The Road to Zagora Read online

  Flic and I had different childhoods. My playmates were the sons of architects and solicitors while Flic played with the kids from the council prefabs (prefabricated houses built during the war) and climbed over the wall into her own garden to scrump apples, not telling her friends she lived there. She went to a private nursery school, a convent school, and what might be called a finishing school in Oxford. I went to a good junior school and then a grammar school (clever kids only), in Kingston-upon-Thames. I see that already some of the differences are beginning to look like similarities. The truth is that while social class defined people from our parent’s generation (imagine what leaving school at fourteen did to my mum and dad’s confidence), it didn’t affect us so much at all. I have never for a moment felt disadvantaged because of wealth or class. Those things are a sideshow, a source of interest and often enough amusement, that’s all. The cultural differences between Flic and myself are mostly fun. Take, for instance, the subject of vocabulary.

  There was a big wedding at Flic’s mum’s house recently and I was amused to see that the portaloos installed for the occasion had the word toilet covered up and replaced with the word lavatory. I can imagine Flic’s oldest brother seeing the toilets, as I call them, and muttering the word vulgar, or, even better, ghastly – words I wouldn’t dream of using. Sometimes the upper-middle classes make good use of the word extraordinary. It’s pronounced like this: ex-STRORD-dinary, with a strong emphasis on a random syllable. Flic is one of six and their posh accent diminishes in direct proportion to their ages. So Flic and her younger sister Alice talk almost normally. But Anna, who is five years older than Flic, comes out with a highly accented GHAST-ly and even, on occasion, ex-STRORD-dinary. I don’t mind. It makes me smile.

  Other words? Well, dinner, is out of the question. What was it Flic was taught? Only dogs and servants have dinner. I may be exaggerating, only dogs and children I think it was. The correct word is, of course, supper. Just as settee is quite out of the question and sofa is right. Lounge is inadmissible and sitting room is the proper word.

  The upper-middle classes also take delight in eccentric nicknames. Among Flic’s friends and family you can meet with Twitch, Miney, Gog, Foff, Fluff, Feathers and many more. And Flic, short for Felicity, has been known in her family by that name from a very early age. In fact eccentricity is encouraged among such people, in great contrast to the what will the neighbours think mentality of my upbringing.

  If we go back to my grandparents’ day the differences between our families are greater. My sisters both remember going to the dog races with my grandmother. Gran would bet on a greyhound, telling Margaret, my younger sister you’ll get that new coat I promised you if that dog comes in. Margaret never did get the coat. My aunt Jean remembers, as a small child, collecting granddad’s best suit from the pawn shop. Gran was a woman of high spirits with a zest for life that made her inclined to spend money that she didn’t have. So it was that my granddad’s suit was pawned during the week to provide some extra cash and then on a Saturday morning, after receiving Friday’s pay packet, one of the children would be sent to get it back. This, like the dog racing, was meant to be a secret from granddad, or Pop, as we knew him.

  I can just about remember my grandparent’s house in Willesden, North London. I remember Gran rubbing my face with a flannel so hard, as if you weren’t clean if it didn’t hurt. And I just about remember the big family gatherings where we would dance The Okey Cokey or Knees Up Mother Brown and Pop would play the spoons. I’m not sure what Flic’s family did on equivalent occasions but I’ve heard them sing Latin rounds.

  I have in front of me now Pop’s gold watch. On the back are inscribed the words Presented by T Wall and Sons to E J Beale for good service 1939-1956. That’s right, sixteen years in the same job, an admirable achievement in those days when unemployment and the poverty that went with it were greatly feared. What a man wanted was a job for life. It didn’t matter what is was, the noble thing was to stick it out and provide for your family.

