MARIELLA FROSTRUP ACCESS ALL AREAS

Watching a daughter go abroad on a first holiday alone can be hard – particularly when you recall your own mistakes on the road!

Ionce spent the most idyllic of mornings on the tiny heartshaped island of Mnemba, off Zanzibar, helping to shepherd a newly hatched nest of turtles into the turquoise ocean.

It was a terrifying business, watching these tiny defenceless creatures set off for the big blue, knowing the long list of predators they faced, from sea birds up above, to crabs and fish below and the minimal odds for their survival. Only 1 to 2 per cent of hatchlings make it through their first year and our efforts to get them across the sand safely would have little impact on their chances of making it to maturity.

I was reminded of that day and felt a similar sense of powerless as I watched my daughter step through the barrier at Bristol airport and set off on her first solo trip abroad. It was like one of those posters of the evolution of man, as images from her birth 14 years ago through to the selfcomposed mini-adult she’s become flashed before my eyes.

I recalled looking at her in awe, moments after she was born, as I held this curious little mergirl, her long fingers waving like underwater reeds moving to the invisible power of the current. She learnt to swim when she was two and the moment it was possible, at 12, she got her scuba diving certificate, so she could visit her favourite habitat.

But stepping out of the door with her neatly packed roll-on, which I’d tried earlier to advise her on the contents of, but was waved away from her bedroom door with patronising disdain, she looked to me like a fish out of water again. Her all white ensemble, that seemed such a sophisticated choice when she’d descended the stairs that morning, was suddenly scarily reminiscent of martyr’s robes.

At the airport, the movie reel of lurking dangers playing through my head, from lost passports to plane crashes and sleazy abductors, was as real to me as the man in uniform asking to see her boarding card. It was all I could do to restrain myself from leaping the barrier and wrestling her back into my arms. And then, turning briefly and offering a slight, hesitant wave of her hand, she was off.

The business of parenting is often described as a thankless one and there are challenges. Hardest of all, I’ve found, is the realisation that we’re simply training our children to do the thing we most dread; step out through the doorway and into the world without us.

I wondered what my mother had felt, when at 16, two years older than my own girl now, I boarded the ferry from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead, off, Dick Whittington style, to find my fortune in London town.

Back then in 1979, without mobile phones or internet to stay in touch, my mum put a brave face on her fears. My minnow was off for a week in France, smartphone tucked in her handbag, to stay with a friend. I had left alone for a big city, in a foreign country, wholly unaware of how vulnerable and innocent I was.

Having now lived through so many decades, so far without serious incident, it’s ironic that I should have become so paranoid about danger. The tips I offer my daughter about safe travelling involve listing the many risks I stupidly took and I pray she won’t: hitchhiking to school in uniform to save bus fare, endlessly talking to strangers, late night lifts from Greek lotharios on scooters, travelling solo in unfamiliar cities, walking home late at night because I’d spent my cab fare on cocktails.

With so many mistakes under my belt it would take a much longer column to list them, but suffice it to say I’ve done all the things that now send an electric current of fear down my spine. An unnerving solo visit to Gambia when I was just 20, a trip through LA’s South Central with musicians looking for thrills, New York in the Eighties taking the late-night subway, so

The world can be a dangerous place, but if that’s what we dwell on we miss out

I could boast about my bravery to friends back home, six weeks in Brazil walking the same footpath alone every day where a girl would be murdered during my stay.

The world can be a dangerous place, but if that’s what we dwell on we miss out on so much. There are plenty of compelling reasons to pull our children close and trim their wings, but as I watched my girl’s easyJet flight take to the sky, I wished for the courage and confidence to let her make her own way, leaving me simply to stand back and admire her journey. Happily, her odds of success are far greater than those baby turtles back in

East Africa.

The start of the journey...