.
The family were living a hard life on a farm her grandparents had bought just after the war, she says.
“The book opens with the scene of my grandmother shouting out the back door that tea’s ready and ‘come and get it while it’s warm or I’ll chuck it to the cat’, which was one of her sayings,” she told RNZ’s Nine to Noon .
Alan built a house truck called ‘Holdfast’ from the chassis of an armoured scout car, the cab from a city bus with ‘Thompson’s Purity Lemonade’ still advertised across the front, a tractor engine and the tyres from a Daimler Mk2 armoured car, Bulloch says.
“He built an accommodation section on the back out of box section steel. He put bunks in the back for all of the kids, all but one. There wasn’t quite enough bunks for everyone.
“So one person had to sleep on the floor, which turned out to be Marilyn, my mother.”
The MacLeods epic overland journey Nine To Noon
As with all the other tasks on the farm the whole MacLeod family, including the children were expected to chip in with the fundraising, she says.
“My grandmother was canning, she canned 400 tins of meat to take with them and preserved fruit and vegetables and made jam and so forth.
“Alan had told the kids that they would have to pay their own way on the trip. So, they cut flowers, they bagged moss to sell, plucked geese, collected eggs, picked wild blackberries. They fattened pigs and calves and sold all of these things.”
Alan’s motivation for the trip remain buried in the family history, but his desire to reconnect with his Scottish clan was one and to revisit battle sites of World War II another – he also saw looming boarding school fees coming and figured a round world trip would probably be cheaper, she says.
The trip begins in 1963 with a ship to Singapore, despite the family being warned off starting there due to the war in Malaya. The first hurdle they faced was dodgy paper work, their carnet for the house truck had been bungled by a Wellington official.
“The date of its expiry was the same as the date it was made out. So, they had an invalid carnet to passage for the whole trip and had to kind of negotiate every country they went through with the border guards.”
The roads in that part of South-East Asia were practically non-existent at the time, she says. And crossing rivers in Thailand involved nursing the 8-tonne truck over rudimentary bridges.
“Often just some logs resting bank from bank and they’d have to get out and shift them to align the logs with the distance between Holdfast’s wheels.
“They were then very tentatively easing onto these logs and holding their breath, I imagine, as it crossed. All the kids would get out first, of course.”
In southern Thailand, they were staying in police compounds because they’d been told that would be the safest place, she says.
“In these compounds there were bamboo or iron cages with people they were told were communist guerrillas who would sort of sit there and stare at the family.
“And the family at first would stare back. My mother always said that she wondered, who was the more exotic exhibit? Because being a white family that was so unusual in those parts at the time.”
Further travails followed in India.
“They were travelling up through Karnataka when they had a very serious accident. So, the vehicle unexpectedly went off the road and plummeted down a bank. And almost all of them were injured.
“And my mother was very badly injured. There didn’t seem to be any medical help nearby. So, the situation was quite desperate.”
They were eventually rescued by an American missionary, she says.
But the journey continued; through India, Pakistan, through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia and Western Europe and then a ferry across the Channel up to UK and up to Isle of Skye, she says.
The adventure affected the family in different ways, two of the boys went to become inveterate travellers themselves, her mother settled into a more “homebody” life back in New Zealand.
But for the whole family it was life-changing, she says.
“I think many of them look back on it as the best time of their lives.”
The MacLeods epic overland journey Nine To Noon
