A date Fakenham columnist will never forget

In his weekly Wensum column, Jim Harding talks about a date that is always special to him...

We all love anniversaries, don’t we? Well, just as I wondered what my topic might be this week, I looked at the calendar and the dilemma, or part of it, was immediately resolved. I had sat down at my computer on Tuesday, August 22 to get started on this Wensum and realised it chimed in with the precise day in 1963 when I had left my home in Old Woking with a rucksack on my back to hitch-hike to Australia.

The date has become, if not like a birthday, at least a very significant anniversary in my lifetime. Whatever was I doing and how would it all turn out? I was aged just 20 and in some ways thought I had the world at my feet. In retrospect, maybe I did, even though I was ignorant of what might confront me over the months – and years – to come.

Had I really thought all this through sufficiently well? Actually, it was very much my own determination and commitment that kept me going. I had painted a Union flag on the back of my Bergen rucksack and was rather proud of what it represented. My passport was stamped with a selection of visas for countries such as Syria, Iraq and Iran, even though I knew but vaguely of their whereabouts.

How much a flag would help me along the way was anybody’s guess but with the swagger of the ignorant I launched out on that long and winding road between rural Surrey and harbour-view Balgowlah, the Sydney suburb in which my sister Rosemary and her husband John had settled down. I had a small sheaf of traveller’s cheques, somewhat less than £200 worth, which I hoped I might be able to exchange for ‘foreign cash’ en route.

If I had stopped right then and decided such an adventure was not really a suitable decision for someone so ‘young and foolish’ I reckon those who knew me, including my family, might have heaved a big sigh of relief. On the other hand I had made such a fuss of what this journey into the unknown meant to me and had planned it for so many months in advance that there was really no way I was going to refuse at the first fence.

So there I was, all set to go. My first destination was the ferry at Dover for the crossing to Ostend. A near neighbour who worked in London offered to drive me part the way there. Goodness knows what he made of me as I stowed my pack on the back seat of his car as he set off on his normal daily commute to whatever office contained that period of his working life.

I do know I hardly stopped talking until we parted company within range of the A2 which offered some hope of lifts to the coast. It was not to be easy going and by the time I made it to Dover, my planned 5pm crossing had already left and I was in limbo. I have no memory of being disheartened as I stashed my rucksack at a left-luggage terminal and decided to explore the town, boosted by the fact that my mate Alan, who I was due to meet, had also left his gear at the same place.

We subsequently met up at a very lively fair with shooting galleries and dodgem cars, reckoning that fate was on our side by this coincidence. No mobile phones of course, at this time. Anyway, we took the night crossing and made an early morning start on the autobahns which would carry us towards Holland and Germany, travelling at what I considered to be frightening speeds. We were on our way! (The happy ending to this tale is that I finally made it to my sister’s home by New Year’s Eve to find they were out celebrating. So I pitched my tent on their lawn).