Travel: To hell and back with the T-shirt to prove it

BEING trapped inside a hot metal capsule with 37 American adolescents is probably not everybody's idea of a holiday. It certainly wasn't mine; I was in it for the money. It was the first time I had been on a package tour and I was leading it.

My employer was an educational, American travel company that prides itself on the academic content of its trips. This means that, instead of taking on experienced professionals from the travel industry who don't know anything about art, it recruits graduates like me who don't know anything at all.

The programme was called 'Peoples of Europe'; we were going to cover seven countries in 18 days, and according to the glossy brochure, were about to 'Celebrate the Spirit of Discovery'. Well I certainly was, having never been to Munich or Rome before. Nor, for that matter, had I been to Heidelberg or Lucerne. And I didn't speak German. I tried to remember exactly what lies I'd told at the interview. Everybody lies at interviews, but usually they don't come back to haunt you quite so vividly.

The first 'Person of Europe' they met, of course, was me. 'You speak funny,' said 14- year-old Meredith when I met them at Frankfurt airport, 'and you're not very old.' I wondered for how long I would be able to keep up the facade of being an old pro, since within seconds Meredith had got my number. The only difference between them and me was that I had the guide books. Some of them had brought along Let's Go Europe, but that doesn't count.

We got on the bus, and I gave them a 'Welcome to Europe' spiel, a short introduction to the problems facing post-unification Germany, and, with an encouraging smile, invited them to ask any questions they liked. A hand shot up at the back; they were obviously keen. 'What country is Germany in?' I was going to have to keep it simple.

The first thing I learnt was to forget all about the concept of embarrassment. Going anywhere with 37 Americans in identikit mix-and-match casualwear is intrinsically embarrassing. Getting on the Tube in London with 37 Americans and shouting instructions at them across a crowded carriage was possibly even more embarrassing than going to the loo, tucking your skirt into the back of your knickers and not realising for several hours. I should know, I managed to do both simultaneously.

The second thing I learnt was to walk slowly, very slowly. I tried initially to hurry them along. I would exhort, encourage, even plead, but it was a lost cause. 'Why do we have to walk?' they'd ask me. 'To get from A to B,' I'd tell them. 'But at home,' they'd say, 'we drive from A to B' It was no good. Americans are more highly evolved than we are, and their legs are meeting the same fate as the appendix: superfluous bodily extras whose original use has been committed to ancestral memory.

In spite of my chasms of ignorance, my inability to navigate, and my less-than- fluent grasp of most European languages, I would have coped: if, that is, it hadn't been for Janice. Janice was one of the teachers and was the archetypal divorcee from hell. Her repertoire of corruscating put-downs had been practised and refined on generations of students. In other circumstances I might have felt pity for such a bitter and warped individual. As it was, the only option I had was to hate her silently.

From the very beginning I could do no right. For a start, I was several centuries younger than her. Neither was I male. Both of these factors placed a considerable strain on our relationship, and when she started to berate me, the only consolation I had was to remind myself that at least I wasn't her daughter.

The kids, on the other hand, didn't mind that I got them lost in every major capital in Europe. They even seemed to be learning something. In the second week I held a quiz and three people knew what country Germany was in. We'd made an unspoken agreement that, as long as the itinerary involved built-in burger breaks and visits to all European Hard Rock Cafes, they didn't complain. They also undertook the task of filling in the gaps of my education.

'Why do you all want to go to the Hard Rock Cafe?' I asked navely.

'It's really cool,' supplied Dwayne, 'and you can get the T-shirt.'

'But why do you need T-shirts from the one in London and the one in Paris?'

'Because you gotta get T-shirts from all the Hard Rock Cafes all over the world.'

'And then what happens?'

'Then you've got all the T-shirts from all of the Hard Rock Cafes all over the world, stupid.'

Janice, incidentally, bought not just the T-shirt but also the leather bomber jacket costing pounds 250. I rest my case.

The best thing about the job is the spontaneous acts of sympathy you receive from complete strangers. 'I've got a bad job,' you can hear them thinking, 'but at least I'm not leading 37 American teenagers around Europe.' Hotel receptionists would put an arm around my shoulder when I looked as if I was about to cry, and waiters would feed me red wine and aspirin. In Venice, a gondolier sang 'All Americans are pigs' to them in Italian to cheer me up. They thought it was 'Tosca' and tipped him 10,000 lire.

At the end of our 18 days together, I surprised myself by actually being sad to see them go. We'd done Europe, and we'd done it together. Even Janice dabbed her eyes at the airport. It hadn't stopped the two-faced old cow from writing the most damning character indictment of me I'd ever read in her evaluation report. Of course, having written this I'll never work again, but Janice had knocked that one on the head anyway.

'It's nothing personal,' the director told me, 'we just can't risk it.' If getting the sack is not personal though, tell me what is. It's probably for the best, though, from everybody's point of view.