Whether it is a question of a holiday or a non-holiday visit abroad, parents often ask themselves: “Is it worth while taking the children with us?” I agree it is not always easy to weigh such tangible factors as extra expense and trouble (both, alas. inevitables) against the less tangible benefits of “travel experience” to one’s offspring. A negative decision may, in fact, seem safer to make than a positive one; at least it will carry with it the support of those who firmly maintain that “children forget it all so easily.”
Yet looking at family travel (or perhaps it would be truer to say remembering it) as a child who between the ages of six and eight travelled extensively in Australia with my parents. I have an instinctive distrust for the theory that young children forget. Naturally I do not pretend to remember all I saw during those two years in Australia but I remember a great deal; and the way I remember it is through the eyes of a child, which is a way in which I can never hope to see Australia again!
Obviously a much younger child can claim no such advantages. But at least parents who do venture forth armed with travelling cradles and pushchairs that fold up like umbrellas are establishing the habit of family travel early. Travelling with babies, of course, still demands careful planning, after which it appears to be largely a matter of the spirit in which it is undertaken. I remember a former District Commissioner from Rhodesia who used regularly to travel home on leave with his young family, once cheerfully remarking that, for those who appreciate a railway compartment to themselves, there is nothing like having a nappie to hold up at the window!
Owing to the war, our own family travels did not really start until our children were nine and seven years old, by which time incidents such as that of the French taxi-cab driver getting out to blow up his tyres in the middle of the road clearly succeeded in leaving a permanent (in this case extremely mirthful) impression. I mention this incident also because, in a sense, it was a pointer to what we ourselves were going to have to learn in the art of improvisation. It is no use denying that the inclusion of children adds weight to some of the problems of foreign travel.
Not least of those that we met in rural France towards the end of the long dry summer of 1947 was the lack of a good water and fresh milk supply – a problem which we eventually, though somewhat uneconomically, solved with the help of bottled mineral waters and by allowing the children to drink small quantities of ordinary wine. (In spite of recent reports of alcoholism among French children, the youngsters we met looked surprisingly well upon this curious fare!) In the light of experience, however, I would recommend that all child travellers are made to adjust themselves as slowly as possible to changes of diet in a foreign land. The first few days in this respect are all-important and, in later years, we found it a good thing to have with us supplies of glucose and plain biscuits to help to fill the initial dietary gap.
In some parts of Europe and the United States family travel is now being encouraged by the introduction of special fare reductions. Several of the American railroads and airlines, for example, operate what they call a Family Fare Plan whereby father pays full return fare but mother and all accompanying children under the age of 18 are allowed to travel for only half. This is a practice which surely needs to become more widespread, for, with all its difficulties, family travel seems the most natural and personal of all ways of introducing the young to a wider world. If the school party is considered worthy of special concessions, why not the family, too?
