When I was quite young I read a wonderful book by Nevile Shute, ‘A Town Like Alice’, and followed it up by another by the same author, ‘In the Wet’. Each book told about Australia, the other side of the world I grew up in. They fascinated me and I announced to my (astounded) parents that I would be going to Australia when I grew up. Since this was the early 1950s and the UK was broke and travel of that kind in its infancy, they told me not to be silly. We were working class, poor but not desperate, and holidays were taken under canvas travelling in Dad’s little black Ford car. We mainly stayed in the same county, Hampshire, though I have to say there were some lovely places to do. We did The isle of Wight and, the year I was eleven, we ventured into Dorset and stayed in the New Forest. I loved being somewhere different, even then. And often we went on train trips, which fed my love of train travel which lasts even now.

So, I knew I was going to travel, even if my parents didn’t believe me. I got books from the library about Europe, India, the US, which  had been introduced to through books like, ‘What Katy Did’ and ‘Little Women’. And I wanted to go to absolutely every place I read about. I disliked the fact that we couldn’t count on having really warm summer weather, or even really cold winter weather, living as we did on the south coast of England. I wrote to pen pals and hoped one day to visit them. Money continued to be in short supply and I continued to read and dream and plan.

When I was 19 I was invited to join ‘cultural exchange’ involving three cities much damaged by the war: Portsmouth, Rotterdam, (in the Netherlands) and Duisburg, (Germany). The group I was to be part of would travel by sea to Holland where we would be part of a group made up of young people from all three cities. At the same time the same thing was happening in the other cities. In the run up to this holiday (we were assured ti was not a holiday but an important move towards a united Europe) I was almost beside myself with joy that at last I was going to leave the country and go somewhere new.