On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (24 page)

When I moved on from Montserrat to Roseau, in Dominica, Annette with me, we were told not to leave the hotel.

‘It’s near the date of the island’s independence,’ we were told, ‘and things might get a bit ugly.’

We put up with staying in the hotel for one whole boring day, then thought bugger it, we’ll risk walking the streets. In fact nothing happened to us and we encountered little worse than broad smiles. Annette was back into scouting at this time and went off looking for the local cub mistress, so their cub packs could exchange letters. She stopped in a shop and asked who to contact.

The shopkeeper said, ‘Just walk down that street over there and ask for Rose.’

No house number, no address, just ask for Rose.

Annette did as she was told, stopped the first person she came across and asked for Rose.

‘It is I,’ replied the lady brightly. ‘You must be the lady who runs the cub pack in England.’

The grapevine on those islands was nothing short of miraculous, since it was only minutes since Annette had spoken to the shopkeeper.

We later visited Rose and her family and had tea with them. They were absolutely charming of course. We had met with nothing but friendliness on all the islands. Actually, that’s not quite true. A man once shouted after our hire car, ‘White trash!’ but when I stopped he simply grinned at me and waved, adding, ‘How’re you doin’, eh?’

On another occasion I came out of the hotel on Dominica and began walking down a hill. An elderly man fell into step with me and without any introduction launched into a long story about someone I assumed was his daughter-in-law.

‘. . . so I said to the girl, I said, you can’t just come in here and laze around, lettin’ everyone else do the work and the cookin’ and all that kind of thing . . .’ This story continued without pause.

At the bottom the hill, without me saying a word in reply, he waved his hand and said, ‘Well, be seein’ you, man,’ and wandered off into the crowds.

Really, the only people we didn’t take to on Dominica were the Europeans. Simone Caudieron, the trainer of telephone operators, lived there. Originally Venezuelan, Simone was based on Dominica. She was not there at the time, being somewhere in the South Sea Islands, teaching women of the Pacific how to connect two callers together. However, her sister was married to a Lebanese man who owned, I believe, a huge firm specialising in coconut products. We visited the couple and were invited to a meal at their home. They told us to bring any friends if we so wished.

We invited the European manager and his wife, who disdained to come because they did not ‘fraternise with the locals’. They missed a great deal. Simone’s brother-in-law was a very cultured man with a large collection of jazz records. I was in my element. The evening was hugely enjoyable, with good company, great food and wonderful music.

19. King’s College, London University

I left Cable and Wireless Ltd in1981. I would miss many things about C&W but not the four hour journey back and forth on the misery line. There had been some distractions on those journeys of course. There are one or two that stand out. The foremost being the ‘jacket’ incident.

All businessmen in London have to work late at some time or another and those who worked at C&W were no exception. Quite a few times I had to catch the eight or even nine o’clock train home and on that train would be others like myself, kept late at the office for some reason or another. Usually they would have had a few drinks afterwards, to wash away the dust of the accounting books at the end of the day.

One night there were several of us, bankers, insurance men and women, others, some of whom were weary and tipsy enough to drop off to sleep. The train left Fenchurch Street and on the way we stopped at several stations including Basildon. We were just about to leave Basildon when a young woman got up and shook a young man who was fast asleep across the seats. Still lying supine the man opened his eyes which grew wider and wider.

‘It’s an angel!’ he said, slurring slightly.

‘Not really,’ laughed the girl, ‘where do you want to get out?’

‘Wherever you do,’ he replied, quickly.

‘Don’t be silly. Look we’re at Basildon.’

He sat up quickly and stared out of the window at the sign. Then still in his shirtsleeves he leapt up and ran for the door, just getting out in time as the train started to pull away. Then he seemed to have a fit and began running alongside the train, hammering on the window and yelling, ‘Jacket! Jacket!’ With great presence of mind the young woman grabbed a jacket draped over the back of a seat and pushed it through the window. It landed on the platform at the man’s feet.

Minutes after this incident another young man stirred from his sleep and then seemed to stare about himself for a few minutes. He appeared bemused, and finally asked in alarm, ‘Has anyone seen my jacket?’ There was of course another suit jacket laying nearby, but clearly not the one that went with the trousers he was wearing. Both the young girl and I, and others in the compartment, were suddenly very interested in the darkness that was swishing by the carriage windows.

That was an evening incident, but there were morning ones as well. One fine Spring morning the train was just pulling out of one of the stations when the door was wrenched open by a youth who flung himself into the carriage. His tie was still in his hand, he had a piece of toast stuck in his mouth, and his shoelaces were undone.

‘My garden,’ he explained as he finished dressing, ‘backs onto the station. I only have to run the length of it and climb over the fence to be on the platform.’

