A World of My Own (11 page)

I was in a very confused state in 1973 about a play I had written rather in the line of
The Potting Shed
. Peter Glenville had criticized it very severely and I began to rewrite it. I quite realized its faults. There was a scene where the principal male character knelt and made a long prayer. I altered the stage direction to indicate that he sat on the edge of his bath, and prepared to cut the prayer drastically, but to my surprise it was only two lines long. Suddenly I realized that the play was very short, and with an exhilarating sense of creativity I began to add lines, and a new scene right at the end.

I have travelled as much, I believe, in the World of My Own as I have in the Common World. My travels in both have not been without drama, but in My Own World one travels at the speed of the fastest jet.

I seemed to have only just embarked, in 1965, when I found myself in Sierra Leone—no longer the colonial country I had known and grown to love during the war, but part of independent Africa—where my young daughter was on trial for her life. She had been heard to criticize the President.

There seemed to be no defence counsel to cross-examine witnesses, and I couldn’t understand the
tribal language they spoke. Was it Temne? Was it Kru? Was it Iguazu? One man strode across the court making an oration which he interrupted to shake my hand. I recognized him. I remembered how, more than twenty years before, I had cracked his skull with a stone, but he bore no malice. We liked each other. He was a chief and his name was Tumba and I wished he could be in charge of the country.

During an adjournment I sought in vain to find a solicitor. I wished to appeal to the judge and tell him that my daughter had only been in the country for a few hours; anything she had said she must have learnt from me, and I wished to take her place in the dock. All must have ended happily, for my daughter is very much alive.

Sometime in the 1960s I was cruising at night off some point of Arabia. In the interior not far away was the ruined castle of Orbutum. There were stories that somewhere along this coast were the lost mines of King Solomon. Mysterious lights shone in the sky above the castle, and there was a legend that, if you named someone you had loved, a light would fall and indicate where the treasure lay. I
whispered a name (a Swedish name) but nothing happened—was it perhaps that I had not loved enough?

None the less, I persuaded the captain that we should search in the ruins. We had to take out permits for our hunt, guaranteeing to keep no more than one percent of what we found. That was no matter in the captain’s view—they would never know what the correct percentage was. But before we could start our hunt, an American naval officer arrived who claimed sole rights. We told him we had priority, but he indicated that that meant nothing. In his papers it was printed that the American government kept the castle of Orbutum in repair for tourists, and in return the government had the first right to prospect. There was no arguing with the American government.

In November 1964 I was lucky enough to have an interview with the Emperor of China, in the city which I still prefer to call Peking. I was travelling with my friend Michael Meyer, the translator and biographer of Ibsen, but he proved a poor travelling companion as he continually suffered from headaches and other small ailments.

I was dressed unsuitably in a sports shirt, and I began to apologize to the Emperor for my informal attire. The Emperor surprised me. He half ran, half slid into the room, a thin elderly man dressed in a black-tailed suit but without the tie. He was followed by some high mandarins in traditional dress, and after a few words they took us driving in the streets of Peking. At one moment the Emperor inexplicably left us, and a moment later we heard him calling from behind. We had not time to turn our taxi before he reached us in another taxi and transferred back to our car.

I was tired of the streets and walls of Peking and suggested for the sake of Michael, who had never been in China before, that we might see a little of the country outside. ‘I remember among the rice fields a small green village around a temple, very beautiful.’

The Emperor left us again and one old mandarin asked about my previous visit. I wanted to show him some lovely photographs in colour which I had taken, but I found in my pocketbook only grey sad photos of naked starving people (and a few of police violence which I shuffled hastily away). I couldn’t help showing him the others, but I tried to minimize the effect by localizing it in place and time. ‘They were taken,’ I said, ‘that year when there were bad droughts in Kyoto.’

It was in June 1965 that I found myself in Syria during a horrible massacre of children, even babies. I had seen something rather like it once in Damascus on a feast day, but not on this scale. I was one of a party and I thought it unwise to go out in the streets, but I was overruled—there was said to be no danger for foreigners. Men were going around with knives, and later, when we were sitting at dinner, a woman came in with a baby on a platter, and she sliced it in half as you open a bag.

In July of the same year I was travelling through Australia, a country I had never known in the Common World except for one day in Sydney. My car had got sunk in a stream and four men helped me to lift it out. I felt grateful until one of them started talking of the cost of ‘salvage’. He said that I owed them between eighty pounds and a hundred and twenty pounds. He was a real bully and I felt scared of him. In the end I paid out the eighty pounds. He took it grudgingly. He obviously hated the English.
I knew that I couldn’t continue to live in such a country.

