On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

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© Garry Douglas Kilworth 2012
cover image © Garry Kilworth

ISBN: 9781301494361

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DEDICATION

For Annie who has made life’s journey a magical experience and to Rick and Shaney, who have added to the wonder.

‘We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. However, we are devastated to say that if we were to publish your story, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our unfortunate regret, compelled to return your divine composition and beg you a thousand times to overlook our short-sightedness.’

Rejection letter from a Chinese publisher

Thanks

Thanks go to Kathleen Mitchell for reading and commenting on earlier drafts and also to my brilliant editor Lesley Levene for the hard work she put in on this manuscript.

There have always been very close friends in the writing world necessary to my confidence and writing spirit. They know who they are and I value them beyond fame and fortune. However over the years there have also been those who were, at the time when their interest was first offered, simply acquaintances or people completely unknown to me, who unselfishly encouraged me, assisted me and boosted my morale, while expecting no returns.

These good people are:

Mike Stone, Guy Adams, Ian Alexander Martin, Claude Lalumiere, Keith Brooke, Steve Newman, Nick Royle, and just in case he doesn’t think of himself as a good friend, though I certainly consider him such, the irreplaceable Pete Crowther.

Among the great and famous who have helped me in the past are:

Mike Moorcock and J.G. Ballard in the early years and always the well-loved, Brian Aldiss.

INTRODUCTION

On my way to Samarkand I have lived a life.

The word
Samarkand
has always evoked in me a longing to visit that exotic-sounding city. I know that the Mughal sultans who ruled India before the British came from around Samarkand, but apart from that I am ignorant of that city’s culture, customs and architecture. I could look it up on Google but that would spoil my eventual visit. I like to be surprised. I have been surprised and awed by many wonderful places by going there before finding out anything about them: Petra, Wadi Rum, Kyoto, Raratonga, the Australian Outback. One day I will go to Samarkand, before darkness overwhelms me.

At the time of writing I am seventy years of age, still happily married to my first real love, Annette. My two children, Richard and Chantelle, are in their forties and likewise still happily married to theirs. Five grandchildren are already overtaking us in the fast lane, four of them boys and one lone but bright and determined young lady. I trust them to take care of the world after I’m gone and I know they will make a good job of it. I can see it in their demeanour and in their eyes.

The following paragraph consists of lists. I make no apologies for that. Lists tell you a great deal in a short-hand way.

I have to date had published over eighty books – novels and collections of short stories – and over a 120 single short stories. My work has been translated into twenty-two different languages, from Korean to Indonesian to Hebrew. Among my many publishers have been Faber and Faber, Penguin, The Bodley Head, Random House, Harper Collins, Hodder Headline, Methuen, Little Brown and Gollancz. While writing works of fiction and poetry, and now non-fiction, I have lived for several years at a time in nine countries and travelled to sixty others, some of them more than once: Singapore a score of times, Australia six, USA five, Canada six, Malaysia twelve, India, the Polynesian Islands, Thailand, Maldives, Indonesia, New Zealand three, Caribbean ten times, European countries countless times. I am a scribbler and a traveller, I love backpacking around the globe and will do it until I am physically unable. Samarkand has been on my list since the age of twenty.

1. York, Rochford and RAF Felixstowe

I was born in York, in 1941. My mother came from Sherborne in Dorset. She was the daughter of Frederick William Vincent Hodges, a civil servant and naval marine who died young from a wound he received in the Great War. My mother, Joan Elizabeth Hodges, was the eldest of four sisters and a brother. There was a mystery surrounding the birth of my grandfather. He was born in a workhouse, his mother Mary Toop being a chambermaid at Lord Digby’s home, Sherborne Castle. The family myth is that one of the lord’s sons had seduced Mary and then disowned her and her illegitimate child.

The baby was later raised by the castle’s gardener and his wife, the Hodges, and my grandfather took his surname from these adoptive parents. As he grew up he was given a good education and a position in the civil service, courtesy of an ‘unknown’ benefactor.

My father George Edward Kilworth, born in 1918, was also the eldest of his siblings. A farm labourer’s son, he was one of five children raised in a tied cottage in Canewdon, Essex. There have been Kilworths in Canewdon since the mid 1700s, when the first of them came over from Ireland to farm the land. Some of them spell their name Killworth and some Kilworth, but since my grandfather was the only one of his eight siblings who spelled his name with one ‘L’ my guess is that they all come from the same Irish root. They originated from in and around the Kilworth Mountains in County Cork.

