The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt

Not every traveller, of course, can justify her lifestyle in such a high-minded way. For some, there is simply the unashamed joy of staring at strange places, the pleasure of discovering what lies over the next hill and – most delightful of all – there is the fun and freedom of being alone, unhampered by family or phone, ready for whatever adventure may be on offer. Such are the women, the loners, to whom travelling offers a means of giving rein to that contrary element of human nature which rises belligerently when roads appear impassable, when disinterested border officials shrug their shoulders and well-meaning friends advise against the whole impossible undertaking. Such travellers are adventurers, the intractable die-hards who have caused teachers to shake their heads and would-be employers to despair. They are society’s square pegs: the guardians of our right to deviate, should we ever feel brave enough to do so. Compelled always to move on, they travel for the joy of it and often – fortunately for us – can find no way of earning a living other than by writing about their experiences. They have no rational excuse, and can offer no justification for their apparently frivolous way of life.

Distinguished and cheerful, their predecessor is Isabella Bird Bishop, that most exuberant of Victorian travellers who so enjoyed her first solo journey – a six months’ ride through the Rockies at the age of forty – that she became an incurable traveller unable to stay put for long. A sickly child, she suffered from a spinal complaint which miraculously disappeared whenever she went abroad but flared up again on her return home. She had originally been sent abroad by the family doctor who thought – rightly enough – that the sea breeze and the whiff of strange places would be beneficial. Dr John Bishop, whom she finally agreed to marry after a long and persistent courtship, commented that her amazing resilience was due to the fact that she had ‘the appetite of a tiger and the digestion of an ostrich’. Isabella died in Edinburgh at the age of seventy-three, her bags packed and ready for a trip to China.

She was followed by others equally intrepid. The daughter of a doctor who was himself a bit of an adventurer, Mary Kingsley worked as his unpaid literary assistant (he refused to spend money on her education) until the death of both parents left her free to travel. She had been warned to avoid the rays of the sun and to get an early introduction to the local Wesleyan missionaries as, her death being the most likely outcome of her ill-advised journey, they were the only people on the West Coast of Africa, her destination, who would be able to give her a decent burial, with hearse and black funeral feathers. Despite the morbid advice, she went. ‘My mind,’ she wrote, ‘was set on going and I had to go.’

With a practical rather than a romantic attitude to travel, she set off in 1893 on the first of her two famous journeys to the West Coast, the precursor of many anthropologists who found the tribes of Africa rich in tradition and culture. Armed with a waterproof sack packed tight with books, blankets, boots, mustard leaves, quinine, and a hotwater bottle, she marched up the gangway of the steamer, eager to dispense with prejudices which she regarded as both cumbersome and irrelevant. The other passengers, all male except for the stewardess, viewed this unexpected apparition with alarm, fearing that she was somehow connected with the World’s Women’s Temperance Association.

Mary Kingsley was thirty when she finally got the chance to break loose from the stultifying drudgery of housekeeping for others. Dervla Murphy was another dutiful, unmarried daughter who devoted herself to caring for an invalid mother until, released by her death, she too set out, at the age of thirty, to cycle all the way to India, for biking and foreign travel had fascinated her since childhood. If asked, however to give a more detailed explanation, she is uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Sitting in her old, stone house in rural Ireland, drinking home-made beer and smoking a cigar, she laughs in amazement when asked if she has a reason for travelling. ‘None whatsoever,’ she says with the complacent look of a cat who has just swallowed the family goldfish, ‘I just go to enjoy myself – I’m completely irresponsible, absolutely no commitment to anything.’ Did she never feel she had to justify her journey, pretend she was off to learn about new places?

‘Not a bit of it,’ she replies, firmly tapping her cigar on a saucer. For such women, there is no way of combatting the compulsion to travel. Like Mary Kingsley, she had to go.

There is nothing new about women travelling the highways of the world and from the early centuries, the Christian Church has offered a useful umbrella to women who had the will and the money to travel the pilgrim route to Rome and Jerusalem.

