Feisty, fearless and funny: new book launched celebrating lives of two intrepid women

I was curious to meet the authors of Accidental Lives, Sylvia Holder and Lindsay Swan, as their fast-moving two-hander memoir had intrigued me. One was an octogenarian, the other a mere septuagenarian but from the stories that unfolded in the book, I knew they wouldn’t be little old ladies enjoying a pot of Earl Grey. I wasn’t disappointed, I had arranged to meet them in a Hove pub where I found them happily quaffing wine and laughing their heads off. They explained that the recollection of events that had amused them over the years still had them dissolving into giggles of delight.

Although dressed rather unconventionally given their ages, Lindsay’s wild leggings and boots and Sylvia’s boiler suit and colourful trainers didn’t look out of placeThe main thrust of the book is their commitment to the transformation of a virtually education-free fishing village in South India into one with a thriving 1000 pupil higher secondary school and award-winning primary school. Their sponsorship scheme for 400 of the village’s poorest children now able to progress to university and good careers is seeing the end of poverty for thousands of families. Their very unexpected and late change of lifestyle came about when Sylvia was 65 and had just retired. She had returned to the fishing village of Kovalam, a few miles down the coast from Chennai, after the tragic death at the age of 27 of Venkat, a boy she had met as a 12-year-old and seen through secondary education and university. Shocked by the lack of any free schools in the 8000-inhabitant village, she set up the Venkat Trust in his memory. Lindsay had no escape route – they’d just sold their London PR business which they’d run together for 23 years and here was an opportunity to work together again as trustees, using their skills to bring education to a seriously deprived Indian village.

Sylvia spent her earl;y years in Bristol and she and Lindsay met in South Africa nearly 50 years ago at the Johannesburg company where they both worked and the depth of their friendship is palpable. Their compatibility working together is also evident and they loved all the adventures that their PR company brought them. Travel clients took them on many overseas assignments, the best being to Zambia where their brief was to publicise tourism in the country, particularly safaris. They happily accompanied many small groups of A list journalists to the national parks bursting with wild life.

There were a few hairy moments, the hairiest being with a four-seater plane rather than a marauding lion. In the pilot’s hurry to refuel the plane as the light was fading, he swallowed some fuel and was vomiting with great ferocity at the same time as trying to steer the plane over the rift valley escarpment in the dangerously gathering gloom. All eyes were peeled looking for the fire marking the landing spot. They lived to tell the tale. As Sylvia is 13 years older than Lindsay, plenty of water had flowed under her bridge before their paths crossed. As a pre-war baby, she remembers doodlebugs and sirens and, at the age of six, she announced the end of the war. Her back-of-an-envelope drawing on VJ day proclaimed “The war is over and it is Wansday”. Since then, her musings are a fascinating amble through the decades – she was on the rain sodden streets of London with her family for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and working her way around America when JFK was President and Martin Luther King was leading the Civil Rights Movement. Later, sadly, she was to remember their world-shaking assassinations.

She was back in London for the Beatles’ explosion and the joys of the Swinging Sixties and then off to Hong Kong for five years when it was still a British colony. Apart from meeting Lindsay in South Africa, she found little to commend it as apartheid still ruled the day but their work assignments were anything but dull – launching the Wombles in South Africa was certainly different and organising an event with the appallingly difficult but most famous couple in the firmament, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, will never be forgotten. All in all, the feisty, fearless and funny duo’s roller coaster lives make for entertaining reading and their efforts and results achieved for the children of Kovalam are nothing short of remarkable. It is an inspirational book. endsWriter and author Christopher Chase Walker lives in Brighton. His latest book, Don’t Falter, was published in March 2024.

ACCIDENTAL LIVES How two intrepid women travelled the world, ran an unconventional PR company and set up a charity in India by Sylvia Holder and Lindsay Swan is published by Black Spring Press on 18 November 2024, £16.99. 204 pages plus 16 pages of pictures. Available for order at all good bookshops, and online at Amazon and Black Spring Press.Royalties from the sale of the book will go to the Venkat Trust, www.venkattrust.org.uk