On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (3 page)

3. Aden

I’ve already written of my voyage to Aden in the MV
Dunera
in my novel
Standing on Shamsan
, but I will repeat a little of what is in that supposed work of fiction. The
Dunera
was around 12,000 tonnes and in 1954 was being used as a troopship. On board were forces and families travelling to the Middle and Far East, where Britain still had the remnants of an empire. Dad was already in Aden, having got there by way of Suez, where there had been some bother. I’m not sure what he did in the Suez emergency, being a clerk by work and nature, but I’m sure he gave it his best shot. Now he was stationed at RAF Khormaksar and on arrival my life took on an excitement I’d yearned for ever since I had heard other sons of servicemen talking about their time in Bulawayo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and such exotic places.

As soon as I got on board the ship and was shown my cabin (thankfully well away from my mother’s) I met Max. Graham Maxwell, a Welsh boy, was to become my best friend for my time in Aden. We would become inseparable, even sharing a chaste but sweet love affair with Rosemary Burns, a thirteen-year-old lass from Kilmarnock in Scotland. Max had already lived in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, so his status in my eyes was high.

It was evening when we set sail. The first thing Max and I did was go into the communal wash room and put a tin mug under the fierce shower. The ways of youth are strange and unfathomable. The tin mug under force made a terrific ringing noise which echoed throughout the lower decks. Looking back on it I think we just did it because the tin mug was there, handy as it were, and the shower water was coming out like lead shot. Anyway, we enjoyed making a din for about ten minutes, then left the washroom, only to find people rushing about with their lifejackets on.

‘Quickly,’ cried my mother, on seeing us, ‘get your lifejacket on and follow me to the muster station.’

Women and children, and men too, were milling around wearing faces the colour of flour.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked, still a bit bemused by the panic.

‘Din’t you hear it?’ shouted my brother Ray, gleefully. ‘The alarm bell’s bin ringin’. The ship’s sinkin’ down in the water, I expect.’

Ray seemed rather pleased about the fact that we were all going to go to the bottom of the North Sea.

The ship wasn’t sinking, of course. It was the brutal shower water on the hollow tin mug that had imitated the ship’s alarm bell. Naval officers came and assured the families that it was a false alarm, though they too were puzzled by what had actually caused the ‘ringing’ noise. No one ever discovered the source of the sound. Max and I certainly weren’t going to own up to causing a panic among the passengers and it would have been a very astute person who could guess what had happened. We went to bed in our respective cabins shortly afterwards and I don’t remember that Max or I ever mentioned the incident again.

We entered the Bay of Biscay, famous for storms, and seasickness overwhelmed me for two days. Once I was able to leave my bed, I went up on deck and stared out over the vast ocean. Sailors have a unique spiritual adventure, every time they go to sea. It has probably been so since the beginning of time, when Man first left the sight of land behind. Water, water everywhere, and always changing shape, always altering colour. Sometimes choppy and churning, sometimes giant waves, always a momentous swell. Various shades of green, grey and blue, depending on the state of the surface, the time of day and the light. The planet’s fluid coat. It fascinated me, even as a twelve-year-old, with its endlessness and variability.

We were supposed to go to school on the MV
Dunera
, but the idea that we would have to suffer classes during this wonderful experience of our first ocean voyage left us boiling with indignation. I think Max and I went to about two hours’ worth, before losing ourselves between the decks. My brother Ray went a little longer, but then he and his new friends soon followed suit. Derek was only six years old, so he did as he was told. We ignored ‘school’ for the rest of the voyage, arguing that there was much more to be learned from the world at large.

We reached Gibraltar after a few days and entered the Mediterranean Sea, which was sunny and warm after the wintry Atlantic weather. I had a Brownie box camera with which I recorded our progress through the Med. Mostly they were photos of Max standing on his head, or pretending to throw up into a lifeboat.

We passed Malta and Crete and were approaching Egypt’s Port Said when our captain received an emergency SOS call. Another British troopship, the SS
Empire Windrush
, was on fire somewhere in the Med. However, we were too far away from the tragedy to assist in the rescue operation. The passengers of that ship, service families like us, had taken to the lifeboats. Eventually the crew did the same and the rescue ships that reached the area attempted to tow the fiery hulk to Gibraltar, but apparently this was unsuccessful and the
Windrush
sank. This was all grist to the mill of my imagination. I did at last feel I was living the life of Kipling’s
Kim
and that daily crises would be the norm.

