The wild one

You can hardly blame a woman of 102 for being a bit hazy when it comes to giving directions. ‘Drive to the Italian border,’ said Lesley Blanch on the telephone, after initially attempting to discourage my visit. ‘When you get there, make a U-turn and I’m the first on the right.’ And so she was, tucked away in a house high above Menton on the French Riv- iera. ‘It is always useful to be near a frontier, in case you need to make a dash for it.’

There were countless times when she crossed frontiers that most people would have trouble finding on a map, not fleeing but restlessly searching for romance, experience and adventure. Her accounts of these journeys were unorthodox and fearless, making her one of the 20th century’s most exotic travel writers. Her bestselling book, The Wilder Shores of Love, has never been out of print since it was published in 1954, yet by the time of her death she herself had been largely forgotten.