My first family holiday abroad, at the age of six or seven, was spent in Brittany, in a little white hotel beside a beach. And it seemed a very strange place.
None of the staff spoke English, and the only other foreigners in the hotel were Enoch Powell and his family. He and my father, who was a Labour MP, nodded to each other rather abruptly on the first day, and thereafter neither family spoke or made any acknowledgement of each other's presence, playing separate games of cricket on different ends of the beach. But I remember Powell's strangulated Midlands vowels drifting across from the other side of the dining room: "And now children, you will always remember this day for the first time you ever ate... lobster!"
I don't know what the Mallalieu children were eating - or more likely refusing to eat. It was cold, blue, and shiny, possibly some kind of pickled fish or vegetable. It bore no relation to anything we could recognise as food. In those days, olive oil was something most English people put in their ears.
The only soft drink at the hotel was a fizzy orange called Pschitt. We would ask the waiters: "Un orange, s'il vous plait," and they would reply: "Non! Pschitt!" It was very strange.
In the village, a short walk across the fields, the inhabitants spoke Breton, lived in picturesque poverty and earned nothing from tourism. Nearby, probably, there was a small port with decrepit fishing boats.
There was nothing to do except play on the beach, which was fine by us.
This month, another generation of Mallalieu children went to Brittany, and it was very different.
The Pierre et Vacances resort at Port du Crouesty describes itself as "un village authentique entre mer et port de plaisance," but it is reallynothing of the sort. It is a suburb of what has fast become a fair-sized town, and the buildings are in a "traditional" Breton style that no one could mistake for the real thing. It is like Poundbury-on-Sea. Twenty years ago, it didn't exist. It has no history, and the entire population changes every fortnight. There are no fishing boats in the harbour, just a thousand or more plastic yachts. All the shops are restaurants, bars, creperies and boutiques. There is no school, no cemetery and no industry other than tourism.
It is Club 18-30 in reverse. All the guests are parents in their 30s and 40s with small children and young teenagers. The only people in their late teens and 20s are working here for the summer. Most of the staff speak English and German, but nobody speaks Breton.
The car parks are full of sensible family cars: Fords, Peugeots, Citroëns and Renaults, but not a Mercedes or a beat-up 2CV in sight.
The guests are mostly French, with a smaller than usual number of English, German, Dutch and Irish. Years ago, Powell looked unmistakably English, if inauthentic, paddling in the sea with his pinstripe trousers rolled up to his knees. Now in Port du Crouesty, it is impossible to tell anyone's nationality until they speak. We have all become Eurotourists.
The food no longer tastes strange. The children are accustomed to olive oil, mussels, garlic, oysters and camembert, if not often to lobster. The restaurant menus offer a homogenised Euro-French cuisine. From what melting pot did the Pizzéria Le Nelson emerge?
One day, in search of the older Brittany, we went to Carnac to see the stones, but since my last visit the alignments have been fenced off, like Stonehenge, to protect them from tourists. We found a path through the woods to the great menhir, the Géant du Manio. There were no fences, and it had been sprayed with graffiti.
Port du Crouesty is clearly not the Brittany where Gauguin painted Le Christ Jaune and got into fights with sailors. Nor is it the kind of north French resort where Antoine Roquentin suffered his existential crisis of identity in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. But there has to be a good reason why so many people come here every summer, and there is.
Protected from the Atlantic by the Quiberon peninsula, and the islands of Hoedic, Houat and Belle-Ile, the bay is possibly the best place in the whole of Europe for children to learn to sail.
Along the rest of the Atlantic coast, the sea is usually too rough. For most of the time in the Mediterranean, there is no wind at all, and then, without warning, you get far too much. The Channel is cold, and the tides and currents often dangerous. But in Quiberon Bay, the sea is flat, sloping safely from the beach, and the wind is light to moderate all day long.
In the afternoons, we watched unworried as the children set off into the distance in kayaks and catamarans. Then we could stroll off, unconcerned, 40 minutes south-west to an almost deserted beach, where there were no fake- Breton houses, only sand dunes, marram grass, brambles and wild fennel.
How clean are the beaches?
Compared with what it must have looked like only nine months ago after the spill, the change is miraculous. There were few traces of oil, less than you would find on most English beaches - and far less rubbish - but you don't see many seabirds, and the first oyster I ate tasted of soap. It might have been the detergent used to clean up the oil, or I might have been imagining it. My younger daughter developed a rash after swimming in the sea and digging in the sand. It could have been an allergic reaction to the detergent. More likely, it was a jellyfish sting.
Where to stay
Eurovillages (01606 787776) offers 6/7-person Pierre et Vacances sea-facing apart ments with a terrace from £376-£1,090 per week including a Channel crossing with Brittany Ferries for a car and five passengers. A 6/7-person apartment is comfortable for four, just about adequate for five but would be seriously cramped with seven. You cannot check in before 5pm and, after an all-night crossing and 200 miles on the wrong side of the road, this is not good news.
What to take
Comfortable pillows, an English tin opener (the mysteries of French tin openers take far longer than a week to master), a large pan, coffee mugs (only espresso cups provided), wine glasses (surprisingly there were none in the apartment).
What to do
Clubs for 3-12 year olds cost £49 for the first six half-day sessions, £14 for the next six. Clubs for 13-18 year olds cost £49 for the week. The creche costs £27 for 10 hours. The clubs are a mixed programme of sailing, archery, volleyball, fencing, sandball, crab fishing and games, although the organisers are also alarmingly keen to put in shows with elaborate dance routines to French pop songs.
Dedicated sailing courses for seven year olds upwards cost from £65 to £120 for five 2-3-hour sessions.
You can hire bikes by the day or week, the local tennis courts cost £7 per hour, and there is an 18-hole golf course nearby at St Gildas de Rhuys (0033 2 9745 3090).
Thalassa (+2 9753 7025) and Navix (+2 9746 6000) run ferries to the islands and boat trips round the Gulf of Morbihan. You can also hire yachts and motor boats.
Port du Crouesty has an efficient, friendly, English-speaking tourist information office (+2 9753 6969).
The best building in the town, and the only one not in mock-Breton style, is the Louison Bobet Thalassa therapy Institute (+2 9753 4968). Marooned in its absurdly small lake, it looks like an ocean liner designed by Le Corbusier. Inside, women with sharply-toned bodies and hairy middle- aged men wander about in starched white dressing gowns, destressed to the point of catatonia. Massages start from £25 for 30 minutes, full cures from £50 per day.
Eating and drinking
If you avoid the pizza bars - and you don't go to France to eat pizza - a meal for a family of five will cost upwards of £50 without ever approaching the heights that you would normally expect from provincial French restaurants.
You are better off cooking at home. There are good fishmongers in the port and in Arzon, with oysters at 80p a dozen and mussels at £1 a kilo. Arzon has a brilliant market on Tuesdays - almost the real Brittany - and, 2km towards Sarzeau, the Super U supermarket is equally good for provisions- fruit that is ripe when you buy it, vegetables with taste, drinkable Cahors at little more than £1 a bottle, Blanquette de Limoux for under £3 and beer for 20p a bottle.
Drinking out is expensive - £1.40 for the same bottles of beer, £1.60 for a Coca-Cola. Nobody sells Pschitt.
