On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer Read online

  I would often go with him. There is little to equal strolling over forbidden fields in high summer, looking to find some game for the pot, occasionally catching a glimpse of a hot fox looking for shade or sending up a black explosion of rooks from the treetops. Again, on a winter’s frosty morning, when all the world is silver, the clods of earth in the furrows as hard as Christina Rossetti’s iron. I would kick at the long ditch grass to fill the air with sprays of ice-stars and use my home-knitted pullover as a bag to collect old crab apples. Such memories are infinitely precious. The countryside runs in my blood and where the choice has been mine I have lived rurally rather than in towns or cities.

  When I was ten Peter let me fire the 12-bore and it knocked me flying backwards off my feet. I had a bruise the size of a penny bun on my shoulder for days afterwards, but I was proud of myself for some strange reason. When the gamekeepers were about and we couldn’t risk using the shotgun, we would take nets and Pugerchov the ferret, and do our illicit poaching silently under the moon and stars.

  Years later, when I bought a house down an unmade road in Ashingdon, I offered to help with the garden of an elderly woman called Mary Sweetlove. (She called herself an anarchist, though I never knew her to carry out anarchy of any sort except against the stinging nettles which surrounded her porch.) Mary brought me a cup of tea as I was clipping the hedgerow around her Gothic-looking dwelling, and she said, ‘Your grandfather used to do that for me.’

  Those words gave me a wonderful sense of continuity, a feeling that we are all walking along a generation track, an ancient way, and that when I am gone, one of my grandkids might just step neatly into my footprints for a few moments.

  The very elderly Mary, I discovered, had once been a publisher. The house whose hedge I had cut had been the office from which she had published many of the works of Tolstoy. She showed me first editions of books she and her husband had published from their small, now very leaky dwelling in our small Essex village. Her dark-gabled home, with its twin towers like witches’ hats, was falling apart at that time and would have taken a fortune to repair. Mary Sweetlove the anarchist, with whom I had many wonderful conversations over endless cups of tea, died in the early part of the new millennium. I’m sure she’s now with her beloved birds, foxes and badgers that used to mill around her garden, safe from harm.

  ~

  At the end of the war dad left the RAF to return to his old job as a greyhound trainer at a greyhound farm in Essex. Either the money was bad, or dad couldn’t stand his bosses, because he rejoined the RAF after a year in civvy street. In 1947 he was posted to Felixstowe, where they had seaplanes such as the Sunderland Flying Boats. I don’t know what he did there, but he was always in general administration, so I guess it was counting things and writing the figures in books somewhere.

  We lived in married quarters – dad was a corporal by that time – and I went to Langer Road Primary School to begin what was to become a very nomadic education. The headmistress at Langer Road was a gruesome woman with a tongue like a rasp file. We had assembly every morning in a hall that smelled of dinner-time cabbage and there we used infant lungs to bawl out hymns. I still know the words of many of the ‘Ancient and Modern’ hymns. My favourite was ‘Eternal Father, Strong to save’ with the refrain ‘for those in peril on the sea’. It meant something in Felixstowe. We had the cold grey North Sea on our doorstep and one day it would come for us in the dead of night and overwhelm and envelop many of us. I get misty-eyed even now when I hear that hymn: it has a very emotional tune and deeply moving words.

  We seemed to learn everything by rote in those days, especially our ‘times tables’. Day in, day out, we chanted those tables, until they were so lodged in my brain they’ll be with me into senility and beyond. Some nursing-home carer will ask a delivery man, ‘What’s seven times eight?’ and I – who by that time will not even know my own name – will interrupt with, ‘Fifty-six,’ without even pausing to dribble.

  Classrooms in the ’50s had coal fires, whose warmth failed even to reach the front row of desks. They heated the backs of teachers until they steamed, leaving the pupils to freeze. Those same teachers were already inflamed by our uselessness and ignorance. They threw chalk, blackboard dusters and other handy missiles at us in the vain hope that such barrages would instil knowledge into our heads. If we lifted our desk lids as shields, the teacher would spring forward and whack our fingers with a ruler. I was never caned at Langer Road, as I was at my several senior schools, but I still collected a few scars there.

