It Happened To Me | Alan Copps

A Grand Tour

The day after school broke up for the summer holiday of 1965, I set off on my bicycle, a little more loaded down than usual, along the route I took each day. I cycled straight past the school gates to Hampton Court Bridge where I met my schoolmate Martin, similarly laden. We cycled on for 60 miles that day to Newhaven to catch the ferry for Dieppe.

It was the first time I had ever left Britain, the culmination of months of Saturday work delivering fruit and veg on a heavy iron bike. I’d saved almost all the proceeds. I had nearly £60 in my pocket and was planning to be away for all six weeks of the holiday.

I was 17 and had started talking vaguely to my parents earlier in the year about a sedate tour to see the Chateaux of the Loire – they never had the money for foreign holidays and I didn’t want to alarm them by going too far afield. But as the summer had approached, Martin and I had conceived a more ambitious aim: to visit another school friend, Paul, who would be staying with his Italian family near Venice. As we pedalled through France we decided to go even further, somewhere more exotic. We settled on Yugoslavia, then a mysterious communist country.

We had a youth hostels guide, a map of France, sleeping bags and a groundsheet (but no tent). We flew a small, Union Jack on each bike, a sort of fluttering talisman. People were extraordinarily kind: when we found ourselves at an unsignposted junction on a dirt road in Yugoslavia, a man at a bar spotted the flags, explained in perfect English how he’d fought with the partisans, gave us directions and bought us a drink to set us on our way. When we slept bedraggled in a shop doorway in Germany we were awoken not with demands to move on but with coffee and chocolate rolls delivered by a smiling shopkeeper.

We slept in roadside fields, on park benches, bandstands, beaches, and even a building site where we shared breakfast with the early workers, stopping only about once a week in a hostel for a bath and rare taste of bed.

Most days we picnicked on bread, cheese, fruit and yoghurt, but we also acquired a taste for Italian home cooking thanks to Paul’s aunt. We also discovered Yugoslav kebabs, German sausage and gorged on ice cream everywhere. We enjoyed local wines, and more dramatically plum brandy. We got baked by the sun, soaked to the skin and shivered in the Alpine dusk. We laughed a lot, sang occasionally and lusted after girls, though after about a week we were far too tired, untidy or dirty to achieve any success in that direction. We argued sometimes, splitting up and cycling for days alone before somehow coinciding and going on together.

In the end we cycled in a huge circle round Europe. It took us four days to labour up the Alps to the Col du Mont Cenis, and less than three scary hours to descend at breakneck speed in semi-darkness towards Turin (the brake blocks of my bike burned away and at one hairpin I simply fell off to avoid going over a precipice).

Our return from Yugoslavia took us over the Alps again through Ljubliana, and across Austria, Germany and Luxembourg before heading back to Dieppe in northern France. I realised somewhere on that last leg I was about to run out of money and spent a few cents on a postcard pleading with my parents to send £10 for my return fare post-restante to the last hostel before the coast.

We covered just short of 2,500 miles and had one puncture, ten miles from home when a thorn from a rose hedge went straight through my bald front tyre. I returned seven pounds heavier than I’d set off (all in leg muscle), and with a new-found self confidence. I’d acquired a taste for adventure and travel that I’ve never lost and that motivated me to become a foreign correspondent – a job I’d dreamed of as a child. I worked for the Daily Telegraph and The Times, covered war in Lebanon, terrorism in Italy, natural disasters, riots and strikes. I travelled to Turkey with the Pope and China with the Queen, but I’ve never again seen so much or learned so much about myself in such a short time.