On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (11 page)

Either we had a surgeon on the island or one was flown in promptly, because the injured man underwent an operation within hours and happily he survived.

~

On Addu Atoll we often had electrical storms, many of them dry, without accompanying rain. Out in the tropics these storms are much more dramatic than any experienced in Britain. The whole heavens light up with scores of lightning flashes that occur simultaneously. Thunder claps crash across the sky, cracking in from a dozen different directions. It’s not just one flash, followed a short time later by a thunderclap. It’s thirty or forty zigzagging spears coming down from thick cloud, followed by two dozen explosions in the air. And there’s very little respite. These brotherhoods of lightning and their sisterhood thunderclaps come one after the other, overlapping, relentless.

One night we had such a storm. A Hastings aircraft was due to arrive with the Commander-in-Chief Far East Air Force on board. The biggest brass in that corner of the world. By the time the aircraft was circling over Gan, the storm was at its worst, punching the guts out of the sky, with many a fizzing lightning flash streaking down the black face of the night. The pilot of the Hastings executed a swift neat landing.

Unfortunately it was not on the runway. He had mistaken certain lightning flashes on the surface of the sea for the runway guiding lights. He actually made a perfect landing in the middle of the lagoon. Everyone got out of the plane, but it sank within minutes to the bottom of the ocean. The Air Commodore was not a happy man and I would hate to dwell on the fate of that poor pilot.

While I was on Gan I sent to Singapore for a Longines watch I had saved up for. It was a beautiful slim timepiece and I was immensely proud of it, the way young men usually are of such jewellery. Later in life I gave it to my son Richard, who still wears it. He also has my South Arabian Campaign medal, awarded for Active Service in Aden in the withdrawal of 1966-7. He doesn’t wear that of course.

Just before we left Gan, Chid and I had our nineteenth birthdays. We both got drunk and threw stones at the guardhouse. Once in July and once in August. Chid is a month younger than me.

Chid and I were due to go back to UK at the same time, but we still yearned for Singapore. So we joined the Gan boxing team and went to the FEAF Championships on our way home. As I have said, I lost my fight yet again.

On arrival in UK, the Customs and Excise people went to work on us. Everything depended on when one had purchased a watch or camera, or whatever, because if the item was over a year old there was no duty on it. Chid and myself had both got our respective Chinese watch sellers to backdate our receipts. Chid had a gold Rolex. I had my Longines. I got away with the deception, but as I was leaving through the green door I saw Chid being led away by grim-faced Customs officials with narrowed eyes. I thought at the time they were going to execute him, but he later caught me up at the station having merely been fined.

~

John Chidlow actually went back to Gan in 1966, for another year-long tour of duty, while I went to Aden. We were both newly married and these two postings were ‘unaccompanied’. Naturally neither of us was happy with the RAF administration for parting us from our families.

10. Ministry of Defence

Probably the less I say about my posting to the MOD in London the better. I hated the place. I was in the main comcen, deep in the bowels of MOD, which stood close to the Thames and had Scotland Yard for a neighbour. I shared a flat in Earls Court with two other airmen who worked on different shifts to me. The flat itself was a single room about fifteen feet by ten feet, with a gas ring that swung out from the gas fire on which we made beans on toast. There was just about enough room to walk between and around the beds, while our clothes hung on a rail at the end of the room. There was no other furniture. No chest of drawers, no wardrobe, no chairs, no table. The only saving grace about that flat was the landlady’s daughter, who was quite attractive. I used to pass her on the stairs and she would smile at me and wish me a good day.

While I was at the MOD my father George was diagnosed with stomach cancer and had a life expectancy of six months. My brother Ray, only sixteen at the time, had joined the Merchant Navy and was away at sea, somewhere near Capetown, South Africa. Derek was at home, but he was thirteen and of course as upset as mum herself. I was at home when my mother was told the bad news and naturally she broke down. It was a weekend, I was on leave at my parents’ house in Rochford, due to report for work on Monday morning. I rang my warrant officer and told him the situation and he said, ‘Get into work right away, Kilworth – I want no bloody skivers on my watch!’ I left my distraught mother and caught the train to London, only to find that wiser heads had persuaded my watch commander that I should be with my mother at such a time. I was told to return home and did so, but I will never forget the bitterness I felt towards the officers in charge.

~

Close to the flat in Earls Court was a jazz venue called the Café des Artistes where I used to hang out in my off-duty hours. At other times I would go to the Marquee or Ronnie Scott’s, two other jazz joints. I was very lonely at the MOD. This haiku reflects my mood at the time:

Poem by a Lonely Youth in London

Comely city girls,
sacred as parkland flowers,
for viewing only.

I would wander along the Thames Embankment, or visit the museums and art galleries, praying that I would get posted to another camp very soon, preferably an operational flying unit with real Air Force planes. The only NCOs at work whom I respected at all were two sergeants. One elderly man whose name I can’t remember and the other a unique character, a young Sergeant Nelson, who later became my warrant officer DSO when I was a sergeant DSM (Duty Signals Master) at Strike Command. Nelly was one of the smartest most intelligent airmen I ever came across. At the MOD he wore a suit and bowler hat, and carried a black umbrella. Indeed, he looked like one of those figures from Renee Magritte’s paintings: a bourgeois banker striding through the streets of London. But that was the showman side of Nelly, who was a deeply complex but caring man who looked after his watch of young telegraphists as if they were his own sons.

