Solo again after 37 years: my first holiday as a widow

Back in midwinter, I went looking for the type of holiday I didn’t really want. It would be my first as a single person for 37 years following the death of my partner in April last year and was freighted with negatives. There were to be no echoes of places Tony and I had enjoyed together down the years. Nor any we’d talked of exploring. Ideally, it would be something undemanding, and I’d set off reassured that he would have been bored stiff.

A trip to the Gardens of the Riviera in the company of a lecturer, each day mapped out, sounded just the thing. We would stay in a modern hotel on the seafront in Menton and be transported from garden to exotic garden by coach. No decisions to be made, no hire-car altercations, no parking nightmares. Just five days of total spoon-feeding. The shame of it.

There was another agenda. I had to demonstrate to my family that I was going to be OK on my own. Lovely as it was to be invited, I didn’t have to be scooped up into their holidays. This summer, a perfect week of crabbing and rockpooling in Cornwall with our grandson and his parents was followed by an indulgent B&B on the Helford River with my sisters and their husbands. But sooner or later I’d have to pick up the threads of being an independent traveller. Meanwhile, I needed a gentle parachute into unfamiliar territory: going solo.

We flew to Nice. Our genial Kirker guide Simon Monckton stood in the arrivals hall with his placard, gathering us up like schoolchildren. We were counted, then swept along to a waiting bus. There were five couples from a broad spread of England and Wales, two pairs of women travelling together and, so it seemed, five independent single women – an unsurprising demographic, given that gardens were our goal. Except for a Yorkshire farming couple, most of us were retired, semi-retired, or not admitting it.

Hurdle One was the bedroom. The awfully big double bed with its mountain of pillows. The two chairs on a balcony overlooking the hotel’s pool, fringed by banana trees, where we would have sat for the first drink. The yawning wardrobe space. I missed our predictable routines as a couple familiarising ourselves with a new hotel: smuggling in a bottle of gin, laying claim to the bathroom ledges – why did I need two-thirds of them? – and getting to grips with the shower.

Drinks in the hotel bar before we left for a group meal helped to match faces to the names on our sheet. At a lively beach restaurant called Le Galion, we started to bond over smoked salmon, sea bream and berries lost in cream. On my left were a couple of newspaper junkies and before I had time to invent a different persona, as someone who has been a Telegraph feature writer for a quarter of a century, I was talking shop.

Hurdle Two was breakfast – the awkward decision about where to sit. I’ve breakfasted in countless hotels on my own for work, enjoying the people-watching, reading a paper. Here, I felt ridiculously exposed. Most of the couples in our party were already at tables for two, chatting in the sunny courtyard. Other pairs were occupying two seats at tables for four. Did I invade their space and, if so, whose? Did I strike out by myself on an empty table at the risk of seeming Garboesque? Then there was Simon the Urbane, sitting alone, respecting the privacy of all but presumably not averse to sharing.

I went to inspect the Hotel Napoleon’s buzzing breakfast bar. Prue from Buckinghamshire asked how to work the coffee machine. There were three sizes of cup and a bank of coffee pods, colour-coded according to strength. I had no idea. “Oh,” she said, “I thought you’d know, seeing as you’re from London.” Cover blown.

I joined the newspaper junkies because they looked up expectantly. They’d spent the previous week on another Kirker cultural tour and could have valuable information to impart. We talked about English papers. Would they survive? What had happened to that Rebekah Brooks? 

As we took our seats on the bus, the true composition of the group unfolded. Three of the women listed as travelling alone were a trio of friends from different parts of the country. There were only two free-floaters. One was me. A hidden common denominator emerged from lifestyle clues and random confidences: nine of us were widows. The club you didn’t ask to join. We climbed aboard for Monte Carlo. Stuck in traffic, I’d often stared up at folk in holiday coaches, feeling a bit smug about our spontaneous itinerary for two. Suddenly, I was one of those pitiable profiles behind the glass, listening to a tour guide.

Simon warned there would be no shade and steep climbs at the first garden. Shod sensibly, we approached Monte Carlo’s Jardin Exotique as if it were the Arizona desert. One of our party was waiting for a back operation, another had broken her leg recently and was using a stick. We needn’t have worried: they were the most intrepid.

It was a phantasmagorical landscape, beautiful and weird, that had taken 20 years to create. Out of a teaspoon of gritty soil, high-rise cacti and giant succulents grew like monsters. 

For the next five days we shuttled between France, Italy and Monaco, visiting a cluster of historic gardens, from the sumptuous Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild to the unexpectedly lovely Val Rahmeh Botanical Garden just behind our hotel. Most were inspired and designed by the British, who loved to winter on the Riviera and took advantage of the subtropical microclimate to plant wondrous things that grew like crazy. Where else would you see orchids sprouting from the trunks of ancient olive trees?

Gardens on the Côte d’Azur tend to be many-tiered, even vertiginous. Wherever we paused for the view – or to catch breath – it was like being in the gods at a theatre of the sea.

At the Villa Piacenza Boccanegra in Ventimiglia, one woman armed with secateurs in a leather holster seemed to be looking after eight acres single-handedly, including the national collection of aloes. Ursula Piacenza is the only one of her family interested in the garden. 

At the Hanbury Botanical Gardens at La Mortola, Lady Carolyn Hanbury is also engaged in a struggle to uphold her family’s horticultural legacy. The two women are friends and meet for weeding afternoons on their respective estates.

We made a careful descent, down through ancient trees and orchards to a fortresslike boundary wall with arched windows to the sea. It was beautiful in a déshabillé sort of way.

At Clos du Peyronnet, William Waterfield ambled affectionately through the magical garden that has been in his family since 1915. He is 86, has no heirs, no family, so is establishing a foundation to ensure its future. “Come and see my zephyranthes,” he said, pointing to an explosion of starlike white flowers between his two fish ponds. The palette was overwhelmingly green. “When is your garden at its most colourful?” a female voice inquired. He looked up with mischief. “Today,” he replied gallantly.

If you are on your own, there is protection in a group tour as well as moments of isolation. The natural twos and threes in our party kept dissolving and changing shape like bubbles in a lava lantern. You could easily drift along as a single bubble or join up with a larger one. You could stride out to inspect a thunbergia on your own without seeming rude, or join a twosome on the pretext of wanting to know a plant’s name.

By the time we got to Serre de la Madone on day four we felt like a cohesive group of garden-lovers, and there was no better place to celebrate our fraternity than in the harmonious garden created between the wars by the reclusive Lawrence Johnston, designer of Hidcote Manor Garden in the Cotswolds.

Holidaying with strangers is a gamble and the test of its success is whether you would do it again. In one of those five-minute conversations while waiting for the bus to pick us up for a final meal together, someone asked me if the trip had been everything I’d hoped. It was a friendly but loaded question. Many of us were sudden singles trying to re-find our place in the world and had chosen gardens as a way to begin. “Yes,” I said, “but next time I would call a friend.”

The essentials

Kirker Holidays (020 7593 2284; kirkerholidays.com) is running two Gardens of the Riviera lecture tours in 2019 in April and September, costing from £1,698, with a single supplement of £320. The tour includes five nights at the four-star Hotel Napoleon and three dinners, including one at the Michelin-starred Mirazur in Menton, flights from London Heathrow to Nice (other UK airports available on request) transfers, excursions and entrance fees and the services of tour leader Simon Monckton.