My paternal nan was a Salwood from Swindon and beyond that I am ignorant. Her faded birth certificate, issued much later, states that Fanny Kate Salwood was born ‘Around 1897’. Grandad was born in 1881, so he was about sixteen years older than Fanny.

My father was an airman when he met my mum in London at the beginning of the Second World War. His RAF ‘Certificate of Service’ describes him as an ‘Electrician’ but I never saw him wire a plug or even change a light bulb in my whole childhood. He was five feet six inches tall, with hazel eyes and brown hair. My mother Joan, on the other hand, was five feet two inches, with brown eyes and dark hair. With parents of this stature and colouring, I stood very little chance of reaching my desired goal of being a six-foot-tall, golden-haired, blue-eyed Adonis who might one day win a freestyle swimming race at the Olympics.

When mum became pregnant she was evacuated to York to have the child, probably to leave the hospital beds in London available for victims of the Blitz. I was later quite pleased about that, because it meant I could have played cricket for Yorkshire at a time when you could do so only if you were born in the county. I never did of course. My ability at cricket has always only ever been average.

The Second World War had four years to run after I was born. My early memories are few and hazy. I know there were bombs and Doodlebugs, and V1s and 2s. I remember seeing fighter planes in the sky spitting fire at each other and I recall being woken in my bed at nights and given a candle to carry to the air raid shelter. In those shelters there were faces that showed pale and white in the light of my candle flame. People rarely spoke above a whisper, almost as if they were afraid they would not hear the bomb that killed them. We huddled together wrapped in blankets. Someone usually had an arm around me as we listened to the drone of the aircraft passing overhead. The German bombers often flew over Essex on their way to London without bothering us, but there were times when they wanted to jettison their payload early or late and dropped it in the estuary of the Thames, close to us.

My pal in my paternal grandparents’ backyard was Black Mick, a dog I grew up with until the age of twelve.

Food during the war, and after, included plenty of stuff not seen on the shelves very much now, if at all: powdered egg, Camp coffee made out of chicory, lemonade powder, crab paste made from crab essence, dandelion and burdock fizzy drink. Some things are now banned from our healthy dining table: bread spread thickly with dripping-fat from the frying pan, for instance, and thick sugar sandwiches. Shame. We were actually quite poor in those days, but I think my grandkids are now sick of hearing me say that we were sent to school with water sandwiches wrapped in newspaper.

The yard was full of clucking chickens. My grandparents’ terraced cottage had no water or electricity (a situation which did not change until the late ’50s). Downstairs had gas lighting, and the wireless was powered by an accumulator battery. In the two bedrooms candles were used. Men slept in one room, women in the other. Sometimes five or six in each. I liked the company of brothers because candles were always blown out when the adults went downstairs and darkness filled the room. We huddled together, terrified, after listening to
The Man In Black
on the wireless: ghost stories read by Valentine Dyall. Water could only be had at a big-handled pump which stood in the middle of the row of ten cottages. The outside toilet was tagged on to the house, but was always freezing in the winter. We used torn strips of the daily tabloids for toilet paper. Invariably a hare hung on the back of the door. Those dead hares would stare at me with knowing, glinting eyes while I performed.

Sunday evenings saw us all using the tin bath. Three inches of kettle water bathed three dirty kids. My youngest brother, Derek, always got the dirtiest water. I never heard of my grandfather taking a bath, but perhaps he did when I was not present.

The bedroom was always very cold in the winter. By the candlelight I would secretly watch my grandad take off ancient dirty trousers that smelled of horse dung and then remove his false leg. I used to grimace at the white crinkled stump which appeared out of the socket. Kids are fascinated by gruesome sights. He lost this limb in the Great War, but every time I asked him how it happened he told me a different story. This is all in my semi-autobiographical novel
Witchwater Country
but I think the scenario which is closest to the truth is that he was hit by shrapnel. This wound probably saved his life, because he would have been sent home. His brother Victor Charles Kilworth (my great uncle) of the 9th Battalion, Essex Regiment was killed in action near La Boiselle at the Battle of the Somme on 3 July 1916, aged nineteen years. So far as I am aware, Victor was the only one of the six brothers to lose his life in the war, though I never remember meeting any of my great uncles.

