By Bike To Budapest, Elizabeth Hilton (1996)
A ride from Denmark to Budapest undertaken by a family of six – the four children being aged from around 10 to 16 during the summer of 1994. The ride was possibly more of a success than the book – although it would provide a primer for anyone planning a long ride with their own children
Minerva Press 1 85863 965 4 Paperback 231pp £9.99
There are no shortage of books about cyclists who have undertaken this route – or something quite similar. All differ in their perspectives and in the periods during which the journey’s were made, of course. But this one is unique – so far as I am aware – in that it describes a family cycling adventure.
Anyone who has coerced a sceptical parents-and-children combo to undertake a modest day-ride at the height of summer will know what an enormous challenge it can be. So getting four children and two parents to pedal over 1,500 miles deserves respect.
Sadly, reflections on this unique aspect of their journey occur only fleetingly in the text. Occasionally, and enjoyably, HIlton throws a shaft of light on family dynamics. In this passage, for example, they are stuck on a railway station in Prague.
“The problem essentially was that we had to choose from sixteen platforms, some empty, some with a train but all with incomprehensible lists of destinations written in Czech. We know that our station was Rez, but this was too small to appear on any of the lists and we weren’t even sure which route it lay on – oh dear.
‘You lot wait here,’ said Peter, ‘and I’ll’
‘SCOUT AROUND,’ we all chorused.
‘Alexander went with him for moral support and they returned after about twenty minutes looking rather perplexed.”
Later on she is good on the negotiations that are necessary with the younger children, who are sceptical of parental promises that ‘it will be all downhill from here’.
Sadly there is also much in the book that is irksome. With little need, and no explanation, Hilton dismisses former Brithsh Prime Minister Clement Atlee and ‘ineffectual’, for example. To the prospect of forming an understanding of the work of painter Egon Schiele she says: ‘My instinctive response is that I haven’t got the time, I am too lazy to make the effort and my intellect will never be up to it – thank God’. And despite her excruciating lampoons of the working-class Brits that they encounter, she is not beyond a pedestrian turn of phrase herself. If ‘scrummy’ is the best description you can muster of a meal, why bother?
Perhaps her real message is that, once a family has set off on a venture then the necessity to manage the parents-and-children dynamic becomes less and less necessary. If that is the case, then it is worth reading as a reassurance for any planning to propel their own children on a pedalling pilgrimage.
PS August 09