On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (29 page)

Shoeburyness is famous for its mud. It sits on the Thames Estuary and the tide goes out over a mile leaving a great expanse of primeval sludge through which less than fastidious people can wade. We took an incredulous and wary Christian Lehmann barefoot out on this stuff that could almost suck your foot off if you left it there too long. We took with us a bucket in which to collect cockles. After harvesting them from scrapes on the mud, making sure we weren’t trapped by an always swift incoming tide, we took the cockles home and fed them with bran to make them open their shells and so release any grit inside. Then we boiled them, let them cool, and finally dished them up on the plate for tea after spraying them with vinegar and powdering them with pepper.

I can’t remember whether Christian actually ate any, but he certainly found the gathering of them a unique experience.

Today Christian Lehmann is a highly respected Parisian author, some of whose novels include
La tribu (The Tribe)
,
La folie Kennaway (The Madness of Kennaway), The Ultimate Game
and one I would love to read if I was older,
Le crocodile de la bonde (The Crocodile in the Drain).
Several of his novels have been made into French movies. He also somehow managed dual careers, not only qualifying as an MD and running a surgery, but also finding time to write his many good novels. He and his lovely wife Veronique, a politician, still visit us on occasion, sometimes with their children. It is people like Christian, fired by the same fuel that drove me to first lift a pen, who make the world of writing something more for me than just sitting down day after day filling a blank page with words. When we talk together, we are effervescent with enthusiasm, the ideas fizzing from our brains.

When he was writing his first novel,
The Madness of Kennaway,
Christian called me at
Wychwater
and asked me if he could use my surname for the main protagonist. ‘What’s it about?’ I asked, flattered. ‘Is this fictional Kilworth to be the hero?’ There was a short silence on the other end of the line, before Christian replied, ‘Not
hero
, exactly. Among other things he’s a cold-blooded, psychopathic killer.’ ‘Hmm,’ I said, ‘let me think about that. No, old chum, I’d rather wait for a novel in which Kilworth saves the world, if you don’t mind.’ It worried me just a little that my French doctor friend believed my family name was perfect for a vicious, murdering, Englishman with no conscience.

We have laughed together over that call since, but then Christian is an unusual doctor. He has never seen the need to draw a definite line between medicine and his love of fantasy ficiton. I remember once visiting his surgery at Poissy, just outside Paris. There was a poster on his waiting room wall depicting a vampire with blood dripping from its fangs. I did wonder whether any potential patients of his had scampered off home on being confronted with that picture.

Some authors consider their ideas too precious to reveal to their fellow writers, but others – like me, like Peter Beere, like Rob Holdstock, like Christian Lehmann, like many others – they can’t wait to discuss them with their friends and get feedback on them. They love to talk ‘writing’ and no discussion is too trivial, be it how one came by a novel concept or the problem of finding a stunning title for the book. The latest films, novels, music, experience, all feed into the conversation, and we always come away after such talks burning to get back to the lonely business of getting the next chapter or tale onto that waiting white paper.

My other connection with Paris in the late ’80s, apart from Christian, were two warm-hearted Americans who lived there at the time. Scott Baker is an author who now resides in Monterey, California. At the time he and his wife Suzi were expats in Paris, where both did translations for various people. Scott and Suzi obviously knew many Parisian publishers and one of their friends was a man called Jacques Chambon, of Denoel Publishing. One night, while Annette and I were staying with them, they invited Jacques and his wife for a meal, hoping that Jacques would offer to publish my translated short story collection
The Songbirds of Pain
in Denoel’s
Presence du Futur
series.

‘Now remember,’ Scott warned me before the meal, ‘Jacques is especially proud of his wines. He will bring some bottles. I know you don’t usually drink wine, but this time just pretend, eh? You don’t want to offend him and it’ll all go that much smoother.’

I told Scott I would do my best, for I dislike wine intensely. I’m not teetotal, I love a gin and tonic, but wine and beer give me migraines. Maybe it’s the additives or something. Who knows? I just find it best to avoid them and stick to what suits my physical make-up.

