When I got off the plane in Sydney, I headed for Kings Cross because that’s where the cheap hostels are. Cheap? It was the worst place I stayed in all my travels. It was like a homeless shelter.

Top of my to-do list for the next day was to collect my mail from Poste Restante. Back in those days, we didn’t have phones or the internet, so the only way to stay in touch with someone was to tell them what city you were headed for, and they would send you a letter at Poste Restante. To find your letter, you’d go to the biggest post office and rummage through all the Poste Restante mail.

Rumour had it that 10% of Swedes visit Australia, and they are all called Larsson or Lindberg, so finding your mail is tough if your last name is Lawrence. But I found my mail eventually. There was one letter from my mum, a book on learning Tahitian from a lovely girl in Bora Bora and a letter from Amy, who I met in Moorea.

Amy’s letter had her address in Bondi. Bondi is popular because it’s close to the city and because it’s beautiful. Amy was living by the beach with a bunch of travellers, and they let me stay for a few days.

Amy and I had a bit of a fling in Tahiti, but by the time I got to Sydney, we were not flinging anymore. We were still friends, though, and we hung out for a few days until she got a job, and I decided it was time to move on.

Australia is enormous. It’s 1,600 miles from Sydney to our destination in Cairns.

Someone offered me a ride to Port Macquarie, a beach town in New South Wales. The beach towns are gorgeous, but they are all a bit civilised, so after hitchhiking up through Byron Bay and Coffs Harbour, I was pleased to make it to Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast in Queensland.

Surfer’s Paradise is like a posher, richer, more modern version of Miami Beach. It’s all fancy restaurants and rich people in cocktail bars… and surfers! I rented a surfboard, and after a couple of days, I could surf well enough to lose my contact lenses.

Next stop, Brisbane.

I hadn’t been shopping for months, so I went looking for some new clothes. I was walking through the shopping district when I heard Beep! Beep! Beep! from behind me. There was a 1960s Volkswagen van with two young ladies waving frantically. It was Anette and Helle from Bora Bora! They made me get in, and we went for a drive.

We ended up back at their campsite, and they invited me to stay the night. There was a mattress in the back of the van that the three of us shared, and as it got dark, Anette whispered to me, ‘I broke up with my boyfriend!’

You might remember the night in Bora Bora, when the same Anette wished she didn’t have a boyfriend back home in Denmark. This time, she was happy to say she had broken up with her boyfriend.

‘Tomorrow!’ she whispered.

When tomorrow came, we went shopping in the city centre, and I went into a bookshop while they went clothes shopping. When I came out, I couldn’t find them. They were gone.

I wandered back to my hostel, sad and alone. It was time to hitchhike some more. Not all coincidences end well.

Just to add coincidence upon coincidence, I was drinking coffee in Bangkok when the same Anette crept up behind me and covered my eyes. “Guess who!” she asked. We shared a coffee, and “I’m back with my boyfriend now”, she told me with a laugh.

Hitchhiking in Queensland is cool, with all the tiny towns with just a pub and a corner shop. I had a bunch of traveller friends that I met in every town. We weren’t travelling together exactly — some were hitchhiking like me, others took the bus — but we’d all agree on the next town, and we’d meet there in the pub. We had a game of poker going, and when we sat down in the pub, someone would pull out the cards, and we’d play some more.

It was illegal to drink in Queensland unless you were planning to have dinner, but there was a trick that everyone soon learned.

‘I’d like a beer, please.’
‘Are you planning to have dinner?’
‘Yes, I am.’

They would give you a little sticker to put on your shirt to say you were planning to have dinner. You didn’t have to actually eat anything. You just had to plan to.

I usually got rides quite quickly. I met a bunch of really nice people, and we talked about their lives and my adventures, but I wasn’t so lucky on my next ride. I stood by the road in the hot Queensland sun and was still there six hours later. My luck improved, though, when a flatbed truck stopped, and the driver called me over.

‘We saw you this morning. You’ve been here all day! Why don’t you come back and spend the night with us? We’ll find you a better place to get a ride tomorrow.’

‘Thank you! That would be marvellous!’ I said.

‘Jump in!’