We all nodded sagely and one of the other passengers remarked, ‘So you were having breakfast when the train pulled in?’

‘No,’ replied the latecomer, ‘I was still in bed.’

If only there was an Olympic event for such things.

On leaving C&W I received a good redundancy payment, with which I cleared my mortgage. On the first day of my new career as a writer I dressed in my suit, shirt, tie and city shoes. I had breakfast at six o’clock and then drove down to the station and waited for the seven o’clock train for London. All my usual travelling companions were on the platform also waiting for the same train, including my accountant friend, Stuart Holliday. When it arrived, they boarded it, I did not. I stood there and waved it out, then went home, changed into casuals, made a fresh pot of coffee, then sat at my desk with a comfortable sigh.

I was a full-time author at last.

However, I was not earning a great deal with my writing at that point, not enough to contribute to the household expenses, so I took on a part time job. The music teacher who taught me to play the trombone, Sandy, started up a house cleaning business with her partner which they called ‘The Country Maids’. These two otherwise able women required a man to wield the heavy carpet cleaner while they zoomed through houses with their dusters and mops. I became that man. For eighteen months I was a carpet cleaner and supplemented my writing earnings with my wages. I still have my ‘Country Maid’ t-shirt.

During the same period I started teaching creative writing at evening classes. I don’t believe you can actually teach someone how to write, but you can give them some advice on what might work in a story. So, my lessons tended to be on catchy first lines, on last lines, on titles, and so on. I have had no training or experience with teaching so had actually no idea whether I was doing it correctly. The really important thing, I felt, was to get them excited about writing their own stories, and discussing things like first lines seemed to do that.

I have my all-time favourite first lines. There is the famous opening to Dickens’
A Tale of Two Cities
: more a paragraph than a sentence, but to me the most stunning of all first lines was written by an author much less well-known, Gordon R. Williams, in his novel
The Siege of Trencher’s Farm
: ‘The moment that Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon there were men in English villages who had never been more that fifteen miles from their own front door’. Sweetly succinct and mind-blowing. The shortest and probably the greatest first line is ‘Call me Ishmael.’ from Melville’s
Moby Dick
. Those few words carry so much information. The narrator says, ‘Call me . . .’ so we know Ishmael is not his real name. If he does not want to tell us who he really is, then what he’s about to divulge is contentious. Then there is the biblical Ishmael, which tempts us to look up the reference to see if we can gather any clues as to this secrets this young man might have to disclose.

With titles there are apparently key words like ‘Eagle’ and ‘Death’ that instantly attract a potential reader.
The Eagle has Landed, Death in Venice,
etc. There are also some gender peculiarities. Put ‘Wife’ or ‘Daughter’ in the title and you have a female-reader magnet.
The Mapmaker’s Wife
,
The Time Traveller’s Wife
,
The Ironmonger’s Daughter
. Such novels immediately become talking points for female book clubs. The male equivalent does not work.
The Postmistress’s Husband
?
The Milkmaid’s Son
? I somehow think titles in this vein would not work in a million years and it’s significant that I can’t think of a novel or short story with the word ‘Husband’ in the title. Fine,
Dombey and Son
, yes, but somehow there is the impression that the book is more about Dombey and the focus is taken away from junior.

Last lines? Frankly, Scarlet, endings need to leave one satisfied but also wishing the story did not stop there. One of my favourite endings is the last line of Christopher Priest's
The Affirmation
,
which leaves the reader in the middle of a sentence that has no full stop or three periods, simply white space. It's a stunning end to a stunning novel and this reader was left staring into space, lost in thought, still holding the book in my hands. It’s the kind of novel that when you finish it and put it down, you simply sit there and reflect for a long while, listening to the silence.

With my own writing, I still remained somewhat under-confident. I was still rough-edged, with only a few O- and A-Levels from night school and an HND that had little relevance to a writing career. I wanted to feel I had really studied the art and craft of the profession I aspired to join. I put in for a degree course in London University.

Annette was now a fully fledged social worker, enjoyed her job immensely, but had always said she would not tolerate a tame writer at home not pulling his weight. She was prepared to give me some space and time to get established but she could not keep both of us on her salary, though a steady monthly income is almost essential to a writer who gets paid if and when the publisher feels like sending a cheque. When I ceased working for the Country Maids I began working part time as a ‘priming boy’ for my brother Ray, a house painter.

Ray had a van in which he took his men up to London every working day, starting at 5.30 a.m. with a stop on the way at a greasy spoon café for ‘bubble and slice’ (bubble-and-squeak and fried bread) before the day started somewhere in the city. He had a contract for painting a certain brewer’s pubs. We painters sat among the paint pots in the back of the van and chattered all the way to our destination and back. I was constantly asked to repeat a poem I’d written. It was not a very good piece of verse but the painters seemed to like it. It went:

There is an unknown river
flowing to the sea
which you and I must follow
to find our destiny.
Over jagged rocks of fear
down each crashing fall,
(something, something, something)
to find tranquillity . . .

