Kirstie Allsopp had no choice but let her teenage son go Interrailing

There is something insufferable about parents who won’t allow a 15-year-old to travel on their own, says Rowan Pelling. It’s a mother’s lot to worry about them while they’re away

BBC series ‘Race Across the World’ – most recently won by 20-year-old mates Owen and Alfie – has given a new generation of teenagers wanderlust (Studio Lambert Ltd)

I’ve long prided myself on giving my sons very long reins. Some might call it benign neglect. When my six-year-old older son wanted to go to the sweet shop two streets away on his own, I said yes – and got ticked off by the local mayor, who encountered him solo.

The same son went to London’s Lego store on his tod, aged 13, biking to Cambridge Station and taking the train, Tube and his birthday money. His younger brother has always caused me more worry. He always cycles no hands (no helmet), and people will cheerfully tell me, “I saw your boy tombstoning from that tall tree by the Cam” or “riding a shopping trolley down Castle Hill”.

Furthermore, I have never put a tracker on either son’s phone, I hate infringing on their essential liberty. Yet even I was a bit in awe of Kirstie Allsopp, who’s just let the world know that her 15-year-old boy (16 this week), Oscar Hercules, had been Interrailing for three weeks with a 16-year-old friend. The TV presenter has stoutly defended his adventure as an essential part of life’s learning curve.

I’ve been facing the same dilemma this summer: how much leeway to give a post-GCSE, demob-happy teenage boy? One who, unlike Oscar Hercules, I can’t bill as hugely “sensible” (like mother, like son). Happily, mine didn’t have the cash for a three-week escape but was determined to make the six-day trip to Cornwall’s Boardmasters Festival, alongside five mates, travelling via coach from Cambridge.

I posted about my mixed feelings on Facebook, and fellow Gen X friends lined up to remind me of the trips they took to Glastonbury or the Isle of Man as teens, with only an army surplus coat and toothbrush for company. My son had a phone with Google Maps and a waterproof sleeping bag.

And yet his trip coincided with a widely reported crowd “surge” at the Point tent, leaving seven in hospital. It was only afterwards I found his group was a few feet away from the worst and saw girls with “snapped” limbs, while my own boy fell, hurt his leg, and had “10 people fall on top of me”. He said the scariest part was a huge speaker toppling, but fortunately away from the crush. It was a salutary reminder that we parents worry for a reason – but nearly always the wrong reason.

Of course, my generation didn’t confess misadventures to our parents and they had no smartphones with which to keep tabs on us (apparently Oscar Hercules’s friend’s mum had put a tracker on him). My sister has just found her illustrated diary of the month we spent Interrailing with two of my old schoolfriends in 1987. It’s a valuable reminder of how half the party fell for the oldest distraction trick in the book before our first destination – one handsome young Italian guy flirting with our party, while the other nicked two money belts from the top of a couchette.

We arrived in Venice with half the party lacking passports or any means of paying for anything. In Rome, we took rooms from a pimp. And on a “deserted” Tuscan hillside where we’d pitched out tents, we were accosted by six burly local men. This near-rape scenario may have been prompted by our group decision earlier to pose naked – and, we thought, unobserved – in the arches of a ruined monastery. We were prancing around for the photo when two Belgian tourists came round the corner.

My sister wrote in the diary: “We thought we had struck an artistic pose, but Rowan was wobbling her boobys everywhere… they probably thought we were a bunch of deranged lesbians.”

Certainly, when we banged on their camper van door at 2am, looking for help from our assailants, the Belgians didn’t answer. At the diary’s end, my sister compiled a list of things we lost during the trip; one was “our dignity”.

We were all aged around 20 when we went Interrailing; lord knows how we would have coped at 15. But as my 71-year-old husband never tires of mentioning, he was booted out aged eight to travel solo to boarding school, which involved making two train connections. And he went out alone on the river at the bottom of his garden in a rowing boat, from when he was seven. My argument against this is that your typical British boarding school survivor from that era is arguably a little too self-sufficient and independent, bordering on emotional isolation.

Our children, meanwhile, fantasise about that level of independence. They’re glued to the BBC’s Race Across the World, where teams of two battle to reach a far-flung destination without once using air travel or mobile devices with strictly limited funds, precisely because it plunges them back to circumstances where greater ingenuity was needed for survival.

Kirstie Allsopp would surely approve. And I’d still be riddled with worry if my feckless teen applied to do it.