There were three couples in the back of the truck — about my age — and they handed me a beer. We drove out, way out, into the country. We eventually arrived at this big ol’ colonial-style house with a veranda. They had acres of land, with a river running through it, and a huge swimming pool. Everyone stripped down to their undies, and we swam.

When we got out of the pool, they gave me a beer, then some wine, and they offered me a tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken (I’d never had Kentucky Fried Chicken before, and I was instantly hooked). We drank and we sang and we played guitar until late into the night, and in the morning they took me back to the road. I was in a better spot this time, and I got a ride almost immediately.

Next stop was Hervey Bay.

Hervey Bay is right next to Fraser Island (now called K’gari), which is a big island about fifteen miles off the coast. I had hardly been in Hervey Bay for an hour when two Swedish dudes asked me if I wanted to rent a Land Rover with them. After another hour, we had two Land Rovers, four Swedes, two Swiss, two English and a German — with a mix of men and women. We bought some food, drove onto the ferry, and arrived on Fraser Island in less than an hour.

Fraser Island is seventy miles long and is made entirely of sand. There is a tropical rainforest, lots of freshwater lakes, dingoes and NO ROADS! It’s a paradise. We drove along the beach for a bit, swam in the sea and just had a wonderful time.

As evening came, we stopped by one of the lakes for the night. We sat around a fire, drinking beer and a bottle of Southern Comfort. The two Swedish men pulled out their guitars, and we sang.

The highlight of the evening — of the whole trip — was when Peter and Anders played Swedish folksongs, and the beautiful Anneli and Catarina sang along. The songs were filled with sorrow, but their voices were celestial, and I think we all wept a little. Tatjana snuggled up in my arms, and we passed around the Southern Comfort. It was heaven on earth.

Our next stop was another island, and Tatjana and I swam on the reef by the Whitsunday Islands. I laughed into my snorkel, almost drowning, when a very large Māori wrasse came and bit Tatjana on her bottom. She thought I had pinched her bum, despite my protests. A few minutes later, I got my very own bite on my buttocks, and I turned to see Tatjana pinching me to get her revenge.

We did our tour of the next island — Magnetic Island — on horseback, and our guide led us to ride bareback through the ocean. Queensland is often visited by a deluge of box jellyfish, locally called stingers. Our guide told us there were no stingers around today, but most of our group didn’t believe her.

Tatjana and I — and all my poker-playing friends — agreed to meet at Mission Beach for Christmas. It was strange to be celebrating Christmas in the hot, tropical sunshine, but we managed. The inn we were staying at had several huge barbecues, and we bought ribs, steaks, chicken and anything else you might cook on a barbecue. Lots and lots of it. And plenty of beer and wine.

When Christmas Day came, I was sick with some horrible tropical disease. I was so ill, I could barely stand. Tatjana took good care of me and held me in her arms, whispering, ‘Ich liebe dich. Ich liebe dich.’ as she stroked my hair. I wasn’t ready for love, though, and neither was she, and we agreed to go our separate ways. Tatjana went back to stay with her uncle in Townsville, and when I returned from the verge of death, I set off for Cairns.

Cairns is special. The highlight is the Great Barrier Reef, just off the coast, where I saw every fish in the ocean. I wasn’t quite ready for the reef sharks, who swam fifteen feet below me, and I was even less ready for the diver who thought it funny to grab a shark’s tail to be towed around. ‘Don’t make him angry!!’ I shouted into my snorkel.

Our snorkelling guide showed us the head of a giant moray eel poking about two feet out of its cavern, until our guide dangled a fish near its face, and suddenly there was eight feet of moray eel poking out of that cavern. ‘I hope they don’t eat snorkellers,’ I thought.

My partying with my poker friends reached its peak on New Year’s Eve, and we partied far into the night. I eventually fell asleep in a sunlounger just as the sun was coming up, then slept the whole day through.

Traveller’s Tip: It’s a bad idea to sleep the whole day, barely dressed, in the tropical sun. The skin on my face peeled off in a single layer.

That was enough fun in Queensland, and it was time to head for my final destination — Darwin. I stood out on the road, and my ride came quickly. It was a big, blue transit van driven by an ageing hippie with a tiny, four-week-old, Australian Cattle Dog on his lap.

