As I write this, my middle son, who’s 18, is off interrailing. He is six days into a train-borne, three-week voyage of pan-European discovery that will take him from London to Amsterdam, possibly, or maybe Berlin, depending, although it could be Paris, before heading on to somewhere else (Munich? Bratislava?) and finishing up almost certainly in Prague, or maybe Budapest, although I’m not sure that Rome has been entirely ruled out. Nor Venice, for that matter. Nor Ljubljana. There was also some talk of going to “the mountains”.
To be honest, not a lot of information regarding the intended shape of this journey was made available to us in advance – assuming there even was an intended shape, which is doubtful. It’s not that his parents didn’t have questions for him; we did. We had many questions. But even under the pressure of those questions (in fact, especially under the pressure of them), specific details emerged only slowly and in tiny quantities, as with scandals involving royalty, and the picture of the trip that I have been able to build can really only be accorded the status of unreliable rumour.
For what it’s worth, then, I do know that six of them are travelling around Europe together, or it may be seven, all male, two of whom I could confidently name, and that the group is potentially subject to further expansion later, depending on whether they hook up with people referred to only as “some of the others” in Prague, or possibly Budapest. However, news has also circuitously reached us that the initial group of six (or seven) was immediately (and we think, temporarily) split at the point of departure in London, when, rather than boarding the overnight coach for Amsterdam (or possibly Paris), two (or possibly three) of its members accidentally boarded a coach bound for Munich (or possibly Prague). But, hey. Victoria coach station can be a complicated place for an English tourist to work out.
For the rest of what will be unfolding over the course of these three weeks, we are required to fall back on our imaginations – which is fine, up to a point, because I can’t think interrailing has changed all that much since the days when I had absolutely nothing to do with it. At 18, the thought of hauling my way around Europe on a succession of trains seemed like an awful lot of effort to me, what with the rucksack and everything. But I had friends who did it, and returned aglow with tales of the bread and cheese they had eaten and of the railway stations whose floors they had slept on, and of the people they had met who were also interrailing and sleeping on railway station floors, and with whom they had shared some of their bread and cheese, often on the floor of a railway station. So I totally get it, with regard to the bread, the cheese and the railway station floors.
And I get it, too, with regard to today’s overregulated, overstructured teenage lives. My son only left school a couple of weeks ago and people are already asking him what he’s “got planned” for his year off. Hard, in that context, not to welcome the sheer formlessness of interrailing, the chance it offers to improvise, play it loose, go with the flow, not know which railway station floor you’ll be sleeping on or whose bread and cheese you’ll be eating, and to enjoy that for what it is. Moreover, whatever else happens out there, this is someone who, for the past two years, has been obliged to use Southern rail to get to school and back. Nobody could deny that he’s owed some time on trains that actually come.
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For my own part, though, I think I could relax more easily into a state of unknowing regarding my son’s whereabouts on the European continent if it didn’t seem so recently that what he did, who he did it with and for how long he did it, were entirely within my remit to control. But, of course, my loosening grip on him is now officially no grip at all and it stands to reason that I might need to take a moment or two to adjust.
And it’s not just me. My eldest son, who is home for the summer from university, recently set out for the evening from a friend’s house and heard the friend’s mother call out, “Be home by midnight.” The friend replied, in a tone of amused bewilderment, “Mother, I’m 20 years old.” The mother paused to digest this, and then said, “OK. One o’clock, then.”
We didn’t put a time on it when my son left for Europe. But recognising a moment, my wife slipped into the street just after he had gone and took a picture of his backpack as it disappeared down the road, bound for Rome, Bratislava, the mountains, who knows?
Robert Crampton returns next week