Semi-Detached (28 page)

It was
a deadly business. Too little ink and fifty pages of blankness would emerge.
Too much, and the black, adhesive gunge would spit out over my Mr Byrite
trousers. The pages of used paper had to be delicately transferred to a bin
without getting them stuck to a shirt. None of this was made any easier by the
early hour, the cramped space or the hangover. We would run around the ship,
trailing paw marks up the companionways to the chef’s office in his smelly
kitchens, delivering the news-sheet to the thunderous engine rooms (where an
engineer would mutely hang it on his clipboard), up to the bridge, into the
lobbies of senior officers and under the doors of the cabins of the passengers.
The ship, of course, chugged on all night.

Reaching
Kos, the headmaster of the ship and the captain went ashore at dawn. Callow as
I was, I never really spotted that the headmaster looked out for us. He took
two of his school office assistants, although we had no function at all except
to look on. We clambered down into a lifeboat and chugged over a limpid bay in
that early, violet, tremulous Mediterranean light, before the rest of the ship
had even woken, slinking to the town quay, on an insiders’ visit, always the
most exciting way to go. It was the best way to arrive anywhere — by boat.
Waiting at the top of the steps was a little knot of men in suits — the mayor
and dignitaries of the town — probably seeking assurance that the ship’s
juvenile complement weren’t going to pillage their island.

By nine
everybody else was ashore. The islanders somehow found a bicycle for every
passenger aboard. The girls pedalled off across the island. A thousand sturdy
Canadian legs pumped through mountains smothered in wild flowers, up to the
temple of Hippocrates and along empty coastal roads. We set off in pursuit. I
was with Jon. A handsome bearded Canadian himself, he had wildly overstretched
his fraternization. He bad planned at least six or seven separate liaisons. We
pedalled furiously around the island to preassigned meeting points. But
wherever we settled with one of his girlfriends, another would come cycling
along the street calling his name and waving plaintively.

It was
a relief when the ship docked back in Malta, even though my vicarious
fraternizations with Bev, Beth, Dale, Karen and Jill had all, somehow, to be
concluded simultaneously On the last night, the band played ‘Auld Lang Syne’,
all the girls burst into tears, and I collected a lot of Canadian postcodes. I
had to explain, where I could, that poor Jon had been held up by his duties,
while he hid in his cabin.

The
school office assistants decided that we would plan more carefully for the next
voyage and try to stop behaving like starving monkeys in a banana shop.
Unsuccessfully we attempted to make sense of the passenger manifest and
repaired to our eyrie above the dock as the buses took away our girls. The
returning coaches disgorged six hundred screaming Scottish schoolchildren
between the ages of eleven and fourteen, and they roared aboard. With the hiss
of a. pneumatic coach door,
Adolescent Lust at Sea
became
The Pure
Hell of St Trinian’s.

During
five cruises in twelve weeks I visited almost every port in the Mediterranean
for six hours. We trudged in a mob down the streets of ancient Ephesus. I spent
an overnight anchorage in Istanbul haggling for a rhomboid leather jacket in
the grand bazaar. (It was made of ‘lamp leather’.) In Santorini we ate a kebab
lunch while the ship disgorged its screaming horde, mounted them-on to hundreds
of donkeys for a ride to the top of the volcano rim and promptly took them
straight back down again. In Izmir I found the Afghan coat which had become
more smelly than fashionable by the time I got it delivered home. (‘You will
have to have it treated for flies,’ I wrote to my mother. ‘Don’t worry, only
ten per cent of them are infected.’) In Tunisia we peered at three or four
disconsolate lumps of stone, pondered how efficiently the Romans had razed
Carthage and then hurried back to our
1950s
world for supper. Later in
the year, we sailed to the Baltic. I went to Finland, Stockholm and Denmark,
with more Scottish kids aboard.

One
morning we woke up in a fjord in Norway: the ship like a model in a slab-sided
stone bath, and, at the far end, a tiny village, a needle spire and a whiff of
smoke waiting in the clear back-lit air. The boats were lowered. Six hundred
hollering children jumped in. A Viking invasion in reverse, we were ferried to
the hamlet, and they sacked the town.