In 383, Egeria, a Roman citizen from Gaul, travelled to Jerusalem to visit the Holy Land. Luckily for posterity, she was an insatiable pilgrim, recording in detail everything she saw. Writing home to her religious sisters, whom she addressed as ‘Lovely Ladies, light of my heart’, she unearthed for them as much information as she could, for ‘you know how inquisitive I am’.

Later, with England converted to Christianity, the daughters of the great Anglo-Saxon noblemen were sent abroad to France to be educated in the Christian and classical mode. It was an opportunity they seized on eagerly, for their new learning offered them an alternative to marriage – a life of religious scholarship. And if the more ambitious women were to achieve any status in their religious communities they would certainly have to spend some time abroad in one of the major monastic centres of learning. This new development in women’s education marked the beginning of a trend which continued through the centuries, giving women of means and status both the opportunity and the incentive to travel.

By the seventeenth century, the pilgrimage had given way to the Grand Tour and it was not unusual for women to travel between the major cities of Europe, sometimes without their husbands but always with a startling entourage of servants and baggage. Products of a sober, post-revolutionary England which offered an enlightened education to its more privileged daughters, women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Eliza Craven toured Europe, Russia and Turkey, studying the architecture, admiring the paintings, dining with the local nobility and wondering at the strangeness of places like Moscow and Istanbul. They were avid collectors of information and assiduous at recording everything they saw.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the energy and drive that characterized the great days of the British Empire were beginning to show themselves among travellers. Lady missionaries were storming the citadels of China and Africa and the young Victorian miss – middle-class and energetic – was starting to travel on her own, savouring the freedom of climbing in the Alps or walking in Italy while the older, more intrepid maiden lady was pressing onwards to India, Japan, Hawaii and America. By the turn of the century, the New Woman – confident, educated and financially independent – was further liberated by the arrival of the bicycle and the aeroplane. Fanny Workman’s bike took her to North Africa and India and another American, Harriet Quimby, took England by surprise by becoming, in 1912, the first woman to fly across the English Channel. Women such as Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark who found satisfaction in combining travel with serious scholarship became professional travellers, bringing with them an aura of respectability that some equally serious travellers have since sought to cast off.

In the 1950s and 1960s, women travellers and explorers were again soaring towards their dreams, breaking new records in the sky, on land and by sea. Jerrie Mock became the first woman to fly solo round the world, and Sheila Scott, having failed her driving test three times, became the first British woman pilot to solo the earth. Ann Davison, as we have seen, became the first woman to sail solo across the Atlantic and in the 1950s the first British all-women expedition set out for the Himalayas. The small but steady stream of women travellers and explorers continues, hell-bent on getting up and away into the skies, over mountains, down rivers or across deserts, travelling on foot, by bike, in a canoe or on their wits alone.

Robyn Davidson needed all her wits about her when she went to spend a year in the incomparable town of Alice Springs learning how to handle camels before setting out with a dog and two camels (one of which was pregnant) on an astonishing trek across 1700 miles of Australian scrubland. Her stay in Alice Springs was a baptism by alcoholism and sexism, and at times was nothing less than sheer misery, but the experience provided her with the protective armour she needed in order to make the journey.

A university girl, she had been accused of being a bourgeois individualist – an insult too terrible to contemplate. ‘For one who associated herself for years with the Left, it was the political equivalent of having VD.’ Soon however, the pressing need to organize her trek pushed any such self-centred concerns to the back of her mind. She learned how to scout in the desert, how to saddle a camel and, when one of them became ill, how to inject it with massive doses of antibiotics. More important for her own survival, she learned how to supplement her diet with witchetty grubs. She wasn’t altogether sure what she was doing in the middle of this vast nowhere. Perhaps she was expiating a collective guilt? The misery caused by her mother’s death had affected her whole family and at times she felt that all the stupid, meaningless pain our family had suffered might somehow be symbolically absolved, laid to rest through this gesture of mine’.

