Fifty years ago today I flew to Canada. I know because I kept a diary of the trip and here's the cover.
It was the best, biggest and longest holiday my family ever went on, also totally out of the ordinary for the era. Most families still holidayed in the UK, indeed when I got back to school in the autumn only two of my class had been abroad that summer. It was doable because we weren't paying for accommodation, we were staying with my Mum's penfriend who she'd been at school with in the 1940s, at least until her sudden emigration to Canada. I was now about the same age they'd been, i.e. 11 years old, and my parents were keen to make this one-off transatlantic holiday before I'd have to pay full adult fare. Somehow they wangled me out of my last week at primary school - it'd never be permitted today - and so began an amazing three weeks in and around the province of Ontario.
13th July 1976 (London → Toronto)
We got up early ready to head off to Heathrow by taxi, it being too risky to leave the connection to the 724 coach. My brother and I didn't have to worry about the packing because Mum always chose our clothes, also we were still on a parental passport. It was my first visit to Terminal 3 having never flown long-haul before and I was very much looking forward to our flight in a Boeing 747. Unfortunately when we got to Gate 3 there was no Jumbo, only a VC10, a plane so old that it'd soon be reaching the end of its working life. The switch may well have been the reason for BA619's delayed take-off, our departure being precisely 1 hour and 12 minutes late which I know because I was being particularly anal about recording everything in my diary. Honestly, all the clues to how the blog might turn out were already there.
I failed to write down what time we took off but I do know they gave us an in-flight snack at 11.00am, that Manchester and Carlisle passed underneath at 11.05am and 11.20am respectively, and that we touched down at Prestwick airport at 11.40am. Here there was an issue with "a false bomb scare" which I seem to have taken completely in my stride but may have given my parents the heebeegeebees, the result of which was another lengthy delay while we waited for the extra passengers to board. It was 1.05pm by the time we took off and 2pm by the time lunch was served somewhere over the Atlantic. I'd love to know what that lunch was but sadly this is where I stopped recording everything in such granular detail. All I know is that the mid-morning snack had included cream cheese and a danish pastry, and that my insular 1970s palate was thrilled by the novelty of a cosmopolitan sugar rush.
One thing British Airways gave young long-haul fliers in those days was membership of their Junior Jet Club. A special brown envelope was delivered by the stewardess, inside which were a pristine blue membership book and a pin badge with wings. On the inside page was a greeting from Captain Leo Budd, one of BA's Concorde pilots, the supersonic wonder which had made its maiden passenger flight six months earlier. The next pages had 50 spaces to record flights made, the idea being that the captain of your flight would sign it and record the number of miles travelled, in this case 3557. All you had to do to receive "a special mileage certificate" was to get that total up to 25,000, the equivalent of seven transatlantic flights, which needless to say never happened.
Annoyingly I didn't get a JJC Pack on the flight out, only on the way back on 6th August. This meant I'd already missed out on 3557 logged miles, indeed actually 3621 because a flight via Prestwick is 64 miles longer. 11 year old me had already learned that AirMiles were a scam. My log book had been signed with a squiggle and underneath it said P.P. CAPTAIN, which I thought was extra special until my parents explained that meant the captain hadn't signed it. We weren't made of money so I never got my mileage certificate, indeed it turned out I wouldn't fly with British Airways again until 2001, and the Junior Jet Club was disbanded in 1984. Perhaps unsurprisingly my JJC badge is still attached to its original card.
Anyway, back on my outbound flight the novelty of flying over an ocean soon wore off. Also a VC10 wasn't as much fun as a 747 with its multi-channel inflight entertainment system, so I hope I took a good book. We spotted Canada almost four hours after leaving Prestwick, likely Goose Bay, which was my very first sighting of another continent. Landing at Toronto didn't seem to worry me, I was too busy checking my watch and noting it was 2.15pm local time, then bemoaning how long it took them to attach the steps. Such was 'security' in those days that Mum's penfriend was waving to us as we disembarked the plane. Before long we were following her to Car Park 6 before driving back to the suburb of Oshawa (and also I assume hugging and embracing after all those missed years but I never recorded that bit).
14th July 1976
I was still writing my diary comprehensively at this point, as you can see.
I had my first experience of product placement in a television programme (Rocketship 7) and was distinctly unimpressed. Later we went to the shops and I went in my first drug store, which looked suspiciously like a chemist. In the afternoon we went to the Ontario Centre, which I assume was a shopping mall but I didn't write down enough clues to be able to confirm this 50 years later. I disliked the moany woman in the InfoCentre but liked Coles, a bookshop. I felt patronised when a waitress gave me a colouring book. After supper we "went down to the Creek where we made a bridge", I assume Pringle Creek but I don't think anybody called it that at the time.
15th July 1976
And after that, annoyingly, I just wrote notes. My intention was to write it all up in proper sentences but I never did so all I have now in my diary is a list of words that no longer make proper sense. I deduce from "Turnstile. Cinesphere, Roof. Forum. Boats." that we went to Ontario Place, a recreational island off Toronto, also that it was brilliant because I left myself three blank pages to write a full account. 16th July is even worse, it just says "Help. Footsteps. Smoke. Pancakes. Tire. Haircut. Sprinkler. Doctor. Pack." And on 17th July we drove off on a week-long campervan tour round Lake Ontario, including my first ever visit to the USA, but I wrote about that last week so won't go over it again.
Some further highlights...
25th July:Camp Sumac. Dairy Queen Peanut Butter Sundae. 26th July: Science Centre (we totally loved the Ontario Science Centre) 27th July: Bo Peep. 28th July:Lake Simcoe. Eildon Hall. 29th July:Pickering Nuclear Power Station(alas no tours today) 30th July: Science Centre (again) 31st July: Parade. Pouring rain. 1st August: Cgugqg (I have absolutely no idea) 2nd August:Holiday. Fireworks. 3rd August:Centreville. Ponderosa Steak House. 4th August: Go Train. CN Tower (the world's tallest free standing tower had only been open for five weeks and the queue was 1½ hours long) (I wrote only three words - fantastic, windy, scared) 5th August:Planetarium. Check-in. BA600. Bye. 6th August:(back to drought-stricken England)
It's thus not quite as memorable as I'd like it to have been. But wow, what a holiday!
