“We’re going to Italy!” we said.
“OK,” our parents said.
Not “No, you’re not, you’re fourteen years old,” – but we were. I was fourteen and my best friend Catherine was also fourteen and the plan we’d hatched was to fly to Italy, just the two of us, to join a raptor protection camp populated by strangers. Neither of us had our own passport, because this was early 2000 and children could still just be handwritten into the back of their parents’ passports. Neither of us had a mobile phone, because fourteen-year-olds just didn’t back then. We didn’t know who’d be picking us up at the airport nor where they’d be taking us for a week. And the “protection” part of the camp was against the Sicilian mafia.
If your fourteen-year-old daughter proposed this, it would be a flat no, right?
I cannot fathom why our parents said yes but they did.
First things first was to get our own passports. Second was to go to an actual travel agent, and upstairs for the first time ever to the flight centre (which I was disappointed, if not entirely surprised, to find wasn’t an airport) to book actual paper tickets which came in a fat packet in the post a couple of weeks later. Here we had another complication: there are no direct flights from the UK to Reggio di Calabria, right on the toe of Italy’s boot. We would have to change planes, all on our own, in Rome on the way and in Milan on the way home. Oh, and I’d never been on a plane. Well, not since I was about eighteen months old. Catherine had been on a family holiday or two to Greece and was therefore the expert.
I remember organising emergency access to money. I had a bundle of traveller’s cheques in a hidden moneybelt, although no idea what to do with them. I also had a card in case we needed to pay for new flights in an emergency. I can’t think what card – neither of us had our own bank account or a job and in the days pre- contactless, or indeed pre-chip and PIN, just going off with Dad’s credit card wouldn’t have been an option.
Our parents took us off to Heathrow knowing that the next they’d hear of us would hopefully be in a week when we stepped out of Arrivals – or when we didn’t. We might send postcards but if everything went to plan, we’d probably arrive home before they did. But they didn’t even get a proper goodbye. We reached Heathrow to find our Rome plane was delayed, meaning we’d miss our connection to Calabria. With no idea who would be meeting us or how to contact them, the only option was to run for an earlier plane. And so within twenty minutes of walking through Heathrow’s front door, we were in the air. I doubt this had ever been achieved before or ever since.
As introductions to flights go, it was a bit of a baptism of fire. Instead of sitting together in the seats we’d booked, we were thrown into whichever seats were available a literal few minutes before departure – it’s only now that it occurs to me that they probably held that plane for us. I cried halfway to Rome and then Catherine, in the guise of an angel, escaped her seat and came to find me. Someone who knew what was going on! My accomplice on the adventure! And she came bearing magazines!
I don’t remember having trouble finding our second plane in Rome. We took matching photos against the Rome Airport logo on a big glass window, got our scheduled plane sitting together to Reggio and the next thing I clearly remember is being met by a pleasant German man called Christophe who had a navy blue Opal Corsa.
To this day, I don’t know where he took us. It was a kind of holiday camp by the beach, with a main road immediately behind and above our white private bungalow and a petrol station visible from the window. I assume we either all went to one bungalow for meals or ate outside – this is ringing a tiny faint bell in the back of my brain. The only food I remember is picking up a massive bag of oranges on our first morning and a big crate of bread, which didn’t really fit in the car. The smell of orange blossom still reminds me of this trip
I thought every day went much the same way. We’d get in Christophe’s car and go off to an abandoned military base that we called Campo Calabro (I think this was Forte Gulli, former military “board” now turned public park and “cultural experimentation” area), overlooking the Straits of Messina, to watch for migrating honey buzzards. That was the main aim of the camp and certainly the part Catherine and I were there to do. We were expecting other “students” and we got them – in the form of young adults of college or university age, not “pupils” or “schoolchildren” like the two of us, over a year from our GCSEs. We were the youngest by a long way. I suspect that’s why we were pretty much in Christophe’s care 24/7.
But we didn’t do a lot of birdwatching. We played in and around the empty military structure, we invented the game “closed-eye drawings” (Catherine invariably won because she was always better than me at drawing and is now an artist, setting up a gallery show literally as I write this) and we generally enjoyed ourselves as day after boring day went by on that base.
Or did it? We had at least three days out, maybe four. That doesn’t leave a lot of time out of a week to be bored at Campo Calabro. We had a day at Pentedattilo, an abandoned hillside town that I swore meant “Five Feet”. Catherine was equally certain it was “Five Fingers” and in hindsight, she was right. We also went to the beach town of Scilla, which is 45 minutes away, right on the opposite side of the peninsula. Was there a raptor- protecting reason for this trip? Not as far as I can see.
Another day we went to a bird sanctuary – ah, this one had a purpose! – up a very snowy mountain in a white-out fog. We drove up it but I also remember the whole gaggle of us climbing up a snowy bank. It was 7⁰ at the foot of the mountain and we had hot chocolate to warm us up, so thick that the spoon almost stood up by itself in the cup. This may have been the same day as the Pentedattilo/Scilla trip but my 35mm film photos didn’t come with metadata so twenty-four years on, I can’t check.
One day we all took the ferry over to Sicily – this may have been the bird sanctuary day, but it wasn’t the mountain day – and were let loose in Messina for a few hours. Two fourteen-year-olds alone in a Mafia city! According to my photos, we saw a monument and a cathedral and then made a can of Sprite and a cup of hot chocolate last us an hour. I still have the straw in my scrap box. We had Christophe’s phone number written in my notebook along with the word DUOMO, which is presumably where we later met back up with Christophe but if anything had gone wrong, I have no idea how we’d have used that number. It would be at least another year before either of us got our own phone and another several before we had roaming enabled.
On our penultimate day, Christophe took us into Reggio and we went to a museum and had an ice cream. That’s it, that’s all I remember of the region’s capital. We finished our week with an afternoon on the beach behind the camp and someone playing guitar and pointing out Africa on the horizon. I’ve looked at a map since then and even if we were on the right bit of the toe, the Libyan coast was at least four hundred miles away, impossible to see even if we sat on the bungalow’s roof, which I probably only imagined anyway.
But I’ve left something out, saved it for last – the afternoon we took on the Mafia! One of their poaching techniques was to play the sound of birdsong to lure birds in so they could catch them. I think these were smaller birds than honey buzzards – quails, maybe. Well, one of the adults on the camp found or heard reports of a tape machine and off we went in Christophe’s car to catch the poachers red-handed!
That is, the adults did.
Catherine and I sat in Christophe’s little car by the side of the road for hours, eating biscuits, looking for the longest word in Christophe’s German novel on the back parcel shelf, trying on each other’s sunglasses and doing endless closed- eye drawings. I dimly remember that we were waiting for the police, who I suspect had little interest in poaching and even less interest in tackling the Mafia. I don’t remember the outcome. I remember being bored.
And at last we flew home. Nothing went wrong except that Christophe bought us ice cream at the airport and Catherine’s fell clean off the cone and onto the floor with a splat. We changed at Milan and got our brand-new passports stamped – more biscuits and closed-eye drawings as we waited. And then we were back at Heathrow, alive, well and on time, to be picked up by our parents who had been mad enough to let us go.
We used it for our Trident Gold, a certificate a bit like a mini Duke of Edinburgh’s Award where you had to complete a certain number of hours of volunteering, three weeks of work experience and a personal challenge; a photographer from the local paper came into school to take pictures of us pretending to look through binoculars, and we had to do a talk about the trip to the incoming year 10 parents – by far the scariest part of the whole thing. No wonder I had no fear of roaming Switzerland on my own during my year abroad as a language student six years later – I’d had a good start on my solo travel career and if we could manage Italy, we could manage anything.