My grandad also had two sisters, Rosa and Daisy. Years later I would hear from the vicar of Canewdon Church that Rosa and Daisy were ‘quite mad, you know’ and that many of the Kilworths suffered from mental illnesses of some kind.

‘You don’t stand a chance of staying sane,’ he said to me, pleasantly.

There was in the alleyway a hutch containing a ferret named Pugerchov, who belonged to Uncle Peter, who used him for poaching on nights when the sound of a 12-bore shotgun would bring the gamekeepers running. It was me who named the creature, after seeing a film about a Russian revolutionary. The only other tame animal in the house was Ginger the tom, who could leap on the sashcord window, his weight forcing it to slide down in order for him to escape. However, in the coal cupboard under the stairs lived wild mice, who would make a dash for the coal-fired range where nan did her cooking, often only to be trapped there by the tom and tragically slaughtered.

Once the Second World War was over, Uncle Charlie became the town’s postman and had a red bike to prove it.

Uncle Peter (the youngest by far) was already the local burglar, poacher and street-fighter, though occasionally he worked the land, using a heavy horse to pull the plough. I learned much later in life from a very reliable source that Peter had a twin who was given away at birth because my nan could not afford to keep them both. The whereabouts of that twin remains a total mystery, since anyone who would know about the affair is dead. Who he was ‘given’ to and what happened to him after that went to the grave with my dad, aunts and uncles.

My aunt May took me to the cinema to see my first film when I reached eight years. The film was
King Kong
and though it scared the pants off me, it also amazed me. I believed every scene, every word, and thought the world a wonderful place to have giant apes in it. By that age I knew Father Christmas was a lie, and that there were no such thing as fairies, but it took a little while for
King Kong
to catch up.

~

Aunt May was a seamstress at the shirt factory and aunt Amy got married and settled neatly into housewifery. Grandad was by then a lengthsman, chimney sweep and sexton. He owned a horse called Custard and everyone outside the family called my grandad ‘Rhubub’. Custard pulled a rickety old wagon which Grandad used for his business.

Mostly it was the lengthsman work that kept him busy, cutting the verge grass alongside the roads between villages. I have a mind’s-eye picture of him still, wielding that heavy scythe of his like the two-handed sword of an Anglo-Saxon warrior. The great blade would flash in the sun as he swept it back and forth and the smell of the cut grass and dry ditch weed seeds began to fill the air of a hot summer’s day. He would work for two or three hours on end, stumping along a verge and swishing the scythe, while I walked Custard forward to keep pace. Then he would stop, take out his pipe, and smoke a bowl full of tobacco, before going back to shaving the county’s face with his giant razor.

In later life I tried handling that same tool, but the one-legged countryman of Irish descent, with his broad shoulders and heavy bones, must have been a great deal stronger at seventy than I was at forty. I was exhausted within a few minutes. His heavy scythe was awkward to hold by the two small handles that protruded from the main shaft and while I could pick it up, it started to weigh a ton after a very short use.

He was a crusty old man, Rhubub, and rarely said much more than ‘Mornin’’. I would ride with him and Black Mick on the wagon, through Rochford, Stambridge, Hockley, Canewdon and Ashingdon, but we rarely talked. Sometimes though, he would quietly hand me Custard’s reins and would then take out and play a rusty old penny whistle – Irish tunes from somewhere deep in his bones – and Black Mick would howl along with the music.

The summer fruit from the orchard and the various bushes was bottled for the winter months. I used to watch my nan steam and seal the jars of blackcurrants, greengages and gooseberries, a mysterious operation that fascinated me. Her larder walls were lined with shelves out of an apothecary’s shop. My nan was a woman of many talents and I did think some of them were closer to the magic than the mundane. She stirred the clothes in her scullery copper with a short thick staff that had grown as white as a wizard’s beard over the years. I have a photograph of her that I treasure and it makes my eyes water when I look at the dress she is wearing in that picture: shapeless, ragged at the hem. My dear old nan hardly knew the best things in life. It was just a long term of drudgery and toil, with very few rewards.

I think it was mostly my nan who tended the allotment. Although they were poor, my grandparents did not go short of plain food. The various harvests from the allotment ensured there were always vegetables in the larder and if there was no money for meat, Peter would go out and shoot something: rabbits, hares, pigeons, pheasants, partridges.

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.