On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (13 page)

We went on leave to Southend for Christmas at the end of 1963, staying first at my mother’s flat in Westcliff-on-Sea. My youngest brother, Derek was then seventeen and lead guitarist in a local pop group called The Flowerpots. He was by this time a bright though spoilt youth, likable and full of enthusiasm for both music and poetry. I have no idea how he intended to earn his living. Derek would not have thought of going on to any kind of tertiary education. I believed he would be lucky to become a tradesman’s apprentice or something of that nature. When he talked to me it was always about things that interested him, like poetry and music.

Sadly, I never going got the chance to find out what he intended to do with his life.

On the morning of Christmas Eve there was a knock on the door. When I opened it a policeman asked me, ‘Is this the home Derek Charles Kilworth?’ I told him that it was and asked what was the problem, thinking that Derek had been involved some sort of fracas. ‘Is he in?’ asked the policeman. I went straight to Derek’s bedroom and checked. His bed had not been slept in. When Derek was on a gig he often came in very late and no one bothered him until around eleven in the morning. I had a horrible feeling in my gut as I went back to the front door.

By this time my mother was in the hallway and her face was white with anxiety. I shook my head and the policeman, obviously striving to be compassionate but clearly burdened by having to be the bearer of terrible news, said to my mother, ‘I’m sorry to inform you that your son was killed in a motor accident late last night. I will need someone, a close relative, to come down to the mortuary to identify the body.’ My mother let out a terrible wail and I dissolved into a mess of shock and tears.

It was Ted, my mother’s second husband, who went with the policeman and the rest of us stumbled about the flat, saying everything, saying nothing, completely useless to each other. Annette was the strongest of us and when a group of young friends of Derek came to the door she confirmed that the rumour they had heard was true and they went away sobbing.

Derek’s death was devastating. He was after all a young boy, full of life, and although my father had also died young at forty-two, his death was a relatively gradual one. These sudden unexpected tragedies are almost impossible to take in at first. I kept going to Derek’s bedroom, looking at the bed, hoping for the impossible. Surely, my mind kept saying, there’s been a mistake? Perhaps it isn’t Derek in the mortuary? He wasn’t a driver, so someone else must have been at the wheel. Who could that have been? Another member of the band? A friend? Who?

It turned out that Derek had hitched a lift and the man at the wheel had been drunk. He lost control of the car and struck a telegraph pole at high speed. The main impact was on the passenger side of the vehicle. The driver suffered a broken leg, while my baby brother died instantly. Even at this distance in time, nearly fifty years later, I still have difficulty in believing a life could be taken away so suddenly, without any warning from any source. I feel the tears and anger welling up inside me, not necessarily directed towards the driver, who though a deadly dangerous fool did not intend to kill anyone, but at the happenstance that snatched Derek from us. Why did my brother leave his gig at that one particular moment? Why was it that specific car that stopped to give him a lift? Why was he in the exact position in the vehicle to ensure his death?

Fate should be tangible, a living being that one can scream and shout at, someone to blame for stealing our so very precious lives from us. Fate should have to account for its crimes against us. Fate kills our loved ones and sometimes does it horribly swiftly and mercilessly.

Just days before his death Derek had written a poem which he proudly showed me. It tells of a car crash in which everything reduces to ‘burning rubber, burning wire, all consumed in a ball of fire
.’

~

Annette became pregnant again at the end of the winter of 1965 and we looked forward to another child, a playmate for Rick. September was almost over. We were in the station library gathering reading material when I got a tap on the shoulder. Annette wanted me for something.

‘Just a minute,’ I murmured. ‘I still haven’t found the novel I want.’

‘My bottom’s falling off,’ she said firmly.

‘Oh no!’ I knew what that meant all right, but this was not good. She was only twenty-seven weeks gone. Fortunately the Medical Officer was next door to the library. We rushed round and shortly afterwards Annette was on her way to Wegberg Hospital. A beautiful four-pound baby girl was born and had to go into an incubator. The baby remained on the critical list for several weeks, needing blood transfusions. Why was she so early? Annette is rhesus negative, while I’m rhesus positive, which causes problems with the antibodies in the blood of a second child. In the mid-1960s there was no anti-D injection to deal with this condition and the result was babies like ours which had problematic births.