The usual route to Darwin in those days was to drive down to Townsville, across the middle of Australia, then straight up to Darwin — 1,800 miles in all. But my hippie driver knew a shortcut.

We set off over the mountains behind Cairns, and we were soon driving along a tiny dirt track, in the hot, hot sun. After a couple of hours, he stopped the van and got out to top up the oil. The van had an oil leak, but it was OK because he had eighteen gallons of oil in the back. We stopped every two hours to top up.

There were some tiny towns along the road. None were big enough to have a pub, but we could stop to get some water and rest for the night. Eventually, we turned south for Mt Isa, and our dirt track got even smaller. We saw countless kangaroos along the way, and my hippie driver had this theory that if you beep-beep-beep the horn as you go by, the kangaroos will stay out of the way — but the kangaroos didn’t know this theory. Their theory was that if a van goes beep-beep-beep, you are supposed to jump in front of the van in a frenzy and scare the passengers halfway to death. He did lots of beeping.

After a bit more driving, we saw a car by the side of the road with a flat tyre. They had been waiting seven hours for someone to come along and rescue them, and once we got them back on the road, we agreed to stick together in case one of us needed help. There was only one town for 200 miles, and after that, the road started to get bumpy. But did we slow down? Reader, we did not. The bumps got bigger and bigger until, eventually, our whole van got airborne and came down with a crash, and the engine fell out the bottom.

We were going nowhere after this, so we waited an hour for the other car to show up. It was only about 100 miles to Mt Isa, so I hitched a ride with them.

I managed to find a tow truck in Mt Isa and sent them back to find a hippie with a broken van transit van with its engine on the ground. Meanwhile, I found a pub where I traded stories with the 1926 North Queensland Rodeo Champion while we drank lady glasses of beer.

The hippie van showed up the next morning. His engine was back where it was supposed to be, and would I like a lift the rest of the way to Darwin? ‘Er. No, thanks.’ I said, and I got a bus instead. I took the bus to Three Ways in the middle of Australia, then hitched a ride the rest of the way up to Darwin with a young German couple in a Volkswagen sedan.

Driving 600 miles through the burning hot sun in a Volkswagen was a new experience. The car didn’t have air conditioning, so we tried opening the windows, but even when we just opened them a little, the car immediately filled with hot desert dust. Driving at night was no good because it was pitch black, and the evening was when all the kangaroos came out to play. We managed to make a ten-hour drive take two days, but we got there in the end.

Darwin had been almost completely destroyed by Cyclone Tracy in 1974, and they picked the perfect period to rebuild. Imagine a city dressed in 1970s fashions. All the buildings had something cool to say. Darwin was lovely, but I don’t think it’s worth a week of driving to go there, and I might skip it next time.

There wasn’t a lot to do in Darwin every day at 4 pm, when everyone would take a glass of wine out onto the verandah to watch the thunderstorm. Beautiful! I only stayed a few days, though, and then I got my plane to Indonesia.

I’ll tell you all about that next time.

I’m writing my memoirs. Follow along if you like.

All About Me

I’m writing down some memories.
You can start at Chapter One if you like or just keep reading here.

– 1993 –

I quit my apartment and my job in London before we flew to Jamaica to get married. When we came home, we went to live in Malta and moved in with Mrs Clown’s family until we could find a place of our own.

One day, Elena took us out to see a friend and on the drive back, she said…

“We just need to stop at the thing to get the thing.”

…but as we drove, Mrs Clown got agitated.

“There’s a party isn’t there! Grrr.
I told you we didn’t want a party…”

We went into the party hall and about half of Malta was there for our secret wedding party. My Maltese wasn’t that great at that time so when Mrs Clown introduced me to every single guest, about all I could say was:

Grazzi ħafna talli ġejtu!
(thank you for coming)

Eventually, my lovely new wife abandoned me with her brother and three bottles of red wine, and told me I needed to get ready for my speech. My Maltese wasn’t very good, so Mario said he’d help me. I managed most of it on my own, but I asked Mario how to say “I am as pissed as a fart!” in Maltese and I opened with that.

“Imbewwel daqs bassa…”

They didn’t find it nearly as funny as Mario and I did, but I continued bravely and when I got to the end, I told them they were “all very naughty” for giving us a surprise party.

