Two men in a van and other memories

At hotel in Kandahar Two men on a van

by Stewart Wilcox-Sollof (Copyright 2002-2010 S. Wilcox-Sollof)

This book has three parts:

1.) A sample of the book’s contents. (Page 1)

2.) The travel time period story only. (Page 5)

3.) The whole book with all my reminiscences. (Page 95)

**********************************************************
1.) Sample (from Love, Motorbikes and Death Chapter):

It was then that I saw the old man lying on the floor; he had made it to the
second floor, and had collapsed there. I headed back to our room and
called for Joe to come down, he spoke good French and could therefore
better handle the situation I thought. Joe arrived at the scene of the old
man’s collapse and judged him to be drunk, needing no more than some
assistance to his hotel room. We fumbled in his pockets and found his
key. Sure enough his room was just ten meters away. With the help of
two Dutch boys who were coming up the stairs we lifted the old man into
his tiny hotel room and laid him on his bed, fully dressed with his lower
legs bent over the edge of the bed, and his shoed feet touching the floor.
He was making quite a lot of noise now in his breathing and I was
uncertain if he was OK. Joe insisted he was just drunk and we all left him
there. When we got back to our hotel room I foraged for some more
francs and made my way down the stairs again to the shower. I couldn’t
however pass the second floor without putting my head around the old
man’s door to see how he was doing.

What I saw was a shock. The old mans eyeballs were standing right out
of their sockets, big and bulbous. His breathing heaved and retched. I
1
rushed back up stairs to Joe, told him to run down to the concierge and
get her to order an ambulance because the old man was seriously ill. I
then rushed back down to the old man’s room. His chest was working like
a forge bellows, and his eyes bulged even more.

I couldn’t speak to him in his own language, my French being so simple,

so I sat down on the bed held his hand and wiped his forehead with my
other hand whilst repeating ‘hold on, hold on, help is coming, help is
coming’. After about thirty seconds the heaving of the lungs ceases and
then loud croaking noises came from his throat. He was not breathing and
I was sure he was either dieing or dead. What to do? What to do? I had
seen mouth to mouth resuscitation given on television, so copying this I
pushed his head back, and with the fingers of one hand I pinched his nose
while with the other hand I pressed his chin to open his mouth wide. His
mouth was full of bubbly saliva and the aroma of cheap alcohol and
nicotine, and that croaking sound kept coming right out of his throat. I
felt repulsed, but I steeled myself, put my mouth over his stubbly mouth
and blew, then blew again, and then again, for about a minute. The
croaking gradually subsided, and his eyes became very still. I supposed
that he was probably dead and that my paltry efforts had failed.

I stood up from the bed tears streaming down from my eyes. Around the
room were photographs, some of him as a soldier from the first world
war; a cavalry man in long gleaming leather boots, riding crop and riding
breaches, that huge mastachio brimming jet black on his face; there was a
look of power and confidence emanating from his direct straight backed
gaze.

An old soldier, weren’t they supposed to never die? And now alone with
him in his room, what was I, the only witness to his death trauma to do?
How do you acknowledge a man’s spirit in that passing moment of death?
Well I didn’t know, so, (and I know how silly this sounds,) I stood up as
erect as I could, and with tears streaming down my face, I saluted him. If
he was dead I hoped his wraith might appreciate the acknowledgement,
but I also prayed that he was still alive, and the ambulance men would
revive him.

A moment later I heard the wail of sirens down in the street. That must be
the ambulance arriving I thought as I walked out of the room and heard
the clatter of boots coming up the stairs. Imagine my surprise then when
it turned out to be the fire brigade, they came up the stairs in their brown
leather jerkins and polished brass helmets, and one fireman carried a
wood and canvas stretcher under his arm. It seemed they did the
ambulance work on the weekends when fire department work was slow.
Gosh knows what they knew about treating medical emergencies. The
leading fireman popped his head around the door of the old soldier’s
room, and then looked at me enquiringly. I wanted to ask him if the old
soldier was really dead, so I decided to say in my simple schoolboy
2
french ‘I’ll est Mort?’ (He is Dead?). At least I wanted to say it as a
question; Mort (dead) spoken in a higher pitch to turn it into a question,
instead I said, all the words in the same pitch, ‘I’ll est mort’ (He is dead)
making it a factual statement rather than the question I intended.

The senior fireman looked at me with something akin to respect, thought

for a moment and then nodded agreement, ‘I’ll est mort’ he said.

The second fireman picked this up, ‘ I’ll est mort’ he said to the others.
They had both said it as though agreeing with me, but I didn’t know,
perhaps he was still alive? For heavens sake we needed a Doctor or a
medical person; someone more knowledgeable in these things than
myself, or a fireman.

Without a backward glance they walked off back down the stairs with the
stretcher still rolled up. What about the old man I thought?

Joe and the concierge were making their way slowly up the stairs just as
the firemen descended. When the concierge overheard the firemen saying
‘I’ll est mort’ she started wailing like a cat. And so she arrived at my side
still wailing with the overpowering smell of hair die wafting around her.

This awful smell and the taste I had left of the mouth to mouth made me
now think of vomiting. Joe questioned her between her wails as to who
and what the old fellow was. It turned out that he had rented the room for
over five years; he had no family except for brother in a town somewhere
in the south. She plucked up courage and peeped into the room and then
began to wail even louder.

A few minutes later when she had descended into quieter sobbing the
French plain-clothes police arrived. They looked into the room.

‘I’ll est mort’, wailed the concierge again.

‘Oui’ said the lead policeman ‘I’ll est mort’.

‘Oui’, said Joe, ‘I’ll est mort’.

‘Oh non, non’ said the concierge, ‘I’ll est mort’.

‘Mais Oui madame’, said Joe, I’ll est mort’

I pulled Joe aside by his lapels and whispered, ‘How do you know he’s
dead?’

‘Cos everyone agrees he’s dead silly’ said Joe, looking at me like I was
an idiot.

3
‘We don’t know that’, I said. ‘I just happened to say that to the firemen
and they repeated it, and now everyone’s saying it.’

‘Well more fool you then’, said Joe.

In my high emotionally charged state it suddenly struck me that perhaps

someone isn’t really dead until there is a consensus of opinion that he is.
If everyone agrees he’s alive on the other hand what then? Could he be
alive? Perhaps he could be. Perhaps that’s how Jesus raised Lazarus.
Everyone knew the power of this man to change things, therefore if he
said arise Lazarus, well then everyone agreed he must now be alive and
hey presto he was. So all I needed to do was get everyone agreeing he
was alive!

‘Joe, please, you must ask them to get a Doctor, please’, I pleaded.

To his credit, Joe did his best. There was a long conversation in French
between Joe and the policemen, during which the policemen looked at
Joe in a very bored manner. The only word I think I understood during
the whole conversation apart from ‘Mort’ was ‘Week-end’.

Eventually Joe turned to me and said ‘I’m sorry he’s dead’.

‘Vous vous appelez comment? ’

They wrote down our names.

‘Ou est le porte-clés?’

I handed them the key to the old man’s room. The senior policeman
promptly locked the door and slipped the key into his side pocket, leaving
the old soldier, worldly possessions, bent knees and all, locked on the
other side.

‘They’ll sort it out Monday’ said Joe as the police walked away down the
stairs.

‘They can’t leave him there,’ I said, ‘If he’s not dead he will be soon
without a Doctor, and if he is dead he’ll start to decompose and the smell
will be even stronger in this bloody place than that hair dye, and his legs!
His legs are hanging at right angles down to the floor Joe, rigour mortis
will set in and they’ll be fixed solid in that position, how will they move
him on a stretcher then?’

Joe shook his head, ‘This is France,’ he said, ‘and this is le weekend.’

The concierge had accompanied the policemen, wailing and wafting back
down to her apartment on the ground floor and we wandered back
upstairs.
4
‘There’s another more serious problem,’ said Joe as we got back to our
room. ‘During that conversation the policeman said we are material
witnesses we must make ourselves available for interviews after the
weekend’
.
‘Oh my gosh! I’m getting married. I can’t stay here Joe’. ‘What if they
keep us here for a coroner’s court?’ My own plight had now become
more important than the old mans.

‘No you can’t stay’ said Joe, ‘but its’ OK. I’ve got a plan!’

We waited till very late, then when everything was really quiet, we crept
down the stairs with our bags. On the second floor I took a last hesitant
look at the locked door of the soldier’s room and imagined again what
was on the other side,

‘God, what if he’d crawled off the bed and was even now clawing at the
other side of the door?’

‘Come on’, said Joe, ‘He’s dead mate.’

**********************************************************
2.) The travel time period story only:

Driving around obstructions

We purchased a few spare wheels from a car breaker, some spare oil, not
enough as it turned out which later caused a disaster, and Fred brought a
tool kit along and some wire coat hangers which had proved so useful in
fixing our now garishly painted van. We tied the bulky bits such as the
spare wheels and cans on the roof along with two long sticks Fed said we
should take in case we were attacked by wild tribesmen, placed the 4-inch
foam rubber sheet we had purchased in the back and chucked our gear
and sleeping bags on top of it. The transport was ready. We said our
goodbyes to Chris and Baz, and with me taking the wheel, drove off.
Now for an adventure, two young men in a broken down old van, bought
for five pounds, travelling to India.

First things first, Fred’s sister, Jenice, lived in a small town in Kent with
her solicitor husband, Michael. She had promised us lunch, no use driving
to India on an empty stomach.

After about half an hour, driving through South London, two things
happened simultaneously. Firstly on a sharp corner an empty Oil Can
lightly tied on the roof bounced off and hung down the side of the van
like a single green earring on a brightly painted face, and secondly, just
100 yards ahead the only person on the street, a policeman, turned
5
towards us and witnessed the event. He did a sort of double take and
stepped out into the road, in a split second a terrible scenario flashed
through my mind. You see, the van had a few fiddly little problems that
were of no importance out of the UK, such as no current test certificate or
Tax, and there were bits of wire holding major components in place.
However, with the police displaying their usual lack of understanding,
these little problems could stop our journey dead at this point. I imagined
myself in a police cell and our little van in a police compound awaiting a
trip to the car crusher; an abrupt end to our dream journey.

So I made a decision and pretended not to see the policeman even though
he was the only thing on the road. As we approached I suddenly ‘saw’
this obstruction and steered around it. I looked back through the rear view
mirror to see the surprised and angry look on the policeman’s face as he
wrote down our registration number. This suggested retribution in a big
way. Keeping my cool, I drove serenely on like I had just navigated
around something inanimate such as a hole in the road or a rogue road
cone. 200 yards on I did a swift left and then a right to try and throw the
expected traffic police posse off my scent, then I put my foot down for
Kent. At any moment I expected to hear the wail of police sirens behind
us.
It was with great relief that we got to Fred’s sister without any further
trouble. She photographed us sitting on the roof of the van, two intrepid
explorers, Fred still looking worried and me with a huge pipe in my
mouth. I was trying to learn to smoke this pipe in order to impress my
German friend Alf later in the trip. Lunch was served, our last meal on
English soil I hoped, unless I got arrested, gulp. Then it was on to Dover.
My heart was in my mouth all the way, surely there must be a hue and cry
out now for our brightly painted 15cwt Vauxhall Viva van registration
number EPE 187B, with a Union Jack painted on the bonnet and one
green earring, last seen in South London being driven by a long haired
yob?

When the doors closed behind us on the Dover ferry I felt like I had
escaped certain death. We went up into the ship’s lounge, I lay down on a
couch, closed my eyes and I experienced not a little relief.

The Pad

I had been living with two friends in a flat above a car spares shop in
Notting Hill. The flat was in an old, run down, rickety, drafty corner
building due to meet the demolition bulldozer. The outside was painted
dark cherry red and the old paint was pealed and cracked. It looked like a
dump, but the interior was very much to our liking. There were large sash
windows along the hall and a long round sweep of four of these windows
in the living room giving it a wonderful open and bright feel. It was
decorated the crazy way young people were prone to then, (more about

6
this later). It had two rooms, plus a kitchen and a bathroom. I didn’t
realize it then but we were paying £17 per week for a piece of heaven.

The Pad -
first floor
I’m in the
window.
(Its’ the
only photo
I’ve got -
the black
area is
probably
Chris’s
thumb.)

My friends were a boy and a girl. Chris, the girl was also my girlfriend;
tall, beautiful and blonde with a sweet lilting Welsh accent, an artist, and
a weaver of dreams. Her world was full of colour and deep, understated
emotion all mixed together like a Titian painting. She had arrived in my
life over a very rocky, soul-stirring road. Like Tess of the D'urbervilles,
when she was an untouched young girl she had been raped, and her
fiancé, for whom she was keeping her virginity, had rejected her. Her
young life in ruins, she quit Wales and moved to London. Of course to
every cloud there is a silver lining for someone. Her past sad plight and
her fiancé’s stupidity had brought the loveliest of girls into my life.

7
Baz
And
Chris

We had been together for three years, they were happy for both of us
though I don’t think she had fully recovered from that trauma, and
sometimes I was sure I witnessed in her eyes an echo of the past; then for
a brief while she would appear helpless and adrift, and I would unable to
reach her. Up to now these periods had always ended quickly and then the
mist between us would clear and things would be just right again. Now,
after three years, for reasons neither of us understood, our relationship
had become unsteady and this mist would not seem to clear. I couldn’t
explain why; I’ve never found human emotion constrained by logic.
Something needed to change and I decided my trip away to India might
do it.
Baz, my other flatmate, I had met at work, and I had invited him to share
our flat when he lost his own. He was an Australian, and like all the best
Australians, his wanderlust had brought him to Europe and England. Baz
was bright, and full of that rough energy so apparent in Australians. It
was Baz who one night demonstrated to us that farts were marsh gas by
turning off the lights and igniting one of his own. Baz was very attractive
to women but he could take or leave them. In fact he mostly left them. He
had one affair with a pretty little Italian girl from the office, and he had a
long-standing friendship with Annie, a beautiful Australian girl, but even
this was mostly fun. He didn’t seem to need women like most of us and
there were one or two little signs of bi-sexuality. I found he and Chris in
stitches one day as he was trying on some of her clothes and he did like
Chris to put makeup on him. She certainly thought he was a little that
way. However were Baz’s predilections, which I never did quite fathom,
he was an explosive, funny, eccentric bag of tricks, and a very good
friend.
We loved the life style; we smoked dope, still held down jobs (because we
had to have money), ate vegetarian, grew our hair, and turned on to an
eclectic mix of Rock and Underground music played every waking hour
and often through the night. (I’ll name some of our favourite musicians
here in a separate paragraph so you can skip it if you don’t like reading
lists)

8
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Steve Stills, Neil Young, Santana, Jimmy
Hendrix, The Band, Country Joe, Bob Dylan, Cream, The Beatles,
Jefferson Airplane, Velvet Underground, T Rex, Pink Floyd, King
Crimson, Deep Purple, Led Zep, The Who, The Stones, The Faces, The
Incredible String Band, The Beachboys and The Byrds.

I think our generation became identified with rock music and it seemed to
dominate our lives. All young people around Notting Hill at that time
appeared to share our music and our values. Our lifestyle didn’t seem
clichéd then; if boldly marching on before being certain of which way to
march is a common feature of youth, we were no different from any other
young generation. Perhaps its’ true we had more freedom than those who
came before us. Of course we did feel we knew better than the older
generation, but that was probably the arrogance of youth. If I look at that
time honestly, I think we were just keen to throw off those heavy shackles
of conformity that the older generation wished upon us.

However contrary to popular belief now most young people then did not
adopt our alternative life style and did conform, but still I’m sure they had
some vestige of interest in it, as the following incident shows.

Hippytitus

After a year in the pad I became the owner of an old grey Austin A35, a
tiny rabbit hutch of a car, which I came to love. I had bought it for £2 as a
test certificate failure and a quick phone call to a car mechanic I knew
soon had it through the test successfully.

I hadn’t been able to afford a car for some time and this little thing was a
great boon. Chris, Baz and I drove in it everywhere. We lived near
Portobello Market. As hungry vegetarians this was a good place for
purchasing low cost fresh fruit and vegetables, and there was a shop
called Ceres, which did wonderful wholemeal bread. However, we liked
to experiment and with a car we could try other markets. Fulham had a
great market in North End Road. So one Saturday we bombed down
there.
Even then Fulham was not an easy place to park. I took a chance and
parked on a Yellow Line in a side street and we went off into the market.
I don’t think we were away that long, but as we arrived back with two
huge cardboard boxes of fruit and vegetables a very young policemen
was inspecting the car. I went into a bright patter I often used when
confronted by authority.

‘I’m very sorry, I’ll move it straight away’. My charm didn’t work. As he
handed me the parking ticket his eyes measured me up and down. Long
lanky hair, orange shirt, and scruffy torn jeans leading down to brown
Chelsea boots painted with big green stars. Baz was worse. He wore a
wide brimmed and feathered fedora hat, jean jacket and black leather
9
slacks. Hippies! Only Chris looked smart, but then she’d look good in a
bin bag.

‘You own this car, Sir?’ frowned the young policeman. I nodded.
‘You know you are parking in a restricted area?’ He said it like I’d
broken one of the Ten Commandments.

‘Can I see your driving documents please’? Well at least he said please,
but I didn’t have any driving documents with me. I knew you didn’t need
to carry them; He would have to give me a ticket to produce them within
five days at a police station. ‘Can I see some form of identification then?’
He asked. Nope he couldn’t, I didn’t have any on me. This seemed to get
him upset; perhaps he thought I was taking the Mickey. He started to
examine the car to find defects; he tested lights, the horn, and the
windscreen wipers. They all worked. Then he applied the hand brake and
asked me to push the car. By this time whatever cool I claim to have had
evaporated. I believed he was after me for no sound reason other than that
my looks didn’t conform and I was damned if I’d help him, (I also knew
the hand brake on A35’s isn’t that good.) When I refused to push he
promptly arrested me.

Now being arrested for parking on a Yellow Line is a neat trick. My

sense of injustice simmered nicely. I felt a bit like Arlo Guthrie on the
Alice’s Restaurant LP, when he gets arrested for littering. As Chris and
Baz tried to point out the absurdity of this arrest the young policeman was
already radioing for the meat wagon. He was going through with it. How
would my friends get home I asked? He didn’t know, he wouldn’t let
them drive the car for sure; it might not be road worthy. Chris and Baz
were in tears; they thought I was going to be incarcerated. I told them not
to worry and to take a taxi home
.
The meat wagon duly arrived. I climbed in and was driven off to a large,
old Victorian building that was then Fulham Police Station. I was led into
a big high ceilinged room and left on my own for a while. That was
smart, it allowed me to cool down a bit. By the time the big bald headed
station sergeant walked in I could not stoke up my sense of injustice any
longer; it was a bit like holding your breath, eventually you just had to let
it go. I smiled at him; he looked like an honest man. It was obvious
within a minute or two that he was as confused by this arrest as me. I
wasn’t an international terrorist, a wife beater or a criminal. My biggest
omission apart from the Yellow Line was that I had no proof of identity.
And that wasn’t an offence. It seemed that the ‘young Turk’ who arrested
me had interpreted the law a little too narrowly.

He smiled not unkindly and scratched his baldpate. Like most practical
people he could quickly detect real work from time wasting. ‘OK, we are
going to drive you back home where you can show us your documents.’

10
Five minutes later I was in the back seat of a Morris Minor police panda
car and was surprised to find my arresting officer on the seat beside me.

Both the police driver and my policeman were young. They had had to
take their helmets off to sit in the car and just by that act they seemed
changed, less aggressive. They looked like any young people, (but with
short hair). I don’t know if it was the matching of age or our close
proximity or the fact I was quite relaxed and smiling, but as soon as they
realized I was not drug crazed, rabid or unfriendly, a whole avalanche of
questions about ‘hippies’ along with the many questionable ‘facts’ they
had about dope poured out. They were young and curious, true they came
from very different backgrounds than myself, but they had the same
interest as most young people in things that were different or new, and
didn’t quite believe everything they were told. Did I smoke hashish
much? Was I addicted? Was it affecting my ability to think? Did it make
me want to fight? Did I know there were fenced off towns in Jamaica in
which dope addicts were quarantined? Loads of questions and
information they had been fed about dope on their training courses. I told
them I believed none of the ‘facts’. And no, I wasn’t addicted, it was a
social pleasure, the dope hadn’t affected me and I hadn’t taken harder
drugs yet. I would, they said, it got addictive. I didn’t believe it did but I
had to concede many hash smokers went on to harder drugs. There you
are they said, people don’t go on to harder drugs from alcohol. Yes, that
was true, but you weren’t made a criminal for drinking alcohol. If you
smoked dope you were a criminal, what did it matter then if you went on
to something harder? If you had low future self-expectations, why not
experiment? May as well be hung for sheep as a lamb. And so the
discussion continued on all the way back to our pad. Before we got back
there they were actually relaxed and smiling.

Shame the flat changed all that.

Much of the hippy furnishings and decorations of the flat may be familiar
today. Then it was something of a shock to the un-initiated. As they came
in a huge inflatable clown figure smiled down like coloured gargoyle
above the living room entrance. Inflatable chairs, large cushions and
Indian rugs covered the floor. A spiral mobile covered with silk
butterflies hung in the centre of the flat where the lampshade should have
been. Brightly coloured Chinese silk kaftans in glass frames and colourful
Indian cottons covered the small parts of the walls not covered by
psychedelic posters. More posters covered the ceiling and the smell of
incense hung in the air. This was very different from their semi-detached,
three-piece suited, regency wall papered world. I’m sure it shocked their
senses; jangled their optic nerves, smelled of otherness and screamed
‘danger! Non-conformity’.

The two policemen walked slowly down the corridor, eyes flashing left
and right. Ducking under the clown they entered the living room. Baz was
11
sat in one corner of the room listening to music through earphones. He
did not see us as we entered and continued to sing along in a high falsetto
harmony to music only he could hear. In front of Baz was a large burning
candle giving off a strong petuny fragrance. Baz held a mirror just above
the candle and as the candle soot gathered on it he wiped it off with his
fingers and smeared it across his eyes and cheeks, just like an Australian
aboriginal would do with finger paint. When we arrived he must have
been doing it for some time and he looked a very strange and macabre
sight; a sort of cross between a monochrome clown and the living dead.

Baz in
Face Paint

The police driver had seen enough, he made an excuse and went back to
the car. Wasn’t his job was it? , My original boy in blue antagonist was
now alone, and now confronted perhaps for the first time in his life by
this weird ‘hippie’ environment, he sat down gingerly in an inflatable
chair, which closed around him and made a farting noise. His face was
growing red; he was definitely uncomfortable.
12
I brought in a drawer full of papers and we searched for those documents
he wanted to see. Finding by examining these papers took some minutes
and throughout this time the young policeman got more and more twitchy
and tense as though an emotional rubber band inside him was slowly
tightening. His eyes popped from the documents to the strange world
around him. Perhaps he might catch hippytitus sitting there, all those
stories about mad dope fiends; surely there must be some truth in them?
The documents: first he found the Car logbook. ‘This is not your name
and address here’ he said. Sure enough I had forgotten to reregister the
car.
Then he looked at my Car Insurance Papers. ‘This attachment letter has
not the same address as here or on the car log book’ he said. The
insurance had been issued at my previous address and redirected on to
me. This wasn’t going very well.

Then he found my driving licence. As he looked at it I had a premonition.

‘That’s not this address either is it and it’s not the same as the addresses
on the other two documents?’ I said, knowing the address on the licence
hadn’t been changed since I passed my driving test, many years ago. He
now had three sets of documents all showing different addresses from the
one he was sitting in. What a quandary? What should he do? At each
setback with the documents that virtual rubber band had got tighter and
tighter. Finally, when the last piece of paper, which could identify me
with the flat, failed to do so, the band must have snapped. His nerves
suddenly made the decision for him; he panicked, bounced out of the
inflatable chair, and with his head down, carrying his helmet under his
arm like a rugby ball, raced for the front door. I pursued him shouting that
I was sure to find something with my address on if only he just held on,
but he was having none of it, he waved one hand behind him and without
turning shouted ‘It’s OK’ as he fumbled frantically with the catch on the
front door and rushed down the stairs.

‘What about my car?’ I rushed down after him and jumped into the panda
car just before it took off. It bumped forward then screeched away. They
looked relieved; they had just escaped hippytitus.

They drove back to the police station, picked up my car keys then drove
me back to my car. ‘If the hand brake is defective you must not drive this
car’, said the policeman. ‘You understand I am not giving you permission
to drive it?’ I nodded. Having said this, he handed me the keys and drove
off, and then so did I.

A few weeks later a formal note arrived from Fulham Police Station
informing me that ‘In this case the police have decided not to proceed
with the prosecution for wrongful parking’. That evening we used the
parking ticket to light a celebratory joint.

13
So you see this life had its’ difficulties, but it had lots of fun. Silly really
to change it, but as a wise man once said ‘the only constant in this
universe is change’.

Fred gets a bug (or two) and Pete proposes the journey

I had found my way to Notting Hill and the flat some years after leaving
school and dropping out of conventional life. Fred had found a job in a
library, got the travel bug and started taking breaks around Europe. These
weren’t regular holidays; he just got a cheap bus ticket and travelled. He
liked Ibiza before it became the club/sex/drugs scene it is today, and he
toured Spain.

Live and let live is Fred’s philosophy of life, as he accepts and has a
natural enjoyment of everyone he meets. I envied him that easy
acceptance of the strange and bizarre, as I always had to fight my own
inbuilt prejudices. He told me he met some incredible people in his early
travels, two of these, Dutch girls, turned out to be lesbians. Fred enjoyed
their company. These two girls invited him to come to their home one
day. We would visit them on our way to India.

Without any guidance in his early travels he made some basic mistakes
regarding food hygiene and had to be hospitalised back in England when
he caught Hepatitis. I went to visit him in hospital and was quite shocked
to see him so weak and yellow, he had to make an effort to talk. He
stayed ill for some time after his release from hospital, but despite the
illness he had got the travel bug real bad. Asia was now in his sights, it
only needed someone to pop the question and he would be off to the other
side of the world.

My travel inspiration probably came from my rather restricted reading.

The only things I read were the IT, the International Times, a politically
motivated underground magazine with a chip on its shoulder, and Oz, an
Australian inspired off the cuff spoof magazine, that majored on sexual
liberation. As well as promoting the drop out society these magazines
often carried features on India and travelling to India. India was promoted
as the place of enlightenment and cheap dope. It sounded interesting. Oz
in fact ended its publication life when the editors were imprisoned for
pornography in 1972, the year we set out for India, but I think by then
they had done their dirty deed and opened their Pandora’s Box of sexual
liberation and confrontation, releasing Germaine Greer et al upon us.
Strange to think that the person I consider a founder of feminism got her
start in what was considered then by many, a pornographic publication.
Pete was the third part of our schoolboy triangle. He had stayed at home,
taken on his parent’s left wing political leanings and was doing his best as
a young socialist. He had entered the print industry and refined his
cockney accent. Where he got it from I don’t know because his parents

14
didn’t speak it. However there were some cockney accents at school,
perhaps he’d picked it up there.

Pete

He also said he acknowledged my so-called alternative life style in

Notting Hill. In fact he probably took it more seriously than I did. For me
it was a pleasurable way of life, but for Pete it was a political act of
defiance. Pete saw everything as political. He agreed with people
dropping out of the capitalist system and he agreed with travel, it
broadened the mind of the proletariat, hence his inspired idea. One
evening over a drink in Finch’s Pub, Pete proposed we travel to India. I
sort of agreed, and spoke to Fred the next day and he said he was up for it
too. Pete had started something.

