Going solo

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It was 1986. There were four of us, confined to the tedium of a provincial French town of impeccable bourgeois character for the duration of the school year.

Paris was only an hour away by train, but the meagre salaries for twenty-year old English lycée assistants allowed us only the odd day out, spent wandering the streets or nursing tiny cups of coffee.

By January, I was desperate to escape the shuttered town – even if it meant the alarming prospect of solitary adventure. Armed with an Interrail ticket, as soon as lessons were finished on a Friday I raced to catch the early evening train to the Gare de l’Est, and cross platforms to whatever distant European city on the departure board triggered my romantic imagination. If the trains ran on time, I might just squeak back to school ahead of my first class – which started mercifully late on Monday mornings. By sleeping on the train on Friday and Sunday nights, I might stick to a budget of £15 for the weekend.

Vienna was an inauspicious start. Greyish mounds of snow lay heaped along the streets. The icy pavements had been spread with cinders, over which an elderly population, muffled against the cold in grey and black, shuffled carefully. The vast monuments of the Habsburg Empire looked sorry and grimed by age. The youth hostel was almost empty, the Danube wasn’t blue and my suede desert boots leaked. I talked to no one and wondered if solo adventuring was really my thing, after all.