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GEORGE MAY HAVE loved Australia, but it wasn’t until many years later that I finally went abroad myself, with my husband Albert.

The day that I heard we’d won fifty pounds on the football pools I thought that the millennium had arrived. We’d never seen fifty pounds in our lives before nor even anything like that amount.

Well, of course, straight away we started talking about what we were going to do with it. When you suddenly realize you’ve got fifty pounds and the largest sum you’ve ever had before is about ten pounds then you think that it’s going to do a wonderful lot of things. First of all we thought we’d refurnish the house. We settled on things that would have come to five hundred pounds at least.

Then I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I like the place as it is.’

Then we decided we’d all have new clothes and then that idea faded out.

And then I said, ‘We haven’t had a holiday in years. Let’s have a holiday with it.’

A holiday to me and my husband meant going somewhere in England. So we started to consider places. We didn’t want to go to another seaside place, living as we did at Hove. And we didn’t want to go to the country because I can’t bear the country.

I don’t like all those static things – the trees and fields and I don’t really like animals. I wouldn’t walk through a field if there was even one cow in it, never mind a herd. Have you ever noticed the way cows look at you – as if they can see right through and they don’t like what they see? Scornful-like. And then they start ambling towards you. They might be going to be friendly but it’s a bit too late if they get right up and you find they’re not, isn’t it? I don’t dislike pigs, but with these factory farms it’s not like the days when farmers used to let you walk around and scratch the pigs. Nowadays farming’s done on such a big scale that they don’t want strangers walking around.

There there are the country pubs. Everyone makes such a thing about country pubs. When you go into one every face looks up at you and you get a vista of blank faces turning towards you. They know you’re a stranger to the place and they want to keep you feeling that way. You walk to the bar thinking you’re a kind of leper.

The country’s very nice if you like being next to nature but I hate nature.

Some people say what interesting faces country people have got; what thinkers they must be. But I know what they’re thinking. You’ve only got to look at the expression on their faces to know what they’re thinking – bugger all. Or nothing worth thinking about, like the crops, the farm and is it going to rain and looking up at the sky and musing about it. Of course it’s going to rain. It always does in the country. At any rate it does when I’m there. And another thing they’re thinking is – what the devil are you doing down there? What are you after? Thoroughly suspicious they are. And even if I don’t know what they’re thinking I don’t want to know. I don’t go for a holiday to sit and wonder what people are thinking. I go to enjoy myself.

The alternative was to go to a big town like Bristol, London, or Edinburgh.

I like big towns because you’re anonymous there. I like to be anonymous. I don’t want the spotlight on me. Well, I didn’t then; I don’t mind it so much now. In any case I hadn’t got many clothes to wear and not much money so I wanted to be anonymous.

I like to be in a crowd so that nobody notices you from the rest. I feel at home in a crowd and I feel at home amongst all the things that are made by man. I like everything that’s machine made and man made. I like shops. I like cars. I like the new lighting that they’ve installed. I like everything that’s mechanically made. I like things that have all been made with somebody’s brain, by man’s ingenuity, and it increases the stature of man to me – because after all’s said and done we’re only midgets here and we’ve only got a very short tenure of life on earth, so I think that anything that anyone’s done to enhance life here is interesting and worthwhile. People keep saying that in spite of all these inventions people are no happier, but how can they tell? They don’t know how happy people were that are dead and gone.

Anyway, while we were still wondering about what town to go to I had the marvellous idea of going abroad.

Of course Albert wasn’t keen because he doesn’t like changes. He likes things to go on in the same old way, and the very thought of going abroad, different food, different people and you can’t speak a word of the language – and no country’s like England. I could see these thoughts going round in his mind. I mean there’s not another country in the world that’s as good as ours.

It was the same when he joined the RAF during the war. He didn’t fancy travelling all over the world. As it turned out he didn’t have to. All the time he was in the Service he only saw one aeroplane – and that was on a scrap heap. He was in the RAF for four years – never got off the ground, and never got any farther than Yorkshire.

He had a marvellous job there. He used to go out and pick up matchsticks and barely did a stroke in the whole of the four years. Four years’ rest it was. When they got tired of doing nothing they used to shovel the coal from one heap and put it in another heap.

But he’d heard about abroad – that it was the land of vice and the food was terrible. That they ate snails and slugs. That it was uncivilized and that the people all wore little grass skirts. He wasn’t at all happy about the idea.