  Felixstowe took care of my early formative years. I played cowboys and Indians on the ‘plains’ between the married quarters and the seashore. There was a boy called Colin Colenso, and his sister, and the three of us used to light fires in the old Languard Point fort and roast potatoes. In the summer months the Territorial Army used that area behind the beach for camping their soldiers and we would earn money cleaning boots and belt buckles. The tents had duckboard floors. When the summer was over and the army had gone, we would run our fingers through the grass where the tents had stood for coins that had dropped through the duckboards. We became surprisingly rich.

  When we weren’t playing games on the dunes, my middle brother Ray and I (Derek was born at Felixstowe and was still a baby) would go fishing off the dockside pontoon where the ferry to and from Harwich used to moor up. Using just a line, wine cork and hook we caught smelt, dozens of them, and took them home for tea. Felixstowe docks is now a massive commercial enterprise, the third largest container port in Europe so I’m told, but in the ’40s and ’50s it was a small open square surrounded by granaries and warehouses, big enough for one or two medium sized ships, but nothing like the monster it is now.

  Around the docks were yards full of giant buoys of the sort used by ocean-going liners for mooring. They were as big as small houses, some hollow metal balls, others square blocks of wood wrapped in iron bands. There were mountains of them and on a certain night in 1953 they became lethal battering rams that smashed into houses, and crushed prefabs and caravans. Whether they were actually responsible for any of the deaths of my schoolfriends I do not know, since I never went back after that murderous night to find out why so many of them failed to survive.

  ~

  When I was about six years of age I had whooping cough and heard my mother and father debating about calling the doctor. It was 1947. Years later I realised that the National Health Service had not then come into being. So my parents would have had to pay for any medical help. In those days families like ours were paid weekly. The money often ran out. There was barely enough for food. Indeed, there was certainly none left for holidays. In my whole childhood I do not remember my parents taking us away for a single holiday which did not involve staying with relations. Us kids were sent to grandparents for the summer, or took a train to my mother’s younger brother, Douglas, in Ilkeston. Also in the late ’40s and early ’50s we still had food rationing. I used to cadge sweet rations from elderly neighbours who liked my curls.

  My mother had four siblings. Like my father, she was the eldest of the family. Next came Aunt Barbara, who lived in Catford, South London and whose only daughter was Christine, my favourite cousin. Then Aunt Daphne, who lived in Shepherd’s Bush, whose daughter Molly was born with a hole in her heart and died at the age of ten and also Harvey, who had diabetes and died in his late thirties. There was a much younger half-sister, Aunt Margaret, but before her in age came my Uncle Doug, whom I adored as a kid. Though my mum’s family had been mostly born and raised in Dorset, they had all gravitated towards the capital, probably to find work.

  Doug was a lorry driver working for the British Coal Board at the opencast mines in Derbyshire. I used to ride passenger in his lorry during the holidays and search for fossils among the coal he carried. I found several fern and tree impressions, which I treasured and took back to show my class at school. Uncle Doug was the spitting image of the actor Nigel Patrick and any film in which the actor starred, such as the
Pickwick Papers or Raintree County, had me riveted. I found it fascinating to see my uncle up there on the screen, even though I knew it wasn’t he. The likeness, the gestures, the speech were all Uncle Doug. He and Aunt Jessie were good, kind, honest folk and I was extremely fond of them. Doug had moved to Ilkeston at the age of seventeen, yet until the day he died at the age of eighty the Ilkeston men called him ‘the Londoner’. He was held in great affection by them though, especially at the working men’s club, where he was elected chairman several times during his life.

