Where the living is easy

Dead flies and cobwebs, mouse droppings and damp beds, brown water and faded furnishings: what is it about our long-cherished holiday houses that makes them such heaven? With glamorous foreign villas out of bounds this summer, we asked seven devotees to describe the perfect setting for a traditional British holiday

- 

Hut on the south Devon coast

Helena Drysdale is the author of six books of travel/memoir, including Mother Tongues: Travels through Tribal Europe and Looking for George: Love and Death in Romania

I first saw the Hut when I was two. As we ran down through the pinewoods and out onto the cliff, I picked up on my parents’ joy, which never left me. ‘Tighter,’ my father urged until I gripped the beach handrail so tightly I could hardly move. Waterfall, hot rocks for sunbathing, shingle patched with softer sand that biscuits in the sun: this is where I spent every blissful summer.

Holidays began with a five-hour drive from London, me and my two sisters and three cats in the back, my father smoking at the wheel. Window down, mouth-filling with saliva, I agonized over when to announce I was going to be sick: too early meant keeping them waiting on the roadside; too late was—too late.

Then, the Hut worked its magic. You bump along an increasingly rutted track—don’t lose your nerve—and park by the gate. As you walk down the path, a vista unfurls of the sea and craggy headlands. A green clapboard bungalow is tucked into the bowl-shaped cliff face, like a stage with an audience of the sea.