Just a Little Run Around the World: 5 Years, 3 Packs of Wolves and 53 Pairs of Shoes

ROSIE SWALE POPE

Just a Little

Run Around

the World

5 years,

3 packs of wolves and

53 pairs of shoes

‘Things last for ever,

not in years, but in the moments

in which they happen.’

—Rosie Swale Pope

For Clive, Eve and James, Pete, Jayne and Nigel and the rest of my family far and wide.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 - Clive

Chapter 2 - The Plan

Chapter 3 - The Tenby Bear

Chapter 4 - Eyes in Your Feet

Chapter 5 - Eric the Wild Boar

Chapter 6 - Need Makes the Naked Lady Spin

Chapter 7 - Rip Van Winkle in a Snow-hole

Chapter 8 - Touching the Stars

Chapter 9 - A Stranger is Family

Chapter 10 - The World of Special So-called Ordinary People

Chapter 11 - Shaken not Stirred

Chapter 12 - The Rising of the Phoenix

Chapter 13 - To Russia with Love

Chapter 14 - Unstoppable Friend

Chapter 15 - Paw-prints in the Snow

Chapter 16 - Kitezh: Bad Times Can End

Chapter 17 - The Axeman Cometh

Chapter 18 - Running into Asia

Chapter 19 - Omsk: The First Race

Chapter 20 - Bandit on a Bicycle

Chapter 21 - In a Siberian Hospital

Chapter 22 - Winter in Siberia

Chapter 23 - A Siberian Bridge Has No Middle

Chapter 24 - Falling in Love with Alaska

Chapter 25 - There’s No Place Like Nome

Chapter 26 - Surviving in Alaska

Chapter 27 - Topkok

Chapter 28 - White Mountain

Chapter 29 - Breaking the Ice

Chapter 30 - Crazy Rogue

Chapter 31 - The Comeback

Chapter 32 - Reunion

Chapter 33 - Ballad of the Red Toenails

Chapter 34 - Life Is a Marathon

Chapter 35 - I Am the Wildlife

Chapter 36 - Running Against the Current

Chapter 37 - New York, New York

Chapter 38 - Goodbye Charlie, Hello Icebird

Chapter 39 - The Most Beautiful Sound in the World

Chapter 40 - The World’s Largest Island

Chapter 41 - Vikings with Golden Hearts

Chapter 42 - Thor’s Hammer and Thorgeir’s Teabags

Chapter 43 - Just a Little Run Down Britain

Chapter 44 - The Last Frontier

Chapter 45 - Homecoming

Epilogue

Author’s notes

Acknowledgements

Further Information

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Siberia, January 2005

There are a hundred different types of silence in Siberia. The atmosphere becomes part of you. You can sometimes see bare white silver birches in the depth of winter hung with stars on a clear night. In the mesmerising vast forests, dusk in January begins at 2 pm. By then everything is in its hole or nest—or nearly everything.

On a cold, still night, I pull my cart that doubles as a sled, deep into the forest and find some smooth snow among the trees. I put up the tent, collect a bowl of fresh snow to take inside with me to melt on the tiny primus stove for drinks and cooking; it’s the nearest thing I have to a kitchen. I have even gathered some icy tree bark from the fallen branches to make tea. The Siberian people have taught me this. It’s not quite PG Tips but it’s nourishing and tastes fine. Need is a great teacher. I also boil up a few handfuls of buckwheat grain to make a kind of porridge. It’s a measure of the power of the silence that even a light footstep outside can make your heart stop. Something is out there.

The night birds—maybe they are jays—suddenly start screeching and chattering. Alert. Out from their hiding places. Gone is their silent vigil. They are harsh calls of warning. Then I hear the howling.

Moments later the wolf has stuck his head right into the tent. My first impression isn’t one of danger or fear but of his absolute beauty. He is a great big timber wolf. His tawny head and long front legs with giant-looking furry paws are covered with drops of half-frozen snow that gleam like diamonds on his thick fur. He has a good look around, as though I should have been expecting his visit. Maybe I am. After all, this is his world.

