My holiday from hell: I wanted to go zipwiring and eat chips. But my mum insisted we find the ‘real’ Mallorca

My sister and I were enjoying our all-inclusive getaway, but my mum hated forced fun and sitting by the pool. So we went off exploring in the searing heat. Our hike through the island’s building sites didn’t end well

Package holidays weren’t yet a thing people did, in 1983 or 84, and Mallorca hadn’t completely become itself, but wasn’t unspoilt either. Me, nine, my sister, 11, and my mum, 46, would have been early adopters of the all-inclusive getaway, if in any sense my mum had arrived in an adopting frame of mind. It’s hard to describe the attitude she brought with her without making her sound like a monster, so you just have to fill between the lines with “she had other nice qualities”.

She didn’t like small talk and didn’t like buffets; didn’t like bumptious dads who invited your kids to join theirs; didn’t like nuclear families; and she wasn’t wild about other single-parent families either. She hated sitting by the pool, drinking piña coladas, group activities and any kind of quiz. She had an aversion to forced fun, which she used as cover for her distaste for many other kinds of fun. Me and my sister loved forced fun. We would lose our shit over a cocktail umbrella.

In that spirit, we arrived at a hotel in Alcúdia, in a giant complex of identical hotels, serving up a constant array of entertaining pursuits, in exquisite temperatures – if you were a lizard.

We spent maybe one morning in the pool and one lunch sampling the not-at-all Spanish delights, where the question wasn’t whether chips but how many, of which delicious style, before our mum decided this was for losers and she wanted to discover the “real” Mallorca. We didn’t have a car, so we set off on foot, all in sandals, only I even had a hat. Sunscreen wasn’t a thing yet either. I had a little red clutch because I thought we might chance on some charming craft shop, and looking at the photo now I can feel that disappointed hope like an ache in my throat.

The only road had no pavement and just led to other hotels anyway, so we sort of scrambled, clinging on to small rocks as hot as a pizza oven, round the back of the building, which wasn’t quite finished so it had a lot of anti-vandal infrastructure that made it look forbidding. “Tsk,” Mum said, “no wonder we felt like prisoners!” I had not felt at all like a prisoner. I’d felt great. There had been an amazing kids’ club with a zip wire, which we could have happily explored all day. Equally, I’d have been happy just reading a book in the sun, like a normal person.

We walked for hours over building sites, changing direction every time there was a “keep out” sign, of which there were many. We encountered no real Mallorca and no real Mallorcans, because even with the exigencies of commerce biting at this society, builders knew better than to be out in that heat. Did I mention that our mum hated drinking water? We were very, very thirsty. The landscape was also parched and barren, unattended diggers and girders breaking up a scene that was otherwise beige-post-apocalypse. Our toes were caked in dust, so we could only perceive their sunburn by the pain.

Trying to cheer everyone up a bit and distract from the fact that, even having gone no distance, we were definitely lost, our mother started to describe a radio play she had heard about a care home which turns out to be purgatory; and as impossible as this sounds, her narration went on much longer than the play itself.

We finally got back to a hotel that turned out not to be ours, but they gave us a lift because we looked dusty and crazed, like legionnaires. From the salvation of the minivan, we probed for some small sign that our mum realised this hadn’t been a good day. “Tomorrow,” she said, “we should definitely wear socks.”