Research and Planning

India was a big project, how to implement it? What funds would we
need? How would we get there? What were the risks and dangers? We

15
had already seen Fred come close to death through a lack of knowledge;
we needed some research.
I wrote off for some information packs advertised in the IT and over the
following weeks we started to discuss the options. Pete took a back seat,
he had had the big idea; Fred and I could sort out the detail. So we
discussed things together and then Pete generally agreed.
The mimeo’d fact sheets I had obtained told us how to get what visas we
needed and what jabs to take. It told us about the gastric problems
westerns faced in the east and recommended we carried our own water
flasks, adding purifying tablets to them. We could drink boiled water
drinks such as tea and processed soft drinks like coke. We could eat well-
cooked food, but no fresh salads or uncooked vegetables. I was a
vegetarian, but the idea that this eating limitation could be a problem
never crossed my mind. I knew there were vegetarians in India and the
overland trip would only take a month or so I thought, I could manage.
They also told us to get a sheet sewed into a cylinder shape and insert this
in our sleeping bag. Then if it got dirty we could wash it rather than the
heavy sleeping bag. This turned out to be of great idea because of all the
dirt and mud we encountered.
How much money would we need? The consensus was £300 to £500,
exchanged into US Dollars, which was the preferred currency most
everywhere. Many travellers did it for less, but my, how they suffered.
Stories of disasters where people left the country with just a few pounds
and ended up somewhere begging for food were rife. It seemed the
British Foreign Office tried to wash their hands of young people trapped
without money out in the East, there were so many of them. Fred and I
decided to take about £350 each and worked out how we could get more
wired to us from our friends. Pete agreed to match it.
How were we to travel to India? There was a bus of sorts advertised in
the IT that went there. It was called the Magic Bus and for £50 it took
you all the way. I wasn’t keen on a bus and said no; I just couldn’t sit
passively in a passenger seat for that long a journey. It was a wise
decision for other reasons as it turned out; we met the Bus and its’ sad
passengers on our travels. With nowhere to sleep and nowhere to wash
these passengers were like refugees.
Transport? We needed a vehicle. Before we planned anything further we
needed to go and look for a vehicle.
But before we had a chance to look for a vehicle, a vehicle came looking
for us.

You open the bottom draws first

We thought Pete had many peculiar political acquaintances, and probably

his political friends thought us strange too. But really there was
something not quite right about many of the people in Pete’s socialist
circles, like they had a screw or two loose.

16
A good example because I knew his background, was my late Uncle
Maurice. Uncle Maurice was a socialist from his boyhood in the late
1930’s. His post war Trotskyist socialist party was in the Guinness Book
of Records as the smallest political party on earth, with just three
members. They believed that Russia was a degenerate workers state,
which apparently made them different from mainstream Trotskyists, who
believed it was a worker’s capitalist state or a capitalist workers state or
whatever, I’m not quite sure, it was all very confusing. Don’t ask me to
explain the difference between a socialist, a Trotskyist and a communist,
maybe like gulls in a colony they instinctively knew one from another,
although we could never tell.

Uncle
Maurice

When he was a young man the rest of the family shook their heads at my
uncle’s antics, but he was serious. During the war it was my Uncle
Maurice who organised the painting of most of the ‘Second Front Now’
slogans on walls all over London. He got a duplicate key made for a
cellar under the house of one of my aunties in North London and stored
huge quantities of black market paint there, obtained with funds from a
foreign ‘friend’. When my aunt found the stash whilst looking for an old
pickling jar, she threw a fit and the foreign ‘friend’ had to provide more
funds for a lock up garage down the road, and then the paint had to be
smuggled there bit by bit in an old pram. It was a shame really; I spent
my baby years in that house. It would be nice to claim that I was brought
up in the house, which had been the centre of the English struggle for the
second front, namely 120 Osbaldesdon Road, London, N16.
As I grew up, every time I met my uncle at Weddings or Funerals he
would take me aside and smiling shyly, tell me how things would shortly

17
change as the workers rose up. I think he had a list of people who would
be stood up against the wall and shot. I loved him, but he was mad.

And, yes, zany Uncle Maurice was a socialist acquaintance of Pete’s.

One of Pete’s more peculiar friends had a habit of coming around to our
flat completely unannounced. He would just turn up, make himself tea,
partake of any joint that was going around, flop down and chill out. He
had come around with Pete one day and decided he liked the ambiance. It
wasn’t that we minded people coming around, we liked it, but he had one
or two of those loose screws. He must have come from a middleclass
background, he was well spoken and he had a Physic’s degree so he
wasn’t stupid, but he was mad. He robbed people’s houses. Or had. I
wasn’t quite sure if he still did it when he came around our flat, but it was
his only other topic of conversation when he discovered we didn’t follow
politics. Generally he just sat quietly and listened to other people, but
when he did make conversation it was to describe how he robbed these
homes. It seemed you had to rob quickly and there was a lot of skill in
robbing a home quickly. His eyes lit up as he revealed his robbing
methods,
‘How do you open drawers?’ he asked suddenly one evening as he came
out of a doped state. At the shake of heads a smile came to his lips, ‘You
open the bottom ones first so you don’t have to close them as you work
your way up.’

He freely admitted he did housebreaking for the thrill he got from the
possibility of getting caught. Really screwy; all that unhappiness caused
to so many people just for a perverse thrill. At least regular robbers did it
because they just couldn’t produce and exchange enough to get the things
they wanted in life. Not fair on others, I grant you, but you can
understand their reasons. Not this guy’s, he was just loopy.

One day for a change he turned up with a problem. His old 15 cwt
Bedford Viva van had failed its MOT. He wanted to know where he
could find a breaker’s yard. Now this was strange, I’m sure most people
with old broken cars just left them by the side of the road, there were lots
around our streets. The van looked all right to me. I asked him why it had
failed. He showed me the list of defects; the major one being that the van
was just a rust bucket, it needed major welding. I tried to persuade him to
keep the van and fix it. He would have none of it. He wanted rid of it.
I looked again. The van had a roof rack, it ran OK, you could stretch out
and even sleep in the back and the rust didn’t matter where we were
going. It looked perfect for the India trip. I offered him £5 for it and he
accepted. He had the logbook with him, which showed him as the owner,
so I was quite happy.

I thought we had our transport.

18
Not so fast, a few days later when Fred, who was a self-taught mechanic,
tested it, he said the big end shells could do with changing. No problem
though, he would pull the engine out with a small mobile hoist he had and
change them, the parts were only a few pounds. We then got two old
headlights off an abandoned mark 9 Jaguar and tied them on the front
grill of the van with coat hanger wire, and then wired them with the other
headlights. Now we had four headlights, though they didn’t all exactly
point in the same direction. The suspension was working lose in places,
but some good old coat hanger wire soon had that snug. Then when we
road tested it and I asked Fred to add another feature; a loop of wire that
could go over the accelerator, so we could take our foot off the
accelerator pedal during long stages of the journey. Fred made two holes
either side of the pedal for the wire and with a bit of experimenting we
adjusted it so it could be put on with one hand reaching down and kicked
off with a foot at any time, and it worked perfectly, a prototype, budget
priced cruise control, we should have patented it.

Our Fact Sheets told us we would need a ‘Carne’, a sort of international

car insurance. For a reasonable price the carne covered every place we
wanted to go except India; the addition of India was for some reason
hundreds of pounds. We were told that the carne provider was the only
source of these Indian documents, it was take it or leave it, so we left it;
the carne would not cover India. We’d have to sort out what to do with
the van before we got there. This carne information turned out not to be
true, we met other travellers on the road who told us we could have got a
carne for India for £30 in Munich from the ADAC. This omission based
on wrong information was to lead to a lot of extra work and a most
strange romance.

We decided the van needed decorating. I painted a Union Jack on the

bonnet. My mum announced a word she’d found that she thought would
be appropriate. The word was ‘Anticrephagous’, which means vegetarian.
We painted it on one side of the van. How many people read and puzzled
over this word on our journey I do not know, but those we met when we
stopped often asked us to explain it. On the other side we painted a
rainbow with a few cartoon characters. Now finished, it looked the
complete dog’s breakfast.

Our route was roughly planned; France, Holland, (Fred’s two friends,)
and then Germany, (my friends - Alf and Co), then over the Austrian
Alps into Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Turkey. We had maps for Europe, but
because of the expense, we decided to economise on any further maps.
We assumed everyone would know the way anyway. We had by now
also acquired the visas to take us through Iran and Afghanistan. British
passport holders didn’t need Indian or Pakistan visas. We needed travel
permits though through Bulgaria, but these were only available at the
frontier. Our visas gave us entry into Iran during a window of 12 weeks.
We had to go. A leaving date was set, 1 November 1972.
19
And then Pete announced he couldn’t make this date. He was skint it
turned out. He said he would fly out and meet us at the beginning of
January at the post-restante in Delhi. That would give us lots of time to
get there and give him lots of time to get the money together. And so just
two of us drove to the Ferry and landed in France.

Trust the Dutch

OK, onwards to India. In the early hours of the morning Fred and I rolled
off that Ferry in Calais and took the coast road north. Our route lay
through Europe, but we would not stop in France. Holland was our first
stop, and after this we would head for Germany, then through Austria to
Yugoslavia.

Fred’s Dutch friends were expecting us. On our arrival they greeted us
and made us welcome. We would sleep nice and snug for a few days in
our sleeping bags on their living room floor.

I was very nervous about Fred’s friends being that they were lesbians. I
had never met a lesbian, but the stereotype I had in my mind was
something of a cross between May West and King Kong. Fred insisted I
would be surprised and so I was, surprised and surprised and surprised.

First surprise: they were both nice, in fact the ‘female’ was a sweet girl.
The butch, if I can call her that, was a bit ugly as a girl, but I guess made
an OK sort of guy. Although they both worked, ‘he’ had a manual job and
his hands were calloused. She held a part time office job and looked after
the home.

Second surprise: they had children, a young boy and girl. Well to be
precise, they were her children.

And third surprise: the children’s father; her legal husband, came around
most evenings and visited. He said he was quite happy with the
arrangement when we got chatting with him. But I felt he was a bit sad,
knowing his wife was being rogered by another female with a dildol each
night. I wondered how the kids would grow up emotionally; well I guess
at least he was there for them.

One thing I’ve found about homosexual couples is they like to show off
their sexuality to those who befriend them. One way is to snog like young
teenagers whenever they can. Whatever the reason for this, they duly
performed this juvenile teenage ritual each evening. I found two women
at it a little upsetting. Fred thought it fine and photographed it.

However, moving aside from this strange sexual scene, in all other
respects these people were exactly like the educated working Dutch I
20
have now come to know and respect. Very open, generous, clever with
languages, good-natured and most tolerant.

In the mornings we cycled around the countryside with the family. It was
Autumn and frosty most mornings. The air was fresh and crisp, raining
sometimes, and a ride would leave us with good appetites and sore
backsides. We bought all the different Dutch cheeses, two in fact; Edam
and Gouda. and butter, fresh rolls and real coffee. Breakfasts were a treat.
In the afternoons we drove around Amsterdam as sightseers and one
evening the girls showed us around the red light district, which has all the
attributes of a zoo, but much funnier.

Four days later, greatly relaxed, we had put England, and everything it
meant, a thousand miles away in our minds. These sweet people had put
us at our ease. We bought them some chocolates, packed up our sleeping
bags, said our goodbyes and drove into Amsterdam for a pre arranged
meeting with Alf and all my other German friends at the American Hotel.

We meet a sex goddess

It was great to see my friends again in Amsterdam. Alf had a new

girlfriend, Monika, a tall, thin manikin of a girl, a little older than Alf and
much more experienced. Clary was there also with his pretty girlfriend,
Francy, my big doe eyed, earth child. Clary knew Amsterdam from a very
different viewpoint than our Dutch hosts. His was the freak club scene
and that evening he acted as a tour guide as we went to some
extraordinary clubs that were themed on psychedelia, alcohol, drugs and
rock & roll with lots and lots of young people from every western country
busy being part of this scene. The boys were very serious about imbibing
lots of whatever it was they were trying to get hooked on, whether it was
beer, music or drugs. The girls didn’t seem to feature much in this
activity; they mostly frowned or rolled their eyes when anyone spoke to
them like they were concentrating on something with a much higher
purpose than getting hooked, or perhaps it was the loud music; they could
not hear what anyone said. I found the whole thing boring. Perhaps if we
had stayed there for some nights I might have joined in and found it
exciting, but I don’t think so. We drank our expensive beer then moved
on to the next venue and drank another expensive beer.

We left Amsterdam later that night and drove to the Dutch border with
Germany where Alf’s parents lived, and we slept on their living room
floor. Alf’s parents were retired schoolteachers. This belied their
beautiful home with its views over a valley. Obviously teachers earned
much more in Germany than England. His parents were old, in their 80’s
I think. Alf was an only late child. He had obviously been spoilt. Up in
their huge converted loft was the biggest working train set I had seen in
my whole life. It took up the whole loft. Alf and his dad had built it over

21
many years. Both parents doted on Alf and were happy for him to stay at
University.

They were very formal and a little cold with we two English boys. It was
probably the war. I hate to think of what hell they had gone through. Alf
remembered as a toddler running at night into air raid shelters with his
Mum, and the RAF bombs banging and crashing outside. Perhaps we
reminded them of those dreadful times.

From his parents’ home we went back via the autobahn to Krefeld. On the
way we stopped at a Rasthaus, a sort of German motorway services, but
with edible food. We climbed out of the van and I made a beeline for the
toilets. A sharp order in German made me turn before I reached the
building and two German policemen walked towards me. Interpol, I
thought, they’d spotted our one green earringed van.

They barked at me again in German. I hadn’t a clue what they were

saying. Then Clary shouted over that they were telling me off for walking
on the grass. Now anyone could see that the grass had been walked over
till it was nearly mud, but yes there was a sign which I guessed said keep
off the grass in German and the policeman was pointing to it. I shook my
head, said I didn’t know what they were saying, and when they realized
they were talking to a stupid English person they walked off in disgust. I
made it to the toilet in no time flat.

Back in Krefeld, the nightlife resumed as if I had never gone away. Fred
just loved it. The Alt beer was magnificent, the girls wonderful. We
stayed for nearly three weeks and spent lots of money.

Monika was a revelation too. When we got up after our first night on
Alf’s floor, she had a breakfast of coffee, cheese and fresh roles for us
plus a surprise; she had sitting at the table the most amazing sexy, blonde
girl I have ever seen in my life. This girl was about five foot six inches
tall with curly blond hair down to her shoulders. She had a lovely face,
high cheekbones, big red lips, a sweet little nose and beautiful blue eyes.
Her figure even sitting at the table was what could only be called
voluptuous. She gave off an aura; she was like a vision any man might
have of his most perfect sexual partner, and I swear that this girl’s eyes
said ‘come take me I’m yours’.

She was Monika’s sister, a photographic nude model, who was staying
with Monika and Alf for a few days. When Monika introduced this sex
bomb Fred and I were just gob smacked. We sat there like dummies,
fumbling with our bread rolls and cheese, unable to string a meaningful
sentence together whilst this apparition was in the room. She smiled
sweetly for half an hour and then departed. We then took our first deep
breath for over 30 minutes.

22
The mad thing is her eyes had definitely said ‘come take me I’m yours’,
we found out later she couldn’t resist men, went out at night to bars just
to find one that didn’t freeze up when she looked at him. We met her a
few nights later in a bar with a Dutch guy who had so much alcohol in
him it acted like antifreeze. He would walk her home that night. Damn!
The first time a female sex goddess had spoken to me, and I couldn’t
respond.

Monika was thinner and older than her sister, and I think she felt jealous.
She harboured the belief that she too could be a nude photographic model
and she had a folio of sexy nude photos of herself revealing all, kept
under a glass coffee table in the lounge. When Fred and I found them I
was amazed. I think Alf was embarrassed because we were looking at
them and I found it embarrassing that I was looking at them with Alf and
Monika in the room, but Fred pored through them all. After a while Alf
and I left Fred with Monika and we went out for an early coffee. As we
went out they were deep in conversation over the folio, perhaps
discussing comparative vulvas.

On one of our first evenings out we went to the Krefeld student club, a
non-descript box of a building with trams rattling by just outside the front
door. It was raining hard and apart from the shiny rain washed cobbles
everything in the town was a sort drab yellow sodium colour. Inside the
place heaved; Alt and Korn at fire sale prices, and lots of girls attracting
lots of boys attracting lots of girls. Fred had taken to Alt like a proverbial
fish to water, and within an hour they decided to apply the ‘boot’ to him.
Not throwing him out, no, this was a huge glass boot filled with Alt that
had to be drunk in one go. I had miserably failed in my attempt on my
first visit and in truth the only person who could empty it was Manfred,
who I had witnessed do it followed with two Korn chasers. Fred tried
manfully. Now the shape of the boot causes a problem. If you drink with
the ‘foot’ down you can’t empty it, so you have to drink with the foot up.
Fine till you drink some and the air reaches the ‘foot’. At this moment the
Alt being heavier than air, the air rushes up the ‘foot’ and the Alt rushes
down the ‘leg’ to meet the drinkers face like the surf hits the shore. With
technique you can be prepared for this by vacating your mouth of Alt as
you see the wave approach and absorbing much of it. However, if your
mouth is full of Alt, the new delivery has nowhere to go but over your
face and head and thence down your clothes. The result is a wet, beer
sodden object that few wish to approach. Fred was already quite sozzled,
or I am sure he would have desisted after the first inundation, but no he
carried on, again and again till he had emptied the boot, in the most part
over himself. Ignoring his sodden condition he continued with Alt and
Korn till he was truly plastered. He then tried to chat up a series of girls
who all backed off and vanished into the heaving mass of students.

Over the coming days we proceeded to visit every bar in the Ruhr valley,
plus parties and events, which seemed to be the standard nightly fare, I
23
guess, unless they were specially arranged for us. Everyone we spoke to
was interested in our journey and, yes, laughed at our van. Life was good,
we had no end of things to do and the beer and the company kept us very
happy.

We would get up around 10.30 am after a night’s sleep on Alf’s living

room floor. Whoever got up first went out and bought a dozen fresh rolls,
which smelt just wonderful, some cheeses, milk and ground coffee beans
if needed. Then back to the flat where everyone there, Fred, me, Alf,
Monika and assorted others would tuck in. We would then all wash and
the day’s itinerary would be discussed. Information on all coming events
was channelled through Alf, who was an epicentre of young social life in
Krefeld, this included parties, concerts, nights out in other towns, beer
fests, and student events.

One day Manfred and Clary had arranged a party by a private lake. The
lake belonged to someone else, a local institution, who didn’t let anyone
near it. Somehow the gates were mysteriously opened and young people
poured in with barrels of Alt and a high-powered music system. The
barrels were tapped and the music turned on loud. However, they had not
accounted for the weather. It poured. There was nowhere to take cover
from the rain other than a single bare Oak Tree. Here we huddled while
Clary got a wood fire going by pouring liberal amounts of petrol on it to
stop the rain putting it out. Enthusiasm for the party started to wane. Then
Manfred thought he’d liven things up with a party trick. He took some
cans of petrol, poured them out on to the water and set fire to the lake,
very spectacular. Unfortunately for him he was still standing in the lake
when he set it on fire, and his antics as he put out the fire in his trousers
certainly raised our spirits. That was the high point, but we were wet and
needed to dry out. We packed up and drove off with the remaining Alt
slopping around in a barrel on our knees so it wouldn’t spill.

The following week the local paper carried a big article about a
mysterious group of ‘Tramps’ who had had a party by this ‘verboten’ lake
and finished the party off by setting fire to it.

Manfred was the manager of Krefeld’s own rock band, Trash. He

financed them. Actually the band was very good, but it was just one of
hundreds trying to make it, and well, Krefeld was not exactly the centre
of the rock industry. Manfred asked us what we thought of the band
name, like everyone else we told him it was great. He wanted the band to
be like the best Liverpool rock band and would happily have employed a
band of all Liverpudlians if he could have found them. He had found just
one, Paul the lead guitarist. Actually Paul was from Manchester, but to
Manfred one Northern British accent was much like another. Manfred
introduced us to Paul just before an open-air concert by Trash.

24
I asked Paul how he found things. He said Manfred was paying him for
something he enjoyed doing and would have done for nothing. He had
booze, could get stoned, and have any number of girls. Life was just
perfect. When Paul got up on the stage he dedicated their next song to his
new found friends from England and gave us a wave. A lot of young
girls’ heads turned our way. Thanks Paul.

We could have stayed in Krefeld indefinitely, perhaps our journey would

have ended there with the last of our money, but we had an obligation
that drove us on. In my alcohol induced dreams I sometimes heard Peter’s
voice calling us on to India. Our boyhood friend must be waiting for us.

Goodbye Western Europe

Our pre arranged meeting with Pete meant that we must reach India by
early January. Without Pete calling us on I don’t think we would have
made it. After three weeks with nearly a quarter of our money spent we
decided reluctantly to push on. Alf helped us plan our journey through
Austria, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria to Turkey. We stocked up on some
food and Alf gave us a huge pile of Playboy Magazines in German. He
thought they might cheer us up during the journey. The fact that we
couldn’t read German meant that the pictures of undressed gorgeous girls
got a bit tedious after the first 20 or so magazines. We also completely
forgot to consider the implications of taking ‘pornography’ into Muslim
countries, because of course they would consider them such. However
their use as a means of exchange proved useful.

So one morning in late November Alf saw us onto the Autobahn to

Munich and waved us goodbye. Off we went, down those fabulous
autobahns at the breakneck speed of 65 miles an hour. We seemed to be
almost stationary as huge Mercedes, BMW’s and Porches caught our
little van in their slipstreams as they glided majestically by at 120 Miles
per hour.

It was getting decidedly cold. We had prepared ourselves for what we

thought of as cold. I had long johns, vests, two ex-air force jumpers and
an army surplus parka. Fred had much the same.

We drove on to Munich, which turned out to be a bit of a sad place really.

The beer fest had finished in October and now just the locals were left
drinking their steins in cold, damp beer halls. They all looked pretty
browned off. No brass bands, and the waitresses buttoned up at the neck
to keep the cold out. Shame. Hitler started here I remembered. I bet he
began his politics of frustration after a winter night spent browned off in
one of these halls. The best of Munich was the stalls selling delicious
pom frits mit mayonnaisser. The railway station was also something

25
special, huge marble floors and vaulted roofs. But there was nothing else
to delay us, on to Austria.

It was now close to December. The rain in Krefeld had actually been
kind, keeping the weather mild. Now it turned still colder and started to
snow as we crossed into Austria at Salzberg. We had to cross the Alps to
Graz in southern Austria and then we had a short jouney down to the
Jugoslav border, which is now Slovenia.

I had experienced winter road conditions as a passenger in the Austrian

Alps when I was a schoolboy in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Each year
we travelled by train and bus to the Hotel Gestrine near Kitzbuhl, where
we learnt to ski. Although the hotel offered a little limited skiing we were
often bussed out to the mountain slopes in small Volkswagen taxi buses.
According to Mr Smith, our gym teacher, who was an ex-desert rat
sergeant major and spoke passable German, these taxis were driven by
ex-wermark guys in their late 30’s or early 40’s, who had all fought on
the Russian front. One of them proved his soldierly expertise by taking an
air rifle we had found in a basement and with one shot hitting the exact
centre of a ten-groshen piece (about the size of a new penny), mounted on
the basement door. We had been firing around it and peppering the door
with lead pellets all evening.

All these drivers had bits missing. The most alarming had most of his
fingers off from frostbite and drove with the palms of his hands and one
long finger; another had a wooden foot. The cabs had bags of stones over
the rear wheel arches to give them more grip, and when filled with 10 or
so large boys plus skiing kits on the back, they probably applied a great
grip through the chain covered tyres on those very icy roads. The drivers
took great delight in tearing around these ice tracks at incredible speeds.
We all survived, but now I wasn’t looking forward to crossing the whole
Alps in our little unchained death trap.

On a lighter note I also decided not to order any food from an Austrian
Menu. I remembered a group of us rolling into a café in Kitzbuhl to get
warm after spending all our Austrian shillings in the local shops. One
guy, Meadows, had a few shillings left and we had to order something to
secure our seats in that haven of steamy heat. The only item he could
afford on the menu was something called ‘egg englass’. Now we all joked
when he ordered it that would be a raw egg in a glass, and that’s exactly
what it was. We all took sips to see how it tasted. It tasted ‘yuk’, but
apparently for those Austrians with acute hangovers it did the trick. I
should think it would, it would make anyone throw up.

There was no thought of food or skiing as I had to confront those icy

roads as a driver. Soon the autobahns ended and we became part of a
stream of traffic mostly composed of giant trucks. These vehicles seemed
to accompany us all the way to Afghanistan, their huge wheels
26
threatening to obliterate our little tin can in a trice. We were low down
and hard to spot without any lights, so we tended to leave them on even in
the daylight hours. This caused a further problem, as our four headlights
were, you might say, cross-eyed. Two were set for British left hand side
driving so shone directly in the eyes of oncoming traffic even on dip. The
other two tied on with coat hanger wire moved around on the bumpy
roads and pointed whichever way they wanted to really, in the eyes of the
oncoming motorists, into the sky perhaps dazzling the odd airline pilot or
into the roadside ditches dazzling Austrian drunks. We bent them down
as best we could and if they moved back to dazzle the oncoming trucks
we got out and bent them round again. This was done for a purely selfish
motive of course, we didn’t mind the odd truck driver being dazzled, but
we didn’t want them to steer dazzled into the little toy car below their
wheels.
As we drove up into the Alps the snow started to get heavy, sorely testing
our little wiper blades. There were trucks ahead, trucks behind, trucks
roaring past on the other side of the road. Whoever was driving our van
was blind to what was oncoming ahead; we couldn’t see a thing because
our steering wheel was on the right, the kerbside. Only if the other person
sat in the passenger’s seat and told the driver it was safe ahead could we
overtake some of the slower trucks. Not that there were many slower
trucks, most of the trucks had no trouble matching our speed.
It was colder than we had ever expected. All vehicles are fitted with
heaters, but in those days vehicle designers considered them as an
afterthought. Heaters had to be there as an accessory on the list of
features on a new vehicle, but they didn’t have to work, or work very well
that is. We had to cross the Alps in mid winter in our old banger being
both blind and blinding and with a pathetic car heater that was also well
past its sell by date.

As the road climbed higher our toes and fingers froze. The driver had to
drive with one gloved hand on the wheel and the other hand stuck under
his lap or armpit, changing hands every few minutes. I had nightmare
flashbacks of those Austrian Taxi driver’s hands, where the frost had
removed the fingers. It became so cold in the front of the van that we took
turns in the back lying on the 4 inches of foam, fully clothed in our
sleeping bag, with the other’s sleeping bag on top, and a blanket over
that. This helped us thaw out a bit. No thought about overtaking now, just
follow the truck in front. The snow was deep. I mean seriously deep. At
one point our little van was buried up to the door windows by drifting
snow in a car park when we stopped briefly for a comfort break at a
restaurant. We had to dig the snow away from the wheels with our hands
and then push the van out onto more compressed snow.
We travelled exclusively it seemed over this compressed snow or ice.
Without chains our little van slid around the road alarmingly so we
quickly learnt to stay in the tracks of a big truck and make no sudden
steering wheel movements. The end of an accidental slide on a corner
could have been a drop of many hundreds of feet over boulders into the
27
valley below. I remember pleading to any higher being that might be
listening ‘Please let us get through this,’ but all that came into my head
was, ‘Drive, just drive.’
Graz took us about 24 hours. Then sometime the next day we reached the
Yugoslav border and drove down onto a flat plain.