Anyway I sent to several travel companies for their brochures – you know the sort of things. They’d pictures of glamorous people in the most beautiful clothes and others lying about on the beaches with a lovely sun tan. It never rains in any of those brochures and there’s never a word about what you do if it does.

One or two of the holidays we thought were marvellous but then we found out that they wanted about five hundred pounds for those. There really wasn’t a lot of choice. We only had the fifty pounds from the pools though we thought we might scrape up another ten pounds – that was as much as we could do in the time available to us. So after we’d got through the brochures about three times we finally settled on a holiday that was twenty-four pounds each for ten days.

For that we would have five days in a place on the very tip of Holland so that we could make trips into Germany and Luxembourg and Belgium and we would have four days in Paris. This sounded a good bargain so we paid the deposit and then we tried to save up as much as we could.

We didn’t go out anywhere. We became practically teetotallers. Believe me I wouldn’t want a holiday every year if you’d got to be a teetotaller to have it. A lot of people do that. They save up their money so that they can have one big fling. I daresay we could have had a much better holiday that way, but just imagine being miserable for fifty weeks so that you can have two weeks’ holiday. Then perhaps it rains all the time or the holiday doesn’t go, like jelly that never sets.

In any case I think that if you’ve had a miserable fifty weeks you’ve probably lost the capacity to enjoy yourself. But we didn’t mind too much because we’d got this lump sum and we felt it wasn’t too long to wait and that we were going to do something entirely different.

We felt really adventurous. Talk about Captain Cook and his voyage round the world or Christopher Columbus discovering America – the thought of Mr and Mrs Powell going abroad knocked them into a cocked hat. We were quite the big noises in our neighbourhood.

On the great day we had to be at Liverpool Street Station at eight o’clock in the morning. This meant we had to put up for the night in London and that was nearly disastrous. It cost three pounds ten for the two of us. We thought it was ruinous – absolute robbery. We had to do it because we couldn’t get to Liverpool Street at eight o’clock otherwise.

We got there about quarter past seven – all eager and agog. We had a terrible job finding our party. We thought our party would be the only party. We didn’t realize that we were a very small cog in a large wheel and that there were lots of other parties – much bigger parties – parties going on things with names like The Hook Continental. We didn’t do anything like that. We had just an ordinary old train down to Harwich.

Finally we found our party and we got on the train. And then we met the courier. Oh, what a charming man that courier was! Of course we didn’t realize then that charm was his stock-in-trade, that it was a facade and there was nothing behind it, just all charm.

He spoke to us individually and held my hand. He was a very handsome man – I felt quite thrilled. I felt more thrilled too because incidentally the others were rather elderly – I think I was about the youngest, or looked the youngest anyway. And I was certainly the liveliest. And he sat down and held my hand. (It was a long time since any man had held my hand apart from my husband and that was old hat.) He gazed into my eyes and I felt he really cared about me. I didn’t intend to throw my cap over the windmill or anything – not that the opportunity ever arose. He told us various funny little anecdotes about other trips he’d been on and things like that. You know how charming people can talk. If you try to analyse it it’s all so light that it just goes away in a puff of smoke but when they’re telling it to you it seems so interesting. And he was good-looking, too, which made all the difference because after all if he’d had a face like the back of a bus charm wouldn’t have got him anywhere. But with charm and good looks and that lovely public-school accent . . .

Now there’s a swindle for you – that public-school accent that takes you in to start with. It gets you anywhere – if you haven’t got two pennies to rub together that public-school accent sees you through.

As he moved from table to table on the train everybody was saying, ‘Oh, isn’t he a charming man!’ We were properly taken in by him.

Then he told us not to buy anything on the Continent without telling him.

‘You’re bound to want to bring back a piece of jewellery or some perfume,’ he said. ‘If you want anything just let me know and I’ll tell you the shops to go to and mention my name and you’ll get it cheaper.’

We swallowed this because you think, what would he tell you it for if it wasn’t true? We found out later.

We eventually reached Harwich and got on the boat to go across to the Hook of Holland. The sea was rough and it was a terrible boat. There was nowhere to sit and you couldn’t even get a place to hang over the side and be sick. At last I found somewhere and just lay there hoping to die.