Intom kulħadd pastaz!

But, it turned out, pastaz doesn’t quite mean naughty. It’s much closer to vulgar or wicked. They didn’t like that either.

For weeks after, people would stop me in the street and say “So you think I am wicked, Kevin?”

Life went on in Malta and we began to settle down but… did you ever see My Big Fat Greek Wedding?

My new relatives smothered me with love. If I fancied a beer, half a dozen cans of Hopleaf would appear in the cupboard. If I went for an interview, a friend of a friend of the man across the street had already called to tell them I was coming.

We were looking for a flat in Sliema but Uncle Leli’s sister had a place up the road where we could stay, and everything was sorted before I even got to see it. It had “between a well and a reservoir” underneath (I still don’t know what that means).

Mrs Clown and I were out shopping in Hamrun one day when we decided it was all getting a bit too much and we decided to move on.

We didn’t know where we wanted to go, though, so we made a list. Australia, Singapore, France, Italy, England, Madagascar — all places we had talked about living, and we made a little matrix with countries across the top and features down the left to help us decide. There were maybe ten features — weather, jobs, salary, language, distance to relatives, etc — and we gave them all marks out of ten and added up the scores.

We were as shocked as you are now when England came out on top, and we made our plans to leave. We didn’t really have many possessions — just a couple of suitcases and a saucepan that Mrs Clown’s mum gave us.

When we arrived at Gatwick, they took us off to the little interview room for illegal immigrants. It hadn’t occurred to me that I couldn’t take my wife home with me.

Why do you have a saucepan?

Er… to cook with…?…

How long are you planning to stay?

Er… forever…?…

They left us in that interview room for ages, and we checked our list of possible countries again while we waited. But, eventually, they came back and just said…

Go on. You can go.

So we went. We rented a car, and off we drove.

We didn’t really have a destination in mind but I thought it would be nice out West somewhere and we drove. As we passed Bath, I told Mrs Clown that it was supposed to be lovely there (I had never been), but it was such a glorious day, we kept driving.

Bristol? Nah, keep driving.
Taunton?
Exeter?

As we drove past all those lovely little cities, I said,

Plymouth is nice. My friend Kev lives there and he has a lovely Portuguese wife, Tusha. You’ll like her. Let’s go to Plymouth.

We stayed in the Kynance Hotel on Plymouth Hoe and after a bit of a misunderstanding where we thought we were sleeping in the closet under the stairs, we went down to the Barbican for dinner. The Barbican is a little haven on the edge of the harbour that is centuries old and all cobbled streets and listed buildings.

Over a pizza, we asked the waitress if she knew of anywhere to live.

Oh! Mr Daniels just up the road has a little flat for rent! It’s over the grocery store.

We moved in the next day.

Living in the Barbican was brilliant!

We were in a first-floor flat (2nd floor, for Americans) overlooking Southside Street which — if you like a rowdy, raucous, riotous atmosphere — is the best street in the world. It’s lined with pubs and restaurants and it’s right by the harbour. New Street — about 700 years old — ran behind our flat, and The Mayflower sailed for America from the quay at the end of our street.

There was always something going on, and all the residents sat on the outside of their window sills, with a can of beer and legs dangling down, to watch the excitement below.

The two lovely young ladies in the flat across the street from us always put their makeup on in the window opposite us, and they were always stark naked. It was a great place to live.

A favourite event was The Bruce Forsyth Appreciation Society where 25 half-drunk blokes staggered down the street dressed as Bruce saying “Nice to see you. To see you nice!” every few yards. There was something new every night. It always involved lashings of beer.

There were parties, pub crawls, fights. We once saw two blokes being beaten up by seven blokes and every time they were left for dead in the street, they would get up and fight some more.

Mrs Clown’s favourite was the artist, Mr Lenkiewicz, who lived around the corner from us. He painted beautiful young women naked, and always painted himself leering in the background. Mrs Clown wanted to model for him.

His best picture was an enormous mural on a wall in our street. It was like Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and featured all the members of Plymouth Council doing obscene things to each other and pooping on each other’s heads. I think they had upset him about something.

