Synchronicity...

Not long before I left for York, I read for the first time a diary my Mum had kept when she was living and working in the UK in 1950. She was 35 and made the trip by sea, on her own, well before the 'big OE' became a New Zealand rite of passage. She was away for two years in all, including a six-week period of youth-hostelling and hitch-hiking on the Continent with an Australian friend. All this at a time not so very long after the end of the war - when Britain and Europe were still rationed and travelling in Europe was neither easy nor necessarily safe. Reading the diary, though not much more than a daily account of 'things done', was both inspiring and moving. While I knew that she had been to theatre, ballet, concerts and exhibitions in London (I still have the theatre programmes), I had not realised just how much she packed in, or that nearly every weekend was spent getting out and seeing different parts of the country, meeting friends and making the most of every opportunity. This was also the time when my parents' friendship (which had begun in 1939 and been complicated by the onset of war and the fact that my father was in the Merchant Navy) very clearly became a romance.