10
avowed any such covert role by insisting that she was but a nonentity, a
mere traveller, and besides that just a woman. The technique is known as
‘hiding in plain sight,’ and Stark applied it with mastery in the field and
throughout her literature.
Though nominally British, Freya Stark was really a cosmopolitan with a
slight Italian accent who had only occasionally lived in Britain as a child.^27
Born in Paris in 1893, she was spirited away within barely a year to the
small provincial town of Asolo, near Venice, where her quasinomadic,
bohemian parents briefly settled, and which she would ultimately make
her permanent home in middle age. Throughout her childhood and teen-
age years, Stark would be constantly on the move: now in Asolo, now at
her grandmother’s in Genoa, now in Cornwall or Devon, now in Dronero
just north of the Riviera, close to the Franco-Italian border. Here she
received a solid convent education and a thorough grounding in French,
to complement her Anglo-Italian bilingualism, to be followed in early
adulthood by German and Arabic.^28 It was in Dronero at the age of 12
that Stark first cheated death, surviving massive injuries to her scalp and
the loss of her right ear when her long chestnut tresses became entangled
in textile machinery while visiting a local carpet factory. After this terrible
disfiguring accident, Stark’s stoic courage during the ordeal of skin graft-
ing without anaesthetic and a long, painful convalescence is an early mea-
sure of her invincible resolve that would serve her so well in later life as an
adventurer and scout. After leaving the Italian convent, Stark read History
at Bedford College, London, but she was unable to complete her degree
because the Great War broke out, and she had to return to Italy. She spent
most of the war years as a nurse, first in Bologna where she received her
training and certification, to be followed by British training and certifica-
tion in 1916, and service as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse
with a British medical unit on the Austro-Italian front north of Trieste.
Here she was given considerable responsibility because of her Italian train-
ing and language fluency. She witnessed the full horror of mountain war-
fare and survived the infamous headlong retreat from Caporetto. Stark
ended the war nursing at a hospital in Torino during a major influenza and
typhus epidemic, which must have been gruelling work.
It was during the years immediately following the war’s end, spent
almost entirely in a lovely sunny spot on the Mediterranean shore near
Ventimiglia, struggling valiantly but unsuccessfully to manage a flower
farm with her difficult mother, that Freya Stark must have begun to think
practically of scouting for Britain in the Middle East. Though her interest