Yugoslavia then was one county or at least one political entity. The
communist war leader, Tito had united the disparate Balkan factions by
force. Yugoslavia was open to the west because Russia had never gained
entry; the Yugoslavs had fought their own very resourceful partisan war
with a little help and arms from Britain. It’s a shame Tito didn’t leave a
political system in place when he died that could have sorted out his
successor away from factional ethnic differences. Anyway at that time no
one knew of the ethnic horror that was to follow a few years after his
death.

As we entered Yugoslavia it was still a little snowy, and cold, but much
easier to drive. The road was straight, narrow and boring. It was used by
masses of heavy trucks and the occasional little Yugo car. They must
have held demolition derbies on these roads every so often as we passed
many, many, wrecked and burnt out trucks and cars. The countryside was
uninspiring after the Alps. Flat landscapes dominated by fields
occasionally fringed by trees. The houses and shops looked decidedly run
down. We drove on to Zagreb to spend the night, it was a Sunday, There
was nowhere open to eat and we were desperate for some hot food and
drink. Eventually as evening came we saw a café, which looked open. We
stopped the van and went in. In fact, it wasn’t open to the public; there
was a wedding party going on inside. As we entered and discovered this,
our faces dropped, and we turned for the door. The bride’s father, I think
it was, in the wedding party called over to the proprietor, and said that we
were not to be turned out. A small table was set for us in the corner and
quantities of the wedding food and drink were brought over to us. We ate
and drank our fill in the midst of that wedding feast. When we rose to go
no one was prepared to take anything from us, they smiled and wished us
a safe journey.

On to Belgrade the next day. I am sure Yugoslavia is beautiful country,

the mountains, the coast are often praised in travel guides, but our route
along the main highway between Zagreb and Belgrade in winter was
uninspiring, the only interest were the minarets and domes of mosques
here and there, we had entered our first Muslim area.

In Belgrade we stocked up with bottled beer and wine. We needed a

supply of drinks out of Europe that was going to be more satisfying than
chemically purified water, and drinks with alcohol in were of course our
preference. Our mimeo’d travel guide had told us Yugoslav beer and
wine were the cheapest and amongst the best in Europe, and they were.
The red wine especially at about 30 US cents per bottle was great. We
28
filled up the van with crates of beer and wine to see us through to our
journey’s end. We now had two forms of contraband on board that
Muslim countries were likely to throw us into rat infested prisons for,
alcohol and pornography. It seems though that fortune favours the stupid.
In blissful ignorance we drove on without being challenged.

On the road

Although Yugoslavia was a communist state, and we felt very sorry for
most of its’ people, who looked rather poor compared to Western
Europeans, we didn’t feel any repression. The police seemed the same as
in Western Europe, they just drove around in cheaper cars. Yugoslavs
seemed pleased to see the Union Jack on the van and one that spoke
English said Great Britain was an ally during the war, which was news to
me then. The food was simple, cheap and wholesome in the cafes. We
carried American Dollars and had piles of single dollar bills. One dollar
went a very long way.

Yugoslavia gave us our first experience of non-European toilets. They

had toilet seats, which was better than later in our journey when a hole in
the floor sufficed. However they had a separate waste bin for the toilet
paper. Their sewerage systems could not cope with paper. The result was
that every toilet room stank. Later on when even the nicety of toilet seats
and paper went, the smell didn’t. The fields and open roads were often a
more pleasant place to do what comes naturally, but often in towns the
toilets had to suffice.

To stretch our money out and make ourselves less reliant on locals
providing food, we had brought along a primus stove with spare gas
bottles and lots of ‘meals in a tin’ type things plus good old British brown
sauce. We bought bread and cheese whenever we could and used purified
water to make tea if we wanted a hot drink. Otherwise there was lots of
beer and wine. We would stop on the roadside, spread out an old blanket
and get the primus going. One pot would hold the contents of one or two
cans whilst the food heated. Then we would consume the meal al fresco
using two spoons. After a while we found food vendors and cafes so
plentiful, varied and cheap that we stopped this practice all together.

Roadside
Food
Break

29
It was in Belgrade that we got in for the first time with other westerners
also travelling to India. From then on I was amazed at the mixture and
types of people who were on the road. There was every nationality,
although I guess the largest contingent were British. It was their
differences as people that I found most remarkable. It wasn’t just a
‘hippie’ trail. In fact I guess that many we met didn’t smoke dope and
could be described as normal. No, that wasn’t correct, they were not
normal. These young people were going to India, travelling thousands of
miles through strange countries expecting harsh conditions, experiencing
who knows what on the way. They had chosen this rather than fly, or not
going at all and switching the TV back on.

Over the next few weeks as we met more and more travellers all heading
for India, if it wasn’t obvious from our initial conversations, I made a
point of asking them why they were travelling there. Here are the main
reasons:
 Spiritual enlightenment
 Cheap and easy to obtain drugs
 Experiencing other peoples and cultures
 None of the above

Yes, the last one was added tongue in cheek, as it was my own response.
Each of the previous reasons were given to me, but I couldn’t quite
identify with them. Rather, I could agree with all of them, but felt that no
one of them was my main reason for travelling. For my part I was there
for the ride. Whatever their first response when pressed further most
people talked of a spiritual dimension to their journey, so I’ve put that
first. It also seemed that the journey itself was spiritually important, not
the just arriving there.

Apart from a shared spiritual dimension in these individuals, this journey

gave them a commonality of purpose; an unspoken fellowship that united
perhaps 95% of those on the road, who would help and trust their fellow
travellers the instant they met.

One of the people we met in Belgrade was Mike, a huge 6 foot 4 inch
Canadian. He stood out, yes, because of his height, but also because of an
item of clothing. He wore what was then the ultimate in cold climate
apparel; a highly expensive Canadian quilted artic eiderdown jacket. One
30
thing the Canadians are prepared for is cold weather, and this jacket was
the epitome of rough travelling chic and the envy of every shivering
westerner who met him. Mike needed a lift to Istanbul and offered to pay
for the petrol there, a good deal all round we thought. It meant one
passenger would have to sit in the passenger seat whilst the other slept in
the back. However, what we didn’t expect was that Mike would spend
most of his time sleeping. He handed us his documents and money for
fuel and apart from getting out when we stopped for calls of nature or
food, he retired into the back of the van. We christened him ‘the bear’.
Well at least the driver would always have company.

Now our way lay through Bulgaria to Turkey. We set off at lunchtime
from Belgrade, we would need to get visas at the Bulgarian border in
order to travel on.

Welcome to Bulgaria, and good bye

This was our first taste of a real communist state. We all know Ian
Fleming’s fictional stories about 007 and the horrible people in the iron
curtain countries whom he confronts. The scene is set as our western hero
draws up to the border in his fast flashy car. A dozen border guards
dressed in drab uniforms with riding breech trousers, putties wrapped
around their lower legs and red stars on their forage caps, point tommy
guns at his car. Then a sour faced woman with her hair in a tight bun on
the top of her head peers out from behind the bars of her office as he
hands over his passport and sneers at him contemptuously, ‘What do you
want here?’ He just smiles a relaxed ‘he-man’ smile and lights a cigarette,
they’ll never discover the contraband in his car.

OK, these are terrible cold war stereotypes that we were fed in the West
about Communism and its horrors, and I think we can agree that those
who approached the iron curtain from the West with these stereotypes in
their heads were indeed stupid.

As we approached the border that evening it grew dark. The landscape

was a dull steel colour. Ahead we saw low cement buildings, traffic
barriers and high fences. We drew up to the border in our rusty van. A
dozen border guards dressed in drab uniforms with riding breech trousers,
putties wrapped around their lower legs and red stars on their forage caps
pointed tommy guns at our van. Then a sour faced woman with her hair
in a tight bun on the top of her head peered out from behind the bars of
her office as we handed over our passports and sneered at Fred and
myself contemptuously, ‘What do you want here?’

I had the strangest feeling of déjà vu, although I knew I had never been
here before. We did not have a chance to reply before one of the soldiers
noticed something hidden in the back of the van; under a huge pile of
sleeping bags and blankets something stirred. The soldier shouted and
31
pointed through the back window of the van with his gun, an alarm
sounded, some other soldiers race around with guns at the ready and
looked in. Were we sneaking in 007 to blow up the socialist workers
party government? More soldiers who had stood idly by now ran around
shouting and pointing their guns at the van, at each of us and at each
other. Ten more pairs of riding breaches appear from a door at the rear of
the building looking for something to shoot at. Finally with all guns
cocked, one soldier gingerly open the back door of the van.

As the door opened the bear rolled out. He stood up, scratched his crotch
and looked around for somewhere to pee. There was lots more shouting
and gesticulating with tommy guns and the bear was hustled grumpily
towards us. Then finally as the soldiers line us up by the side of the van,
bunhead came to our unlikely rescue by pointing out that we had given
her Mike’s Passport along with our own. The soldiers grudgingly accept
that we weren’t smuggling in an 007 agent, and settle back to sneering at
us.

‘You want tourist visas? asked bunhead.

‘Yes we want to be tourists and go and camp by the black sea,’ we lied.

Huh! No,’ she says pointing to our hair. ‘No tourist visa for long-haired
people.’

‘What about if we put it in a bun?’

‘No. You can have only transit visas for 48 hours, no stopping, stay more
than 48 hours or you will be arrested.’

And that will cost us $10 each. Thanks.

We had been warned about travel visas. They give tourist visas free, but
they had long ago decided that young westerners were not good tourist
material, better sting them on the way in by charging them for travel visas
and kick them out quick.

Fred and I were both concerned about this short period, the old van was
playing up a bit, the gear lever had shifted its position all by itself and we
felt that boded trouble. No good telling these refugees from Pinewood
Studios though, because our journey would probably end there. We had
to cross our fingers and cross the frontier. We paid our hard currency and
got our passports stamped. The Bear climbed back in his den, we climbed
into the front seats and the barrier was lifted. The road was straight, about
300 miles on the map, (this was the last bit of our map, it ran out at
Istanbul.) There was only 50 miles to Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia,
where we would stop for the night and try to sleep in our cramped seats.

32
The guns pointed at us ominously as we drove away. Soon Mike was
gently snoring again in the back.

I vill show you zer good places

We drove into Sofia without any trouble, parked in a square just off the
city centre and slept as best we could in our seats. In the morning we
looked out at our surroundings; drab grey cement and granite buildings, a
few private cars, but mostly buses, trucks and horse carts. The people on
the streets were drably dressed too, like they wore a sort of camouflage,
to keep attention off themselves. Our brightly painted jalopy was a centre
of attention, like the only point of colour on a grey painted canvas. People
kept coming up to it and peering in. They tried to speak to us in other
languages, often German, then gave up with a small smile and walked
off. After a while a real strange ‘dude’ approached us. He was no more
than 18 years old. He had on a wide brimmed hat, with long black curly
hair protruding from under it, and a shoulder to ankle black leather coat.
He looked like a cross between a Cowboy and a Gestapo trainee. And he
spoke broken English.

33
 The Strange Bulgarian Dude

‘How are you?’

‘Vhat are you doing (here)?’
‘Vhere are you coming (from)?’
‘Vhat do you want (to) do (here)?’
‘I vill show you zer good places.’

We really didn’t know what to make of him, he spoke English like a

German. We were told Bulgaria banned long hair and ‘hippiness’. How
come he had been able to grow his hair? Could we trust him?

‘I love heavy metal, I love Led Zeppelin.’

Led Zep? He couldn’t be all that bad. He could help us.

The three of us crammed into the front of the van and drove off, Mike
was still dozing, he knew we would wake him for any E&P; eating and
peeing.

First of all toilets. He took us to some with washbasins, wonderful. There

was no such thing as hot water, but we spruced up. Then something for
breakfast, we had to buy some bread and cheese from a drab government
food store, cafés were hard to come by here. Then some tourist things, he
showed us the river, then this building, then that building, all very
uninteresting.

‘I love Led Zeppelin, do you love Led Zeppelin?’

‘Sure we do, that album with the Zep catching on fire, bet you like that -
one of the greatest albums of all time.’

‘Do you have Led Zeppelin music?’

‘ Sure, at home.’

‘Oh’ Silence for a while.

‘What other music do you like?’

Fred chimed in ‘Mahler, Sibelius, Brahms and I love Far Eastern classical
music too.’

Our newfound friend said nothing, but his face went a sort of blank.

‘And I like Pink Floyd.’ I said.

34
‘Are they a band?’ asked our new friend.

‘Yes, brilliant, like Led Zep.’

‘Like Led Zeppelin?’

‘Yep.’

‘I must write that down please.’

I hoped Pink Floyd were a little like Led Zep, I wasn’t into Zep as much
as him, don’t even think to be sure that Pink Floyd was like them, or
perhaps they were to the young Bulgarian ear, but I needed to say
something to make him happy. Perhaps he thought all young westerners
listened exclusively to Led Zep type bands. Now he had a new band to
find out about. Life was great.
As the morning wore on we decided Sofia’s charms as they were would
have to be put aside and we told our new found friend that we had to
move on because of our visa restrictions. Before we left he asked me for
the names of other bands I could recommend to him. I gave him King
Crimson, Country Joe and the Fish and The Incredible String Band. I
hope he liked them.

Now we had to drive and drive. There were mountain ranges both sides of
us and the country was quite hilly and green. We tried to sleep a few
hours in our cramped seats early the next night then drove on again.
There was nothing by way of cafés or services, just the occasional petrol
station that accepted deutschemarks. The country was ragged, the roads
were empty except for the occasional heavy truck and horse and cart,
hardly no private cars. The lack of decent sleep and the pressure to get
through was draining us, we had to find somewhere to stop for some
relaxation and food.

Tired and haggard we drove till the early morning, then somewhere near
a place called Dimitrograv we saw a sign saying ‘Hotel’. We looked at
each other, maybe there we could sit down and perhaps eat. No matter
what our passport visas said we were going in.

We travelled up a gravel drive to an imposing modern 60’s style building

on a small hill and parked our bucket of rust right outside, what the hell?
If they won’t serve us because of our visas what did the van matter? As I
got out of the van my legs creaked, my back ached and my stomach
rumbled. Mike climbed very groggily out of the back of the van, like he
was emerging from hibernation, and he was hungry too.

Inside it looked quite modern and expensive. The big dining room took
up most of the space on the ground floor and they had obviously had a
party there last night; the tables still sported dirty tablecloths and the
35
chairs were in disarray. The place smelt of stale tobacco. A young, very
smartly dressed manager came out of the kitchen. I heard one or two pans
banging in there, a good sign, the kitchen was occupied. Did he speak
English? He squeezed his lips together, shook his head slowly and held
his middle finger and thumb a quarter inch apart, a little perhaps.

Could we have breakfast? Food? We made signs as we spoke. His head

went to one side. One moment, he turned back into the kitchen, spoke for
a second or two then returned. Bread and eggs? Yes?

Yes, Yes, Yes, please.

A young waitress came to clear one table for us, and whilst pots and pans
continued to bang in the kitchen, we were directed to the toilet, and it had
hot water! We grabbed our wash bags from the van and 15 minutes later
returned washed to a table, which was laden with fresh crusty bread,
butter and a mountain of scrambled eggs. There was fresh coffee too.
Heaven.

After a huge breakfast we relaxed for an hour then paid the bill, which
came to about six dollars. I think everyone was pleased, including the
staff, who had probably earned an extra day’s pay in an hour. Invigorated
we returned to the van and headed for the border, suddenly this didn’t
seem such a bad place after all.

We pause

That afternoon without any further trouble we arrived in Turkey. It was

the 3rd December 1972. We drove to Istanbul, over the Bosporus, into
Asia and off our road map. From now on we would have to ask the way.

The Turks didn’t mind the length of our hair or if we stayed a while, and
we needed some rest and recreation, and some running repairs. We had
discovered that the gearbox was falling out of the van; the steel on a cross
member bar holding it in place had rotted away. A lot more than coat
hangers would be needed.
Istanbul was a brash clashing honking city of old classic American cars
that served as the city’s taxis. They trundled around the poor quality
roads constantly blaring their horns at every slow pedestrian or horse and
cart. The city is a meeting place. It always has been. So many routes lead
through it and to it. At this time it was awash with young westerners,
some coming, some going, some just hanging around. The Hotels that
catered for the travelling youth were off the bottom of the Michelin
guide, usually –5 Star. Cold rooms, hard beds, cold water and light
fingered staff, and these were the better ones to be found on our journey.
It got much worse as we travelled on, however most people didn’t seem
to mind, the hotels were cheap. They also formed a focal point around
which we met with other travellers and made new friends.
36
Near our hotel we found another English group travelling in a
Volkswagen Camper, by far the preferred method of cheap travel (unless
you only wanted to spend a fiver). They were nice and the camper was
nice and within a day the bear announced he was now to travel on with
these guys – bigger sleeping quarters being the obvious motive. One of
the Volkswagen people, Graham, a teacher from Manchester took me
aside, they hadn’t actually asked Mike to join them, if we minded they
would tell him no. I explained that we were very glad to get our bed back
and I apologised for bringing the big snoring brute into their lives, but
Graham didn’t seem to mind.
In a way I envied Mike, another of the Volkswagen people was Charlotte,
a beautiful twenty something redhead from Surrey. She was gorgeous, a
voluptuous figure all covered in freckles. I wondered if the freckles went
all the way down. She seemed intense and remote at the same moment,
which I took to be quite sexy. Later I found out it was a stress condition
and she was travelling to India for mystical purposes. One of those people
to be avoided I would say, but I didn’t take my own advice.

A group of us set out to do some sight seeing. I was eager to explore the
history of this old city; this was Asia, a strange culture, a different
religion, and a fantastic history. However, I was to be disappointed, the
Turks were very funny on ancient monuments; they liked to ignore them
or keep them buried. In reality most of the buried past wasn’t theirs; it
was mostly Greek with a later Roman influence. In 1453 the Turks who
originated in Iran took Constantinople from the Romano/Greeks, and they
renamed it Istanbul. I’m sure if the two sides had the same religion, the
next five hundred years would have sorted out the language differences
and they would have become one people, however, today they are still at
each other’s throats. The Greeks had occupied most of Asia minor
continuously for two and a half thousand years before a million and a half
of them were ‘sent back’ to their ‘homeland’, Greece, in the early 1920’s
and a half million ‘Turks’ returned to Turkey from Greece at the same
time.

Apart from strange bits of broken statues discarded in quiet back gardens,
the only recognisable Greek monument in Istanbul is the St Sophia, the
huge eastern Christian cathedral, now a mosque. Inside the tourist
authorities had recently taken off paint covering the walls for hundreds of
years to reveal beautiful paintings of the Madonna and child and the
saints, ancient and exquisite, painted over 500 years ago. It was still a sad
empty echoing place though, with only one other interesting feature,
Vikings had carved their names on the stone balustrade on the balcony
above the main hall. These incredible men had travelled a thousand miles
over the rivers of Russia to get here, hauling their long boats around rocks
and rapids, and had taken up jobs as personal guards to many of the
ruling class in this city that they called Micklegard. As strangers to the
eastern Christian religion, they were probably kept away from the main
cathedral concourse and had probably carved their names in boredom
37
whilst waiting for their patrons, who were involved in services below.
One of these Vikings, Harald Hardrada got homesick. He crashed his
Viking ship over a huge chain that was strung out over the Bosphorus to
stop ships, then subsequently fought his way back to Denmark, raised an
army and invaded England, only to be defeated and killed at the battle of
Stamford Bridge. He did however weaken Harold of England’s army,
who were then defeated by the Norman army of William the Bastard,
who was renamed the Conqueror. Hence a bored Viking irrevocably
changed the course of English history. Well maybe he wasn’t one of the
bored ones, but otherwise it’s a true story.

Next to St Sophia was the blue mosque, built it was said to match the
beauty of St Sophia and in my books every bit as dull. Topkapi, the
sultan’s palace, although mostly ruined was a much more interesting
place.
In the palace’s museum was an emerald as big as a bar of soap with just
one corner chipped away. There was a huge diamond and ancient gem
encrusted swords. We were shown the dilapidated rooms, which were
once the sultan’s harem, apart from some wall tiles the interior splendour
was gone, but the vivid story of how a brutal system of sexual servitude
had worked, lived on. The harem girls would have to climb into the
sultan’s bed from the bottom to show their respect and then do everything
to please their master. If he was dissatisfied he would clap his hands and
say ‘let her disappear’. Two eunuchs would then tie her into a weighted
bag, row her out in a boat and drop her into the cold Bosporus to drown.
They say that the bottom of the Black Sea is salt water containing
hydrogen sulphide and free of any dissolved oxygen, this environment is
sterile. It will dissolve metal, but preserve organic matter. If strong
currents carried those weighted bags into the Black Sea, which is the
direction that deep Bosphoran currents head, then these displaced
members of the Sultans harem will still be there, sealed in their bags and
perfectly preserved in every detail.

Our final tourist destination was the Souk, a huge labyrinth of passages,
once the palace stables, now a market. Early travel writers had once
enthused about the range and diversity of goods on sale in this market,
but a sad change had taken place. Nearly every stall carried just two types
of goods; the usual inscribed brass junk bits and pieces found in any
middle-eastern market, and coloured embroidered sheepskin jackets by
the tens of thousands. The original beautifully embroidered Turkish
shepherds jackets had been popular among young westerners for a few
years in the sixties and it seemed a whole Turkish rural economy had
been diverted to produce cheap poorly made copies. The Souk merchants
had moved to corner the market, but I had a sneaking suspicion that the
market was gone. Well not quite. After many hours wandering in twos
and threes through the Souk we met up again and found the Bear had
swapped his wonderful comfortable Canadian thermal jacket that
everyone had coveted, for a really awful example of the embroidered
38
sheepskin art. It was short on the sleeves, tight around the armpits and
scruffy round the neck, but he was sure he had a bargain. Hmmm.
Anyway, I had found some stalls deep in the market that had missed the
sheepskin bubble and in one I found a rack of beautiful antique silk
kaftans being sold for a relative song. I bought two, which were soon on
their way back to Chris and Baz.

We did find one other bit of Greek architecture; the steam baths. A group
of us from the hotel decided that the cold showers were just not good
enough and we went en mass to the ancient Greek steam bath that was
still in use. We stripped off and stretched out in the main chamber on
marble slabs. The patrons already there mumbled and grumbled amongst
themselves, then one of them then came over and with a few gestures
made us tie our towels around our wastes. It seems the sight of nude men
by other men is proscribed in Turkey.
We had also read the warning about western girls never going about by
themselves in Muslim countries and even in Turkey they were told to
cover their arms. Now it registered that although eastern people seemed
to adopt western ways, they didn’t think like we did, they had another set
of values that we needed to understand as we travelled through their
country. If we presumed everything was like home we would get a rude
surprise. More than one traveller coming from Iran assured us, that a
German driver, who had stopped in a town recently when he had hit and
killed an old lady with his car, was summarily beheaded by a mob and
had had his head stuck on a pole and paraded around the town. We
decided not to stop for old ladies whether we hit them or not, or anything
else come to that.

The following day, we got on with fixing the van. We tied the gearbox
member back up in its correct position with coat hanger wire, but a
particular point on the gearbox needed precise anchoring and this needed
a weld, which we couldn’t do. A few enquiries with a taxi driver led us to
a most amazing place; the street of a thousand mechanics. This road on
the edge of the city ran on for about a mile. Along each side were
hundreds and hundreds of sheds/garages housing specialist car mechanics
for any conceivable purpose. Every possible type of repair for any make
of car or truck could be undertaken here. This was the reason that
thousands of Classic American Cars could still taxi around Istanbul after
travelling millions of miles. Given time I’m sure these mechanics could
have done a complete makeover of our little van; had it mechanically
perfect with a shining new body, but that wasn’t what we needed. Half an
hour and a few well chosen welded points and our van was back on the
road for three dollars. We decided to move on.

Heavens revealed

We took the road to Iran. Our Volkswagen friends had helped us plan our
route with their map the day before when they set off. Now we were not
39
sightseeing. Having no map and no picture of the scale of our journey, we
had no idea how long it would take us to get to India, and our money was
down because of our long break in Germany. We needed to move on.
We took the route through the mountains swapping over driving and
sleeping positions regularly so we could make good progress. The first
two hundred and fifty miles was good highway up to a town called
Gerede. Here we found a café with some hard beds for the night. Fred
brought in some Playboys to read and suddenly we became the centre of
attention. A very good room rate with breakfast was agreed if we left a
few magazines. Other people there asked us for copies which we freely
supplied. They also allowed us to crack open a bottle or two of
Yugoslavian wine and a great time was had by all. Without any words of
English all the truck drivers tried to tell us their life histories. We kept
nodding and looking at pictures of their families and girl friends. It was a
great pity we couldn’t really speak to them, at the very least they would
have given us sage advice on the road ahead.

The next day we left the good road and travelling along dirt roads went
higher up into the mountains. It got colder and colder as we ascended into
the mountains and now in December the countryside was bleak. What
trees there were, were bare, everything seemed a drab, lifeless colour.
Higher up the earth turned to rock, stones and shale. We seemed wholly
alone, in a bare landscape. We rarely saw other vehicles, when they did
appear they were usually trucks. For a while we treated it like a rally,
tearing around the corners, dust clouds from the dirt on the road flying
up. Then we got bored and just drove. Fred constantly checked the oil and
water.

Oil and water check

As evening arrived the van pulled one of its tricks; the lights failed. Now
auto electrics are one area where coat hanger wire has no application.
Everyone hates their car electrics failing, once you’ve changed all the
fuses you have to concede you haven’t got a clue. In the growing twilight
we drove back up the highway then off the main road into a sizable town
we had seen a little earlier. The town had one garage and it was open
40
though bereft of any customers. We pulled up on the forecourt and got
out to speak to the proprietor who was reading a newspaper in his office.
A little bit of sign language and he indicated he could help. He shouted
into the shed that comprised what I thought was the service bay and a
large gang of kids came out and proceeded to open the bonnet and with
screams and laughs started to examine the car. The eldest was perhaps
fourteen and the youngest I guess no more than seven. They seemed quite
unconcerned that this was the first Bedford Viva van they had ever seen.

With screwdrivers and spanners and torches, as it was now dark, they got
to work. The proprietor noting the concerned look on our faces led us off
gently into his office where he made us strong black tea. By the time we
had finished the tea the kids were jumping up and down around the car.
One was inside testing every electrical device, they all worked, even the
window washer, which had packed up in the Alps.
We paid the trivial amount of money the proprietor asked for and then
searched around to find something to give the kids. Fred discovered a
plastic wallet of spanners in his tool set he had never used, and we gave
these to the delighted kids along with some sherbet lemons I’d been
saving.