I have to say that at no time did either of us ever believe our baby girl was going to die. I have no idea now why that was, but we never talked of losing her even though she went through several crises during those first few weeks. The talk was only of when we were going to get her out of that glass case and into the real world. Eventually of course, this happened, for the little mite was a fierce fighter, with a strong will and determination that remained with her from that day onward.

Annette and I had long ago discussed the possible names of our children and had decided that if we ever had a girl we would call her Chantelle. Annette’s French pen-friend was called Chantal and we decided to fancify it a bit with the ‘elle’ rather than the ‘al’ ending. Shortly after the child was born Annette got a visit from the padre who said, ‘It’s probably advisable to christen your baby in case something happens to her.’ I’ve already said we had absolute confidence in the idea that Chantelle was going to survive, but Annette was in a groggy state, naturally, after giving birth. So she told the padre, yes please, but in her confusion had lost the spelling and pronunciation of ‘Chantelle’, so instead she told him to name the baby Yvette Anne.

So she became for a short while Yvette Anne Kilworth.

Then I visited the hospital, heard her story, and said, ‘Oh, no – I’ve already sent the telegrams telling everyone her name’s Chantelle!’ In the meantime Annette had also sent telegrams from her hospital bed informing all and sundry that the baby’s name was Yvette.

For a while we had a very confused set of relatives back in England.

Eventually the baby was re-christened (and very definitely registered) as Chantelle Anne Yvette Kilworth. And a right royal name it looks too. As when Richard was born, I had to drive to Düsseldorf within ten days to register the child at the British Consulate, otherwise both our kids would have been German and liable for military service. Since neither of them likes goosestepping very much it was a good thing I was on time. (That’s a cheap joke, but hey . . .)

Eventually, Chantelle got shortened to Shaney.

Chantelle is not actually a name they give to girl babies in France. Annette and I contrived it. Yet now there are a plethora of Chantelles, most of them coming out of Essex, though one or two of our friends’ children have also used the name for their offspring. It’s my firm belief that Southend-on-sea mothers-to-be heard the name of our daughter while collecting their children from school, liked the sound of it, and used it for their next girl child. Somewhere around the turn of the century one of these Essex Chantelles appeared on a reality television show. The name then naturally spread and flourished throughout the United Kingdom. The last I heard it had reached the USA. The name we invented was hijacked. ‘Chantelle’ has become a best seller by word of mouth, but sadly the two collaborating authors remain anonymous.

So, now we had what I regarded as the perfect family. A wife, a husband, a boy and a girl. Very symmetrical. Others might think that a dozen kids and two run-ragged parents make the perfect family, but for me one on each corner, two of each sex, is my ideal balancing act. My pride in my family has never diminished.

I have written earlier that Bill Bailey was captain of an American PBY Catalina flying boat, an aircraft that could land on the ground or on water. The tips of the Catalina’s wings could convert the floats to wheels. This elegant-looking aircraft was used in anti-submarine warfare, search-and-rescue, freight, convoy escorts and patrol bombing. An aircraft with beautiful lines, very versatile, the Catalina was the most successful flying boat of its era. The PBY stood for Patrol Bomber Y, the letter Y simply being a manufacturer’s code. It had a crew of eight men: the pilot (Bill), co-pilot, bow gunner, flight mechanic, radioman, navigator and two mid-aircraft gunners. To my knowledge Bill never crashed, nor was he shot down. He began his flying career in Canada, after joining the RAF as a common airman (just like his son-in-law) and then going for a commission (unlike his son-in-law) and eventually learning to fly. His patrol area, after leaving Canada, was the wide blue Indian Ocean. There he learned to navigate by the stars, a skill of which he was inordinately proud. He passed some of this knowledge on to Annette and her younger brother Colin and both can still name the major constellations.

