Clare Travers
Having spent her early working life as a trainee stockbroker in London, Clare Travers married and immediately went to live abroad with her husband. They spent a number of years in Izmir, Turkey, where she taught English to, among others, the Turkish Air Force, followed by spells in Africa, firstly in a distant corner of Kenya, where they took their first child, Amelia, at the age of just six weeks.
Two years later, now with a new baby, Sam, they found themselves in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), where it was so remote that letters could only be sent and received via the good auspices of a missionary organisation that flew to Nairobi twice a week.
When they returned to England, she brought up her family and worked for many years in her local independent bookshop. In her fifties, she embarked on a degree in English Literature, and so completed the education that had somehow remained unfinished since she had left school in the early 1970s.
Having achieved that, she conceived the idea of collating and editing a series of letters she had written to her parents from the time when she had first lived abroad.
Clare’s Story
The re-discovery of a cache of ‘letters home’ prompted Clare to revisit her early married life in Turkey, Kenya and Zaire. In Postcards from a Far Country, she describes life in remote areas when letters were the only link with the outside world.
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