  ~

  Christmases at that age were magical. I can remember looking out of the window and seeing a lone star fading in the early morning sky. My favourite Christmas present – the one that thrilled me with its colours and textures – was a chemistry set. I was never good at school chemistry, but this was different. You could make all sorts of wonderful concoctions with a home chemistry set. Stink bombs, salt petre fuses for bombs, copper crystals. You could do litmus tests, change the state of liquids and gases, play with a Bunsen burner without getting told off, make explosive mixtures, kill wasps by creating a vacuum in test tube, make electricity and magnets. Wow. I loved that gift.

  I never became a famous chemist of course, which would have made a nice round ending to the story. You know the sort of thing, Albert is given a tin whistle for his birthday and eventually grows up to become an international flugel horn player. No indeed. Nor did I become any kind of chemist whatsoever, not even a gifted teacher of the science like my friends Chris and Fe Evans. I became a writer. Just as Arabic newspapers would come to thrill me with their strange writing patterns, so did those test tubes with their coloured powders and crystals stir the latent apothecary and alchemist in me. Not that I wanted to cure or poison people, or turn base metals into gold. I just loved the idea of doing those things with magical ingredients. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Gold Bug. Words in Arabic, tubes of coloured chemicals, these were full of mystery and awakened strange imaginings. Imaginings that became tales of the fantastic kind, which I later burned on to blank white paper.

  Also I have come to realise that the writer must have been in me from a very early age. It was not so much the chemistry that excited me, but the names of things. Words. Labels with saltpetre and ferrous sulfate printed on them. But the one gift that really brought home this revelation was the ubiquitous water colour paint box. I don’t think a Christmas passed without a paint box in my stocking. But it was not the colours themselves, or the thought of using them that excited me. It was the names of the paints: burnt sienna, yellow ochre, crimson lake, cobalt blue, burnt umber. These names hovered on the edge of my imagination, like keys ready to open doors to strange and wonderful story-worlds.

  ~

  Early in the morning on 1 February 1953 my brothers and I were abruptly woken. My parents were dashing down then up the stairs with perishable things like photo albums. When I stood on the landing and looked down the stairwell I could see about a foot of water swilling around the hallway. Bleary-eyed and confused I went back into the bedroom and looked out of the window to see a wall of water combing the fields behind the house with white surf. A moment later a tidal wave struck the side of the house, breaking one or two panes of glass, and thundered round the corners of the building. Soon seawater was gushing in below and my parents stopped their evacuation of the lower part of the house and gathered us all in the main bedroom.

  ‘It’s a flood,’ said dad. ‘The sea wall’s collapsed. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. These houses are very solid.’

  However, kids can see concern in adults who might be the greatest actors in the world. My brothers and I knew we were in trouble. We could hear the wind screaming around the eaves, see the water swirling halfway up the walls of the house, and were aware of distant cries of those in the houses a little lower than ours. Hell had opened its sluice gates and not fire but water was surging through the gaps. Then a short time later there was a loud bang on the side of the house and the whole place juddered. Looking out we saw one of those massive ocean liner buoys swirl past after hitting our brickwork. It went on to strike another house in the next row and we could see bits of brick fly up on impact.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ said mum. ‘We’ll be fine.’

  Staring out of the window again I could see a meteorologist’s mast on the top of which was an anemometer. There were rungs going up the mast, each about a foot apart. I watched the water level climbing those rungs one by one. We were probably going to drown. I was scared but not terrified. I thought we might die, but I also thought we might be rescued. It was a strange, ambivalent feeling, looking out at the ocean that had swallowed my garden. There were animals floating by now, cats and dogs, being swept along with the force of the tide. Thankfully I saw no people, though there were plenty who died that night, some of them horribly. I learned later that water rose six metres above mean sea level. In Britain, Holland and Belgium 2,400 people lost their lives. Ours were saved by my dad, who tied us to the chimney stack with strips of blanket until the water began to subside. My mother stayed in the attic, but the water never did reach that high.

