Postcards from Stanland. David H. Mould

      Preface

      I wrote my first travel journal at the age of nine. It had a circulation of precisely three—my father, mother, and sister. I’m not sure they actually read it, although they encouraged me to keep writing. It was run-of-the-mill stuff, a prosaic accounting of towns and sights visited, meals eaten, weather, and beach conditions—the predictable literary output of a nine-year-old. However, I would not have written anything, or asked my father to have my notes typed (with carbon copies), if I had not had the opportunity to travel.

      In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, most middle-class families took a summer vacation at the seaside, hoping the sun would peep through the clouds. Usually it did not. I have memories of cold, rain-swept South Coast resorts, with families huddled in their cars, the parents drinking tea from a thermos and reading the tabloids, glancing occasionally at the grey skies and the cold waves crashing on the stony beach. The children fidgeted and fought in the back of the car. There were no handheld gadgets to distract them; after they got bored with their toys, there wasn’t much else to do but start destroying the upholstery or tormenting the family dog, if it was unlucky enough to be on the trip. Occasionally, a parent would say: “Children, we’re at the seaside. Aren’t we all having a lovely time?” No one was, but no one wanted to admit it. On rare sunny days, the kids could play on the beach, perhaps even finding a patch of sand, but most days it was too cold to swim; the main seaside attractions were the funfairs on the piers.

      Most years my parents headed for France or Spain, where the weather was predictably better. We strapped the family tent—a heavy, complicated canvas affair with many poles, pegs, and guy ropes, which looked as if it had been salvaged from a M*A*S*H unit—onto the roof rack of the Vauxhall Velox, and set off for Dover to take the ferry across the English Channel to Calais or Boulogne. We drove south, buying baguettes, butter, cheese, and tomatoes for picnic lunches and camping every night, my parents enjoying a bottle of vin ordinaire over dinner. I sat in the backseat, noting the kilometer posts, the terrain, and the historic landmarks, and taking notes. “Rouen,” I earnestly remarked, “has a large cathedral.” I helped navigate, a serious responsibility in the days before France built its equivalent of a motorway or interstate highway system. I was fascinated by the road maps and the names of towns, villages, and rivers, and I loved to plot our route. Often I enjoyed the trip—reading maps, getting lost, and asking for directions in shockingly bad schoolboy French—more than the destination.

      I made my first solo trip at the age of seventeen, spending three months at student work camps in France, hitchhiking across the country and religiously writing postcards home. Unlike the typical “Weather lovely,

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