In the late 1950s during the month of September, Allyson Roberts was born in the city of Manchester in Northern England, where she lived with her family until finishing her primary education. Afterwards they moved to Oxford, where she would complete her secondary education.
Time went by and she decided to follow in her father’s footsteps by doing a Business Degree in Behaviour in Organisations after being accepted at Lancaster University. Despite wanting to follow him, Allyson knew she was different as she was “more left-wing, very political, more interested in the unions and union law but not interested in management”. This wasn’t a life for her. She wasn’t cut out to become a married woman, with a nine to five job and two kids. What she really wanted was to “fly” to know the world.
Things started to change gradually for her. To pay for her degree, she started to teach English to Italians on the south coast of England and with this experience she realised that teaching was a way of “escaping the horrors of a nine to five job”, as she notes, and an opportunity to travel the world.
After finishing her first degree, the first job she got was as a teacher in Algeria, teaching English for specific purposes in the Algerian Petro-Chemical business. Wanting to know what she was doing, she realised that she had to take teaching degrees and courses. But more importantly for Allyson, who would come to visit a lot more countries and work in some of them, this was to become her most amazing, challenging and interesting experience, mostly because of the cultural differences between what she was used to back in Britain and what she was facing now in Algeria, a place where women were treated in a very different way. Allyson was free to wear what she wanted as long as it covered the body. She wasn’t allowed to speak to her students, as they were all boys, except when they were in class. It was hard for her being the feminist she was at the time, she wanted to rebel, she wanted to do something about this situation but she knew that that couldn’t happen. She had to learn to appreciate their culture and accept them for what they were.
Following this experience, she visited many other countries like Holland, Spain, France, Germany, Canada and India. As said by Allyson, the most important of them all were the ones she lived and worked in – Algeria and Germany, in which she stayed for a period of two years in each of these countries, and Canada. The three months she spent in India were also extremely important for her even though she didn’t teach there. She was in a period that she had to take time off in her life and “do something really different” and India provided that chance.
She had been working for nine years in London in a Teacher Training job which was very demanding when, eventually, Allyson got tired of this routine and the stressful life in London. It was time for a change. Jonathan, Allyson’s partner whom she had recently met, had the idea of going around Spain in a motorbike but she was against it. Allyson’s answer was simple but very explicit – “I’m not sitting behind anybody”, she wanted to be there. So this led to how they would spend their next three months. Allyson suggested going horse riding in Portugal, a country she knew from a previous visit. During these three months they travelled around Portugal’s countryside, more precisely in the Alentejo, and it was like “let’s go and see what happens”, and she describes this as a “wonderful experience”.
This led to their decision to come and live in Portugal. They realised they would like to live here given that they loved the experience of the hospitality and generosity of the Portuguese people, who had helped them out through their journey, and also, Portugal was a place where Allyson knew she could teach. Subsequently, they found a new home in Torres Novas in a tiny, beautiful old house. And they have been living there for almost eighteen years now.
As workaholics, people have little time to chill out and do other things they love but Allyson manages to find time for her favourite past times like playing the piano or being in contact with nature. She’s also an avid reader. Around her 20s she came across a German author named Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize winner, and seen by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, who became her favourite author, and the book that really struck her was The Magic Mountain, widely considered to be one of the most influential works of the 20th century German literature.
Having been a strong fighter for women’s rights and a feminist, she admires women that fought and still fight for their independence and for their individual rights, like George Sand, a French novelist and feminist, or Simone de Beauvoir, a French author and philosopher, and other women who fought in the 1940s, 1950s or 1960s for their own form of emancipation.
Allyson isn’t a religious person, she doesn’t have empathy or sympathy for organised religion as she thinks that religion is “the prison of mankind” but anyway, she believes that Buddhism is the closest religion to having principals that can guide people’s lives, keeping society on track. As humans, we are blocked by our own egos and Buddhism aims to get rid of the ego. However in terms of belief, she believes that there is energy that pervades and that life is part of it but she doesn’t agree on the existence of a God.
Allyson is interested in alternative medicine like Homeopathy for both horses and people. She came across Homeopathy as she prepared for the three months would she spend horse riding with her partner, just in case they had any problems along the way. She is also interested in Reflexology, which she learned some years later and used to practise.
Despite being in Portugal for so long, Allyson still feels like a foreigner. She can identify with Portuguese culture and understand it more but she hasn’t changed herself, she hasn’t changed her cultural identity. She believes that “the more you travel, the more you question your own culture, what’s right and what’s wrong” and she adds “in Portugal things are not wrong, they are just different”.
But even though it was her birthplace and where she lived for a long time, she doesn’t feel at home in Britain because it’s a very closed island with a strong island mentality as the British don’t relate themselves with the rest of Europe. Allyson loves to visit Britain but she feels at home in Portugal and plans to stay here for a little bit longer.
The future is uncertain for everyone and Allyson is no exception. She doesn’t know what lies ahead but there are many things she would like to do before it’s too late, like going back to India, or learning to dance Tango, or even improving her Portuguese.
Life has a lot of ups and downs, highs and lows but now Allyson feels satisfied with her life. There has been a lot of fighting along the way on so many levels including rights for women or being different but now everything has settled. Despite that fact, she’s now having strong creative urges, she wants to paint and to write. She has been teaching for over thirty years, the last seven in FCSH at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and now she just wants to stop and just express herself through art or on other levels.
All these facts and events she experienced throughout her life show us that there is life beyond the box. There’s the box we are all thought to be in, and if you take the lid off the box, you see everything outside and all the opportunities that are out there, and the way Allyson has been leading her life is just one way for her to find out what she wanted and loved, that enabled her to survive. Teaching worked this way for her.
Juliana Machado