  My brother Ray had the flu. He was quite sick and since it was very cold – it was February, remember, and though the wind speed had dropped a little it was still extremely fierce – my parents took us back down into the house as soon as they thought it was safe. I’m not sure how much time we spent on the roof, but I don’t think it was a long period. As soon as it was light we were rescued by the army in rowing boats – by that time the tide had gone out and the water had dropped to about two metres in depth – taken to the Sergeants’ Mess, which was a tall building, and thence to the docks where we were packed into a launch. There were other families of course, with dark grey RAF blankets draped over them, and we huddled together with bleak expressions. The launch, which must have done many trips, and probably there were more boats ferrying people across the haven, took us to Harwich. We then boarded coaches and were taken to USAF Waterbeach in Suffolk.

  Thirty-eight people lost their lives in Felixstowe, and a great many homes were rendered uninhabitable. Fifty-eight died on Canvey Island and thirty-seven at Jaywick, a small village in nearby Essex. Many, many more were drowned in Holland, and several in Belgium. Ships and trawlers went down in the channel and the North Sea with loss of life. Scottish forests were flattened by the wind. The flood was the result of a combination of a hurricane, a spring tide and an ocean tidal surge. The disaster began building during the day of 31 January, starting on the Scottish east coast, and working its way down to the south. There were no warnings broadcast on national radio. To this day I have not received a satisfactory answer as to why that should have been. Local radios in the ’50s did not broadcast at night, so by the time we were hit, about 1 a.m. on 1 February, local stations had closed down. In those days too there were very few home telephones. No one I knew owned a telephone.

  2. RAF Newton

  We stayed on a short time at Waterbeach, then dad got a posting to RAF Newton, near Gunthorpe in Nottinghamshire. I was bussed to the Robert Thoreton School on the Fosse Way, which I have Googled without success. My old school seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth. There I was taught English by Mr Whitehouse, who was one of those teachers who light fires in kids. He was an inspiring man who taught me not grammar, spelling and punctuation, but how to love the written word, whether in stories, poems or novels. In his own way he was brilliant and as a writer I owe him a great deal.

  At that time my actual skills at writing something grammatical, with correct spellings, were almost zero, but Mr Whitehouse introduced me to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Richmal Crompton’s Just William and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and I was absolutely hooked. I did not stay long at Robert Thoreton, but from that moment on I wanted to be nothing but a writer of fantastic tales. I lost myself in Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. Admittedly some of these authors’ works came to me in the form of Classics C
omics, but hey, I liked the story, not the delivery.

  Mr Whitehouse also gave me a copy of my all-time favourite book, Plain Tales from the Hills. Kipling’s short stories are a masterpiece of laying fictitious experience down on paper. The short story has always been my forte as a writer and as a reader I cherish the form. It is too bad that these days it tends to be neglected by most readers, who seem to want only fat novels of 200,000 words or more. To me the small tale is incisive, keenly observed, hard-hitting and shines brilliantly.

  Thank you, Mr Whitehouse, wherever you rest today.

  In general Robert Thoreton School was like any other: boring, tiresome and anti-Kilworth. I was caned three or four times and still bear the scars of one of those beatings (it was for drawing fighter planes in my maths exercise book). On our honeymoon my wife asked me what the three white scars were on my bottom and I said, ‘Funny, there should be six.’ Humiliation accompanied beatings at Robert Thoreton, since they took place at Assembly in front of the whole school.

  I also fell in love for the first time at RAF Newton, with an officer’s daughter named Nicola. She did me wrong. She was caught behind the bike sheds with another boy and I was taunted mercilessly by my enemies. Nicky was pretty though. I have always been a sucker for a pretty face.

  ~

  Not long after we arrived at Newton, dad was posted to Aden, in the Middle East. He went on ahead, then sent for us. I was absolutely eager to go to Aden. Other service brats had been and had told me of the great times they had had there. You only went to school in the mornings and the afternoons were spent swimming in water that was as tepid as a Sunday bath. Then there was the whole exotic atmosphere of a land which at its heart had an extinct volcano cone with a whole town inside it, Arabs on camels, sharks in the sea, oases out in the desert, open-air cinemas, and a host of other remarkable experiences.