and some well-publicised incidents – murder, mainly – made it less attractive. Youth hostels were popular. Students from all over Europe criss-crossed France, Spain and Italy, eating sparsely, dossing down and making friendships along the way. I never encountered drugs or even excessive drinking, and my most threatening experiences (at least that I remember) involved a short-haired young woman in a Renault Dauphine who gave me a lift near Besançon, and a plump baker doing his deliveries in a van among the hills above Nice. Using the French verb profiter, they both immediately made it clear that, as they had never met an Irishman before, they would very much like to ‘profit’ by meeting one then.
I would generally stay for a week or so in Paris – finding a cheap hotel in the hinterland of St Michel – and then set off. The first year, my goal was Switzerland, where a friend from school and Trinity, Walter Lewis, was working in an hotel. I hitchhiked there, seeing the Romanesque Abbey church at Vézelay and the Well of Moses at Dijon – as well as getting sunstroke by the lake in Lausanne – on the way. Walter’s boss gave him very little time off, so I did not stay long, and then hitchhiked down to Milan. I don’t recall going to see Leonardo’s Last Supper but I do remember a Jehovah’s Witness who tried to interest me as I lingered in front of the Duomo. I got to Florence, which I was determined to do. A postcard to my mother: ‘At last, I got here. It is absolutely beautiful & mad hot. I have got rid of the friend, thank goodness’ (presumably someone I had been hitch-hiking with) ‘and am thoroughly enjoying it all now. The youth hostel here is like a mansion, with beautiful ceilings and frescoes.’ My Aunt Isa1 had told me about Michelangelo’s David: she had been reading The Agony and the Ecstasy, the biography of Michelangelo by Irving Stone, and she made her description of the carving of the David so vivid that I absolutely had to see it.
I hitchhiked back by way of Pisa – ‘eating lots of spaghetti & enjoying myself’, according to a postcard to my mother (1 August 1963) – and the French Riviera, in Nice sleeping in an abandoned car that I found somewhere to the east of the port, and then it was back to Paris, staying for a few days with the Chassines on the way.
The following year, I went directly to Nice. I sent my mother a postcard from Vichy:
I am hitchhiking to Nice. I got one lift last night to here – 150 miles and very good. I arrived at 12 midnight having left Paris at 5.30. Altogether about 250 miles. This is a spa town like Bath only not as beautiful. My address in Nice is c/o Cooks, 5 Promenade des Anglais.
In Paris I had made friends with a very droll Swedish student of psychology who was touring by car with his uncle; but, in a very Swedish way, the uncle was three years younger than the nephew, Lars. This is a friendship that has lasted to this day, almost fifty years. Lars and I still keep in contact and over the decades he has visited me many times and in many places, and I have stayed with him on several occasions in Stockholm. Lars Fimmerstad became a noted humorous columnist on the leading Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet. Two years after meeting, we decided to combine our student summer travels and met in Rome. We stayed there for about two or three weeks, ravenously visiting every museum and church, studying the stones in the Forum and on the Appian Way, eating frugally, going to Aïda at the Baths of Caracalla, and generally having a lot of fun.
Of the relatively few of my letters which my mother saved, I have one or two from this time. ‘We went to the opera one night in the open air,' I wrote (29 July 1967). ‘It was just fantastic. Absolutely huge, with almost a thousand people on stage at any one time. They also had carriages drawn by four white horses. In another scene, there were camels. It really was a marvellous night.’
Lars is someone who sees humour in almost any situation, interpreting things with the eye of a psychologist – and a Swedish psychologist at that – so that events which on the surface appear dull become immediately entertaining. He deploys a similar approach with people. To my young Irish eyes and ears – he speaks with a perfect Oxford accent, with only occasional lapses of grammar and syntax – he often seemed totally absurd but that – as a general rule – made him very amusing company indeed. I wrote to my mother (19 July 1967): ‘Lars, the Swede, is getting a bit on my nerves – but then who wouldn’t? He tends to be a bit old-fashioned and refuses to sit beside people on the buses. Another thing, he wants to talk all the time, and I get fed up of that.’ After Rome, we hitchhiked to Naples, saw the sights and visited Pompeii, and then took the overnight ferry – sleeping on the deck – to Palermo in Sicily, where we stayed, mainly in the seaside town of Cefalù but also in Taormina.