  And so it was that my father took up the job of chauffeur, driving a rich man up to London and back every week day for twenty something years. The man could have gone on the train, it would have been quicker, but to arrive in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce gave him a certain status. Not much of a job then; merely a rich man’s status symbol. But Dad did what he had to do and was mostly happy. I remember Saturday mornings and him getting the Rolls out of the garage, washing and polishing it and singing and whistling as he worked. He would sing I have often walked down this street before from the musical My Fair Lady. Or Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World.

  I once saw the film of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day with Anthony Hopkins playing the part of a butler in a grand house. He was brilliant, portraying the deferential, almost obsequious, manner that a man must adopt in such an occupation – a certain stiffness of movement, head bowed a little, face expressionless. How do I know this? Because I remember my father playing that role when he was with his employer. They spent a great deal of time in each other’s company over the years but never spoke much and certainly not of personal things. After more than two decades of knowing each other my father’s employer still called him Collins and my father in return used the word sir.

  Of course people didn’t open up about personal matters in those days in the way they do now. Least said, soonest mended, was one of a number of phrases people used to say we don’t talk about that. It’s interesting to note that in Flic’s family they were prohibited even from talking about not talking about things – at least in English. If an inappropriate subject came into the conversation they were told ça ne se dit pas, French for it is not said. In the bath they were told to wash those unmentionable places with the words entre les jambes et sous les bras. And in my family our parents’ Christian names were a well kept secret. I don’t know how old I was when I came to know that they were called Harold and Winifred.

  My father was Harold to his wife, Collins to his employer, and Dad to his children. But there was another name too. I have a vague childhood memory of hearing him addressed as Cap by old friends who came to visit. You might think that it stood for Captain or Capo but you’d be wrong. I have only recently learned that it was short for Madcap. Hmmm… not the name I would imagine for him but then my earliest memories are of him in his fifties. But wait, here’s a memory and I believe it’s true. On his seventieth birthday he rode his motorbike at seventy miles per hour no hands, and took a photograph of the speedometer to prove it. Madcap it is then. That’s one of the ways that I’ll think of him from now on.

  I have spoken to both of my sisters about Dad recently. One sent some photographs that made me a bit lumpy-throated and tearful for a moment. The other sister sent these words (which also made me feel lumpy-throated and tearful for a moment too):

  I would say that we were not worse off than our neighbours and Dad was always in work. We had clean school uniforms. A mum at home to care for us, a large extended family, wonderful Christmases and caravan holidays. Dad would be so proud to see us now. That illegitimate lad who with a bad start in life gave love, security and adventure to us.

  One of Flic’s sisters started gathering a collection of stories of their father recently. He wasn’t a madcap but certainly an eccentric with a great sense of humour. There is, for example, the letter, written in verse, that his niece, Christina, received from Rudolf Nureyev in answer to her fan mail. It included the words I find my pas de deux les hard de deux thinking of you. Some people believe that Nureyev didn’t write that letter at all but that it came from a certain Robin Eden. When the residents of the new estate built at the back of Robin and Catherine’s house looked out of their windows one morning and saw a tramp asleep on a bench, an empty beer bottle by his side, they phoned the police. The tramp turned out to be a stuffed figure, like a scarecrow. Again there are those who believe it might have been the work of a tall man wearing a bow tie who was seen in the vicinity earlier that morning. T
he name Robin Eden springs to mind. But who am I to say?

  On the face of it my father and Flic’s could not have been more different and so it surprises me to find myself writing about a couple of similarities. Firstly, I think that for both of them their activities in the war years will be remembered as being compassionate rather than anything else. That’s a good thing to be able to pass on to our children. And they both retained a boyish sense of humour into their old age. I suspect that they were able to do this because they had the support of their wives, Catherine in the case of Robin and my mum, Win, in the case of my father, women who were each the emotional and practical backbone of the family.

  Thinking about it now I wonder if the biggest difference between Flic and myself is that she was one of six and I was, in effect, a single child. My sisters left home early to get married and my brother was killed in a motor accident at the age of seventeen. So most of my childhood memory is that of an only child. Or, you might say, since my two sisters spoilt me and competed for my affection (and they still do), an only child with three mums. I guess that explains some things. Certainly Flic was brought up to share and to practice great tolerance. I wasn’t.

