IN THE SUMMER vacation of 1957, I took a position as courier with a Birmingham travel company, the Midland Air Tour Operators (MATO), which ran tours to northern Italy. My task was to look after successive groups of tourists from the Midlands, which changed every fortnight. Each group stayed, as I did, at the Hotel Ristorante Le Palme (the palm trees), in the village of Laigueglia, about an hour's walk along the coast to the west of Alassio, in Liguria, northern Italy. The position was challenging in more senses than one. First of all, the company brochure assured its clients that the charter flights would land at Albenga, an Italian town about three quarter of an hour's drive from Laigueglia. The reserve airport would be Nice, across the border in France. In fact, however, the company had not managed to secure the right to land at Albenga, and all flights landed at Nice as well as taking off from Nice on the way home. The journey from Nice to Laigueglia took three to four hours, and in those pre-EU days there was officious bureaucracy to deal with at the Franco-Italian border. Naturally, I became the target of complaints to the effect that the company in its publicity was misleading its clients.

The second problem was that the company representative had chosen the Hotel Le Palme in mid-winter, at a time when there was relatively little traffic along the main road along the coast that ran past the hotel (this was before the invention of the autostrada). In full summer, however, the main road was choked with traffic well into the night, and in addition a garage directly opposite the hotel was testing motor bikes until past midnight. Those whose bedrooms faced the main road needed earplugs. Those whose bedrooms faced the courtyard, on the other hand, were spared noise from the road and garage, but since dancing went on in the courtyard up to one in the morning, needed to find dance music conducive to sleep. Therefore, the next morning after each party arrived, I was faced by disgruntled clients requesting a move, either from the roadside to the courtyard side, or vice versa.