On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (40 page)

After an afternoon of listening and scribbling, that evening we went to see hula-dancing and to a feast where the favourite Polynesian food was on the menu. At that feast we met the film producer of the movie
Babe
who was married to a local woman. The ‘favourite’ food was of course roast piglet, one of Babe’s descendants.

~

On return to England after our second ‘world tour’ we carried on life at
Wychwater
. I had planted two more trees in 1988, just before we had left for Hong Kong. One was a willow, down by the pond, the other was a ginkgo in sight of our kitchen window. Both saplings were as thick as my forefinger. When we got back the willow was a mature tree, fifteen feet high and badly needing a haircut. The ginkgo was still a finger-thick twig that stood two feet high, alive and thriving, but amazingly immature. It was still the same height and girth when we left it behind in 2001. I have seen fully grown ginkgos and they are giants. Clearly ginkgos grow vaster than empires and more slow. Beautiful leaves though.

Every year we had our garden party where we invited our writer and editor friends, many of them with children now who I took for rides in the trailer of my tractor. They were good happy times. My own kids were settled and Annette, like most nanas, fell into her role of grandmother with great relish. We saw Conrad, Christian and Jordan quite often in the mid to late ’90s, at their house in Shoeburyness. The boys were sport mad and we often played yard cricket or kicked a ball on the nearby green. All three grandsons were growing up strong and healthy. They were well-mannered too and treated their nana and grampa with great respect, Shaney and Mark saw to that.

To Julie and Rick’s two children Annette was ‘Swimming-nana’ the other nana being ‘Knitting-nana’. Annette took Alex and Chloe most weekends to the swimming baths and was instrumental in helping them to learn to swim. Once, Alex tried to test Annette by asking her if she would ‘Knit me a Postman Pat if my mum gives you the spring (string)’. Knitting being an anathema to Swimming-nana the refusal was forthright and telling. She was never again asked to knit anything.

My favourite grandchild story is about Alex. At his primary school they gave out talents and tokens. Talents were earned for being good, tokens were given out for being bad.

After his first week at school he came home and was asked by his mum Julie, ‘How did you get on, Alex? Did you earn any talents?’

Alex turned his angelic face to his mother and said seriously, ‘Hundreds and hundreds.’

‘And what about tokens.’

He shook his head. ‘Not a single one.’

‘Oh that’s wonderful. Well, next week I’m going to see your teacher and have a little chat about how you’re getting on.’

Alex screwed up his face in thought for a moment, then said, ‘Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t talk about the talents and tokens.’

~

In the ’90s too, we went on several expeditions to the West Country with Rob and Sarah, walking Offa’s Dyke, Dartmoor and visiting Maiden Castle. Both Sarah and Rob liked nothing better than striding out over frost-covered peat hags, breath coming out as sprigs of steam, finding a spot to picnic in a grove of stunted oaks. Once, I went through the ice of a shallow pond and filled my boots with freezing water. I had to trudge to the pub six miles away with fine spray flying from the tops of my boots while the others walked behind me making hilarious remarks. To be fair, Sarah showed concern over my freezing feet, but the other two could not stop laughing long enough to enquire after my condition.

Malcolm Edwards was now married to Jacks, a lovely young London editor whose parents lived in Somerset. I remember the wedding as being a very wet day under canvas, since it took place mainly in a marquee in the garden. Everyone sloshed around on duckboards, though the tent was warmed by jet engines that made its cheeks billow. Rob was best man and gave a wonderful speech fashioned from reworked lines from a poem by Seamus Heaney which ended something like, ‘Bog, fen, mud and ditch-deep peat – welcome to your new home.’

In the mid-90s, Rob, Sarah, Annette and I were invited to the home of Jacks’ parents for a winter weekend. On the way we stopped at Avebury to gather spiritual energy from the standing stones and ended up getting lost after dark in the fields beyond the site. We managed to trudge our way to a garage light on the motorway and thence back to the car, our boots thick with mud from the ploughed furrows. Jacks and Malcolm were there in Somerset to greet us and again we met Jacks’s family, who were charming and gracious, but were happy to engage us in a lively argument about fox hunting when my book
Hunter’s Moon
came up. It was probably Rob who mentioned the novel. He was always trying to promote my books and indeed got me several Guest of Honour spots in places like the Czech Republic with his selfless endorsements.

