The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt. Mary Russell
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pilgrimage.’
Such personal pilgrimages of the soul sometimes ran full circle when the traveller learned to accommodate the life which she had previously found irreconcilable. Ella Maillart, who made a memorable solo journey across Turkestan in the 1930s, found herself bewildered by a warring Europe that seemed bent on destroying itself. She left her native Switzerland and spent the war years in southern India in order to understand why ‘cousins killed cousins’. ‘… to understand my innermost soul, I had to live in the immensity of Asia [which] … is so vast that man, aware of his own littleness, has given first place to the divine life, bestowing on it alone the glory of true reality.’
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