleaded with you every single day for the last 11 months to holiday together.
Trust me when I say it’s a recipe for disaster. And having just binge-watched the new BBC drama Two Weeks In August, I feel entirely vindicated. This brilliant black comedy about a group of fortysomething pals who have known each other since university and decide to spend a summer fortnight together in a Greek villa shows exactly how pear-shaped shared vacations often go.
Whether it’s sexual tensions, long-held grudges, buried secrets, or bad behaviour, there is something about the sun, the wine and the long, open-ended days together that means it all comes out.
I now know that the one thing guaranteed to ruin any holiday is not sunburn, midges or dodgy plumbing, but making the idiot decision to share your holiday home with another family, writes Shona Sibary
Trust me when I say it’s a recipe for disaster. And having just binge-watched the new BBC drama Two Weeks In August, I feel entirely vindicated (pictured, Shona on holiday)
This brilliant black comedy about a group of fortysomething pals who have known each other since university and decide to spend a summer fortnight together in a Greek villa shows exactly how pear-shaped shared vacations often go
You think it’s going to be fun. But it ends up becoming the kind of experience you need months of therapy to recover from.
In our case it should have been a slam dunk. Penny (not her real name) and I had been close friends since my daughter, Annie, and Penny’s daughter, let’s call her Tallulah, started at the same school a few years earlier. She also had an older daughter who was 14 from the same marriage. My other children were Flo, then eight, and Monty, who was four.
We bonded, as school mums do when small children are your entire universe.
Except I also had a demanding job as a journalist and Penny was a stay-at-home mum. This wasn’t a distinction that mattered at all in our day-to-day friendship. But it became one that suddenly mattered a lot in a holiday environment. More on that later.
I liked Penny enormously. She was gutsy, outspoken and practical. We saw eye-to-eye on lots of life stuff that I thought mattered. How often we did or didn’t want to have sex with our husbands. How precious some of the other mothers in the class were. How we hated the PTA, but both loved going to the theatre. These are the delicate threads that weave the web of an adult friendship when you don’t have a work connection, childhood or university memories to fall back on.
Most crucially, the success of our relationship worked on the understanding that Penny was the ‘good’ mother, the domestic goddess, and I was the chaotic, working mess, always late, always needing rescuing.
And rescue me she did. She would endlessly scoop Annie up from school when a work commitment detained me and take her home for shepherd’s pie cooked from scratch. Annie would then later be triumphantly delivered back to me in White Company pyjamas, gleaming from bathtime, her hair in a sleek French plait.
At bedtime my daughter would tell me in whispered awe that, ‘Penny mops her kitchen floor every night, Mummy!’
I liked Penny enormously. She was gutsy, outspoken and practical. We saw eye-to-eye on lots of life stuff that I thought mattered (pictured, Jessica Raine and Dolly Wells in Two Weeks In August)
I only tell you this to put into context how incompatible we really were. Our friendship flourished on the basis that I gratefully acknowledged how brilliant Penny was at all that stuff. She, in turn, hailed me as the entertaining friend to wheel out at dinner parties.
But of course – as Two Weeks In August demonstrates from the very first disastrously awkward al fresco dinner – when you’re on holiday, the rules of engagement completely change.
There were early rumblings in our case, too. With three children under nine, I wanted to bring along an au pair. But Penny had other ideas.
‘My big girl will help,’ she insisted. ‘We don’t need anyone else.’ Reluctantly I believed her, though in hindsight I should have realised it was nonsense. I had three boisterous children. She had one studious five-year-old and a grumpy, hormonal teenager whose idea of absolute hell was being our resident babysitter for two weeks.
Then came room allocation. Penny had Googled the holiday house and even though it was my ‘find’ – and Keith’s birthday – had decided she really wanted the only bedroom with the en suite that just happened to have a sea view. It was also at the opposite end of the house from where the children were sleeping.
We made no decisions in advance. But on the day of arrival, as we pulled up to the gite in convoy, I am not exaggerating when I say that before their car had even rolled to a stop, Penny had leapt from her passenger seat like a participant in Challenge Anneka and unlocked the front door.
By the time I had unstrapped all my children and removed our suitcases from the boot, her Clarins products were lined up in the en suite bathroom of the coveted master bedroom, she had almost unpacked all her clothes and thrown, with a proprietary flourish, her straw hat on to the bed.
It was an act of breathtaking audacity – and the first crack in the friendship.
Later that night in bed, in the only other double room (which was on the ground floor next to the kitchen with a view of the gravel driveway), I whispered furiously to my husband that my ‘friend’ Penny might be a bit of a selfish cow. Always the optimist he said: ‘Maybe she’ll offer to swap halfway through?’
She didn’t.
From day one, there were red flags. It started with the holiday kitty. How much to put in? We already knew that Penny and her husband, Henry (not his real name) were better off than us. It had never mattered before, but when they suggested we contribute an eye-watering €1,000 each to be renewed at the end of week one, we were a bit taken aback.
But we had one more child than them so tentatively agreed. It soon became clear, however, what this budget was actually for.
Turns out that the ‘organised’ Penny I liked at home was a bit of a holiday Godzilla. One with very expensive tastes. Clearly, she wore the trousers in her marriage and protected her domain – the kitchen – like a highly trained Doberman.