We then carried on up into the mountains. I must have dozed off for the
next thing I remember is that we had stopped on the side of the road at a
high pass and Fred was shaking me and asking me to get out and look. As
I got out of the van I had to do a double take at the sky. The Milky Way
lay in magnificent repose in the night sky. It was filled with millions of
big bright diamonds. We were both astounded, never had we two townies
who lived in a polluted city seen anything like this before; the stars were
like a bright tiara crowning the earth. They weren’t all white, there were a
few yellow ones and blue ones and red ones, but it was the whole massive
quantity of stars that seemed arrayed just above our heads, they couldn’t
be as far away as our science books said, they were too bright, too
vivacious. Something of such scale and beauty works on your heart, on
your metabolism even. I found myself taking deep breaths as my eyes
swept the sky for what must have been many minutes till the muscles in
my neck ached. I remember thinking that this awe is what ancient man
must have felt when he considered what he saw in his unpolluted sky.
After a few minutes of dumbfoundedness the cold got to us. We got back
in the van and drove on through the high narrow mountain roads, which
hugged the side of the mountains bending and twisting with their
contours. The air was sweet, but very cold.

For me this witnessing, as it were, is part of the unique pleasures of

travel. Looking at a photograph or watching a television documentary has
never given me more than inkling of the actuality. I remember spending
time with some great friends on their canal boat moored at Chester near
Liverpool. My friends, along with a few other narrow boat residents,
formed a tiny community in the Chester narrow boat basin. It was an old
41
and neglected place grown wild from lack of use. Cliff and Mandy were
artists, who loved each other dearly and rejected mainstream life. Cliff
had recently saved a derelict wooden hulk of a narrow boat called
‘Betelgeuse’ from being broken up for fire wood and was slowly
restoring it, but already in its’ primitive state it was home for them and
their two children. I loved them and I loved their attitude to life. I would
sneak off from the comfort of my London home and hitchhike north for a
few days of rough sleeping in a narrow cote. There would be the constant
evocative smell of a coal stove and the yellowy light of a pressurized
paraffin lamp providing some warmth and light during those many cold
and rainy days as we discussed the disorder of the mainstream world and
practiced their sweet alternative low tech life style.

On one of the first days I arrived there, the harsh cold got me up at the
crack of dawn and I walked out along the towpath to get my circulation
going. I hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards along the canal when
there was a screech from behind me, and a translucent arrow shot past
and alighted on a tree on the far side of the canal. The bird seemed very
angry at having its’ tranquillity disturbed and studied me with
unconcealed animosity. I studied it back, not from anger but from shock.
I was looking at my first Kingfisher. His brilliant iridescent colours were
incredibly beautiful. How many books, TV documentaries and films had I
seen Kingfishers reproduced in? Very, very many, and they all lied. They
told me ‘this is what the bird looks like’, well perhaps yes if a three year
olds’ picture of an elephant prepares you for the real thing, they did.

In the Turkish mountains on the evening of the second day we caught up

with the Volkswagen. We stopped together at a road junction and shared
some food and a hot drink. Then we roared off ahead of them up another
mountain, and then a couple of hours later, calamity: the engine began to
steam. Fred diagnosed a split hosepipe. We had no replacement. Perhaps
we shouldn’t have driven the thing at such breakneck speed, but there
again we were in hurry. An hour later the Volkswagen caught up with us.
We were frozen. Being the splendid people they were they produced a
towrope, they would tow us to the next town. Fred got the short straw and
had to stay in the van to steer it. I snuggled up to Charlotte in the
Volkswagen.

We had broken down at the top of a mountain road; the next town was in
a valley. The tow was therefore mostly down hill on a winding road with
lots of precipitous drops. Fred had got a very short straw. An hour or so
later we pulled up by a likely looking garage and a very shaky, wild-eyed
Fred climbed out of the van. That, he said, had been the worst drive of his
entire life. With the Volkswagen engine switched off, we heard very
strange bubbling noises from the van wheels. There was also a strong
smell of burning, and in the dark of the evening the hubs seemed to glow.
Fred said he had had to drive with his foot on the brake all the way down
because the towrope was short and he couldn’t see around the
42
Volkswagen to predict when he needed to brake. Towards the end he said
the brakes had failed and he had only the weak handbrake to rely on.
What had started out as a split hosepipe now seemed a lot more serious.
Everything in the town had closed for the night including the garage, so
the Volkswagen people said they would stay with us for the night to see
that we got fixed up and we enjoyed their company for an hour or so
before everyone got to sleep. Charlotte had smiled at me a few times that
night and I went to my cold sleeping bag feeling very good; to hell with
the broken down van, a pretty girl had noticed me.

In the morning the garage proprietor was very pleased to see his first
customers waiting for him on his forecourt and he and his assistant got
straight down to business. The hosepipe they fixed easily but the wheels
got them very agitated. When they took the wheels off and took the brake
cylinders apart they were totally amazed. The heat from the brakes had
boiled off all the brake fluid and burnt the piston rubbers to cinders. The
brake linings themselves were also scorched and this was amazing as they
were made out of asbestos. The garage men had never seen anything like
it before. At least the hubs were O.K., otherwise we’d be walking to
India.

After a few hours and with the help of another specialized mechanic in a
different part of town they had the brake shoes relined, and with their
natural Turkish flair for fixing all things mechanical they had the brakes
working by lunchtime.

The Volkswagen had set off earlier in the morning when they heard all
could be fixed. We followed on in the afternoon, very gingerly at first.
What more could go wrong with the van? We were to find out later in our
journey. It had more tricks up its metal sleeve, but thankfully not in
Turkey. We drove on through the sweet mountain air and under those
brilliant stars to the Iranian border.

We crossed into Iran at a place called Bazargan, we had fifteen days on

our visa, which we probably wouldn’t need completely. Allowing for any
little problems we should be in Afghanistan for Christmas. At the border
we met the sad, mad and hungry occupants of the magic bus. The bus was
having some repairs made to one of its springs and its occupants were
scattered around the area of the bus looking like survivors from a
concentration camp. They all had deep, black eye sockets, dirty clothes,
and filthy hair. Many were coughing; God knows what they had caught in
sitting weeks in that unhealthy bus compartment. One of the lads shared
our bread and cheese. His girlfriend had gone off with some other girls to
find somewhere to wash. His gratitude for the food was immense. As he
polished off the food with a bottle of good Yugoslavian beer he told us of
the horrors of the journey so far; cramped filthy conditions, nowhere to
lay out to sleep, no washing, no heating, toilet stops on the side of the
road for both sexes, everyone catching each others coughs and colds, and
43
then there was the smell of fifty closely packed, unwashed human beings.
It was hell on wheels and they had not gone half way yet.

That way

The Iranian roads were full of trucks, horse drawn vehicles and Hillman
Hunter Cars. I must explain for anyone who was not around in the UK in
the 60’s that the Hillman Hunter was a popular car then. When the design
got out of date, Rootes, the car’s maker sold the design and production
line to Iran and within a few years the model seemed to have overtaken
all the roads in Iran. A traffic jam might have a thousand Hillman Hunters
bumper to bumper.

The first night in Iran we were still high up and stopped for the night
above a small town. The lights of the town twinkled up at us and the stars
twinkled down. It was really cold and Fred and I emptied the van of its’
contents and climbed into the back in our sleeping bags. The interior of
the van was covered in condensation. After a few hours I woke up with
the most enormous asthma attack.

I had contracted asthma at two years of age after bouts of pneumonia as a

baby. The cause of this illness was the cold damp house we had to live in,
in post World War II blitzed London. My elder brother had died of the
same pneumonia when three months old. There was nothing my parents
could do, as there was nowhere else to live except the garage from which
they had moved. From my teenage years a simple inhaler was all I
needed to ward off an attack, but that night nothing could hold that attack
back. I couldn’t get my breath, it was a bit like drowning, I rocked back
and forth to try and bring some calm to my fevered state, for on that very
cold night with water condensing on the inside of the van I was extremely
hot just from the exertion of breathing. A thought went through my head
again and again, I was more than a thousand miles from home with no
chance of help. Fred couldn’t help me that night, I just rocked back and
forth as my lungs heaved and wished to go home. Eventually I fell asleep
from exhaustion. In the morning the worst had passed.

As we drove off the mountains the hundred miles or so to Teheran it got

decidedly warmer. At the approach to the city the roads started to look
better, straighter and more modern with a crash barriers running down the
sides. On the side of the road now was a shoulder, just like our hard
shoulders on Motorways, but made of packed earth. I decided we needed
to stop a while to change drivers so I pulled over. As I did so Fred said
‘What are you doing?’ Perhaps he had seen something I hadn’t, but it was
too late. I manoeuvred the van neatly on to the hard shoulder, where it
promptly sank. The hard shoulder was apparently re-designated as a soft
shoulder during the winter rains.

44
We sank up to our axles, our back wheels spinning without any purchase
in the soft ooze. Another fine mess you’ve got me in, Ollie! I climbed out
gingerly through the window onto the bonnet and jumped onto the road.
There was no Automobile Association here, but we were to find that
Iranian drivers all helped each other instead. In less than a minute a
pickup truck stopped. Without a word of English the driver got a huge
towrope out of the back. He fixed it to his truck and I lay on the bonnet
and attached it to our van. The pickup revved up and slowly applied force
on the rope. Nothing happened. He increased the revs, his wheels started
to spin and smoke on the metalled road, and, nothing happened. We were
stuck good, but the driver was not to be outdone. He flagged down what
seemed the biggest dump truck in the world. The dump truck backed up
and had the rope attached to it, then it slowly put force on the rope.
Nothing happened. The dump truck engine started to reverberate as the
wheels failed to move the van one inch. By now there was a crowd. Lots
of motorists had stopped to encourage and give advice on the work. After
this failure they all stood in a huddle on the side of the road discussing
things for a minute then breaking up suddenly like an American football
team, they walked to different positions on the road ready for the next
play. The large dump truck was unhitched and the oncoming traffic was
stopped both ways as the vehicle did a three-point turn and brought his
front bumper up to the edge of the mud shoulder. The towrope was re-
attached and ever so slowly in low reverse gear the great beast of a truck
pulled back. With cheers from the crowd the front of the van slowly rose
out from the mud, and the van came unstuck from its hole. As the van
completed its return onto the road the cheers rose to a roar of approval
and there was a lot of backslapping.
Being unable to speak to them in Parsi we quickly got out some of our
bottle store, but these knights of the road would accept nothing. They
smiled, shook our hands and went on their way.

I found myself driving again as Fred had done the driving part in the
sinking van and was looking a little shattered. We drove on for an hour
through the traffic until we got to a policeman, who was allowing traffic
to turn right, but not go ahead to the city. We turned right, then thinking
we could outsmart the system I turned left, left again and right, back onto
the road we wanted to be on and straight into the middle of a line of the
most enormous tanks you have ever seen. The novelty of our situation
was tempered by the fear of being run over, as the high up tank drivers
could hardly see our little van. At any moment the huge metal tracks of
the monster behind us might crunch our little tin box into what would
look like the flat empty coke cans you see on the road. The noise was also
dreadful with the un-muffled tank engines revving away, and storms of
sand dust were rising everywhere. Fred was shouting at me to get off the
road, at least that’s what I think he was shouting because I couldn’t hear
very much. However I wasn’t going back into that mud again, not for the
life of me, I’d rather take my chances as a coke can, thanks very much.

45
I could see the line of tanks on a bend ahead, there must have been fifty
of them ahead of us and I couldn’t see how many there were behind.
After five minutes we came across a senior Army Officer on the side of
the road by his jeep. He seemed to be inspecting these £500,000
leviathans and taking the salute. A look of astonishment appeared on his
face as we passed him in our £5 rust bucket resplendent with its Union
Jack bonnet. I gave him my smartest salute and we were spirited away in
the line of tanks before his astonished eyebrows had time to drop. In my
minds eye I imagined him making an entry at the bottom of his inspection
form under Army Vehicles – Misc: ‘One personnel transport ex–GB’, and
then another little note: ‘Get the damn thing properly camouflaged and
get that driver’s hair cut!’

A few moments later I saw a turning on the right and we shot down it and
away. Phew! We seemed to pulling in potential disasters faster than we
could handle them. Well perhaps that was it, from now on Iran would be
kind to us we thought. No way, the biggest calamity was yet to come.

We drove into Teheran and found a fleapit of a hotel with cold and cold
running water in the middle of the old town.

It was here in Teheran that I began to witness the medieval feel of

Muslim lands and that strange anachronism of the middle-ages side by
side with modern technology; it was a surreal experience. We walked
down narrow winding back streets populated with what seemed to be an
ancient shrouded and hooded people who occasionally had to jump aside
to avoid motor scooters, the only form of modern transport that could
navigate those narrow streets.

I found nothing in Teheran to detain us, we visited a few mosques and

viewed some gigantic monumental architecture and then went back for a
cold shower and bed on a concrete floor. The sooner we got on the better.
Our advisors in the hotel told us there were two roads to Afghanistan; one
along the mountains, which was a good road, the other through the desert,
which was a bad road. We should head for the mountain road. All we
needed was some engine oil because our engine had drunk all we had
brought. That shouldn’t be a problem in one of the world’s leading oil
producers. We bought some at a garage, but to our amazement it was
watery thin, we bought another brand at a second garage, it was just as
thin. This was a bit worrying with such an old engine, but we had a
simple choice, it was that oil or nothing. We crossed our fingers filled up
with the thin oil, and drove east out of Teheran. We had decided to ask
our way a number of times to make sure we were on the right road, and
so we did. Every time we asked people on the road or at various garages
they just smiled and pointed on without hesitation and so on we drove on
quite content. Thinking about it, we shouldn’t have been so sure of their
answers, it was a bit like asking a pedestrian on a London street the way
to Scotland in Dutch.
46
The road wasn’t that good. It was only a dirt road. We soldiered on for a
few hours expecting the road to improve but it didn’t. In fact it got
considerably worse, and became a continuous series of corrugations or
ridges, it was then that we heard our exhaust box come off. We were in a
hurry so we didn’t stop, exhausts didn’t seem very important here
anyway. Then for an hour or so we didn’t see a soul, till as afternoon
came on we found a person at the side of the road and by luck he had
pretty OK English.

‘Is this the mountain road to Afghanistan?’

‘No, this is the desert road to Afghanistan’

‘Is it all as bad as this?’

‘No, this is the good bit!’

For reasons you can never quite fathom we decided to drive on through
the desert. We had no compass, no map, no knowledge of the desert, no
rough road vehicle, no survival kit, and in fact no idea at all of what we
would face. We just thought we were smart enough.

we should have turned around, why we didn’t then I do not know.

Perhaps it was just in my nature that I didn’t want to retrace our steps and
Fred just went with the flow as he so often did, but it was a bad call.

As I said we had no compass, and no maps, when we came to cross roads

or a fork we went on what looked like the main route or the more
easterly. The further we got into the desert that day the more uncertain we
became and the rougher the roads became. There were rarely people here
except the occasional heavy truck driver. Sometimes the route or road
looked exactly like the desert ground, except perhaps a little rougher. Our
Van wheels bumped from one corrugation to another on the road, surely
all these desert roads couldn’t be as bumpy as this? Yes they were and
worse. We could manage only 15 to 20 miles per hour as we bumped
along up and down. After a while the van seemed to slow down, the
engine strained; it was like the brakes were on. We stopped. An
inspection revealed that a cross member that held the chassis rigid had
been bent around as it hit the bumps and had stuck against the back
wheels acting like a brake. With a great deal of ingenuity and our scissor
jack, Fred levered it back. We travelled on a while and the same problem
occurred, once again the scissor jack was used and so it continued for
three days as we crossed the desert.

The desert was called the Dasht-e-Kavir. It wasn’t like any desert I had
ever imagined; no romantic vistas of sweeping sand, no camel trains, no
oasis with pools of cool water and palm trees for shade. This was more
47
like an abandoned building site. It was thousands of square miles of
rubble; rocks and shale, sand and grit. If the Turks and the Kazaks and the
Samarians before them had crossed this region on their way west they
would not have lingered long, or it must have been better then. Perhaps
this desert was the result of over grazing, could it once have been green?

We did come across one oasis, there was stockade with a sign ‘hotel’ on
it and a beaming young boy who stood outside trying to sell us drinks,
possibly the hotel owner’s son because he had authority over the other
people there and spoke some English. When we asked him the way he
pointed on again but said we wouldn’t get through with our van. We
ignored him and drove on.

We had decided to drive some of the night and all of the day, switching
drivers, one resting or trying to rest in the back whilst the other drove. We
did in fact manage to get some sleep whilst being rocked around and
shaken, which was quite an achievement. I found myself driving the first
night when the corrugations seemed extremely large. I couldn’t see much
ahead either, as the cross-eyed head lights just managed to show the next
few corrugations. Still I drove quite fast. Fred, I knew, drove more
cautiously, but I got bored unless I was driving on the edge, as it were,
even if this was only twenty miles an hour. This was our downfall.

I had been driving for some hours that night, it was well after midnight.
Fred was tucked up in the back. The moon was out which helped the
headlights a bit, but I really should have been driving slower or been
more awake. Suddenly ahead was a sharp turn in the road and as I steered
the van around it I saw the biggest ‘corrugation’ so far in the desert road,
it was as high as a small wall; about two to three feet high, at least twice
as big as any corrugation we had rode over so far. At the speed I was
driving at there was no time to stop, I decided to crash through and put I
my foot down on the accelerator pedal, shouting to Fred to hold tight a
moment before impact. With a great bang the van hit the wall, the front
rose in the air and to my amazement, like a thorough bred point-to-point
racer it glided over that huge hurdle, only to crash however, into a water
trap beyond. Yes water! The van raced on under its’ own momentum
carving up bow-waves until it came to a stop.

As we slewed to a stop the water started to come in and the engine died.
We had driven into a lake. Sorry, I had driven into a lake. I switched off
the ignition. Fred screamed to know what the hell was going on as his
sleeping bag had suddenly become very soggy. I was damned if I knew. I
shouted for him to get out and he climbed out after me through the
driver’s door window onto the roof dragging his soggy sleeping bag
behind him. There on the roof in the moonlight we could see a huge
expanse of water all around us. Being as we had driven through a desert
as dry as a bone, this ‘lake’ was quite a surprise; swimming had not been
on the itinerary. The water had risen to about a third of the way up the
48
van and stopped; at least it was a shallow lake. We were not going to
drown.

We decided to wait the few hours till daylight to consider our options. We
dared not try to start the engine until we could get out of the water and
just hoped the battery was above the water line, otherwise it would short
circuit. How we were to move the disabled van through the lake was
beyond us.

What a sad sight we must have made sitting there in the moonlight on the
roof of the van, isolated and shivering in the midst of all that water, a
shared soggy sleeping bag the only insulation we had. Whilst we waited
we tried to figure out what had happened. We guessed part of it; this was
a flash flood. Then later talking to other people we sorted it out more
exactly. It appeared that rain storms in the mountains create surging rivers
that pour down on to the desert. Some depressions in the desert form huge
natural bowls or containers that have very impermeable surfaces, and
here the waters gather. These huge expanses of water can form and then
vanish in the heat of the sun in just a few short days. Of course everyone
that crosses the desert knows this, or should. The trick was probably not
to be there when they formed. Our timing was bad.

A few hours later I thought I must have been dreaming for as the dawn
broke, it seemed a great monster rose out of the misty waters. With eyes
blazing it roared towards us parting the waters in huge waves. As it got
nearer I could see it was a huge truck, its axles above the water line, it
was negotiating what to it, was a small puddle. We both cheered. As the
driver reached us, without hesitation, he did a u-turn and reversed up to
us, then he climbed out of his cab on the back of the truck, tied on a tow
rope and threw the other end to us. We got the van secured and then the
lorry pulled us along through the lake to other side. Without further ado
the truck driver opened the bonnet of our van and proceeded to
disassemble the carburettor, take out the spark plugs and the points and
dry them all off. He then re-assembled the whole thing, turned the key
and started the engine for us, all this without a word. He would accept
nothing, not even our thanks, as we didn’t speak his language. He just
smiled, waved, got back in his cab and drove off back through the lake.
We emptied the van and laid everything out to dry in the sun, then after
some breakfast drove on.

Such remarkable ordinary people had helped us all through our journey,
putting our £5 bargain back into working order again so we could proceed
on. If they were following a code in the Koran then they were a great
advert for it.

After this incident our attitude changed. We were absolutely sure that we
would get through the desert; nothing apart from the compulsory regular
work to free the back wheels would stop us. We drove and drove and
49
drove, through heat and cold, night and day, we were going to kiss this
building site goodbye. When our water ran out we switched to good old
Yugoslav beer. On the third afternoon, slightly inebriated, we came out of
the desert and approached the holy city of Mashhad near the Afghan
border.

As I have said from the time of our brief stay in Teheran I believed urban
Iran had a definite medieval aura to it. Modern technology existed, but in
a Middle Ages ethos. The fact that many people wore long ‘medieval’
clothes did nothing to rid me of this idea. I once read that the middle ages
were a state of mind. I don’t mean that they didn’t exist, but they were
dominated by a belief system that saw everything as good or sinful, there
was nothing in between. In the Muslim era this is the 15th century,
perhaps this is their middle ages in which there is only black or white,
good or bad, believer or godless, just like the west in the middle ages,
when Christians burnt witches and believed in a physical place called hell
inside the earth and heaven up in the clouds. Perhaps the difference of
attitude between Western, Muslim and Hindu reflect the age of the
religions. As religions get older and the diversity of the universe
establishes itself in the minds of the believers and teachers, perhaps their
value systems mature. What was only a two valued system; black or
white, good or evil in medieval times is today re-interpreted in a multi
valued, shades of grey moral system rather than stark a black or white
system. We say that something has good aspects to it, another thing has
bad, this is good in this context, but bad in another. The ancient Hindu
religion, which is older than Christianity, welcomes and tolerates new
ideas of spiritual value and they see good and bad, creation and
destruction in the same God with different aspects.

Mashhad had a crazy disorganised feel to it, traffic and pedestrians

mingling about the hot dusty streets. As we approached the mosque in our
gaily-painted van we started to get rather withering looks from people.
The front approach to the mosque was littered with small traders with
their stalls selling postcards and holy bric-a-brac. We climbed out of the
van and asked one of the vendors if we could walk into the forecourt of
the Mosque to view its stunning architecture. He spat at us and growled
something, which sounded like a curse; we were non-believers, hence we
were evil I guess, or at least we were not interested in his holy postcards.
The other vendors all turned and sneered at us, and others around looked
peeved as well. They were obviously all part of the non-believer
welcoming party. Discretion being the better part of valour, and
discretion in this case being a fear of losing our heads, we withdrew into
the van and drove away. Since that time I’ve often thought of picketing St
Paul’s Cathedral in the same way, spitting at anyone who didn’t look like
a true believer. Mind you, today that would include most of the
population; I’d run out of spit.

50
We drove on up into the cold mountains and arrived at the Afghan border
that evening.

Little Prince

The border post was closed at night. When we entreated the hashish
smoking border official to let us through, he shook his head and said
bandits would catch us. We scoffed at this, but I think now it was wise
council, we certainly did not understand the wild and violent ways of the
country we were entering. As we spoke with the sleepy eyed official, his
little, bright faced, son or nephew, who could not have been more than
ten years old, processed our documents. My passport was stamped with
the fact I had brought a vehicle into Afghanistan. They told me that I
would not be allowed to leave Afghanistan unless I took the van out again
or had the stamp cancelled in my passport by selling it. That didn’t sound
too difficult. We had decided that once we got to Kabul we would sell the
van anyway because of the Carne problem, and go on to India by bus and
train.

A strategically placed hotel between the border posts took in guests as

they arrived after sunset, fed them, made a space available for them to
sleep on a dormitory floor and charged just a little more than was
customary. The maitre de was a jolly Afghan who had a little English. He
forced food on us. Now I being a vegetarian had eaten only a little hot
food on the journey. The stew he offered smelt good, but I had a sneaking
suspicion it had meat in it. I asked him if it did.

‘No’ he assured me ‘it didn’t.’

I smelt it again; yes I was sure I could smell meat.

‘No,’ he said with wide-eyed honesty, ‘no meat at all.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, absolutely,’ he said, watching me with benign smile.

I took a spoonful. I tasted meat! I confronted him again eyeball to

eyeball. ‘This does have meat in it!’

He turned his head slightly and pressed his lips together, ‘Well,’ he said
with a sweat smile, ‘very, very little.’ What could I do? His heart was in
the right place. I passed over the hot food and had some bread and cheese.

Many people arrived in the hotel that night, washed up like flotsam, as it
were, on a strange shore by a receding tide, all caught there because the
border had closed. The dining room was very large and well heated by a
large wood burning stove, everyone conversed openly and loudly and we
51
mixed and mingled, delighted to be out of the desert and in strange, but
friendly company. One oldish, very stern faced, western dressed Afghan
seemed to make a big effort to get friendly with various other westerners
and then me. I didn’t feel too comfortable talking to him, as he seemed to
have some other agenda apart from general sociability. It didn’t seem in
his nature to mix with young foreign people, but he tried ever so hard to
be nice.

He told me he had just been on his Haj; his pilgrimage to Mecca. He

talked about the pillars of his faith and the importance of Haj. Finally,
seeing there was nothing else he could think of saying, he got to the point.
There were two things of major importance for a true Muslim to achieve,
one was Haj, and the other was to convert a non-believer, would I like to
convert? I politely declined and mingled on. Well, that wasn’t too bad, at
least he wasn’t after my body, just my soul. I found out later that if you
convert, which takes just a minute, then change your mind later, Muslims
have a right to kill you. Ecumenical this religion is not.

Of the many people there that night one stood out. Or rather everyone
else stood out, because he was a midget. He was about 20 years old,
perfectly formed but with a short lower torso. His name was Robert and
he was Malaysian. It turned out he just travelled all the time. His dad was
a police inspector, who apparently paid him enough of an allowance to
travel the world, third class. He was looking for a lift to Kabul, the capital
of Afghanistan, and our next big objective. He would be pleased to pay
his way.
Well. I thought, even if he did sleep in the back all the time like the Bear,
he was so small we could probably squeeze in next to him. I spoke to
Fred and he agreed we would take him. I dubbed him the little prince
because he seemed to me so regal and quite serene.

52
 Centre Picture - The Little Prince and Fred

The next morning the border post opened and we took off on the Afghan
roads. These were, in comparison with what we had covered so far
outside Europe, superb. The Russians had laid out a beautiful concrete
road system all the way to Afghanistan’s neighbouring borders. This
great civil engineering project was undertaken not for altruistic motives,
but for strategic military reasons; Russian tanks could drive straight to the
borders in double quick time if Afghanistan ever asked Russia for
military help. How very considerate.

The roads were long and flat, and virtually empty, at first a delight, but
soon deadly boring. With Fred sleeping in the back, Robert seemed just
fine sitting in the passenger seat, his little legs dangling down hardly
touching the floor, talking to me and taking things in. To drive on these
roads you hardly needed to do a thing. The gas pedal was fixed down half
open with that loop of clothes hanger wire, and you didn’t need to engage
your feet at all because there were no junctions or traffic lights to stop
you. Really you only needed the lightest touch on the driving wheel, the
van almost drove itself. Robert asked lots of questions about driving;
what did the pedals do? Why do you change gear? He said it was sad that
he would never drive because his legs were too small. Now hearing him
say that I got upset. I believe passionately that everyone should share the
thrill of driving. In fact I laughingly say the only major omission from the
American Constitution, is a clause on the inalienable right to drive.
There was no major reason for Robert not to drive. I knew that pedals
could be modified so they need not be a problem. Come to think of it
there was no major reason that Robert could not drive now, no, none at
all. He didn’t need to press the pedals, I could get the thing going and yes,
he could drive. I put it to him, would he like a go? Yes he said if I was
absolutely sure it would be OK.

