This memoir begins just before WWII although two of its greatest influences were men of the nineteenth century, one from the north of England and the other from Switzerland. One, my grandfather, whom I did not really know, left me a priceless bequest that strongly influenced the first part of the journey recorded herein. The other influenced the latter part, equally forcefully. Who these two were and how they are integral to this story will hopefully become apparent.

The outward journey for me began towards the end of my first year as an infant in my mother’s arms travelling from England to Istanbul on the legendary Simplon Orient Express. An unusual start for a little English girl especially as it was just before the anticipated war and Europe was in a turmoil of preparation. The train however still ran with us on board. But what led to this journey?

My father was a young architect married to the daughter of a Methodist minister who became my mother. My grandfather was, from all accounts, a much loved, progressive and ecumenically inclined minister who, at the turn of the nineteenth century travelled from the north of England to Atlanta in Georgia to an ecumenical conference. He also pioneered the place of women in his Church and ran a deaconess’ training program: a man far ahead of his time and custom. Above all he was gentle, kind and modelled and lived his faith by example. He married my parents and four years later christened me. They bought a small, newly built house just outside London but still among green fields and trees. They set about creating a beautiful garden and home together and took their dog for long walks, eventually including me in a pram. Many years later my mother told me the beauty of the pram was often commented upon, rather than the baby within it! I would also have been put to sleep in that pram under a tree at the bottom of the garden. I would have played on a rug or in a play pen on a green lawn and smelled the flowers or puzzled about the bees and butterflies as they flew by, or enjoyed the warmth of a log fire inside dancing and crackling on cold winter evenings. There was no need for rattles and plastic toys for entertainment. Outside there would have been leaves above waving in the breeze and the sound of the little fountain in the garden. People would come and peep over the edge of the pram and talk to me or let me hold their fingers while I gurgled in response. I would have heard the sound of the bicycle bells going by down the street and the occasional whirr of a car being cranked up, dog barking, the milkman’s horse and cart clopping by or the rag and bone man calling out to see if anyone had “any old wares” for him to recycle.

While writing I can still imagine all this and know that it has been a sort of mysterious talisman for the future. I felt it and have held it close within me for eighty years through many countries, challenges and experiences and now in Australia. That is how infancy was for some lucky babies at that time. Despite this apparently benign start to my life there would have been plenty of challenges, the effects of which were subsequently buried in my unconscious. The worst was because just after the confusion of my father having left for Istanbul, my grandfather died. As a baby, it was my father’s first prolonged absence. I can only imagine the effect it must have had on my development and growth. My mother was desolated at the loss of her father and departure of her husband. Her anxiety about the unknown, the preparation for our departure and the loss of the home my parents had so lovingly built together would have added to her trauma and maybe affected me.

However, thanks to her, there remained a legacy of absolute safety and trust, despite all the tough challenges on the way. In my own way I must have unconsciously adapted to all these circumstances in a manner that still benefits me today.

The questions I now, very consciously, address are related to how and why that beginning affected me so deeply? It feels as if life itself is one long puzzle of trying to answer such things and to understand how they contribute to who we are to become. What makes one anxious, angry, fearful, happy, sad or even depressed at times? What is it that brings joy, excitement, confidence and quiet pleasure? How do they all fit together for each in our own individual way? Why do we like or get on with some people more than others? Why do we adapt to circumstances in differing ways? We each build our own personalities according to our genetic inheritance, environment and adaptation to it.

Are we true to our real selves and potentials or are we trapped by a persona that develops as an environmentally induced protective mechanism with which we then identify? In this case we may remain enslaved in a type of psychic pupa waiting to be transformed like a butterfly. Hard-won insight has finally showed me how, although I felt so safe, interested, loved and trusted in my early life, I nevertheless developed a False Self as a form of protection and denial. Ostensibly I was always happy, a truly compliant Pollyanna and it apparently served me fairly well into mid life. It protected me through many challenges and changes ahead.

As an erstwhile daughter, wife, mother, speech pathologist, academic, lover, researcher, psychoanalyst and plain old someone who has travelled, lived and worked in many countries and cultures, I am trying to readdress and order the long and varied road of my experiences and relationships into something approaching a cohesive whole. It is like a giant, multi-dimensional, textured jigsaw where one has to fit all the interconnections together. In so doing I acknowledge the richness and variety of my life and feel utterly blessed. Hindsight seems to be the partner of insight and contributes so much to foresight and wellbeing in the present. This is part of the ‘individuation process’ described by C.G. Jung the Swiss doctor and analytical psychologist whose life’s work has been a guiding light during the second half of my life, just as my Grandfather’s legacy had been of the first. Both men experienced a deep understanding of the power beyond the Self. Amazingly my mother later told me—when I had started to train as a Jungian analytical psychologist in late mid-life—that my grandfather had read many of Jung’s works with great interest. They were after all contemporaries.

My story, therefore, seeks to weave together three main autobiographical threads: the outward events of my much-travelled-life; the inner psychic processes set against a background of Jungian Analytical Psychology; and the sometime roller coaster (switchback) of my journey in faith. In the case of the latter it has been as if the frame of a roller coaster remained pretty solid although unseen from the carriage but the rails going up and down at varying speed made it tough and unsettling. I therefore avoided the ride, as often as possible, both literally and metaphorically