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My Grandad the Hero

The rain tap-taps on the roof, a soft sound, reminiscent, making inside seem more sheltered, warm. There's nothing else like this, sitting in here listening to the rain. It's the noises that stay with you. A noise like that can send you straight back to when you were small. Like the whistling of kettles and clatter of pots in the morning, the sounds of everyone coming awake. It's a strange feeling of being inside, of being safe. The noise of the gas cylinders and the bang-bang of windows being shut.

I love holidays like this.

Caravans get a bad press, mainly because they have no place on our roads. This is a fact. Static is the only way to go. Your own plot, miniature fences and white plastic planters. The working class equivalent of the summer house in the country. Camping, but without as much setting up.

The static caravan will attract all sorts of treasures deemed no longer fit for the house. Even now, the 70's lives on for many in caravan sites the world over. It was where you put things before they invented car-boot sales. For me, caravans will always be kind of magical places, peculiar as that may sound. They are places of make believe, play-houses were adults pretended too. My Grandad had that effect on things. His indulgent eccentricities casting a spell over my childhood. To me as a child, the only time I knew him, he was like a box of tricks waiting to be opened. Sitting here now, watching the rain come down outside, I can remember sitting anxiously waiting for my Grandad to get back.

My knees are on the settee seats, I'm sitting backwards peering up close to the big bay window at the end of the caravan. I can see the corner where the track disappears into the trees. Behind us, at the end where Nan and Grandad slept, we were backed by a vertical wall of rock, the top lost in the sky. An abrupt mountain you could reach out and touch. It meant we couldn't be attacked from behind and I was grateful for that.

It was just before the corner, that shaded bend in the track, where the rabbit would hide and wait. I'd never seen him, never really dared to have a proper look. My Grandad had told me all about him, so I'd know what to look out for. He'd shown me the huge scars across his back, like jagged pink lines melted in his skin. It terrified me.

They had been sworn enemies since he and Nan had bought the caravan from a travelling Russian circus troupe all those years ago, before I was even born. Every summer since they had fought it out, neither

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