I awoke one morning to the sounds of a bustling port. There were cries all around the ship, with dogs barking in the distance and the hum of a busy harbour at the entrance to the Suez Canal, which led to the Red Sea. Port Said. When I went up on deck I found passengers leaning over the sides of the ship. Down below were the owners of small craft known as ‘bum boats’, these vessels full of goods such as
gambia
knives, bullwhips, wooden carvings, brass trays, and all sorts of paraphernalia, casting lines up to potential buyers on the main deck.

There was a basket tied halfway along these lines into which the Arab sellers were putting their wares. These would be hauled on board and the buyers would then put the price of the item they had purchased into the basket to be hauled down again. A certain amount of trust was required of the passengers, who could if they were of a criminal nature not bother to put the money into the basket. There was no way the Arab seller could get on board to demand his money. However, I don’t recall any problems of this kind. I do remember fierce haggling going on, before the purchase of the goods, but once the price had been agreed then honesty seemed to be the order of the day.

One of the baskets which I observed being used was lined with an Egyptian newspaper. I was fascinated by the Arabic writing with its centripetal swirls and alien flourishes. Not just a foreign language, an exotic one with (to me) an unintelligible alphabet. I was given that newspaper by the vendor, who flashed me a golden smile and told me to ‘Keep it – a present for you!’ I treasured those pages as I might have done diamonds. Here was ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, the ‘Thief of Baghdad’ and ‘Sinbad the Sailor’. This was the land of bedtime stories and I was in it, living it, part of it. Amazing.

Over the flat rooftops of the whitewashed square houses of Port Said strode Johnnie Walker. The Johnnie Walker sign was a huge two-dimensional man in top hat and coat-tails, carrying a cane, caught in eager mid-stride. It did not seem as incongruous then as it does to me now. A giant whisky advertisement in a land where alcohol was banned by religious edict? Egypt was not then a European colony, though of course it had been at one time, but Johnnie must have been up there for the benefit of ships like ours. At the time, to me, it was just another one of those wondrous symbols of the Middle East, like the newspapers and the bum boats, not to mention the Gully-Gully Man.

The Gully-Gully Man was an institution in Port Said and I had been told by ex-Aden boys back in England to expect him.

The Gully-Gully Man visited most passenger liners that stopped in Port Said. He was quite simply an Egyptian magician who performed amazing feats for the grown-ups and children from a dull and insipid land: doves came from his nose, silver coins that glittered in the Eastern sun came from between his toes, bright ribbons and scarves came from his ears. His body was a treasure trove which required only the magic words – abracadabra, open sesame, zebristi – for that body to mysteriously relinquish its contents. He entertained us for a whole afternoon. In the evening young Arab boys swam out to surround the boat, yelling for coins. Passengers threw them in the water and the boys would dive down, retrieving them from the depths. I was twelve years of age and didn’t know whether those boys were collecting coins because they were starving or because they were – as I had been when selling home-made lemonade to passers-by outside my house in England – simply earning a bit of pocket money. I didn’t know. I still don’t know, but I suspect they relied on those tossed sixpences and shillings to eat.

Next day we entered the Suez Canal and glided gently through that magnificent waterway. On the banks of the canal were fields being worked by Arab farmers. I could see men drawing water using Archimedean screws to fill their irrigation ditches, and donkeys turning wheels with pots on them, doing a similar job. Between the ship and the banks of the canal were hundreds of feluccas, some fishing, others carrying bales of goods. There was a dusty, musky smell to the air which pervaded everything on board. The East was enveloping us, packaging us in its sights, sounds and smells. I was entranced by the whole biblical scene. It was as if one the pages of my Sunday school books had suddenly sprung to life before me. There were the palms that were spread before Jesus as he entered Jerusalem.

Suez was the line between a pleasant temperature and an uncomfortable heat. Once we entered the Red Sea we were in the furnace. It didn’t bother us kids as much as it did the adults, who complained constantly about the heat, just as they had complained about the cold and wet back home. There was no satisfying grown-ups. We knew that from experience. If you had offered them the best climate in the world, they would probably have called it boring.