A winter Devon visit took us to the home of the Frouds. Wendy and Brian Froud live in Devon, in a dingley-dell cottage. The previous owners could well have been Hobbits. Wendy is a puppet maker and had fashioned the creatures for several films, including the fantasy movie
Dark Crystal
. The house is full of her creations, every nook and cranny harbouring a strange creature. Simply going to the toilet is an adventure in Wonderland. Brian is a writer and illustrator of fantasy books. My favourite is
Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book
: fairies caught by the young Lady Cottington and pressed like flowers between the pages of heavy tomes before being mounted. One or two of the fairies did not need to be pressed, since they were peeled from the windscreens of cars.

Brian told us that one day he wanted to do a book of Sheela Na Gigs. These are quasi-erotic carvings found on Romanesque churches, usually of an old woman squatting and pulling apart her vulva. They’re more prevalent in Ireland than most countries, but are found in UK and on the continent too. Some think the Sheelas are pagan, but they are always found on churches and so must have something to do with the early origins of Christianity. However, it is strange to have such an erotic symbol on a church and no one quite knows how old they are or what was their purpose. Brian was fascinated by them but admitted they wouldn’t make a children’s book. To my knowledge he hasn’t yet produced his volume of Sheela Na Gigs.

~

About this time we had also taken to going on European city breaks with Bill and Lisa Fedden, to Prague, Vienna, Berlin, etc. It was while we were in Prague that I recalled that Peter Beere, a writer who like many of us sometimes questions the literary value of his work, once sighed and said to me, ‘When I sit down to write, I hope to emulate Kafka, instead I always end up writing like Peter Beere.’ I therefore sent Pete a postcard from the great writer’s house near Old Town Square. On it I scribbled, ‘When I sit down to write, I hope to emulate Peter Beere, instead I always end up writing like Kafka’ and signed it ‘Yours, Franz’.

~

Birgit Benkhoff, my German pal from King’s College, had moved from Claygate, just outside London, to take up a professorship at Dresden University. After several years teaching at the London School of Economics she had separated from her husband and was free-flying. I am very fond of Birgit and admire her greatly. We have now been to Dresden many times to stay with Birgit in her art deco flat and seen some of the magnificent buildings which were not burned in the fire-bombing of the Second World War. Those which were scorched have been left blackened, while the rebuilds, such as the Frauenkirche, are of course new looking. The Green Vault, which houses treasures of old Germany, has a huge, astonishing collection of magnificent golden, bejewelled objects and ornaments.

Dresden was also one of the homes of Karl May, born in 1842, who wrote Western stories and tales of the Orient.
Old Shatterhand
is one of his most famous cowboy stories. There is some doubt that ‘adventures’ he claimed to have had ever really took place, but Karl May was a popular writer of his time and later regarded by the literary world as an innovator. We visited his house, now a museum, several times. It is full of interesting paraphernalia collected by the author.

~

Over the turn of the century we visited Canada several times, once a return to Quebec, twice to Annette’s cousin Elizabeth in Vancouver, and twice to Shaney and Mark and the boys in Toronto. With Elizabeth and her husband, Karl, we did a long, lengthy tour of the Yukon and Alaska by car. Karl, a Canadian-German tour guide, had recently been given northern Canada as his new route. It was a great holiday, driving in the land of the midnight sun – well, midnight and
all
night. The sun never went down. We stayed first at White Horse, then at Dawson City, which was awesome having only dirt roads and the sort of wooden buildings you see in Western films. There was a motorbike rally going on in the Yukon at the time, which added to the excitement. We visited the Klondike gold claims, which were still operated part-time by some residents of Dawson, supplementing their incomes.

When we entered Alaska we were in USA territory of course and the first stop was a town called Chicken with a hundred residents. It had been named when the first settler saw a ptarmigan standing on a rock and decided it was the local equivalent of a hen. A grisled male resident eyed us over a can of beer in the Trading Post and grunted sourly, ‘Welcome to Alaska, where men are men, and women win the Iditerod!’

