When I was 12 the mother of one of my school friends (yes I had one or two) and my Mum hatched the idea that a Youth Hostelling holiday on the Isle of Wight would be a good way for two boys to get their first taste of a holiday away from parents.

Unlike most of my friends I never belonged to the Cubs or Scouts. When I’d asked if I could join the Cubs at the age of 8 Mum had simply said she didn’t think it was a good idea and my persistent efforts to get an explanation nearly ended with the standard punishment.

To this day I have no idea why she took this attitude, all 3 of my sisters were Girl Guides in their day and that seemed a fine idea for them. Admittedly I was a pretty sickly child but nobody had ever suggested that I was too fragile for normal boyish activities.

It’s perhaps significant that the decision to allow me to go on this holiday came a month or two after Mum remarried and I suddenly had a Father again after 8 years. Maybe it was time to start ‘making a man out of me’.

The only way we were being allowed to go on this adventure was if we were accompanied by someone old and sensible enough to ensure our safety and good behaviour.

Thankfully my Big Sister, 16 and very sensible (if a bit bossy at times) volunteered for the job so a route was planned that was actually achievable by a pair of 12 year olds and bookings were made at the various Youth Hostels.

In those days my bike was an old Hercules which, for the uninitiated, was made entirely of steel and to a skinny little 12 year old weighed a ton. Its strength and weight were actually considered virtues!

It had a 3 speed Sturmey Archer gear hub which had to be treated with great respect. If you didn’t back pedal to change gear there was a strong likelihood of the gears slipping followed by a cross-bar accident, the bane of many a boy’s cycling experience.

So come the great day my sister and I cycled over to Graffham to collect my friend and then the three of us set out for our first stop. Andy and I had been all for making straight for Portsmouth, catching the ferry and making our first stop on the Isle of Wight.

Bless my sister for obstinately refusing that idea and insisting that a hostel outside Portsmouth should be our first stop. By the time we got there I had to admit that that I couldn’t have gone another hundred yards let alone make it all the way to Portsmouth Harbour.

Dinner, no worse than the school canteen and eaten in the same refectory setting was a small milestone in my life.

After we’d eaten and got a mug of tea I looked down the long table and realised that by the time the sugar bowl made it as far as me my tea would be stone cold, so I drank it without sugar for the first time ever.

I never took sugar in tea from that day on, indeed I found sweetened tea to be quite nauseating and for a couple of weeks after I got home had to keep reminding Mum about it.

After dinner came the introduction to the very ethos of Youth Hostels, everyone got a chore. I was assigned to the washing up crew which gave me some clue as to what the canteen ladies had to put up with every school day, I vowed to show them a lot more respect in future.

The most unsettling aspect of the Hostel was dormitory sleeping, something I had no experience of. Naturally the older boys got to choose bunks first and the younger boys all ended up on the bottom bunks.

Thus it was that I was given an inadvertent eye full of a boy in his late teens who, to my shock clearly intended to sleep naked. Before I could hastily roll over and face the wall his threatening voice came down.

“’Ere, kid, you lookin’ at my dick?”

I had the presence of mind to stay silent, saying no would have been tantamount to admitting that I was indeed looking at a very big and interesting dick, not something I wanted to admit then.

The incident passed without further comment and a few minutes later the Warden came in to announce lights out. The blessed safety of absolute darkness came to my rescue and being very tired after such a hard day I was asleep in minutes anyway.

Love