‘It really is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in,’ I informed my mother (27 July 1967). ‘Yesterday we saw smoke coming out of Etna. The village is high up, built into a cliff, and you get a bus down the cliff to the sea – which is very, very clear and deep. We will probably stay here until early next week and then go back to Rome. We have seen a tremendous amount.’
From Sicily, we went back to Rome. A postcard (dated 2 August 1967) of the Temple of Aesculapius in the Borghese Gardens to my mother: ‘Returned here yesterday from Sicily, where we really had a terrific time. I am going to Florence on Friday just to see a friend.’ This was a handsome upper-class young Florentine, Carlo Olivieri, who lived with his mother on the Lungarno and whose father was an admiral in the Italian navy. I had met him in France two years previously and the friendship continued – mainly through correspondence – for a number of years but we have, unfortunately, long since lost touch.
Carlo, I recall, introduced me to the novels, in French, of Julien Green but I found them too difficult and his recommendation that I read Andre Gide’s Les Faux Monnayeurs (also in French) struck more of a chord with me.
The year I went to Morocco, and in the absence of Saxon and Diana driving me there, I hitch-hiked through France, crossed the Pyrenees, and then travelled down the east coast of Spain to Algeciras, where I took the ferry to what I thought would be Tangier but turned out to be Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the north coast of Africa. From there, it was a bus the fifty or so kilometres to Tangier, where I found a room in a seedy hotel in the medina. I stayed for a week or so and then took a bus down to Fez and on to Meknès. I had an introduction (through Carlo Olivieri) to an American living in Rabat, and I went and stayed with him for a few days. This was the nearest I came to witnessing the decadent expatriate Morocco that was so notorious. There was an ‘atmosphere’ in the American’s house: Arab boys seemed to come and go as they pleased and make themselves very much at home. I neither saw nor experienced anything but I was uneasy. (I was only 20 at the time.) I wanted to move on.
As I could not face hitch-hiking all the way back to Paris, I telegraphed my friend Speer Ogle in Dublin and asked him to lend me the train fare and wire it to me in Rabat, which he did; and so I got to Paris, but I was still without a sou in my pocket. I was not in the least concerned as it was in my head (someone must have told me so) that, if stranded abroad, all one had to do was to go to one’s embassy and demand to be repatriated. So, cleaning myself up as best I could, I made my way to the Irish Embassy on the Avenue Foch. There I was seen by a young diplomat who quickly disabused me of the notion that I might be sent home to Ireland free of charge. But seeing perhaps a look of panic on my face, he delved into his trouser pocket and pulled out a wad of notes. Peeling a few of them away, he handed them to me. ‘I’m not supposed to do this and please don’t mention that I did so,’ he said, ‘but I myself (not the Embassy) can lend you some Francs and you can send them back to me when you get home. Would that help?’ In my mind, I can still see the way he took out the notes and handed them to me but I have no clear memory of who he was. Inexplicably, however, the name Campbell comes into my mind, and with some investigation, I find that a John Campbell was a junior diplomat in the Paris Embassy in the 1960s (he married a French wife in 1964). Ten years my senior (it transpires), it must have been he who helped me. If it was he, his subsequent career took him as Ambassador to China, to Portugal and to Germany, worthy rewards in my view for a man who had made a kindly gesture towards a foolish 20-year-old.
Eventually, I got home. And then it was back to the dull days of Trinity, a very small circle of friends2 and not a lot of fun.
There was only one of my Trinity summers when I did not get away. When my plans for doing so were already well advanced, my mother wrote to me (18 May