On three occasions, the climax of my school year is the
summer trip abroad. Abroad is already magical as a word. The idea is to get to
know places and people who are not British. Is the message to be that we are
glad to be home again?
So perhaps it is because the two teachers who take us get
their trip free? Nothing in this world would make me take a group of teenagers
anywhere, though if they were all like me and half the other girls they would
behave extremely well most of the time.
How parents can let a teenage girl sally off to foreign
parts without making the slightest attempt to point out the dangers and provide
tips on avoiding the pitfalls is a puzzle to me. But that’s how it was in my
case. They relied on my caution, I suppose, and I had plenty of that.
On reflection, the three trips had a lot in common. Though
individually they were probably unique at the time, they have become a jumbled
series of exploits in my memory, not least because of the first timid taste of
honey I experience thanks to the distance between me and my all-pervading Mama,
who is determined to protect me from the unmentionable, whatever that might be,
except when logistics make even that impossible, in which case I am exhorted to
‘be good’, the meaning of which advice I do not discover until several years
later, when the advice is edited to ‘If you can’t be good, be careful’, but
never actually explained in words of one syllable, and I’m certainly not
asking.
I am tall and fair-haired, and have quite a round face and
the light skin of a Scandinavian. I could also be Yugoslavian, I’m told, or
Dutch. I have never seen myself as anything but a Doris Day look-alike,
actually. When I get to Germany, about 10 years later, I realise that I fit in
with the Germans, too, because they seem to have more tall genes than the
British, and oh joy, the clothes are long enough. Until I leave home, I have
been rigged out in a school uniform and cursed with various items of Sunday
best, usually chosen by Mama on the basis of two criteria only: they have to be
bargains and there has to be room to grow into them. However, growing into things is already
difficult if they were made for shorter girls. The endemic British schoolgirl
was several inches shorter than me. School blazers invariably had sleeves to
fit other arms. The answer used to be to buy larger sizes, which would actually
have meant my expanding sideways too. I’m glad I was an avid tennis-player at
the time, so I got my share of running around using up calories.
The first scuffle with foreign parts takes me to Amsterdam,
where I am of course instantly taken for a local. Typical for the run-ups to
these trips, we have had no preparation apart from being told not to buy
alcoholic drinks on the boat, not to smoke, not to take large amounts of pocket
money and not to talk to strangers, all of which advice I obey but no one else
seems to.
We speak no Dutch but expect everyone to speak English,
which fortunately most of them do. My struggles to fend off foreign visitors
asking for directions with the aid of a phrase book are hilarious. We wander
round Amsterdam in a group clutching lunch boxes and have skirmishes with the
local culture. But we could be in Blackpool for all the mind-broadening effect
it has on us.
I remember some jaunts in flat boats on the canals and trips
in a coach to somewhere where they grow tulips by the acre and to Edam, where
the inescapable, pungent smell of cheese at various stages of manufacture is
all-pervading. The visit to Edam is also memorable because the girls presenting
the cheeses could all be my sisters.
We visit the Rijksmuseum and the women on the portraits look
like my relations. We cross the Zuider Zee on a boat and dress up in Dutch
national costume and I look like something off a commemorative plaque. I find
myself posing for tourists wanting a snapshot of a “real” Dutch girl. I expect
people still remember the nice Dutch girl who spoke perfect English.
By the time we set off for home, I have decided that Vincent
van Gogh – in front of whose paintings I have stood mesmerized - is my
favourite painter, with Rembrandt a close second. In my suitcase is a chunk of
smelly cheese and a pair of clogs. My pocket money hasn’t stretched to more.
Abroad is nice.
As it transpires, I don’t return to Holland for another
decade, but two years later – and I am now a young lady of nearly sixteen, the
school trip goes to Switzerland, and I get a second initiation into continental
flair.
I remember the train journey being interminably long and
spent in a packed carriage trying to survive the fooling around of my
classmates, who don’t seem to get tired. Quite a few now have steady boyfriends
and their parents would not sleep peacefully in their beds if they knew what
their offspring did when beyond parental control. I would like to have a
boyfriend, but all the boys I like are already taken and the ones who seem to
fancy me don’t appeal to me at all. So I remain single, sober and unsullied,
which is exactly how Mama wants and expects me to be to my dying day.
