Trefan Morys is a low 18th-century barn, stone-built, slate-roofed, topped with a weather vane and surrounded by a dense tangle of garden beneath a towering elm tree. Jan Morris has lived here, halfway up a hill in the top-left corner of Wales, with Elizabeth, once her wife, now her civil partner, for the past 30 years. Before that they had raised their four children in the big manor house a little further down the lane toward Criccieth and the coast. Like everything about Jan Morris’s long and unique life there is a kind of storytellers’ magic to Trefan Morys. Last week, I drove up through Snowdonia and down toward the Irish Sea, to listen to some of Morris’s myths and legends, while the last of storm Dennis rattled outside.

Hearing about most lives you have a sense of beginnings and middles and ends, but Morris’s 93 years resist very much in the way of this-led-to-that. It is a life that forms instead around improbable adventures a million miles from here – Morris, at 26, was the only journalist to accompany Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their 1953 ascent of Everest; at other times she wrote about living on Field Marshal Montgomery’s family houseboat on the Nile, and in a palazzo on the Grand Canal; she met Che Guevara in Cuba; she visited Hiroshima after the bomb, and reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. In her dreamy books about cities – most memorably Venice and Trieste – the world can seem a permanent Xanadu.

These unlikely journeys are nothing, though, in some ways, beside the defining romantic quest of her life. Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris on 2 October 1926, in Somerset. As she recalled in her memoir, Conundrum, “I was three or perhaps four when I realised that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.” She was under a piano at the time, listening to her mother play Sibelius. Conundrum detailed a pioneering journey across a perilous internal border. A journey that involved years of hormone therapy and culminated in reassignment surgery in Casablanca in 1972, before a return here, to Llanystumdwy, to Elizabeth and to their children.

People read my books and say ‘What did you mean by that?’ To be honest I’m not always sure

From the vantage of 93, some of this life has started to seem like a foreign country to Morris. She still lives with Elizabeth, who suffers from dementia. Their youngest son, Twm, a poet, writing in Welsh, lives in a cottage across the road and “is a miracle”, Morris says, in the help he gives them. Jan does not travel very far these days, though her trusty Honda Sport R still sits ready for action on the gravel outside. Her books have shrunk in scope, too. The last two, the bestselling In My Mind’s Eye and her new book, Thinking Again, are composed of daily diary entries that unlock Morris’s storehouse of memory as they describe children in coffee shops or dogs on the beach at Pwllheli. The pace of those books is set by the 1,000 daily steps up and down the lane outside that she commits to as an exercise regime, and the marching tunes that she whistles as she goes. The tone is of someone who has seen the whole world and decided on this place as an ending.

In the long, beamed sitting room of Trefan Morys, we talk first about the house itself. When they all lived down the road, the kids used to come and play here in the stables, overgrown with bramble. Later Jan and Elizabeth felt the big house was unmanageable, so they found a buyer, cleared out the horse stalls here, brought the books and bookcases from the other place, along with the weather vane, renovated and moved in.

In the final diary entry of Thinking Again, Morris dwells on “hiraeth” that Welsh word that is often translated as nostalgia, but which she – half-Welsh, half-English, another hybrid – feels more like a national addiction to longing. “It is a different thing for Twm, for example,” she says. “I don’t have his instinct for Welshness, with him it is more basic, it comes out of the soil, for me it is more an idea.”

James Morris, Nepal, 1953. Morris was the first reporter to break the news that Hillary and Tenzing had conquered Everest. Photograph: Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images

While we talk, from time to time a small fluttering bird taps its beak on the window as if to gain entry. “Do you hear the bird tapping?” Morris asks. “It used to portend death didn’t it? We have it every day at different windows.”

