It's grown-ups who bustle back from holidays and half-forget them in the rush of daily life. Children inhabit a different world of time and memory. Their lives so far have been short, so a holiday stands out. Even a week can become an episode of importance, fuelling years of memory, imagination and hope.

A childhood holiday is more than just an indulgence: often enough it is a time when new truths are understood in new settings. What to us was yet another beach or midge-ridden campsite may well be, to the unknowing child at our side, a jewel: an amulet to carry through life’s harder moments.

Holidays really matter. It sometimes astonishes me how sharp my own memories are from nearly 50 years ago, and not just the exotic holidays either.

As a travelling diplomat’s child I was lucky to have some wide vistas: to help build a little dam in a Swaziland stream, see dawn on the Swiss mountains and catch mudfish in Thailand. Yet the more prosaic memories are equally sharp. There was the boy at Wissant, on the sandy cold Channel foreshore, who taught me to make a bow and arrow and incidentally how to be friends with a boy who was not my brother.

There was the walk by Hadrian’s Wall in the rain, and the attempt at golf on the St Andrews putting-green when my dad decided to show us his home turf. There was summer as a six-year-old at Thorpeness when I ran away most days with a packed lunch in a spotted hanky and a firm intention of getting to London, and was generally back from the dunes in time for a real lunch.

That vividness is also the reason why, as soon as I found out it existed, I started supporting the Family Holiday Association. Thirty years ago its founders, Pat and Joan Laurance, decided that what struggling families need as much as anything is a holiday.

Sudden unemployment, bereavement, illness and poverty create many needs; but one of them is, simply and frivolously, a break. Stressed parents, child carers, victims of crime, people who live almost impossible daily lives in lousy accommodation, all began to benefit miraculously from their prescription of a week by the sea together, somewhere simple, often in a caravan.

The evidence even from this modest holidaymaking is that family bonds strengthen and children’s eyes are opened to another kind of life and, indeed, to the existence of hope itself. This small pleasure, taken for granted by most of us but denied to two million people each year, has literally changed lives. Some countries recognise this – the French issue “cheques-vacances” as part of welfare. In Britain it took the Laurances to get the beach-ball rolling. And it rolls on. Give it a push, do . . .

— Details: 020-7436 3304, www.fhaonline.org.uk

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