I was born in London and as a very young child at the outbreak of World War II, I was evacuated to a coal mining village in South Wales where I came early to the grief of separation and the loss of my parents. It was at that time I found consolation and excitement in making up stories, I used to call them 'having an adventure.' Teachers began to say I was a born writer. I left school at fifteen and after a variety of casual jobs, I joined the Women's Royal Army Corps. After leaving the army at nineteen, I married and raised three children while working as a freelance photographer. Later, I studied for a degree in world religions at London University.
By the age of 47, with the children off my hands, I decided it was at last time to see something more of the world. I had no hesitation at all in deciding that a bicycle was the ideal transport for my purpose. I also decided to travel alone and so far I have seen no reason to change the format.
My first project was to ride from Karachi to Kathmandu along the line of the Indus River and the Himalayas, and five months and five thousand miles later I achieved my goal. Back home, I wrote up the account of my journey, calling it 'Riding the Mountains Down,' after a poem by e.e.cummings.
With the book published and selling well (it is still selling in German and Japanese translations under the title 'Himalaya'), I set out to ride from London to Jerusalem following the paths of the Crusaders and early Christian pilgrims.
The main attraction of the route was that it took me through all the wonderful sites of antiquity that I had so long yearned to visit. It was another five thousand mile saga, challenging in quite a different way from the Himalayan venture, but equally rewarding and with highlights all the way.
Probably my most dangerous undertaking was following the course of the Nile from the Mediterranean to the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda. It was a journey that presented great contrasts - the most stunning African landscapes, wonderful and diverse peoples, poverty, refugees, and always the problem of survival, of staying alive in the deserts, of finding food and clean water, and of steering a way through the skirmishes of the Sudanese civil war and the aftermath of the Ugandan massacres. (Published as 'Riding the Desert Trail,' it is available in German as 'Ah Agala' and Japanese as 'something quite unpronounceable.')
A second Africa book centered on yet another of that continent's great and fascinating rivers, this time the Niger in West Africa. My travels there took me through the remote desert lands of the Sahel, through Niger and Mali to Timbuktu. Again, beauty and hardship were the two poles of the experience. The terrible beauty of an inimical desert terrain permeated by the ghosts of a past steeped in gold and the slave trade. 'Frail Dream of Timbuktu' is also available in its German translation as 'Timbuktu.'
I have also written two books about my own country. 'Riding North One Summer' was intended as a celebration of the English landscape seen through the web of its history. And I saw it as only a cyclist with the freedom of a tent and all the time in the world can see it.
The other, 'The Fragile Islands,' was about the Outer Hebrides, a string of small and jewel-like islands off the North West coast of Scotland with which I had long been in love.
More recently, I explored Eastern Turkey, going by way of the little explored Black Sea Coast before heading into the mountainous lands of Kurdistan and Armenia to Mount Ararat and ancient Van - the central melting pot of history. ('Beyond Ararat' is also available in German translation as 'Ararat.')
A quite different journey followed. This time I rode the well-beaten track of a thousand years of pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in a remote corner of Galicia in Western Spain. A richly rewarding journey, it was also surprising in the sense of the unexpected demands it made on me and the insights it afforded into my own motives and feelings. It also gave me a tremendous sense of rubbing shoulders with other pilgrims past and present.
My most recent travel book is also something of a departure. 'Like Water in a Dry Land' is about present day Palestine, a book in which I set out to discover what at that time, the peace moves in the Middle East were really adding up to. I was reluctant to take it on such a political theme, but decided eventually to do it because I felt I could make use of my knowledge of the area, its history and its involved politics in order to understand something of the present anguished situation. In the event, it proved as much a surprise as all real journeys should be. This title is only available directly from ourselves.
Now I am living high up in the Brecon Beacons with my two cats, Sappho and Dido. They are two cats with decided literary pretensions, and living in a house where computers are all around, they are themselves computer literate. To find out more click on:
Two Cats Walking