In Switzerland – the French part, so we can, theoretically,
improve our language skills - we stay in a wooden chalet hotel high in the Alps
in a place called Champery, which is the next best thing to heaven. The bedroom
walls of our chalet are all lined with wood and the floorboards creak, and for
the first few days I can still feel the motion of that interminable train
journey. It’s rather unpleasant, like being drunk, I suppose. The heady Alpine
air does the rest. Swimming in the icey water of the public swimming baths with
the midday sun pelting down and ice-capped mountains wherever you look is
unforgettable. We are expected to climb some of those peaks, I understand.
Well, not exactly climb. We get into ski lifts and are hoisted away above the
clouds. In the evenings we eat Swiss home cooking and walk up and down the
village main street in our best frocks. Some make more of their freedom by
creeping out at night for revelries of various kinds that I do not share, since
I know not what they are and, as usual, never think to ask.
The whole Swiss adventure and the journey home at the end of
it leave me so exhausted that I sleep round the clock twice. I am still single,
sober and unsullied.
Paris is my third and last continental destination under the
auspices of school travel. We are now coming up to our final school year and
most of us look grown up even if our behaviour is still more juvenile than
sophisticated. The boys who survived without apprenticeships and are going to
have academic careers one day, so are still at school, and a few of the girls who
also stayed the at school beyond the legal leaving age have already gathered
valuable experience of alcohol and make the most of the free flow at every café
and pub. Most of them have also had experience of sex, though in those days
that was a risk since the anti-baby pill had only just been invented. However I
remember one girl had parents who were chemists so I suppose the pills could be
obtained. I’ve no idea if they were. Again, no one asked me if I’d like one.
In Paris, we sleep in dormitories at a boys’ boarding school
round the corner from the Champs Elysées, which rather limits the scope of
those there for erotic adventures, and we are forced to squat over holes in the
ground for toilets and drink coffee out of thick pudding basins. I can’t
remember anything else much, except that the washing facilities looked like the
troughs into which my uncle put special protein nuggets for the cows to eat
while they were being milked. Clandestine arrangements are almost out of the
question in that environment, but the coffee is delicious. In fact, I can live
with everything except those holes in the ground.
Supervised by the two maiden aunt French teachers, one the
uncherished Miss Owens and the other a dithering, fearful spinster of uncertain
age and devoid of even a vestige of self-confidence, both write caution in
large letters and rule by threat, so our scope for taking the initiative is
somewhat narrow in all spheres.
The teachers are justifiably nervous. We are to stay
together but boys separate from the girls, and on no account to go off on our
own. That works well for about the first 24 hours. After that it is mayhem. We
come and go at will and the two ‘Madame’s, as they like to be called because of
us being in Paris France, resort to paying only lip-service to their raison d’ệtre and making copious notes
that are to be held against us should anything really catatonic happen.
The fact is that those madams don’t really care what happens
as long as they are not blamed for it. They are getting their Paris holiday
free and – in our view - the best thing they can do is mind their own business
and get on with their own tourism. Anyway, the group is self-supervising. Not
many of us are really precocious enough
to flaunt the ‘no sex please, we’re British’ code. Well, not so as you’d
notice.
Our visit to the Louvre that, as all excursions, starts as a
group event is probably my best personal triumph, if you can call it that. I
linger for too long in front of some exhibit or other and to my surprise
discover that everyone, including the Madames, has disappeared. Instead of
looking for them, I abscond. I slip out of the Louvre by a different exit to
the one we came in by and roam around all the places I have read about in my
little guide-book, most of which have been declared no-go zones by the Madames.
Hours later I arrive back at our school lodgings to be greeted by screams and
shouts of where have I been and what did I think I was doing? I’m impressed and
a little flattered. They really have been nervous. A boy from the science class
smiles at me. I instantly fall in love.
That moment of infatuation is really the clue to the success
of that Paris trip. Paris is the best city for lovers and I am now one of them.
If I have ever doubted this emotion I am having to eat my words. I am dizzy
with excitement that someone has noticed me at last in a way that does justice
to the trouble I now take over the way I look. No matter that I would really
have preferred to be noticed by one or two of the others in the group, preferably
the taller ones. I cannot choose, but I have at last been chosen.
My admirer is nice. He pays for my soft drinks and holds my
hand. When we take our magical evening trip down the Seine in a boat that looks
like a Venetian vaporetto but bigger, he rests his arm on my shoulder and a
shiver of delight shoots down my spine and up again. In retrospect, it was all
a bit tame, not in the least like any of the torrid romances that I have poured
over in Woman’s Own, but beggars can’t be choosers. Notre Dame is lit up like a
Hollywood film set. The Seine gleams in the reflected light. I wish the night
would never end.
But it does, of course.
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