“Wherever I lay my hat, that’s my home” may be something of a cliché. But for a long time Mike Edwards lived every word of it.
He earned a farm worker’s crust on New Zealand’s North Island and the Australian outback.
Ferried a truckload of adventurers from London to Katmandu in a beat-up Bedford.
Proposed to his girlfriend at the Taj Mahal.
And moved home more often than the population of a small town.
There’s no question life for the 63-year-old Kiwi has been nothing if not eventful.
But after a rollercoaster existence, for the past 15 years Mike and wife Diana have lived in peaceful contentment in the high moors between Creetown and Gatehouse.
His journey to rural Kirkcudbrightshire, to say the least, is a colourful one.
Born in Huntly, a small town not far from Auckland, Mike was never in the same place for long as a child.
Parents Betty and Dick had emigrated to New Zealand from England to escape the privations of post-war Britain.
His father joined the New Zealand Army and new postings meant frequent flittings for the family.
“As a lad I moved every couple of years and went to nine different schools,” Mike recalls.
“For New Zealand the Commonwealth was such a big thing in those days.
“All the cars came from Britain and everything followed a British way of life.”
As a boy, Mike knew little of Scotland but attended Scots College in Wellington, a Presbyterian day and boarding school.
“I then did three years at high school but because of all the moves my education was a mess,” he admits.
“I left at 15 two weeks before I was due to sit exams and got a job on one of the first rotary dairy farms in New Zealand, milking 440 cows.
“I had a bedroom in the corner of a shed and my pay was 118 dollars a month.
“The farm was owned by the McManaways, who were of Scottish descent.
“I was there for two years.”
Mike switched careers and landed a procurement post at the Intercontinental Hotel in Auckland buying fruit, vegetables and flowers at local markets.
“There was this big fashion show at the hotel and all the top designers were there,” he recounts.
“The people running the show wanted flowers – lots of them.
“So I had to go and buy a whole truckload at the market.
“I was sitting bidding against all these florists who were quite catty about it.
“I had been told get whatever you need and I ended up paying $70 when the usual should have been $10.
“All these buggers saw what I was doing and were bidding me up.
“They were not very happy!”
Mike’s time at the hotel was brief “I was getting itchy feet”, he says, and the 19-year-old left New Zealand for London.
He worked in pubs, slept rough, lived in squats and “met a guy who thought he was Jesus”.
“It was the late 1970s and I was learning about life the hard way,” admits Mike “but I was determined to stand on my own two feet.
“So I started with an agricultural contracting firm owned by two Irish brothers and worked all over Kent.
“I was there for eight years and I loved the job. From not really liking Britain I thought ‘this is okay’.
“I drove the biggest dung spreaders in the country.”
With years of farming experience under his belt Mike hankered for pastures new and moved to Western Australia to work at Merriden in the wheat belt.
It was a tough life – and when the chance came of a big money job on a gas plant and pipeline project at Dampier, 1100 miles on the coast to the north, Mike grabbed it with both hands.
“I was easily taking home $1500 a week – which was a lot of money in 1982,” he says.
“One time in the pub I bought a yacht – it’s one of those things you do when you’re a young man with too much money in his pocket.
“But after nine months I got bored and I quit and moved to Perth.
“All I did for a few months was all-night partying and full-on drinking and not getting up until lunchtime the next day.”
And at something of a loose end Mike returned to England and picked up his agricultural contracting work.
He enjoyed the job but after three years his chances of finding love seemed as remote as ever.
“I had no real social life where a could meet a girl,” he says ruefully.
“I was working seven days a week and just had no time.
“Then one day I noticed a magazine advert saying “overland drivers required for Africa, Asia and South America.”
“I thought ‘hmmm, that’s interesting’ so I phoned up and filled in the application form.
“About 60 people turned up for the presentation.
“The guy said if you don’t think this is for you that’s fine and we won’t take this any further.
“Maybe only 30 stayed on and the next morning I went for interview.
“I fell out with the interviewer – he was also a Kiwi – and I thought that was that.
“But two weeks later a letter came through saying I had got the job.”
Mike’s first big mission with Encounter Overland, a British travel company specialising in trans-continental expeditions for intrepid young travellers, was to change his life.
The job involved transporting young adventurers, typically aged between 18 and 30, from London to Katmandu.
The journey across Europe and Asia in a converted lorry followed ancient trade routes through Turkey, Syria and Jordan and on to Nepal via Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and India.
“Our vehicles were ex-army Bedford trucks with a two-wheeled trailer carrying spares and luggage hitched on behind,” he explains.
Mike was in the cab and the 18 travellers were seated on cushioned benches in the back.”
