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back; but I'm told that the first time my mother left me with my aunts I never so much as asked for her. This was new; there were different, sights & smells to explore. My father's family are a little closer to home, but more spread out. Again there were journeys to visit. Difference was always an enticement.

We often travelled at night and the car-engine is still a lullaby to me. (Don't worry, I don't drive!).

My earliest memories of travelling south were on the buses. I'd sleep most of the way, though we'd be woken for tea and toilets at each of the service stations. We'd get into Victoria at 5 in the morning and have to wait until half-past for the caf to open. It would be an hour or so after that before the Reading B bus was due out. Or if it was a Sunday, we'd have to walk out and round the corner to catch the Green Line. I remember the people, and the smell of diesel. And how big it all seemed.

Later there were family holidayscamping trips around the British Isles. In these days of carbon-footprints the debate rages as to whether we should be exploring the world when we know nothing of our country. I'm lucky. I have seen a great deal of the UK. Not all of it, by a long shot, and my lucky-dip-where-next bag has as many home-grown wishes as far-flung ones. We climbed hills, and dug holes on the beach. I've swum in a freezing cold sea loch and the not much warmer North Sea. We camped in "resorts" and in farmer's fields. We spent one night, one-at-each-corner holding the tent down...and my parents still exchange Christmas cards with a couple they haven't seen since the time 30-years-ago they shared the duty of digging trenches around other folks' tents to take the flood-waters away. That was a camp site I revisited years later with a boyfriendjust before I went down with my first bout of sunstroke.

Any spare afternoon would take us across the moors to the coast, where we'd scrabble for shells and wait to watch the fishing fleet land its catch. The shells are still there; the fleet has gone.

We examined castles and country-houses and roman forts. We learned our kings and queens and the tribes that preceded them. We saw the crown jewels, and the prison cells, and the battlefields.

And we learned to walk and to read timetables. We went without, and indulged in the luxury of having. We learned about bustle, and how to be still.

There were school trips: to Austria; a cruise around the Med which took in Athens, Izmir, Ephesus, Tunis, Cadiz, Corunna; a three-week stay

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