Jacques and his wife arrived and the meal began. We got on a like a house on fire. However, I found that I could not drink Jacques’ wine, indeed a beautiful looking liquid in a beautiful looking bottle, for fear my head would explode halfway through the evening. So, with a little nudge to Annette, we surreptitiously began swapping glasses when no one was paying attention to us. The subterfuge went well. Annette is good at drinking wine and never seems to get tipsy. Finally the evening was drawing to an end and no decision had yet been announced on the book.

Jacques said, ‘Garry, before we can do business, I want to know – do you like Meryl Streep as an actress, or not?’

Meryl Streep had been around for some time by the late ’80s, but she irritated the hell out of me. She was one of those actresses who are regarded as great stars before actually making any decent movies. Everyone was talking about Meryl Streep, saying what a wonderful actress she was and how they loved her movies and thought her the greatest actress ever to hit the screen. And though
The Deer Hunter
is a terrific film she always seemed to be mooning around the place, softly weeping. She has one of those thin noses that go red around the nostrils when she cries. It makes me squirm. I know, I know, the fault is mine, but that’s how it is. Everyone else loved and still loves Meryl Streep, Annette included, but I still wince and squirm.

So I gave Jacques an honest answer.

‘I don’t like her,’ I replied.

‘Good,’ he said, stretching out a hand, ‘we can do business.’

Jacques didn’t like her either, but I never did find out whether it was the red nose that put him off too, because he then smiled at me slyly and said, ‘And may I congratulate you on finding a wife who is not only charming and lovely, but drinks wine like a real Parisian.’

Obviously, we had been observed.

Les Ramages de la Douleur
, the French edition of
The Songbirds of Pain
came out in 1989. My work has been published in twenty-two different languages now, from Korean to Indonesian, yet
Les Ramages de la Douleur
was special. The largest money advance I’ve ever had for a book was from Germany, but to be published by the French is like getting a painting into the National Gallery.

While I am writing about France and literature, I have to put down one of my lifelong puzzlements. The Frenchman Pierre Boulle wrote
The Bridge Over the River Kwai
a novel about an idiotic English officer who is demented enough to want to assist his Japanese captors – an enemy who has been relentlessly cruel towards the officer’s fellow prisoners, torturing them, murdering them, allowing them to die of disease and starvation – simply because he likes to see a good job done well. Excuse me M. Boulle, but here’s one Englishman who thinks you’re an arrogant Frenchman who’s made a lot of money out of mocking my countrymen and doesn’t understand why the rest of his nation can’t see that too. My puzzlement is why the British celebrate this novel which clearly ridicules them using a stereotype right out of a French handbook .

Equally, I have never understood why the American movie and play,
The Lion King
, isn’t abhorrent to the very nation which produced it. The USA is a republic which began life by detesting monarchs, thought that kingships were the very pit of evil, and yet this story written by one of their own vehemently supports the idea of hereditary rulership. Supports it even to the point where the weather gods are so outraged by the fact that an evil uncle has ursurped the throne, it ceases to rain.
The Lion King
is a Hollywood and Broadway hit. American audiences love it. Clearly, despite generations of our cousins over the other side of the pond protesting that royalty is the spawn of the Devil, a good many of them harbour in their psyche a longing to return to those good old days when they were persecuted for their religious beliefs and were happy not to govern themselves but to be maltreated and abused by a monarch who ruled through an accident of birth.

(PS Some of my best friends are French and American.)

~

I have said earlier that Annette introduced me to art and she has continued to put art galleries in my way throughout our long marriage.