We stopped the van and swapped places. I put the coat hanger wire loop
over the gas pedal so it was revving about half revs, got my leg across
from the passengers seat and pressed the clutch, put the van into second
gear and let the clutch out very slowly. We were away! Robert looked
terrified as he realized he was in control of the van, or not as the case
maybe, and we weaved from one side of the road to the other as we
jointly tried to get the van going in a straight line. Once this was
achieved, with a gentle voice and a slowly lighter and lighter touch I
encouraged Robert to steer the van positively. Within a few miles I was
able to take my hand off the driving wheel and Robert was driving. And
soon he was loving it. His face lit up as he got the feel of the wheel and
the road. Soon he wished to go faster and I changed up gears and quickly
he was driving in top gear. We flew along in the Afghan sunshine, Robert
and I laughing like children.

53
After about half an hour I realized breaking might be a bit of a problem
because my legs didn’t get to the pedal easily, but that was something we
could experiment with later, I thought, as we turned one of the few
corners on these roads and came across an Afghan Police check point
waving us down.

The first stupid thought that entered my head was perhaps they’d been
tipped off by the British police about my traffic violation on the way to
Dover. I had not foreseen the long arm of British law stretching out over
Asia to arresting me here.

We had to stop the van. I pushed the gear stick into neutral whilst
stretching over to my maximum length to knock the wire off the gas
pedal whilst braking with the hand brake, it worked, we shuddered to a
stop before we hit the road block. Robert lowered the driver’s window.
The Afghan policeman looked in. He saw Robert’s little feet dangling
down by the seat and just stared. I tried to look as blasé as I could; a
passenger interrupted by a tedious check point, and Robert, bless him,
kept his eyes straight ahead in a bored manner, like a chauffeur asked to
stop, awaiting orders to continue. All he needed was the chauffeur’s hat.
The theatre seemed to work. Unsure of his ground, the policeman did
what all government employees do; he reverted to procedure.

‘Passports!’

Keeping our faces very bland we casually handed over the passports. He
took them back to a central control box. What he was saying to the other
policemen there I do not know. Perhaps he was trying to guess with them
by what magic the pedals worked themselves in this strangely painted
circus like vehicle complete with dwarf driver, or perhaps he thought this
vehicle from the West didn’t need pedals. I guessed at least he would
come back and ask to see Robert’s non-existent licence, but then again
did they have driving licences in Afghanistan?

Hell, never mind the licence, I thought, this was the first time Robert had
ever had control of a vehicle, and I use the word control in a very loose
sense. What about if they made enquiries with the Malaysian police?
Robert’s dad would let the cat out of the bag for sure:

‘What crazy bastard let me son drive? You should shoot him as an
example!’

‘Sure chief, just hold on minute, Abdul where’s that rifle?’

At the very least I presumed we were heading for the clink and I
personally was in real hot water. We waited and watched, whilst
pretending to be not the slightest bit interested in what the policemen
were doing. I told Robert to smile and we feigned joviality in the van.
54
Five minutes past. It seemed like five hours. Perhaps they were phoning
head office for advice.
Finally he came back. He handed Robert the Passports and made a sign
for us to drive on as the barrier was lifted. I sat back with a huge surge of
relief, but then I saw Robert’s panicky face, and looking down I could see
his little feet frantically gesticulating at the pedals, Oh Gosh! What
should he do now? He can’t drive through the barrier; he can’t drive!
All pretence gone I shoved both my legs across his lap, jamming my right
foot down onto the far gas pedal and my left on the clutch, I put the van
into gear shouted at Robert for heaven’s sake to drive in a straight line
now and not drive over the feet of any of the policemen who were
inquisitively lining the road ahead of the van to look in. With me
straddled across him like a secretary across the boss’s lap, Robert drove
the van forward through a group of totally amazed Afghan policemen,
who were scratching their heads at my strange antics whilst I smiled back
at them and patted Robert’s face. Then with my foot hard on the gas we
were through the barrier and down the road before they could swap notes.

Robert, the son of a police inspector, should have known better, but once
through he thought the whole thing greatly exhilarating and laughed like
a drain as he ‘drove’ the van all over the road on purpose. Once we had
calmed down and the van was cruising again, we got into intense
discussions about how he could get a car modified so he could learn to
drive. He had decided then and there to go back home and to pass his test
in a modified car, then buy a Porsche and burn up the Malaysian roads,
his dad could always sort out the speeding tickets.

Throughout all of this Fred had slept. I think he was still feeling the
exhaustion of the desert and I had let him sleep on. About half an hour
later as Robert very skilfully negotiated a quite rare camel cart on the
road, at speed and with great aplomb, Fred woke up. He sat up, rubbed
his eyes and looked at me in the passenger seat. Then slowly his head
turned to the driver’s seat with no one apparently sitting in it, then a
double take back to me in the passenger seat. Was the van was driving
itself? He looked up a bit over the driver’s seat and could just make out
Robert’s head. The colour drained from his face, yes, the truth is
sometimes shocking. He shook his head as if trying to get rid of a bad
picture and then panicked.

‘What the hells going on? You’re going to kill us,’ he shouted. He was
scrabbling out of his sleeping bag as he said it, with the obvious intention
of grabbing the driving wheel. We both assured him it perfectly fine, but
he was not to be placated. Reluctantly I knocked the gear stick out of
gear, put my foot across and kicked off the accelerator pedal wire and
braked with the hand brake, and then we two co-drivers relinquished
control of the van to Fred.

55
But we’d had our day, we smiled at each other, no one would take this
away from us.
We drove on through the valleys, the mountains rising to our left.
Towards late afternoon the engine started making some bad noises. We
soon identified these as the steam sewing machine noise you get when the
big ends go. The thin Iranian oil had done our engine in. The new big
ends that Fred had put in before we left England had worn through.
Fortunately Fred had kept the old ones with his tools. We had no choice
but to change them back.

We had to stop soon. Every so often huge mud built forts would appear a
little away from the road. These were probably traveller’s resting places,
however they looked very forbidding and we drove on. Then a town
called Kandahar appeared on the road, there was no garage, but there was
what looked like a tourist guesthouse on the right. As we drove the now
steaming sewing machine of a van onto the drive of the hotel, what
should we see in front of us, but the Volkswagen. It turned out they had
driven without problems through the Iranian mountains and arrived here
relaxed the day before. They were all fine, Charlotte was looking even
sexier than ever and made a point of talking to me. I decided things were
not so bad.

The hotel was good by tourist standards; hard beds, cold showers, what
more could you ask for? We took a room, had a cold shower, then relaxed
with our old friends and a few new ones. Tomorrow we needed to fix a
sick van, and there was no local help. Fred’s ingenuity would be taxed to
the full.

Missing

The next day Fred started on the engine, it was to be a Promethean effort.
No helpful garage, no hoist, just a handful of tools and a Holts do-it-
yourself Bedford Vauxhall viva service manual. I was not needed for a
while so I wandered around the town, bought some fruit and then went
back to the hotel. Out back of the hotel the proprietor had a monkey
chained to the wall. It was a rather angry monkey and bit anyone it didn’t
like, obviously the Afghan kids, who seemed to be everywhere, teased it.
I started to feed it grapes and could soon get it to sit on my lap whilst it
ate them. When Fred came to find me I asked him to get his camera and
he took a photo. Later back home I remember a pretty girl saw the photo
and told me how handsome I looked, then asked me with a smile who’s
lap was I sitting on?

56
Me with
Monkey

Back with the van in the driveway, Fred had drained the oil and water,
disconnected all the feeds to the engine, uncoupled the springs and shock
absorber links and the drive shaft. There was now a rope around the
engine. Without the aid of a crane or pulleys we would have to take the
engine out of the van by muscle power alone. We recruited the help of
two German boys, tied a block of wood to the rope and heaved that
engine out. Then we turned it on its side and Fred removed the sump to
reveal the big ends. He soon had them in pieces and the ‘new’ big end
shells out. They were half cylinder metal pieces, which had special
smooth soft metal linings on the inside. These had all been scraped away
leaving large scars where the lining should have been. Fred then brought
out the ‘old’ shells in his toolbox, these were definitely old, but the
original metal lining was mostly intact. Where they were slightly scarred
the changing of position of them on the four piston big ends would
57
probably help. Back they went. Then the engine was re-assembled and
the next day we heaved it back into the van again.

I was once more redundant whilst Fred got all the bits reconnected. A
friendly freak from England offered me a bit of Afghan Hash. Why not
bide away some of the time smoking it? Now Afghan Hash has a
reputation of being about the best in the world. Huge fields of it grow in
the mountains and the collectors run through the fields with leather
jerkins on. The plants hit the leather and secrete the very highest quality
hash, which is scraped off and formed into bars. Whatever the pro’s and
con’s of hash smoking, and by the way I don’t smoke it now, I must say
that the smell of this Hash is exceedingly beautiful, it is like a distilled
summer’s day. I would like to have some just to smell it sometimes, not
to smoke it. But on that day having nothing to do, I smoked it.

To me the sudden effects of this narcotic are like hitting a brick wall at
one hundred miles an hour, without injury. There is a sudden ‘donk!’ and
everything changes. Colours are brighter, textures are softer, sweet
sounds are sweeter, words have more significance, girls can be more
beautiful, and time becomes an irrelevance. To counter that, a perceived
hard word or look can be like a physical attack, some pain can become
torture, whilst some pain can vanish. You become less co-ordinated and
unable to undertake quite simple tasks. The great jazz trumpeter, Dizzy
Gillespie, once complained to his band, who smoked dope each night,

‘Boys, that stuff spoils your music.’

‘Nonsense’, said the band, ‘It makes our playing sweeter.’

‘OK’ said Dizzy. ‘I’ll tell you what. Tonight you stay off the weed and
I’ll smoke it, then you tell me who plays sweeter.’

That night they did just that, Dizzy smoked and the band refrained. Later
when he recovered back at the hotel, he spoke to the band.

‘Boys, you were right, I played more sweetly tonight than I ever played
before in my life.’

All the band slowly shook their heads, ‘no Dizzy,’ they said, ‘tonight you
were just awful!’

So the weed generates a false reality, it leads you to believe things that all
others cannot agree with. Those who understand the effects of this
narcotic will at least arrange controlled smoking sessions that have sweet
environments so the ‘trip’ is good.

I decided after I got the ‘donk’ that day to go out by myself. Bad call. I
wobbled down into the town. Soon Afghan boys gathered around me,
58
eager to make contact with a westerner. They realized immediately that I
was zonked to the eyeballs and started to make fun of my feeble efforts to
walk in a straight line. In my narcotic state I took this to be extreme
antagonism, unable to talk to them and afraid of attack I made my
winding way back to the hotel as best I could. That should be a lesson to
myself, I remember thinking.

After I recovered in my room I went back to help Fred. The next day the
engine fired up and sounded good, to everyone’s surprise, including
Fred’s I think. Wasting no further time there we paid up and drove off.
We stopped next in a town that had an impromptu market to buy some
food and we all got rides on a camel. OK as a once only experience I
would suggest, but not to be repeated; you sway most dreadfully up there
and the camels stink.

Further towards Kabul we drove through a town with a cinema. It was a

cement box type building with no obvious fire exits and so a likely death
trap, but we were all three a little tired and the idea of sitting in
comfortable seats in the warmth, relaxed and being entertained appealed
to us. We bought our tickets for a few Afghan dollars, equivalent to a
couple of pennies, and went in and sat down. The auditorium was very
small but sloping like one of our own cinemas and the chairs were very
comfortable. The film however was a particularly bad bit of Bollywood.
It had all the usual clichéd plot lines. Two middle aged actors; a fat lady
and a moustachioed man, both pretending to be young, fall in love
without once kissing. They find themselves in a dire situation, but bravely
overcome all odds, including the terrible machinations of the ‘baddy’,
whose close up face on the screen goes through all kinds of contortions
whilst he thinks up horrible things to do. During their ordeal at the hands
of the baddy the hero and heroine manage quite often to break out into
spontaneous song, she in a high pitched wail, which sounds like a cat’s
bitten her bum, and he like he’s a forty a day smoker with a hang over.
This particular film had an awful additional touch; the ‘baddy’ was
surrounded by young western people, who lounged around a pool with
not much on, drinking alcohol and not saying much either. The good/bad
medieval computation was an obvious: westerners equal bad. For me it
was a nasty piece of racist propaganda, but probably very effective with
an audience who had nothing else to judge it by.

We had just absorbed all of this from the film when there was a slight
shudder, the picture flickered and died and someone screamed. People got
up and ran out of the building. We were mystified and sat there waiting
for the film to recommence. After a while we saw it was not going to as
the staff had run out as well. Then the realization came; we were sitting
there quite contentedly in a concrete death trap during an earthquake. We
arose and exited at some speed. The film wasn’t that good anyway.

59
We subsequently reached Kabul without further incident. On our arrival
we travelled around looking at what sights there were. It was all very sad
and nasty. The centre of Kabul had a few ugly multi-storey buildings, and
there were a few older Victorian looking government buildings, but the
rest were low-rise cheap cement walled boxes or wooden fire traps. A
huge gorge ran through the centre of the town, at the moment the water
level was low and a large rock shelf extended all the way through Kabul
by the side of the river. This was the public toilet; every foot was covered
with human excrement awaiting the spring flood to carry it down to the
plains of Pakistan where grateful people would welcome the ‘fresh’
water.

Most Afghan people were swathed in long wraps and many of the women
and girls, who followed behind the men, had on burqas, black one-piece
garments covering everything head to foot with a little meshed eye hole
in the head part. This didn’t stop us identifying the young girls as their
heads turned to follow the western boys whenever they saw us. The place
was dusty and very cold. The cars on the roads were amazing, they were
all Russian made copies of those ugly 1950’s American cars, a bit like the
rounded shape Ford Zephyr my dad had driven 20 years before. A taxi
driver driving one of these monsters spoke a little English. He told us
fervently ‘ Russian good, give lots to Afghan, American bad, we go with
Russian.’ And so they did the next year, or at least the left wing Army
leaders did, but unfortunately it didn’t work out as they expected.

Robert, my little prince, said goodbye to us and headed for the Bus depot,
he was not stopping he said. We took lodgings in a cement block hotel
near the main open square of the town, and put a card in the window of
the van offering it for sale. It was late December, high up in the
mountains and freezing cold. Each hotel room had a small iron, wood-
burning fire in the middle, the hotel owner, at an exorbitant price,
supplied the wood. It was very hard to light the stove and so we cheated
by using some methelated spirit we had brought along for our primus
stove.

Everything of value we carried on our person for the rooms were often
robbed. Within a few days Fred lost his camera when he forgot to take it
with him. Luckily they didn’t take two rolls of exposed film, so we had
some pictures.

There were, some very nice restaurants in the town and Afghan dollars
being about a hundred to the US dollar they were very inexpensive.
Everywhere we went that was frequented by westerners, there were
pathetic little posters put up by embassies showing pictures of young
western people who had been last seen in Afghanistan and short messages
underneath the photos asking for help in finding them. When we asked
people about these photos they just shook their heads; these Westerners
would never be seen again. It seemed that the other side of the Afghan
60
warrior was a murderous thief. These photos upset us for a few days then
we stopped noticing them.

The tourist shopping was very interesting. There was every conceivable
type of hash accessory you could want to buy in many shops near where
westerners gathered. Other shops offered fabulous blue Lapis Lazuli
jewellery, the Lapis being mined in the mountains of Afghanistan. Some
of the older traditional necklace pieces were made of Lapis and coins and
weighed many pounds. It was the Lapis stone when crushed to a powder
and mixed with egg whites and oil that was to make the vivid blue oil
paints used by Europe’s renaissance artists. I remember standing in a
Venetian church in stunned silence looking up at a Titian painting of the
Madonna resplendent in a most dazzling blue gown. Five hundred years
had not in the slightest way marred that beautiful blue lapis apparition.

Something of further interest to British Tourists were the strange, eerie,

antique shops filled with stacks of Victorian swords, guns, uniforms, and
watches; in fact almost everything that a British Army would need to
fight a battle in the late nineteenth century. Victorious Afghan tribesmen
had looted these items during a continuous on-off war against British
India in the previous century. Once they killed over 17000 people in the
Khyber Pass; the Pass that runs between Afghanistan and the then British
India. 4000 were soldiers, the rest civilians retreating from Kabul. Only
one man, a Doctor Brydon, had survived. The spoils from these battles
were taken back to the villages as symbols of a successful campaign.

Now, a hundred years later all this loot had accumulated in these antique
shops ready to be repatriated by tourists. It wasn’t this irony that hit me
though; it was a feeling of great sadness. Five of my great uncles had
fought in the Great War not twenty years after Victoria’s reign. I saw
those British soldiers who died in the Khyber Pass in my minds eye
before they were called upon to put on uniforms and be sent to India. I
saw the spirits of bright-eyed cheeky boys, everyone’s son and brother, in
all this forgotten paraphernalia of war.

The town contained large amounts of westerns all coming or going and
filling the hotels and restaurants, Kabul being on the main route to India.
We met some very interesting people including Mark, who had been on
the road for two years. He was over six foot tall, stern faced and
handsome. Over meals taken at long benches in the restaurants catering
for Westerners, he talked about his travels around Asia and the Middle
East and his love affair there with a sheik. When we showed some
distaste for things homosexual he turned on us and asked had we ever
done it, if we hadn’t how could we comment. He had so much presence
that we didn’t argue with him. One day we got talking about hash and the
laws in Europe banning it. At the end of the meal he took me to his room
and showed me a book he had just bought in the market. When he opened
it I saw it was hollowed out just big enough for the large slab of hash in a
61
plastic bag he had inserted into the space, He sewed the book up in a
hessian bag and stuck a label on it with an address in England. He would
post it he said from India. It was going to his mate who would send him
money. I laughed, that would never work. The customs people or their
dogs were bound to spot it and his mate would get caught and sent to
prison. Well he said, he’d been doing it for two years and hadn’t been
caught yet. I was flabbergasted. Was it that easy?
We met the Volkswagen people again and before long Charlotte invited
me back to her hotel room in a wooden firetrap of a hotel in the old
quarter of town. During that day I got to know her much better, in fact
about eight times much better. Well, I had been without female company
for some time. For the next few days we enjoyed that thrill of newfound
love. Charlotte was well prepared physically with prophylactics, but I
don’t think she was well prepared mentally for the attention of a lover.

After a few days she started to look slightly shell shocked. It turned out
that she had not had a boy friend for over two years and up to a year ago
she had been on valium to relieve a stress disorder. She also intimated
that she was psychic. I could see that our passion was causing her stress
again. The next day in a restaurant with a large group of us relaxing, I
believe she was still not thinking clearly when she announced that she
wanted to travel on to India through the Khyber Pass by horseback,
Afghan horses were famous for their sturdiness she said and she would
buy one and ride it to India. Would I go with her? I had never ridden a
horse, but it couldn’t be that difficult. Sure I said.

Mark heard this nonsense and got angry. We were mad. Hadn’t we taken
notice of all the photos pinned on the walls by the western embassies?
These showed the faces of young westerners, boys and girls last seen in
Afghanistan, some months, some years ago. The certainty was now they
had been killed when they were isolated somewhere in the country. Many
tribesmen had little or no respect for stranger’s lives, especially non-
believers, and would kill for the contents of your pockets, which
represented great wealth to them. We would never get to India.
I had forgotten the pictures. Mark was right and I saw Charlotte saw it
too. We were being stupid.

Whilst I had been otherwise engaged with Charlotte, Fred had stayed
around the hotel, and spoke to anyone who showed any interest in buying
the van. After a couple of days we discovered that the Afghans, although
many showed an interest, could not buy it. There was some government
vehicle import monopoly that was enforced by law. We would have to
sell the van to a foreigner or take it out again. Before this realization
though Fred had met a very smart, western dressed middle-aged English
speaking Afghan, who said he was interested in buying the van. He
seemed more interested in Fred though. Now Fred was a very open
person, as I have said and when this Afghan invited Fred back to his
house to discuss the sale, Fred agreed.
62
It turned out that the Afghan was a very wealthy aristocrat. His house was
fabulously furnished with hugely expensive hand made Afghan rugs
covering every bit of the houses extensive flooring. These were woven,
he told Fred, by people of his villages. They chatted for a while over
coffee and food about many things but nothing about purchasing the car.
Finally when everything seemed relaxed the Afghan introduced Fred to a
very pretty Afghan girl, who, he whispered, had won a national beauty
contest. Whilst admiring the girl, Fred was tickled by the idea of an
Afghan beauty contest. How would the contest work, would they troupe
in in burqas and be judged on their height or posture or the way they
giggled under that layer of black cloth? Anyway this girl was not in a
burqa, she was dressed in very expensive western designer clothes and
she was a beauty.

The polite conversation continued over more food and drink though the
van was never discussed, but later as Fred left, his host asked him if he
would return the next day. Fred told me all this later in the day with an air
of mystery, there was some ulterior motive for the aristocrat’s interest,
but he was damned if he could spot it.

The next day on his return visit all was revealed. The girl was an Afghan
princess, educated in France, she had returned and been forced into an
arranged marriage with an Afghan prince she highly disliked. Now she
was allowed to spend each day in this aristocrat’s house ostensibly
looking after his children, but in fact they had a strange sort of intimate
relationship. Her aristocrat friend had a sexual problem, he was a voyeur;
he wanted to watch others. She, with her western education, liked
Western boys, and now she had seen Fred and she liked him. Would Fred
be prepared to enter into a liaison bearing these things in mind?

She was very pretty, ‘Yes’, he said he would.

And so this peculiar affair started for him, the aristocrat called for him in
the morning, and then the ménage a trois commenced. On the first
occasion they decided to drive out into the countryside because the
Afghan was afraid his servants would notice something if they carried on
at home. So they drove out twenty miles or so and stopped in a very
lonely place. Fred and his new girlfriend climbed into the back of the van
and the Afghan sat in the front passenger seat, drinking whiskey and
keeping an eye out for anyone coming. It would seem a difficult thing to
do, to keep an eye out of the van knowing what was transpiring inside it.
However he must have done his job well because just as Fred got his
trousers down, the Afghan shouted ‘Quick, quick, there’s someone
coming down the road on a donkey, get back here and drive off.’

Doing his pants up swiftly Fred clambered back into the driver’s seat and
they drove off. The Afghan then suggested they go to the estate of one of
63
his friends who was out of the country. They gained entry somehow and
drove into a huge verdant garden/estate. There they found a secluded spot
and Fred parked the van and climbed into the back to recommence his
passion. This time things went on a little longer and Fred had his trousers
all the way down to his ankles before the Afghan screamed ‘Quick,
there’s someone coming around the corner right NOW!’
With even less time than before Fred jumped into the driving seat and
drove off, his trousers still around his ankles and his tackle hanging out.
That was it for the countryside. They decided to use our hotel room.

Once Fred started this liaison in the hotel I was left to sell the van, but
fortunately a Pakistani boy and his Dutch girl friend, who were returning
to Holland and wanted cheap transport, had approached Fred the day
before. Fred had already sold off the contents of the van including the
wonderful foam rubber insulation for a few dollars in the market; some
lucky trader’s family would sit comfortable and warm in their home
thanks to him. Fred told the prospective van purchaser that he didn’t think
the van would go far but the Pakistani was still interested, and a few days
later when I had taken over from Fred he returned to offer I think forty
US dollars; far more than we had paid for it. I agreed the price and we
drove off to the Afghan interior ministry building to get our passports
endorsed with the change of ownership.

As I drove off from the hotel around the main city square, I inadvertently
went through an amber traffic light. Too my utter surprise an Afghan
policeman jumped out from behind a wooden sentry box and landed in
front of my speeding van, nearly killing himself as I applied the brakes in
an emergency stop. He looked like all Afghan policemen, an unshaven
face, a long mud coloured greatcoat, a holstered gun and bare feet.
Shouting loudly and unholstering his gun he climbed into the back of the
van and signalled me to follow his direction.

‘What does he want?’ I asked the Pakistani in some alarm.

‘A bribe, you went through a red light,’ said the Pakistani, adding ‘don’t
give him anything. I know them, that’s all they want.’

‘Where’s he taking me?’ I asked.

‘To the police jail’ said the Pakistani, adding again ‘don’t give him
anything, they only want money.’

Now I had heard many stories of Afghan jails. They were filthy and
verminous, and you were chained to your iron bed where rough, stubbly
bearded warders sodomised you each night!

‘How much does he want?’ I asked.

64
They exchanged words.

‘One thousand Afghan dollars, but don’t pay him.’

I tried to work out in my frightened head how much that was in US

dollars. ‘I don’t want to go to jail, can you make him an offer? I said.
Again they exchanged some angry words.

‘He will accept five hundred, but don’t pay him, Wait a minute I will
discuss with him again.’ More angry words, then nods.
‘200 hundred is his bottom price, but I would not pay him.’

I paid him.

The policeman grabbed the money and like a jackrabbit shot out of the
van and had vanished across the square.

‘You should not have paid him, they all do this’

.
Now two hundred Afghan dollars was, I found out, about a month’s
wages for these impressed policemen. But in side street money exchange
terms that worked out to about two US dollars. I’m glad I didn’t make a
principled stand.

We drove on to the ministry stopping at every light that threatened to turn

amber or red. The passport stamping took ages. We queued first in this
line to see an official behind some bars who handed us a form and sent us
on to other lines where officials behind bars did something to the form
and looked at our passports, entered something on the margin of the form
and passed us on to other lines.

We queued with rows of quiet Afghans who, each time they got to the
front of the queue passed over some Afghan money along with the form.
The official opened a drawer and casually swept the money in to it before
stamping the Afghan’s document, and then the Afghan moved on to the
next line. I asked my Pakistani friend what was happening with the
money. That’s the baksheesh he said; the bribe. Nothing happens with the
bureaucracy without a series of bribes. What about us? Oh, they have
given up with westerners; westerners don’t understand the system and
cause trouble so they don’t ask them for bribes.

Finally we got to the last queue. Bigger bribes seemed to take place here.
The official took our documents and passports into a room open behind
him, and presented them to a large self-important man behind a big desk
who perused them for a second and then set about applying stamps to our
passports. The job was done. I could leave Afghanistan now anyway I
chose.

65
It was Christmas Eve, that evening in our favourite restaurant I was
jubilant, any sadness of parting with the van was offset by the relief of
getting it off my passport. Charlotte over the other side of the bench table
seemed very subdued, repressed even. We all enjoyed our Christmas fare,
which was the same as any other evening, but eaten under a few
Christmas decorations put up by a thoughtful proprietor, and then
departed to sleep. Charlotte asked me to come over later so I thought
everything must be alright with her. I spoke to Fred about moving on, he
seemed nervous about this. His Afghan Princess didn’t want to lose him.
He wanted to travel on although he didn’t want to part with her in tears.
He would have to make a decision. The strain of performing in front of a
live audience must have been affecting him.

I walked over to Charlotte’s hotel to meet her in the lounge/dining room,

if you could call an open area by the lobby, that. When I saw her I was
taken aback, her eyes had completely transformed. They looked intense,
rabid even. What had happened?

Charlotte told me she had had to take some valium. She said she had not
been ready for an intense sexual relationship, and that she had needed the
valium because it released her spiritually. To me it looked like it had
grabbed her mentally. She was now aware again of her spiritual element,
she said, and she realized who she was again; she was a female goddess.
She said this in all seriousness and with very starey eyes.