Albert was fine – never turned a hair. And what particularly grieved me was him coming back from the bar saying, ‘Do you know how much whiskies cost in there? About a third of what we pay at home and it’s a bigger measure.’

What a time to choose to say a thing like that when I was calling for the angel of death. I felt so ill and every time I went to the lavatory to be sick they’d just let me be sick and then turfed me out again.

It was a horrible boat – not enough room, no chairs, no nothing. Mind you, even if it had been comfortable I couldn’t have enjoyed it.

The funny thing was when we eventually got to the Hook of Holland I felt as right as rain again. It amazed me that Albert wasn’t disturbed at all because he wasn’t any more used to it than I was. He said it was because he’s got a placid disposition that it didn’t upset him, that because I’m always so eager and excited and never keep calm it happened to me.

Anyway when we arrived at the port there was a coach waiting to take us across to this place on the very other side of Holland where we were staying – Walkenberg.

About halfway across we stopped at a place where our courier had an arrangement – where we could get coffee and cakes cheaper. So we all piled out of the coach like a flock of sheep with him at the head of us. We must have looked a very motley collection buffeted by the storm at sea. And most of us were elderly, what I call good elderly people. You could tell that never in their lives had they deviated from the straight and narrow. In we went and Albert and I had two cakes and a cup of coffee each – and we paid in francs.

I couldn’t work it out there and then but when we got back in that coach I did and I said to Albert, ‘Do you know what that cost us for two cups of coffee and four cakes? It cost us twelve and six. Good God, if that’s the kind of place where he’s got an arrangement I shudder to think what it’s going to cost us anywhere where he hasn’t.’

We got to Walkenberg and the hotel where we were going to stay at eleven o’clock that night. And the brochure had said that when we reached there a warm welcome would await us. Not only did no warm welcome await us – no kind of welcome at all awaited us. There was simply nobody there. Empty hotel.

We were stuck down one end of the dining-room and the courier plonked forms in front of us which we had to fill in and sign. We never saw the proprietors. And Albert and I weren’t even in the hotel – we were in an annexe on the other side of the road. At the time we couldn’t have cared less. We were so excited about being abroad we didn’t mind where we slept.

But it just shows what kind of party we were with – they all went to bed. They come abroad and on the very first night there they go to bed at eleven o’clock – just because they are used to doing it. Well, we didn’t.

We went and found our room and put our things in and went off down the sort of main street and found a place where people were sitting outside and we sat there drinking beer until two o’clock in the morning. Although we were so tired we had to prop our eyes open, we were determined to be able to say that we were drinking beer there at two o’clock in the morning. Fancy the others going to bed. Aren’t the English people terrible? They’ve got no daring in them.

All right the beer was horrible stuff like – well, it’s like water compared with English beer. I agree they’ve got wines that we haven’t got and it’s cheaper but their beer’s no good at all. And Albert’s a beer drinker. During the course of our holiday he got so fed up with not having a decent beer that he asked for a Guinness. He only did it once. They charged him eight and six for a glass of Guinness. They said they had to import it. No wonder nobody ever gets drunk over there because although the places are open all day you could drink that beer till you floated in it and it wouldn’t do anything for you.

Still we made out we were living it up. We wrote back most glowing accounts of sitting outside this place drinking beer at two o’clock in the morning. We were frozen to death. It was cold and the beer was weak but we didn’t write about that.

That was our first night there.

The idea of course of staying at this place at the very tip of Holland was to make coach trips into Germany, Luxembourg, and Belgium. And that was another stupid thing in the brochure. You had to write and say just where you’d like to sit in the coach. I chose two numbers in the middle. Well, when the coach arrived at the hotel it was already half filled with people from another tour and they weren’t going to shift for us. We just had to sit where we could. And didn’t some of the others moan. Albert and I didn’t because we didn’t really care that much. It was only a small thing.

This first day we went into Germany and the brochure said, ‘Germany with its lovely castles and a trip down the Rhine – a visit to the Drachenfels and Cologne with its wonderful cathedral.’ And we had a packed lunch. Oh, those packed lunches! Salami sausage, strong salami-sausage sandwiches and an orange – and we got the same every day. I couldn’t eat the salami and I couldn’t even eat the bread because it was so tainted with garlic.

