‘I had a sense that our holidays were not normal’

Jean Hannah Edelstein thought her childhood meanderings around Scotland were something she wouldn’t want to repeat – until she became a parent

Among my favourite photographs from my childhood is one that my brother entitled “Showdown at Barf Creek”. In the picture we’re standing beside a car at the side of a road somewhere near Ullapool, in the Scottish Highlands. I have a cheerful smile. My brother is pulling a disgusted face. And somewhere in the background my poor little sister is being sponged down by my mother with the cold waters of some highland spring, as she’d just vomited all over herself and the back seat of the car. My father was the eye behind the camera, the person who decided that this was a Kodak moment worth remembering forever.

My mother is Scottish; my father was American. They met and married in Scotland in the late Seventies after he moved to Glasgow on a postdoctoral fellowship. My brother was born in Scotland, and then, following the demands of my father’s career as a physicist, they moved to New

York State, where they had me. Raising children in America was not my mother’s particular preference; she was not someone who’d dreamed of emigrating, although she put up with it. To keep us close to her roots, however, most of the summers of my school years were spent in Dumfries and Galloway and thereabouts, staying with our Scottish granny.

Mum would bring us – three children, seven-and-half years between my older brother and younger sister – across the Atlantic on her own, because as was usual in America my father had only about 10 days of paid holiday each year. Once we’d recovered from the red-eye flight (“Your mother’s not feeling well,” my granny would tell us the next day, “so I’ll be looking after you”), we would spend a month or more being Scottish: drinking our five daily cups of tea, picking our way through a field full of cow pats with our cousins, enjoying days out on the beaches of the Solway Firth in jumpers and raincoats, hiking to the tops of hills and