Travel Biography - Week 27.

Feeling Nostalgic but with Plenty of Sighs.

After arriving home from the second trip across the Atlantic Ocean, there is a feeling of having achieved much, especially outside Europe. First, a three-week visit to the Holy Land and my familiarisation with Middle East culture. Then follows what was before unthinkable, the affordability of flying across to North America - twice and all!

During the 1970s, despite my poor standing at work during the first five years after leaving school in 1968, I was quite well off financially. There may have been several reasons for this. First of all, I was earning what you might call a decent income. Secondly, I was single, and therefore, I remained free from the costs involved with married responsibilities. And that was despite seeing and hearing about former classmates with their spouses and pushing a pram. Thirdly, I had never owned or driven a car, although I did pay for several driving lessons "trying to keep up with the Joneses" - as I saw that more and more people of my age group progressed from two wheels to four. But I never gained enough confidence behind the steering wheel and decided to remain on two bicycle wheels for life.

As narrated in Week 1 of this Diary, my interest in Travel began with Mum sending me out on errands to buy groceries. During the turn of the 1960s, it was normal for children to be out on their own or with mates without adult supervision. Road safety was drilled into us from a very early age, and so, together with a much lighter density of motorised traffic, parents were more confident in their children's safety. Ok, from time to time, I arrived home from the playground with a grazed knee, and a dab with cotton wool soaked in antiseptic aggravated the pain into a sharp sting, but all became well thereafter. The word compensation was virtually unknown, unlike today's woke society, where one can sue at a drop of a hat.

And so, from the first time I browsed through a world atlas to the moment I first set out to buy a can of peeled tomatoes or a loaf of bread around 1960, to the moment I boarded an aeroplane at Gatwick bound for Toronto in 1977, the travel evolution reached its final explosive stage. Only to leave a strand of dissatisfaction as I looked through the photo slides of the 1978 hike into the Grand Canyon. The very best of the photos, those taken at the bankside of the Colorado River flowing through the bottom of the deep natural crevice, were spoilt. I suppose I should have known better than to attempt to photograph scenery at around 5.00 am, blue skies nevertheless. Nope, no newspaper or travel magazine would have been impressed.

Therefore, whatever I did in the following 17 years, there will always be a hidden desire to re-hike the Canyon with a better camera and on a different schedule. And I might have had a chance as early as 1979, when I was seriously considering a third trip to the USA specifically to re-hike the Canyon to fulfil my crushing desire to build a photo album of the experience. It wasn't that far short of an obsession. 

But any ideas I might have had were dramatically cut short when I lost my job at British Aircraft Corporation in June 1979, ten months after returning home from the States. To be truthful, I was sacked due to first messing up a job, and then having a massive row with the foreman over the misleading image on the drawing board. It was this contest with my boss that I was dismissed for, and not so much the wrong machine setting. The dismissal was to affect both my working life and travel alike. It was the closing of a major life chapter. 

British Aircraft Corporation in its heyday.

I covered up the shameful incident by saying to people that I was made redundant. Incidentally, had all gone more smoothly and worked at the aircraft company for another two or three years, I would have been made redundant, as the whole corporation was earmarked for closedown during the 1980s.

1980 was one of the worst years of my life. No longer prosperous, instead, I was living off a meagre state benefit. I was too proud to visit the Bank of Mum and Dad, and besides, although Mum was willing to help out, Dad was less willing. Instead, on one occasion, when the electricity bill arrived through the post, I laid it flat in front of me and prayed over it, remembering that around 700 BC, the Judaean King Hezekiah did exactly that when his Assyrian enemy King Sennacherib sent him a letter ordering him to surrender. After King Hezekiah prayed, his enemy withdrew his forces, and King Sennacherib was slain in his homeland by his own sons. By contrast, in my apartment the following morning, some money was posted through my front door. The sum, sent anonymously, equalled the amount owed. Such as living by faith, as I hadn't told anyone about the electricity bill.

Any thoughts on travel became a distant dream. But I didn't idle around. Instead, I visited the local Jobcentre often to see if any vacancies were going. I saw nothing suitable. Oh, how I wished I had done a lot better at school! I was wishing I had a degree, that passport to career glory held by a majority of male Christian friends of my generation. How I envied them! That dreadful mental illness, the feeling of an inferiority complex, began to intensify. And I also felt hungry too. And that became obvious one evening when I delivered a message to a Christian home inhabited by three unmarried graduates. The girlfriend of one of them was there, alone, and she invited me in. In the dining room was a table laid out with all sorts of sumptuous goodies, appetising fare awaiting the arrival of the three grads from work. The richness of the food items so neatly presented with abundance made me feel so impoverished and hungry. At first, my mouth watered. Then alone, and on my way home on foot, my eyes began to shed tears. 

It was at that time when one of our church elders assigned me a job, to emulsion his living room, that a route to self-employment was set. Under the recommendation of my housegroup leader, I began to post business cards through the door of every house in my area, along with an advert in a local bulletin. I didn't have to wait long before the phone began to ring.