After a few months of living above Mr Daniels, we were able to buy a flat of our very own on Plymouth Hoe, but I’ll save that story for next time.

I’m writing down some memories.
You can start at Chapter One if you like or just keep reading here.

– 1978 –

I fell in love with J*** on the first day of class at Chis & Sid. I was 12, but I was shy back then, and didn’t get around to talking to J*** for several years.

Class 2P was the most social group of kids you could dream up. We did everything together. We went to the disco every week. We went to each other’s birthday party with a Party Six of Heineken or a bottle of Cinzano Bianco. I even got to dance with J*** a few times but nothing ever came of it because I was still too shy to talk to her and anyway, she had a boyfriend.

We were together for the next two years, but we were split up for the last two years. We all still hung out together most weekends. We often went ice skating at Queensway in London, and I got to hold J***’s hand as we skated together around the rink. We even went to the seaside on the train.

— 1982 —

I left school at 16 to join the Royal Navy, but everyone else stayed on to do A-levels, and I lost touch. But just before Christmas, I received a fancy invitation to Prize Day at Chis & Sid. I had won prizes for coming first in maths and for lots of O-levels.

I was due home for Christmas Leave on Prize Day, so I accepted the invitation. It was six hours on the train from Cornwall with a ferry ride and tube ride on top of that, but I thought I‘d make it.

Mum picked me up at Sidcup Station and drove me to the school, but I was an hour late already, and we had to run the last bit. The headmaster was already making his ‘Well done, everyone! Have a good Christmas…’ speech as I burst through the doors at the back of the hall. Mr Hahn spotted me in my Navy uniform and grabbed the microphone from the headmaster:

“…and the prize for maths goes to… Kevin Lawrence.”

After the prize-giving, I was invited to a party — still in my uniform — and everyone wanted to hear my Navy stories. Later that evening, David said, “Hey! There’s a party in the Sixth Form Centre on Wednesday. Why don’t you come? We’re allowed to bring beer, wine and cider. No spirits though!”

I got the bus down to the school on Wednesday afternoon, and all my old friends were there. We drank and we danced until Dexy’s Midnight Runners played Come on Eileen! and we all held hands in a big circle. J*** held my hand!!!

We held hands all night, and we danced to the slow ones together. And we kissed.

The next evening, I decided to ask J*** out. I was terrified. I had never asked anyone out before.

I called from the phone box at the top of Sidcup Hill, and my hands were shaking as I tried to get my 10p into the slot. I dropped it twice. But J*** said ‘Yes’ and we went to see E.T. the next day. J*** became my girlfriend.

We went out to the pubs in Bexley Village every night of my Christmas leave until, filled with sadness, I got that lonely train back to Cornwall.

— 1983 —

Our romance blossomed for the next couple of years, and we wrote love letters every week. Later that year, I was drafted closer to London, and I could travel up from Portsmouth to see J*** almost every weekend.

It was cool to be a teenager with a full-time salary, and we could do things that most teenagers can’t afford. We went to tons of concerts. Kool & the Gang. Wham! Queen. Elton John. Spandau Ballet… I still have all the brochures. And nightclubs! J***’s favourite was The Empire, Leicester Square, and it took me years to get over my allergy to disco music.

J***’s family took me on a horse-riding holiday to Wales every Easter and for a week in Annecy, France, every summer. We had the perfect romance until I joined my first ship, and they sent me away to the Falkland Islands for six months.

— 1985 —

When I got home from The Falklands, J*** and her mum came to meet me as we came alongside in Portsmouth Dockyard. The band played Rod Stewart’s I am Sailing and we kissed like Romeo & Juliet.

Our romance carried on where we left off — but it wasn’t quite the same.

J*** had a job now in a bank in London and had new friends from work. I still went to meet her every weekend and we still went out on the town every Saturday night but things soon began to get awkward.

We had already booked a holiday together but I think we both knew our love affair was coming to an end. We had one last wild fling on Las Playa de Las Américas but when we got home we agreed to go our separate ways.

A few months later, I got a phone call out of the blue. It was J***.

Live Aid was special.