Hopper is the first artist on my list, with his haunting gas stations and red-roofed farms. Unbeatable. Going back aways, the Pre-Raphaelites, but among their number Burne-Jones stands out for his painting of the expired knights caught in the deadly nets of giant brambles. The Impressionists, naturally, especially pointillists like Suerat. Those funny men, Miro and Paul Klee. Klee’s pen-and-ink primitive drawing of an angler and his fish still makes me laugh. David Hockney, being a Brit with lots of splash about him, has my attention, but I’ve always preferred the weirdness of Dali to the genius of Picasso, who like Gauguin moves me not. Gauguin’s South Sea Island pictures are too dark and gloomy for such a bright, colourful place populated by bright, colourful people. Paintings like Wyett’s
Christine’s World
, fascinate and chill me with their inferences. Chinese paintings, of Guilin’s strange mountains with their pines clinging to precipices, also draw my wonder. There are many many more artists of course, Turner and Constable among them, who can fill my hours with pleasant viewing and I’m most grateful to my wife for awakening my interest so early in our marriage in order that we could enjoy art together.

One picture I have lost. I saw it but once in the Tate Britain. I think it was by an artist named Baum and it is of two men, in classy cafe, sitting one either side of a small table. In the middle of the table is a thin vase containing a single flower. The men, though they are dressed in business suits, have the appearance of being conspirators. One of them is saying to the other, ‘We can’t do it without the rose’. What a brilliantly mysterious scenario. It has had me lying awake at nights wondering what is the rebellion or plot that needs this bloom to make it work? Of course, it is all fanciful, there could be no such scheme that needed a rose to bring about a revolution or mission, but the
idea
of it is so intriguing it clings to the edge of my conscious like a tree on a Guilin cliff.

There is another form of art, which can be found in comics. Of course as a boy I was hooked by Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel
and other preternatural heroes. Later, as a grown man, I read the comic strips in newspapers and enjoyed Charlie Brown and Snoopy. But the one artist whose brilliance shines past or through every other brilliant cartoonist is Bill Watterson who invented Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin’s battles with his parents, especially with a father who when asked by Calvin for a scientific explanation of where the sun goes at night, informs his son gravely that it is pulled down by piece of string in the hands of an Australian Aborigine, and is then rebuked by his wife, are classic. Hobbes, the stuffed tiger that becomes philosopher and Calvin’s mentor, being fiercely real when adults are not around, is magnificent. These comic strips are the work of a genius and anyone who hasn’t discovered them needs to do so before they die or they will not have experienced genuine laughter. I have every book of Calvin and Hobbes that was ever published.

Poetry has always been with me and has needed no introduction by wife or friend. I have loved poetry since my first nursery rhyme and will do so until the grave. I love Robert Burns for all his work, William Carlos Williams for ‘El Hombre’ and ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, Coleridge for ‘Kubla Khan’, Emily Dickenson for the lines ‘
Parting is all we know of Heaven, and all we need of Hell’
. Tennyson for ‘The Eagle’
and ‘Ulysses’, Ted Hughes for ‘Snowdrop’ and many others, Ralph Waldo Emerson for ‘Brahma’ – absolutely terrifyingly enigmatic, James Elroy Flecker for ‘Stillness’, Colonel Lovelace for the lines
‘I could not love thee dear, so much, loved I not honour more
,’ (though I am not in agreement with the sentiment, but in sympathy with a man trapped in his time), Laurie Lee for ‘The Wild Trees’, Roy Campbell for ‘Choosing a Mast’, oh many, many more. But my all-time favourite, because it fills me with such an overwhelming sense of what is lost, is William Soutar’s ‘The Tryst’, the last verse of which has two lovers parting forever, with the narrator telling his listeners, ‘
Sae luely, luely, cam she in – sae luely she was gaen – and wi’ her all my summer days – like they had never been.’