Five
hours later, the masters at arms stood at the companionway, reaching
eleven-year-olds out of the boats, turning them upside down and shaking them
vigorously Key rings, model churches, souvenir pencils and bottles of illicit
beer tumbled on the ridged steel deck to be gathered up into a hamper and
returned. The ship delayed sailing that evening, so that the frightened
shopkeepers could come aboard and reclaim some of their looted stock.

It was
around then that the staff captain, a small man with the demeanour of the Duke
of Edinburgh kept waiting by a pop star, took to glaring at me. I think it was
my hair. Lounging in the saloon, running up bar bills on a chitty or chatting
up the younger teachers, I would glance up to see him on the other side of the
wood-block dance floor, incinerating me with a glare. Once, I was asked to set
up a microphone for a lecture. He stood at the back of the empty hall for five
minutes, sporting an expression of malevolence that would have felled a dog.

Perhaps
it was this that made me feel that I was in an early George Orwell novel.
Before we reached Alexandria, it was patiently explained to me, once and for
all, that ‘these Goan people are simply not as intelligent as white people’.

I
protested. ‘What on earth makes you think that?’

The
officers at the table gaped in bemusement. One of them laughed. ‘Look around
this room, for Christ’s sake. Who are sitting at the table? White men. Who are
serving them? Black men. Do you think that would be the case if black men were
as intelligent as us?’

Everybody
seemed to have run away to sea. The banquets, so lavish, became repetitive. The
horizons so broad, were, in fact, bounded by the bow and stern of the ship. The
lovely girls, who swooned over the handsome third, were there to romance but
never to touch. The visits were to the same docks, year after year, cruise
after cruise, and only the intelligently curious headmaster and his lecturers
seemed bothered to go ashore. The rest preferred their world hermetically
sealed, but were in reality suffering from island fever. And I was only a
visitor. Nonetheless, after I stepped off the boat in Naples, my letter home
was filled with regret at leaving.

I
disembarked from the
Uganda
with a tightening around the chest. For the
first time in my life, my days were completely unregulated. As I write this, I
am trying to check whether it can possibly be true. I was eighteen. I must,
surely, have separated myself from social connections before. I must have been
responsible for setting my own bedtime, or finding my own meal. For Christ’s
sake, I had been to Glastonbury and eaten boiled kale, hadn’t I? But I had
never faced an entire country like this.

A flush
of panic washed over me. I bought a pair of bargain sunglasses to assuage it.
Aviator-style, satisfyingly cheap, they were black enough, I hoped, to hide my
wide-eyed innocence, but probably silly enough to mark me out to what, in my
credulity, I imagined was a wholly rapacious population. I was a
straggle-haired eighteen-year-old would-be cool dude, humping a suitcase
through hot streets, brusquely fending off propositions from taxi drivers: ‘Where
you wan’ go?’

Yes,
indeed, where did I wan’ go? That magic feeling. ‘Nowhere to go.’ For the first
time in my life I had nobody to talk to in the evening, nobody to share a meal
with, nobody to make a joke with about the rank smell emanating from the
drains, nobody to expect me to get in, nobody to tell me whether the place I
was going to sleep was safe. Oh, Mummy!

I went
to Rome. The train had seemed the safest emergency option. I could stick my
luggage on the rack and sit down for a bit, while the auburn country wound
past. I don’t think I admired the railway system. I put any differences from
suburban London down to Latin primitivism. But I was happy to get away from the
confusing south and anxious to distance myself from the cruise ship. Moving on
felt safe. It delayed decisions. Besides, I bad to see Rome.

In the
autumn of 2004 I went back there for a fortnight. Was it the first time since?
It seemed so comfortable and familiar and so unchanged. At about half past six
I hurried my wife Jo out into the street. It was Sunday night, and Rome was
alive like a dignified cocktail party. Most of the shops were open, and the
passeggiari full of people just walking, many arm in arm like us, a few with
dogs, husbands and wives, men together, girls laughing. They were peering and
assessing, presumably spotting tiny variations in detail in the goods on offer.
Women’s fashions do, after all, change, but Roman men wear muted colours,
cashmere pullovers, tweed jackets and soft shirts in subtle stripes and
delicate fabrics, and a hundred small stores seem to offer them infinite tiny
varieties of their discreet, unvarying, preppy taste.

