Me

As a teenager, I had very definite ideas about what I was going to do with my life! I was going to study, either as an Oceanographer or as a Medical technologist and then I was going to Travel! I had no idea where to exactly, but Europe was my first goal. I would work to save up enough money, then travel until it was exhausted and then work some more. I gave no thought to love or settling down and I had no ambitions to be a mother at all!

Fate plays tricks on us, I was never destined to have any of those careers, instead I married and became a housewife and mother. I worked briefly in an office and it taught me after a while that I was not cut out for that kind of work at all.

Our first child was a son, Alistair, who we lost to viral pneumonia. We then went on to have three beautiful daughters, Margaret, Janet and Lesley who all in their own way wrapped their father round their little fingers and have kept me on my toes!

My creative streak was useful as I made all their clothes, a good deal of their toys and it was also channeled into various fund-raising efforts for their schools.

Then my husband, who was in the Navy, was posted overseas, first in 1977 to Lorient in France, so I at last got to travel overseas! We were there seven months and so explored Brittany extensively and had a brief visit to England to visit my grandmother and other family.

I only learnt to count in French, as I was thrown in at the deep end and we didn't make an local friends. I could ask for the bare necessities, like "un baguette, s'il vous plait". All the rest of my shopping was at supermarkets or with pantomiming actions, which weren't always successful, I had bought some 'colic' medicine for Janet in this manner and fortunately met one of the South African wives who could speak French before I gave it to her. Apparently 'colic' in French does not mean wind and I would have seized her insides up if I'd given it to her!

I had never liked history at school but enjoyed reading historical novels. I was caught up by the sense of 'Living History' that abounds in Europe. In Larmor Plage where we lived, you could go from our flat ..... in a modern building on a busy main road .... back to the previous century, by walking a hundred meters or so round the corner into a country lane. There the old women dressed in black and wearing their headdresses still did their washing in the communal wash tubs just as their mothers and grandmothers had done before them.

I found the Neolithic sites totally fascinating. Some, like Carnac ..... where 'regiments' of large standing stones march across the countryside .... evinced awe and the question Why? The dolmens were easily explained as tombs, but How was often the question there as some of the stones are exceptionally tall and heavy. Some places hadn't changed at all since they were built. Often the city centers would be as they'd originally been with the more modern structures surrounding them. Mont St Michel was as it had been in mediaeval times, a town surrounding a monastery on an island that was cut off from the mainland by the tide once a month.

On a visit to the market-place in Lorient, I saw an old woman making bobbin lace. I would have liked to have learnt how to make it myself, but my lack of the language was a problem and I had no idea where to even start looking. It was only 12 years later that I was able to realize this dream and finally learnt to make bobbin lace for myself.

Our next overseas posting was to South America. My husband was posted to the embassy in Uruguay. We lived in Montevideo for three years, made loads of friends and so I was able to become fairly fluent in Spanish as well as adopt the lifestyle there, which was a lot slower and more languid than we were used to. I took tapiz [a form of weaving] classes. This was done on a fixed loom and was decorative rather than wearable weaving. I was later intrigued to see a slightly more primitive version used in Peru by the women out in the countryside who weave the carpets and wall hangings sold there. We also saw men ploughing the fields with primitive ploughs that their ancestors would probably have used.

	We were able to travel widely and to my delight Bolivia, Peru and Chile have many Inca and Pre-Inca sites. In Bolivia we visited Tiahuanaco, a Pre-Inca ruin close to Lake Titicaca. It was here that we first came upon the 'spaceman' theory as an explanation as to how all these sites with their mammoth stones had been built. In a courtyard there we saw carvings of the faces of different races, easily identifiable as Asian, African etc. How had the knowledge of these people arrived in the middle of the Altiplano of Bolivia?
Llamas are the South American equivalent of the camel. They are the most common, alpacas are used mainly for wool and the vicuña is the rarest, has the finest wool and so is the most prized of all. Used extensively for transporting goods, the milk, meat and wool are also used.
	Machu Piccu and the other Inca sites were completely awe-inspiring. What 'primitive' man had been able to accomplish with basic tools defies logic.