21. Hong Kong

In 1987 my yearning to revisit the Far East of my youth was almost overwhelming. I was enjoying my life as a writer, a boyhood dream come true. I was now earning very good advances and had well overtaken my salary at C&W, so I felt established and well able to provide for the future. Annette too was earning a good reliable salary, one which did not require months of waiting for the cheque to arrive in the post. Our son Richard was in the process of backpacking around the globe and was at that time with our friends Peter and Carolyn Worth in Melbourne. Chantelle was happily married to Mark Lillie, who was making his way up the ladder in the banking world and doing very nicely. My cat Dylan Tom was the only dependant and he was actually well able to feed himself on the local fauna and was in truth a savage beast without a conscience. He bit or scratched those who tried to stroke him, only accepting a human touch on his terms. He would deign to climb onto my lap, or curl up close to me, as long as I did not reach out a hand. I did at one time think of offering Dylan as an understudy for the monster in the film
Alien
, since he had the same kind of ripping, tearing motion when devouring a mouse, blackbird, or at least once, a pigeon.

However, the wild Dylan was unjustifiably wronged on occasion. Annette came home one day and after putting the shopping away went into the living-room to find Dylan sleeping on the living-room table. This was of course forbidden. My wife stood there and yelled at him for at least five minutes to remove himself. Eventually the real Dylan came wandering in from the kitchen to find out what all the noise was about and found his mistress shouting at her own fur hat.

One evening around Easter, when Annette’s social working was getting on top of her, she said, ‘I passed a travel agent’s today and saw a holiday in Penang.’

Malaysia, my old stamping grounds.

‘How much?’ I asked.

She told me.

We had not long paid out for our house extension and the coffers were a unusually low at that precise point in time.

‘Next year?’ I said.

However, when she went to work the next day I got in my old beat-up Mitsubishi Colt, the one owned for years by a Suffolk farmer and still covered in bits of straw in the back, and drove to the travel agent. Using my credit card I booked the holiday, then drove to Basildon Hospital where Annette’s office was situated – she worked with the Mental Health Team there – and told her what I’d done. We were both sure it was the right thing to do, because we were both thirsting for faraway places. She was ecstatic and so was I. Singapore and Malaysia were now a long way off in my youth and I had ever dreamed of going back again.

We had a tremendous holiday which revived all my passion for the Far Eastern countries and climes. On return we found a letter on the mat containing a cheque for almost exactly the amount that the holiday had cost us. I had sold a book in Italy and this was the advance.

‘It was obviously meant to be,’ said my philosophic partner in life. ‘We should go again.’

We tried Voluntary Services Oversees first, thinking we might as well do some good in the world at the same time as fulfilling our own desires. There was a job in Thailand for a couple. No pay of course, but food and lodging. On application we went to Sloane Square wondering why a charity needed to have a house right in the heart of London’s most expensive property area.

It was obvious from the start of the interview, mainly conducted by a young man who appeared to assume that since I’d been in the British military for nearly twenty years I must be a right wing bigot. I was continually asked what my prejudices had been during my overseas tours. The idea that military men are more racist than civilians is a complete myth. I have found far more bigotry among English villagers who have barely come into contact with Africans and Asians, than soldiers and airmen who have been stationed in foreign countries and who have lived among them.

The assumption was particularly ironic, since at the time I was a member of the International Defence and Aid Fund for South Africa (IDAF), a secret organisation raised by the pacifist John Collins, a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral. The fund was for the assistance of hundreds of black South African families, including children, who went on trial accused of ‘treason’ and crimes against apartheid. I was recruited by my friends Andrew and Cheryl Hall, who were also members. Every month I would receive a registered envelope containing a large sum of cash in notes. I had initially been given a list of the names and addresses of twelve black South African families, to whom I would write letters as if they were old friends and include a ‘present’ in with the letter. My instructions were ‘never use headed paper with telephone numbers for family correspondence’ and ‘never discuss these matters with anyone.’

The money was used for legal fees and assistance for families whose main earner was incarcerated. If a family failed to reply to two letters in a row, I had to inform a London monk named Friar Sherrington, and was usually instructed to drop the contact from my list. It probably meant that my mail had been intercepted by the South African police or the family member I was writing to had themselves been arrested.

