"My family has always been traveling. Traveling got into my blood," Fiona Harden said. Through personal stories she recalls her family life in a colonial setting of bygone days. She is too young to remember at first hand the era that was ending when she was a child. During her growing-up years and as a young adult she kept her taste for traveling. Marriage to a banker continues still to keep her on the move.
Her father, a Royal Naval officer, took the Japanese surrender at Port Dickson at the end of World War II. He met her mother, the daughter of a Foreign Office official, in Singapore. The two married there, and from the navy her father stayed on to be a rubber broker. Fiona and her sister were born in Singapore. When circumstances changed on the former Malayan Peninsula, the family left Singapore and returned to England.
"We moved around the south of England, and I went to school in Kent," Fiona said. Eventually she entered the University of Plymouth, where, intent on a career, she studied art and architecture. On removal to London, by chance she began employment with a public relations company. She changed when she joined the staff of a newspaper. "I moved to The Observer and worked on the arts pages there," she said. "Then I went into the paper's PR department, and was about to be appointed to another newspaper when I met my husband. I dropped everything to go to Cyprus to be married. That was totally against the career and everything I had dreamed of."