For those of you already condemning me as a liberal and weak parent I can assure you that it was not "on the good ship Venus", or "Four and Twenty Virgins" or others of that rugby club style but quite a witty ditty that very rarely had to get past the first three repetitions before we all fell about laughing.
It went along the lines of "stop the car I want a wee-wee".
In fact it really started as an attempt to bring the attention of the children to things outside the car of educational interest in order to broaden and further their interest and comprehension of things in what is, after all, a very big and complicated world.
The beauty and wisdom of the sing-song tune was its infinite flexibility.
Replace "a wee-wee" with "a look at a building of interesting architecture", "..........an unusually shaped tree" or " a.........geographical feature" and you have
a) caught their attention
b) provoked a curiosity in their young sponge-like absorbency brains
and c) introduced an opportunity to show off and extend knowledge and intelligence to a willing albeit captive audience.
In my own childhood a car journey was an exciting event, a chance to travel perhaps as far as the next County or to another town whereas today most equivalent to my age then have already been abroad and on a regular basis so as to be, well frankly, a little bit weary and bored by the whole thing.
I however looked forward to that short drive from Suffolk to Bedfordshire to visit grandparents or the longer haul down to Cornwall and Somerset to see Uncles, Aunts and Cousins.
Of course, I had to be thoroughly travel sick first before being able to technically enjoy the drive. There were various medicinal remedies available including a vile syrupy mixture which must have been designed to make you throw up rather than effect a cure. The other method, handed down the ages was to sit on a sheet of newspaper. I was a bit suspicious about the authenticity of this supposedly ancient remedy on the basis that newspapers were only commonly available in modern times. I could imagine Egyptian travellers sitting on papyrus and later cultures using parchment or silk. Neither pharmacy nor journalism ever really worked with me and I usually just chucked up anything that I had digested within the first 20 miles of the road trip. "Stop the car I want to b.............." too late.
When comfortable and no longer nauseous I was able to gaze out at the wonders of the countryside and towns through which we travelled. As my education progressed I was able to recognise and name geological and topographical features with great enthusiasm. This constant source of information was at first tolerated by the rest of the car-imprisoned family but only for so long and their previously sympathetic and kind natures were often, I realise now, stretched to breaking point and beyond.
I have not however mellowed with age in terms of my interest in all things of the built and natural environments.
Regular readers will know this from my frequent recounting of tales and stories centred around particular buildings or land that I have come across first hand or where something has caught my imagination or interest. In more recent months I have written on the subject of the tidal surge erosion of Spurn Point, described a cottage of largely original format and condition and discussed the cost of building a house.
I was working recently in Scarborough on the North Yorkshire Coast and drove past the end of a street called Holbeck Hill.
Somewhere, deep down in my psyche lurked a fact associated with the address. It took a bit of mental processing of both good and useless data to tease out the reason for my feeling of deja-vu. In true form my mind adopted the sing song method of rationalisation to the tune of stop the bus I want......and then.....fog lifting, lights on, click, clunk, whirr.
The Holbeck Hall Hotel.
Bingo, well no. it was much too high class an establishment for that sort of seaside entertainment but it did have the attention of the nation for a week or so in June 1993.
The Hotel had an unrivalled location overlooking Scarborough South Bay, the Spa, seafront, harbour and across to the Castle on the promontory. The 70 metres of ground in front of the hotel were laid out as landscaped gardens above the cliff line. The ambience of the place was reflected in the room rates, amongst the highest in the resort.
A guest, looking out on a fine June 4th morning, noticed that only 15 metres of the garden remained as a feature with the bulk of the land mass having disappeared and the rest beginning to slump and fall away.
There had been strange goings-on over the preceeding six weeks with cracks appearing in the footpaths along the cliff top. These had been repaired but as a precaution the Council closed the access points above and below the cliff line. Heavy rainfall in May and early June onto the glacial clay has caused a point of saturation. It was too much for the natural composition to cope with culminating in a huge rotational landslide of the one million tonnes of material.
Likened to a slow motion lava flow the mass spilled out over the cliffs and into the sea forming a large semi circular platform. The Hotel structure was powerless to resist the forces of nature and gradually began to tear apart. News crews from the UK and a wider world interest documented the destruction of the Hotel in a very voyeuristic way. Updated bulletins over the next few days showed real-time images of the development of cracks and fissures in walls and between elements of the building. There were sights of curtains billowing out of gaping holes and furnishings falling out of what had been windows, doors and full walls.
The four star hotel became part of the equally auspiciously rated tourist beach.
Twenty years on the memory of the event has tended to fade. The former position of the Holbeck Hall Hotel has been stabilised and landscaped and it is hard to comprehend that there was ever a prominent building in that idyllic spot. A large saucer shaped undulation and the bulge of the coastal path catches the eye as being something unusual. The curious by nature may pull up and park at the nearby Viewpoint and read the information board about what happened.
There have been more recent cases of landslide and soil creep along the East Coast, notably on the steep valley sides above the Esk River in Whitby including a section of the graveyard below the church which was the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula.
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