Whatever you've always wanted in a holiday - rest, relaxation and a change of pace - once you have children, all this becomes a distant memory. Take the stack of paperbacks out of your suitcase, you will not be reading them; they will only mock you from their untouched heap. Forget about lying prone beside the pool with a glass of iced tea: you will spend the long days herding children away from the water's edge, clearing up discarded food and broken cups, and generally trying to prevent your child from falling down the treacherous stone stairs/cliff at the bottom of the garden.
Once you have reconciled yourself to the fact that holidays will never be the same again, you will need a formula for a fortnight away with the family that will involve as little additional work as possible. Many parents are deluded enough tobelieve that by multiplying the number of adults and children, you reduce the workload. This of course is a fallacy, not least because the combination of old friends and new children can produce its own, frankly exhausting, complications.
For rank naivety, you could not hope to beat Elspeth Wright and her husband Richard, who rented a large beach house on Cape Cod for 10 days with 10 friends. There were 12 adults and Elspeth and Richard's eight-month-old baby son Ben. This was, they quickly realised, a mistake. While the others could eat, swim and sleep as the mood took them, Elspeth and Richard had to think about Ben's bedtimes and mealtimes, and find ways of keeping him cool when the midday temperature reached the stifling mid-80s. If Ben woke up crying in the night, they were acutely conscious that their baby was disturbing everybody, and argued in urgent whispers about how to hush him. None of their friends even had children, so they could not expect any help - people don't really know what to offer unless they have been in that situation themselves. The best they could hope for was to be politely ignored.
"I began to lose it as the days went on," says Elspeth. "Our friends would be up talking and playing music till all hours, but of course Ben would wake up punctually at six in the morning. To get to the kitchen and make up his bottle, I would have to step over people who had crashed out in the sitting room among empty bottles, dirty glasses and ashtrays. After a few days, and slightly crazy with tiredness by this time, I would throw open the shutters and wake them up, going, 'Sorry! Need to clear up now!' "
Clearly, it is a bad idea to take a child on holiday with friends who don't have children. In a rented house, you will spend much of your holiday fussing around, trying to prevent accidents, which is bound to get on other people's nerves. The fact that you can't relax for a moment when everyone around you is napping in hammocks, can also make one pretty tetchy.
"When my daughter was 18 months' old, we rented a villa with six friends," says author Henry Sutton - whose dark novel Bank Holiday Monday describes the increasing tensions between a group of friends and one child, who rent a converted windmill for a long weekend. "My daughter was teething, and she was keeping us, and everyone else, up most of the night. It was just awful; we got so tense, and everyone was trying to be polite, pretending they hadn't heard her screaming all night. There were no other children on that holiday, and that was a mistake."
People without children, perhaps relishing their own last days of freedom, simply do not notice that parents might need help on holiday. A single parent can find him or herself alone with the baby day after day while others go off for long hot walks or day-long excursions. One mother, keen to remain anonymous, complained that she also found herself playing babysitter to her friends' children on holiday. Since her baby was the youngest, and needed full-time care, her friends presumed it couldn't really make much difference to her if she had another child to look after, while they went off sight-seeing.
Other people's children may create other hazards. As you plan a holiday with old friends and their families, you assume the children will amuse each other while you catch up with your mates over a glass of wine. But no matter how well you think you know people, you need to establish whether, and how, their parenting styles differ from yours. Years of hanging out together, sharing cabs, boyfriends, even flats, will not prepare you for the fiercely held principles that take hold once people have children.
"I fell out with a very old friend when my children and I visited one summer," says Alison Gibbs. "She used to be a junk-food fanatic, and she would always be the one to go down to the all-night garage for sweets, so I never imagined she would have such strict rules about food: I would give my children a biscuit if they were hungry in the middle of the afternoon; I didn't even think about it. Then I found out her children were not allowed biscuits or sweets, ever. We sat around awkwardly as her child had an absolute tantrum, and she refused to give in. The final straw came when I sautéd some potatoes, and cheerfully called the children to the table for egg and chips. I realised I had committed another major gaffe when my friends' son, aged seven, beamed with excitement and said, 'This is the third time I have eaten chips in my life.'
"Of course, I would be exactly the same if someone came to stay with me and brought out a packet of sweets just before lunchtime," she adds. "You really have to make sure you know people's limits."
One mother of four, who did not want to be named, remembered a holiday with her brother that was marked by a punctuality clash: she discovered - funny she had never noticed before - that he liked to eat meals at the same time every day. Her large family is relaxed about its schedule, rises late and barely eats at the same time two days running. So, for the first few days they would wander in when they were hungry and find their hosts seated at the table, waiting. In the following days, there were terrible scrambles to assemble everyone for punctual meals, which was seriously unrelaxing for all concerned.
Everybody has strong ideas about childcare, especially relating to food, bedtimes and discipline, and things can get pretty tense if you don't respect each other's ways. "We had a terrible time when my brother's chil dren came to stay," Henry Sutton remembers. "They were completely undisciplined. One of them was up at 6am, playing football in the corridor, or firing his bow and arrow through an upstairs window, then running up the stairs to fetch the arrows. I was trying to finish off some work, and I asked him to go and play quietly somewhere else, or just go and watch television. His parents exploded at me, and told me that they brought their children up to do whatever they want, that they believed in complete freedom. I couldn't handle it."
Sometimes the children of close friends refuse to like each other, which can be somewhat embarrassing, and people tend to take it personally. One year's difference can create fierce competition and younger children's tendency to hero-worship can get seriously on the older ones' nerves. Volatile allegiances mean a child of four can be suddenly left out, which, as a parent, is excruciating to watch. On one holiday, when I realised that my friends' children had hidden my son's beloved teddy bear, I felt like packing my bags. It can take all one's powers of distraction and diplomacy to rescue the stricken one without making things worse.
Even worse than fighting children is tension between the parents. Isabel Cochrane discovered on the first night of her week-long holiday with friends that the other couple were on the brink of splitting up. "If it had been just us, we could have said, 'We're off, sort yourselves out,'" she remembers. "But because we had the children, we were stuck, all of us together in this unbelievably hostile and scary atmosphere."
Think carefully before organising a holiday with mates: if it goes wrong, it can cause irreparable damage to your friendship. One couple who rented a farmhouse for two weeks with friends were barely speaking by the end of the holiday. "We were up at 5am every day," says Frances, who had a seven-month-old baby. "Their child was three, so he was desperate to get going and doing things, but we were always faffing around with the baby. We were all so tired, we would move around each other in the kitchen, bickering. By the end we had seriously fallen out."
The unexpected result of this falling out was that the two couples felt much closer to each other by the end of the fortnight, and went on to enjoy subsequent holidays without the added complication of friends. Occasionally, a bit of antagonism can be a good thing: having a common enemy is wonderful for bringing a family together.