It was in Canada that he did his flight training and I remember him telling me a story about that period. He was ordered by the instructor, who sat immediately behind him, to dive on a farmhouse they could see on the Canadian prairie below and only pull out of the dive when the instructor said so. Bill immediately went into the dive and went hurtling down towards the farmhouse. The roof of the house got closer and closer until Bill could almost see down the chimney pot. Finally, ignoring the instructor’s last order, he pulled out of the dive without being told to. However, when he next glanced behind he could see the instructor frantically trying to reconnect his communications cord which had become unplugged, sweat pouring from the man’s brow. Had Bill been a man who automatically obeyed orders they would have crashed and killed themselves and probably any occupants of the farmhouse. In a similar incident on patrol in the Indian Ocean Bill had been ordered to bomb a submarine, but he was not certain of his target and, ignoring the order from an admiral, went down for a closer look first. He discovered the ‘submarine’ was an innocent whale.

Like many men who had been through Second World War he was normally very reserved about his exploits. These were the only two stories I ever got out of him. However, he did tell me about his training period, on which he was given leave from Goose Bay. Going back to the UK was out of the question for the period of the leave, so he hitchhiked across Canada to Vancouver and back, paying for his trip by playing cards with lumberjacks and others. Bill was a brilliant bridge player. I never knew anyone as good. How the hell he found lumberjacks who played bridge rather than poker mystifies me, but he was not a man to lie about his history. Later in life he and Betty taught bridge in the local college in Southend-on-Sea and were probably responsible for most of the bridge players in the Thames estuary. They were legends at the game, which Annette and I studiously avoided playing except with our closest friends the Chidlows. There are no points to be had when your in-laws are experts at a game that needs the mental skill of a mathematician and you are useless at maths. Bill Bailey was not a patient man with his children, expecting them to be as brilliant as he was, and being taught by him was a horrible experience. I’m sure he was all right with unrelated students, but with his family he was severe.

Once Shaney was born, we had to move. The flat above the farm had only two rooms and now we were four. I found another hiring in Luttelforst in a huge, monstrous-looking house that was straight out of Gormenghast: a Gothic German mansion with witch-hat towers. Inside it was a maze of dusty and gloomy passageways. It was set in the grounds of a private park, complete with lake and swans. Some German baron or other lived in it at one time, but in 1965 the woman who owned it had to let out rooms to pay for the upkeep.

We had the whole top floor, an attic divided up into six rooms with sloping ceilings and sharp corners. The elderly landlady always dressed in black and had a mynah bird in the hallway that mimicked her daily greeting so accurately it was spooky. Her name was Frau Raut, but being terrible plebs we dropped a vowel from the surname. She looked like a formidable maiden aunt straight out of one of P.G. Wodehouse’s novels, but in fact after a while she thawed a bit. Not much, but a bit. The myna never did. It remained forever the frosty-voiced Frau Raut, startling us when we crept in at midnight after a party at someone’s house with a strident ‘
Guten Tag
!
’
from its perch in a dark corner of the entrance hallway. It reminded me of the refrain from Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Raven,
quoth the myna, ‘
Guten Tag
!’

We had learned a good bit of German since living there and that was lucky because Frau Raut, unlike our beloved Kathe, did not speak any other language.

While in Germany I wrote a lot of ‘nature’ poems, mostly about ice and snow, mountains and trees. They were good training. I stuck to traditional rhyming sequences and metres for the most part, feeling my way into less formal poetry later on. I’m a great believer in learning the craft from the beginning before tacking in a personal direction.

So, we had three years exploring Germany, including the Black Forest, the Eifel Mountains, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Cologne. We made several camping trips to Italy and Belgium and actually did our weekly shop in Venlo, Holland. Pay was better in Germany, with overseas allowances, but we were still not well off. Annette took a job in a flower shop and became a florist’s assistant for a year or two. She learned all the names of the plants in both Latin and German.

Chid and I joined the local Rover Scouts and went on several camping expeditions with others who enjoyed the outdoor life as much as we did. (I don’t think I’ve ever outgrown my love of scouting and even now yearn to be 12 years old again and singing songs round the campfire.) One winter we camped in sub-zero temperatures in the Eifel Mountains. When we tried to cook breakfast after an ice-bound night during which I slept not at all, the eggs were frozen solid in their shells and the bacon shattered in the pan. Chid suggested we use the eggs as missiles to stun a deer and thus earn a venison breakfast, but I had by that time cut my hand badly on a piece of bacon and wanted to go home.