Pauline Hawkins
Pauline: Periled but Undaunted
The name “Pauline” is still associated, by those of us old enough to remember, with the old serial film melodrama, The Perils of Pauline. The association is apt, for Marin Valley’s own undaunted Pauline Hawkins was bombed out of London, evacuated to Birmingham in the Midlands, and when she heard the German bombers coming, held her breath while speculating how close the next one was going to land.
Our Periled Pauline married at 19 and emigrated to Canada with a one-year-old child. Widowed five weeks later, she remained a widow for nine years. She remarried and became, at the age of 33, not a “tourist” but a “traveler,” overland via a Dormobile campervan, along with tent. The perilous journey led from France and Europe through the deserts of Iran, Afghanistan, and over the Khyber Pass. All this along with her German shepherd, “London,” who was in quarantine for six months in England before taking off (airfare paid in full) on this adventure.
Our Perilous Pauline was robbed at gunpoint by bandits in Torbat-e Jam with a rifle butt jammed into her back and her head covered with a stinking wool jacket from one of the locals. Why? Because she was a woman along with forty men and it was Ramadan. Arrested and held in jail in Kabul, she was robbed of jewelry and money.
Her travels took her through Greece, Turkey, Iran, India, and Afghanistan, by freighter to Mombasa, and from East Africa to Kenya, where she stayed with the Maasai. The tribal people honored her as a guest by tapping blood from a cow’s jugular vein, mixing it with milk, and pouring it into a gourd. After it was passed around to the elders, it was up to Pauline to overcome her instinct to not even smell it and to put the gourd to her own lips, pretending to drink it. Lots of smiles.
Onward to Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and Cape Town, South Africa. From there she took a freighter called the Dolly Turman back to the US. Dormobile, dog… all safe and sound. What a ride!
Just for fun, ask her how she liked having a baboon in the vehicle or how it felt to be running for your life in desert sand going three steps forward/two back.
Ask about driving a VW van across her eventual USA homeland and how she ended up in Marin, where you might have run into her over the years when she lived in a motel in the San Rafael Canal area and in San Anselmo, Kentfield, Mill Valley, Sausalito, and Bel Marin Keys.
Like many of us Marin Valley women, Pauline…raised to be a housewife…excels at cooking and homemaking. Having learned how it feels to be poor, and using food banks, she had to reinvent herself with marketable skills: programming telephones and installing systems in offices.
Finally, she earned the privilege of living here, and throughout the year you’ll find her collecting, organizing, and distributing items for the October Black Cat event. Not unexpectedly, Pauline has dedicated herself to our community, including nine years on the HOL board and 15 years on the Park Improvement Committee. She enjoys photography and nurturing the life of plants by seeding, grafting, fertilizing, pruning, and above all…talking to them. Ask her to show you her before and after photos of the stark area in front of the clubhouse transformed by her dedicated labors and skilled gardening. You’ve seen her climbing, scrambling, hauling, digging, planting, and weeding. Check out the clubhouse plantings — the flowers, shrubs, and trees that welcome us each time we approach the clubhouse. Then ask her to invite you through her iron gate labeled “Pauline’s Garden”. Here you will find a magical winding garden path leading to compost bins, plums, grapes, apples, lilacs, bluebells, shrubs, seedlings, cuttings, and other specimens of vegetables, herbs, and ornamental plants.
If you’re lucky she might invite you into her museum of a home packed with treasures (think nomadic Bedouin mask) from all over the world. If you’re luckier still, she might make you a cappuccino by hand the Italian way, with raw organic sugar. You might even catch a hummer fluttering around her, sparrows in the bedroom, towhees in the kitchen, or the turkey found sleeping in her sunroom.
Along the way, you will surely hear about her two children, four grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. Dundee was her treasured guide dog reject for whom she was on a waiting list for eight years. He lived to the good age of 14. ■