2025 marked an astonishing 50 years since I went on a school holiday to Chamonix in France. So, I returned to Chamonix, not having been there since 1975. I don’t know what I expected to find or experience. But the memories came flooding back of a very eventful school summer break.
In the mid-1970s, I was at a small private school in Loughton, Essex called Loughton School. Most of the pupils were rich kids from Chigwell, Buckhurst Hill, and Woodford – on the Essex fringes of east London, bordering Epping Forest. Many of the families had roots in the East End, especially the Jewish kids, and had moved to the suburbs as they got more affluent.
Every year, there was a skiing holiday to Aviemore and a French language break to somewhere in France. In the summer of 1975, our French teacher – Mr Offord – was able to secure shared rooms for a group of us in a newly built, brutalist accommodation block at a boarding school in Chamonix, called the Cite Scolaire.
Despite the wealth in their families, most of my fellow school pupils went to the usual Spanish coastal resorts (“Costa del…”), or the Algarve, that the rest of the British population colonised every summer. More adventurous families might go on holiday to Yugoslavia. But nobody ventured much further than that, and in the 1970s, trips to south-east Asia, the United States, or Australia were the stuff of fantasy – even for the middle class.
DISCOVER: Corporal punishment in 1970s schools
We went by ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe, which was cheaper than the Dover-Calais option. It seemed to take forever. In contrast, when I travelled to Portugal with my parents, by car, we would board the hovercraft from Ramsgate, which was a thrilling ride!
On board ship, we ate chips with tomato ketchup. I nearly choked when a French woman and her child slipped on some very steep steps, leading downwards from an upper deck, somersaulting to the bottom, and staggering forward with a bloodied face. A sight I’ve never forgotten.
In Paris, the school group was taken to a cafe where we ate Croque Monsieur, a hot ham and cheese sandwich that was alien to everybody present. Exotic food was always a risk with 1970s kids. My mother realised this when she unwisely served squid to some of my mates for lunch and got a very unfavourable reaction. “Ugh – disgusting!” But ham and cheese was OK.
One kid then needed the toilet but moments later returned ashen-faced:
“Somebody’s nicked the bog!”
The cafe had squat toilets, which were very common in France at that time. Mr Offord glanced knowingly at me and we both guffawed at this pupil’s ignorance. Driving to Portugal with my folks, I’d used more squat toilets than I cared to recall. I’ve always found them a bit gross. But no toilet had been stolen!
DISCOVER: School gym horror in the 1970s
First day in Chamonix, we were taken on the cable car that leads to the top of a snowy mountain, Aiguille du Midi, from which you get a clear view of Mont Blanc – highest peak in western Europe. The change in temperature from warm Chamonix to freezing mountaintop wasn’t well explained to us and a group of girls in platform shoes, midi skirts, and puffer jackets could be seen shivering in the cafe.
While I drank a mug of hot chocolate in the cafe, a middle-aged Japanese guy asked if he could take photos of me. He then snapped away and handed over a 500 Yen note. Everybody thought this was a cute little incident. Only years later, after the avalanche of exposes about 1970s child abuse, I reconsidered what had actually happened. Not sure a teacher would welcome a random adult photographing one of their pupils these days.
The discovery of a joke shop in Chamonix livened things up. I had itching powder put in my bed one evening. But I retaliated with stink bombs and fire crackers later on. More alarmingly, a couple of shops openly sold flick knives (switchblades). We thought that was terribly cool.
At the end of this school holiday, the other kids packed and got ready to return home. However, my parents arrived in a VW camper van (which my mother always referred to as the “caravanette”) to whisk me off to Portugal. That was a long journey across France, Spain, and on to our destination.
There had just been a revolution in Portugal and the Communist Party was in control. When we drove to the border, there was a long queue of cars as soldiers, all sporting Che Guevara style beards, handed out leaflets from the Armed Forces-People Movement. The whole country was covered in political graffiti, featuring clenched fists and the communist hammer and sickle. American TV programmes had been banned and 80% of the economy was under state or workers control.
Once I returned to Loughton School for the autumn term, Mr Offord turned to me in the French class: “Now everybody, most of you have been to the usual destinations for your summer holiday, but somebody here has been in the middle of a revolution.” I rose from my seat and regaled a very confused class about what I’d seen. How to explain a southern European Marxist uprising to English 12-year-olds in the 1970s?
The summer of 1975 was one I won’t forget.
