My Mum

Last year I wrote a piece about my mum's travels for my journalism course, here it is...

Theresa Chuter finished school at 16 and went to work in a factory, as it seemed all of her town did. By 21 she had progressed up to a bookkeeper/wages clerk at a local engineering company. It was at this point that she became “disillusioned” with life. “One day I was walking down the tiny little corridor that I walked up and down so many times and just thought, ‘how many more times am I going to do this?’ and I thought, ‘this is my life. I need to do something with it.’” And that was it, she quit her job and bought a one way ticket to Greece.

She had planned for a two month trip, with £400 and no immediate plans she aimed to get a job in Athens that would pay for her accommodation and return when she got fed up. “The first three weeks were just absolutely horrendous. I was lonely and homesick. ‘Go to Greece. Get a job.’ And then you get there and it’s a different thing all together. Nobody needed anybody. So I spent days and days wandering around looking for work.”

The reality hit home pretty quickly that running off and exploring wasn’t going to be as wonderful and idyllic as she’d have liked. The mundane job that she had been doing day in day out back in England looked a lot more appealing from 2400 miles away.

“And then I managed to get a job, and I met a fellow backpacker, my confidence was growing by this time so I went off to the islands, did a quick tour and thought ‘no. I am not ready to go home now. I can do this.’” With this new found love of Greece and confidence in herself growing, she returned to the islands, secured herself a job, and stayed there for five months.

By this time it was mid-October, England is freezing cold and Christmas songs are already starting to prematurely creep onto supermarket shelves and into our brains. Many of her high school friends had settled down and started families; my Mum however was heading for Egypt.

In today’s world, where I spend £30 a month on my phone bill, £60 on a haircut and £££ on dinners/nights out, I couldn’t understand how she could afford to not work for a month. She said that she had left with £400 and came back with £100, and that to survive she was ‘very, very skimpy with money’ and worked when she needed to. The freedom surrounding this idea is almost incomprehensible. Here my mother was, hopping about between continents without fear of the unknown, just a need to explore, I think that there’s much to be admired about that.

“The plan was to do Egypt and then come home. We were sitting on the roof of this hostel one night with other travellers, and people were saying where they were going and there was an American guy. He wasn’t event part of our group, he was just sitting on the roof reading, and he looked up and said ‘yeah, everyone seems to want to go to Bethlehem for Christmas’ and I thought ‘yeah. That’s a plan.’ Because by this time I was well into it, there was no way I wanted to go home.”

In under a year the experience had already changed her so much, the girl who was pining for home comforts now barely gave England a second thought, the girl who couldn’t wait to go home was now preparing to spend her first Christmas away from home. The more of the world outside of England she saw, the more she needed to see, there was not a chance that she could return to the confines of working in an office after experiencing the freedom of travelling.

                                                                                                                                                       

“I managed to get to Bethlehem for Christmas Eve. I secured a place on a kibbutz first, a tiny, tiny kibbutz with very, very few people. It was right on the Jordanian border, which at the time there was quite a few terrorists who came over from Jordan into Israel. Our first night there was spent, being told ‘Don’t cross the barbed wire, the gates lock at night so you can’t get out, if you see anything on the floor don’t pick it up, whatever it is you don’t know”.

Ten months into her two month trip she fell completely in love with Israel, her visa for Israel was valid for a year, and she saw it out to completion.

After this she moved to the south of Israel, “it looked like the end of the world, like if you walked any further you’d drop off, absolutely nothing at all. It was the back end of nowhere. At the time the Sinai desert, was being handed back to Egypt because of the peace talks. Over the months before I arrived people were slowly moving out and there was very few houses or anything left at all, but now it’s actually a thriving holiday resort called Sharm el-Sheik. It was called that when I was there but there were no hotels, or holiday complexes. It was just a lot of sand.”

By the time the second Christmas had rolled around her Israeli visa had ran out and she saw this as a good time to return home. She had been gone for two and a half years. During her time away contact with home had been sporadic at best, during her first lonely weeks she had written home every couple of days, then as she began to find her feet it altered to weeks, months and eventually when she could remember.

After catching up with her old friends, of who she now had very little to say to, she packed up and left again to do some “proper backpacking”. Starting in France she travelled across Europe to Belgium, The Netherlands, Austria, former Yugoslavia and Italy. She then found herself back in Athens where, through pure coincidence, she came across a girl who she had met on the bus from London to Athens years ago. Together they travelled to Istanbul where due to the heavy military presence they didn’t stay long before moving on back to Israel. “Then I think I got tired, there wasn’t really anywhere I wanted to go, apart from India and Australia and I wanted to go overland, but there was a lot of trouble between Iraq and Iran, so it wasn’t really safe to go overland for anybody. So after four and a half years I decided to go home for good this time.”

The time that my mother spent away changed her life forever, it gave her confidence, a passion for exploring other cultures and showed her how vast and diverse the world really is. She has always told me that she doesn’t want me to look back on my life with regrets from opportunities passed. She never has, and never will.