Robyn Davidson was twenty-seven when she made her solitary and memorable journey across Australia. She has blond hair and a determined smile and though there is a gentleness in her eyes there is also the self-knowledge she gained during her own remarkable pilgrimage. ‘You are as powerful,’ she wrote when she reached the Indian Ocean and the end of her journey, ‘and as strong as you allow yourself to be.’

Lucy Irvine was strong too, but despite that she nearly succumbed to poisoning on three occasions while spending a year as a castaway on the island of Tuin, which lies between the north coast of Australia and Papua New Guinea. She was a 24-year-old tax clerk when she saw a newspaper notice advertising for a wife to live on a desert island for a year. Gerald Kingsland, who had placed the ad, liked what he saw – her ‘bubbling, bucaneering spirit … her delicate wrists … unwavering eyes – and long, shapely legs’.

On her twenty-fifth birthday they made love. A month later, for his fifty-first birthday, she took him to the Royal Festival Hall and the following month they married. It was a marriage merely of convenience. The Australian immigration authorities would feel happier, they said, about allowing a couple to live together on a deserted island if they were married.

‘I’m not in love with you,’ Lucy told him, ‘but I feel very closely attached to you and who knows what the year will bring?’

How could they have guessed what it would be like? They’d brought only the minimum of food with them – two hundred tea bags, a packet of spaghetti, two kilos of dried beans, a bottle of cooking oil and a few other bits and pieces. It would be enough to keep going until they could grow some things of their own. They drank the milk from the large green coconuts that hung overhead and caught and cooked their own shark. It was an idyll that wasn’t to last. Three times Lucy became violently ill from eating wild berries. They ran dangerously short of water and Gerald’s extra years began to tell on him. He developed a gangrenous ulcer and they both lost weight Their affection for each other degenerated into a strained uneasiness and it wasn’t until their year was ending that they managed to recapture their earlier feelings. At the end of the year, however, she left both the island and Gerald just as she had always planned to do, marriage or not.

‘“I know you’ve got to go,” he said. “Christ, you’re only twenty-six, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” … And with that he pulled me closer and our faces bumped together in a brief kiss.’ The year was over.

There have been other women propelled by the same curious combination of determination and vulnerability – a blind woman sets out to climb Kala Patthar, 500 feet above Everest base camp, a grandmother cycles solo across America and Eve Jackson, a young Englishwoman, plans to fly solo in 1986 from England to Australia in a frail microlight aircraft. The list lengthens each year, but spread across the world as they are, spanning the years from youth to old age, these women appear linked by nothing more than their sex and the common experience of travelling. Surprisingly, the link that initially might appear to be a vital one – that of feminism – is rarely to be found.

It may be thought that because a woman attempts to achieve something in what has hitherto been considered a male area she is doing so with the primary intention of making a statement about women. It is abundantly clear, however, that in the case of most women travellers, this is not so. It is true, certainly, that some of them have consciously and deliberately laid their motivations and success on the altar of their womanhood. Others, in the course of travelling, have taken on the mantle of their sisters, as their physical journey has evolved into one also of the soul. But to describe all women travellers as feminists would be to take away from them that very quality which makes each one unique – their individuality.

Put them in a room together, and there is no guarantee that harmony will prevail. In the 1880s, when Marianne North and Constance Gordon Cumming accepted an invitation to meet Isabella Bird Bishop, their lion-hunting London hostess was overjoyed. ‘Three globe-trotteresses,’ she trilled, unwisely. The two were not especially amused. Isabella was decked out in gold-embroidered slippers, a silver and gold petticoat from Japan and was sporting a favour presented to her by the King of the Sandwich Islands. ‘We withdrew,’ said Miss North, somewhat loftily, ‘leaving Miss Bird unruffled and equal to the occasion.’