Annette still has a cotton tablecloth with elephants printed on it, that was sent as a gift to us by one of the families who did indeed believe we were actually supplying the money. It was the last we heard from that particular correspondent. We were told she had been killed during one of the anti-apartheid demonstrations. In 1989 IDAF provided the funds for 198 children’s cases alone. In all £100,000,000 was smuggled into South Africa by Canon Collins and his helpers and though BOSS, the South African Secret Police attempted to infiltrate and break up IDAF in UK it never managed to do so. Unfortunately Sweden’s arm of IDAF was destroyed by BOSS, but the three-hundred or so UK participants in this cloak-and-dagger game were never discovered. (Anyone interested in reading more about IDAF should log on to the website www.canoncollins.org.uk/about/about/HistoryIDAF.shtml)

On the VSO front, the panel did not impress Annette either, since they did not seem to know there was any difference between mental health and mental handicap, even after she had queried their definitions.

We failed to get that particular job, though they did ask us to apply again when another opening came up. It seemed from further enquiry that we should have been more altruistic in presenting ourselves. According to someone we met in the hallway who had been successful, we should have proclaimed a desire to save the world, whereas we naively thought having a huge amount of overseas experience (in a time when people did not travel abroad as they do these days) and having lived in conditions and climates that people in the UK might find oppressive, it was a good bet we would stay put once they sent us there. It was a fact that the drop-out rate among those who were chosen to go was high and indeed one of those who were sent on the mission we had applied for was one of those drop-outs.

‘I’m going to start applying for jobs abroad anyway,’ Annette told me, in one of her determined moods. ‘We’re not beaten yet. No more Mrs Nice Guy!’

It took a year, but finally she got an interview for a job in Hong Kong, working for the military schools in the colony. If successful she would be in the Child Guidance Centre of Osborne Barracks, her boss the Educational Psychologist attached to the British Army. She would have the honorary rank of Captain, thus eclipsing her lowly ex-RAF sergeant husband.

She did in fact, while we were lying in bed once, say in a commanding tone, ‘Ah-hum fetch me a cup of tea, will you sergeant?’

I did indeed fetch her the cup of tea, but I promised that it was the last one she would get ever get from me if she continued to pull rank.

Robin Moseley, the ed psych, was on the interviewing panel along with a severe-looking female who took an instant dislike to Annette. This woman whispered to Mr Moseley that she believed Annette was not a real blonde, thus quietly angering him. The assumption that he would hire someone for the colour of their hair made his hackles rise and and gave him cause to favour the only female in the short list.

Of the six candidates they appeared to settle for a young man in his thirties and Annette went home prepared to hear that she had failed.

We were at Rob and Sarah’s house – they frequently put us up when we were in London – when a phone call came from two women friends who were using our house for the night.

‘There’s a huge package arrived,’ chirruped Sandy, of Sandy and Andy, of the Country Maids, ‘from the Ministry of Defence.’

Annette and I danced up and down the hallway, much to the consternation of Rob and Sarah, who couldn’t understand why we wanted to go to the other end of the world for three years. The big package could only mean one thing. Annette had got the job. Otherwise it would have been a slim letter saying sorry, but you were rubbish at the interview.

Indeed, it turned out that the favoured young man had a girlfriend he had no intention of marrying. However he had wanted to take her with him to his new job in Hong Kong. Unfortunately for him the military in the 1980s took a Victorian moral stance on marriage and they told him they could not countenance employing a couple living in sin. This may sound incredulous today, but now is now, that was then, and so the young pretender was told he could not have the job, which then passed to the next candidate.

Annette.

Sorry mate, but yippee!

Shaney and Mark were excited for us. Shaney had given birth to our first grandchild, Conrad, a terrific bundle whose first pair of shoes I lost when I took him shopping in a baby-backpack. Also the first time nanna and grampa babysat for him, he screamed the house down. We wondered how we managed to raise our own kids when we couldn’t handle the next generation. It should be easy, but in fact the weight of responsibility feels ten times greater and grandparents always imagine they have to keep their grandchild entertained and wildly happy.

