I thought I knew awkward. Then mum published her Swinging Sixties travel diary

One of my earliest forays into investigative journalism occurred when I was a schoolkid and found mum’s old travel diary on the bookshelf. The foray was very short-lived. Who wants to discover their parents had a past?

It was the 1980s. I leafed through a few pages of neat handwriting that spoke to me from across two decades. It was 1964. Mum was 24. She boarded a ship in Australia to take her to Swinging London. Why travel on a ship when you could fly, I wondered? That must have taken ages. And where was Dad?

The ship was called the MV Fairsky. Soon Mum met a familiar face onboard, Pamela, a teaching colleague. On our family holiday we had met Pamela, who lived in the middle of England in the grand Sundial House on a lake with her English husband and children. Obviously Mum came back to Australia, but perhaps Pam never had? It was just like that poem The Road Not Taken, beloved by English teachers everywhere (including mum and possibly Pam), but for real. Maybe that Robert Frost really had been onto something.

I closed the diary. The little I had read was enough. Need to know? More a case of Don’t Want To Know. Gwenda and John Brook need never be anything other than Straighty 180 in the eyes of their son, thank you very much.

And so it is with every generation. As youths, we convince ourselves we are the ones who invented going out, getting drunk, kissing (or snogging or pashing or whatever we called it) and getting boyfriends and girlfriends. Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll? We were the experts, our parents only knew about that from the Rolling Stones.

But then my niece Laetesha (born in England because brother Nick and Katherine went there for two years and never came back, a la TRNT) became fascinated by mum’s ’60s backpacking in Europe, which she labelled Mim’s Adventures. Until Mim told her about hitchhiking.

Laetesha was baffled. What was that word? And then she was horrified. Getting into a car with strangers? “But you don’t know them,” Laetesha remonstrated with the full force of a Generation Alpha grandchild.

It was then Mim realised that even though Laetesha lived in this amazing era of globalised lifestyles and had travelled overseas before she turned one, something precious about the spirit of adventure had been lost.

Almost an Odyssey, by Mrs Gwenda Brook, available on Amazon, is the result. Out there for all the world to read. But what (gulp) was in it? And could I read the version co-written by Enid Blyton?

This was not to be, and I quote:

“Monday April 20, 1964. I must have had a weekend hangover and it was windy. I was nasty and the kids reacted of course.

“Bright light – David H appeared and took me off for lunch. Our exit and return to the school were accompanied by loud cheers and whistles.”

Sorry, no. This does not equate with the engaging and lively 86-year-old who is a voracious reader, does this paper’s crossword each day, drives herself to church choir and rarely if ever goes to the pub. But there was more:

A note she wrote from her hotel room in Kathmandu to an expectant BOAC airline Captain Kumar, explaining how she was sorry but was tired and could only go out briefly, to which he replied: “Please do, at least give me a glimpse.”

And the marriage proposal Mum received in London’s Trafalgar Square – from a man who was not my father. No comment. No questions.

Europe and Africa in the 1960s were politically divided and the youthful generation was flush with the excitement of entering communist East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie against the express wishes of their parents. Mim records a British soldier telling them: “There’s nobody over there to help you.”

Time and again strangers showed kindness, such as at a depressing campsite in Morocco where a passing Welsh vet employed by Morocco’s king to tend the royal horses reappeared with his wife to offer the backpacking Aussies use of their garden guest house.

In her later years Mim tired of travel, but Dad kept alive the tradition before he died. I didn’t pluck up enough courage to move to London until I was 30 and can’t recall hitchhiking once. I remain in awe of Mim’s adventurousness. The ’60s generation didn’t worry about ratings on booking.com – they just went ahead and did it.

Now stranger danger is high on the curriculum, we worry we might be refused entry to the US, and two Aussie surfer brothers get murdered in Mexico for their car tyres.

But the modernity that has made international travel more accessible and also more fraught is the same modernity that brought Mim’s book into existence.

My sister-in-law Katherine typed up the diaries and found she could typeset a book on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, which it would publish for free. The platform would even help us design a cover.

I lost the argument on that, explaining that the photo of Mum throwing coins into Rome’s Trevi Fountain didn’t really work because her arm was covering part of her face. That was instantly dismissed. But what would I know? I have only been writing and editing for 30 years.

Yet there was something marvellously life-affirming at seeing my 15-year-old niece on a school trip to Rome in February striking the same pose 51 years later. Laetesha didn’t have an arm over her face. Gen Alpha know how to work a selfie.

On a call to Mim I let her know about the column and she freely confirmed that she had removed sections of the diaries because she wanted them to be for Laetesha.

Once again, the burning curiosity which has propelled me for decades vanished. I couldn’t hang up fast enough. Just not quite fast enough.

“I only included one marriage proposal,” Mum said airily, “and none of the others.”

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