A Young Traveller

Merry Christmas is the theme worldwide.

Walking Rusty is still required twice a day. 

He likes going outside the grounds on his morning walk only, in the afternoon or evening he drags me round the apartment complex. . He wakes me up before six and out we go.  

The rest of the day if we go out once, twice or thrice he does not want to leave the grounds. I try to get him out but he just puts his head and stops if we don’t follow his route. 

So I photograph what I see. I bring this up as I don’t have many photographs from my youthful travels, so I figure pictures of what I see will have to substitute.

I have a collage of memories of my childhood journeys not least because my mother was Italian and my father was British so every summer my sisters and I decamped to Italy for a few months of freedom as privileged members of the landed gentry in Umbria.

I flew in commercial aircraft when they were propellor powered, I drive across Europe with my mother in her Triumph convertible at a time when freeways were rare and passports were checked and pondered at European borders. It’s little wonder I suppose that travel has never seemed unusual or dangerous to me.

I was 11 when my parents got divorced in the summer of 1969. A boy at my boarding school invited me to India to visit his family who lived on a yea plantation in Assam. Imagine my surprise when my father agreed instantly. I didn’t realize at the time that he was glad to have me out of the way while he split our family up. 

I listened to the moon landing on a scratchy radio while living in a colonial style tea plantation run by his British father as Britain still ruled India and all within sight of China and Burma so far lost to the world my friend was obliged to sleep at boarding school stay with relatives and only come home in summer. 

I went on safari, I watched women pick tea and elephants carry logs and I learned to swim. In Calcutta I saw my first dead bodies being picked up off the streets and I watched bodies burned in funeral pyres on the banks of the sacred River Ganges. I was far too young for such experiences especially as when I got home my family was split in two and my sisters carried the belief it was all my fault. Being in India had been a refuge from the storm and as much as I disliked the noise and smells, still vivid to me, I had spent a month hardly noticed in that alien world. 

After that I flew back and forth three times a year between London and Rome at a time when air travel was reserved for the upper classes. My mother a loud vivacious Italian woman made friends with the customs officers and met me on the tarmac like a diplomat and whisked me past tedious passport controls, limitations reserved for normal travelers. It made me horribly self conscious. 

When I traveled no one saw me, I was anonymous. When I arrived I became categorized and accountable and I always felt, rightly or wrongly, judged. At home the judgement was always negative. 

My mother and my elder twin sisters all dressed up

And then my mother died and I was alone in a sea of negativity. My motorcycle saved me.