Starting a business of my own as a painter and decorator was not easy, and there were times when I was worried about when the next payment arrive, so I could keep up with the rent, as well as eat and stay warm. I was okay with most of my completed work, satisfying the customer. However, one client threatened me with Court action after mistakingly using a sheepskin roller (made for applying emulsion) to apply oil-based gloss paint on an interior door. The result was a door covered with shed roller hairs. The whole door needed a total strip down to the wood.

On another occasion, I chose the wrong colour paint to coat a metal exterior drainpipe. The client ordered me to buy the right colour and repaint the whole job - at my own expense, as the homeowner refused to pay me any extra for the effort. With a complaint from another client at a different household for taking too long, it looked as if my potential career as a painter and decorator was doomed. It was.

A Sheepskin Paint Roller and its Tray.

But not all of a sudden. Jobs were still coming in, but they were slowly tapering. Soon, I'll be jobless again. That was when my housegroup leader suggested cleaning windows instead. So, I began to canvass, knocking on doors to ask the householder whether they would take on a window cleaner. At the time I was fortunate. With the manufacturing industry (where I tried for several jobs during my unemployed days) still thriving, I had the domestic market to myself, and in four different streets, I collected a small number of customers. Thus, for a while, window cleaning and painting ran side-by-side, with the window cleaning side of the business growing, and after several months, beginning to dominate the week. However, the painting side of the business continued, on and off, right up to the year 2000, whilst I was already married, and my wife's pregnancy was still in its first trimester. After then, the painting side of the business ceased altogether.

International Travel - It's back to the start.

The 1970s saw the evolution of Travel from train journeys to Italy in 1973, to a flight to New York in 1978. Therefore, after the loss of my full-time job as a precision machinist at the British Aircraft Corporation in 1979, the whole Travel sequence was similarly repeated throughout the 1980s and into the explosive climax in 1997, when I flew around the world.

1981 saw my first trip to Italy since 1975. This was the fruit of working hard and saving up as a self-employed handyman and window cleaner. However, I also wanted to say hello to my maternal grandparents in Turin, so, I booked a boat train from London to Turin, and back via Milan, as I had a friend from church working there on a contract. But what I didn't do, and should have done, was to buy a go-as-you-please national train ticket to travel around the country for a fixed period, in exactly the same way as the Greyhound Ameripass.

The boat train journey brought nostalgia from the 1970s. During the 1980s, it had changed little, with daily departures out of London Victoria to either Folkstone or Dover to Boulogne-Sur-Mer or Calais. On the French coast, a Ferrovie Dello Stato di Italiane train awaits as I sailed across the Channel. Once on board, it's a continuous ride across France, stopping at Amiens, Paris, Dijon, Chambery, and Modane, where I had my passport checked before entering the Mont Cenis Pass to emerge at the Italian town of Bardonecchia. The train pulled into Torino Porta Nuova terminus before pulling back out to continue with its long journey to Rome.

In Turin, I made my own way to Via Giacomo Dina, using the same tram service I remembered from 1971. By recognising the church opposite the tram stop, I was able to find my way to my grandparent's apartment. I was greeted warmly by them at the door, and a torrent of happy Italian words flew through the air in my direction. I tried to converse with the limited Italian vocabulary I had, with some success. I wasn't destined to spend any night at my grandparents. Rather, it was a stop lasting two to three hours, and then I would move on. Whilst I was backpacking America in 1978, my parents were sunning in Loano, on the Ligurian Coast. Therefore, when he asked me where I would like to go, I too chose Loano. My granddad, being how he was, immediately decided which hotel I should stay in, and made a phone call booking on my behalf. He, along with his wife, drove me to Porta Nuova Station to board the train for Loano. On the platform, I kissed and said goodbye before boarding the train.

My grandparents were Italian old-school, and considered themselves the head of the entire family, including both my parents, my aunts and uncles, their sons and daughters and their spouses, along with their children, that is, all my cousins on my mother's side were under their umbrella. I even recall a severe telling-off my grandad gave to one of his grown-up sons, one of Mum's younger brothers and my uncle, a married man with children of his own. Personally, I didn't like their family worldview, but I gracefully submitted myself to their way of thinking and kept on smiling and showing affection. Admittingly, once alone on board the train, I felt relieved. I never saw them again, as they both died a few years later.

After a non-stop ride, the train pulled into Loano Station, the first in a line of coastal resorts. I found the hotel quite easily, and with my name and identity already on their register, I was assigned a room. Unlike in America, this hotel had a swish feel about it, it was very comfortable and they served breakfast. I stayed three nights there before deciding to check out to do some exploring around the northwestern area of Italy, taking in Genoa, Pisa, Viareggio, and Florence.

Loano. This was taken during the 2020 pandemic.

My grandparents knew that I was at a certain hotel in Loano. But they didn't know how long for. Therefore, by leaving Loano, I felt that I was also escaping from their watchful eye.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next Week: My Traveller's Cheques were stolen and how I survived Florence pennilessly.

***

The photos I took on the 1981 trip to Italy were also in slide form, therefore the pics posted here are stock photos. Other than that, they all depict the places I visited.