Gill Shaddick

Gill Shaddick

Gill Shaddick left Britain aged twenty-one to take up a job in Hong Kong and kept on travelling. She met her husband, Mike, in a township in Zambia where she was the only single girl and he the only single guy. Together they embarked on a peripatetic journey living in a dozen countries. They counted cotton bollworms in Egypt, Sudan and Iran, tagged eels in New Zealand, owned a fishing business on Lake Kariba in central Africa and ran a rabbit farm in one of Scotland’s remotest corners. Their four daughters, each a constant source of joy, amusement and awe, were all born in different countries. In 1987, Gill and her family moved to Australia. Months later Mike was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and with that his future plans for overseas contracts disappeared overnight. But travel was Gill’s passion and she determined there’d be many journeys ahead, at first with Mike, then backpacking with her daughters and ultimately going solo. Gill is a distant cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson. His grandfather’s clock ticked out the hours as she grew up, which she credits as one reason why, from an early age, she was enchanted by travel and writing.

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I left Dover on a bright Spring day in 1965 but, halfway across, thick fog enveloped the Channel.

“No idea,” advised the purser when I asked how long we’d be delayed. “You just stay on the ferry, dear, and go back. You’ve already missed the boat-train to Genoa.”

Instead, I got a train to Paris and met a sweet French boy who said we should elope. I kissed him goodbye and caught a milk-train through Switzerland. The seats were wooden and I sat beside a woman endowed with such enormous hips that I feared if I stood up, I would never see my seat again. A grumpy Swiss conductor protested my ticket was not for his train, and, when I reached Genoa, it seemed that all was lost until a Lloyd Triestino official saw my First-Class luggage label and plucked me out of the crowds and up the gangplank. That thrilling twenty-four hours triggered in me an insatiable appetite for travel.

After my Australian adventure, it was three years before I left the UK again. In 1968, when I was twenty-one, I took off on the Trans-Siberian Express on the way to Hong Kong, where I’d landed a job in an advertising agency.

I spent two glorious years growing up and melting down in a noisy pot of colour and culture and would have been oblivious to the fact that it was almost the last outpost of the British Empire had there not been a great many ‘when-wes’ in Hong Kong. These were Brits who’d lived a bloody marvellous life in Africa until 1960, when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan signalled that Britain would relinquish its African colonies: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”