The tapping of the bird leads Morris into the first of a few apologies that she no longer has the eloquence she once did as an interviewee. “Sometimes I fear I am not exactly compos mentis,” she says. “It comes and goes. Like with Elizabeth. The other morning I was taking her breakfast on a tray and I fell, and there were cornflakes everywhere, and marmalade. I thought, well no good asking Elizabeth to help with this. But she came out, and miraculously was transformed into the real Elizabeth, and briskly helped me clear it all up beautifully. I said to her a few minutes later how encouraging she can still do that, but she could not remember what had happened.”

Morris looks around her bookshelves, the thousands of books that line this long room floor to ceiling. “People always say: ‘Have you read them all?’” she says. “No. but I have an emotional attachment to them all. I pick an old book out and if it is interesting I read a few pages. I put letters and photographs and cards in them to find later.”

Does she still get a lot of correspondence?

“Mostly from people who go to Trieste or Venice and read my books, and say ‘What did you mean by that’? To be honest I’m not always sure.”

As a wandering writer – she is widely acclaimed for inventing a way of writing about cities that blends history and imaginative description and a sort of psychology of place – Morris made much of herself being an outsider. In Conundrum she wondered whether her “incessant wandering” as a journalist for the Times and the Guardian and freelance “had been an outward expression of my inner journey”. She has resisted the idea of biography, though she allowed Derek Johns, her former agent, to write her literary life, Ariel. In it he notes at one point how “it is interesting to consider that the move from male to female and the move from Englishness to Welshness were roughly concurrent”. She herself has suggested that she always favoured the “soft side” of her character more than “the hard side”, and that Wales was closer to that softness. She is reluctant to talk much about her adventure in gender, since she has said so much before. But I wonder simply if she has a sense of a before and after in the voice of her writing?

“I don’t think my writing changed that much,” she says. “Except that perhaps I became a little more relaxed about it.”

She gets up from her chair, remembering something.

“I found a book the other day, which I thought might interest you. It was about the trilogy of books which was the centrepiece of my life really, I hesitate to say intellectually, but certainly emotionally.”

Jan Morris at home in Trefan Morys, Wales. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

This was the trilogy about the rise and fall of the British empire, which Morris wrote over a period of 10 years, beginning in 1968. The recently discovered notebook she shows me, is full of all her – or James Morris’s – original plans and schemes for the books: a carefully handwritten catalogue of dates and events, with sections on ideologies, politics, wars, cross-referenced to every nation under British rule. “I look at something like this and I think ‘Can that really have been me?’” she says.

It feels like somebody else’s work?

“It certainly does! I can’t fathom it. My tendency has been to jump in and tell stories. I had forgotten all of this.”

The Pax Britannica trilogy demands the adjective “magisterial” more readily than just about any other series of books I can think of. It begins with the birth of Victorian ambition and ends with the death of Churchill. Written with all Morris’s characteristic brio it is a compulsive exploration of patriotism, of manly endeavour, which ends in elegiac retreat and submission. Morris began the books as James and ended them as Jan; I wonder if that trajectory of tone in her history reflected that great change in her own life?

Perhaps, Morris suggests, and shrugs. “But I should say I would never use the word change, as in “sex-change” for what happened to me. I did not change sex, I really absorbed one into the other. I’m a bit of each now. I freely admit it. There is obviously all of this debate about it all at the moment, but for me it was never a black and white thing. Never could be. It was a sort of instinct. A question of spirit almost. But that’s all in that book I wrote, isn’t it?”

At one point in Conundrum, written in 1974, Morris wonders whether she might be simply ahead of her time, a premonition of gender fluidity to come. Whatever the case, she had a certainty about her “slow motion Jekyll and Hyde” that was all her own. When the transformation was complete in Casablanca, she writes “I had reached Identity” with a capital I. (Elsewhere she described it as “At-one-ment”). She pictures herself as Ariel, “a figure of fable and allegory” in pursuit of the “higher ideal that there is neither man nor woman”. Had the possibility of safe surgery not existed, she had no doubt she would “bribe barbers or abortionists, I would take a knife and do it myself, without fear, without qualms, without a second thought”.

