From Our House to Guest House
Travel back with me to a different world. Before cheap flights and packaged tours. When cars were few and money scarce. When the annual summer holiday was spent beside the British seaside. When trains not planes were used to get there. When holidays were annual bouts of escape and sources of reassurance. Families would book the same fortnight every year and stay in the same seaside town. Hotels were rarefied places; unattractive as well as out of reach for most; the genteel and more affordable option being the Guest House. Holiday snaps in faded family albums witness to seaside pastimes on the beach, along the pier and in the comfort of an alternative home with all services provided by the familiar and approachable landlady/owner. Proper breakfasts were taken at leisurely pace before the walk out onto the “front” or promenade and a day of pleasure spent in donkey rides on the beach or in shivery dips in the sea. Parents and grandparents, too, would sit on deckchairs often over-dressed for the venue, anxious to impress. The windbreaker would be at the ready to shade the family from wind and keep the sand out of the sandwich lunch pre-prepared by the Guest House staff.
People of my parents’ generation were fond patrons of Guest Houses for most of their lives. The Guest House was a superior home-from-home for family holidays; but it was also a place of many little snobberies, of petty one-upmanship. Comparisons were legion. Was it situated beside the sea or in a side street? Was it in the best part of town such as in slightly elevated Cliftonville rather than day-trippers’ Margate? Was there “hot and cold” water in each room and how many bathrooms were available for the guests to use? Was there a separate sitting-room and a proper evening meal or just “high tea”? And what if it rained all day, could the guests get back into the house or were they required to stay away till late afternoon? Of course Guest Houses are different now, even when they still exist. Some have taken the high road and converted themselves into tiny boutique “hotels”. Some took the low road and ended up as transit accommodation or places of multi-occupation for lonely young men or women displaced from faraway homelands in search of employment.
In the meantime the families seeking their annual escape opted for packaged travel and ready sunshine. Benidorm succeeded Blackpool. Sardinia grabbed the wind-shielded denizens of Scarborough. And Malta was judged better than Margate. But as Covid-19 takes its continuing toll will “staycations” lend new life to old Guest Houses? Or are we all now so pampered by en-suite accommodation and restaurant-quality food and drink that the Guest House is beyond redemption? Of course it is not only the Guest House that has changed but the world that gave it life.
Beyond the reach of the vast majority of their fellow citizens, the leisured classes of the interwar years enjoyed long weekends in the spacious houses of their peers. The country house party became the much sought-after means to brush with what we now call celebrity. Hostesses of such weekends quietly invited photographers to come and take photos of their guests relaxing or disporting on the terraces of their grand houses. The morning after the guests had left, the photographs would be leaked to a newspaper or society magazine. The country-house “happenings” fed an appetite for social tittle-tattle, for a glimpse of the luxurious and the notorious from modest breakfast tables up and down the land. Envy was stirred and wanted to be satisfied, even if only in a sort of hand-me-down way. The society weekend in the country cast a long shadow, well beyond the interwar years. Visiting others’ large houses courtesy of the National Trust became a national habit. Staying in other people’s houses for holidays a derivative pleasure. Whether on outings for the day or in search of a relaxed holiday free from household chores and served by “staff”, all were engaged in a harmless collective fantasy. The Guest House was an escape from “our house” and – albeit remotely – a chance to savour the enjoyments of being a guest in someone else’s house, a mildly grander one than the visitor’s everyday one.
The Guest House as it once was has passed its prime; it has become something else. Notwithstanding an understandable preference to holiday in Britain until Covid-19 is brought more firmly under control, the remembered charms of the Guest House will not arrest the summer rush for the Mediterranean sunshine.