Family endurance tests: Summer holidays took on a different meaning when the children came too, says Margaret Maxwell

I WENT to Marbella for three days last month. On my return, I needed two weeks in bed to recover. While Britons spent most of June sweltering in the 80s, the Costa del Sol, while I was there, was shrouded in damp mist - think of a bad British March.

The rain blew down in horizontal sheets and the only hot place in our five-star hotel was the sauna. I came back wrecked, with a bad chill. Rain and seaside make a depressing couple: abroad they seem even worse.

The incident served to cast a deepening shadow over my impending summer break, even before scenes of French lorry drivers flashed on to the screen. For some years now I have noticed that these important and expensive summer breaks do not run true to plan. I cannot think of a single holiday since I have had children from which I have returned rested and refreshed. It might have been a break from work and home, but increasingly it has come to represent an endurance test.

I have been asking my friends, all of whom have young children, what they feel about holidays. The most positive response was that holidays are no longer a rest, just different. One said that was why they saved up to go skiing, because it kept everyone busy. A high-flying career woman, a mother of two, said she always fell ill during the first week of her summer holiday, and that was why she had to take three weeks to get any benefit at all. Another friend said it was while she and her husband were on holiday that they decided to get a divorce.

I can clearly identify the moment when holidays changed into stressful ordeals. I had had my first child, who was just toddling, and we rented a glorious farmhouse in Tuscany. But the antique terracotta floor tiles were uneven, and tripped her up. The unguarded stone stairs presented a potentially lethal drop on to more of those nasty hard tiles. The picturesque first- floor balcony, where we were supposed to view the sunset while sipping our gin, had a horribly low wall and another sheer drop. The charming olive grove garden around us was steeply terraced: to a one-year-old it was as inaccessible as the Alps.

Taking the cue that one had to adjust one's ambition and lower one's sights, we tried family holidays in Britain. It was certainly cheaper. But it was also profoundly depressing to be refused entry to a good seafood restaurant - and to be deprived of Cornish lobsters - because of being accompanied by two small children.

I have an abiding image of this phase in my life. I unpacked a picnic on a beach where the wind was brewing. I turned my back for a second to hold on to a beach ball. When I turned round, the entire cold chicken - our lunch - was coated with sand. I have also noticed that when you rent a seaside house in Britain it is rarely as well equipped as your home, making it more difficult to fend for your family when, lacking dishwashers and tumble dryers, it is pouring with rain and freezing cold.

So we next spent a fortnight at a grand hotel south of Naples with three swimming pools. As we arrived, one child went down with chickenpox: as she recovered, the second one contracted it. On arrival back at Gatwick, the airport authorities (tipped off by the airline) would not let us in until a doctor had checked all of us. We must have looked a gruesome sight. He gave the children some pink medicine and me a big spoonful of tonic.

Last summer we tried again, nothing but relentless. But the villa advertised by a reputable agency was actually where the owner stayed. We were put in a kind of converted adobe hut in his massive garden. This was five yards from a palatial hen coop which also contained a flock of geese. When the guard dogs, which were unleashed at night, bounced up against the coop, all the geese woke up and honked furiously.

We lost so much sleep that we managed to drop the car keys in the sea. This being southern Italy, it took five days for a spare pair to arrive. We were stranded because no one runs minicabs there: the only way to make money, they say, is to own a restaurant. When we came to leave, my weary husband walked out of the adobe hut, turned his foot on the step and broke a bone.

And this summer? Well, it's back to Italy in a touching display of the triumph of hope over experience. The only certainty about it all is that I know I will need another holiday as soon as I get home.