ABSTRACT
‘What must their mothers have been thinking of?’ That or similar would have been the sentiments in the last ten or so years, yet in the early to mid-1950s it was deemed perfectly natural for one’s young to spread their wings, alone or with a like-minded friend, on voyages of exploration. With Robert, at 15, I became one half of a French tandem bicycle, which we christened Fifi, when we set off on a camping trip hundreds of kilometres in extent, and of several weeks’ duration, from England’s industrial Merseyside in the north, all the way down to England’s south coast. Our destination was Lyme Regis, known for its fossiliferous exposures of the Jurassic Blue Lyas, which the local resident, Mary Anning, had made famous in the early nineteenth century. It was as usual a hermaphrodite tandem, and therefore with a frame rather weaker in the rear half, a weakness later to prove its downfall while simultaneously introducing us to the addictive and economical joys of hitch-hiking. The latter, however, seems nowadays practically a lost art, in part perhaps for reasons, real or imagined, of safety. But more of that later.