Syria was at peace in 1984-5 and Mike’s party visited Damascus’s bustling bazaars and the huge 70-foot water wheels at Hama, used since pre-Roman times to raise water for irrigation and domestic use up from the river Orontes into aqueducts.
The Iran-Iraq war was raging during the three-month expedition and on one occasion the conflict came too close for comfort.
“We just avoided Teheran but people in Iran were really friendly and spoke English with an American accent,” Mike recalls.
“Our route ran south of the capital and had reached Esfahan, a city in central Iran.
“We were in the Sheraton Hotel when suddenly the air raid sirens went off and all the lights went out.
“Everybody ran outside and all the anti-aircraft guns sited on the top of buildings were firing.
“I thought about diving under the truck for cover but it would have made no difference if a bomb hit.”
One of Mike’s jobs was making sure vehicles and passengers were properly covered for varying degrees of risk en route.
“When you got to a country you had to buy insurance for that particular country, which could be expensive,” he explains.
“Every driver made trip notes and I had a folder of experiences logged by other drivers on previous trips.
“Those could be good places to camp, where to avoid and who to contact if you encountered trouble.
“Our route through Iran took us over the frontier into Pakistan and on to Quetta.
“The city is only a few miles from the Afghanistan border and when we walked around the place it was full of Afghani fighters.
“It was exactly like you see on TV – they were all wearing turbans and had AK 47 assault rifles thrown over their shoulders.
“We called it ‘my year of living dangerously’ – but I would do it all again tomorrow.”
Mike embarked on another journey on the road to Katmandu – with wife to be Diana.
“She was having a gap year after finishing at Cambridge and was one of my people on the trip,” smiles Mike.
“Diana was meant to fly back home but stayed on hoping to bring me home with her.
“We spent three months together in Katmandu and drove all around Nepal.
“With one month left we made a trip to the Taj Mahal.
“We were sitting on a bench chatting and I just said ‘when we are married...’.
“Diana was shocked and asked me if that was my wedding proposal.
“I couldn’t quite believe it myself but that’s exactly what it was.
“I suppose that’s why I took the job – because there was a much better chance of meeting a woman.
“Diana had gone out to Katmandu for the experience – and she came back with me!”
After they married in England the couple emigrated to New Zealand.
The move, Mike admits, was “pretty awful” because, to him at least, his native land suddenly seemed small and parochial.
The duo returned and set up home in Yorkshire where Diana worked in computer programming while Mike turned his hand to doing van sales of materials to wood finishers and joiners.
They had been looking for a place in the country when a chance conversation set them on a road which was eventually to lead to Galloway.
“A fella said to me one day ‘you want to go to south-west Scotland,” Mike recalls.
“‘Just turn left at Gretna Green and there’s a huge area which almost touches Ireland.
“ There’s barns and cottages and they are almost giving them away.’
“So we decided to come here for a holiday and stayed in a cottage near Garlieston.
“One day we went to Newton Stewart shopping and made the mistake of looking in the estate agent’s window.
“When we started seeing the prices we could not believe it and the property that was there.
“We returned to Yorkshire and put our property on the market.”
Mike had started his own business by then, Furniture Revivals, repairing and restoring tables, chairs and dressers from a bygone age.
The couple moved to Annan for two years in the 1990s when mobile phones were still a novelty – but the new technology allowed Mike to keep his base in Yorkshire.
“I was still running my business, going down and staying with my in-laws,” he says.
“But then I saw a job advert in the Standard for a caretaking couple for the Earl of Galloway at Cumloden House outside Minnigaff.
“I said I could only come if I could have a workshop for my furniture and was told I could have the stables for free if I did all the conversion work.
“We worked there for ten years and saved up to buy a house but when we put in an offer it always fell
through.
“We tried looking for seven years.
“Then one morning in Castle Douglas we saw workers cottages up by the old Gatehouse station advertised for sale for a ridiculously low price.
“Offers were invited in the region of £50,000 so I said let’s go and find the place – it’s only the back of Creetown.
“It was locked up and you could only look through the windows.
“It didn’t matter – on Monday we went to the solicitors.
“I asked ‘how are we going to buy the place and knock this out?’.
“We decided to offer 30 per cent over the asking price and the seller bit our hands off.
“We saw the ad on Saturday, visited the property on Sunday, put an offer in on Monday and by Thursday we had bought it.
“We made him an offer he could not refuse.”
Renovating the former railway workers’ cottage turned into a real labour of love – but Mike has no regrets.
“It was in better condition than I expected and in the perfect location – but we had spent all our money getting it.
“I had to strip out the whole inside and we spent seven years doing it up, room by room.”
Mike takes a philosophical view of his road from New Zealand to Galloway.
“It’s really important being happy with your lot,” he says,
“And don’t beat yourself up about stuff – just be content with your life.”
