Christina Dodwell

How does your family cope? How do they know whether to worry about you or not? Have they just taught themselves that they really mustn't worry and just hear from you when they do?

We used to have a system when my mother was alive that if three months passed and they hadn't even had a card from me, then she was allowed to do a bit of worry. This happened, I think, in that first five years of travelling, it happened about three times. And she was very clever about what she did. She'd say, Okay, she's gone missing now, and it was in southern Africa. She contacted a friend who was a farmer, who knows who in South Africa, the farmer's the fisherman, and they all spread the word, Who's seen a woman on her own on a horse? Now, you see, a woman on a horse on her own doesn't pass unnoticed. Everybody knows. They all knew where I was. It was just a question of information getting outside.

I suppose the greatest enemy then, Christina, if it's not other people, not wild beasts, not unknown terrain, it must be illness. What happens to you when you really get sick out there? Do you take packets of pills and antibiotics?

No, they'd all have gone off. They wouldn't have kept well in the heat and the humidity. And I think that medicines that don't work are probably worse than no medicines. I tend to go to the witch doctor or the healer or or the herbal people. And does he do the trick? Occasionally, one of the best ones was a chap I paid him two chickens and he threw into the calabash some twigs and they started to fizz and bubble and uh then I had to produce sort of the old empty beer bottles and he said now you've got to drink two beer bottles a day of this stuff. It tasted very bitter. I had bronchitis at the time and he said that um if I did that I had to keep doing it until the bronchitis went away. I'm sure it was quite a good tonic for me. It didn't really do the trick, but um it might have done.

And will he understand, if one day, as you surely will, you up and off again?

You see, if you marry somebody like me, you can't imagine that they're going to sit and and work in a kitchen and and have them do all that sort of thing. You don't pick people like me if that's the kind of wife you want.