Where the living is easy

Dead flies and cobwebs, mouse droppings and damp beds, brown water and faded furnishings: what is it about our long-cherished holiday houses that makes them such heaven? With glamorous foreign villas out of bounds this summer, we asked seven devotees to describe the perfect setting for a traditional British holiday

Hut on the south Devon coast

Helena Drysdale is the author of six books of travel/memoir, including Mother Tongues: Travels through Tribal Europe and Looking for George: Love and Death in Romania

I first saw the Hut when I was two. As we ran down through the pinewoods and out onto the cliff, I picked up on my parents’ joy, which never left me. ‘Tighter,’ my father urged until I gripped the beach handrail so tightly I could hardly move. Waterfall, hot rocks for sunbathing, shingle patched with softer sand that biscuits in the sun: this is where I spent every blissful summer.

Holidays began with a five-hour drive from London, me and my two sisters and three cats in the back, my father smoking at the wheel. Window down, mouth-filling with saliva, I agonized over when to announce I was going to be sick: too early meant keeping them waiting on the roadside; too late was—too late.

Then, the Hut worked its magic. You bump along an increasingly rutted track—don’t lose your nerve—and park by the gate. As you walk down the path, a vista unfurls of the sea and craggy headlands. A green clapboard bungalow is tucked into the bowl-shaped cliff face, like a stage with an audience of the sea.

Built from a kit in 1923, it was run as a campsite for socialists: no running water or electricity and nudity encouraged. Waving angrily at a yacht approaching to moor, the owner fell over the cliff and died and, in 1950, my grandmother bought it. Although now equipped with ‘facilities’, it retains its slightly spartan simplicity and there’s still some nudity. It is the essence of privacy.