My first summer in France - Unphotographed memories

A capture taken from Google Maps showing a field and copse near Auxerre in 2026.

It's a hot summer here in France, and today I was thinking about my first French summer, and what for me at the time – I was 16 – was an epic journey hitch-hiking down through France and Spain. It was the school holidays and there not being much money around it was either hitch-hike or stay at home. What little money I had I invested in a ticket to get me across the English Channel. I remember that even as a boy I deeply resented the economic barrier to my freedom of movement that Britain's insularity represented, the fact I had to pay to get off the island. I found that deeply unfair. It was a sentiment strengthened that summer by my being able to walk across the Franco-Spanish and Franco-Belgian frontiers for free. 
Those of you who read this blog regularly will know of my passion for the photographic image. But, I did not always have access to cameras. And I made that trip without one. And yet, the images I have in my mind of my time on the road are as vivid as yesterday.
For me it was pure adventure. I won't pretend there weren't moments when I was scared of travelling alone. I tried to team up with people in youth hostels along the way, but most people were already travelling in pairs, and in any case if you wanted to catch a ride it was better to be on your own. Of course, I can't imagine letting a child of mine undertake that kind of journey today. My mother later told me that every day I was gone she lived in fear. We had no phone at home and in any case the cost of a phone call was prohibitive, so she had to make do with the occasional postcard.
The trip didn't start well. Having caught the bus down to London's Victoria station I let my self be conned out of some of my precious pounds while in the queue for the boat-train. A man with a trans-Atlantic accent claiming to work for NATO in Brussels promised to give me a lift once we got to the other side. He asked me for change to get some beers for the journey and I gave it to him, only to gradually realize I'd never see him again. The next morning I woke up having slept in a Brussels railway station platform waiting room, and set off hitch-hiking.
The first night I was in Mons, the next day I got as far as Paris. And after a few relatively expensive days in Paris living off bread and cheese, I set off in the direction of Spain and got as far as Bordeaux. The next day I got a ride with a man who evidently was interested in more than just chatting, but managed to fend him off and get another lift as far as Bayonne. I'd arranged to meet a couple of Danish boys I'd met in Mons. Miraculously they showed up. We were staying in a large shed-like dormitory that passed for a youth hostel, and we bought cheap white wine. I didn't drink much of it, but enough to learn the next morning what a hangover felt like. In Franco's Spain, hitch-hiking was frowned upon, and traffic in any case was sparse. So, I spent some of my precious pesetas on trains and travelled down from the Basque country to Catalonia. My cultural referents were not sophisticated, I hadn't yet read Orwell, but I had read Laurie Lee's Spain-based autobiography As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. It was in the town of Lérida, today better known as Lleida, I first heard that summer's ubiquitous tune, Gershon Kingsley's Moog synthesizer-generated Popcorn which in 1972 was a worldwide hit for Hot Butter. 
One of my most colourful memories was travelling over the Pyrenees from Lerida towards Andorra with a bus full of Spanish army recruits and watching the sun go down over the mountain: an orange golden purple sunset the like of which I'd never seen. It's an image that has remained a reference for me when looking at any other sunset.
With some of the money I still had, I invested in a bottle of duty-free Johnnie Walker in Andorra thinking it would be good capital at some point in my trip. At the French border, I caught a lift in a campervan with a British family who took me as far as Perpignan. I recall them being horrified that I was travelling alone. But I wasn't the only one doing so, and some were doing worse than me. I met a lad from Liverpool at the youth hostel who'd lost all his money and his passport and was heading for the nearest British consulate to get assistance. He left me a few potatoes wrapped in newspaper. I'd been waiting at the youth hostel for a letter from home which I hoped would contain a few British pounds. But, I fell foul of the youth hostel's 3-night rule, and on the morning of the fourth day they threw me out. 
I was wandering out of town to look for somewhere to sleep when I was approached by a young tramp; perhaps today we'd say homeless person. But, like me he was travelling, and we'd been reading W. H. Davies at school. He had unkempt, mousy blond hair and seemed like he'd tumble forward as he walked rapidly down the road. He took me under his wing and a little way out of Perpignan we found a field where I produced the potatoes. He made a fire and we ate them. He taught me a few useful phrases to add to my schoolboy French and in the morning having slept in the open, me in my sleeping bag and my companion under his overcoat, we parted ways. 
I returned to the hostel hoping the letter had arrived. It hadn't, so I set off hitch-hiking again. I had pen pals in Belgium, some 1200 kilometres away. I walked out of Perpignan as I hitched, I always kept walking. I had a theory that people would be more sympathetic to someone walking than just standing in expectation at the side of the road. After a few hours trudging along the National highway - the autoroute was still a way in the future - I came across a couple of French boys who were surviving on unripe grapes from the vineyard that ran alongside the road. They wanted food and looked like they'd do anything to get it. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, I had nothing for them, neither money nor food. They'd been there for three days without catching a ride. I set off again a little more despondently. My apprehension was made worse after seeing a signboard towards the last fuel station for 100 kilometres. It was very hot and to the boy from Liverpool the surroundings looked desert-like. The song that filled my head during my road trip was Status Quo's 1970 Down the Dustpipe in which the protagonist is travelling with a ten-dollar bill in his jeans. 
I got lucky, a single man in a VW Beetle stopped for me. He confided a few minutes later he'd only stopped because from behind I looked like a girl; I had neck-length curly hair and was wearing patterned, purple jeans. He drove like a maniac, most of the time "on the wrong side of the road", overtaking traffic at what seemed to me like astronomic speeds. He was heading for Lyon. Just after nightfall, just south of the city for the first time I saw the brightly illuminated petrol refinery at Feyzin. Some, thirty years later I'd be drive past them with regularity but they'd always spark that teenage memory.  Just north of Lyon the man dropped me at the side of the road where there was a field on the right side of the road, but also a small corner shop that was still open on the left. I went in to buy some water and bread – by this point it was all I could afford – and ran into a group of four university students from Southhampton. I asked if I could bed down next to them for the night. It turned out they were travelling through France in an old, and very slow-moving black hearse. Two of them slept inside where the coffin would go, and two outside on sleeping bags. I was outside. The next day we progressed very slowly towards Paris. 
I got out at Auxerre at the junction for Belgium, walked out of the town and found a field next to a copse where I put down my sleeping bag; I always felt safer sleeping in an open field. The next morning I woke up to the sound of a combine harvester that was getting closer by the minute. It was a bright, fresh morning and it was my seventeenth birthday. 
After various acts of kindness were shown to me along the way, I eventually reached my destination in Belgium where the bottle of Johnnie Walker was duly handed over to my friend's father – a gruff, Italian, immigrant worker. It seemed to appease him. A week or so later I got back to the UK. 
We are saturated by images, so much so that as the ever-prescient Jacques Ellul could write already in 1981, people live increasingly by and through the image, and "are without a past. Living off a stream of images, each of which contains the entirety of what they need to know, they have no need for memory; they have no need to retain what they learn today."*
I have not a single photograph of that teenage trip to France and Spain. But, I feel no sense of absence. Later on I would start taking photographs of all the journeys and moments I lived through, and they are good to have. Especially when they can illustrate who and what have now disappeared.They're good when they can be used as a supplement to memory rather than its substitute. 
*La parole humiliée, Paris, Le Seuil.

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A snapshot taken some months later in the year of my trip.