We were twenty years old and in the grip of wanderlust. We’d read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and we wanted to live like him, hitch-hiking and riding freight trains across America, sharing cheap red wine with hobos.  

I’d been made redundant from my factory job in Derby, with a payout of eighty quid, and my mate Blakey was doing nothing in particular, so we set out for the South of France, as many British kids did in those days. Dreams of long hot summers picking grapes. I still have an old diary which tells me that on 2nd March 1981 we paid £4.50 for a one-way coach ticket from Derby to Dover.  

Looking back forty years later, I admire our stamina, but not our planning. We carried a tent, our sleeping bags and not much else. We expected to hitch to the vineyards, easy as that. 

We spent a hellish night camped in a storm in Dover, on the cliffs next to the old gun batteries. In the soggy morning we changed our money into French francs and took a cross-channel ferry to Calais, where we stood by the roadside in pouring rain with our thumbs out. After two days we’d made it as far as Boulogne, half an hour further down the coast. We gave up. We caught a ferry back to Folkestone and drank all the way. Sick of camping in wet and windy fields, we checked in drunkenly to a cheap Bed & Breakfast where the landlady had seen it all before. 

We hitched and bussed two hundred and forty miles along the south coast of England. It took us two days; it rained all the way and we drank all the way, pitching our tent in pub gardens and spending most of our time and money in the bars. We drank like poissons. We’d been drunk in Dover, banjaxed in Boulogne, pissed in Peacehaven. In Exeter we crashed on a mate’s floor and stayed up till six in the morning drinking cider which had cost us £1.30 per gallon from a local farm. 

After ten days we arrived back home in Derby.  I had forty pence left. We’d rattled the bars of our suburban prison, but we needed a better escape plan. I buckled down and within a few years was working in the City, had kids and a mortgage and a BMW. Now I live on the south coast, in Hastings, one of the towns we passed through on that trip forty years ago. In 1981 I wrote that it was a horrible town, but maybe I was in a bad mood, and it would have been raining. I love Hastings now and am perfectly happy here, merci beaucoup.  

I wonder what might have happened if we’d made it further than Boulogne on that trip. I might have strangled Blakey during a drunken row and died of starvation with my thumb out in a remote layby in Aix-en-Provence.  

Jack Kerouac died in Florida aged forty-seven of cirrhosis caused by alcohol abuse. As for Blakey, I haven’t seen him for decades.