The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The holiday that changed me ‘I found mum floating face down’
Parish-council Zoom legend Jackie Weaver reveals how a family staycation put her off Scotland forever
It was the week my mother almost drowned, and I was sheltering from the cold and rain in a café, when I decided I would never spend another holiday in the north of Scotland. This was about 15 years ago, way before I went viral as a parish-council Zoom sensation, and it was the sixth summer in a row that I had driven up to see my parents. We were staying in a caravan they kept on a private beach in Morayshire, about 45 minutes from their house.
We are a Scottish family – we’d only moved to England when I was 10 – but my mother never settled and my father promised they would return when he retired. For the first couple of years, they visited us. But then it became: “Oh, it’s too much for the dogs.” My mum wouldn’t have been bothered if she had never seen us again, but my dad was very fond of us, so with our three children, my husband, Stuart, and I would drive up from Cheshire – a journey that took almost nine hours.
We were three days into this last trip when I found my mother floating face down in the sea. Stuart and I were sitting on folding chairs, like a pair of pensioners, in jeans and woolly jumpers, watching the children, who were young teenagers at this point. The North Sea is so cold that even in the height of summer they would wear wetsuits – but only two of them had gone in, so there was one wetsuit spare. My mother walked past us, wearing it, and went into the sea.
Stuart and I carried on talking. The boys were further out, and my mum was still close to the shore – but something just wasn’t right. “Do you think she’s OK?” I asked. Stuart said “yeah”, but a moment later added, “No, she’s not!”
I ran into the sea and pulled my mother out of the water. She couldn’t have weighed more than seven stone, but she was a dead weight. Her face was blue and she wasn’t breathing. As I dragged her to the beach, my back went and I just couldn’t stand up straight. I had no idea what to do.
That was when two young paramedics (yes, really) happened to walk by. One did CPR on my mum, while the other ran for an ambulance. It seemed like an eternity before it arrived, by which time my mum had regained consciousness and said she was fine! Stuart stayed with the boys, and when the ambulance took my mum to the hospital, my dad and I followed in the car.
I looked like the one who had nearly drowned. My thick, woolly jumper was so full of seawater, it weighed more than me. My trousers were soaking wet, so I was walking like John Wayne. I was freezing cold, dripping all over the floor, and in so much pain with my back, I was stooped at 45 degrees.
When they let us into the recovery room, my mum was on oxygen, wrapped in a thermal blanket. “You are
very lucky,” said the doctor. “We nearly lost her. It will be touch and go for a few days.” He was talking to us like we had abused her, then my mother said to me: “What are you doing for tea tonight?” Tea?
They asked questions to check she hadn’t lost her marbles. It irritated the hell out of my mother, but when they asked what year it was, her answer was 20 years out. They gave her another chance, and this time she was five years out. That’s when my dad said: “Well, she wouldn’t know, because she doesn’t write cheques.” The person filling in the form looked at them as if to say: “I think we had better get social services.”
My mum came out of hospital five days later. We were having a cup of tea in the caravan when she said to my son Iain, the one who hadn’t gone into the sea: “You mustn’t blame yourself.” She then explained that if Iain had been in the sea, she wouldn’t have had the wetsuit to put on and none of this would have happened. Apparently, it was entirely Iain’s fault! That was the only time I ever saw my father get angry with my mother.
Stuart and I decided then and there that our next holiday would be abroad. The Post Office had the forms we needed for passports, and before we had driven back home I’d sent them off. The boys had never had passports, and the only foreign trip I’d taken was the year Stuart and I got married, when we went on a coach trip to Amsterdam.
Our next holiday was in Tenerife. It was the first time we had all gone abroad, and the boys loved it. Since then, we’ve been abroad every year. The best bit is the weather, but even if we were in Outer Mongolia, it would be better than a fortnight with my mother. Those Scottish trips were always framed as: “You’re having a free holiday – be grateful!”, but it never felt like a holiday. Now, I feel sad that I put the family through it.
by Jackie Weaver is out on September 16 in hardback (Constable, £12.99)