No Place for a Woman - Tapa dura

In 1964, at the age of 19, Marie Christine D'Albiac married John Ridgway, a penniless paratroop officer with a passion for adventure. Two years later he embarked on one of his most dramatic exploits by rowing across the Atlantic with Chay Blyth. This inspired the Ridgways to set up on their own, at Ardmore in the remotest Highland regions, a school of adventure which has become known around the world. In this harsh environment, Marie Christine has learned survival the hard way. Over the years her workload has been consistently enormous, a prodigious daily grind involving the administration of the school, cooking all the meals for up to 30 people every day, running the salmon-smoking business and the shop at Ardmore, as well as being the full-time wife of a formidable, hard-driving but vulnerable man. In recent years Marie Christine has accompanied John on a number of his tough, dangerous and always demanding adventures overseas. On one of these they decided to adopt Elizabeth Berg Huaman, a girl from the Peruvian jungle, whose murdered father was a friend. The story of this adventure was told in John Ridgway's book "Road to Elizabeth". Now Marie Christine recounts the story of her life, her deepest feelings and aspirations as well as her adventures, with particular emphasis on her role as mother to a girl from a different world, whom she is working to integrate into her own family.