Ok, it wasn’t quite solo but when you’re a 14-year-old girl flying to Italy, a travelling companion who is also a 14-year-old girl doesn’t count. Not only were we flying alone, we didn’t know the people who’d be meeting us at the other end. We weren’t 100% sure there would be anyone to meet us at the other end. And this is in the days before teenagers had their own mobile phones. All I had in case of an emergency was a handful of traveller’s cheques hidden in a moneybelt, along with my passport, which made it very uncomfortable to bend down. In hindsight, those cheques were no use at all in an emergency since they were meant for buying emergency flights and we had no way of doing that.
I look now at my older Guides and younger Rangers and it’s unimaginable, two of them flying off alone to the toe of Italy, changing planes alone in Rome and Milan on the way and the way back respectively. No airline accompaniment, no flight attendants looking out for us, no one making sure we got through these foreign airports ok.
My friend Cat came into school one day with a leaflet she’d found through the local wildlife trust, advertising a raptor protection camp in southern Italy and we declared there and then that we were going. Never mind the detail that we didn’t so much as have our own passports back in those days, that neither of us had ever flown alone before or that we were fourteen. Our parents got onto the logistics: organising passports, booking flights with actual paper tickets through actual travel agents, sorting out traveller’s cheques and E111s and in my case, opening my first ever bank account so I had access to money more readily. I have a dim memory of becoming a named user on my dad’s credit card for emergencies but that memory may be wrong because I think you have to be eighteen for that.
The big day didn’t begin brilliantly. Our Heathrow-Rome plane was delayed, meaning we would miss our connection to Reggio Calabria. Fortunately there was a Rome flight just leaving. No goodbyes; we were in the air twenty minutes after walking through Heathrow’s front door.
We survived Rome. I have no idea how because it was the first time I’d ever been on a plane, ever seen the inside of an airport and I was fourteen. But we navigated the airport alone (no accompanied minors here, we were left to our own devices), we even got our brand-new passports stamped, posed next to a logo’d window and successfully got on the right plane for the next leg of the journey.
The second flight was better than the first. It hadn’t been a panicked rush to get on board and our seats were – as planned – next to each other, a luxury we hadn’t been able to have from London. I admit, in the shock of it all, finding myself very suddenly alone on the plane, I’d cried a bit.
At Reggio we were indeed met, by one of the adults from the raptor protection camp we were going to. His name was Christophe, he was German and he drove us down the coast to the campsite – not tents, or even caravans but two-bedroom bungalows. Cat and I, as the youngest campers by far, and the only English speakers, had one to ourselves. Did we have a key? Did we keep the door locked day and night? I honestly don’t remember.
Yes, we were the youngest. This was a camp for students of the university age group, not the high school age group. The next youngest person there was four or five years older than us, which is a lot when you’re only fourteen. There were people there from Germany, Italy, Malta, one from Finland and one from… I can’t remember where but I remember his name was Falco.
We spent a week there, mostly sitting on an abandoned military camp overlooking Sicily, monitoring the migration of honey buzzards. Not that either of us saw any. We actually had a lot of trips out, so counting on my fingers, we didn’t seem to spend as long at the military camp as I thought we did at the time. Christophe took us out to see the delights of Reggio Calabria and bought us ice cream. We had a morning visiting a bird sanctuary on Sicily and then an afternoon loose in Medina (two fourteen-year-olds, unsupervised and alone in a foreign city!). We went to… well, I can’t remember that either. I remember climbing up the side of a mountain in thick snow and foggy conditions that may have been a blizzard but I have no idea what we did at the top, although I know we had a hot chocolate at the bottom of the mountain. It was seven degrees outside and the hot chocolate was so thick I could stand the spoon up in it. It’s the hot chocolate I have measured every hot chocolate since by. We went to the abandoned village of Pentedattilo (Cat and I still argue periodically over whether that means Five Feet or Five Fingers and although I know now that I’m wrong, I still stick to my guns) and to the beach town of Scilla. We had a barbecue on the beach. I have a dim and vague memory of sitting on the roof of a light Mediterranean house while one of the Maltese students played Wonderwall on a guitar but I also dimly remember being able to see Africa in the distance and a map has since shown me that this is utterly impossible.
We spent one afternoon sitting in Christophe’s car by the side of the road while the adults and the Italian police dealt with a poacher using a recording of a quail to entrap other quails. Christophe had a book in German on the back parcel shelf and we scoured it for the longest compound word we could possibly find. We perfected the art of “closed-eye drawings” on that afternoon.
And then we flew back. Christophe delivered us safely to the airport, after extorting us to hurry up with breakfast or we would “lose the plane”. He would leave without us and we would “have to go by feet” – two phrases that have to this day never left my vocabulary. Changing planes at Milan held no terror for us by now. In fact, we had such a long time to wait between planes that we sat and played closed-eye drawings until we ran of things to draw. Both planes ran to time, there was no panic here, we could sit next to each other and we were going home. We’d phoned home from the public phone on the campsite once, maybe twice. There were no “We’re on the plane, we’ll be in at whatever o’clock” texts, our parents had no choice but to trust that we were on the planes listed on our actual paper tickets. And we were.
My mum has since said that if I was fourteen again now, there’s no way she’d let me go again.