I thought I knew awkward. Then mum published her Swinging Sixties travel diary

One of my earliest forays into investigative journalism occurred when I was a schoolkid and found Mum’s old travel diary on the bookshelf. The foray was very short-lived. Who wants to discover their parents had a past?

It was the 1980s. I leafed through a few pages of neat handwriting that spoke to me from across two decades. It was 1964. Mum was 24. She boarded a ship in Australia to take her to Swinging London. Why travel on a ship when you could fly, I wondered? That must have taken ages. And where was Dad?

The ship was called the MV Fairsky. Soon, Mum met a familiar face onboard, Pamela, a teaching colleague. On our family holiday, we had met Pamela, who lived in the middle of England in the grand Sundial House on a lake with her English husband and children. Obviously Mum came back to Australia, but perhaps Pam never had? It was just like that poem The Road Not Taken, beloved by English teachers everywhere (including Mum and possibly Pam), but for real. Maybe that Robert Frost really had been onto something.

I closed the diary. The little I had read was enough. Need to know? More a case of Don’t Want To Know. Gwenda and John Brook need never be anything other than Straighty 180 in the eyes of their son, thank you very much.

And so it is with every generation. As youths, we convince ourselves we are the ones who invented going out, getting drunk, kissing (or snogging or pashing or whatever we called it) and getting boyfriends and girlfriends. Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll? We were the experts, our parents only knew about that from the Rolling Stones.

But then my niece Laetesha (born in England because brother Nick and Katherine went there for two years and never came back, a la TRNT) became fascinated by Mum’s ’60s backpacking in Europe, which she labelled Mim’s Adventures. Until Mim told her about hitchhiking.

Laetesha was baffled. What was that word? And then she was horrified. Getting into a car with strangers? “But you don’t know them,” Laetesha remonstrated with the full force of a Generation Alpha grandchild.

It was then Mim realised that even though Laetesha lived in this amazing era of globalised lifestyles and had travelled overseas before she turned one, something precious about the spirit of adventure had been lost.

Almost an Odyssey, by Mrs Gwenda Brook, available on Amazon, is the result. Out there for all the world to read. But what (gulp) was in it? And could I read the version co-written by Enid Blyton?

“Monday April 20, 1964. I must have had a weekend hangover and it was windy. I was nasty and the kids reacted of course.