She complained about everything. The fact there wasn’t a casserole dish, or non-stick frying pan or even – get this – an asparagus steamer. I thought this was amusing until she then sent both husbands off to the supermarket with a list that could have come from the Sandringham kitchen.
Top three items were lobster, foie gras and a ridiculously pricey deluxe cheese called Brillat-Savarin (I kid you not).
We’ve always been a bit of a ‘let’s just barbecue some sausages in the garden’ kind of family. It didn’t matter anyway because we weren’t consulted at any stage.
Henry was so terrified of deviating from the rules he stuck to Penny’s list like a limpet. Keith returned from their first trip to the Leclerc supermarket, pulled me into our tiny bedroom and said incredulously: ‘You’re right about her. I tried to put that quiche you like in the trolley and Henry said I wasn’t allowed because Penny hadn’t written it on the list.’
I tried not to feel irritated. We had different approaches, so what? Let’s just open another bottle of wine and let her do all the cooking, if that’s what she wants…
But it soon became glaringly obvious that subtler dynamics were at play. While I had naively assumed that being in France would be a bonding experience, Penny clearly saw the holiday as the perfect opportunity to point score.
Everything became a power struggle. At sunset if Keith wanted to go and fish off the rocks, I’d chuck him a beer and say: ‘See you later.’ Penny, on the other hand, would refuse to let Henry join him, pointedly muttering: ‘Someone needs to help with dinner.’
Then, while I was upstairs putting four children to bed (the reluctant teenager nowhere in sight), Penny would grab the opportunity to shut herself in the kitchen with a G&T and do the entirety of dinner.
You could argue this was a great division of labour. And yet it turned out that Penny did not really want to do all the cooking. She did it without asking in that huffily infuriating ‘I’m being a martyr’ way, banging pots and pans around just to be sure everyone in the house knew exactly where she was.
When I finally resurfaced from bathtime and reading stories it was a fait accompli. I’d enter the kitchen offering to help (bearing in mind it was only around 7pm at this point) and she’d look at me witheringly and say: ‘It’s done. We’re having coq au vin.’
Why she behaved like this, I still have no idea. Probably, she was deeply unhappy with her lot in life and resented me for having a career. Back at home she could lord her domestic prowess over me and I was genuinely grateful for her help; on holiday this equilibrium didn’t work at all.
The atmosphere in the villa became brittle and tense.
Quite honestly, I think the only reason she may have agreed to come was because she saw the holiday as the perfect opportunity to compete with me, expose all my shortcomings as a mother, wife and cook, and make herself look better in front of her own husband. Who knows, maybe to justify the crazy housekeeping fund he likely transferred to her bank account every month?
Yet she seemed to keep him on a tight leash, too – he was barely allowed out of her sight.
The thing about going on holiday with friends is that you see how they live when they’re not ‘on show’. You see their habits and foibles, their ‘family rules’ and rituals. You can’t mask your real, everyday personality when you’re living together, even for a few days – and hers was so much more controlling than I’d realised.
Whenever we went out, she insisted on tidying the garden, neatly arranging all the chairs and closing up the house as though we were never coming back again.
The atmosphere in the villa became brittle and tense (pictured, Jessica Raine in the BBC drama)
The thing about going on holiday with friends is that you see how they live when they’re not ‘on show’. You see their habits and foibles, their ‘family rules’ and rituals (pictured, cast from Two Weeks In August)
She loudly complained about the mild smell of drain in the kitchen, which made me feel bad since it was my choice of villa. In fact, she turned up her nose at lots of it – the location, facilities – in a way that seemed designed to make me feel unsophisticated and apologetic.
Quickly the holiday began to disintegrate. By day the villa was full of simmering resentment; in the evening, after we’d eaten her dinner in an atmosphere of increasing mutual dislike, I coped by getting drunk.
We devolved into two camps, with even my conflict-averse husband expressing his sincere wish that we’d never bloody well invited them.
The final straw came on day five when, mutinously and because I knew it would annoy her, I announced that I was bringing an au pair out for the second week after all. I just wanted to salvage some of my holiday and a friend in London had offered hers – a lovely Australian girl who fancied a week in France.
Penny was furious. There was a lot of banging of doors and huddled whispers in the master en suite. A few hours later Henry sheepishly announced they had to return to the UK because an unexpected work commitment had arisen.
With one gleeful eye on bagging the bedroom, I just smiled and said: ‘Well, cheerio then.’ I couldn’t even bring myself to wave goodbye.
The moment their car disappeared from sight I immediately grabbed a bottle of bubbly from the fridge and said: ‘Right kids – let’s party!’
The relief that they’d gone was overwhelming. But I also felt oddly rattled. How could I have got Penny so wrong? How could someone who seemed so sane at home become such a nightmare out of her natural habitat?
Certainly, it’s a cautionary tale, and we have never made the same mistake again.
The coda to all this is that Penny and I never spoke again. Not a word.
I know that sounds absurd, a parody of British aloofness. The healthy thing would have been to clear the air. But we didn’t. We just ignored each other.
It’s an old adage that hell is other people. But there must be a very special inner circle there reserved just for shared holidays.
