The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt. Mary Russell

commented Margaret Lucas, flamboyant and eccentric Restoration writer, ‘we live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and Dye like Worms.’

      Three hundred years later, Sabina Shalom found herself fat, middle-aged and menopausal – and with a bee in her Miami Beach bonnet about hitch-hiking to Australia: ‘The idea obsessed me simply because it was right off the map. It became an excuse, not a reason, for getting away … I longed to be free of duties and obligations. Free of thinking, worrying, protecting, mothering. Free of feeling everyone’s burdens and making them mine.’

      The distant horizon beckons even more urgently now, as the blandness of the mid-twentieth century threatens to render us anonymous, our identity emerging as symbols on a computer printout or fashioned as fodder for the consumer society, for the marketing and media world. Within this murderous matrix, women are tamed and packaged, their new ‘liberated’ image as steeplejacks, truck-drivers or soldiers glamourized, glitzy and unreal – suitable copy for the propaganda machine anxious to demonstrate society’s stifling generosity towards them. For those with the will to escape, a journey outwards into the unseen may be the only hope of finding what lies within. Better the reality of the unknown than the artificiality of the known.

       CHAPTER 2 Pilgrims to Freedom

      ‘Nothing could hold her back, whether it was the labour of travelling the whole world … the perils of sea and rivers … the dread crags and fearsome mountains …’

       Valerius on Egeria.

      Travellers, like the rest of us, need to communicate with someone even if, by writing a journal, it is at one remove. In 1884 a remarkable book was discovered which tells of a journey made by a woman who travelled to Jerusalem around the year AD 383.

      Its author, Egeria, was a devout Roman citizen of noble birth, who journeyed from Gaul to the Holy Land and recorded everything she saw, thus leaving us with both a fascinating traveller’s tale and the only complete account we still have of the fourth century liturgy. So timeless are some of these liturgical ceremonies that her description, written sixteen hundred years ago, captures that odd mixture of gloom and glitter, superstition and ritual that haunts the dark interiors of present-day Jerusalem: ‘All you can see is gold and jewels and silk; the hangings are entirely silk with gold stripes, the curtains the same and everything they use for services at the festival is made of gold and jewels. You simply cannot imagine the number and the sheer weight of the candles and the tapers and the lamps …’

      Travelling through fourth-century Palestine was not without its dangers. Wild animals roamed the purple hills and the inhospitable locals, weary of seeing endless bands of well-to-do foreigners pass through their lands, were liable to attack without warning. It was a formidable undertaking for anyone, let alone a woman on her own, but as long as travellers stuck to the straight and narrow Roman roads, they were relatively safe.

      By the time Egeria set out on her journey, the pilgrim way was well established. Monasteries dotted the route and quite a few hospices had been set up for the use of Christian travellers, many of whom, of course, were women. In fact, the hospices themselves were often run by women, among them Paula, a Roman matron whose business acumen and managerial skills led her to establish a chain of hospices. Her contemporary, the scholar Jerome, was amazed that a mere woman should be so successful: ‘With a zeal and courage unbelievable in a woman she forgot her sex and physical weakness and settled in the heat of Bethlehem for good in the company of many virgins and her daughter’ – whom we must charitably assume was one too.

      These journeys were far from being temporary religious fads, indulged in by rich women with time on their hands. Egeria and Paula were followed by wave after wave of women who put down lasting roots in Jerusalem and refused to return home. A guide book written nearly four hundred years after Egeria’s arrival comments on the presence, just outside the East Gate of the Holy City, of a hundred women living in an enclosed convent, receiving gifts of food which were pushed through a hole in the wall.

      By the eighth century, the pilgrim route had become something of a tourist trek with many of the delays, frustrations and unexpected expenses that one might encounter today. Sea-captains refused to allow their passengers to leave ship until they had paid the airport tax of the day, known euphemistically as a ‘disembarcation fee’. Travellers passing through non-Christian areas were subjected to poll taxes which varied according to their apparent wealth, and one traveller commenting on the bureaucracy of the day, no less autocratic then than now, noted in disgust that ‘anyone who is found by night or day without a paper or a stamp issued by one of the kings or princes of that country is sent to prison … until he can prove he is not a spy’.

      None of these inconveniences, however, deterred women from the journey, and indeed so numerous were they on the road to Rome that they presented a special problem to the church authorities whose attempts to restrain this restless tide were at first paternalistic and benign but were soon revealed in their true, repressive colours. ‘It would be well and favourable,’ wrote Boniface to the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘… if your synod would forbid matrons and veiled women to make these frequent journeys back and forth to Rome.’ To have wives and mothers straying so far from home was an obvious threat to the institution of marriage. Not only that: despite their respectable status, such matrons, it seems, were in danger of falling by the wayside as so many of their sisters had done previously. ‘For,’ the anxious cleric continued, ‘there are few towns [along the way] in which there is not a courtesan or a harlot of English stock.’ He might have taken a more charitable view of his fallen sisters, as one of his predecessors did. St Marcianus, in the fifth century, persuaded a number of prostitutes to reform and to demonstrate their new way of life by making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem – a journey which he thoughtfully financed himself.

      Banditry, piracy, prostitution and smuggling – it was all a long way from the vision of a young, wistful, Anglo-Saxon girl, exiled in a German monastery, who had to content herself with being a second-hand traveller.

      I, unworthy child of the Saxon race, the last of those who have come hither from their land who am, in comparison with these my countrymen, not only in years but in virtue also, only a poor little creature … Yet I am a woman, tainted with the frailty of my sex, with no pretensions to wisdom or cleverness to support me, but prompted solely by the violence of my own will like a little ignorant child plucking a few flowers here and there from numerous branches rich in foliage and in fruit.

      With painful humility the young Huceburg, amanuensis for the first Englishman to travel to Jerusalem, sat down to write what is the earliest English travel book still available to us.

      She had been sent from England to the monastery of Heidenheim, in Germany, where her cousin was Abbess. While there, another member of her family, the monk Willibald, now an old man, returned from his travels to dictate his book to the wide-eyed young girl. The guidebook. The Hodaeporicon, written about 780, is full of stories that must have amazed her – how the party saw a lion, how they were arrested by the Saracens on suspicion of spying, how Willibald, later Saint Willibald, smuggled balsam through the customs. First he filled a calabash with the balsam, then he took a hollow cane, filled that with petroleum and concealed it in the calabash so that when the officials came to examine the calabash they were distracted by the smell of petroleum and the balsam went undetected.

      Huceburg was the product of her religious education, trained to view herself as a woman and therefore less than nothing, but there was nothing humble about Margery Kempe, the mayor’s daughter from Bishop’s Lynn who, in 1413, set sail for Jerusalem with a party of pilgrims whose collective and determined aim was to lose her as quickly as they could.

      By the fifteenth century, women, despite the prohibitive antics of the church, had established themselves as regular and seasoned travellers on the pilgrim run. Their enthusiasm and ebullient response to religious ceremonies could, at times, be somewhat of an embarrassment but their presence was vital to a church which thrived on ignorance and superstition. It is the women, after all, who keep the candles burning and who see, through the hypnotic haze,