Miss Gordon Cumming, in fact, was not unlike the unruffled Isabella. Born into a wealthy Scottish family – her home was at Gordonstoun – she got her first glimpse of the outside world at the age of thirty-one when she received an invitation from her sister to visit her in India. Visit! She was amazed at the idea and almost turned it down since no one, she felt, went to India unless they had to. Yet on arrival, she was immediately captivated by its mystery and sense of history and especially by the similarities between Hindu and Celtic customs. After a two-year stay, she returned to England and wrote an ecstatic two-volume account of what she saw. A few years later, she received an invitation from the Bishop of Colombo to visit him in Ceylon and her reputation as a traveller began to grow. As soon as she got back home to England, people started asking her where next, to which she replied: ‘Fiji, because that was the most absolutely improbable idea that could suggest itself.’ But improbable or not, she went, and then on to Japan, Tahiti and San Francisco. Mistress of the throwaway line, her books – she wrote one about each journey – are littered with tantalizing phrases such as ‘our acquaintance with camels had hitherto been limited to the Arabian dromedary …’ An inquisitive, studious lady, she observed misery and poverty with compassion but from a distance and, in common with many travellers, she was not always around when her publishers needed her. In a foreword to one of her books, there is an apology for some inadequacy or other, explained by the telling phrase: ‘In the absence of the author, who sailed unexpectedly for Fiji …’ The proofs, on this occasion, were read by none other than the unruffled Miss Bird.

It is perhaps surprising that the paths of the travelling sisterhood did not cross more often, though had Fanny Workman met up with her contemporary, Gertrude Bell, the political sparks might well have turned into a conflagration. At the very time that Fanny was conducting a series of major climbing expeditions in the Karakorams, resolutely advertising the cause of women’s suffrage, Gertrude was helping to found, in England, the Anti-Suffrage League.

Both these women were products of their respective worlds, moulded and influenced by the whims, attitudes, needs and prejudices of those around them. Certain women have set out on their journeys happy not only to take the attitudes of society with them but also to impose them on those they have encountered along the way, whom they perceived to be in some way in need of improvement Others have found such values false and insufficient, and have felt compelled to go in search of qualities which they feel are lacking in the world they leave behind.

Whatever their needs and motivations have been, travelling has over the centuries offered to women a means both of discovering and expressing their own individuality, for the change in their needs has been one only of degree. Women, said a seventeenth-century writer, should stay at home and attend to their duties, which he kindly characterized as ‘subjection, helpfulness and gracefulness’. The tedium of such advice was unbearable. ‘The truth is,’ commented Margaret Lucas, flamboyant and eccentric Restoration writer, ‘we live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and Dye like Worms.’

Three hundred years later, Sabina Shalom found herself fat, middle-aged and menopausal – and with a bee in her Miami Beach bonnet about hitch-hiking to Australia: ‘The idea obsessed me simply because it was right off the map. It became an excuse, not a reason, for getting away … I longed to be free of duties and obligations. Free of thinking, worrying, protecting, mothering. Free of feeling everyone’s burdens and making them mine.’

The distant horizon beckons even more urgently now, as the blandness of the mid-twentieth century threatens to render us anonymous, our identity emerging as symbols on a computer printout or fashioned as fodder for the consumer society, for the marketing and media world. Within this murderous matrix, women are tamed and packaged, their new ‘liberated’ image as steeplejacks, truck-drivers or soldiers glamourized, glitzy and unreal – suitable copy for the propaganda machine anxious to demonstrate society’s stifling generosity towards them. For those with the will to escape, a journey outwards into the unseen may be the only hope of finding what lies within. Better the reality of the unknown than the artificiality of the known.

CHAPTER 2 Pilgrims to Freedom

‘Nothing could hold her back, whether it was the labour of travelling the whole world … the perils of sea and rivers … the dread crags and fearsome mountains …’

Valerius on Egeria.

Travellers, like the rest of us, need to communicate with someone even if, by writing a journal, it is at one remove. In 1884 a remarkable book was discovered which tells of a journey made by a woman who travelled to Jerusalem around the year AD 383.

