It’s never too late to take up a new interest, or even to change career. Former fashion model Marguerite McCurtain, now a travel writer, remembers how her wanderlust led her away from the fashion industry to a life spent exploring the four corners of the globe …
My mother told me that I am descended from a long line of wandering poets, musicians and storytellers from Co Clare.
So storytelling is part of my DNA.
In the dim and distant days of my childhood, storytelling was certainly part of our normal family life. We lived in an old house in the dark woods in East Galway said to be haunted by the ghost of a woman in white and a 7ft man, who seemed to reside in the sitting room fireplace.
There were also stories about headless horsemen driving a coach and four down the main avenue in the dead of night and of other apparitions so terrifying that anyone who had ever encountered them died instantly of fright.
I didn’t see any of these; but I did hear the dragging footsteps on the stone floors and pathways and I heard the tapping noises on the Georgian windows and I answered the loud knocking on the front door on many occasions to find that there was noone there.
It was the perfect place for a child with a febrile imagination to grow up.
My summers were spent on Inis Bofin Island where my mother’s family ran a family hotel. At night all the visiting children gathered in the adjoining pub to enjoy the forbidden treats of a fizzy Club Orange and Urney’s Cream Chocolate bars and to eavesdrop on the storytellers.
There, we heard more stories about sea tragedies and disasters, dead sailors and fishermen, sudden storms and the ever- present dangers of the wild Atlantic Ocean. We listened, entranced.
Eventually, overdosed on eavesdropping and probably an excess of sugar, we climbed the shadowy stairs to bed, terrified by the cries of seagulls and the sounds of the sea.
My childhood summers passed like that.
University beckoned.
Afterwards, I worked in the various worlds of the fashion industry.
I travelled a lot for work, mainly to the US and mainland Europe. In a pause between jobs, I decided to go on a once-in-a-lifetime journey to visit some of the places on my bucket list.
I was planning my trip, in a well-known budget travel agency in London, when serendipity intervened. I saw a flyer advertising a landmark journey overland from Kathmandu in Nepal to Lhasa in Tibet. It was the first time that the Chinese Authorities had allowed tourists to travel by this route. I booked the trip. When I returned to Dublin, Gay Byrne invited me to speak about my journey to Tibet and my other travels on the Late Late Show.
Howard Kinley, a trailblazing student leader, journalist, and a friend of my husband saw me on the show. He invited me to write five travel pieces for the Irish Times where he was working as a features editor at the time.
I was amazed.
“Write five travel articles Howard!?” I said. “I have never written anything more demanding than a college essay or a Christmas card.”
“Did you keep a travel journal?” he enquired.
“Yes,” I replied.
“OK” he said “Let’s meet for lunch.”
Over lunch he outlined the secrets of travel writing as he saw them.
“It’s like this,” he said “You write a great first sentence or paragraph. You write a memorable last paragraph and in between you try not to bore the reader to death.”
In fact he wrote my first sentence. It read:
“I was standing on the roof of the world looking at the North face of Mount Everest.”
Armed with this scant but insightful information, I tentatively began to write.
A short time later, serendipity struck again in the form of Terry Prone. She had read an article that I had written for the Irish Times about a morning on Lake Tana, source of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. She invited me to join a writing skills course at Carr Communications.
There, I wrote a short essay about the drama and dangers of a dawn plane journey through an ice corridor to the Forbidden Kingdom of Mustang in the Himalayas. Terry advised me to send it to Martha McCarron, the producer of Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ 1. Martha accepted it and she also broadcast a number of my other essays on Sunday Miscellany.
Serendipity intervened for a third time. Tim Lehane, one of RTÉ’s renowned producers, heard my Miscellany broadcasts and invited me to contribute to his “Another Time, Another Space” programmes. Tim liked the notion of spontaneity in storytelling for radio. He preferred me to record my stories from memory without a script.
And so I ended up like my ancestors in the storytelling business. However, much to my astonishment, I discovered by chance, the art of travel writing along the way.
Clearly it is never too late to learn new tricks.
Marguerite McCurtain’s charming collection of travel essays, Invisible Threads, is out now.
