MARIELLA FROSTRUP ACCESS ALL AREAS

At a time when society is at its most constrained, we can all enjoy accounts of intrepid adventures

hese feel like dark days for the footloose; airlines grounded, trains reduced, ports closed and we, the population, secluded in our homes with our freewheeling days a distant memory. Yet it’s hard to be entirely gloomy with those I love in proximity, the sun blazing as I write, the rooks boisterously cackling in trees top-heavy with nests awaiting new life.

My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, as explorer Juanita Harrison described it in the early 20th century, is still spinning on its axis. Harrison is just one of 50 female explorers whose accounts I gathered in an anthology called Wild Women, which has just come out in paperback. With our own lives at a standstill, it may prove a timely publication. When I was compiling their stories, I often found a direct correlation between the high quality of the writing and how far it went in evoking the destination, and the unlikelihood of the reader ever getting there.

The further they roamed, the less travelled their paths, the more my footloose femmes seemed to rise to the demands of taking their reader along with them. So many of my favourite accounts were written by intrepid 19th-century singletons, hitching up their skirts and heading for the world’s wildernesses to experience the thrill of the exotic and the freedom it offered from their corset-restricted lives.

Is it mere coincidence that at a time when society was at its most constrained, accounts of such escapades were at their most popular? I’d love to set off on a virus-defying mule ride across Arabia right now for my readers’ delectation, but my only imminent journey is via a pile of books that traverse the globe.

Instead of mourning where I can’t be and what I can’t do, it seems the perfect opportunity to be embarking on armchair adventures to whet my appetite for future trips. It’s how I spent most of my 20s, lingering in the Travel Bookshop on London’s Portobello Road, later made famous as the spot where Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts first meet in the film Notting Hill.

Back in the Eighties, it was the ideal venue for romantic liaisons in real life too, with the advantage of knowing you had one thing in common! With shelves labelled by continent and then divided by countries, this tiny portal to the planet meant that, aside from my work trips to the US and around the UK, mentally my travels were far more adventurous. I didn’t discriminate, I had crushes on any number of explorers, living and dead. Redmond O’Hanlon took me up the Amazon, Mark Shand and Don McCullin kept me amused through Irian Jaya, Peter Fleming took me on a Brazilian Adventure, and Norman Lewis made a visit to Naples seem almost unnecessary, so vividly observed was his depiction of the city towards the end of the Second World War in 1944.

Later, I fell for an unsuitable man simply because he read aloud to me in bed passages from Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian exploits. Those cosy nights tucked up in bed while Wilfred braved desert storms seemed as good a reason as any to forgive my narrator’s sexual wanderings!

We may currently feel trapped, in our homes, with our families and on our small island, but we must never forget that we are the luckiest of species. We have brains that can expand limitlessly and take us anywhere we want to go. Some of us may remember a time when a foreign trip was a luxury, meticulously planned, saved up for and finally embarked on. When we’re finally back on the road, suitcases packed and passports to hand, perhaps we’ll also take with us a renewed sense of gratitude for our good fortune, to be able to walk the world and marvel at its wonder.

In the words of Harrison, who escaped Mississippi as an illiterate 10-year-old but went on to write an exuberant account of her globetrotting: “I have reversed the saying of ‘troubles are like babies, the more you nurse them the bigger they grow’. Instead I have nursed the joys.”

edited by Mariella Frostrup (Anima, £9.99) is out now.

For more great literary adventures, turn to page 9

We will see Petra with new eyes