[00:00.49]Children who play truant from school are unimaginative.
[00:05.90]A quiet day's fishing, or eight hours in a cinema seeing the same film over and over again, is usually as far as they get.
[00:14.82]They have all been put to shame by a boy who, while playing truant, travelled 1,600 miles.
[00:24.10]He hitchhiked to Dover and, towards evening, went into a boat to find somewhere to sleep.
[00:31.47]When he woke up next morning, he discovered that the boat had, in the meantime, travelled to Calais.
[00:40.70]No one noticed the boy as he crept off.
[00:44.31]From there, he hitchhiked to Paris in a lorry.
[00:49.16]The driver gave him a few biscuits and a cup of coffee and left him just outside the city.
[00:56.17]The next car the boy stopped did not take him into the centre of Paris as he hoped it would, but to Perpignan on the French-Spanish border.
[01:07.44]There he was picked up by a policeman and sent back to England by the local authorities.
[01:14.83]He has surely set up a record for the thousands of children who dream of evading school.