Even as
we joined in and thought about some serious shopping ourselves, we noticed that
the shops were closing, that the streets were thinning. The carabinieri let the
cars through along the Corso. The cafés were still busy. The flower stalls
would stay open until late — someone might want to offer apologies or take an
offering. It’s not the brisk, alienating outdoor life of Paris, London or New
York, where early evening is all a frenetic rush to get on to mid-evening entertainment.
There aren’t many cinemas round the old city. Theatres are thin on the ground.
The promenade was the main event, and by eight it was seriously over, and the
stragglers were thinking about getting off home.

Nothing
seemed to have changed since 1970 except me. Then, I was burning with A-level
artistic pretension, part of which involved a mini grand tour of ‘great art’
and ‘important architecture’, but I had standards. I was a good, cold,
northern chapel sort of a chap and on my guard against curlicues. The Baroque
dismayed me. Gold things worried me. I could just about cope with the
grotesque, but was suspicious of Bernini. On first walking into St Peter’s I
recoiled from what seemed an Aunty Betty, gold-plated, glittery notion of the
sublime.

But I
was prepared to mug up, and public collections are good companions. In Rome I
busied myself with the sights. Pompously, I seem hardly to have bothered with
the seventeenth century and addressed myself exclusively to the historical
certainties of Ancient Rome, trudging to the Forum, tramping on to the Colosseum,
wandering out to the baths of Caracallus, even managing to walk to the Appian
Way, and then indeed some small distance along it; a restless vade mecum,
following other people’s noses, ticking off the guide-books’ five-star
attractions on a forced route march. As long as I was planning my budget,
carefully calculating where to eat, comparing prices in small restaurants,
estimating which place would serve me the cheapest spaghetti, or which
pantel-leria could provide me with three huge slices of white-spotted
mortadella, I was fully engaged with my quest. Overnight I had changed from
spendthrift financial hooligan to a penny-pinching ascetic. I filled my letters
with accounts of my cheap meals and careful budgeting. It probably gave me
comfort too. By following my parents’ instructions, by living up to their
standards. I was still in Epping in my purse.

When I
had exhausted my restlessness, I went back to the little room I bad rented near
the station. It was a ‘walk-up’ and smelled of cooking. The owner wore a vest.
I sat and wrote up my accounts in a tiny room behind a sliding door while
television jabber echoed down the marble staircase. In the morning, I pushed
through a beaded curtain and ate dry rolls and apricot jam with black coffee at
a Formica-topped table and then hurried out to pound on, talking to no one all
day, until finally leaving the cats to the dusk around the Trajan’s Forum. One
night I went to a concert presented by the British Council in an ornate room
full of stacking chairs. It was sparsely attended by earnest pairs of girls in
glasses and thin men, leaning demented faces on one hand. In the second half,
the musicians got to their feet and plucked randomly at the piano strings
through the lifted lid of the Bechstein. I felt deliciously separate from
everybody, so much so that when my school friend Andrew arrived, I actually
resented his presence.

So, now
in 2005 I have in my hands a plastic-backed exercise book. I would have bought
it in a ‘tabacchi’ in Italy. It records everything I did from
1
April
until
19
April 1972. Here, at last, is a proper record — a gate, a
window into the real obsessions of the eighteen-year-old me.

I have
written ‘Griff Rhys Jones’ on the first page (‘Now get out your exercise book
and write your name clearly in the front of it’). There were some other vaguely
figurative decorations, including bald-headed space-rulers, a female resembling
Sandy Denny at a woodland folk meet, and a booted space soldier firing a ray
blaster.

Despite
the missing first half of the journal, I know that Andrew joined me in Rome. I
know I despaired of losing my pensione, until a woman realized my dilemma and
took me downstairs to find another, bigger, double room. I know that when
Andrew arrived I dutifully tramped round all the ancient sites again and showed
them to him as if I owned them. I know that this began to irritate him. I know
that we left for Siena for three days before we headed to Florence to start our
art course.