In the late 1940s, well ahead of the 1960s rejection of convention, the Cooke family from Aberdeen were out travelling the world’s B roads in a converted Bedford ambulance. Lesley Lyon, youngest of the six Cooke children told Home Truths how her parents, Jack and Ruth, developed their wanderlust fifty years ago…

It was 1951 and the Festival of Britain was in full swing; and Lesley was nine years old when the Cooke family took off on a particularly memorable trip. The Cooke family, all eight of them, piled into the car whilst an ancient caravan, bursting at the seams, lurched along behind. They set off down the road, to a great deal of waving off by the neighbours, "We got no further than the first corner, than Dad realised that the water in the caravan tank was slopping about terribly - so we circled the block, the neighbours were still there looking the other way, as we crept up from behind - home again." They Cooke family got further the second time, but it’s this type of incident which seemed to define the tone of their adventures on the road.

The family had some marvellous holidays, but when their children had flown the next, the Cooke parents decided to make permanent changes in their lifestyle. At nearly sixty years old, they sold their home in Aberdeen and took to the open road in a converted Bedford Ambulance. Janet, Lesley’s daughter, spent a summer travelling with her grandparents and has clear memories of her grandparents mobile lifetstyle, "Whenever we stopped for more than ten minutes, washing would be stuck out the side window on a little airer, the kettle put on and tea made." This was fine, mostly, until one day, Janet and her grandparents stopped at Blackpool pleasure beach (you could park on the road right by it in those days). It was then that Janet saw the most gorgeous man she’d ever clapped eyes on, "As he walked past the van, I thought, ‘Oh no! the washing’s out… I ran out and started speaking to him anyway… he thought it was quite cool, and granny leant out the window and gave us cups of tea. After a while, I realised there were five or six people standing behind us, and one of them said, ‘Excuse me can we get some sausage sandwiches here?’ That was one of the most embarrassing things...but it was a marvellous summer."

After having six children, Lesley says, her parents found life on the open road blissfully free of responsibility. "The only thing they had to think about was, can we park here? Where do we get petrol? Is there drinking water?" Ruth and Jack met wonderful people, and Lesley recalls one memorable Christmas in Morroco when her mother made Christmas puddings inside the ancient old ambulance.

Before the advent of email, Lesley’s mum kept in touch with her children by writing her ‘Dear People’ letters on a battered old typewriter, into which she’d feed many layers of paper and carbon, "Sometimes there were seventeen carbon copies of Mum's letter home, and if you got the seventeenth copy, you hadn’t a hope of reading it, so you’d have to phone round to fill in the gaps.." The despatches home told of Jack's popularity with children wherever they made camp, the making of Christmas puddings in the old ambulance as they stopped off in Morocco, how they'd enjoyed sitting quietly in their favourite seats in the van when everything was done for the day, and of, course, the continous flow of wonderful people they met on the road.