Gabi Coatsworth

Editor’s note: This is a 2025 Summer Writing Contest WINNER!

My first passport, issued in 1959, is the first official document I ever saw that confirmed I was an individual in my own right. I stared at the navy-blue cover, with its shiny golden royal crest, my name handwritten in turquoise ink capitals across the top, my number at the bottom.

Inside, more handwriting with my description, completed by my mother—I recognize her hand. At ten years old, I stood four feet, eight inches tall with blue eyes and sandy hair—a pale reminder of the bright red mop that earned me the nickname “Carrots” at school. The best that can be said of the photo is that I look clean.

I needed the passport to visit my father’s family in Poland. My two older twin sisters came too, but my father couldn’t accompany us, since he was still considered a Displaced Person, unclaimed by any nation. So we were escorted, along with eight other children of Polish origin, by a female martinet who took an immediate dislike to me.

The journey took two days by ferry from England to Holland, and by train through West and East Germany, to Warsaw. We slept slumped against each other in our seats, illuminated by a blue lightbulb, disturbed only by armed border guards coming to check our papers. I thought of the stories I’d heard and the occasional film I’d seen, where German soldiers on trains spelled terrible trouble for the POWs in World War 2, if they attempted to escape.

I went back to Poland the year before my father died in 1961 and the year after, by road, speeding along the Autobahns the Nazis had built to expedite their future invasion of my father’s country. My English mother drove with my four sisters and me crammed into the largest car she could afford, the two-door, four-seater Ford Anglia with a roof rack to carry our luggage.

At fourteen, I took my first trip alone, to Paris, to stay with a friend of the family. By now a seasoned traveler, who thought her French was better than it actually was, I learned to navigate the city, asking gendarmes wearing short capes and kepi caps the way to the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower.

My personal information was renewed years later, in the same document. Now seventeen, I was a student, not a schoolgirl, five feet, six inches, with much longer sandy hair, which became fair in later iterations. We’d never heard of dirty blond as a descriptor. My eyes were grey by now, mostly because I’d started reading romance novels, where the girls with blue eyes were insipid, but the grey-eyed ones had moxie.

My photo shows a hopeful teenager, whose upcoming school trip was to be a cruise to Lisbon, Morocco, Cairo, and Alexandria. The Egyptian stamp remains—indecipherable, because it’s in Arabic.

I’m grateful I visited all those places in the Sixties, before they became protected from tourists. But that’s another story.