When I was 19 I bought a return ticket to London, withdrawing all the money I’d saved from my part-time job in a newsagent. The holiday was prompted by meeting a boy from Liverpool who I’d spent six days getting to know on his backpacking trip across Australia. I told my parents it was love. I told anyone who would listen it was love, including him. But within 24 hours of arriving in England to stay with him at his sister’s place in Milton Keynes, it was clear to both of us this was not the love affair for the ages.
Determined not to spend my last teenage year stuck in a suburb in Buckinghamshire, I took off with an Australian friend and we travelled around Europe for months, staying in the cheapest accommodation we could find and living on bread, cheese and the occasional bottle of red.
This was 1990, a time before mobile phones and the internet, when the primary contact with back home was the collection of mail from the general post office using poste restante. I phoned my parents once, reverse charges and it cost them a fortune to tell me that my grandmother had died and I’d missed the funeral.
This was more than 30 years ago and still I remember the prickle of fear as we walked the streets of Florence late at night with our backpacks heavy and nowhere to stay, the smell of snow in the tiny town of Zug outside Zurich, where we drank giant mugs of hot chocolate each morning, and the laughing in Vienna as strands of my frozen hair snapped because I’d underestimated how cold it was and gone out immediately after showering.
Travelling then meant if you lost your traveller’s cheques, you starved until someone could send money from home. And, if the accommodation where you were staying was ridden with bedbugs, you couldn’t just look up nearby places on your phone and book in remotely. You were on your own.
Before I left Mum had sewn me a money pouch to wear around my neck, keeping those traveller’s cheques close. She’d also made me a sleeping sheet so I could avoid unclean bedding. She didn’t want me to go, and these gifts were her way of telling me to have a wonderful time. She’d always liked knowing where I was and what I was up to and suddenly I was heading to the other side of the world with no concrete plans and far too much confidence in my ability to stay out of trouble.
It’s only now, as my 18-year-old daughter prepares to leave on her own gap year trip, that I have more sympathy for what Mum felt. Working multiple jobs and saving every penny, my daughter has researched where to stay, how to get around and what to do when she arrives. She rarely asks for my opinion and I find myself desperately unsure of whether I should wade in or back off.
I want to be supportive but not hovering. I want to be cool but not aloof. I want to be like the perfect travel guidebook, coincidentally open on just the right page, providing the right amount of advice and then closing again before becoming boring.
When she first mentioned gap year travel I was encouraging, wanting her to have her own experiences that shape her. As I had mine. I didn’t let myself dwell too long on the idea of her not being here. Our house has already shrunk in size and soon it will just be me, my son and the cat. And I’m not quite ready for that.
But this trip is not about me missing her, or about reliving my own adventures as a teen, or about proving that I am mother of the year with handy advice to help her plan the safest trip so that I feel reassured.
It is about her.
And I will miss her. And I will message her in the middle of the night telling her I love her. And I will Google how to sew a sleeping sheet and possibly even make her one. And I will slip some extra euros into her pocket as she leaves. But I will not make it all about me.
A friend told me about how she sobbed as she watched her daughter disappear through the customs door and then her phone rang. It was her daughter and they chatted until the plane took off.
This is not 1990 and I am not stuck at home waiting for a letter or a reverse-charge call. I have promised not to bombard her with messages, but at least I know I can text, phone, email, WhatsApp or DM and she’s bound to answer something. Particularly if she’s run out of money.
• Nova Weetman is an award-winning author of books for children and young adults, including The Edge of Thirteen, winner of the Abia award 2022
