- Work Hard
- 12th Aug 2026
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Newcastle author publishes her first book aged 75 proving age is just a number
Newcastle author Alexis Ramage has published her debut book this year, at the age of 75, a memoir written as a promise to her late husband Hunter.
The Girl from Bulawayo: Buffalo and Flames traces a life that began in Bulawayo, in what was then Rhodesia, and eventually settled near Newcastle, where Alexis has been a proud Geordie for two decades.
It is, by her own description, “not a tidy book”, written by a first-time author in her 70s who sat down to keep her word to Hunter, the husband she lost to cancer.
THE BOOK SHE PROMISED HUNTER
Before he died, Hunter told Alexis he was leaving her everything. She told him she was going to do something for him in return, though she did not yet know what.
“I said I was going to do something for him. I did not know what. I do not think he believed me, and I would not have believed me either.”
That unspecified promise became The Girl from Bulawayo: Buffalo and Flames, written by a woman who had never written anything before
“I am a woman in her seventies who sat down and put her life on paper because she had made a promise.”
Of the result, she is unapologetic rather than polished. “It is not a tidy book. It has a great deal of soul in it, which I think is better.”
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
The memoir follows Alexis from Bulawayo to a string of countries she never quite belonged to, through a difficult presence she names in the book as “an energy vampire”, and on to a late marriage, widowhood, and an unexpected home in the North East. It is, at its centre, a book about second chances.
“You can build a home more than once. You can lose the country you came from, and the years you should have had, and the person who made the next home, and still find you belong somewhere. It takes longer than you would like. It does not look like you imagined. But it happened to me, here, at the top of England, among people who call me pet in the post office.”
FROM BULAWAYO TO A VILLAGE OUTSIDE NEWCASTLE
Alexis left the country of her birth as it became Zimbabwe, with no fixed plan and no single destination in mind. “People talk about emigrating as though it is a decision, a thing you weigh up over a cup of tea. It rarely feels like that. You go because the world you knew has gone.”
She left, she says, with little more than her belongings and her nerve. “I had a suitcase and a great deal of hope, and I was not the only one.”
The years that followed took her through several countries, never quite belonging to any of them. “You learn to be adaptable and you learn to be pleasant, and you learn that when people ask where you are from it is easier to give a short answer than an honest one.”Of that long, rootless stretch of her life, she is unsentimental. “I had addresses. I did not really have a home.”
50 YEARS IN SOMEONE ELSE’S SHADOW
Alexis is candid, in the book and out of it, about a difficult presence in her life for most of her adult years, someone she chooses not to name. “I do not expect everyone to understand this, and I know how it sounds. In my book I call it an energy vampire.”
It took her decades to see the pattern for what it was. “50-odd years is a long time to be someone’s shadow.” When she finally stepped away, she says she felt like herself for what may have been the first time. “Not triumphant. Just quiet, and lighter, and rather sad about all the years.”
She is careful to say the book is not an act of revenge.
“I am not writing this to accuse anybody. I am writing it because I suspect I am not the only woman who has spent a lifetime being made small and thought it was normal.”
FINDING A QUIET MAN CALLED HUNTER
In her 40s, while living abroad, Alexis met Hunter, an Orkney man six years her senior. It was her second marriage, and she knew exactly what she was looking at.
What drew her to him was his steadiness. “I would tell you to look for a man who does not change.” Hunter, a chartered accountant, was gentle and consistent, and, in her words, “always concerned for me, always wanting the best for me.”
After a lifetime of moving and making do, she says finding him changed how she understood herself. “Hunter was the only person I ever truly had.”
BECOMING A GEORDIE BY ACCIDENT
The couple married in Newcastle in 2004, having previously lived in Henley-on-Thames. The move north was practical rather than romantic: Hunter’s mother was ageing, and she was already here. “That is the whole grand story of how I ended up a Geordie. Not destiny. A mother-in-law.”
What began as a decision made for someone else became, in time, the place Alexis says she belongs. “You know where you stand. Nobody is being clever at you.” After a lifetime of learning new rules in new places, she found that straightforwardness a relief.
LOSING HUNTER AND KEEPING A PROMISE
Hunter was healthy for most of his life until a swift diagnosis of cancer changed everything. “When someone has been healthy all their life you rather assume they will go on being healthy. There is no bracing for it anyway.”
She is honest, too, about the trade she would rather not have made. “I would rather have Hunter than a book. That was not one of the choices.”
A DEBUT AT 75, AND A HOME SHE FINALLY CHOSE
Alexis began writing in her 70s, when, by her own admission, a sensible woman might have been putting her feet up.
“And it is never too late.”
She now lives near Newcastle, a proud Geordie among people who, as she puts it, “call her pet in the post office”. Of Hunter, and of the book she wrote for him, she says: “He would have been quietly pleased. That was the only way he ever was.”
Rachael Ellis
Head of Content
After gaining a first in her BA Media and Journalism degree at Northumbria University, Rachael worked at Newcastle’s leading regional newspaper with her stories being picked up in national and global newspapers. She spent two very successful years giving a voice to those communities across the North East who otherwise…
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