There is a wonderful moment in that book when she returned to Wales and went to the local shop for the first time as Jan. No one who knew her batted an eyelid, and very few have done since. Has she been surprised?

“I put it down to kindness,” she says. “Just that. Everything good in the world is kindness. Though the only person who ever uses that word in politics is the prime minister of New Zealand [Jacinda Ardern]. She is tremendous isn’t she? I’d like to meet her.”

Morris’s recent diaries are too wise to get bogged down in identity politics, and the disruptions of Brexit and Trump only rarely invade her thoughts. Once again, she offers a simple solution.

Morris discusses Conundrum, one of the first autobiographies to explore personal gender reassignment, on the Dick Cavett show in the US, 1974. Photograph: ABC Photo Archives/Walt Disney Television via Getty Images

“If you are not sure what you think about something, the most useful questions are these,” she says. “Are you being kind? Are they being kind? That usually gives you the answer.”

She gets up from the sofa, inviting me to come and see the rest of the house. On bookcases and on desks and tables there are wooden scale models of ships from all over the world – those on the bookshelves relate to the books behind them – a sampan for books about south-east Asia and so on. On either side of the doorway are two bardic chairs awarded to Twm at Eisteddfods. On the ceiling there is the painted “eye of a poet” looking down.

Propped against one wall is a photograph of the summit of Everest taken by the Indian air force who flew over the expedition as it made its last assault on the summit. Morris points out the place she climbed to at 22,000 feet. “That wasn’t a bad story was it?”

I get her to remind me of the bones of it just to hear her tell it. When she was assigned by the Times, which sponsored the ascent, she had never climbed any mountain before. They had to work out a way of protecting their scoop and get it into the paper in time for the Queen’s coronation. Having hugged Hillary in congratulation, Morris scrambled down an ice field and sent a wire overnight with a pre-coded message. It read: “Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.” This meant: “Summit of Everest reached on 29 May by Hillary and Tenzing.” Morris made a lot of friendships on the mountain and they all stayed in touch for the rest of their lives. She is now the last survivor from that last camp.

Upstairs, we are joined once again by the tap-tapping bird at the window. Morris points out the huge pen-and-ink drawing she did of the islands of Venice, on which if you look very closely you can see their son Henry heading back from school over the Accademia bridge, in the days when they lived in the city.

Photographed in 1988, the year she published her acclaimed history of Hong Kong. Photograph: Fairfax Media Archives/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

In one corner of the loft room is Morris’s desk – “where the magic happens” – and behind it on the wall a portrait of a man in naval uniform. “Jack Fisher,” Morris says. “I am going to have an affair with him in the afterlife. I love him dearly.”

Over the years, ever since Sir Robin Day bluntly asked Morris about her sex life in an interview on the BBC (about which she formally complained), she has batted away questions of lust, which she suggests has never been her thing. Part of that deflection has centred on her lifelong crush on the most unattainable of pin-ups: Admiral Jack Fisher, charismatic First Sea Lord of the British fleet in the Great War, a man who died six years before Morris was born.

Morris wrote a book about Fisher in 2007, in which she noted that “I first set eyes on him in a photograph some time in the late 1940s, and knew at once that he was the man for me.” That image went with her up Everest in 1953 and on every adventure that followed. She ushers me into her bedroom where there is a poster-sized photograph of Fisher on the back of the wardrobe door and points outside to a small balcony where there are twin sculpted busts – one of her head, one of the admiral’s.

“He is devilishly handsome,” I suggest.

“No it’s not that,” she says. “But we will have our affair.”

As she describes her writing life Morris admits to the selfishness that made it possible to undertake her great voyages of self-discovery. In a less than kind review of Conundrum when it came out in 1974, Germaine Greer, essaying misgivings about gender change that persist, wrote that “as Jan Morris plucks at your sleeve for a girlish heart to heart, you wonder about Elizabeth. Her unbroken silence is the truest measure of Jan Morris’s enduring masculinity.”

