I went on my first school trip abroad in 1998. We live on the south coast of England – and when I say “on the south coast”, I literally mean that half of us lived closer to the ferry than to the school and when we got to France, it was the same thing with the French families. Poole to Cherbourg French exchange: logistically easier than any other exchange in the country.
We’d been assigned penpals a while ago and now we were matched up again, ideally with our penpals but not always. Mine wasn’t. I’d been writing to Elodie but I was paired for the exchange with Julie. We went over to stay with them and they came over to stay with us. I can’t remember which went first but as we went in June I suspect they came to us first. It kind of feels unimaginable now to allow your Year 8 child going to another country on their own for the first time to stay with strangers but I’m pretty sure my school still does exchanges. I don’t ever remember learning much French from them, though.
I remember very little about this trip but I recently rediscovered a scrapbook I made and then subsequently pulled apart. I can see that it was written on the old Amiga computer, I can see that I removed all the postcards, which I presume are safe in my postcard box. But it is full of leaflets and tickets and cute comments so let’s have a look.
We went on the Barfleur, obviously (obviously to me; that boat has been plying the Poole-Cherbourg route for longer than I’ve been alive – well, the website says it was launched in 1992 so maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration). It’s 157,65 metres long, according to the scrapbook which tells me that my original source was French because in English we’d call that 157.65 metres long. We had our own large room at the bottom of the boat and we were allowed in the on-board shop but not the bar or duty-free. No, of course we weren’t – we were twelve/thirteen years old, although apparently I did manage to get my hands on a booklet of duty free special offers because it’s taped into the scrapbook. We left at 4pm English time and arrived 9pm French time, which is a sailing time of three hours.
Next page: We went to the Bayeux Tapestry and stopped at Arromanches on the way back. I have a student ticket for the tapestry stuck in the book plus a ticket for an audio guide and then a ticket for the 360 cinema at Arromanches. There’s a booklet about the D-Day landings and the Battle of Normandy on this page. I’m not sure which place it’s attached to. Opposite is a map of Arromanches port showing the artificial reefs, an Arromanches 360 leaflet and a gap where there was clearly a postcard – having gone through my postcard box, it was a nice sea view over the bay with the artificial port just peeking out of the right hand side. I was very taken with the cinema – see if you can make more sense of this than I can: “Some bits are parts of Now when you’re flying or on a boat or in a car”. I take it this means that it feels like you’re flying or in a boat or in a car. I certainly approved – the next bit is “It’s the most amazing place to visit”.
Over the page is a huge A3 poster of the cinema and then a double-sided info sheet about the American Battle Monuments Commission.
Next page, mysteriously, is totally blank. Opposite is the page where we went to Mont St Michel. There are gaps where three postcards have been removed – back in the day, I attached them into the scrapbook with homemade yellow photo corners. We have Mont St Michel during an evening lighting storm, reflected perfectly in the water. We have it from a distance on a grey day with the tide halfway out and we have a lovely portrait purple-tinted evening close-up reflected again in the water. Then there’s a school group ticket and a short paragraph about visiting it, including “the tide comes in faster than a galloping horse”.
Apparently it took two hours to get to Mont St Michel so we stopped in Coutances. I have a flyer for a creperie and a little tourism leaflet on the town.
Then there’s some details about my exchange family – their address, a paragraph about the family (Julie (12), Elodie (15), Pierre-Olivier (10), Snoopy (5; dog), Hercule (2; goldfish), a drawing of their house and a menu of presumably that day, including that I had a chocolate bar and some chocolate milk in bed and apparently lemonade for breakfast.
After that, there’s a double page of little paper bags, presumably the ones that contained the postcards I removed.
On the next page there’s the tag from a string of strawberry sweets – I can just about remember them and it makes my mouth hurt to think about – plus a short letter from Bayeux thanking me for my visit and offering services like sending brochures to me.
And then we get the interesting personal stuff. There’s a timetable for our swimming pool in Cherbourg, which suggests that we went swimming. There’s my identity card – we went on a group passport because that was fine in 1998 but we needed an ID card each, so there’s me, aged 12, either trying not to giggle at the passport photo machine or very shy about the whole thing. And there’s a piece of yellow card with emergency mobile numbers for both our teachers and the teachers at the twin school. In a box under my bed is a whole pile of those cards – I went on six school trips abroad in total and we had a card for each trip. I’m interested to notice that in 1998 this particular UK mobile number started with 0385 instead of 07xxx. I think I do remember the 07 pattern coming in.
The other interesting thing I have , which you don’t get to see, is the group passport – it’s an A4 piece of paper, or at least our copy of it is, with the full names, dates of birth and places of birth of all the participants of the trip. I can see that my best friend was removed shortly before the trip happened and then added back on at literally the last minute. I can see enough information to steal the identity of 30-odd of my old schoolmates. There’s one in particular who was born in Bristol and I’m glad to be able to verify that because there’s something about Winchester that reminds me of that fact. I can only conclude that when I was much younger, I got Bristol and Winchester mixed up at some point.
What I don’t have are any photos of this trip. We used film cameras in those days and I either didn’t have my own or wasn’t trusted with my parents’ at that age. By the time I went off to Italy and Paris just two years later, I did or was – I well remember taking three whole rolls of film with me for both of those. Imagine being limited to 108 photos. I can take 108 in a day now.
You may know by now that I like scrapbooks and I think my first school trip abroad is definitely something to keep a book about. This one needs some surgery. It’s all stuck together with sticky tape, which isn’t designed to survive twenty years. I’d like to move it all into a new book but I’m not going to, not yet. I’m just going to replace the crumbling tape with washi tape and glue-dot anything else down so that next time I haul it out, it doesn’t fall apart in my hands. I’m also going to put the postcards back in. The postcard box is great and I like having them accessible but I’ve not opened it in twenty years. I may as well put them in the correct place, like I did with my Russia scrapbook.