The Iditerod is a hard gruelling sled dog race which covers over a thousand miles of snow-bound Alaska, usually in around nine to fifteen days. A woman called Susan Butcher had recently won the race four times, a fact which was clearly difficult to stomach for some of the frontier mountain men in that tough, unforgiving land.

~

From Chicken we covered just about the whole of mid and south Alaska right down to Skagway where the gunfighter and criminal Soapy Smith met his match in the lawman John Reid. John Reid shot Soapy dead in a gunfight on Juneau Wharf at 9.15 pm, July 8, 1898. Unfortunately for law and order, Reid also died of his wounds, later on that day.

The four of us then struck southwards to Denali National Park where we saw our first wild grizzly bear, a blond giant of a beast chasing a rodent. I had not realised before then that bears could be different shades and blond grizzlies are quite common in that part of Alaska.

We covered thousands of Alaskan and Canadian miles on that trip, all of it in the light, with nary a dark moment.

~

The late ’90s also saw a visit to Vietnam, where Glen and Wilma Swaik were based. Glen works for an Australian oil company and they told us they would put us up and we could use them as a base. We had a terrific time. We went with Wilma and her kids to the Cu Chi tunnels dug and used by the North Vietnamese army when they were fighting the Americans. There were three levels of tunnels, each at a deeper depth. Ben, Wilma’s son, who was about eight at the time, wanted to go in the lowest tunnel and Wilma would not let him do it without an adult. I was the mug. I followed our guide, a young Vietnamese with deep scars on his face, who’d been born in the tunnels during the ’60s.

The first layer of tunnels were big enough to crouch inside. The second layer had us crawling on our hands and knees. The lowest level was a wormhole. I was terrified. It was pitch black and I had to position my body as if I were diving into a swimming pool. In this way we had to wriggle along the hot, earth-smelling hole as if we were trying to enter a house by way of the drain pipe. I was conscious of the weight of the earth above and around me. There were questions. What if the soil collapsed and buried me alive? What if I ran out of air? What if our guide had only hate in his guts for Westerners? What if my heart raced too fast and I had a cardiac arrest here in the intestines of Vietnam?

These questions did not need answering in the end of course, because I came to a place where it opened up into a cubic room made of nothing but clay. Ben was effervescent with joy at doing his thing. I was quietly relieved we were all still alive. The guide was smiling one of those oriental smiles I have never been able to decipher. He led us back to the surface where he proved that he did not hate me by letting me have a go with his AK47. I blasted a sandbank with a whole magazine of rounds, before we went on to be shown the mantraps – iron maidens made of sharpened bamboo – that when sprung pierced the stomachs and chests of many an unwary American soldier, spilling giblets on the floor of the jungle. Ben loved these too. In fact Ben liked most things that made an adult’s stomach churn, including handling large snakes, which he made me do with him later on in the day, at a snake farm.

I was actually very fond of that eight-year-old iconoclast.

It was the Swaiks who revived our interest in the Hash House Harriers, that fine Far Eastern tradition which we had come across in Singapore and Hong Kong. Expats get together and do a cross-country run, very often a paper chase, through bush and rainforest, desert and cattle country. The idea is to raise money for charity. At the end of the run you had beer and a hash meal. Ben was asthmatic, the dust made him choke and heave for breath, but the boy still did the run. The money raised went to the orphanage for children whose sight had been lost following the use of Agent Orange in the war with the Americans. When we got back to UK Annette and I ran our own Hash and raised enough to purchase two more Braille machines and a sackful of toys.

It was in the streets of Ho Chi Min city, which the locals still call Saigon, that I saw some amazing sights. The place was swarming with small motorbikes and I saw a farmer with a live pig sitting upright on the pillion, its forelegs tied around his neck, its bristled cheek next to his own. They looked a handsome couple. I saw a young man standing on the pillion-rider’s pegs, his arms at full stretch sideways holding a huge sheet of glass, while the driver weaved in and out of the masses of vehicles that clog the roads of the city. I saw two beautiful young women, slim and elegant, wearing lilac choeng sams, and evening gloves which covered their arms to their elbows (to protect their skin from the sun), on their heads those oriental conical hats, also lilac coloured. They rode straight-backed, complexions flawless and gleaming, looking as cool as Catgirl.