I told her to go to bed and get some sleep. Good God, why did people
take stuff that screwed them up like that? But then who was I to
comment? I hadn’t done much better with the hash.

For the rest of our time in Kabul we were still assumed to be an item, but
there was no real contact, and later in Delhi when she walked onto the
hotel roof lounge with Mark and announced a liaison with him I was
relieved for myself, but sorry for him. However if he was the hard nosed
pragmatist I took him for I was sure he would discard Charlotte during
her first performance of the hyped up, on valium female goddess routine,
otherwise he was in for big trouble.

I went back to my hotel room, Fred was out and the room was very cold. I
tried to light the wood stove. The wood got hot, smouldered, but failed to
really ignite. Ignoring the advice I had received about pouring methelated
spirit on hot stoves, I opened the front of the stove and splashed some
more in. I remember there was a sort of ‘wump’ sound and then I found
myself over the far side of the room, my eyebrows burnt off, hair singed
and my skin scorched. I had just blown myself up. After dowsing my
arms and face in some cream I thought would help, I climbed into my
sleeping bag and went to sleep. Apart from some peeling skin I wasn’t
hurt and I wasn’t cold anymore.

66
A few days later a group of us, including Mark, Charlotte and Graham,
and Hans, a young, long-haired, bearded German boy and his girlfriend
decided to move on to Pakistan through the Khyber Pass by local bus.
Graham and Charlotte were leaving the VW because its’ owners were
heading north to visit some Buddhist shrines at Bamiyam, away from
India where they wanted to go. Fred I think was emotionally blackmailed
and decided to stay on until his paramour and her friend could arrange to
travel to India with him, and then he would meet me in New Delhi.
I entered the bus with one small bag of belongings and my rolled up
sleeping bag, and we drove off to Peshawar. The bus bounced down the
uneven bending road of the Pass, high rocky escarpments passed us on
either side. Yes, this was the ideal place for an ambush; those British
troops hadn’t stood a chance, and neither would we on horseback.

The hundred dollar note sting

The bus took us through the border with Pakistan without much trouble
although the border guards looked long and hard at the German passports,
whilst returning our British ones without a glance. We arrived hot and
sweaty but in one piece.

As we pulled in to the Peshawar bus terminus a whole posse of hotel touts

descended on us shouting room rates. We chose one tout at random with a
nice smile and an OK room rate and he herded us to a line of bicycle
rickshaws, to be carried to our hotel. Our rickshaw man insisted three of
us climb into his contraption; at least one too many. The thin and wiry
operator then heaved down on the pedals and slowly, painstakingly
moved the rickshaw forward. Witnessing this man’s struggle, I found
myself in a dilemma. I couldn’t help, there were only one set of pedals,
though I desperately wanted to. I couldn’t get out and walk, because I
would have deprived the driver of his income, or if I’d paid him anyway
and walked that would have insulted him. I had to sit there and endure
with guilt this poor, underfed wretch struggle with all his might to move
our well-fed, western bodies to our hotel. Perhaps this was good for the
soul. It was certainly good for his pocket as I gave him a big tip, but I
never allowed myself to be driven in a bicycle rickshaw again.

Our hotel was no different from the hotels we had just left, perhaps a bit
smellier; it was warmer in the day in Peshawar, being as it was at the foot
of the mountains, but it was still coldish at night. They called Peshawar
the City of Flowers. I couldn’t see why, the flowers must have gone long
ago, but Peshawar seemed a little more relaxed than Kabul. The houses in
the poorer quarter where we stayed were mostly two storey wood and
clay affairs, with more modern ones popping up of concrete. There were
shades along the road protecting the market vendors from the direct heat
of the sun. When we walked around the market the older locals mostly
seemed to ignore us with a scowl, if those two things can be undertaken
simultaneously, whilst the younger locals often grinned. A few locals had
67
acquired casual, western clothes. They perhaps wanted to become
involved in western culture. There were already small, but growing
populations of Pakistanis and Indians in the UK drawn there by the
opportunity of better their living standards, and there must have been feed
back to their folks here. We were told, though, that the intelligent
traveller should be cautious, for just as in Afghanistan, there was still
hatred and envy of foreign people and non-believers.

The food was good and it was cheap, fresh bread cooked on the walls of
small clay ovens complemented by vegetable curry and rice, and there
was sweet tea or bottled coke to wash it down.

We spent the the day visiting the fort and other tourist ‘musts’ in
Peshawar, and the tourist centre issued us with concession documents,
which entitled us to discounts off the already very low cost rail fares in
Pakistan. We bought Second Class train tickets for Lahore and departed
the next day on a train pulled by a steam engine, something we had lost
from the railways in England, The smell of the steam engines in
Peshawar station was a sensual event; I hadn’t realized how much I loved
that smell from my boyhood. I’m glad though we bought Second Class
tickets rather than the Third Class we travelled on later in India. Second
Class meant that you could usually find a seat, maybe of wood, but this
was much better than the scramble in third class with people sitting under
your feet, or you under theirs or jammed up along the corridors or even in
the luggage racks or on the roof of the train. The journey itself was
tedious and slow. Train travel on the sub continent is a rather
lackadaisical affair, delays being the norm. Later on I saw a sign in Delhi
Station informing passengers that the times published in the time tables
were the times before which the trains would not depart. Now that had a
refreshing honesty about it. The Pakistan countryside looked quite bare in
late December. The land was generally flat and uninspiring. We passed
through Rawalpindi and Gujranwala and many smaller towns, many of
them industrialized, though agriculture, industry, and domestic habitation
seemed thoroughly mixed.

When we got to Lahore Station that evening the customary posse of hotel
touts surrounded us. One offered particularly low rates and we followed
him. We were piled into scooter rickshaws and driven off. The dirt roads
were pot holed all over and carried a mixture of painted trucks, cars,
bullock carts, single decker buses, handcarts, and taxi-scooters, all
ridiculously overloaded. We were now much closer to sea level and had
moved nearer the equator, and although this was the Northern
Hemisphere’s winter, it was hot and dry. I doubt if it ever got cold in the
daytime.

The hotel, where we arrived was a two storey wooden building, and it
wasn’t nice, but then again we surmised the others were probably the

68
same as this one. We unpacked our few belongings, rolled out our
sleeping bags and got some sleep.

The next day we toured around. The streets were packed with people and
here in the older, poorer part of town every house seemed to support a
shop front. To a westerner it was hot and dirty. We viewed a magnificent
red brick fort and had lunch in one of the many roadside cafes offering
freshly cooked food. Later when we returned to the hotel Mark threw a
fit. He said his belongings had been rifled through. I looked at my
belongings; nothing seemed to have been touched. The others said the
same, but Mark was adamant, he knew when someone had disturbed his
things, he said, because he set them up just to show him if they had been.
The manager and staff claimed complete innocence in the matter. Mark
insisted he would move hotels and packed and left immediately. I knew
he was concerned about the large mount of Hash he had revealed to me
he was carrying. Graham and I met him later that evening for a meal and
he agreed to meet us again the next day at the bus station where we would
catch a bus to the border with India.

On my return to the hotel I found that the police had visited it and taken
Hans away. His girlfriend was distraught and we all comforted her as best
we could and agreed a plan to visit the German Consulate with her in the
morning, for help. However the mystery deepened the following morning,
she had vanished from the hotel we were told. We guessed she had gone
to the Consulate the previous evening without us and stayed there. The
hotel staff looked very glum and seemed to avoid our eyes. Unable to
fathom these things out we paid our bills and took taxis to the bus
terminal. When Mark heard our story he just shook his head, these things
were linked he was sure.

The bus took just an hour to the border. This border was not a nice place.
Both countries, so similar it seemed to western eyes, hated each other
with intensity and had had a series of wars with each other since
independence from Britain in 1948. The border had to open to let tourists
through, because they provided important income for both counties, and
so the two countries co-operated, but with bad grace. The border officials
wouldn’t talk to each other or even go near each other; we had to walk
fifty yards between the two border posts to present our documents in each
country. I guess a lot of the tourist income thus generated was ploughed
back into guns so that they could knock the heck out of each other again
in the next war.

Once again the British Passport holders were swept straight through
whilst the other passport holders were carefully scrutinized. I realized as
my passport was stamped that it was the 3rd of January 1973. We had
completely missed all the usual New Year razzmatazz.

69
As we walked onto Indian soil we had a huge surprise; there smiling in
front of us were Hans and his girlfriend. After a moment of shock we
greeted each other with smiles and hugs and asked what had occurred.

This was Hans’s story: Early the previous evening a Police Major had
walked into their room along with a grinning hotel manager and had gone
straight to the place where Hans had secreted his little store of Hash. The
major arrested and handcuffed him and took him to the police station
where they put a proposition to him. He could either, be tried for the
possession of cannabis, and be jailed in a Pakistani jail, or he could help
them by undertaking a very simple job. They showed him a $100 bill and
asked him to change it at one of the cities many illegal moneychangers.
The bill was a little old and creased and was of course phoney. These
moneychangers changed hard currency at much higher rates than the
government’s official rate and were therefore outside the law and could
not complain to the police about phoney money without admitting their
‘guilt’. If the moneychangers did spot the forgery and get rough the
police major would protect Hans. Simple no? Hans said yes he would do
it. The conspirators gave him the bill and sent him off.

However, when Hans came out of the police station he went straight back
to his girlfriend at the hotel, grabbed her and in order not to arouse staff
suspicion just took their small hand bags and no other luggage, walked
out of the hotel and caught a taxi to the bus station and a bus to the
border. And here he was, free. He showed us the faded forgery, I’d never
seen a hundred dollar bill before, not even a forged one.

What an incredible story this was, how devious the hotel manager and his
police major accomplice had been, how quick-witted Hans had been, and
how prescient was Mark with his unheeded warning. It made us all think,
we were surely innocents abroad and except for people like Mark we
were easy targets. After Han’s story I was concerned at how long this
predation might continue. All the way to India, the further we got from
Western Europe, generally, but with many bright exceptions on the road,
the less comfortable we felt. In Turkey only a little, then Iran and
Afghanistan and on through Pakistan you often felt like a ‘mark’, they
wanted to take something off you, hopefully only your money in a seedy
transaction. For we exhibited extraordinary wealth to these people; the
contents of our easily removed wallets might take them a lifetime to save.
We also represented evil according to some of their clerics; we were
unbelievers, we had loose morals and were here they said to seduce them
from the way of God, and finally we were stupid, valuing ancient, natural
and cultural things around them that they disparaged, and showing little
regard for the money we spent and the material things on which they
placed such high value.

Only as we entered India did this change. At once I felt the people were
pleased for us to be there and were not thinking how to take something
70
off us unless it was a little understanding. We would have less need to
worry here; whereas the culture in the countries we had travelled through
in some ways encouraged antagonism against non-believers, the culture
in India, based on a secular state consisting of mostly Hindu mixed with
Sikh and Muslim seemed to promote interest in others. There were
exceptions in India too, but when they tried to take your money they did
it with hint of humour and a smile.

We took our first Indian bus to Amritsar, which was about an hour away,
where the Indian Railway awaited us.

Into India

The Sikhs are a people apart. They are good businessmen and often have
high personal ethics, which gives a true Sikh a human stature above many
other people.

Their scripture is called the Granth Sahib, which is stored in the Golden
Temple in Amritsar. The Sikhs exist or have existed between the Muslim
and Hindu faiths, occupying a no-mans-land both spiritually and
physically. A Sikh respects those of other faiths and does not demean
them.

We stayed in a Sikh run hotel, which I found a cut above all other eastern
hotels. The place was calm and the food on offer very good. We toured
the sites of the City and saw the Golden Temple. Then we purchased
foreign student travel passes, which greatly reduced all our train fares and
we bought third class train tickets to Delhi. The following afternoon we
entrained.

We set out on a local train, which puffed its way across the Punjab
stopping everywhere. Green parakeets in their thousands roosted on the
telephone wires along the track. As evening came I witnessed a glorious
sunset displaying those unusual colours you see on calendar pictures in
Indian grocery shops, a vivid violet sky back-dropping a tangerine-gold
sun. Here this really was the colour of the sunset, it wasn’t just imagined,
as I had believed.

The train would often stop, sometimes for hours. There was no
explanation, no one asked why. Indian trains ran that way. Once again, as
in Pakistan, although most was countryside, we passed through many
industrial towns with smoking chimneys. India was not just an agrarian
society.

The third class in which we travelled is an interesting class. This is the

poor class, hard wooden benches and crowded humanity. The train was
packed and I was sure many people had not paid. The farmer’s wife who
got on at Jalandhar with two live chickens and sat next to me was never
71
asked for her ticket although ours were inspected it seemed every other
hour. People sat on every bit of floor and that night I slept in the string
luggage rack above the benches, whilst Graham slept under them. The
other westerners got what sleep they could in sitting positions. The train
stopped everywhere and a stream of people always got on and off no
matter what time of day or night, they treated the train like we treated the
local bus.
When the train finally pulled into New Delhi station we ignored the hotel
touts. We had the address of a hotel in the Sikh quarter and we took
scooter taxis straight there.

We had made the right choice; the place had a bright feel about it. The
common area was the roof of the hotel where everyone congregated
including the hotel owner and his wife and children. We sat under
awnings and sipped cold coke. The roof lounge was a sensible idea; Delhi
was very hot and you needed the open air because enclosed rooms were
stifling.

Sikhs pay especial attention to their sons and the hotel owner’s small son
was constantly handed around and cuddled and played with, by the Sikh
men more than the women, it seemed. There was a language barrier
between our hosts, and us, but we got along fine. Once again the food
was wholesome and we didn’t feel at risk of being robbed. The Sikh
community encouraged early rising because early rising meant you would
get more done that day, and the Sikh quarter in Delhi has its’ own unique
wake up alarm system which we discovered at very first light the first
morning. A large troupe of Sikh women and boys marched around the
streets singing at the tops of their voices and banging cymbals and drums.
The noise was tremendous and all in the hotel were wide-awake within
the half hour that this cacophony ran for.

One thing was becoming a great nuisance. Flies had become more and
more numerous as we came down from the colder mountains. They were
the big iridescent blue variety we call Bluebottles. There must be millions
per square mile in these hot, populated areas, and there is rarely any cold
to destroy them as their European cousins are destroyed in the winter.

With so much rotting material, India must seem a land of plenty to them.
There were so many flies that local people ignored them. Westerners
could not tolerate them and were constantly swatting and swishing to
keep them away because they knew flies were major carriers of disease. I
wondered if the horrible disfigurements we often saw in Indian people
were the result sometimes of fly borne disease. The flies however, to give
them their due, must be the most successful creatures on the Indian sub
continent, they have, as a group, a huge capacity, audacity and overtness;
nothing diverts them from their task of finding nourishment and breeding.
During our journeys through India flies would always be around in vast
quantities. They gathered in their hundreds and thousands around
72
anything edible or damp; food, excrement, animal eyes and sweaty parts.
They would be everywhere buzzing around our heads, and they bred like,
well, like flies. I watched two flies mating on a plastic chair on our hotel
roof. As they sat there, their rear ends conjoined, other flies landed
around them, turned away from them, and cooled them with their wings.
The noise of the other fly’s wings cooling them was quite audible. The
two lovers had a perfectly air-conditioned love bower. At that moment I
didn’t have the heart to kill them.

No Mail

In India, the Pax Britannica of over a hundred years had brought great
wealth creation and growth. I don’t disagree that Britain exploited India,
but India grew and prospered too. In Delhi you could see the legacy of
British India in two distinct ways in the Old and the New.
New Delhi is a nice place to explore. It is big and grand and could have
been designed for tourists. New Delhi clearly shows its British Legacy. It
has wonderful Lutyens designed marble and stone buildings flanking
wide ceremonial avenues. These imperial buildings were constructed to
reflect the greatness of the British Raj with broad avenues to take great
processions on state occasions. New Delhi is now the capital city of India
with the President occupying the old Viceroy’s house and the Indian
Parliament occupying the old Secretariat Buildings. It is a place where
tourists can relax, wander and shop, following their guidebooks around
the great buildings.

For me it was interesting for a while, but there was little shade and its’
really hot. Even in January you find yourself entering many of the huge
air-conditioned banks that have established themselves along Connaught
Place, and are staffed by the most beautiful Indian girls in saris. You take
a few minutes pretending to fill in forms, whilst you admire the pretty
girls and cool down enough to walk out again.

Travel just a little way beyond the New and you find the Old. Old Delhi
presents a picture of organised chaos. In the first instance you do not see
any British Legacy, all you see is a fantastic mêlée of hundreds of
thousands of people going about their daily routine of earning a living
whatever way they can; some more successful than others. But in fact this
is another aspect of the legacy; the huge volume of people that a hundred
years of internal peace, financial stability, a less bridled economy and a
developed transport infrastructure have made possible. The problem this
increased population raises is that the faster the population grows the
more they have to divide up the limited assets of the country. As the
Indian population boomed the ordinary people stayed poor. It seems to
me that birth control choice is vital if people are to enjoy any of the
material benefits that social stability brings.

73
People in hot eastern countries have different priorities to westerners.
Firstly you don’t need to protect yourself from the cold much, so really
apart from the rainy season, if you can’t afford it, shelter isn’t a must
have. If you are poor in a town, you can live on the street, or rather the
pavement; pedestrians won’t drive over you. Whole families squatted
sadly on spaces on the pavement the size of a small room. Where
pedestrian traffic was not too high every bit of pavement was occupied. I
also saw women cultivating little patches of dirt a few metres square by
the side of their pavement bedroom between the pavement and buildings,
this was their kitchen garden, fertilised and watered I know not how, nor
wish to consider.

The road traffic was incredible, lots of 1950 style British designed oxford
cars and taxis, many fabulous but falling to bits pre-war British cars, giant
trucks, bullock carts, scooters, scooter taxis, motorbikes, holy cows, carts
pulled by men (and women), pedestrians and buses, all pushing,
rumbling, hooting, roaring, stopping, starting and polluting in one great
big jam. The smells, the sights, the sounds, and the heat were a shock at
first. Chandri Chowk, the great bazaar had all this and thousands and
thousands of shops and stalls all piling out onto the road. Down the
narrower side streets scooters and bikes were the only vehicles that could
penetrate easily and pedestrians seemed to have the upper hand as there
were so many of them. The huge press of humanity seemed to have a life
and consciousness of its own as it wove snake-like through the narrow
streets, yet each individual in this flux had a different purpose and a
different destination and they seemed quite comfortable to be there.
We were not in tourist spending mode, but certain essentials were
purchased. We all switched our footwear to water buffalo hide sandals
with a little loop for the big toe and a broad band of leather across the top
of the foot. They were beautifully tooled and we soon got the technique
for walking with them. The girls purchased light blouses and the boys
purchased longis. These are about a metre of brightly coloured cloth,
which we learned to drape around our waists. We often wore them
instead of trousers. Traditional things like sandals and longis tended to be
of good quality, but you had to watch out for anything else you bought. I
purchased a small green canvas holdall to take my gear. The maker had
left the cloth border next to the sewed seem so narrow it promptly blew
when I filled it. It was probably the penny saving made on a centimetre
strip of material that caused the bag to split.

One day whilst I was waiting for my friends to come out of our hotel, I
sat talking to someone who claimed to be a magician and who relieved
me of ten rupees with a card trick. He asked me why I had come to India?
When I said I didn’t know, he nodded his head and said that I would find
something. When I asked him why, he said this was because I had come
without preconceptions.

74
Later that day in our wanderings we passed a Hindu Book Shop, I think it
was the equivalent of a Christian Book Shop in the UK; it was there to
spread the good word. When I entered the shop I discovered a huge tome
four inches thick on the Bagavad Gita. Now the Bagavad Gita or Gita as
it is usually called, is only one short story from the Mahabarata, one of
the most holy Hindu books. The Sanskrit Language does not have past
tenses so the stories in these books come across to their public as now;
these religious stories are now stories. This particular story holds an
intense spiritual/philosophical/emotional appeal to Hindus, who consider
all their holy books to be true history and the Gita to be a gem in that
history. The reason I was attracted to this translation was its detail in
depth. Each stanza was produced in the original Sanskrit, Then the next
paragraph showed word for word Sanskrit/English. Then the next
paragraph was just the English in the same order. Then the next
paragraph was the English re-arranged grammatically. Then any unusual
words were further explained. Then one or two renowned Hindu scholars
gave a commentary on the text.

This was the idiot’s guide to a little fragment of the Hindu Scriptures, but
it seemed an important fragment. My only hesitation in buying it was its
weight, about two pounds; I had made the decision after disposing of the
van to travel light.

I read the introduction, which explained that the Gita was about a great
ethical dilemma that the hero, Arjuna, had to resolve in order bring about
redemption. My curiosity was aroused. For the ridiculous equivalent cost
of two dollars I acquired some extra ballast. I assumed it would weight
me down all through my travels in India, then find its’ place on a dusty
book shelf at home unread. But I felt the better for having bought it.

If the act of buying something to weigh me down for the rest of my

journey seemed fairly stupid, the next day the act of buying something to
torture me was really stupid, and for the fifteen minutes that followed this
purchase I thought I was going to be broken or crippled; I had decided to
submit myself to a road side massage/manipulation.

Street masseurs or manipulators are to be seen in every town in India. The

rickshaw drivers and cart pulling coolies go to them. This clientele is as
tough as old boots, with strong sinewy arms and legs and powerful back
muscles. In order to manipulate these tough characters you need what
might seem brutally energetic levering techniques. Generally the
practitioners are judged on the number of joints they can crack and how
far they can contort their client’s body.

I forgot that we had no common language and that apart from screaming I
had no way of telling my manipulator that he should desist. Of course I
didn’t want to scream, that would seem whimpish. The chap I selected as
my torturer was a little wiry guy, no more than five feet tall. I was sure
75
this titchy guy couldn’t be that tough. He had his establishment, a mat, on
the pavement under the shade of a lonely old tree that grew on the edge of
an English cemetery that was now in the heart of a teeming Indian city.
Being in the cemetery, the tree had somehow escaped the axe. Off to the
other side of the cemetery was an old Victorian chapel, which looked like
it had seen better days; it sat there dejected like a desolate old lady
forgotten in the midst of a scene of rape and pillage.
As soon as I stepped forward and sat on his work mat a shout went up and
within a minute you couldn’t see through the crowd. I think this also
spurred on my would be miniature tormentor, who saw the opportunity to
advertise his services to a wider public.

Using a thin cloth around my fingers and toes he proceeded to click every
one of them in each joint. That hurt but it was just tolerable. Then he set
to work on my ankles, wrists, knees, elbows and shoulder joints, twisting
and cracking them every which way at angles they had never assumed
before. The audience warmed appreciably as the pain seared through my
body. Then turning me onto my front he proceeded up my spine with the
heal of his foot. At this point I felt like a man being publicly flogged and
needed something to bite on. He then sat me up again and worked
through all my neck joints.

Then he started the real work. He got my body in various wrestling locks,
sometimes twisting different combinations of arms and legs and bending
my torso beyond extremes; at one point my head was between my thighs,
and I could see the backs of my legs. Next he started work on my head,
getting it into various vice-like grips. Finally he executed his piece-de-
résistance, He put the cloth over my earlobes, bit my earlobes through the
cloth and pulled on them until my ears clicked!

It was over, thank god. My tormentor smiled triumphantly at me and

stood up. I smiled feebly back; it felt great to be alive. I staggered to my
feet, pulled out twenty rupees from my money belt, which I knew was far
more than the going rate and gave it to him. He seemed gratified. With as
much dignity as I could muster I wobbled through the crowd to my
friends, who had thought the whole thing a great sport, but on reflection
declined to follow my example.

The parting of the ways

Each day in Delhi I went to the central post office post-restante, to check
if mail had arrived or to hopefully meet Fred or Pete. No mail ever
arrived during the weeks I stayed in Delhi, but Fred arrived a week after
me and moved into our hotel. We then both made the journey to the Post
Office each day after that in the hope that Pete would show, but he never
did. It seems he never raised the necessary cash.

76
Fred’s Afghan princess had arrived also with her paramour and they had
established themselves in a smart hotel. Fred visited them, but soon
became discouraged. The girl was paranoid about being recognised by
anyone who knew her, even here in Delhi. Fred couldn’t understand this,
he thought they would travel around together, but this was not to be. I
think I understood her. Muslim law has a swift remedy for adultery; death
by stoning. In fact, as a party to it, I’m sure Fred could have shared the
same fate. Whilst they were ensconced within a private hotel room in
Kabul I’m sure she felt pretty safe out of purdah, but not here in big,
teaming, wide-open Delhi.

Once we had decided that Pete was not going to arrive, we had to decide
on our next steps. At this point Fred’s princess was still undecided
whether she would stay or go home. Hans and his girlfriend were
departing to a beach in Goa, a place we all wanted to go eventually.
Charlotte and Mark were departing we knew not where, as Mark was
being mysterious. Graham wanted to travel in the steam trains he loved
around India, and he asked me if I ‘d like to go with him. I certainly did. I
presumed Fred would come with us if he could, but decided to set him a
dead-line as Graham would not hang around.

At this point his princess departed, but Fred had been speaking to some
Americans who were driving a Volkswagen beetle down to the love
temples at Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh and they had a spare seat. This
was something he wanted to see. So we agreed to meet again in Goa in a
month’s time and using a borrowed map identified the beach for our
reunion.

Two days later armed with Indian Railways 3rd class countrywide go
anywhere tickets, purchased for a song, Graham and I walked into
Delhi’s main train station and breathed in deeply that incredible infusion
of coal fumes, steam and grease which is to many men more
overpowering than the most expensive French perfume. We walked along
the front of platforms admiring those huge steam engine Giants, the
noise and the smell taking us back our childhoods when steam trains were
the norm in England.

Graham was a good companion for me, full of that boyish enthusiasm for
any thing of interest. He was well organised too with good guidebooks
and lots of ideas. We would tour India visiting old palaces, temples, forts,
mosques and shrines, all by rail. It was quite feasible he said and would
be very cheap.

The train we departed on was crowded and the seats were hard, but we
were buoyed up and excited. The carriage was hot and the only form of
cooling came from the open windows. If the train stopped for any length
of time the heat became severe. Indians of all shapes and sizes sat around
us, on the seats and on the floors. Mostly they smiled at us politely.
77
Strangely the thing that would impress me far more than any of the sites
we visited were these people. The 3rd class was not used much by
educated middle class Indians, which was a pity because when we did
occasionally meet them I was often struck by their clever yet unassuming
intellect. We travelled always with common people, common in that they
had very little. They were mostly Hindu. They were friendly, kind, and
interested in us and always conversed if they had a little English. Maybe
they were not as knowledgeable as the middle class, but then they were
not educated and could not read or write. Now, from my travels with
them I believe these people are the wellspring of India. Their Hindu
culture seemed to be all pervading with its easy to grasp ritual, its strong
base of history/mythology and its easily understood open philosophy.

First of all we were to stop in Agra, as everyone who goes to India is told
to visit the Taj Mahal there. This is the tomb built by Shah Jehan in
memory of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Like everyone who visits it I can
confirm that it is beautiful, but to really experience it I think you need to
visit it in moonlight with the one you love. We appreciated it a little too
academically, admiring the detailed inlaid precious stonework and
listening to its history. Later, I did however get some feel of the emotion
of the place when we went across the river to the Red Fort, and I climbed
up to the turret where Shah Jehan was imprisoned by his wicked son for
the last twenty years of his life. He could look out every day at his
beautiful Taj, but never come near to it again.

