My fantastic summers in London as an unaccompanied child in the 80’s

Every Summer in the early 80’s I was sent for two months to the United Kingdom to stay with family.
I always stayed in a different location and after sampling the UK in the first year in a smaller city of Coventry, I made it to London the following year and for for a few years after.

It was expensive in those days to fly so I was always sent travelling alone.

An air hostess would take charge of me at the airport and take care of me until I was collected at the destination.

It was on one of these flights, seated at the back of the aircraft beside where the hostesses sat where I too sat, inhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke from a chain smoker beside me for an hour and a half on board.

No one saw any problem in the days where smoking was permitted.

I had great times in London as a child where I was free to roam and it was easy to get around with the Tube.

I learned not to ask directions ever because most people didn’t know or didn’t have time to tell.

Balham, Clapham, Waterloo.

Before my summers in London I had already spent a summer in Coventry with a cousin and her daughters when I was about 8 years old.

I was always quick to adapt and become speak the local accents like a local.

I had stitches removed from my wounded finger one year at hospital and I fainted.

I saw a Louis Armstrong hologram with motion which I thought would be more common by now but they aren’t.

I saw the same lady in the morning in the suburbs and again later in the day in the city that same day disproving the saying that you will never see the same person twice in that city.

A drunk assaulted me in Waterloo station one day because I was playing with a toy gun and nobody noticed a thing.

I lay across the timeline marking GMT in the park.

Leicester Square. Covent Garden.

Time Out. Wine bars.

I experienced a particular boomtime of the city, that cycle is never ending in London.

London is a busy city much enlarged since my time there.