So off we set on our coach ride and the first stop was what they called the Drachenfels. It’s seven hills in a row supposed to look like a dragon. Well honestly you’d have to be as blind as a bat to ever think it looked anything like a dragon. It didn’t compare with our South Downs. Just seven little lumps. The top one was very high admittedly but I couldn’t see a dragon anywhere. When we got there there was a little railway that ran up to the top of this highest lump and the courier said we were all going to go up in it.

So I said, ‘I’m not.’

Now on these tours they can’t bear you to deviate. It worries the couriers. You’ve got to be the same as everybody else. By the look on his face I could see that I worried our courier.

‘Oh, I couldn’t go up there – absolutely impossible – it’s too high,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t leave the ground.’

‘I hope not,’ I said, ‘for other people’s sakes.’

He said, ‘The views up there are marvellous.’

I said, ‘They wouldn’t be any good to me, I couldn’t look at them.’

I simply refused to go. He didn’t like it but he had to put up with it in the end.

So Albert and I wandered through the town on our own. And I think that was the best part of the holiday. We found a lovely little German beer garden where there was a man playing one of these xylophone things with hammers and we hadn’t been there above ten minutes when he started playing English tunes. And there was dancing. It was very lively.

In the interval this man that was playing came over to us and said, ‘You’re English, aren’t you?’

Of course we lapped this up. It gave us a feeling of prestige. So we ordered him a drink and he joined us.

He said, ‘You know I can tell almost anybody’s nationality now. I’ve been playing in this beer garden for the last twenty years.’

So I asked, ‘How is it you speak English so well?’

And he said, ‘Oh, I was a prisoner of war in England.’

This was in the 1914–18 War.

He chatted with us a bit. When he left I said to Albert, ‘What a charming man.’

‘Yes, charming thirst, too,’ said Albert. ‘Do you know he ordered four beers while he was sitting here and all on us.’

We were certainly paying for our experiences. Still I expect he felt we owed him something, he having been a prisoner of war.

Eventually we went back and joined the coach. Then we drove to Cologne. By the time we got there, with what I’d drunk in the beer garden I was only thinking of one thing and that was the loo.

There we were in Cologne. There was that lovely cathedral and there was the ladies’ lavatory not far from it. And there were dozens of coaches – all queuing for the loo. It took me twenty minutes to get in and out and we were only allowed half an hour in the city. Talk about see Naples and die. I tore into the cathedral, looked at some gold plate and tore out again. That was Cologne for me apart from the loo.

Then we came to the Rhine. Well, the brochure had said a trip down the Rhine. We just went across in the ferry. That was our trip down the Rhine. As we went across we could see one or two castles – but what a swindle.

A mortifying thing about going in and out of these various countries was that the customs men come in and collect your passport. Yon know what passport photos are like – mine was absolutely hideous. It made me look an ugly ninety. Yet they look at it, look at you and then hand it back, so you’re forced to the conclusion that it really looks like you. Very mortifying.

Anyway we got back about ten o’clock, had a hot meal which was good and Albert and I went out on the town again.

The next day was another one of these coach trips. You’ve got to be in the very best of health when you go on a holiday like ours because they’re absolute endurance tests. We went to Luxembourg which they had said was a charming little country. I admit it was very pretty. I enjoyed it there until the courier had the idea of taking us down into a grotto.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in one of these underground grottoes – shocking things they are. You go down to the bowels of the earth on an iron spiral staircase and the last bit of it is slippery and slimy. I fell the last four steps into the mud at the bottom. It’s dark down there and there’s an underground river. You get taken in a boat on this river but you can’t see a thing. And I was worried about my clothes, wondering how muddy I was, which I couldn’t see down there. I think grottoes are very much over-rated things and it stank to high heaven. Well, you can imagine it, can’t you? I mean it’s been there since time immemorial. Everybody says ‘Oo’ and ‘Ah’ – I’ve never seen anything so daft. I mean you might as well put the light out and sit in your own room. At least you could sit in comfort, couldn’t you?

The next day we went into Belgium which wasn’t interesting at all because they took us to Brussels, and I didn’t think much of Brussels. It seemed such a dirty town to me. Apart from that there was nothing special about it at all.

Then we had one day at leisure in Walkenberg – getting our strength up as it were for the trip to Paris. This we were both looking forward to. The very name Paris conjures up images and does things for you.

