I just wasn't interested in what America offered - I've never really liked chewing- gum

I just wasn't interested in what America offered - I've never really liked chewing- gum.I was looking for art, for artists, for old churches, for all the things that were built and painted and created before the 20th century, because America was full of the 20th century And also, Paris was glamour and romance and sexy men It was sex America was extremely puritanical in that period Paris was freedom and free love. It was as it turned out, certainly sex, I don't know about love.So I saved my money and bought my passage on an Italian boat called the Castel Felice, the Happy Castle. Pier 52 it was, and we had to be on board at three o'clock in the afternoon, and my parents saw me off. They were worried, they worried easily and I think they had a notion that in a way I was never coming back from that journey, because I never did really.When we pulled away from the shore, I could make out my parents in these crowds of people, it was like a movie, people were waving and the sun was starting to go down. There was New York receding, that amazing skyline, that my people had done in reverse: I was pulling away from it and very aware that my paternal grandparents had approached that very view and it was a bizarre feeling. And I remember feeling that I was on the edge of something and that I was not coming back. The excitement of it is almost impossible to express, the freedom.We had six days of sailing ahead of us - it beats the hell out of air travel.

It was a spiritual change, when you crossed from the United States to Europe in that time and crossing by sea was an important voyage. You were travelling in more than just space and time, you were actually preparing yourself.So there I was with a European study-abroad group, being led by a delightful Englishman, queer as a three-dollar bill but I didn't know it. His name was Tony and he was funny and wry and he had that irony that Americans don't have. It was my first real contact with an English person and he was delicious.I shared a cabin with two Australian girls and I'd never heard such profanity. I'd never met women who could tell dirty jokes and my God those Aussies could tell dirty jokes - they were amazing. There was a first class we used to sneak up to - when you're a young girl and pretty good- looking you can do anything, that's one thing, there are no walls that don't come down. There was more of a party going on up there, but it was mostly crew.

They took the best quarters - it was an Italian ship.First thing I saw was English land, the Needles. We called at Southampton and I thought everyone looked very small and the cars looked very small and all the men were wearing macs. I thought they looked very tired, and I was such an arrogant little American twerp I'd forgotten that the biggest war in the world had been fought 10 years earlier, and 10 years is not a long time to recover from the Blitz. And also the Brits fought it much harder and with much more heart than an awful lot of other people I was to meet in Europe, like the Parisians.London was on the tour, and I sat on the top of a red bus and cried, coming down the Strand, that got me. Not going to St Paul's and all that, but the street where Benjamin Franklin had an affair with his landlady. I remember seeing the street name and thinking, "My God, it's real, I'm actually going down Fleet Street."But England - I wrote a post-card to my mother saying, "It is so weary and grey I could never live here." I was waiting for the romance of Paris, the heat and the glamour and glitz.