The Travel Itch.

From being a child, 'foreign' people and places fascinated me. What is that I wonder. Did it come with mother's milk? Was it imprinted in my DNA? Even before mum died suddenly leaving 3 little girls behind, I was always running ahead wanting to see what was next, what was 'over there'. That's why I never appeared on family photos walking along the sea front of Mablethorpe. But it's also true that with the new family arrangements came discontent and unhappiness. The outside world looked infinitely better than the one I was experiencing at the time.

Whatever it was, the opportunity to travel was a major motivator in my becoming a nurse. British nurses were welcome anywhere in those days. I had dreams of being a ship's nurse but by the end of training, I came to realise that being cooped up on a liner with 'dried arrangements' (as my friend David loved to call his elderly customers) holding heads over buckets and bandaging the odd sprain was not exciting enough.

 In fact by the end of training I was sick of anything to do with hospitals and, with my friend Val cashed in all 44.00 pounds of superannuation and went hitchiking round Europe. (An account of this journey appears in the yet to be published memoir 'Continental Shift.') To get the money to return home we worked as housemaids for Army personnel in the Westfalia district of Germany. It took five months to accumulate enough to fly home, my first commercial flight. I had put on 20 lbs due to the crashing boredom of vacuuming clean floors and dusting pristine sufaces every day, comforting myself with great slabs of Cadbury's chocolate and far too many delicious German cherry tarts 'mit sahne.'

Upon returning to my chosen career, I lost the extra weight in 2 weeks, thankful to be back among the bedpans and sutures. But the itch to travel never disappeared. Within 6 months I'd moved to another city in the UK to do midwifery training. That is a tale for another day.