a modern woman
She was born in the mid 1950s in Wales. The war was over and opportunities were abound if you were prepared to take them, if you were brave enough to break the mould. She was clever and beautiful — she was the girl all the boys talked about in reverent, hushed tones. She held her advantages well, well enough to stave off the usual resentment that followed a girl like her.
Teachers encouraged her to matriculate and she went North. An alumna from a mining town in the Valleys was still rare in the 70s, the local landscape was built for coal faces not pretty ones. The pretty face caught the eye of a hometown boy, one she wanted to be seen by. They got married.
With a teaching qualification under her belt the married couple could live an itinerant life, as teaching posts came so they went. In the classroom she found appreciation, respect; at home she was the one being taught a lesson. The trappings of the ancient institution found another woman subject to a raised hand, another woman in true wedlock as with many others throughout history.
She found the strength to leave, to run. And run she did, treading the tarmac became a normal part of her life. That’s where she met him, at a race amongst the sea of other runners. She needed someone to keep pace with and he would suffice. Even before the finish line she was intrigued; he was ambitious, he was moving to the Far East.
They saw each other regularly and before she knew it she was flying to visit him. She saw the benefits of his corporate life, made even more luminous by the spoils of colonialism that were still in full effect, the driver, the car, the club memberships. She was utterly enamoured. When she went to a party in one of the towering skyscrapers that peppered the harbour she was greeted with the face of middle-class England and a bathtub full of champagne bottles, this is where I want to be she thought.
Less than a year later she called Hong Kong home. Time went by and they ran on together, infiltrating the highest of sets. By the mid 90s the question of extending the bloodline hung in the air. But they came too soon, only for a few months would they sign four names, it soon became just three. Then came the hospital visits, the continuous convalescence and the worry. Bathtubs for her were filled with a different kind of bubbles now, at six, ten, fifteen and even twenty-one.
She would wonder if there was a quota of luck assigned to people, they say that women can’t have it all and maybe women where she came from have even less shares to work with. But at home in the undulating hills they still talk about her mythical beauty. To them she’s the one that got away, a modern woman that escaped prescriptive regional life.