I seem to have been travelling a great deal in 1965, for two weeks after Australia I found myself in Liberia on a visit for the
Sunday Times
. It was more than thirty years since I had walked through Liberia with my cousin Barbara in the world I share with others. A great deal had changed in Monrovia, the capital. I found myself in what could truthfully be called a luxury hotel. My purpose was to interview various members of the government, and I asked someone how I could set about this. ‘Nothing easier,’ he told me. ‘Leave it to your secretary. She’ll manage.’ And manage she did. I found I had a rendezvous arranged with nearly everyone except the President—and I was very glad not to see him, for he had every reason to hate me, since he was Doctor Duvalier, late of Haiti, Papa Doc.

The same month found me again in West Africa, where there was a dangerous situation with some villagers who were enraged against the whites. It was suggested that someone unarmed should go in and talk to them. Not without some fear, I volunteered.
I joined another man and we went in together. Someone had questioned my qualifications and I replied that I had always liked Africans. The situation was tense in the village, but all passed off well. As we left, we met a group of nuns who were only too pleased to see us.

I was walking with four companions through Moscow at night, but a KGB car frightened my friends and they left me alone. I thought it best to go up to the KGB officers of my own accord and ask the way to the Europa Hotel. The officers said, ‘Get in the car. We’ll take you there.’ At the hotel someone brought a high-chair for the second officer, and I could see now that he was a dwarf. I asked him why people were not allowed in the streets at night. He replied, ‘We want the streets to be safe.’ I said, ‘Safe for whom, if nobody’s allowed in them?’ He admitted that I had a point there he hadn’t thought of.

I was taken by car across a frontier to Havana. In a bureau there I spoke to a member of the government.
My friend who had brought me assumed I would now be given a car and would travel south, but I was getting tired of the Cuban revolution, and unwilling to take risks. The minister as usual was quite unco-operative. My friend said that all the priests had left and the countryside was in the hands of the suffragettes—magnificent-looking women, but what horrors! I told the minister that I had written much in favour of the revolution, but I had had no help at all from his side. He said evasively, ‘You have seen more than we have.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘None of us has seen a priest drunk.’ He was referring to a character in my last article—a priest I had seen in an aeroplane when I was returning home.

While I was in South Africa I read an account in an Afrikaans newspaper of a police interrogation which I had suffered. Everybody sympathized with me. I took off my left glove to show a rather twisted hand, but I refused to accuse the police of torture. ‘They were just angry at my answers,’ I said. I felt rather proud of my generous attitude, but at the same time secretly pleased at being regarded as a hero. ‘It was a woman who twisted your fingers, wasn’t it?’ ‘To tell you the truth, I only remember two men. Perhaps
there was a woman there. I seem to remember very little of what happened.’ I thought I would try to send a message to my friend Etienne Leroux, a novelist I admired, to say that I was in Cape Town, but I didn’t want to get him into trouble so I thought I would use the name Verdant, which he might recognize as Greene.

I had just been reading with great pleasure (and I had marked many passages) a new translation of the Bible by my friend George Brown, the Labour politician. I liked particularly his treatment of the Psalms, which had always bored me. George had left only stray fragments of them, so that they gave some of the intriguing interest we feel for the scraps of a mutilated papyrus.

In reading Boswell I came across this remark by Samuel Johnson, which I found amusing. It concerned farting.

‘The Canons kept the wind under their robes until the smell could be attributed to the ladies, or else
the ladies had waited until the wind could be attributed to the Canons.’

A crowded party, everyone helping themselves to food and drink. I joined Claud Cockburn, who was talking to a young writer with the surname Graham. They were discussing George Orwell. I said that 1984 was a bad novel, like all his novels. It was only his essays which were good.

A Jesuit priest called Blunden wanted to talk to me about a criticism I had made of the Pope. When we met I asked him if he was a relation of my friend the poet Edmund Blunden. He said, ‘No,’ and made a derogatory remark about his poetry. He said Blunden had run out of steam.

I replied that that happened to everyone with age, and he had left a fine body of work behind him. He admitted that ‘The Midnight Skaters’ was a good poem, and I tried to remember the title of another which ended with the line ‘Look up with hatred
through the glass.’ I started glancing through a collection of his, but I couldn’t identify the poem.