  My parents were ordinary people of straightforward kindness and integrity. Flic’s parents were ordinary posh people of straightforward kindness and integrity. My mum and dad didn’t try to make me follow a particular career; they just wanted me to be happy. Flic’s mum and dad didn’t try to make her follow a path either. Both of us were born to parents who were already in their forties, and we were brought up in comfortable, predominantly middle-class, leafy, small-town suburbia.

  And so ends the chapter that included the words Flic and I started on the road to Zagora from somewhat different places; we come from different backgrounds. I really believed those words as I wrote them. Now I’m not so sure.

  G is for Grindlewald (Switzerland)

  I am a killer, I kill only for money, he said, holding a huge knife out in front of him. “But you are my friend,” he continued, smiling. “I kill you for nothing.” He was the Yugoslav cook in the hotel in Grindlewald where I worked for a couple of weeks washing up. It was his only joke in the English language. I was twenty years old and had set off from home with the intention of going to Lapland.

  The hotel was called The Silberhorn, if I remember correctly, and it was run for Jewish visitors to the town, on kosher principles. I guess kosher is a symbol of an active commitment to a faith and a cultural identity. I have no idea if the persecution of Jews over the centuries has strengthened that commitment or if the strength of the commitment and the statement of otherness implied by it has led to the persecution. I try to respect other people’s way of doing things but, in truth, kosher seems a bit daft.

  The hotel kitchen had three different areas for different sorts of food and cutlery and plates and so forth were kept separate. On Friday we would make up lots of concentrated tea so that on Saturday, the holy day of Shabbat, it could be topped up with hot water and we wouldn’t have actually brewed the tea on the day that God set aside for not brewing tea.

  A fourteen year old boy who was working in the kitchen for the summer made friends with me. He was related to the management, was Jewish, and wore a little skull cap. When I left he walked with me to the station. Some local youths, seeing his headgear, called out names as we passed. It still goes on.

  8

  Not Lapland

  I was twenty years old and didn’t know what life was meant to be about. I had spent a few terms at a teacher training college; fallen in and out of love; worked as a forklift truck driver among other things; and saved some money for travelling. I was at home in leafy suburban Surrey, bored and lonely, unemployed, and longing for wild and beautiful places. I left a note on the kitchen table, gone to Lapland, and set off, first travelling by train to Paris – it seemed wrong that I had never been to this famous city that was relatively close by. I would make my way north from there.

  Paris was a disaster. I was lonely and I didn’t like the city that much. The first night there I went to a youth hostel and found it full so I ended up sleeping on a park bench under a plastic sheet to keep off the rain. The next day I looked at a map and saw the Alps not so very far away, wild enough and nearer than Scandinavia. I took a train some of the way and started hitching.

  I remember now that my dream was to meet a young woman soul-mate in an exotic location and find myself settling down with her and of us leading some sort of unspecified meaningful life together. Reader, it didn’t happen. What did happen is that I found the world to be a very beautiful and interesting place. I loved travelling and began to think of it as a life purpose. I would forget any ideas of material wealth that I might have had and live intensely. As I explained to myself, experience was to be the substance of my life, nothing else. I was, it must be said, a strange young man. I rejected the conventional life model of a settled career, a mortgage and so forth but I really had no idea what to put in its place. I was making it up as I went along.

  As I travelled away from the city and into the hills I began to enjoy myself more. One of the first significantly beautiful places I stayed in was a village on Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland. There was some sort of waterfront, perhaps a jetty, I don’t know, a place where you could look out over the vast expanse of the lake, almost an inland sea. Above the village there was mixed farmland with arable crops and maybe hay meadows and certainly plum trees and vineyards. Then steep slopes covered in forest. Then, higher again, the summer pastures with cows grazing. A perfect landscape. I loved it.

