So said Lucy Irvine after her return from little Tuin Island in the Torres Strait, where she and her "husband" Gerald Kingsland spent a year in 1982, some five years after I had lived and worked on nearby Thursday Island. The result was the book "Castaway" and a movie by the same name.
"An infinity of sea and sky bluer and more brilliant than in any dream. Our wake made a white streak across the blue so struck with glittering points of light it smarted the eye. We passed islands to our left and to our right; bottle green bosomy mounds frilled about with white sand rising out of that electric world of blue."
Lucy Irvine was born on 1 February 1956 in Whitton, Middlesex. She ran away from school and had no full-time education after the age of thirteen. She was employed as a charlady, monkey-keeper, waitress, stonemason's mate, life model, pastry-cook, and concierge, and also worked with disabled people and as a clerk at the Inland Revenue.
She has written "One is One"; an account of her early years, aptly named "Runaway"; "Castaway"; and - which is where our paths crosssed again - "Faraway" about her year spent on remote Pigeon Island in the then British Solomon Islands where I almost took a job myself in late 1969.
She now lives somewhere in Bulgaria where she runs an "orphanage" for stray animals. In the above aeon-video, she tells her story from the cluttered yurt in the Bulgarian countryside that she now calls home.
She explains why, throughout her life, she has chosen unconventional paths as a means of protecting herself from feeling overwhelmed by a modern world she saw as imbued with too many prescriptions and, indeed, too many choices. Far from a tale of romantic ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ self-actualisation through travel, Lucy instead offers her idiosyncratic outlook with unvarnished honesty, detailing preferences that some might find lonely or perhaps self-centred, but nonetheless tug at more universal tensions between drives for security, belonging and freedom.
"Living on a remote island is hard, but returning to society is harder."
P.S. If you, too, wish to make a small donation to the The Lucy Irvine Foundation Europe, LIFE, which is a non-profit organisation actively reducing the suffering of dogs, cats and horses in Bulgaria, click here.