I’ve forgotten many of the lines over the years, but as you can see, this not a work that would send the critics raving. I’d written it as a schoolboy and the painters kept asking for it, until every one of them had learned it by heart. Now if you ever met any of those painters you would know that poetry was not their first love in life and in the ordinary way of things they avoided it like the plague. But years later I found they ‘used’ my poem to pull girls at the discos, telling the said girls that they had made it up in their heads while observing the said female from the other side of the room. I could have written them a poem that would have knocked the socks off any young lady, much more suitably tuned to a love chant, but this little ditty about a river apparently worked, I was told, with regular success. In fact it had never been known to fail these lusty young men whose idea of a love affair was a quickie in a bus shelter while walking the girl home along the seafront.

One or two stories are worth telling about my time with my brother’s painters.

Once I went with Ray to assess the painting of a pub and we were talking to the landlord when Ray pointed up at what was once a white ceiling.

‘What are all the red spots?’

‘Oh, that’s what’s left of one of my customers,’ replied the landlord. ‘He came in here, stuck a shotgun under his chin, and pulled the trigger. That’s why I decided to redecorate . . .’

Nice.

Another story.

There was a base in the Angel Islington where Ray got his painting materials and where any window frames which needed replacing were made. The painters and carpenters who worked there parked their cars in the streets in and around the workshop, all on double-yellow lines, as did most of the locals. Throughout the day one might hear telephones ringing, starting at one end of the street, and travelling all the way down to the other end. Then with perfect choreography the painters and locals would rush into the roads, jump in their cars, and drive around for ten minutes – until the traffic wardens had moved on. Then the cars would be reparked and life and work continued as normal.

Finally, we were working on a new estate of houses when Ray asked me to paint a front door. While I was gaily swishing my brush over the woodwork two burly Irish labourers arrived and began laying a garden path. They were skilful, smoothing out the concrete with their tools until it looked like a lake of liquid glass. Once I had finished the door I did what most people do after such a job: I stepped back to admire my work. My right foot sank into newly laid concrete. I glanced around quickly to see that the labourers were unaware of my folly. My next move was in sheer panic. I bent down and tried to smooth out my footprint with my hand. At that moment one of the men looked up and his face registered absolute astonishment as he saw a painter happily running fingers through his fresh concrete.

‘What the fook?’ he yelled.

Those thick-set, heavy-shouldered, big-fisted pair of Irishmen chased me all over the site until I found a ladder and climbed up on a roof, drawing the ladder after me. They prowled around the houses, looking for another ladder, but luckily they were not successful in their search. They then spent twenty minutes shaking fists at me and subjecting me to some very ripe language. Finally they went away, Irish-lilted threats still tumbling from their tongues. I stayed on the roof until everyone had gone home, before descending, vowing that that I would do my utmost to get a place in university that September.

~

I was lucky enough to get on a BA Honours course reading English at King’s College, London, in the Strand. I went there with mixed feelings. I felt as if I had achieved something momentous regarding the Kilworth family, none of whom had ever been to university going right back to Edward Kilworth who came over from Ireland in the 1700s, yet I was also a mature student, forty years of age, and therefore somewhat after my time. Even after I had gained my degree, three years later, my mother would continue to boast that her Garry had ‘a GCE’ which in my mother’s mind was the epitome of educational achievements.

King’s College was everything I dreamed it would be. There were two other mature students in my year reading English, both about my age, but what was surprising was the lack of students who came from secondary or comprehensive schools. I believe there were only two of us. The majority came from independent schools with a smattering of grammarites. King’s was and probably still is a very traditional university, the fallback uni for those students who had marginally failed to get their Oxbridge entrance. The degree rested entirely on the results of final exams, rather than course work. My mind is now hazy on the number of papers we took for our finals but there seemed to be hours and hours of them. The number of books I read for the course went into the hundreds. Some of them had to be skim-read, but by the time I was into it by one year my mind was buzzing with literature.

I actually got a government grant of £2,000+ and friends of Annette, Marilyn and David Ross, let me use their London flat to bed down during the week. There was no furniture in it, but I had a sleeping bag, a canvas camping chair, and the use of a cooker. It was fine. Annette stayed at the flat couple of times when she got a social work placement south of the river. On leaving a year later they told her, ‘You were the wrong colour, the wrong age and the wrong class for this post, but somehow you fitted in and did a great job.’ That’s Annette: her smile carries her a thousand miles in the right direction and though she is of very middle class parents she has no side to her whatsoever. She will happily sit down beside a beggar and share her conversation and sandwiches. I admire her love of people above all things.