The hotel we stayed in there was a good one. Mind you there was trouble from some of the party who didn’t like being on the top floor. I almost felt sorry for the courier when he said to me, ‘You know, it doesn’t matter what party you go with, you always get people who moan and groan the entire time. You’d think that they were on a luxury tour the way they go on.’ Though incidentally I noticed that at mealtimes the courier always sat at a separate table on his own and he never had the same kind of food as we did. He did far better. He was on a luxury tour by comparison.

The next day we went out shopping in the morning. Albert was going to buy me some perfume – something he’d never bought me in his life – and he asked the courier whether he had an arrangement. He had – and he directed us. Albert bought me a little tiny bottle of scent. Two guineas it cost. And when we got back to England I found we could have bought it here for forty-five shillings. Three bob we saved – on the carriage I suppose. I don’t see where the arrangement came in. Let’s face it, the only thing was, never in this world would Albert ordinarily have spent two guineas on perfume for me. So at least I got it, and it was marvellous. I used to use it very sparingly, a spot at a time. I hadn’t used half the bottle before the scent went out of it. It doesn’t always pay to be too careful.

Of course we wanted to go to a nightclub. Some people that I was doing for at home had said that we should go to the Folies Bergère.

‘Don’t pay for a seat,’ they said, ‘you can stand at the back for the equivalent of ten shillings and it’s just as good because not only are you near the bar but you can see everything that’s going on.’

So I told this to the courier.

‘Oh, no,’ he said ‘you’ll never get in the Folies Bergère, you have to book months ahead to get in there.’

We should really have gone and found out for ourselves, but we didn’t. We thought, he must know doing these trips every year.

Then this courier said, ‘I’ve got a better idea. I’ve got an arrangement with a nightclub called Eve’ (and the way he said Eve made it sound ever so salacious) ‘and for two pounds ten each you can sit at a proper table and share a bottle of champagne between four of you.’

We hesitated. Five pounds for two of us seemed an awful lot of money. But then to go to Paris and not be able to say you’ve been to a nightclub? After all, to us they seemed the main feature of Paris life. So I said, ‘Oh let’s do it. That’ll be our last big expenditure. Let’s go.’

Albert was keener than I was. Naturally it would be more interesting for a man than a woman. I couldn’t see what there was going to be in it for me. If there were any turns on I wouldn’t understand the language. But Albert wanted to go back and say that he’d seen a bit of nudity, so we decided to go and we gave the courier our money. When I look back and think of the money that man made I could pass out. I must admit we had taxis there – though we had to make our own way back. I’m certain he wanted to make sure we got there.

When we got inside the place it was so small. There were only two rows of tables and a bar at the back, but by the time we’d paid two pounds ten each we couldn’t afford to buy any more drink anyway. Four of us sat at a table with a tepid bottle of champagne in the middle. I’d had champagne when I was in domestic service and I knew what it should taste like. This stuff was absolute rubbish. We sat there sipping it and then the first turn, if you could call it a turn, came on.

It was twelve girls nude from the waist up with very fancy dresses below the waist. There were gasps from most of the men. One man belonging to our party went as red as a beetroot. Albert sat there all nonchalant looking as though he saw such things every day. He didn’t. You’ve never seen such a collection in all your life. Talk about twelve raving beauties – they must have gone out on the highways and byways and scoured the lot in. They were short and fat and tall and thin. And the shapes of them! Some had appendages that looked like deflated balloons – others had got them about the size of footballs which looked as though they’d blown them up before they came on the stage. Some had got such a little that you couldn’t tell what sex they were; they might have been men for all we knew. And they didn’t do a thing – they just kept walking round and round. There was a notice up saying ‘Do Not Touch The Girls’. Even Albert said, ‘Good God I’d have died before I would have touched one of them with a barge-pole.’ If I tell you that Albert was bored to tears in less than five minutes you can understand what they were like.

Then came a sort of quick-patter act. Some people laughed – presumably they were French and understood what was being said. We didn’t understand a word.

Then the girls came on again with different dresses from the waist down – paraded round again with their inane giggles. I said to Albert, ‘Have you ever seen the female sex looking like that?’ He said he hadn’t and I believed him. Of course it was nothing to me – it was like bread and bread. I spent the time studying those who had pimples and where they had them.

We were there an hour. Just turns interspersed with these girls. It was dreadful. When we got up and went we left by the back stairs and as we passed a paybox I saw that we could have gone in and stood for the equivalent of twelve and six. When I told all the others they were furious and they ostracized the courier for the rest of the trip. We didn’t. We wrote it down to experience. We put ourselves in his position. If we were taking a pack of greenhorns around we’d have had to have had very good characters not to have made a bit out of them.