Elizabeth was moved to respond to Greer, writing: “I am not very silent and certainly not anguished. The children and I not only love Jan very dearly but are very proud of her.”

Jan and Elizabeth reaffirmed that love in a civil union ceremony in Pwllheli in 2008, witnessed by a local couple who invited them to tea at their house afterwards. “I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and still have them,” Elizabeth said at the time. “After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on.”

When they sold the big house the couple retained a small island in the neighbouring Dwyfor river where, in the manner of Welsh princes and poets, their ashes will be scattered together. The place will be marked with a slate headstone that is currently stored in a cupboard under the stairs, reading: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.”

With the Duke of Edinburgh in 2013 during a reception to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Hillary’s ascent of Everest. Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images

We walk around the house in order to see the statues of Admiral Jack and Jan staring into eternity on their pedestals, and Morris apologises for a fleeting lapse in memory as I question her a bit more about her fantasy man.

“I am sorry to be so indistinct,” she says. “The truth is, you are talking to someone at the very end of things. I felt that first about two years ago. I felt it creeping up, and now I know I am approaching the end.” She has written elsewhere about how her spirit will haunt two places in particular – the banks of the river Dwyfor and the seafront in Trieste. I wonder whether she still thinks that. “Death?” she says. “I think of it as a blank.”

Apart from Jack Fisher?

“Apart from Jack Fisher!”

We sit inside for a while at the long table that dominates the kitchen, eating some sandwiches for lunch that Twm has left under tinfoil. There is an Aga, and a Welsh dresser and a low shelf on which are arranged seven pots of homemade marmalade, a different one for each day of the week, which now represent Morris’s principal vice (up until two years ago she claimed to have drunk at least a glass of wine every day since the second world war, but has lapsed a little now).

I suggest that there must be a part of her restless soul that misses the travel. Can she revisit those worlds by reading her own books?

“I ashamed to say I do read my own books quite a bit,” she says, and laughs. “There are one or two good things. But then you also feel, oh do please stop going on…”

Does she ever feel hemmed in here?

“Never, no. The sea is just over there. I wouldn’t want to be entirely in the mountains. I go down to the sea most days. I suppose the day will come when I cannot drive the Honda. Then I suppose I will have to walk it.”

Is she still managing to do her thousand daily steps?

“I try. Quite often now it is a bit too much for me. But I try to do some exercise every day, the gods insist on it.”

There is a lovely diary entry in the current book in which, with the weather raging outside, she determines to do her thousand steps indoors: “round and about the sofas I whistled my way, never pausing, left, right, left right… counting the paces on my fingers and sometimes bursting into song, until at last, breathless but triumphant, I reached the millennium on my thumb.”

She is whistling an old show tune now while she is making coffee. I am reminded of the fact that for her Desert Island Discs with Sue Lawley all of Morris’s choices were songs by Irving Berlin. This went back to Morris’s first job as a trainee reporter on the Western Daily Press aged 16. She was sent to Bristol docks to meet a big band sent to entertain the US troops stationed there during the war. Berlin was with them. “He was terribly kind to me. So I have always thought of him ever since as the ideal American. I’ve always loved his songs anyway.”

To prove the point, standing at the kitchen sink, Morris breaks into one of them. The voice that won her a choral scholarship to Oxford as a boy is cracked a bit now, but she can still carry a tune. The song is from the film This Is the Army, and she cuts to the rousing chorus, in marching time:

Someday I’m going to murder the bugler!

Someday they’re going to find him dead!

And then I’ll get that other pup

The guy who wakes the bugler up

And then spend the rest of my life in bed!



“I find myself whistling that many mornings these days,” Morris says, “but then I always get up, of course.” She pauses for a bit, and concentrates on sorting out the kettle and the coffee and the mugs and the milk and takes care in bringing all of it over to the table. “Life has its problems,” she says, with a half-smile. “But it also has its delights.”

• Thinking Again by Jan Morris is published by Faber, £16.99. To order a copy for £14.27 go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15