Your story – Heather Scott

Tell us about a fun school trip you had as a child?

We didn’t go on many trips in the Primary School, I remember going once to see the reservoires in Mid Wales and another time to visit the Houses of Parliament, neither of which I considered fun but probably interesting.

When I was in the fourth year of senior school, summer of 1968,  I went on an educational cruise around the Baltic which was a lot of fun as well as eye opening. We were away for, I think, about ten days and missed the last few days of the summer term at school and it went into the first week of the summer holiday. The ship was called the SS Nevasa it was an old wartime troop carrier that had been converted into an educational cruise ship, not very luxurious, we slept in dormitories down in the bowels of the ship.  We visited Copenhagen, Visby a  town on the Swedish island of Gotland, and Leningrad which is now St Petersburg. Copenhagen and Visby were interesting and it was fun being shown around by the local students especially the bleached blond Swedish boys who to 14/15 girls were very dishy.  We were also very lucky as the weather in both places was brilliant sunshine when we arrived there, previously the weather had been dreadful we had sailed through a force ten gale the day before. Leningrad was completely different it was during the Soviet Era and everything was very drab, even the people who seemed scared stiff to talk to us, it didn’t help that the day was also very grey and damp. The night before we were allowed to dock the ship was circled by soviet submarines all night and when we eventually arrived we each had to show our passport cards as we left the ship which we hadn’t at the previous places, our teachers sensibly collected them all in after we had shown them but one school from Barry didn’t and unfortunately one pupil, he was only twelve, lost his and they had the devil of trouble trying to get the soldiers to allow him back on the ship. The captain of the ship, the teachers from the school and some bigwig from the education department,it was the first educational cruise to the USSR, all spent what seemed like hours negotiating with them, all the while the poor kid didn’t know if he was going to get home or not.  After each place that we visited they held a party on board during the evening for the students who showed us around to say thank you, in Leningrad the soldiers counted themm all on board and then before the end they came on board to escort them off to make sure they all left. It was a strange place but  interesting to see, especially the people. I remember at the end of the visit they took us to a large store to do some shopping, it was weird you went to one counter to choose what you wanted to buy, went to another to pay for it then went to another to collect it, all of this took a very long time and as all of the students and other visitors were there at the same time it was mayhem.   Because of this my friend Gaynor and I were left behind when they went back to the buses which were not too far away in a bus park, when we eventually left although we knew the way we thought we would as some people who were walking past, not thinking that they probably wouldn’t be able to understand us, but when we spoke to them they looked at us like frightened rabbits and rushed off. We never considered big brother might be watching but they evidently did.