You probably know that Bob Geldoff rounded up the greatest bands in the world to perform at Wembley Stadium with a simultaneous concert in Philadelphia. They’d announced on the radio that the tickets were all sold out but J*** went up to Wembley anyway and they had a few left. With 72,000 other lucky ticket holders, we went to see the best concert in the history of music.

We had the best seats in the stadium — just to the left of the stage — and the concert was truly amazing. At most concerts, artists play their new stuff that no one ever heard before but at Live Aid they were at their best because there were two billion people watching on the telly.

All my favourites were there: Sade, Elvis Costello, Paul Young, Spandau Ballet. We all cheered when Freddie Mercury stole the show and we all cried when they played the Drive video by The Cars while children starved in Africa. Everyone there remembers the teddy bear who did laps of the stadium in between sets and we all cheered with each toss into the air.

When the finale came around and we all sang Do They Know It’s Christmas?, we sang and we sang and we sang. We sang those last two lines over and over; all the way down Wembley Way to the tube station and halfway back to London on the Tube. What a day!

After Live Aid, J*** and I rekindled our romance for a few more months and went on one more trip to Annecy with her family but we had a massive falling out the night before we left. We practically broke up the first day we got there and didn’t speak to each other for the whole week. What a horrible week that must have been for J***’s family!

– 2010 –

Time moved on and we didn’t see each other again until many years later when I was visiting from America and met up with a few old school friends at Hall Place in Bexley. We’ve met for lunch a few times since. It’s fun to reminisce about the old times.

I sometimes wonder if we might’ve made it if it weren’t for that trip to the Falklands. At the time, we thought we would last forever but, looking back, I don’t think our romance would have survived. First love is always special but we had our separate lives to live. I am glad mine turned out the way it did and I hope J*** can say the same.

First love is special though and looking back at those early memories brings a twinkle to my eye.

Back when we were teenagers, we went to discos, and line dancing gave us permission to dance without being embarrassed. Twenty-first-century teenagers don’t have that excuse to get started.

I was at school in the early 80s, and we (boys and girls) used to dance together at the discos we went to every week. I was a bit shy as a teenager, and it was hard to get me dancing. The thing that pulled me in was a group dance, or a line dance, where everyone was dancing together with the same moves (”Come on and jump to the beat! Jump!”). I think the big difference was that no one was watching because they were all concentrating on their own “Jump!”. There might have been some boring twats criticising from the sidelines, but no one cared what they thought, because they were boring twats.

Once I’d got the confidence to line dance, it was a small step to disco dancing or doing the special moves that Ska required, and by then, I could dance anywhere with anyone — but it was the group dance/line dance that broke down those barriers.

I fell in love with a girl in my class when I was 12, but I was too shy to tell her. I held her hand when we all went ice skating together, and that was allowed because everyone was holding hands. We even jumped to the beat (”Jump!”) at the disco together, but I couldn’t tell her I loved her. Too shy.

I joined the Navy when I was 16, while everyone else was still at school. The first Christmas I came home, there was a party at the school. We had all had a little to drink, and when Come on Eileen came on, we all danced together, holding hands in a big circle. I HELD HANDS WITH HER! The beer and the dancing made it easy for me to ask her out, and we were together for the next three years. When we compared notes later, it turned out we had both fancied each other since we were twelve, but we were both too shy to do anything about it.

Fast forward to now, and my kids never had that line dancing opportunity to hold hands, so it’s nearly impossible to make that next big step to kissing and falling in love. They play video games across the interwebs together, but that step to holding hands and kissing is a step too far.

I had lunch with my girlfriend a couple of years ago, and our strongest memory from our teenage years was holding hands and dancing to Come on Eileen. We both remembered “Come on and jump to the beat! Jump!”, and wished we’d done something about it from the start.

Twenty-first-century kids don’t expect dads to dance.

When I was 19, at Jacko’s birthday party, we played The B52’s Rock Lobster, and everyone did this weird, knees-twisting, arms-flapping dance that became the standard Man’s Dance for the next couple of years. I didn’t really dance again after that until I got married, but my wife made fun of my dancing, and I never danced again.

Fast-forward to now and my kids are all grown up and I don’t care what they think when I do my weird, knees-twisting, arms-flapping dance. I am supposed to be a middle-aged Dad who would NEVER dance because that’s not what dad’s do.

But I dance.