On our way out of the mausoleum gates I bought a small stone box inlaid
with semi precious stones like those in the Taj. The workers, who made
and sold these trinkets in front of you, claimed to be the descendents of
the original craftsmen who built the Taj. As it was built over three
hundred years ago I thought this was unlikely, but in India it was a
possibility as trades are handed down father to son.

We entrained again and travelled east through Uttar Pradesh to Lucknow

then Allahbad and Patna.

The trains are a world complete. We slept in our sleeping bags on the
seats or the floors, and bought our food on the platforms. There was a
huge amount of food and drink vendors at every station shouting their
wares to the passengers. The food consisted of deep fried vegetables in
batter or samosas. The drink was sweet tea or bottled soft drinks like
coke. If we grew bored of this limited repast we could eat cheaply enough
in restaurants between train journeys. I never saw meat eaten in India,
except for one restaurant at the end of my stay in India, when the
proprietor quietly offered me meat, suggesting of course that I would
enjoy it much more than vegetarian food. I remember one day walking
into one very swanky restaurant full of Middle Class western dressed
families; we presented ourselves replete in longhis and sandals, and with
our dishevelled hair and growth of beard we were quickly ushered onto a
78
side alcove table and served discreetly; obviously we disturbed the
refined ambiance that the owners and their customers were trying to
create.

On the trains our appearance was totally acceptable. We talked with other
passengers whenever we could and from the windows watched the people
of India go about their daily lives. I had quite gotten used to seeing
wooden carts mounted on a two truck wheel axle being pulled by one or
two men. This often with the blazing hot sun scorching their uncovered
backs. One day I looked out to see one of these carts being pulled by a
man stripped to the waist with sweat pouring off him and a young woman
dressed in a most beautiful red sari and covered in jewellery. That young
woman pulling the cart in the appalling heat unsettled me. Graham
guessed it was part of a marriage ritual.

At each station as new people came onboard, beggars came too. They
used the railway trains as others used the streets. We gave sometimes, but
mostly not, an Indian teacher had told us early on that we should not
encourage the beggars, especially the younger ones who got used to the
easy money. Later when their youthful appeal ended, they turned to crime
rather than work. Sometimes though we were moved, or we were
entertained into giving. There was one morning when we heard a rousing
song coming down the train. A group of blind musicians were making
their way along the train singing very marshal songs that seemed to lift
everyone’s spirits. One played an accordion and another a drum, and the
leader had a very fine tenor voice. They all smiled as they travelled in a
crocodile formation along the aisle singing gloriously. One sighted person
who held out a collection bag led them slowly along the carriages. Many
passengers dropped a coin into their collection bag as they passed by, we
included. Another day a young beggar of no more than 6 or 7 years came
along the train, and with a really bright presence seemed to have no
problem in willing money out of people all along the carriage. Having
taken on board what the teacher had told us I declined to give, but as soon
as the boy saw this; a rich westerner refusing to give, he focused on me
alone asking again for ‘baksheesh’, free money. When I said no he was
puzzled, he asked in a little English and lots of sign language, why. I was
sure he would not understand the long explanation of youth begging
leading to crime etc. so I just indicated I had no money. This was not a
clever thing to do; everybody in India knew that westerners were all as
rich as Croesus. The boy sat there with me for half an hour, his other
patrons completely forgotten, as he asked me questions in his pidgin
English to ascertain why I had no money. Then when satisfied he
answered some of my questions. He was a lovely child, and I couldn’t
help wondering what would happen to him as he grew older, how would
he end up? I understood from the answers he gave me that he was part of
a large family living on the platform of a big train station, and he and his
brothers and sisters were the income earners, and they worked
exclusively on the trains. After half an hour he said he had to go as his
79
return train was waiting on another platform in the station we had just
arrived at. At this point of course I weakened and offered him some
‘baksheesh’. With a surprising resolve he said no, I needed the money.
Then he arose and climbed off the train, waving and smiling at me as he
ran down the platform.

There were so many acts of kindness other than this young beggar taking
pity on me. On one occasion we had caught a connecting train, which was
packed. A railway worker, who was stretched out at the end of a corridor
squeezed up and let us two weary travellers sit down. He then insisted on
sharing his food with us. This consisted of deep fried sour vegetables,
revolting to western taste, but we had no choice but to accept the offering
and smile as if we were enjoying it.

On another occasion an act of compassion opened our eyes to the social

unjustness of India. A passenger talking to us realized we had nowhere to
stay that night when the train terminated. We had no concern about this as
we were used to sleeping in stations, but he insisted we come to his home
for the night. His home turned out to be a galvanised sheet metal hut on
the side of a muddy hill amongst thousands of similar huts. There was no
running water or any form of sanitation. His wife and two daughters
made us completely welcome when we arrived unannounced, and went
down to the standing water pipe to get water for us to wash in. Their sink
or washbasin was a concrete area a metre square with a slightly raised lip
around it. Used water etc flowed out through a hole in the wall and out
onto the muddy path that serviced the huts. The hut itself was no more
than six square metres and there was just the one room. The girls
somehow kept themselves clean and tidy in their bright saris despite the
deprivation. One landlord owned this whole hill we were told, and the
family were lucky to call this home. Each week they paid their rent. No
rent money and they were out, with another family ready to move in, such
was the shortage of ‘good’ accommodation. We were appalled.
With huge open areas of land all around it seemed ridiculous that
thousands of these poor people should be crowded into tiny huts on this
stinking hillside, but that was the way the planning system worked.
Nothing happened without bribes; only the rich had the money to bribe,
so they controlled the housing developments. Putting up a tin shack
would cost only a few thousand rupees, and you could get that back in
rent in a year or two, and then everything after that was profit, apart from
the further continuous bribes to officials. Put up a thousand shacks and
you soon became a rupee millionaire. You bled the poor and called this
corrupt system a free market. I am not a communist and I value free
enterprise, but this was rotten.

We slept that night in one corner of the concrete floor, the family in the
other. The next day we departed. We offered some money, but this of
course was not accepted; the poor had their values.

80
The railway, like all transport systems, develops around it an economic
infrastructure; a hinterland of businesses all linked in some way to the
system. In India this has been greatly refined as everyone tries to find an
economic niche in this main transport system. For instance, trains are
often halted in India, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for days and
there’s never an explanation of why. So there is no way of knowing how
long the train will be held up. You just have to sit and wait. If it’s due to a
derailment somewhere it will take days. We got stuck in just such a way.
In fact we realized it was a derailment when on the first day we saw huge
cranes on rails passing us. We were stopped in the middle of nowhere.

The food needs of a whole train of perhaps 500 or 1000 people in a

deserted area were completely ignored by the Indian Railway. We were
just a train that was delayed. Not one of the Indian passengers
complained or showed any concern. Within a few hours food and drink
vendors arrived at the train. Within a day the noise of vendors selling
their wares around the train was constant. Where had they come from?
How did they know we were here? A little later two guys turned up
humping great big sacks. They made a small camp and lit a fire next to
the railway line. In their bags they had masses of cow horns. Working in
front of us deftly with the heat from the fire and sharp knives they
fashioned those cow horns into representations of storks and then they
travelled up and down the train offering them for sale for a few rupees. I
bought a pair for my Grandmother’s mantelpiece. Beggars also gathered
and so did palmists and other diviners and tricksters. An abandoned bit of
countryside had become an instant trade centre. Then finally as the train
recommenced its journey, the gathering dispersed.

Along with this economic infrastructure came a very high density of

people. There is little privacy for these mostly poorer Indians living if
they are lucky in those tin shacks, if not, in the open by the side of the
railway line. The traveller will witness all of these people’s daily
activities, in both public and private, sometimes-shocking acts.
In one town our train did one of its many long stops in the middle of what
looked like an enormous abandoned slag tip, full of small hills of grey
slag with brightly coloured chemical waste pools in the troughs. Into this
scene of desolation rode a man on a bike leading a newborn calf. He
stopped in front of the train carriages and without a glance up to
acknowledge the existence of the train or its’ passengers, he got off his
bike, took out a knife and cut the calf’s throat. He then proceeded to skin
the calf. He neatly took the hide off from just below the head, and
retaining only the bones of the lower feet in the pelt. He then folded the
new pelt up, tied it to the back of his bike and rode off leaving the starry
eyed calf’s head attached to a bloody red carcass. The train’s occupants
had only a few moments to reflect on this gruesome act and its’ mystery
when a second, even more gruesome act, followed.

81
High up in every bit of sky above the sub continent, squadrons of huge
buzzards patrol, gliding on the ever-rising thermals. They see the smallest
detail below and they can identify any type of carrion from the moment it
becomes available. Within fifteen seconds of the bicycle butcher’s
departure the first buzzard landed. It was about three feet high with a
wingspan of perhaps six feet. It was followed a moment later by three or
four more, and then ten and twenty and many, many more. Rather than
tuck in to the tasty morsel before them, they decided to play tug of war
with it, screaming at each other and flapping their ragged wings as they
dragged the torso to and fro through the pools of chemical waste, so that
they got wet, and the once bright red meat turned dark brown, then black.
More birds were landing all the time; there must have been two hundred
within ten minutes. The calf’s body slowly broke up into various dirty
black bits and pieces and groups of birds started separate tugs of war for
each of these. After a while some individuals or pairs of birds secured
their own little piece, which they devoured chemicals and all. Then they
fluttered to the tops of the slag hillocks and spread their wings to dry in
the sun. With perfect timing, as the calf’s denouement became complete,
the train started up again and we, staggered by what we had seen, were
carried away from the carnage. This whole event could have been the
production of a macabre theatre, held on stage, with the vultures as extras
and the bike man and calf taking curtain calls at the end to a stunned and
enthralled audience.

I realized afterwards, that right from the early part of our journey when
we left Western Europe in Yugoslavia, I had undergone a hardening
process, blocking out the poverty and harshness of life I saw around me. I
justified this by saying to myself that I could do nothing to help, I could
only witness. The death and defilement of that calf had shaken my
conviction more than the poverty I had seen around me. I remembered a
Dutch girl we had met at one of the border crossings. We had been
travelling through some very poor areas and had witnessed much poverty
and associated human misery. This girl was crying, her friends said she
had been crying for days and could not stop crying. She cried about all
the human misery she saw around her, she had to go back she said, back
to Holland. Everybody called it culture shock. It was a useful label. Now
I felt I understood her a little better.

Coming to rest

Our journey had lasted about three weeks when we arrived in Bombay.
From here we could take a train to Goa later in the week. Bombay has
quite a lot of grandiose imperial British buildings just like Delhi, but it
seemed even more crowded than Delhi. The buildings reminded me of
London, and Bombay also had lots of old London red double decker
buses. These faithful beasts of commuter burden limited to 55 passengers
on board at any one time, had been retired from their London routes only
to be shipped out to Bombay to spend the rest of their days slowly
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rumbling along the pot holed Bombay roads carrying in excess of a
hundred passengers. In London the bus conductors kept a strict rule of
only seven people standing in the bus and only on the lower deck and no
standing on the access deck area. No such rules here, the passengers
inside these busses were crammed in by those getting on behind them all
pressing in right back to last person, who would be only just on board by
a toe hold on the platform with one hand grasping the vertical white
safety pole on the outside of the bus. How the bus conductor ever
collected the fares I don’t know, I guess most of those passengers rode
free. Later when we used the urban railway system I witnessed the same
cramming on the carriages with perhaps ten people hanging out of the
doors whilst the train whistled along. I’m sure the accident rate was
appalling, but then how else could the system cope with such huge
quantities of passengers. One day, in order to escape the pressure of
people, we entered a much more sparsely occupied first-class carriage,
only to be accosted immediately by an inspector who fined us on the spot.

There was one other reminder of home; a very strange one. At that time
in London in the winter of 1972-3, troupes of sparsely clad shivering Hari
Krishna devotees could be seen parading up and down Oxford Street
chanting their mantra of enlightenment to the tinkling of small cymbals.
They had become an accepted part of the London scene after the police
who had at first arrested them for vagrancy, got a good telling off from
the press and stopped molesting them. Harmless was the label that
became attached to these guys, and everyone thought them nice people if
a bit silly. In Bombay I quite expected to see Indians chanting mantras, it
was part of their religion, but I did not expect to meet western Hari
Krishna troupes, yet here they were, and not just one or two, there must
have been hundreds of them. Around every corner of the city centre you
would hear their little finger symbols and their Hari Krishna dirge.

The reason for these surreal apparitions was sitting in a huge bell tent on
a large area of open ground in the middle of Bombay. It was their swami,
His Divine Grace AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Curiosity led us
to enter the bell tent. The swami was sitting perfectly still on a huge
raised golden plinth buried in a mountain of flowers and looking
extremely bored. He looked not a day under two hundred years old with
an incredibly wrinkled and pale Indo-European face. The 400 or so seats
in the tent were about half full, and about half of the audience were made
up of western devotees in Indian dress and the other half were made up of
Middle Class Indian families in western dress. I don’t know if the Indians
were there to be enlightened or amused. In fact they looked quite
bemused, like they had sneaked into a cinema without paying, but were
now bored with the film. At the precise moment we sat down, the music
in the tent ceased and the Swarmi became suddenly animated, (like
someone had connected his batteries). He started to talk. He said that he
had tried very hard for many years to bring some enlightenment to the
minds of westerners, but had all of his efforts confounded; nothing of
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spiritual value seemed to enter their confuddled western heads. Then he
had a brilliant idea, according to the Indian scriptures, God, Krishna had
said that there were many ways to enlightenment; through love, through
learning; through fasting and self denial, through serving others - many
many ways, but also through just repeating his name. That was it! These
dense westerners could be brought to enlightenment by just chanting
God’s name. The swami gathered together a group of westerners and
taught them to chant. It worked; they got it. The rest, as they say, is
history. And here he was today in a huge bell tent talking to a group of
bemused middle class Indians, and being bored out of his skull, and they
likewise being bored out of their skulls. Well, that’s show business for
you.

Although I found him honest and good and full of that thing we in the
west call charisma, I think I’d prefer a less demeaning holy man.

We also met another Indian celebrity on the day we arrived at Bombay

Railway Station, at least he told us he was a celebrity. We had detrained
hungry and had entered a slightly smarter than average restaurant in the
Station. As we tucked into some rather good Indian vegetarian food a
chap on the next table smiled and nodded towards us, spoke to us in good
English and we entered into conversation. He was small and dapper,
smartly dressed and in his 30’s. He said he was a Bollywood film star and
took major parts in non-Hindi films. Now there were a large number of
regions in India where the spoken language is not Hindi, and it seemed
that Bollywood catered for these regions with their own language films.
As he chatted away very pleasantly asking about our journey and talking
about the Indian film industry, both Graham and I thought ‘Yes, you are
as much a film star as I am.’ So we were both very shocked therefore
when a gaggle of young Indian girls all pie eyed and giggling came up
and asked the star for his autograph. He was a film star! A continual flow
of teenagers came up to his table all woozy at the proximity of their idol.

He ascertained that we were looking for a hotel and invited us back to his
place. Now I’d seen a picture of movie star homes in that Afghanistan
movie house. He would have a huge pool in the grounds of his mansion
and it would be circled with beautiful western girls in bikinis who would
ply us with drinks and other lovely things. Wow – Bollywood here we
come!

The reality was however a little different; a one bed-roomed flat in a

Bombay high rise apartment building with cement floors and a cold
shower. So this was how the stars lived in India. We stayed with him the
three days till we left for Goa. Giggling Indian girls, who had come into
Bombay from the sticks just to see their star, and get his autograph,
continually besieged the flat. We left him each day and rode into Bombay
centre on the over packed trains to see the sights. When we came back in
the evening there would still be girls around. He would then take us out to
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restaurants, he said to show us good Indian cuisine, but I think he did it to
show us off. I got the idea that we were like trophies; it was cool to
associate with westerners, it showed you were worldly. Having said that,
he was everything that kindness could be, explaining Indian life to us, and
later advising us on our forward journey. When we left him we didn’t
offer him money, but Graham left him a pen that he had much admired.

It was time to meet Fred again. We set off by rail for Goa. The railway
line to Goa passed through dense forest; almost jungle, the first dense
vegetation we had seen. Goa had been a little Portuguese enclave until
Indian Army tanks rolled in, in the early 1960’s. The Portuguese had used
Goa as a Trading Station. They left the tropical forests mostly intact and
despite the fact that the natives had converted to Catholicism there was no
over population problem. Goa had hundreds of miles of beautiful sun
filled, palm fringed, silver sand beaches, Goans were friendly,
accommodation was low cost, or free if you made your own hut on the
beach, and the food was delicious, plentiful and cheap. If you were
looking for a place where you need do nothing, this was the place to do it.
This was hippy heaven.

We arrived at midday and took a bus from the station to Colva beach
where we were to meet Fred. There were a few houses and a church on
the road to the beach and a restaurant with a shaded patio as you arrived
at the beach itself. The beach was a continuous ribbon of silver sand
fringed by palm trees, which looked out over a beautiful deep blue ocean.
One or two fishing boats were pulled up on the sand. The sun, however,
was quite fierce. We entered the restaurant, ordered some food and asked
about accommodation. There were three choices; a ‘hotel’ back up the
road, a bit like the hotels we had stayed at before, or we could stay in one
of the native huts for a few rupees (pennies really), or build our own
shelter. We chose the native huts and were directed to the fishing village
a few hundred yards away. On enquiry we were shown a palm-thatched
hut that looked quite suitable, paid our rent and moved in. It was dark in
the hut and our eyes took time to adjust as we went in and out. There
were bits of fishing gear lying around, but we made ourselves quite
comfortable in one corner. Huge palm trees shaded the hut, and there was
lots of natural ventilation, i.e. holes in the walls and roof, so it was not
stuffy. On the negative side, if you were squeamish there was a problem;
the hut had existing tenants; hundreds and hundreds of enormous spiders.
One had made a beautiful round marquee-like web almost floating in the
air just above where my head laid when I climbed into my sleeping bag.
If you could accept them for what they were then you could see the up
side; in this hut flies would never plague you. On the beach side of the
village was a well of sweet water where you served yourself by lowering
half a tin can down on a rope. Coming out of sea after a swim you could
douse yourself in the cold water taken up from the well in order to
remove the salt from your skin.

85
We roved the beaches talking to people and searched for Fred, but he was
not there. Sometimes we saw beautiful girls completely naked and
beautifully tanned coming stoned out of the self made beach huts. Vast
hordes of Indian men came down to the beaches on the weekends to see
these girls. They would spread out in a line across the beach from the
waters edge to the palm trees and walk up to twenty miles along the soft
sand in the blazing sun in the hope of catching sight of these beauties,
who were fabled as ‘free love western lovelies’ in the Indian press.
At night with the shining moon, the long beaches are enchanting, but
beware if you decide on a barefoot walk by the water’s edge. A horrible
shock awaited you. The tidal area is crawling with thousands of crabs,
some of which will scuttle enormously fast across your feet. If you panic
and run you are likely to tread on three or four more, their hard shells
cutting into your feet. It gives you the shivers. No one, not even the
natives walk there at night.

Apart from the natives and the spiders and the night crabs, there was one
other group of local inhabitants that must be mentioned, the pigs. Huge
great sows installed in a mud pen adjacent to the village lavatory. This
lavatory like most in India consisted of cubicle with two bricks on the
floor. You placed your feet on the bricks and squatted down. For anyone
with a bad heart their first squat might be their last. As I squatted there
that first time, I heard a grunt. Looking down below my dangling
wedding tackle I saw the most enormous hairy snout sniffing up my bum.
In a second it gulped down the you-know-what I had just produced.
During that second I reacted. Jumping out of my squatting position, I
turned, picked up a handful of sand and small stones and threw it at the
snout, which retreated with a whelp. After I had explained what had
happened to a delirious Graham, who couldn’t stop convulsing with
laughter, I calmed down. Obviously this was an important part of the
villager’s food chain. I was glad at that point that I was a vegetarian.

Fred was not at the beach. We had looked up and down and talked to
everyone. He was definitely not there. So we settled down and relaxed
with a daily routine of doing nothing but swimming, sleeping, eating and
relaxing. The restaurant was the gathering point for everyone on the
beach. The food was good and plentiful and cheap. The proprietor was
happy for you to spend all day there if you wished and I found the
company very relaxing. Graham had brought a pocket chess set with him,
which we used if the train journeys became at all tedious. The restaurant
had a full sized chess set, which was much nicer. We got friendly with an
American, who came over to watch us play. He said, and I believed him,
that he was a contemporary of Bobby Fischer, the world champion and
had played with him in New York’s Central Park. He said at that time
anyone could play Fischer for $10. When I expressed surprise that
Fischer would play a game for just $10, he said they were very short
games; Bobby would make about seven to ten moves then say ‘ you lose’
and not play anymore. If the opponent challenged this Bobby would
86
explain how he had lost through his board position. It seemed unless you
dominated the middle of the board, you lost. You could lose a game in as
little as seven moves, wow!

The American eventually sat down opposite me to play. I was not very
good, in fact I would say I was lousy. I didn’t have the concentration
needed and didn’t think through the moves. If I found someone at my
level then the games were fun. This guy was serious business. I needed to
concentrate big time. He was obviously showing off as he developed his
complicated position in the middle of the board, hardly hesitating
between moves. I must have spent three to five minutes on each move. I
knew he was setting me up to take me apart and I studied and studied the
board. Suddenly I saw the possibility of mate in four moves, if he didn’t
see it, that is. He didn’t seem too absorbed in the game talking to people
around us, and I’m sure this was part of his showing off. I made my first
move of the four. He didn’t see anything dangerous and moved one of his
pawns. I took my time before I made each of the two next moves. He
continued as before. Then BANG! Mate, I had him. He could not believe
it. How could he lose to such an amateur? It was impossible.

He challenged me to a re-match, this time he concentrated, and he took

me apart limb from limb. Another? No, I knew he would win every match
now. I wanted to walk away with the conceit that I had beaten a
contemporary of Bobby Fischer and that he had not won against me more
times than I had against him.

The sun bears down through the day on the beach so most sought shade
and coolness. Even the local mongrel, who slept under a palm tree near
the restaurant hoping for scraps, sat in the shade of the trunk of the tree.
As the sun moved around the sky so the mongrel shifted his position to
get back into the shade. You could almost tell the time from his position
by the palm. We had taken off our lovely water buffalo leather sandals at
the beach; no one wore shoes here, but this did cause me a problem when
once again Hash appeared.

Of course drugs were everywhere, but we ignored them, Graham, because

he was a straight up and down teacher who wouldn’t contemplate such
things, and me because I didn’t want to get stoned unless the environment
was right. One day however I was caught out. I was invited to a small hut
just erected on the beach by an Afghan and a red headed English boy
called, of course, Ginger. These two were as thick as thieves. In fact I
think they were thieves. Ginger had survived for two years on the beaches
without money. The Afghan had found and joined him after running away
from military service. Ginger had discovered that the Afghan could cook
and so they decided to open a café on the beach. I was invited to its
opening. We sat inside the palm frond walls and sipped tea. Then the
Afghan brought in cakes. These were all there was to eat and these were
Hash cakes. I felt obliged to buy a couple and ate them. The cakes did not
87
taste too bad. They tasted like currant cak……..ZONK! I hit a brick wall
at one hundred miles an hour. It wasn’t a bad experience, but sitting there
for perhaps a minute or was it two hours I felt decidedly uncomfortable.
There was no stimulus, nothing was said, nothing to look at, no music to
listen too. I said goodbye and wobbled out of the hut into the blazing sun.

At first I could see nothing, only blinding brightness, but my feet, oh my

god, the sun-heated sand pierced the soft soles of my feet like a thousand
burning Gillette blades. The pain was out of this world and into the next. I
staggered up though the soft sand, the pain searing through the soles of
my feet, and eventually fell in a heap on my sleeping bag in the hut.
‘That’s it’ I thought when I awoke later. ‘There’s too much pain in having
casual drug fun, I quit.’

Apart from that, our time on the beach was what might be called idyllic,
but for two stimulus hungry people the idyll soon got boring. Unlike most
westerners who stayed in Goa, we wanted more than nothing to do. I
wanted something to focus on, and Graham wanted the rest of India.

Fred failed to show up and after a week we both agreed we needed to

move on. Later when I met Fred again in England it transpired that he had
been in Goa at the same time but on a different beach, Calengute. Our
carefully laid plan had failed over a basic assumption; that we knew
where the other would be. Even today I am sure I had the correct beach
and Fred that he had the correct one. When Fred realized we were not
going to show he took a ferryboat back to Bombay and had a fleeting
liaison on board with a Bollywood starlet in a lifeboat. He then travelled
by train back to Delhi, and found someone who needed drivers to take a
Volkswagen bus back to Europe, after which he hitch hiked home.

Graham and I travelled back to Bombay, where we met some travellers

who told us of Temple near Bombay where we could stay for free. Being
low on money, this seemed a reasonable idea. We took a suburban train
and arrived at a little village called Dahanu Road. The Temple was
situated at Dahanu Beach a few miles away and there was a bus
connecting the two. However it was late evening and the buses had
ceased. We saw a hotel sign and went to investigate. The owner showed
us a dormitory room with a line of bodies already asleep on the hard
floor. I could hear a strange buzzing in the room, which took me a
moment to identify. Flying high around the ceiling were a squadron of
mosquitoes. I watched as one after another they hovered, stopped
buzzing, and then dropped like stones onto their dinner resting there on
the floor. We decided to take our chances and walk to the Temple.

The countryside around us in the late evening was quite beautiful, huge
water buffalos were soaking in the village pond and gangs of children ran
along besides us keen to find out more about we strange westerners. One
little boy spoke English and when I told him where we came from his
88
eyes misted over and he said he dreamed of living there one day. We
walked out of the village beyond the children and down to a beach about
a mile away. Then following instructions we turned right and walked
another two miles to the temple.

The temple was not a westerner’s idea of what an Indian temple should
look like. It was a single storey cement built compound across from the
beach. The gate was locked, but we knocked and waited not sure what to
expect. A little Indian, no more than 5 foot or so opened the door and
with a big smile welcomed us. He was the temple keeper. Immediately he
asked if we were tired and showed us to a room, or cell would be a better
description, like a holy order cell but more sparse, there was not a stick of
furniture in it. He asked us if this was OK, then said good night and
departed. We rolled out our sleeping bags, stuffed some clothes into the
sleeping bag bag as a pillow and went into a long refreshingly deep sleep
in the cool of the cell. Heaven.

The next day he showed us around. The temple building formed a square
around a big yard. Nearly all the other rooms in the compound building
were cells like ours, but there were no other visitors occupying them. He
then showed us into the Temple Chamber. There seated in a golden chair
on a plinth was a full sized model of a man, Dressed in western clothes
the model was in every respect lifelike, from the grip he had on the chair
armrests to the penetrating eyes. This was a statue of Sai Baba, an Indian
holy man revered by millions of Indians. Indian Holy men die and are re-
incarnated at regular intervals, so this incarnation in western clothes must
have been a recent one.

When we asked, the keeper said we could stay as long as we wished for
free. He offered to make us food each day for a few rupees, to which we
willing agreed. Apart from us, the keeper and his little son, and a little
puppy dog tied up in the courtyard, there was no one else around. Graham
loved it. Goa had had a sort of inverted stress to it, like an enforced ‘do
nothing’. Here he felt comfortable and happy. He could write the long
letters he loved at his complete leisure. He could walk out of the
compound gate onto the beach and swim in the sea for as long as he
wished hardly seeing a soul. The seawater at Duhanu was not as blue as
Goa, I think it had estuary water mixed in it, but there were no currents
and Graham liked it right enough. He read all his books, took his meals
and wandered into the village with me to shop in the little market for fruit
or wander into one of the shed-like cafes for something to eat or drink.

