The bare details might suggest that it’s an adventure straight from an Enid Blyton book.
But more than 70 years ago, in August 1949, a pair of youngsters in the south of England decided they fancied a summer holiday – and ended up travelling 700 miles to the Hebrides.
Millie Richardson, 13, and her younger brother Syd, aged nine, were determined to visit their grandmother and give her a kiss.
And why not? Except that granny’s home just happened to be on the Isle of Lewis.
It was, however, the duo’s idea of “paradise” and, faced with the prospect of a summer stuck at home in Hitchin in Hertfordshire, they were feeling bored and frustrated.
So they decided to take matters into their own hands and embark on the sort of escapade which would spark a national panic today.
Leaving a hastily scribbled note behind – with the words “We’re going away camping for a few days” – and undaunted by having very little money in their pockets, Millie and Syd set out in redoubtable style on the journey of a lifetime.
Indeed, these siblings went armed with only the clothes they were wearing and their bathing suits, alongside a couple of ration books and a bag of stale buns.
But they had an indomitable spirit and 30 hours after they ran away and, after travelling unaccompanied by rail, sea and road, the intrepid twosome arrived on Lewis.
They had not parted with a penny and no adult had stopped them along the way.
Spilling from the bus at their mother’s native village of North Tolsta, they might have been feeling tired and hungry, but as Syd recalled of his older sister: “We has been there before and my big sister Millie was determined that we would go back.
“She led me astray – and I went happily along with her!”
Back in Hitchin, their anxious parents, Sydney and Mary, were understandably relieved to hear by telegram that the children were safe and sound with Mary’s family.
But by Monday morning, the story of their exploits had appeared in a variety of newspapers across the country.
And their antics were rewarded with a three-week stay in their beloved Tolsta, which is exactly what they wanted all along.
As Millie recalled: “It was so exciting. Milking the cows and fetching water from the well.
“My grandfather reading the Bible by the light of the tilly lamp. And swimming in that ice cold water! It was wild and free and it was magical.”
When the holiday was over, and they had to make the return journey south to London, Syd and Millie did so fully ticketed and with a stuffed purse.
Islanders had showered them with pocket money, impressed by what they had pulled off, seemingly so effortlessly.
In Syd’s words: “We were mini celebrities!”
The former journalist, who now lives in Yorkshire, has reminisced about the story that made headlines and the Hebridean village he has loved all his life in the footage. The sparkle in his voice confirms he has never forgotten the sheer thrill of that experience so long ago.
And from her home in Queensland, Millie has looked back fondly to that heady summer excursion when she persuaded her wee brother to go with her all the way to Tolsta, and concluded: “I wanted to live there forever”.
It was a throwback to a more innocent time and the whole episode has been captured in an excellent BBC Alba documentary which is well worth checking out.
Syd and Millie were the sort of people who have gone into the wider world and prospered.
Yet there is clearly a little part of them which has remained forever in the Hebrides.
