Are travellers born or made?
Why do some of us have an insatiable quest for elsewhere while others are content at home?
Are travellers born or are they made? It’s a question I’ve been deliberating in this era of clipped wings. Why do some of us have an insatiable quest for elsewhere while others are content at home?
In times past, travel was expensive and holidays were denied to many, especially the post-war generations of the ’40s and ’50s. But I was fortunate. My parents, who were not young when I was born, worked hard and saved well so we could have regular “hols”. In my pre-teen years in England, this meant the ritual of visiting the same Brighton guesthouse every summer – but there was more to it than that.
My father was a foreign correspondent, and a daring one at times. His tales of reporting on the toppling of King Farouk in Egypt in 1952 and (thrillingly) flying to Monaco in 1956 for the wedding of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly became varnished and heightened with each telling and I could never get enough.
My first memory of travelling, the actual setting forth and feeling a certain differentness, is of Paris when I was about four years old. Dad, dashing in a felt fedora, and I went by complicated means on a night train and ferry to France. Peter Edward Bear, tatty from fierce bedtime hugging, would have been with me, because he never left my side until I started school.
I remember people speaking in a strange language that sounded like music. I was allowed a hot chocolate, a confection of such wondrousness I can still almost smell it.
We walked wide streets and there were crowds chattering in those new lilting and rising words and people sitting outside to eat, which surely I found remarkable.
My memories are not of exact details but more the sensory recollections of aromas and sounds and the thrilling revelation that the world was so much bigger than Surrey. I longed for more.
Dad took me back a year or two later and then Paris became an obsession in my teens – learning French a commitment, sitting still not an option.
When Dad passed away in 2008, I trawled through his scrapbooks and found a feature on the exiled Windsors in their villa in the Bois de Boulogne. Is that where we visited on the Paris trip? The date seemed about right. “Didn’t even offer a bloody cup of tea,” he’d pencilled across the newsprint.
I can’t remember and now he’s gone. But I sense it was that one day in Paris when a seed of inquiry and restlessness was sowed that was to flourish and grow untamed.