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Margaret Marshall had known Frederick Williamson for much of her life but it wasn't until the English summer of 1932, when he was home on leave from India, that they met again and fell in love. Less then a year later she joined him in the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim, where he was now Political Officer for that region, and they were married.
"Derrick," writes Mrs Williamson, "belongs to that rare and happy breed who are lucky enough to find their true vocation in life." He loved his job as a representative of the British Imperial Government to these ancient Buddhist kingdoms, and he loved their people and way of life. And she quickly fell into step with him.
Three times they travelled on tours of duty throughout the rugged and magnificent Himalayas. First to Bhutan, green and lush, where she developed a close and lasting friendship with the Royal Family. And then on and up, towards the crest of the main Himalayan range and into Tibet, "...a stark, almost primeval landscape, yet strangely beautiful..." Finally, the long-awaited holy city of Lhasa, their meetings with the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, their visits to the three great monasteries that housed between them some twenty thousand monks, and, again, abiding friendships.
But her new-found life was to come to a painful halt, for derrick became ill and died during their second stay in Lhasa in 1935. "In a sense," Mrs Williamson writes fifty years later, "that brief period was my life..."
In these memoirs, she poignantly portrays that life, and paints a broader picture of life that was also to come to a painful and terrible halt twenty-five years later when the Chinese took over Tibet.
Memoirs of a Political Officer's Wife in Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan, Margaret D. Williamson, Wisdom Publications, Paperback, 240 pages, $18.95
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