North Africa Letters

In over 70 days away I sent home a total of thirteen letters and postcards and my mother dutifully typed them out and sent copies to my great uncle Sir Stanley Reed, who had helped finance the trip, to Gill Rothwell, and to Michael's mother. She must have sent them the top copies because the copies she kept - in the Arab chest - are poor quality, which caused problems when, recently, I wanted them turned into digital files using optical character reading. The result was about 75% accurate, meaning that a great deal of editing had to be done.

The letters are interesting to read for several reasons. One is that they show how easy it is to do a prolonged journey if the traveller, like Michael and I, has a supreme optimism that nothing will go wrong. In some ways it is also interesting to recall the incidents we omitted so we didn't worry our parents. While such occasions were rare, they were unpleasant and, more important, suddenly exposed our vulnerability. The letters also display a youthful arrogance, an assumption that others are as thrilled by what we were experiencing as we were. So, for example, I felt no compunction in expecting my parents to send additional money to bale me out when funds ran low. Finally, there are places where their tone makes difficult reading. I have to allow that, at the time, I was fresh from public school with a public school sense of superiority. There are phrases that make me cringe but, without the sublime self-confidence, I don't think we would have dared that journey.

The letters bring home how wearying such travelling is. Particularly when hitch-hiking, we never knew, from one day to the next, what would happen or where we would be. We were filthy; we both had cuts in our feet which were infected; we were undernourished; and we became increasingly tired of each other's company. By the end I was longing to be 'home' in England.

The text of the letters can be downloaded as a .pdf file here.

From the letters it is possible to work out where we were each day. However, since the last letter was from Gibraltar, the last few days, through Spain, Andorra and France, were not recorded. The dates are available for download asa .pdf file here.