Anyway apart from that we enjoyed Paris hugely. We saw the Louvre, the Palace of Versailles, all those kind of places – and Paris is a beautiful and interesting city. We’d wander around on our own then sit outside the cafés watching life go by.

Twice at our hotel they served us with something like meatballs, tasty but mysterious. I was intrigued with them. And I’ve always been a bit pushing. I’d read in the papers about Lady So and So or the Duchess of Something or Other being abroad and coming back with the most marvellous recipes. They’d been down to the kitchen and the chef had given them these recipes which they printed.

So I said to Albert, ‘I’ve a good mind to ask for the recipe of these meatballs.’

He said, ‘I wouldn’t bother. I don’t want any of them when we get back home.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘neither do I but I just want to go back with some sort of recipe.’

So I said to the waiter – he spoke perfect English – ‘Will you please ask the chef for the recipe for me?’ in a nice sort of way. I thought that he might even invite me down in the kitchen.

The next day I inquired of him, ‘Did you ask the chef how these meatballs are made?’

He said, ‘Yes, I did, and the chef said, “God knows, I don’t.” ’

I expect they were like those resurrection pies that the cook used to make us sometimes when I was in service. All the bits of meat that you thought had long departed this life would appear again with a pastry crust on and we used to call it resurrection pie. But did I feel deflated by that waiter. Talk about entente cordiale.

On the way back home we were booked to have lunch at Antwerp at a luxury hotel. And it was a luxurious place, not a bit like the hotels we’d stayed in.

We arrived at Antwerp an hour before lunch and we wandered around the town; we were then to meet in this hotel. As we went up the steps we felt like the poor relations, we’d hardly any money left by that time. It was a huge palatial entrance with a grand staircase all thickly carpeted. I was dying to go to the lavatory and I said to Albert, ‘I wonder where it is?’

He said, ‘Ask somebody.’

It was the sort of place where you imagined the people that went there didn’t go to the lavatory.

And I said, ‘Oh, I haven’t got the nerve to.’

Eventually I discovered it was downstairs. You’ve never seen such toilets. I suppose all posh hotels are like it. It was lovely there. You didn’t have to put money in and there was a whole row of basins, gold-plated taps and a separate towel at each basin. So I washed my hands. And then from nowhere sprang an old harridan holding a plate and I looked at this plate and there was nothing less than the equivalent of half a crown in it. Of course I hadn’t the nerve to give her less. I should have stuck it out but she looked so intimidating.

The general run of toilets in France are something too terrible for words. They may be better now – since de Gaulle, I mean. But I’d never seen anything like the sanitary arrangements. Those awful ones they have in the street where the men’s legs show below and their head and shoulders above, and you can visualize what the middle’s doing. I think they’re revolting.

We were on a tram once and I could see a man sort of leaning on his elbow in one of them – for all the world as though he was there to have a rest. And we went in a café on our own the first day and when I went to the toilet I stood outside waiting and a man came out. Embarrassed? I went the colour of a beetroot. Then another one I went into was just two toilets and a sort of half-tiled wall and I discovered there were three men sitting with their backs to me. They’ve got no reticence at all. Talk about all friends together. The funny thing is that after you’ve been there a couple of days – you keep drinking that awful beer that runs through you – you don’t take a bit of notice. It just shows what a thin veneer civilization has really.

After lunch at this posh hotel we set off for home. The trip back wasn’t too bad. It was smooth. But I still couldn’t enjoy a cheap whisky because after we’d bought some cigarettes and some wine to take back, we’d nothing left. By the time we got to Liverpool Street Station we were a sorry-looking lot.

In the brochure there was something about the friends we were going to make and I’d had visions of exchanging addresses and writing to these friends and keeping in touch. Instead of that – not only was nobody speaking to the courier – they weren’t even speaking to each other.

When we got back home I said to Albert, ‘Let’s have another look at this brochure and go through the things that weren’t as they said they would be.’ But as we read it again we saw in very small print at the bottom ‘Turn to the back page’. So we turned to the back page. There again in very small print was written ‘On this tour the agents exercise the right to make any alterations that circumstances may demand’. So that it had just been that in our case the circumstances had been very demanding.