I was intrigued by the controversy around a British 15-year-old boy travelling around western Europe with a friend. At the same age, a friend and I travelled across the US on Greyhound buses. It was her first international trip without an adult but I’d been crossing France and Germany from Manchester by bus and train for several years. There were no mobile phones. I had barely enough cash for food on the journey, no credit card. If I needed help, I had to ask for it from whoever was around, in French or German as necessary.
My parents were outliers even by the standards of 1990s Britain, and I grew up hyper-independent in ways that haven’t always served me well. Any hardship was, obviously, the luxury version; I carried small change and made my own arrangements but my parents paid for the tickets, and no one suggested that I should be earning money rather than exploring Europe during the holidays. By necessity, I was already a sensible and responsible teenager and I became more so on the road.
I find it hard now to separate any additional dangers of travel from the dangers of being a teenage girl in a big city in the early 1990s. I was used to a level of harassment in the streets that I hope is unthinkable now. It was no worse in Marseilles, and better in Cologne, than on my way to school at home.
There were some alarming moments in the early hours of the morning during long layovers in American bus stations, but there were also eye-opening, world-changing conversations with strangers. I became fluent in French and German, able to get by in a few other languages. I trusted myself and was discerning and lucky in deciding who else to trust.
As a teenage girl in the 1990s there was a level of harassment that I hope is unthinkable now
My friend’s effortless joyful incompetence sets an example that’s difficult to match
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My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss: A bleak, often brilliant personal history
It could, of course, have gone badly wrong, but that was true of making my way around Manchester as well. Those other places weren’t innately more dangerous than where I lived. My parents were often travelling themselves and uncontactable, anyway not likely rescuers in any jurisdiction. I carried my vulnerability and my self-reliance with me.
Twenty years after those trips, I moved to Iceland with my own primary-aged sons. Icelandic kids walk to school with friends and siblings from when they start at the age of six. They play out, on the streets and parks, in mixed-age groups but without adult supervision. We lived in an apartment by the sea, with many opportunities for a child to fall off walls and docks into sometimes frozen water. We could let our son join in with all his Icelandic friends, or we could keep him safe by English standards.
I can’t understand, his teacher said, why you would raise your child to depend on someone else for his physical safety. Isn’t that the most dangerous situation of all? The answer wasn’t only that I didn’t yet trust a six-year-old boy with his safety, it was that I wanted him to know himself loved, to understand that we cared that he didn’t fall into the sea. As a child I had learned to keep myself safe, but I had also learned that my safety wasn’t interesting to anyone else.
That, I think, is the nub of the question about teenagers and independence. My kids have travelled alone between Britain and Ireland from their mid-teens, with phones and credit cards, between households where they know themselves loved as well as trusted, using familiar transport routes.
[ Sarah Moss: I find the phrase ‘first world problems’ deeply objectionableOpens in new window ]
Of course something could go wrong, but things also go wrong here in Dublin. I’m a parent, tolerating worry is in the job description, and so is the gradual handover of physical safety from parent to child. I suspect that the exact timing of that handover can be left to the discernment of individual families in their individual circumstances just fine, as long as the work of loving care is properly done.
And I wonder, how many of the people tutting about a middle-class 15-year-old boy with a rail pass feel the same concern for all the unaccompanied teenage boys crossing land and sea on boats, trucks and their own two feet to seek a place of safety?