I once met Nelly outside of a work situation, when I took him home to a dinner Annette had cooked one Sunday, not very long before I was demobbed in 1974. In that situation all his confidence evaporated and he became intensely shy. He visited just that once, though I invited him back many times after that. To my knowledge Nelly never had a relationship outside of work with anyone, male or female, and indeed never spoke of any friends. However, the respect he had within the RAF, from both his superiors and his men, was unequalled. Warrant Officer Nelson was indeed a legend in his time, a man so competent you wondered why he had never put himself forward in the political arena. He would have made a great prime minister.

Before he got sick, dad had his ‘tally man’ job, selling women’s dresses door-to-door from the back of a van. He hated the work but jobs were hard to find. An old friend of his had given him employment. I could see the stress it was causing in him and it worried me. He was gambling too – at the dogs mostly – and, as ever with him, losing his hard-earned wages. He would wait for me to come home of a weekend, then ask me quietly for a loan, out of earshot of my mother. George was not a waster, but he had a gambler’s blood in his veins and when times were bad he turned to it for comfort.

Dad’s end was almost scripted. The boys of our family have always had a partial blindness in the right eye. Dad had it, I have it and Ray has it. I can’t remember whether Derek suffered from it too, but I suspect so, since it only becomes apparent in early manhood. The medics seemed to think they could correct the imperfection in dad and he underwent an eye operation. During that operation he was given an epidermal injection that damaged a ganglion and left him with a painful right leg, the nerves all shot. More or less at the same time as he was recovering from the eye operation and complaining about the injury to his ‘leg’ he also complained of stomach pains.

The doctors dismissed the latter, saying it was a result of dad trying to compensate for the poor leg performance when he walked. In other words, they believed it was muscular. When they discovered it was stomach cancer it was too late: he then had only a few weeks to live. Raymond was sent for and was flown back from South Africa. For the next six months dad lay on the living room sofa, drugged and listless. He was never told him what was wrong with him, because mum knew it would terrify him. So we kept up a pretence that it was a muscular problem which would eventually be cured.

Dad was taken into hospital for his last few days. They said at the moment of death he sat up, looked around him, smiled at a fellow patient, then fell back onto his pillow.

~

In London one day, sitting in my flat, I heard a knock on the door. Opening it, there stood Chid! He was at the time serving at RAF Compton Bassett, the giant hub of the RAF’s telecommunications, and a place he hated as much as I did the MOD. Neither was a good posting. They were large communication centres with no heart, no spirit, no real camaraderie and too many chiefs.

‘Hello, mate!’ I said, glad to see him. ‘Come up for the weekend?’

‘I’ve deserted,’ Chid replied. ‘Or gone AWOL.’ He frowned. ‘Is there a difference?’

‘Dunno, mate.’ I was a bit shaken by his news. ‘You’d better come in.’

He did come in and gave me his story. It was one of those tales of finally snapping after months of harassment. I never learned exactly what had got to Chid, but I knew it had to be bad because he was a toughie and could put up with a great deal before snapping. I didn’t try to persuade him to go back. I could see that he was determined to run away and stay away. We spent the day together, knocking around the capital, then he said goodbye and left. He needed money but I only had a fiver to give him at that time. Later he wrote for more, but again I was travelling backwards and forwards to Rochford and had none to send. I felt really bad about that, but I had no friends at the MOD, at least none I could ask for money, and by the next payday Chid was already in custody.

So Chid had his rebellion against authority and it was time for me to kick the traces, though I was less dramatic in my revolt. I was absolutely sick of the MOD by that time and asked for an exchange posting to an operational station. It meant someone changing places with me. An exchange posting was frowned upon by authority. They were looked on as bothersome and not usually taken notice of – but my superiors at the MOD were as desperate to get rid of me as I was to leave.

A miracle happened. Of all the RAF camps in Britain, the one that had the man who desired to go to London was working at RAF Coltishall, the very station I loved the most. I can’t remember his name but I know I prayed for that airman’s soul when I next went to church. I expect he came to hate the MOD as much as I did, but by that time I was in the company of old friends, and familiar Norfolk pubs.

However, before that exchange took place, a momentous event happened in my life. My old friend Tom Hasler’s parents lived just two miles away from my own. So when I went home at weekends we used to meet up and go out looking for girls. Tom was tall and handsome, and he had little trouble impressing women. I was somewhat shorter, but had cheek and ego on my side. One Saturday evening we went to the Halfway House, a pub in Thorpe Bay, Southend. There was a jazz festival on at the time: the Dave Mills Band were playing. We walked in and saw two girls sitting together, both of them very good looking. One, a slim blonde about five feet four inches tall (very important), was wearing a light blue angora cardigan and her eyes matched the colour of it. She was so pretty she took my breath away and when I asked her for a dance those blue eyes sparkled and she gave me a stunning smile and said, ‘Yes.’