We managed to contact Rick in Melbourne and told him of our plans. He was very encouraging too, being a globe-trotter of some consequence by that time. His two spells in Israel had been followed by this round-the-world journey and at that particular moment in time he was driving a baker’s van in Melbourne and eating a lot of cream cakes. However, Rick never needed to worry about getting overweight. He has always been as lean and hard as whipcord. He told us he was going on to pick fruit in Queensland later that month, but hoped to visit us in Hong Kong after returning to UK. At his present rate of progress, considering he had to cross the Pacific and the United States, that would not be tomorrow or the next day. He still had adventures ahead of him.

We had one big problem before we left for Hong Kong: what to do with the house. As fortune would have it, my old scouser mate had recently remarried to a lovely young woman, Marti. She had found a position in our local hospital and they needed somewhere to live. Our house, we said, was at their disposal. We charged them a nominal rent and they and their border collie would keep the house warm for us and mow the lawn. I told Pete I would get him a good ride-on mower to do the two acres, but I knew from experience that even with the latest machines the hedging and mowing would become very very tiresome.

Later, there would be a clash of personalities, not between people but between our half-feral cat Dylan Tom, and Pete and Marti’s rather gentle collie, Max. When Dylan realised he would have to share a home with a stinking bloody dog his eyes widened and his nostrils flared with indignation. He soon sent the feline message that if this arrangement was permanent, he was going to be the boss. Apparently he used to sit in a high place – on the spiral staircase or a windowsill – and if Max happened to stroll unawares beneath him, a paw would flash out and a claw would rake a nose. The poor collie must have walked in fear for three years, never knowing from which direction to expect the next attack.

During the previous few years I had visited Pete at his remote home among the drystone walls and rushing, rocky becks of the rugged Lancashire dales. Pete, who has the physique and facial looks of Charles Bronson during the actor’s best years, has always been a slight enigma to me. He is immensely talented, his writing skills excellent, yet there is a half-hidden underlying vein of self-doubt that forces him to rewrite much of his work. His children’s books draw on a wry Liverpudlian humour that I have always envied. We wrote a novel together called
Dog People
which has never been published, about a man living alone who is suddenly invaded by a group of strangers. They take over first his garden, then move into his house, living in a corner of the kitchen, until finally the owner moves out and leaves the place to the newcomers.

Pete is a wonderful friend and a good man. He loves his dogs, there has always been at least one collie at his heels, and he is at heart more of a romantic than the tough guy he looks.

After his divorce from his second wife, before he met Marti, Pete came down to us at
Wychwater
feeling depressed. In order to cheer himself up he had dyed his hair with henna. ‘Why don’t you do the same, Gaz?’ he suggested. ‘Go red young man!’ I had recently grown my hair long so entering into the spirit of the thing I bought some hair dye and followed his fashion. Only, I was a few years older than Pete and bore many grey patches on my thinning scalp. These did not come out red. They turned bright pink. Not only that, my hair frizzed up, to emulate the cloud-like hairstyle of Art Garfunkel. Every day, when I went shopping, I had to pass small children playing in the park, and they would rush to the fence screaming, ‘Dandelion! Dandelion!’ It mattered not to those barbaric infants that dandelion seeds are not in any way pink, but fluffy-white.

So, Pete and Marti would look after the house for us.

Next, in that package that had arrived, was a form I had to fill in as the ‘dependant’ accompanying Captain AJ Kilworth during her tour in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong. It was a form that was usually filled in by wives of serving soldiers. A clerk had obviously gone through the form with a pen and wherever the word ‘wife’ appeared, he had crossed through it and replaced it with ‘husband’ in – as John Murry would have put it – the small neat handwriting of the illiterate. I filled in the necessary blanks but was confounded when I came to the sentence ‘If pregnant, date of husband’s confinement’. Clearly our clerk had become so bored with his work he had failed to pay attention to the small print.