  I remember taking the little train up to Grindlewald on a steep rack-and-pinion railway line, standing on the little balcony (for want of a better word) at the end of a carriage, seeing the Eiger and the other big peaks and coming to understand the expression it took my breath away. I walked in a mountain landscape of outstanding beauty. And in the youth hostel I saw a well-paid job advertised and found myself washing up in a kosher hotel, working mornings and evenings, walking up the mountain a little way in the afternoons, seeing the moonlight on the Eiger from my bedroom window at night. I worked there for two weeks and then moved on.

  I pottered about Switzerland, mostly on my own, sometimes with people I had met up with in youth hostels. One time I got benighted on a hill above a lake near Interlaken, slept in a barn, and ate so many bilberries for breakfast that I threw up. Above St Moritz I managed to scrabble up to a 10,000 ft summit on my own. There, with very cold hands, I attempted to open a tin of sardines, the only food I had with me. I failed and came down off the mountain feeling very hungry.

  Then I decided to head for Greece. I walked out of St. Moritz in the wrong direction and ate a picnic beside a strange track that turned out to be the famous Cresta bobsleigh run. Then I walked back through town and hitched in the right direction, towards Italy, getting a lift with a man who asked me to steer the car from the passenger seat while he looked at his map.

  I arrived at a town in the Italian lakes on a Sunday afternoon feeling wary and timid. This country, I had heard, was more dangerous for the traveller. Crime was much more prevalent here than in other places I had visited. I hid my cheque card in the bottom of my shoe for safety and wandered about trying to find the youth hostel. There seemed to be a lot of signs to a place called senso unico, but I couldn’t see it on the map. All the young men carried themselves with a certain machismo, a proud bearing which looked aggressive to me. Eventually I went up to one of these guys, a young man on his own who looked less scary than some of the others. He smiled and seemed sympathetic, understood my mispronunciation of ostello della gioventù, took me to a bus stop and put me on the right bus, explaining to the driver that he should set me down at the right place. The bus driver, I seem to remember, refused to accept payment. And these people didn’t seem scary anymore; they were kind and helpful and I had got it all wrong.

  It was in this hostel that I met an American who had just graduated from Harvard with a degree in classics. He wa
s a fine violinist and carried an expensive instrument with him that he wouldn’t let out of his sight. His ambition was to become a composer of stage musicals. I wonder now if he succeeded. His idea of travel was to buy a cheap car in Paris and sell it in Athens. And he needed fellow travellers to help pay for fuel. So he and I and another American and an Australian young woman set off together down through Italy. We stayed one night in Rimini and then carried on to Brindisi to catch the ferry to Corfu.

  On the island we found a youth hostel in a rural location, with a cheap bar across the way and a beach nearby, accessible by a rough track. I bought a thick blanket in Corfu town and slept on the beach for a while, pottering about along the coast or in the olive groves, going to the hostel for meals. My violinist friend left for Athens and I moved up to the hostel. It was there that I spent the last of the money I had earned in Grindlewald. No matter, I would go into town and cash a cheque. I took out my cheque guarantee card and found that in the place on the back where my signature had been there was now the word VOID. I remembered that when I arrived in Italy I put the card in my shoe for, wait for it, safe keeping. This now looked like a mistake. The motion of my sweaty foot had rubbed out my signature.

  I couldn’t afford the small bus fare into town so I hitched. I walked around looking for something to steal but I had no idea how to go about it. Eventually I went to the hospital and offered to sell my blood, a convenient way of earning money abroad in those days. They checked my blood type and found that yes, there was a potential buyer, a relative of a patient in need of a transfusion. But I had competition, a German guy was also selling blood of the same type. The relative looked us over, the weedy little Englishman, the hunky blond German. He got his wallet out and negotiated a price with the hunk. I walked back to the hostel, hungry enough to try to eat cactus fruit along the way.