U3A Writing: A Hitch-Hiker's Guide To Europe
Morna Braybrook recalls a trip around Europe in days long before package holidays and mobile phones.
Fifty-seven years on, the journey four of us made around Europe in the summer of I949 seems more of an adventure now than it did when we were planning it, if planning is the right word. We launched into it: three students from Royal Holloway College, London University, at the end of our second year and one ex-school friend, then a student at the Institut Français in London. Two were enrolled for a summer course in France, one was to visit the family in Klagenfurt, Southern Austria, with whose daughter she had made an exchange the previous year, and the fourth came along for the ride(s).
One rucksack each, a small tent to be carried in turns and nebulous arrangements with our families, to be confirmed by us en route, over a period of six weeks or so, about poste restante communications in advance of our arrival in various towns in which we hoped to be deposited by our proposed means of transport: hitch-hiking.
The start of the summer courses set a firm date for the end of the first stage of the trip
We did not start well. After a stormy crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe we waited a long time for the first lift, but eventually progressed inland to spend our first night in the small tent, besieged, as we thought, by buzzing gnats. We found in the morning we had pitched the tent in the dark of the previous night under a buzzing pylon.
The first proper wash we had was in a modest Turkish bath in Rheims and the two summer course candidates should have arrived reasonably clean and on time, while we two others carried on through Switzerland and Austria, sometimes rolling ourselves up in the tent if we were too tired to pitch it, rolling further than we intended down a sloping field on one occasion. I had studied in Graz the previous year and, through friends there, we made the last lap from Graz to KIagenfurt in a British army lorry.
The next stage of the Grand Tour for three of us was to be around Italy, back through France and then home. The fourth member of the group had to go home from Klagenfurt by train, but I went on alone to meet the other two in Venice. We had blithely agreed to meet near the Cathedral in St. Mark's Square on such and such a day, looking out for each other at hourly intervals. I was immensely lucky to find one lift all the way with two Italian businessmen, most concerned to point out that not all Italians were gentlemen, which we did find out later, but by then we were three together again. I spent one night in a convent in Venice before finding the two others in St. Mark's Square.
A hasty exit from the back of a lorry from some less gentlemanly Italians left us minus the small tent and we were camping under the stars in a field near Forli, when the farmer turned up with some workers, all carrying rifles, and conducted us to his farmhouse. It seemed as if the whole village was gathered in the kitchen to view us and an old woman almost wept over us, "Le poverine, poverine!" The farmer's wife packed all three of us into one huge bed for the night.
After that we stayed in youth hostels, which varied from a marble palace built by Mussolini in Florence, to a villa in Rome and the top floor of a hotel on the outskirts of Naples. We dined in ristoranti communali and managed to see what now seems an incredible number of the sights in those towns. The Tower of Pisa was at that time still not leaning over far enough to prevent people from climbing up it, so we did.
We got as far as Genoa before we decided to take the train into France and then spent some idyllic days on the island of Ste. Marguérite off the coast at Cannes, where you could catch fish and octopus to make bouillabaisse in the youth hostel kitchen or on an open fire on the shore. I wonder if the hostel is still there or whether now it has been superseded by a luxury hotel. On a map of that coast I see that the islands off Cannes are called "Lerins" but Ste. Marguérite is what I remember.
Grenoble had a special attraction (later to become a husband) for one of us three so she returned there, leaving only two of us to make the journey home through France. Two Swedish gentlemen took us over the mountain roads from the coast to Clermont Ferrand and we learned that "tingel tangel" means "zig-zag" in Swedish. In Clermont Ferrand news reached us of Sir Stafford Cripps's devaluation of the £ and perhaps the strength of our spirit of adventure had likewise dimmed. Anyway, we decided to take the train again and duly returned as sedate third year students to Royal Holloway College.
