A hitchhikers' guide to growing up: Hitchhikers are on the road to extinction. Former practitioners tell tales of the unexpected. 'I thumbed a ride with a teenage transsexual'

HITCHHIKING was a mania in Crawley. Once the fourth form had discovered that some driver would eventually give you a lift, no matter how smelly or spotty you were, we indulged in a thumbing frenzy, even hitching the two miles to school and back.

To escape the torpor of the Sussex new town where I grew up, we thumbed to Brighton every weekend and pretended to be students. As a teenage experience, hitchhiking certainly beat puberty.

At the age of 15 it was time to join the big boys on the motorway to the Lake District. After the last bell, Steve and I hopped over the school fence to the A23 roundabout and held out a spidery and hopelessly optimistic sign reading 'Birmingham'.

Despite the flowing orange locks of my fellow traveller and my squalid khaki greatcoat, we reached London crouching in the back of an old Post Office van.

We were dismayed to find the foot of the M1 crawling with rival thumbers. Eventually we got a lift along the hitching artery of the UK, but only as far as Watford. Somehow we coerced a lorry driver into stopping to pick us up from the hard shoulder, and then hopped slowly and painfully up the M1, pausing for an obligatory hour at the spiritual home of British hitching - Watford Gap Service Station.

Bolton, it transpired, was a hitchers' graveyard. In desperation, we escaped the swirl of slip roads by heading off at an angle into the depths of Lancashire.

Male hairstyles as excessive as Steve's had not yet penetrated so far north. 'Hop in the back, darling,'instructed the pig-farming owner of a Morris Traveller. Any difference in dress between genders had long been swamped in a tide of crushed velvet jackets and mauve loon pants, and I slowly realised our host thought Steve was a GIRL. I was hitching around unknown territory with a transsexual. And we were to share a tent that night.

We reached Windermere and camped without catastrophe, but the return journey home was miserable. Somewhere north of Rugby I insisted we split up - to improve our chances. Steve reached home unmolested, and I got back first - in time for maths.

(Photographs omitted)