Hazel, 90, Shottermill House, Haslemere
Childhood holidays were spent at Penmaenmawr in North Wales. We travelled by train and it was full of holidaymakers. On one of the journeys, we were waiting to get on the train and my coat slipped out of my father’s arms and landed between the train and the platform. The guard had to come and rescue it.

If the weather was fine, we played on the beach with a bucket and spade. One of the things we loved to do was stack stones into a tower and then throw stones to knock it down. We would also go swimming and the beach was quite safe as it had a gentle slope in the sea. We never needed a watch as we could just look away at the clock tower that was actually for the miners. One of the walks we liked to do was to Echo Rock, and on the last day of the holiday we would walk up to the hill and pick winberries. There were no plastic bags in those days but we saved paper bags. On our return home Mum would make winberry pies for the family.

Jean, Finborough Court, Great Finborough
I was a teacher and my husband was a headteacher. We used to live in school houses and to have a cheap holiday you could swap school houses with another family in a different part of the country. It worked well and we did this several times, staying in counties such as Devon and Northumberland, while families occupied our house in Suffolk.

There were a few surprising incidents in some of the houses where we stayed. On one occasion we had been enjoying the company of a cat, only to find that it had moved in while we were there and didn’t actually belong to the usual tenants. There were some spooky goings-on in another school house when my husband turned round and saw a lady in Victorian dress. She didn’t bother us. We just carried on with our holiday but thought it was amusing when we received a phone call from the people we had swapped with to ask if we had seen anything. She must have been a regular visitor!

Catherine, 95, Bethany Christian Home, Plymouth
I grew up in Preston, Lancashire and was the eldest of five children. My family didn’t have tons of money so instead of going away for a summer holiday we would go on days out to Blackpool. My mother and my aunty would take us by train and they would pack a picnic of ham or bacon sandwiches and bottles of drink.

Mum and Aunty would get a couple of deckchairs and set them on top on the prom while played on the beach below. We would dig in the sand and make sandcastles, swim in the sea and enjoy donkey rides. There used to be a man with a bicycle with a little stall as part of it. It was called a ‘stop me and buy one’ and you could buy ice creams.

Pamela, 81, Milward House, Tunbridge Wells
When I was about 13, I went away to a bungalow we owned in Lydd-on-Sea on the Kent coast. We used to visit the bungalow my mum and I, whilst my dad would be at work. Mum and I sat down on the front of the bungalow in the sun, or we went down paddling during the day. When my dad came back at the weekend, we would visit National Trust places or Tenterden. Because we owned the bungalow we could go on any time we wanted.

Shirley B, 80, Milward House, Tunbridge Wells
When I was 11, I had a pen friend in Germany and the school organised for me to visit her. I started travelling young, and that’s why I’ve always enjoyed travelling.

When I was 25 after my nursing training, I went to Switzerland with a friend. We went up the Jungfraujoch, where they filmed James Bond’s ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. I went to see architectural places and travelled on many mountain railways and funiculars and lake steamers. I really liked their cake shops “Konditorei” and enjoyed the chocolate torte.

Brenda, 83, Milward House, Tunbridge Wells
The only time we went abroad we went to Switzerland with our campervan. It was a youth group holiday and we stayed in a Christian Guesthouse in a village. My favourite thing was the beautiful scenery. The people were friendly. We didn’t sleep in the campervan at night, but we used the kitchen and often did hot drinks in the campervan in the evening. We went up a huge mountain on a cable car, but the boys walked as they always enjoyed walking.