When I was born I was taken from England to Ireland to live with my Gran. After 4 years I was back in England. Then every year after that Mum would take us back across the sea to visit Dublin. The journey wasn't luxurious, no first class for us! But I loved the train from Yorkshire to Liverpool or Holyhead and the sound of the wheels clacking along the rails would take me off into my own world. Our transport across the water was a hulking big ship from the B&I line and access from the quay was via a shaky old walkway, or gangway as it was known then. My God, I hated stepping onto that thing and looking over the sides of it into the murky harbour water. My fear of walking on swing bridges, pedestrian flyovers, even opencast metal stairways must originate in that experience. I know I would hold my breath as I struggled up it and would let out a hugely relieved sigh when at last my foot landed safely on the ship's deck.

You've all seen Titanic, right? It is even on my list of all-time favourite movies. Gotta love Jack, AKA Leonardo DiCaprio! Remember the barred entrance/exit between First Class and Steerage? It was real. Believe me. We had one, too. We had no steerage class, well not for the humans anyway, but the ship did carry cattle in it's hulk. We just had first and second. Yeah, great being defined as second class. At least today it is called economy! I would stand at the rail on the deck and could see through the bars along a carpeted passageway, where stewards in white shirts and red vests were carrying trays of food and drinks to the unseen passengers in First Class. Meanwhile we second-class citizens of open wooden Deckland were freezing and wet from the relentless lashing of the wonderfully bracing cold wet wind coming off the grey, rolling Irish Sea.

Sounds awful, doesn't it? Yet this is where my love for travel was born. As soon as I could persuade my mother I was old enough to take care of myself, I would spend the 8 hours travel time to Dublin wandering the deck, watching the couples smooching, listening to the duos and trios playing their Irish music on fiddles and guitars, steering clear of rolling drunks stinking of Irish whiskey, and gazing out over the black sea, loving the sight of the whitecaps on the waves and the silver sheen on the water from the moon's reflection. Yes, we always travelled overnight. Can you imagine a young girl being allowed to do that nowadays? Funnily enough, in all those overnight journeys, and there must have been at least 14 of them over the years, I was never in any danger. Well, not until much later, when I was about 16, but that's another story for another day which I may never tell anyway.

So this is where it all began. Looking through those segregation bars I was determined to one day be on the other side of them; that I would one day cruise the high seas and visit foreign lands with exotic sounding names. I had not even thought of flying as that was still outside my own experience but I had found the gypsy in me.