Its author, Egeria, was a devout Roman citizen of noble birth, who journeyed from Gaul to the Holy Land and recorded everything she saw, thus leaving us with both a fascinating traveller’s tale and the only complete account we still have of the fourth century liturgy. So timeless are some of these liturgical ceremonies that her description, written sixteen hundred years ago, captures that odd mixture of gloom and glitter, superstition and ritual that haunts the dark interiors of present-day Jerusalem: ‘All you can see is gold and jewels and silk; the hangings are entirely silk with gold stripes, the curtains the same and everything they use for services at the festival is made of gold and jewels. You simply cannot imagine the number and the sheer weight of the candles and the tapers and the lamps …’

Travelling through fourth-century Palestine was not without its dangers. Wild animals roamed the purple hills and the inhospitable locals, weary of seeing endless bands of well-to-do foreigners pass through their lands, were liable to attack without warning. It was a formidable undertaking for anyone, let alone a woman on her own, but as long as travellers stuck to the straight and narrow Roman roads, they were relatively safe.

By the time Egeria set out on her journey, the pilgrim way was well established. Monasteries dotted the route and quite a few hospices had been set up for the use of Christian travellers, many of whom, of course, were women. In fact, the hospices themselves were often run by women, among them Paula, a Roman matron whose business acumen and managerial skills led her to establish a chain of hospices. Her contemporary, the scholar Jerome, was amazed that a mere woman should be so successful: ‘With a zeal and courage unbelievable in a woman she forgot her sex and physical weakness and settled in the heat of Bethlehem for good in the company of many virgins and her daughter’ – whom we must charitably assume was one too.

These journeys were far from being temporary religious fads, indulged in by rich women with time on their hands. Egeria and Paula were followed by wave after wave of women who put down lasting roots in Jerusalem and refused to return home. A guide book written nearly four hundred years after Egeria’s arrival comments on the presence, just outside the East Gate of the Holy City, of a hundred women living in an enclosed convent, receiving gifts of food which were pushed through a hole in the wall.

By the eighth century, the pilgrim route had become something of a tourist trek with many of the delays, frustrations and unexpected expenses that one might encounter today. Sea-captains refused to allow their passengers to leave ship until they had paid the airport tax of the day, known euphemistically as a ‘disembarcation fee’. Travellers passing through non-Christian areas were subjected to poll taxes which varied according to their apparent wealth, and one traveller commenting on the bureaucracy of the day, no less autocratic then than now, noted in disgust that ‘anyone who is found by night or day without a paper or a stamp issued by one of the kings or princes of that country is sent to prison … until he can prove he is not a spy’.

None of these inconveniences, however, deterred women from the journey, and indeed so numerous were they on the road to Rome that they presented a special problem to the church authorities whose attempts to restrain this restless tide were at first paternalistic and benign but were soon revealed in their true, repressive colours. ‘It would be well and favourable,’ wrote Boniface to the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘… if your synod would forbid matrons and veiled women to make these frequent journeys back and forth to Rome.’ To have wives and mothers straying so far from home was an obvious threat to the institution of marriage. Not only that: despite their respectable status, such matrons, it seems, were in danger of falling by the wayside as so many of their sisters had done previously. ‘For,’ the anxious cleric continued, ‘there are few towns [along the way] in which there is not a courtesan or a harlot of English stock.’ He might have taken a more charitable view of his fallen sisters, as one of his predecessors did. St Marcianus, in the fifth century, persuaded a number of prostitutes to reform and to demonstrate their new way of life by making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem – a journey which he thoughtfully financed himself.

Banditry, piracy, prostitution and smuggling – it was all a long way from the vision of a young, wistful, Anglo-Saxon girl, exiled in a German monastery, who had to content herself with being a second-hand traveller.

I, unworthy child of the Saxon race, the last of those who have come hither from their land who am, in comparison with these my countrymen, not only in years but in virtue also, only a poor little creature … Yet I am a woman, tainted with the frailty of my sex, with no pretensions to wisdom or cleverness to support me, but prompted solely by the violence of my own will like a little ignorant child plucking a few flowers here and there from numerous branches rich in foliage and in fruit.