My heart is thundering. Yet my strongest instinct is that he’s not going to attack me. I have learned to trust my instinct. It’s all I have. I stay quiet, but the wolf knows I’m shaken. You can’t pretend to animals. They always know how you feel. Then he backs away and he’s gone.

I have to go out to repair the ripped tent flap with duct tape. The moon has risen, revealing a pack of wolves waiting like grey shadows among the trees.

The next morning they have left but they come back again at the end of the day when I set up camp. I am on a desolate road that stretches for miles through the forest. I’ve only observed one or two vehicles over the last few days travelling to the mines in the far east of Russia. There are no houses for hundreds of miles and I wonder if these wolves have seen a human before. Perhaps I’m just part of the wildlife.

Over the next few days they disappear at daylight and reappear when I stop for the night. They never come close to the tent again or harm me. It is as if they are running with me. They always gather for the night quite a distance away. I’m uneasy—yet at the same time their presence comforts me in a way I don’t quite understand. After about a week they vanish. I believe it’s because I’ve left their terrain; I have crossed an invisible border.

These beautiful wolves with their ancient, strange ways gave me courage to think of the painful memories of why my run had begun.

On 12 June 2002 my husband Clive died in my arms of prostate cancer. I knew with a passionate conviction that I had to do something. To tell people, to remind them to please go for health checks. If Clive and I had thought about him going to the doctor earlier—perhaps he would be with me now. I had to find a way to make others listen, especially men and women who hate going to the doctor and discussing intimate things. There is no social status with cancer. I’m only an ordinary woman, but if I just stayed home doing the weeding in my backyard, nobody would have taken any notice—that’s why I am running around the world, and sleeping in the cold in the forests with wolves.

If my message saves even one life—it will all have been worthwhile.

CHAPTER 1 Clive

Tenby, Wales, 2002

We thought he could beat it, just as Clive had always conquered everything. Years ago, he sailed practically everywhere in the world, delivering yachts. He sailed boats no one else could manage. He escaped from pirates on the high seas, weathered all storms. He had always been fit, and very full of life and laughter.

Clive had twinkling blue eyes in an inquisitive and happy face; you could stop to chat to him for a moment—and still be talking hours later. I met him in 1982, when I had been at a low point, struggling to get an old and ramshackle 17ft sailing boat ready to sail solo across the Atlantic. Although he was a businessman in Pembrokeshire, he couldn’t stay away from the sea, and was helping out at Kelpie’s Boatyard in Pembroke Dock, where he rigged my little boat. Clive had been married before like me and had two deeply loved grown-up children, Jayne and Nigel. I was also very close to Eve and James, my children from my first marriage.

After I completed my solo voyage, we had a simple wedding and nearly twenty extremely happy years together. We would walk or run down to the sea and look at the sunrise, making a golden path of light across the sea from the harbour and North Beach in Tenby where we lived.

‘I think heaven isn’t later,’ he often said. ‘Heaven’s right here on this earth.’

Half-jokingly, he called doctors ‘vets’ as a compliment. He loved animals and admired vets who have to look after patients of

all

 sizes, including strange animals. I had already run the Sahara Marathon. Clive had made a film about it and about working animals. We had visited a donkey clinic in Marrakesh after the race; my feet were blistered and Clive, worried because no doctor was available, asked their head vet to treat them. The vet had done a terrific job on his first two-legged donkey, applying soothing green cream smelling of aloe vera, normally used for girth galls, he said, while his other patients had eehowed, looking on sympathetically. The blisters healed perfectly.

All these carefree times suddenly ended. Our world changed in a way sadly known by millions but shatteringly new to us. We were unaware of cancer—not of the fearful loss, pain and grief it caused to so many, but that it can happen so easily to anybody. It seems unbelievable now.

On 26 June 2000 Clive went to see Dr Griffiths, his ‘vet’, at Tenby Surgery, because he had begun to have discomfort when he peed. We were shocked, devastated when the tests showed that Clive had prostate cancer.

‘It’s not so bad,’ Dr Griffiths tried to reassure us. ‘It’s often one of the easiest cancers to treat. You can have prostate cancer and live to ninety—and then get run over by a bus.’

