Patricia Nicol

ALREADY, by last week, our big group holiday of a month ago seemed a distant, laughter-filled memory. Then, a message popped up on the WhatsApp group: ‘Don’t quite know how to put this. Your children’s heads may need examining. Ours last night were full of nits.’

Suddenly those happy memories of children playing in the sea or several heads bowed together over a shared screen while distracted parents could not be bothered to enforce the ‘No Devices’ rule, took on a more threatening tincture. Might any have escaped nit-free?

I love to holiday with a gang of friends — 35 of us aged six to 50 that week. However, in novels, group trips are often fraught experiences where bad things happen. Storytellers, from Chaucer through to EM Forster, Agatha Christie and Ruth Ware, have revelled in grouping people together on a trip, then cranking up the tension.

In Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, two families discover someone floating in the pool of their Riviera holiday let. A young woman, Kitty Finch, emerges naked from the water, claiming there has been a mix-up on the rental dates. But is she actually there deliberately?

In Lucy Atkins’s sinister thriller The Night Visitor, three families have travelled to a tumbledown property in Provence, a building where precariousness seems to outweigh character. Anti-heroine Olivia Sweetman, a television historian, has carried a guilty secret with her. Can she outrun it abroad?

Not all fictional group holidays end in bitter recrimination. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim begins on a sodden afternoon in 1920s London. A newspaper advert addressed to ‘those who appreciate wisteria and sunshine,’ is a siren call to bored Mrs Wilkins, who determines to assemble a party of gentlewomen to rent the advert’s small Italian castle.

What unfolds is a paean to the transformative power of travel, a romantic landscape and female friendship. Sometimes you need to regroup, not strike out alone.