Get your motor running

Maxine Jones has bought a camper van. She tells of her adventures and encounters, in it, in Ireland and abroad. Photographs by Maxine Jones

'A house is like a prison," a traveller woman said on the radio. "I know, I know," I replied. I was driving the van up and down the Stillorgan dual carriageway ßto recharge its batteries, while my three sons attended cubs and scouts. The youngest had left the cassette on overnight after I'd collected him from football training. Initially embarrassed at being collected in something more like an ice-cream van or an ambulance than a family saloon, they had eventually relinquished.

I wasn't sure, at first, how the van, with its pink curtains, would double as a runaround. Several feet higher than in a car, you get a new perspective of the road with unexpected views. I usually feel like singing when I get past third gear. I've never taken to cars – never polished one in my life, yet the van is waxed and tended. Neither have I ever shown much interest in the house, yet the fittings and appliances in the van are a source of fascination.

When neighbours ventured out to look at my new purchase I would turn the tap on and off so they could marvel at the running water, an idiotic grin on my face as if I were a native of some long lost tribe coming across modern conveniences for the first time. The neighbours fell into two distinct camps – those who said they'd love one themselves and those who feared I'd gone beyond the pale. "The kids will love it," the latter group conceded, inwardly shuddering, I suspected, at the thought of enduring such conditions themselves.

I bought the van in mid-December after an obsessive six months' search, clocking up 80 hours on a single internet bill, immersing myself in motorhome magazines and plotting my route back from Germany after deciding that was the only place to buy one. I'd close my eyes and imagine a camper van parked in front of the house and then one day it was there.

This, of course, was not enough. Winter or not, I wanted to go somewhere. And so I subjected the boys to winter camping, waking to frost on the grass. They endured it better than I did. I'd wake up several times in the night, the cold gnawing through to my bones. We travelled to Reading in the lull between Christmas and New Year so the boys could visit their English relatives. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision taken on a wave of excitement about the new purchase. In Banbury where we stopped off, English caravanners had their temporary homes decked with Christmas lights and flashing neon Santas.

In February we went to Fota and stayed on a site in Cork, which was just someone's back garden; the "campers' kitchen" a tiny shed with a corrugated roof, a table and bench. We washed in cold water. Only on the last day did we realise it actually was hot, we just had never let it run long enough to warm up.

I planned Easter – two weeks in the Peak District; and summer – six weeks in France. When there was nothing left to plan, a vacuum opened up. On the road every day is new and fresh. Surprises awaited us, ad-hoc solutions to find, like attaching Velcro to the bottoms of the curtains so they'd stick to the carpet-lined walls and keep out draughts at night. I could envisage a life, when the children were grown, when I would continue in this manner alone, heading south when it got cold, until I grew old.

Life's accessories are reduced to the bare minimum in the van. We leave behind the incomplete games piled precariously on shelves, the deluge of washing to be aired and put away, the marked walls that screamed to be decorated, the dust swelling in corners, the brambly garden, the slowly rotting window frames.

The view from the camper van window can change from mountains to fields to sea at our whim. Some teatimes, if the weather is fine, I pile the boys in the van and fry rashers overlooking the beach at Sandycove, a 15-minute-drive from the house. As soon as we get in the van, the atmosphere changes. Now and then we just sit in it parked in front of the house and absorb this atmosphere – self-contained, disconnected, womb-like. A place apart, like a church.

I overdid it sometimes. Taking four bikes with us to England at Easter wasn't worth the effort and the ancient bike rack collapsed, leaving a scrape down the back of the van (which I immediately tended to with paint). The sites were rule-laden and unfriendly. The campers were hostile to children and most were accompanied by over-pampered pets, whose excrement they religiously removed.

We finished the trip on a bleak sheep farm in Anglesey, where the weather took a turn for the worse and the awning blew down. I vainly tried to fold it up in the wind and rain while the children read comics in the van.

No one really talked to us during the two weeks, apart from one old woman who turned out to be Irish, though she'd lived in Staffordshire since she was 14. She told us something of her life when I complimented her on her little white dog as she passed our van.

"I'm from Tipperary," she said, in a broad English Midland accent. "I've been here 50 year. Me 'usbant, Ron, died of lung cancer two an' 'alf year ago. He were from Stoke on Trent, but 'e loved Ireland. Loved it. Wanted to be cremated an' 'ave 'is ashes scattered round Tipperary."

She explained she was staying in a caravan with her son and his wife. "He's just had a quadruple bypass. Only 47. I learnt about that t' same day I found out Ron had lung cancer. Anyroad, Ron never was buried in Ireland. Me son decided it'd be better to bury 'im 'ere, like, so's someone could visit." She spilled out her regrets and her sadness, then tugged the dog's lead, gave the children a big smile, and was gone.

In the nearby pub we befriended a group of Scottish children. When I was talking to the mother of one of the boys, she mentioned the cost of secondary school uniform for an older son. Later, when I asked the boy about his brother, he said he was dead. The grandmother of the Scottish girls came in and sat in the van with me the next day and told me about her hometown of Kelso. The only other person I had anything like a conversation with was the owner of the pub, who was from Belfast.

As summer nears, the boys aren't quite so ashamed of the van. Their friends are beginning to envy their planned trip to France. Though planned is a bit of an overstatement. I've booked the first site, near Roscoff where we land, and have a ferry booked back from Cherbourg six weeks later.p