The next test, the scan, revealed it had already spread into Clive’s bones. I prayed for a miracle that night; I would have done anything to have had the cancer instead of him, but Clive just said, ‘I can cope with this.’

For the next year, life went on almost as normal. He responded very well to the medication and I couldn’t get over his strong will. He began running on the beach, which he had actually never done before—he was not a runner. It was so hard because for a long time he wanted to keep the fact that he was ill between us and his doctors.

One day I saw he wasn’t really able to jog on the beach any more but was trying to hide it. Then he stopped and put his arm around me.

‘Don’t cry,’ he said, ‘or you’ll make me cry too. Be strong.’

He was well enough to go camping in Ireland in the autumn as he had longed to do. It was lovely. The Irish side of my family kept saying how well Clive looked, which made me proud but also tore me apart as I couldn’t say what had been happening. Whatever he chose to do

was

 the way to do it.

I remember our tent beside the misty dunes, reeds and grasses in the early morning near Rosslare Harbour, before catching the ferry back. We had such fun. Time generously stopped its bitter headlong race; and stood still, just for a little while. It was time’s gift that meant everything. Things last for ever, not in years, but in the moments in which they happen.

Clive was as full of dreams and ideas as ever. He eventually told his daughter and son, and a few more people about the cancer, and we carried on as he wanted to do. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to face his problem; it wasn’t about achieving last dreams. Clive and I didn’t believe in the word

last

. Dreams are founded on reality and facing up to trouble. We just kept on going forward, because it was the only way.

He wrote a poem, ‘I Want to See the World’:

I want to be a sailor, I want to roam the oceans far and wide, I want to see the islands and the far off distant lands, To listen to the music of the drum. I want to ride on camels, and elephants too, And lie on beaches basking in the sun. I want to go to India, and see the famous Tajah, Then visit Everest and its peaks…

Much later, on my world run, I realised that it was Clive who taught me that you never give yourself a break going uphill but only when you are over the top of the mountain. And that the mountains are in the mind.

Clive longed to go to Nepal. He had been born in India and his father had been in the British Army in charge of the Gurkhas. Clive had never gone back because he hadn’t wanted to go as a tourist. Before his illness he had accepted an invitation by the Nepal Trust for us to trek and help them build a hospital in Humla. He still said he’d do anything to go. He also wanted to go to Cuba to make a film about a run, as he had done in the Sahara.

He very nearly made it to Cuba too. He felt better and insisted I go ahead and come back and fetch him after the run, so he could just film it in a few days. He reckoned he’d be OK for a few days away.

This was never going to happen.

Suddenly he got much worse. In January 2002, we were lying in bed together. I had been dozing and Clive pulled the duvet—that’s all he did—and his arm gave a loud crack.

‘I think it’s broken,’ he said. ‘It’s OK if I just lie still.’

The ambulance came. At the hospital they said that the break above the elbow was a classic sign of bone cancer spreading out of control. He was in and out of hospital until April, bravely going to physiotherapy to get back what strength he could. Doing exercises as prescribed by the doctor, with his arm in a sling. I saw it all. I went everywhere with him.

The physiotherapists were astonished he could joke. He used to say, ‘Oh, I have

everything

 going for me. My teeth are going, my hair’s going, my eyes are going…’

On 10 April, his birthday, he ate his cake, or a bit of it. I gave him a little torch you could hold in the palm of your hand. He gave it back, saying, ‘Please keep this for me.’

From soon after his birthday he was in hospital until towards the very end.

Peter Hutchinson of PHD Designs, who make the finest lightweight down clothing on earth, sent Clive a down vest weighing only 250 grams which sat on his fragile bones, giving him so much comfort.

After the arm, his hip broke. Just as they were hoping to get him walking again, the tumours in his spine caused his legs to become paralysed.

He bore it all, as everyone does, and still tried to have a laugh. When his friend Chester visited, asking if there was anything Clive needed, he replied, ‘Yes, I need a fast car.’

