The Things I Wish I Could Put in Their Backpacks

We were late. The particular kind of late where you stop believing you’ll arrive on time and start simply hoping nobody’s keeping track.

Nell was looking out of the window when she spotted a plane. Not just any plane — a Jet2 Holidays plane, the kind she reserves a special sort of wonder for.

We’ve flown with them to Greece a few times, and somewhere along the way the girls decided the crew were basically magic — given little jobs to do when airports got chaotic, teddy bears issued their own tiny passports, thoroughly fussed over. For Nell, Jet2 isn’t really an airline.

It’s Greece.

It’s the start of something.

“I wonder if they’ll stop the plane and pick us up,” I said, half joking.

She didn’t take it as a joke.

I watched her face change in the rear-view mirror — eyes widening, genuinely turning the possibility over, as if a plane really might drop out of the sky and scoop us off the road.

And watching her do that, I thought: these girls have wanderlust.

I don’t know when it arrived. I just recognise it.

I want that for them. I want them to see Greece and Morocco and Malaysia and everywhere else, and then everywhere I haven’t been either. I want them to go further than I did.

And then, within about twenty seconds — this is genuinely how fast it happened — my brain went somewhere else entirely.

From Nell marvelling at a plane, to imagining my daughters at seventeen, eighteen, twenty, backpacks on, somewhere I’ve never been, without me.

I’ve travelled a fair amount, and most of it has been wonderful.

But not all of it.

A night train in Morocco where men got into my carriage and wouldn’t leave me alone. Being pressed against in crowded places by men who knew exactly what they were doing. Being physically attacked in the Sahara. Moments where I genuinely didn’t know how things were going to end.

So my brain, apparently uninterested in simply enjoying a plane sighting, started trying to solve the problem.

Which is how, somewhere on an entirely ordinary drive to their grandparents’ house, I invented a knuckle ring.

A four-fingered one, attached to the outside of a backpack, as a warning.

Except then I started thinking about the law — you can’t exactly travel through customs with what amounts to a weapon strapped to your bag.

So I redesigned it in my head.

What if it wasn’t a weapon at all, technically, until your body decided it needed to be?

Something that could detect the actual physiology of fear — the cortisol spike, the stress response — and only then release itself. Something that could somehow leave a record that her body had registered genuine fear in that moment. Proof, should she ever have to use it, that she had felt threatened.

I got as far as imagining the court case.

From a plane.

In twenty seconds.

This is apparently just what happens in my head.

Underneath the sheer ridiculousness of the imaginary knuckle ring, though, was something much less ridiculous.

I was trying to invent a way of putting a piece of myself in their backpacks.

Something that could go where I can’t.

I don’t want my fear to become their inheritance.

I don’t want everything that has happened to me to become the reason their world gets made smaller. I want them to know those things can happen and still believe the world is worth going out into.

Because the world has been kind to me far more often than it hasn’t.

Most of my memories of travelling aren’t frightening ones.

They’re beautiful ones.

People helping me when I didn’t know where I was going. Places I couldn’t quite believe I was standing in. Food, conversations, trains, beaches, mountains, ridiculous situations, people I would never have met if I’d stayed safely at home.

I just happen to remember the exceptions with unusual clarity.

And apparently so does my nervous system, twenty years on, at the sight of a Jet2 plane.

Nell still thinks that plane might come down and get us.

I hope she doesn’t grow out of that for a long time.

I hope both my girls keep looking at planes like that. I hope they wonder where they’re going. I hope they always want to know what’s out there.

And when they’re seventeen, eighteen, twenty, with backpacks on and some faraway place in mind, I hope I’m brave enough to let them go.

Although, if I’m really lucky, perhaps they’ll let me come too.