‘Everyone had been traumatised one way or another’: on the road with writer John Sandilands in 1971
In an early iteration of slow tourism, John Sandilands and his wife took to the open road in the Observer in 1971, with a horse ominously called Fireball and a ‘gaily painted’ traditional wagon, courtesy of the Welsh Romany Caravan Company. ‘Gentle and picturesque’? Absolutely. Relaxing? No.
‘Previous experience of horses is not necessary, but it is useful,’ the brochure said, with casual understatement. Without any, and after only a brief run-through of the basics from a laconic Mr Thomas, the couple were unleashed on the back roads of Mid Wales with a list of instructions to roam as they (or Fireball) fancied.
It was not without incident. Going up and down hills meant getting off and leading Fireball; when they forgot, he farted in their faces, requiring the deployment of Mrs Sandilands’s ‘Marcel Rochas’s expensive toilet water’. An incident when the wagon went rogue on a sloping field ended, not quite in the disaster that seemed imminent, but with ‘A pyramid of cutlery and plates, food, water, teabags, all formed into a sort of custard by a steady seepage of Fairy Liquid.’
Unharnessing Fireball at the end of the day was challenging but child’s play compared to catching him again in the morning. Sandilands’s pentathlon of ‘sprinting, jumping over a stream, long-distance running, stalking, falling over and swearing’ attracted a sizeable audience, including a small boy who caught Fireball, ‘giving me the contemptuous look he probably reserved… for girls.’ Harnessing the horse again was, if anything, worse. ‘In the end no fewer than seven people became involved, all shouting and grabbing the instructions off each other.’
The couple headed prematurely back to base, spooked by an incident in which Fireball galloped off with them ‘much like the chariot race in Ben Hur’. Comparing notes with other temporary travellers, ‘Everyone had been traumatised one way or another, mostly by their horses.’ Still, it had been character building, the countryside was unquestionably beautiful and for only £5.50 a week, you couldn’t say fairer than that.
