Although I never moved in with them, Marianne, whose riverside cottage was a few yards down the road from Grandmother Carlie, kept a loving eye on me. Marianne had a very tough struggle to bring up her four children alone. She was proud and very hardworking. She gave French lessons, sewing lessons, dancing lessons, anything to make ends meet. We became very close after I grew up.
The strange thing is that although Marianne is not really my mother and did not bring me up, we are very alike in character. Marianne is the head of the family today and is the foundation of the happiness of my own children and grandchildren. I love and admire Marianne and her children unconditionally—my half-sister Maude and half-brothers Gerald, Nicolas and Ronnie.
Carlie needed me and I was the only person to whom she really responded and was kind. Crippled and bedridden with osteoarthritis, she would thump the floor at night with her stick for me to come to her aid. I would feel so helpless, listening to her screaming for hours with the terrible pain that pills couldn’t ease. I loved her but remember my anger and sorrow as I tried to push her across the gap between her commode and the bed, praying she wouldn’t fall. Although just a child, I was already her carer. Her nurses seldom stayed as she was difficult with everybody except me.
Carlie guided me in many ways. She was very religious and for years tutored me herself. I didn’t go to school regularly until I was thirteen. But above all she taught me that freedom and responsibility go together, that life is the best university and that anyone can reach for anything.
‘Rosie,’ she would say, ‘it’s not good looks or natural gifts that count—luckily for you my girl!—it’s the wanting to do things that makes them happen.’
I was tall, thin and gangling with long pigtails.
To do my English essay, she’d send me off on my donkey Jeanette, and then I would have to write about my adventures to entertain her. It was Carlie’s influence that set me off on a lifetime of adventures.
Carlie had been a keen gardener in her youth and she still tried somehow to carry on gardening—through me, so to speak—from her bedroom. Slugs and snails brought in, along with all the greenery, would tumble onto her floor. Furiously, with knotted crippled fingers, she’d help me bunch flowers. It had to be done just so. The trumpets of the daffodils all had to point one way. Sometimes the room would be wall-to-wall with daffodils, forget-me-nots or even buttercups and dandelions. She sent me to Limerick with her long-suffering lowly paid gardener to sell them to eke out our funds. It was great for her—one of the few physical ways she could be a bit independent and earn money from bed. We were far from wealthy as there was no National Health Service in Ireland, and her medicines were very expensive.
When I used to go to Limerick market to sell the flowers for her, I would also take bunches of flowers from my own little flower bed to sell, as my dream was to save up to buy a pony. I secretly sold most of my clothes at a secondhand shop too, but I never really managed to save more than a pound or two for the horse. Animals were my life and love.
Nobody talked about the past. Maybe Marianne, so sweet-natured, could have done so, but I couldn’t stand the aura of pain, nor the sympathy. My grandmother would never talk about how she’d found me or about my past. It took me years to learn about it all. It caused her too much pain. She hated looking back, but even though her own prospects were so bleak she did look forward with all her might to the future, which she said was through me. Her strong ideas will always be what I most remember about her.
I had been brought up with animals because Carlie was certain that it is animals that give you respect for life. Mostly we collected orphans. I ended up with the elderly Jeanette and four little motherless donkey foals, bought for about five shillings from farmers who did not want to keep them; a little dog called Bobby; seven goats; a chicken with one leg; and a beautiful dairy cow called Cleopatra, who gave good milk even though she was elderly. As I did not have a horse I taught Cleopatra to wear a saddle and halter—and rode her on one occasion, to the Pony Club. Of course we came last because cows jump over the moon only in fairy stories—but we did have a rosette tied to her tail, after trying hard in the gymkhana, even though I fell off at the end as cows trot and gallop with their heads down. With Cleopatra as my steed, falling off was especially uncomfortable as she had a pair of very pretty but quite sharp horns! Anyway, animals were my education—and I could not have had a better one.
I did get a horse in the end, in a way I could never have dreamed. When I was aged about nine, all the local children were asked to the country estate of a rather grand lady called Mrs De Vere for a picnic and summer fete. We were given rides on an old black mare who was led up and down by the gardener. The mare was very unhappy about this, and kept trying to snap and bite everyone, even biting the gardener’s trousers as he gave a leg up, but I just fell in love with her. She was tall—about 16 hands high—and very fat, fierce and wild looking. I remember going to an old oak tree with all the other children and being told we could have a wish here as it was a lucky tree. I wished with all my heart that Columbine, as she was called, could be mine.
Amazingly, three months later, the old mare arrived right at my front door with her saddle and bridle, led by the gardener. He explained that Mrs de Vere wouldn’t let him ride her any more as he was too heavy and because the mare was very old—and that is why the lady had decided to give Columbine to me. She thought I had a special way with animals, as I was the only child Columbine had not tried to bite!
The mare was so big that she more or less took charge of me and brought me up—she was my friend for years. It was fun teaching my sister Maude, just four years younger than me, how to ride on her.
When I was young I dreamed of being a runner, but thought I was no good. I’d never believed I could run a marathon, still less run around the world. Then, when I was about 47, I picked up a copy of Runner’s World in a doctor’s surgery while awaiting an inoculation. Having read the torn copy of the magazine, I thought, I can do that, and that very evening set off to run around the block.
A year later in 1995 I decided to enter the London Marathon and started to train for it. One day I was struggling hard up a steep hill thinking I was crazy to attempt a marathon when two super-fit local runners caught up with me and said, ‘Hey, you’re doing pretty well.’ They slowed down to stay with me and we ran together the rest of the way. They taught me to believe in myself just as Carlie used to do, and that made all the difference.
After the London Marathon I became aware of the Swiss Alpine Marathon in Davos. I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to go back to my birthplace. When I mentioned to the race organisers that I’d spent my early childhood in Davos they ran an article looking for my foster mother. I had had never been in touch with her as my grandmother had not wished to talk about the past, and had never told me her full name. They found her—Frieda Fridli who now, at 98, was the oldest person in Davos. That didn’t prevent her from coming to the finish. She invited me to her home—and she had photos of me as a baby on her mantelpiece. It was as if she had waited specially to see me again. I was so proud to introduce her to Clive, who had come with me as photographer, and we stayed in touch with her until she died at the age of 100.
It made me realize that running is far more than a sport, it is a way of communication. Running had brought me back to my past all those years ago and suddenly I was sure it would help me move forward and honour Clive’s final battle too.
I spent hours looking at maps. I saw that I could run all the way round the world without having to cross any oceans. It would have to be through icy northern latitudes, the harshest latitudes on earth, but it took hold of my mind and spun it in circles of excitement. It also looked cheaper than other ways because…it was cheaper than other ways. It was the package tour alone on foot. No expensive long-haul airfares.
I threw myself into planning it. The preparations were to take more than a year. With hindsight, I should perhaps have spent longer, but it just seemed very important that I should go as soon as possible: I’d had Clive on my mind, and also all those faces in Ward 10; people who had dreams, people who had led careful lives and had made plans for the future, which they now