Around the end of primary school, I became a girl-child: something less free than the kid I’d been. I became, in my own eyes, “fat”, “ugly”, wished I was dead or not-born. I didn’t know how to keep these thoughts to myself.
Mum didn’t know what to do about the change in me. But she knew school wasn’t helping and she’d always wanted to travel. So at the start of 2001, instead of buying me a new schoolbag for my final year of primary school, she bought some luggage, a copy of Europe on a Shoestring and two one-way tickets to Madrid. (In what was perhaps the greatest inequity of our childhoods, my older sister stayed behind in Perth with our dad and stepmother.)
At the time I had no idea how much courage Mum’s choice took – and how much that trip would widen my perspective and shape the adult I became.
Every day of the six months we were away from home was packed with new impressions. After the hours of stale air and plane food, my first Spanish meal – a hot ham and cheese roll – tasted like heaven. I felt too young for our youth hostel, and Mum too old, but we both enjoyed the curious looks we received from fellow backpackers when they noticed us up late with our jet lag watching Pulp Fiction.
There were odd looks wherever we went. After our bus from Toledo arrived in Cádiz at 3am, we found ourselves locked out of our lodgings amid the dregs of Carnival. I was tired enough to nod off on the doorstep, but the late partygoers made Mum nervous, especially when she saw a group dressed like the Nadsat gang in Clockwork Orange – complete with jockstraps, batons, bovver boots and all. When a bearded stranger offered us his flat until dawn, Mum accepted; when I later wrote a postcard while drinking freshly squeezed orange juice at a seaside cafe, she told me not to tell Dad about that night.
That wasn’t the only time I realised how out of her depth Mum was. On an overnight train, she had her pockets picked after dozing off. At a crowded station, she freaked out after I snuck off to take the stairs without her. In Naples, a local man took an interest in her and appointed himself our guardian; though I was annoyed by Mum’s polite laughter and her inability to shake him off and navigate the city alone, I was equally annoyed when her admirer suggested “the baby” might want to sleep straight after dinner. We ended up sightseeing with him until 10pm.
It was a relief to set our luggage down in Malta. Although my grandfather had emigrated decades earlier, he’d found a woman from his village willing to lease us part of her terrace house over the summer. Our arrival in Żejtun coincided with the Festa Santa Katarina, a celebration of the village’s patron saint involving processions and Catherine wheels. Cousins immediately recognised us in the crowd, became part of our days.
Sometimes village life seemed shockingly traditional. One day an uncle brought home a bunny, set it in the yard to frolic, then slaughtered, skinned and gutted it. The ladies at the corner shop looked suss and stopped talking whenever we came in. At a centuries-old cathedral, some nuns interrogated Mum about me being illegitimate and unbaptised.
Still, it was thrilling to have cousins to play with, to swim at the beaches my grandfather had loved as a child; to have a sense of my Malteseness for the first time. I must’ve seemed to be thriving, since Mum briefly floated the idea of extending our lease and enrolling me in my cousins’ school for a term. But after two months in the village, her wanderlust returned.
In Tunisia, we saw wild camels running across the road. In Zagreb, we dined on turkey legs and mushroom pasta so rich that Mum fled to the bathroom to throw it up. In Munich, we sat in a biergarten with Canadian backpackers who told me how lucky I was.
Even so, I cried on the bus from Munich to Paris. I’d gotten gum on my cords. My thighs looked fat in my cords. The bus toilets malfunctioned and we rode into Paris pinching our noses against the sewage stench. I started reading Little Women on the final leg of our journey; of all the March sisters, it wasn’t bookish tomboy Jo who I identified with, but Amy, the brat who burns Jo’s manuscript and gets to go to Paris instead of her.
But Paris didn’t transform me like it did Amy March. My heart wasn’t in it. I was homesick yet disappointed to be returning home; I still felt like the same “fat”, “ugly” girl.
It’s only now that I’m nearly the age Mum was on that trip, and pregnant with my own child, that I can appreciate how much of a risk she took in taking me away – and what a gift it was. I can also appreciate the girl that I was at the time: changeable, awkward, intense, playful, dreamy and, above all, lucky. I feel lucky to have seen so much of the world through this girl’s eyes.
West Girls by Laura Elizabeth Woollett is out 1 August through Scribe