The Red Sea voyage confirmed my sense of wonder in the Middle East. We passed Ethiopia, the Yemen, and went on down to Somaliland. One morning the deck was covered in silvery flying fish. On another Max and I were looking down into the water and saw giant manta rays cruising just below the surface. Then there was the occasional shark, when the ship’s butcher threw offal into the water. And of course dolphins that played around the bows and in the ship’s wake.

All this is commonplace now, in the 21st Century, but back in 1954 very few working class people left the shores of Britain. There were those on passage to Australia of course, and one or two shipping out to India and Hong Kong, but for the most part the experience I was having was a rare one. I felt very special and also privileged to be able to see such wondrous things and come into contact with such exotic cultures. I don’t think my parents appreciated it as much as I did. They enjoyed what they were doing, but I believe they were more impressed by the cheap alcohol and the fact that we – a common-or-garden family – would have servants in our new home. We had been raised to the status of imperialists simply by leaving our own shores and by being British.

It sounds very high-colonial, but my parents were people of their time, ignorant of any wrongdoing. Their government ruled a foreign land and they had not the mental tools to question it. They were not unkind, that I can state emphatically, nor were they arrogant, being too close to their own peasant roots for that. My dad’s father still scythed the grass on the byways of Essex. My mum’s mother still gutted fish in Harwich fish market. Mum and dad were the offspring of parents whose work was similar to that of Said, the Somali cook-bearer we eventually employed.

Said was an African. He came from a land with deeper, richer smells. Musk and animal dung and the earthy odour of coming rain. A place where the sunrises enveloped the landscape, enfolding it in a blanket of swirling colour, mostly dark and fiery reds. Where the sunsets could cause one’s heart to skip a few beats. Africa had shaped his tall, shiny-black, angular body and had formed his sharp mind. I was always, as a child, very much in awe of this quiet, secretive man who, it always seemed, found me faintly amusing and in need of guidance in life. Said had a family but rarely spoke of them. His work and his loved ones were separated by the Red Sea, an impossible commute.

Mum’s daily orders to Said were very occasionally overridden by us boys, since she was a female. Said much preferred to receive his daily duties from a male member of the family.

Once, mum said, ‘We’ll have lamb today, Said.’

When she’d left the room my brother Ray, who hated fatty meat at that time, whispered, ‘Change that to egg and chips, Said.’

We duly got egg and chips, but rightly so it wasn’t Said who got it in the neck, it was us boys.

We rarely did countermand our mother’s orders for dinner or other things, since mum was definitely the head of the family and a very fiery-tempered head at that. Dad was a meek fellow, not given to confrontations, and was happy for mum to rule the roost. I never blamed him for that. Despite being five feet two inches tall and weighing six and a half stone, mum was a veritable termagant when crossed. We were all afraid of her. I loved her of course, as did my brothers, for she could be as fierce in her love and protection of her sons as she was in the condemnation of their wrongdoings.

My parents did of course find the Middle East ‘dirty’, being people of their time. Post Second World War many housewives seemed to be obsessed with cleanliness. This was in an era when people were fascinated by modern inventions, such as nylon and rayon, and were contemptuous of anything old fashioned. I doubt my mother looked out over those fields on the banks of the Suez canal and got excited by waterwheels and irrigation ditches as I did. She probably shuddered and went down to her cabin to play with her new electric hairdryer.

~

In 1839 an obscure British sea captain by the name of Stafford Bettesworth Haines sailed into the harbour of a poor Arab fishing village and claimed it as a possession of Queen Victoria. A local sultan’s son took exception to these Europeans on the beaches of Aden and engaged the British in a smart little war. The British marines overcame the opposition and eventually the sultan signed a lease allowing the British to use the village as a ship’s coaling station. One hundred and ten years later that same fishing village had been transformed into the second busiest harbour in the world (after New York). At the time of the occupation Aden was thickly forested. Mimosa, tamarisk, camel’s thorn and myrrh shrubs grew in abundance. These were populated by rabbits, hares, gazelles, foxes, hyenas and a great deal of bird life. By the mid-1800s the land had been deforested by the successors of Captain Haines, to build houses and ships, and other things necessary to the flourishing of a great port.