It is 1959. For weeks, which seem like months when you are ten years old, we have been preparing for this day. We have been poring over maps, learning Ordnance Survey signs, running fingertips over contour lines. Parents have been paying 2/6p weekly. I have a new suitcase, just for me. It is grey with shiny chrome catches. But my pride and joy is my new rucksack. It is khaki coloured canvas with two front pockets and brown leather straps which I buckle and unbuckle with delight. I stroke it and examine its contents – a sandwich and an apple for the journey to come, two notebooks, coloured crayons, and a clean handkerchief. I don’t know then that the treasured rucksack will follow me on adventures in teenage and young adult years, to be reluctantly replaced with bright blue nylon at a much later date.
We stand in line in the playground which is different today. The austere red brick building with two entrances, “Boys” and “Girls” engraved in stone over each, is unchanged. The metal railings recently replaced after a world war are unchanged. But today parents are gathered within the railings, not normally permitted and two coaches have been driven onto the school playground, awaiting the two fourth year classes who are to set forth on an adventure. We gaze at the scene in eager anticipation whilst harassed teachers brandish checklists. At last, we are shepherded onto coaches. I sit with my best friend, Linda. There are to be no arguments about window seats as we will swap at midpoint of the journey for it will take almost four hours to reach our destination. Motorways have not yet reached this part of the country. There is frantic waving, some tears within and outside the vehicle and then we are off for a whole week of adventure. Linda is tearful, not due to saying goodbye, but because her tomato sandwich has leaked onto her big sister’s borrowed rucksack.
I have never been away from home alone. Sleepovers have yet to be fashionable. I live in a flat part of England and have only marvelled at photos of Everest. I am now going to the next best thing – the Peak District of Derbyshire. Linda and I are trusted good girls, or so the teachers must believe, and we sleep not in a multi bedded dorm but just the two of us in proper divans in a staff bedroom. We enter a secret world before and after lights out. The hostel is rambling yet cosy as we queue up alongside Mr Coltman’s armchair in the evening, waiting for him to load film into our box Brownies. On Sunday we perch at wooden tables to write our postcards (pre addressed in the classroom) home.
The whole week is an adventure. I have my first shower with squeals of excitement as one by one we run into the teacher’s outstretched towel. The bath at home will now feel forever boring. We walk beneath Ladybower Reservoir, we kneel to make brass rubbings in Hope church, we learn about the Great Plague of Eyam. I do not realise then that I will still recall facts about Mompesson’s Well when I am in my seventies. But most of all we learn about freedoms and differences. We cast off our gym slips and don jumpers and slacks in the evening leisure time. We see our teachers as semi human as they leave the blackboard behind and become carers for a week. All of this is new and exciting but most importantly I fall in love with the countryside and hills and long to return to this new world of adventure. Perhaps that school journey led me to an eventual life in the Scottish Highlands. Perhaps.