As we ‘stomped’ (the jazz equivalent of jiving) she told me her name was Annette and she lived nearby. Tom was dancing with her friend, Hilary, and there was a third girl with them. They had all been to the ‘Miss Exquisite Form’ competition at the Grandstand in Westcliff-on-Sea and the three of them had come First, Second and Third. Annette confessed she was the one who had come in third because, she had a thirty-two-inch bust, unlike her pals who had somewhat larger bosoms.

Annette’s prize had been an enormous rigid-coned bra and we both laughed as she told me. Although she was rather shy, I made up for it with my unreservedness. I was totally smitten by her clear skin and lovely face: with her tall slender neck, the gazelle-like quality of her body, and her long beautiful legs. More important to me, she spoke the Queen’s English. That enchanted me. I was aspiring middle class and here was a girl who was intelligent, spoke grammatically in wonderfully clear tones, laughed a lot, was blonde and stunningly pretty, with a slim and attractive figure. Annette had left grammar school at sixteen and now worked in a local government office. Here was a lass who was above my station and education, yet miracle of miracles, she seemed to like me.

I could not believe my luck in finding such a girl.

In fact I fell in love at first meeting.

I asked if I could walk her home, which apparently was quite near at hand, and did so. It was a large house in a residential area. Thorpe Bay was the posh end of town, where the stockbrokers and bankers lived, and Annette told me her father was an accountant. ‘In the war he was the pilot of a Catalina air-sea rescue aircraft,’ she told me, ‘but he left the RAF to become the accountant to the Southend Borough Engineer.’ I was duly impressed. A Catalina has a crew of eight, so Flight Lieutenant Bill Bailey had been an important man just a few years ago and probably still was though in less dramatic employment. Annette Bailey let me kiss her goodnight and I went home walking on air. This wonderful person actually liked me. This sweet-lipped girl of seventeen years had let me kiss her goodnight. My cup not only ranneth over, it flooded the ground beneath and caused a river to swell its banks.

I phoned her the next day and we arranged another date.

~

Over the next few weeks we went to the pictures, to a show in London called
The World of Suzie Wong
and to France on a day trip, where I wore a Frank Sinatra hat and felt I was the man. I fell completely head over heels in love with Annette Jill Bailey. We had enormous fun together, just walking along the seafront, or sitting listening to records. Her parents tolerated me because I think they believed this was a transitory affair and I would be gone very soon. Bill Bailey called me every name but the right one – Barry, Larry, Harry – and made seeing Annette as awkward as he could without actually forbidding his daughter to meet with me. Betty Bailey was a softer person, but I don’t believe even she wanted me to be a permanent fixture at that point in time. Things got a little worse when in order to increase my visits to the house I bought a motorbike which woke neighbours when I left.

Annette and I had one or two tiffs, as lovers do. Once I wanted to see a Western movie on a bright sunny afternoon when Annette thought we should be walking ‘somewhere nice’. Another time I was supposed to join her family for Christmas and got on the wrong train, ending up in Cromer at midnight instead of Thorpe Bay. So I was a day late and fifty years later Annette still hasn’t forgiven me for that. But these were small bumps in an affair that was to end happily ever after.

We mostly had fun together. She taught me stuff like ‘art’: something outside my growing-up experience. We would visit the Westcliff Art Gallery, which had a painting by Tristram Hillier entitled
Cutler’s Green
: a vivid landscape scene of a pastures and haystacks with one leafless ghostly-white tree dominating the scene – the first piece of fine art I ever felt passionate about. More recently we have managed to obtain a print of
Cutler’s Green
which is now on our stairway wall to remind us of what I still call our ‘courting days’.

Annette also gave me for my twentieth birthday the one book which has been my faithful lover since being introduced to literature: Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury
expanded by C.S. Lewis. The poetry in that volume lifted me up and carried me off to nights of cloudless climes and starry skies. I still have a copy on my desk as I write this, though Annette’s original present, with its olive-green cover, has long since fallen apart at the seams.

Eventually I asked Annette to marry me and she said ‘Yes’. She was still only seventeen and I was twenty but at that time a lot of my friends were getting married and none of us thought it unusual for our age. Possibly it was because we were servicemen and had grown up quickly, having lived and worked abroad, borne arms in foreign lands and seen life in the raw in oriental cities. I knew no civilian boys of my age, so I have no comparisons to make. What I do know is that almost all my airmen friends got married around the same time and the vast majority of them have stayed married to the same partner.

I don’t kid myself that one of the things that attracted Annette to me was the fact that my air force career took me to foreign lands. She had not travelled abroad at that point, except on a school exchange to France, and was desperate to do so. Her heroines were women like Jane Goodall and Freya Starke, and the man she married would have to have the same desire to travel overseas that was in her blood. The idea of foreign travel may seem pedestrian to people these days, but in the fifties very few ordinary British families had the opportunity to travel to places like the South Pacific, India, Hong Kong or even Cyprus.