Ward 10 Palliative and Cancer Care Ward, in our local Withybush Hospital in Haverfordwest, is a place I will never forget, of endless empathy and caring, of a lightness and kindness beyond words. Anne Barnes, a gifted and blessed cancer specialist, always wore not medical gear but bright clothes to cheer her patients up. When Clive and others were transferred to her ward she often dropped dark hints about the latest sexual orgies and parties in Ward 10 at 2am. Of course these didn’t ever happen but the thought brought a smile to her patients’ faces and may have hidden their terrible pain better than the morphine.

The most dedicated nurses I have ever known let me sleep in my sleeping bag for long months, or even on the edge of Clive’s bed, just holding him. One night I awoke and found Clive looking at me. He smiled and said, ‘You had such a good sleep.’ There was a look of pride and love in his eyes I can’t express. The nurses patiently taught me how to do everything for Clive such as cleaning and washing him. It was a privilege for me to do it: I would have done anything for him.

Their policy was to enable patients to come home for the final days if the patient wished for it. I shall never forget how caringly they went about it. They even had a special hospital bed brought to our home, and round-the-clock nursing care.

Clive was so happy to see the honeysuckle he had planted and smiled at the sight of the sparrows, which he always called his ‘feathered hooligans’, feasting on fat balls outside the bedroom window. I had actually been training them up with extra food before he came home so they could put on a gala show. A day later, 12 June 2002, he was gone.

After all the pain and suffering, I awoke beside him feeling that a light had come on. He had been given all his strength and spirit back and was moving on.

When the kind lady doctor had been and the wonderful young Paul Sartori nurse (like our local Macmillan’s nurses) had retired next door after hugging me, I just held Clive close to me all through the night. I didn’t know what else to do. I held him like you might hold onto someone in a desert.

He was off on such a long journey; he might be lonely for a little while. I was on a journey too. Beginning a journey and ending a journey. I was heartbroken, and held him and looked at him all those hours; and then I knew you can only keep hold of beauty by letting it go.

He

had

 won his battle right to the very end. You don’t win a battle because of how it turns out. You win by the way you face it. He was up among the pirates. He was happy.

Even during this desperate fight Clive had never lost his sense of fun. My monument to him shouldn’t be sorrowful, grieving or gloomy. I had to do something for Clive that would be crazy and huge. I could run some marathons for cancer awareness, I thought.

I had been looking at the map of the world on my wall, wondering if I could afford overseas marathons, when something took hold of me by the scuff of the neck; a thought broke through my grief and seized every part of my being.

I would run around the world instead.

CHAPTER 2 The Plan

Tenby, August 2002

I was born in Davos, Switzerland, where my mother was in a clinic suffering from tuberculosis, while my father was away serving in the British Army. When I was two days old the doctors put an advertisement in the local paper for a foster mother, as my mother couldn’t look after me. There were 45 applicants as I learned many years later. My mother chose the local postman’s wife, who was good to me. To strengthen my lungs, my foster mother took me for long walks, which ended up in the grounds of the TB clinic so my mother could look at me out of her window, because her infection made it impossible for her to have physical contact with me. I have shadowy memories of the faces of my mother and foster mother and the black squirrels eating nuts off my hands. My foster mother always dressed me beautifully and had photos of me taken for my poor mother to have around her bedside later.

I never knew my mother, but I shall always feel such huge love and gratitude to her for having the courage to give birth to me when she was so ill, and also for her greater courage in having to face giving me away. I feel I owe my life to many exceptional, caring and loving people.

When I was two my mother sadly died and my Anglo-Irish grandmother, who was called Carlie, came to collect me to live with her in Country Limerick, Ireland. She gave me a rabbit called Peter, and took me away. She broke the link. My last memory of my foster mother was of a lady with hair in a brown bun crying as she ran beside the train taking me away. From then on Carlie cared for me even though she became crippled with osteoarthritis.

In 1951 when I was five my father, a tall charismatic army officer with kind eyes, married a marvellous Swiss French lady—Marianne. Carlie was bedridden by this time, but my father felt that I was happy with her and it would be unsettling to move me, so we kind of looked after each other. In those long ago days in Ireland, life was simply worked out in the way that everybody thought best. I don’t regret it. In 1957 my father also died, leaving Marianne to raise their four children. He was only 47.

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 preve