A Proper Family Holiday Read Free Page A

able to catch up and so she didn’t bother.
    Now, all these years later, Ronnie told herself that everything had turned out for the best. For a start, despite everyone’s predictions to the contrary, Mark had stood by her. They’d been together since they were both fourteen. Mark had already left school and was working as an apprentice at a joinery company when Ronnie told him she was pregnant. He vowed right away he would provide for Ronnie and his child, and he had definitely made good on that promise.
    Mark moved in with Ronnie and her parents as soon as the baby was born. When Sophie was two, the little family was able to move out of Ronnie’s parents’ house and into a rented place of their own. With overtime and a bit of work on the side at weekends, Mark earned enough for Ronnie to stay at home until Sophie could go to school. When Sophie was nine, Ronnie considered finishing her A-levels at an adult-education college, but then she fell pregnant with Jack and the cycle started all over again. Including the postnatal depression.
    But this makes it all worth it, thought Ronnie, at such moments as when she watched twelve-year-old Sophie, tall as a giraffe, make her precocious debut as goal defence in the school netball team. And what high-flying job could have been more satisfying than seeing four-year-old Jack play a sheep in his first nativity play? These were the consolations for having so spectacularly short-circuited her plans for world domination with an unprotected shag. Ronnie might not be living in a posh house or driving a fancy car like some of her old friends from school, but she had been able to see her children grow up, while her contemporaries were so scared of stepping off the career ladder they put their carefully planned babies into childcare at six months old. You never got those early years back. If you missed the first word, the first steps, that was it. Those were the things that magazine writer Chelsea didn’t understand when she talked about how bored she would be if she were a stay-at-home mum.
    ‘I don’t know how you can stand not using your brain,’ Chelsea had said the last time she and Ronnie were together. It was at that barbecue to celebrate their grandfather Bill’s eighty-third birthday (Bill was celebrated every year now, just in case). That was the comment that sparked the discussion that became a full-blown row that ended with Chelsea accusing Ronnie of having become a mummy martyr and Ronnie accusing Chelsea of having turned into a self-obsessed snob, and subsequently led to the sisters’ two-year-long estrangement.
    ‘ Not using my brain! ’
    Mark had become used to hearing Ronnie exclaim those four words at random moments during their week. It was usually when she had finished overseeing Sophie’s maths homework or had finally deciphered an incomprehensible instruction in a letter sent home from Jack’s school. Ronnie would then segue into a rant about how Chelsea had no idea how taxing family life could be. Ensuring that two children and one other adult were fed, dressed, happy and healthy, all on the kind of budget that would have been tight enough for a singleton? That was no mean feat. And now Ronnie was working part time as well. She never had a minute to herself. From time to time, she really did feel as though she was running an army battalion. Chelsea did not have a clue what a mother’s life was like.
    Perhaps that’s why she didn’t see the need to apologise for her remarks, Mark occasionally dared to suggest. Only when Chelsea had a family of her own – assuming she could ever hang on to a man for long enough – would she realise the gravity of the insults she’d delivered over a chargrilled sausage in a bun.
    ‘I don’t care. I won’t ever forgive her,’ Ronnie claimed.
    Jacqui’s birthday wish was to change all that. Ronnie had to promise their mother she would put her anger to one side for just this week. For what might be their last ‘proper