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No Man’s Land
The Story of a Man
who Became a Woman
by Paula Grieg
www.maverickhouse.com
email: info@maverickhouse.com
ISBN: 978-1-905379-28-6
Copyright for text © 2007 Paula Grieg.
Copyright for typesetting, editing, layout, design © Maverick House.
54321
The paper used in this book comes from wood pulp of managed forests.
For every tree felled at least one tree is planted, thereby renewing
natural resources.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
‘ Take, oh t ake m e a s I a m ,
S um m on out wh a t I s h al l b e .
Set you r seal up o n my h e ar t ,
A nd l ive i n m e. ’
- Jo hn B el l
NOTE
M
y name is Paula Grieg. I have three children and
no stretch-marks. Therein lies the story of my
life; a life of inner conflicts and contradictions.
My early life, childhood and adolescence were spent
in Germany, a country to which I am now bound only by
memories, since almost all my family there have vanished.
I first became aware of my gender ambiguity before I
reluctantly left Germany for a new life in Ireland, though
at the time I had no clear idea what this meant or where it
would lead.
In Ireland I fell in love, married and started a family;
raising those same dearly loved three children. My career
took off and I built an existence. Those who looked on
might have thought I had it all, but everything I built always
stood on shaky foundations, because at the very heart of it I
was not who I seemed to be.
Progressively I realised that I needed to acknowledge
my true self or I would never find peace within myself.
But that personal inner peace came at a high price—the
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NO MAN’S LAND
12
P A RT 1
GERMANY
CHAPTER 1
R O OT S
E
urope as we know it today has been shaped by many
wars and conquests. Over the centuries empires
were built and lost by armies of the mostly poor
for the benefit of the feudal few. One particularly dark
and bloody period of European history became known as
the 30-Year War. Rather than a continuous war, it was a
period of many skirmishes, a trial of strength between the
old establishment supporting the Pope and Holy Roman
Empire on one side and the forces of the Reformation
led by King Gustav-Adolph of Sweden on the other side.
When the guns finally fell silent in 1648 with the signing
of the Treaty of Westphalia, much of medieval Europe lay
in ruins, ravaged by the twin scourges of war and bubonic
plague, then commonly known as the Black Death.
When the wars finally ended, many of the ordinary foot
soldiers and mercenaries who had fought on both sides
found themselves displaced far from their homelands; too
poor, too sick or too weary to return to their homes from
where they had set out many years before. My paternal
ancestor was such a soldier, a low ranking officer of the
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NO MAN’S LAND
16
R O OT S
17