The tea or ‘chai’ was something special, made with condensed milk, hot
water and tealeaves in a little container, which the café owner would hang
on a string and whiz around his head. A meal of curried vegetables cost
no more than a few rupees and we found we could live comfortably on
the equivalent of five pence a day.

89
As for me, I got out my huge tome on the Bagavad Gita and started to
read. We stayed in the temple for three weeks, completely relaxed.

After a few days we received an invitation to tea from a prominent

landowner. The caretaker knew little about him except that he was a
Persian. This information turned out not to be true, only his ancestors
were from Persia (Iran). He welcomed us into his home and we took tea
on the porch of his house. His people, he said, were Parsis, they followed
the ancient Zoroastrian Fire Worship religion but kept a low profile in
modern India. His ancestors had arrived with the technology for making
arid areas bloom, and by husbanding the water supply they had created
huge areas of fruit trees and lovely gardens. He had us try some fruit,
which tasted very pleasant. He asked about us and about our journey and
then at the end told us that we were always welcome to come again. I am
not sure if there was any reason for his invitation except curiosity, but he
was very kind.

I swam a bit with Graham, but I am a very weak swimmer, hate water in
my face or worse up my nose or throat and one day I overstretched
myself. There was a rowing boat anchored out about two hundred yards
from the shore. Graham challenged me to swim to it through the choppy
water and swam off, I followed. He then swam back with me still making
my way out. When I got to the boat I was exhausted by my poorly co-
ordinated swimming action. The boat was too high for me to climb into. I
turned for the beach but after fifty yards could not swim any further. In
the rough water the waves kept covering my head. I was exhausted and
terrified of drowning. I couldn’t swim any more. With the last of my
strength I waved and shouted at Graham. He waved cheerily back.
Giving up the swimming I rolled on my back, and that, I think saved me.
My face out of the water I could kick with my feet and slowly, painfully
I came back to shore completely exhausted and vowing never to enter the
sea again.

As with most Indian habitations there were packs of feral dogs around.
They weren’t hostile, but Indians ignore them and would for the most part
not think of being kind to them in any way. The puppy tied up in the
Temple compound was from a feral dog mother. Each day she came and
visited him in the compound and if he was lucky he would get to suckle
from her. The caretaker had taken the puppy to entertain his little son.
Now it is quite certain that dogs need people, we have bred them to a
point over thousands of years where people matter most to them, not
other dogs. These feral dogs followed us around on the beach hoping for
a stroke we occasionally gave them or scrap of food. We didn’t
encourage them too much because they were full of fleas, but the puppy’s
mother was a special favourite and we fed her many scraps. Theses dogs
would however eat anything. Harking back to the pig toilet episode in
Goa, here it was exactly the same except a dog muzzle would appear
under your thighs. I also witnessed a dog eating another dead dog that had
90
been washed up above the high water mark on the shore. Their habits did
not ingratiate them to us, but their eyes always seemed to beg our
attention.

There were times when the temple would get busy. Coach loads of
mainly middle-aged Hindu women would arrive suddenly and the temple
would fill with colour and sound. Many of them toured India, travelling
to all the holy sites, exactly like middle-aged catholic women did in
Europe. Their devotions however were a bit more hands on than
European women. They would adorn Sai Baba with wreathes of flowers,
light incense and chant their Vedic songs accompanying themselves with
small cymbals. They, in fact, would lead the prayers. The place would
come alive as these busy women made a beautiful place for their holy
saint.

This was a lovely time for Graham and I and we would sit quietly by the
wall of the temple drinking in the scene. We have a great problem in the
West understanding the Hindu religion and Indians have a great problem
understanding why we can’t understand them. Here are some points we
westerners might consider:

Firstly, there is no past tense in Hindi; there is a ‘nowness’ about

everything: their history, their holy texts are now.

Secondly, there is no clear distinction in many Hindu minds between a

deity and a holy man, although there are degrees of spirituality. Add to
that the certainty of reincarnation, which makes a lot more sense if you do
believe in a spiritual dimension outside of our bodies and brains.

Personally, once I accepted these premises, I felt I got on much better in

my understanding.

As well as the coach parties there were individual pilgrims, who turned
up for a few days of retreat or rest. One old man, made mountains of food
and insisted that everyone eat it. He just seemed happy watching others
devour his own prepared meals, which were delicious.

The keeper relied on these visitors for his income. He was unpaid in his
job and lived on the handouts and leftovers from these visits. That is not
to say that he considered himself poor or destitute. He had an excellent
position compared to the poor farmers. Farmers and their situation are the
yardstick by which people in India compared themselves. Do you have a
larger income than a farmer? Do you work less hard than a farmer?
Actually you should be able to answer yes to both of these questions
otherwise you are hard done by indeed. Dahanu like all other villages and
towns was full of little shops with shopkeepers or restaurateurs staying
open all hours just to sell a few rupees worth of goods or food. We would
often stop on our way to the market at a little open-air café for a bottle of
91
coke. We never saw another customer there. For the shopkeepers this
boring poverty and idleness is much better than the grinding poverty and
back breaking work of their farmer opposites; the farmers are definitely
lower on the social ladder, long live boring shop keeping.

Our pleasurable wanderings took up only part of our day, and we slept
long and deep and read copiously. The Gita was a revelation to me. I read
it methodically, one stanza at a time, from the word for word
Sanskrit/English translation, through the English texts, the commentaries
by scholars and special word definitions.

I had travelled thousands of miles without any clear purpose except to

experience new things, which indeed had happened; People had pointed
guns at me, I had been frozen and then overheated, spat at, blown up, tied
up in knots, and nearly drowned. I had been ship wrecked in a desert and
repudiated as a lover, and suffered torture under drugs, but then there had
also been so many magical moments, so much generosity and kindness,
even a beggar had taken pity on me.

I had not come to India for enlightenment and my purchase of a religious

text had been on a whim, but in that temple in the peacefulness of that
backwater, with nothing other than friendly influences all around me I
had some rare and precious time to reflect and consider the meaning of
things and I learnt something I will never forget.

The story of the Gita covers the time of a great battle, where Arjuna, the
hero, supported by his God, Krishna, who has taken the form of his
charioteer has to fight and kill members of his own family. This terrible
paradox of not being able to fulfil your destiny without causing terrible
things around you, and so therefore often refraining from action at all is
discussed and explained, along with the reasons for evil actions; our
passions or desires for self. In the process of this explanation Krishna
reveals and opens up an understanding of the nature of the spiritual
universe to Arjuna. Here are a few quotes from the text that may or may
not make you think about our earthly condition:

1. The senses, they say, are high; higher than the senses is the
thought-organ (brain); But higher than the thought organ is the
consciousness; While higher than the consciousness is He (the
soul- you).

2. One should lift up the self by the self, and should not let the self
down; for the self is the self's only friend, and the self is the self's
only enemy.

3. Let the disciplined man ever discipline himself, abiding in a secret

place, Solitary, restraining his thoughts and soul, Free from
aspirations and without possessions.
92
 4. 'I am (in effect) doing nothing at all!' -- so the disciplined man
should think, knowing the truth, when he sees, hears, touches,
smells, eats, walks, sleeps, breathes.

One evening, towards the end of our stay, when I had completed my
study, I walked out of the compound onto the shoulder of the road along
the beach to watch the sun go down. Sunsets over the Indian Ocean are so
beautiful, especially when as on that evening there is some cloud to
reflect the colour of the sun as it turns from brilliant gold to deep crimson
during its’ descent into the sea. There was no rush to do anything that
night; I had all the time in the world. I could stay there until every drop of
light had gone from the western sky. I watched as the sun melted away
into the sea and the brilliant colours of sun, sea and sky mixed together
then gently faded off. The spectacular sun set left a bright glow in the
clouds near the horizon. Slowly the light diminished, but after an hour
there was still some light there. I waited on. After two hours I could still
detect light. After the third hour I was still sure all the light was not gone.
I watched on for one more hour, but the light never completely vanished.
There was to be no sudden end to the light and I would not witness its
moment of demise, but I had witnessed a graduation of change, so gentle,
so subtle, that it left me quite tranquil. I turned and went back to the
compound and into my sleeping bag for a very deep and peaceful sleep.

After three weeks at the temple Graham and I agreed to move on. My
money was running out and I didn’t want to ask Graham for help.
We returned to busy Bombay and on a fellow traveller’s recommendation
we stayed at a seamen’s hostel. This was clean and cool and relaxed. I felt
my journey to India, this time, was over. Graham wanted to go on to
Calcutta and then Sri Lanka. I went to a travel shop and found I could
return to London by Air India for about £100. I had only $20 left, less
than £10. I cabled Chris in London and she cabled £100 back. I bought
my ticket, and with most of my remaining Indian rupees bought the most
beautiful hand carved sandal wood statue of Krishna and his lover,
Radha, and a small one of Ganesh from the seaman’s hostel shop. The
next day I said goodbye to Graham and promised to keep in touch, then I
travelled by taxi to the airport and boarded a 707 for London Heathrow.

93
Statue of Krishna and
Radha mounted on
Venetian Plinth.

The trip back took sixteen hours, which seemed inordinately long, even
though it had taken months to go the other way. We touched down once
in Beirut, which looked really pretty; this was before the wars that
destroyed it.

At London Airport I walked through Customs and Immigration dressed in

a green longi and leather sandals with a cane walking stick over my
shoulder carrying a tied orange longi loaded with some of my bits and
pieces and I carried in my other hand a small battered and torn green
canvas bag with its seems split, stuffed full. The immigration officer took
my passport and looked me up and down. Smirking, he said ‘I know what
you’ve been up to.’

Oh no he didn’t.

94
**********************************************************

3.) The whole book with all my reminiscences.

Chapters
Driving around obstructions.......................................................................................5

The Pad..........................................................................................................................6

Hippytitus......................................................................................................................9

Fred gets a bug (or two) and Pete proposes the journey........................................14

Research and Planning..............................................................................................15

You open the bottom draws first...............................................................................16

Trust the Dutch...........................................................................................................20

We meet a sex goddess...............................................................................................21

Goodbye Western Europe..........................................................................................25

On the road.................................................................................................................29

Welcome to Bulgaria, and good bye.........................................................................31

I vill show you zer good places..................................................................................33

We pause.....................................................................................................................36

Heavens revealed........................................................................................................39

That way......................................................................................................................44

Little Prince.................................................................................................................51

Missing.........................................................................................................................56

The hundred dollar note sting...................................................................................67

Into India.....................................................................................................................71

No Mail........................................................................................................................73

The parting of the ways..............................................................................................76

95
Coming to rest.............................................................................................................82

Driving around obstructions.....................................................................................97

The Pad........................................................................................................................98

Hippytitus..................................................................................................................100

Fred gets a bug (or two) and Pete proposes the journey......................................105

Research and Planning............................................................................................107

You open the bottom draws first.............................................................................108

Blimp, blimp..............................................................................................................111

Love, Motorbikes and Death...................................................................................115

Trust the Dutch.........................................................................................................122

Passions combined....................................................................................................123

Saved by the German Cavalry................................................................................130

Bristol Fans...............................................................................................................134

We meet a sex goddess.............................................................................................137

The Catalyst..............................................................................................................141

That’s not his name, that’s what we call him.........................................................145

Goodbye Western Europe........................................................................................149

On the road...............................................................................................................153

Welcome to Bulgaria, and Goodbye.......................................................................155

I vill show you zer good places................................................................................157

We pause...................................................................................................................160

Heavens revealed......................................................................................................164

That way....................................................................................................................168

Little Prince...............................................................................................................178

Missing.......................................................................................................................184

The hundred dollar note sting.................................................................................195

Into India...................................................................................................................199

No Mail......................................................................................................................201

The parting of the ways............................................................................................204

Coming to rest...........................................................................................................210

96
Driving around obstructions

We purchased a few spare wheels from a car breaker, some spare oil, not
enough as it turned out which later caused a disaster, and Fred brought a
tool kit along and some wire coat hangers which had proved so useful in
fixing our now garishly painted van. We tied the bulky bits such as the
spare wheels and cans on the roof along with two long sticks Fred said we
should take in case we were attacked by tribesmen, placed the 4-inch
foam rubber sheet we had purchased in the back and chucked our gear
and sleeping bags on top of it. The transport was ready. We said our
goodbyes to Chris and Baz, and with me taking the wheel, drove off.
Now for an adventure, two young men in a broken down old van, bought
for five pounds, travelling to India.

First things first, Fred’s sister, Jenice, lived in a small town in Kent with
her solicitor husband, Michael. She had promised us lunch, no use driving
to India on an empty stomach.

After about half an hour, driving through South London, two things
happened simultaneously. Firstly on a sharp corner an empty Oil Can
lightly tied on the roof bounced off and hung down the side of the van
like a single green earring on a brightly painted face, and secondly, just
100 yards ahead the only person on the street, a policeman, turned
towards us and witnessed the event. He did a sort of double take and
stepped out into the road, in a split second a terrible scenario flashed
through my mind. You see, the van had a few fiddly little problems that
were of no importance out of the UK, such as no current test certificate or
Tax, and there were bits of wire holding major components in place.
However, with the police displaying their usual lack of understanding,
these little problems could stop our journey dead at this point. I imagined
myself in a police cell and our little van in a police compound awaiting a
trip to the car crusher; an abrupt end to our dream journey.

So I made a decision and pretended not to see the policeman even though
he was the only thing on the road. As we approached I suddenly ‘saw’
this obstruction and steered around it. I looked back through the rear view
mirror to see the surprised and angry look on the policeman’s face as he
wrote down our registration number. This suggested retribution in a big
way. Keeping my cool, I drove serenely on like I had just navigated
around something inanimate such as a hole in the road or a rogue road
cone. 200 yards on I did a swift left and then a right to try and throw the
expected traffic police posse off my scent, then I put my foot down for

97
Kent. At any moment I expected to hear the wail of police sirens behind
us.
It was with great relief that we got to Fred’s sister without any further
trouble. She photographed us sitting on the roof of the van, two intrepid
explorers, Fred still looking worried and me with a huge pipe in my
mouth. I was trying to learn to smoke this pipe in order to impress my
German friend Alf later in the trip. Lunch was served, our last meal on
English soil I hoped, unless I got arrested, gulp. Then it was on to Dover.
My heart was in my mouth all the way, surely there must be a hue and cry
out now for our brightly painted 15cwt Vauxhall Viva van registration
number EPE 187B, with a Union Jack painted on the bonnet and one
green earring, last seen in South London being driven by a long haired
yob?

When the doors closed behind us on the Dover ferry I felt like I had
escaped certain death. We went up into the ship’s lounge, I lay down on a
couch, closed my eyes and I experienced not a little relief.

The Pad

I had been living with two friends in a flat above a car spares shop in
Notting Hill. The flat was in an old, run down, rickety, drafty corner
building due to meet the demolition bulldozer. The outside was painted
dark cherry red and the old paint was pealed and cracked. It looked like a
dump, but the interior was very much to our liking. There were large sash
windows along the hall and a long round sweep of four of these windows
in the living room giving it a wonderful open and bright feel. It was
decorated the crazy way young people were prone to then, (more about
this later). It had two rooms, plus a kitchen and a bathroom. I didn’t
realize it then but we were paying £17 per week for a piece of heaven.

The Pad -
first floor
I’m in the
window.
(Its’ the
only photo
I’ve got -
the black
area is
probably
Chris’s
thumb.)

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My friends were a boy and a girl. Chris, the girl was also my girlfriend;
tall, beautiful and blonde with a sweet lilting Welsh accent, an artist, and
a weaver of dreams. Her world was full of colour and deep, understated
emotion all mixed together like a Titian painting. She had arrived in my
life over a very rocky, soul-stirring road. Like Tess of the D'urbervilles,
when she was an untouched young girl she had been raped, and her
fiancé, for whom she was keeping her virginity, had rejected her. Her
young life in ruins, she quit Wales and moved to London. Of course to
every cloud there is a silver lining for someone. Her past sad plight and
her fiancé’s stupidity had brought the loveliest of girls into my life.

Baz and Chris

We had been together for three years, they were happy for both of us
though I don’t think she had fully recovered from that trauma, and
sometimes I was sure I witnessed in her eyes an echo of the past; then for
a brief while she would appear helpless and adrift, and I would unable to
reach her. Up to now these periods had always ended quickly and then the
mist between us would clear and things would be just right again. Now,
after three years, for reasons neither of us understood, our relationship
had become unsteady and this mist would not seem to clear. I couldn’t
explain why; I’ve never found human emotion constrained by logic.
Something needed to change and I decided my trip away to India might
do it.
Baz, my other flatmate, I had met at work, and I had invited him to share
our flat when he lost his own. He was an Australian, and like all the best

99
Australians, his wanderlust had brought him to Europe and England. Baz
was bright, and full of that rough energy so apparent in Australians. It
was Baz who one night demonstrated to us that farts were marsh gas by
turning off the lights and igniting one of his own. Baz was very attractive
to women but he could take or leave them. In fact he mostly left them. He
had one affair with a pretty little Italian girl from the office, and he had a
long-standing friendship with Annie, a beautiful Australian girl, but even
this was mostly fun. He didn’t seem to need women like most of us and
there were one or two little signs of bi-sexuality. I found he and Chris in
stitches one day as he was trying on some of her clothes and he did like
Chris to put makeup on him. She certainly thought he was a little that
way. However were Baz’s predilections, which I never did quite fathom,
he was an explosive, funny, eccentric bag of tricks, and a very good
friend.
We loved the life style; we smoked dope, still held down jobs (because we
had to have money), ate vegetarian, grew our hair, and turned on to an
eclectic mix of Rock and Underground music played every waking hour
and often through the night. (I’ll name some of our favourite musicians
here in a separate paragraph so you can skip it if you don’t like reading
lists)

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Steve Stills, Neil Young, Santana, Jimmy
Hendrix, The Band, Country Joe, Bob Dylan, Cream, The Beatles,
Jefferson Airplane, Velvet Underground, T Rex, Pink Floyd, King
Crimson, Deep Purple, Led Zep, The Who, The Stones, The Faces, The
Incredible String Band, The Beachboys and The Byrds.

I think our generation became identified with rock music and it seemed to
dominate our lives. All young people around Notting Hill at that time
appeared to share our music and our values. Our lifestyle didn’t seem
clichéd then; if boldly marching on before being certain of which way to
march is a common feature of youth, we were no different from any other
young generation. Perhaps its’ true we had more freedom than those who
came before us. Of course we did feel we knew better than the older
generation, but that was probably the arrogance of youth. If I look at that
time honestly, I think we were just keen to throw off those heavy shackles
of conformity that the older generation wished upon us.

However contrary to popular belief now most young people then did not
adopt our alternative life style and did conform, but still I’m sure they had
some vestige of interest in it, as the following incident shows.

Hippytitus

After a year in the pad I became the owner of an old grey Austin A35, a
tiny rabbit hutch of a car, which I came to love. I had bought it for £2 as a
test certificate failure and a quick phone call to a car mechanic I knew
soon had it through the test successfully.
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I hadn’t been able to afford a car for some time and this little thing was a
great boon. Chris, Baz and I drove in it everywhere. We lived near
Portobello Market. As hungry vegetarians this was a good place for
purchasing low cost fresh fruit and vegetables, and there was a shop
called Ceres, which did wonderful wholemeal bread. However, we liked
to experiment and with a car we could try other markets. Fulham had a
great market in North End Road. So one Saturday we bombed down
there.
Even then Fulham was not an easy place to park. I took a chance and
parked on a Yellow Line in a side street and we went off into the market.
I don’t think we were away that long, but as we arrived back with two
huge cardboard boxes of fruit and vegetables a very young policemen
was inspecting the car. I went into a bright patter I often used when
confronted by authority.

‘I’m very sorry, I’ll move it straight away’. My charm didn’t work. As he
handed me the parking ticket his eyes measured me up and down, long
lanky hair, orange shirt, and scruffy torn jeans leading down to brown
Chelsea boots painted with big green stars. Baz was worse. He wore a
wide brimmed and feathered fedora hat, jean jacket and black leather
slacks. Hippies! Only Chris looked smart, but then she’d look good in a
bin bag.

‘You own this car, Sir?’ frowned the young policeman. I nodded.
‘You know you are parking in a restricted area?’ He said it like I’d
broken one of the Ten Commandments.

‘Can I see your driving documents please’? Well at least he said please,
but I didn’t have any driving documents with me. I knew you didn’t need
to carry them; he would have to give me a ticket to produce them within
five days at a police station. ‘Can I see some form of identification then?’
He asked. Nope he couldn’t, I didn’t have any on me. This seemed to get
him upset; perhaps he thought I was taking the Mickey. He started to
examine the car to find defects; he tested lights, the horn, and the
windscreen wipers. They all worked. Then he applied the hand brake and
asked me to push the car. By this time whatever cool I claim to have had
evaporated. I believed he was after me for no sound reason other than that
my non-conforming looks and I was damned if I’d help him, (I also knew
the hand brake on A35’s isn’t that good.) When I refused to push he
promptly arrested me.

Now being arrested for parking on a Yellow Line is a neat trick. My

sense of injustice simmered nicely. I felt a bit like Arlo Guthrie on his
Alice’s Restaurant LP, when he gets arrested for littering. As Chris and
Baz tried to point out the absurdity of this arrest the young policeman was
already radioing for the meat wagon. He was going through with it. How
would my friends get home I asked? He didn’t know, he wouldn’t let
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them drive the car for sure; it might not be road worthy. Chris and Baz
were in tears; they thought I was going to be incarcerated. I told them not
to worry and to take a taxi home.
.
The meat wagon duly arrived. I climbed in and was driven off to a large,
old Victorian building that was then Fulham Police Station. I was led into
a big high ceilinged room and left on my own for a while. That was
smart, it allowed me to cool down a bit. By the time the big bald headed
station sergeant walked in I could not stoke up my sense of injustice any
longer; it was a bit like holding your breath, eventually you just had to let
it go. I smiled at him; he looked like an honest man. It was obvious
within a minute or two that he was as confused by this arrest as me. I
wasn’t an international terrorist, a wife beater or a criminal. My biggest
omission apart from the Yellow Line was that I had no proof of identity.
And that wasn’t an offence. It seemed that the ‘Young Turk’ who arrested
me had interpreted the law a little too narrowly.

He smiled not unkindly and scratched his baldpate. Like most practical
people he could quickly detect real work from time wasting. ‘OK, we are
going to drive you back home where you can show us your documents.’
Five minutes later I was in the back seat of a Morris Minor police panda
car and was surprised to find my arresting officer on the seat beside me.

Both the police driver and my policeman were young. They had had to
take their helmets off to sit in the car and just by that act they seemed
changed; less aggressive. They looked like any young people, (but with
short hair). I don’t know if it was the matching of age or our close
proximity or the fact I was quite relaxed and smiling, but as soon as they
realized I was not drug crazed, rabid or unfriendly, a whole avalanche of
questions about ‘hippies’ along with the many questionable ‘facts’ they
had about dope poured out. They were young and curious, true they came
from very different backgrounds than myself, but they had the same
interest as most young people in things that were different or new, and
didn’t quite believe everything they were told. Did I smoke hashish
much? Was I addicted? Was it affecting my ability to think? Did it make
me want to fight? Did I know there were fenced off towns in Jamaica in
which dope addicts were quarantined? Loads of questions and
information they had been fed about dope on their training courses. I told
them I believed none of the ‘facts’. And no, I wasn’t addicted, it was a
social pleasure, the dope hadn’t affected me and I hadn’t taken harder
drugs yet. I would, they said, it got addictive. I didn’t believe it did but I
had to concede many hash smokers went on to harder drugs. There you
are they said, people don’t go on to harder drugs from alcohol. Yes, that
was true, but you weren’t made a criminal for drinking alcohol. If you
smoked dope you were a criminal, what did it matter then if you went on
to something harder? If you had low future self-expectations, why not
experiment? May as well be hung for sheep as a lamb. And so the

102
discussion continued on all the way back to our pad. Before we got back
there they were actually relaxed and smiling.

Shame the flat changed all that.

Much of the hippy furnishings and decorations of the flat may be familiar
today. Then it was something of a shock to the un-initiated. As they came
in a huge inflatable clown figure smiled down like coloured gargoyle
above the living room entrance. Inflatable chairs, large cushions and
Indian rugs covered the floor. A spiral mobile covered with silk
butterflies hung in the centre of the flat where the lampshade should have
been. Brightly coloured Chinese silk kaftans in glass frames and colourful
Indian cottons covered the small parts of the walls not covered by
psychedelic posters. More posters covered the ceiling and the smell of
incense hung in the air. This was very different from their semi-detached,
three-piece suited, regency wall papered world. I’m sure it shocked their
senses. perhaps jangled their optic nerves, smelled of otherness and
probably screamed ‘danger! Non-conformity’.

The two policemen walked slowly down the corridor, eyes flashing left
and right. Ducking under the clown they entered the living room. Baz was
sat in one corner of the room listening to music through earphones. He
did not see us as we entered and continued to sing along in a high falsetto
harmony to music only he could hear. In front of Baz was a large burning
candle giving off a strong petuny fragrance. Baz held a mirror just above
the candle and as the candle soot gathered on it he wiped it off with his
fingers and smeared it across his eyes and cheeks, just like an Australian
aboriginal might do with finger paint. When we arrived he must have
been doing it for some time as he looked a very strange and macabre
sight; a sort of cross between a monochrome clown and the living dead.

103
Baz in
Face paint

The police driver had seen enough, he made an excuse and went back to
the car. Wasn’t his job was it? , My original boy in blue antagonist was
now alone, and now confronted perhaps for the first time in his life by
this weird ‘hippie’ environment, he sat down gingerly in an inflatable
chair, which closed around him and made a farting noise. His face was
growing red; he was definitely uncomfortable.
I brought in a drawer full of papers and we searched for those documents
he wanted to see. Finding by examining these papers took some minutes
and throughout this time the young policeman got more and more twitchy
and tense as though an emotional rubber band inside him was slowly
tightening. His eyes popped from the documents to the strange world
around him. Perhaps he might catch hippytitus sitting there, all those
stories about mad dope fiends; surely there must be some truth in them?
The documents: first he found the Car logbook. ‘This is not your name
and address here’ he said. Sure enough I had forgotten to reregister the
car.
Then he looked at my Car Insurance Papers. ‘This attachment letter has
not the same address as here or on the car log book’ he said. The
insurance had been issued at my previous address and redirected on to
me. This wasn’t going very well.

Then he found my driving licence. As he looked at it I had a premonition.

‘That’s not this address either is it and it’s not the same as the addresses
on the other two documents?’ I said, knowing the address on the licence
hadn’t been changed since I passed my driving test, many years ago. He
now had three sets of documents all showing different addresses from the
one he was sitting in. What a quandary? What should he do? I’m sure that
104
at each setback with the documents that virtual rubber band had got
tighter and tighter. Finally, when the last piece of paper, which could
identify me with this flat, failed to do so, the band must have snapped.
His nerves suddenly made the decision for him; he panicked, bounced out
of the inflatable chair, and with his head down, carrying his helmet under
his arm like a rugby ball, raced for the front door. I pursued him shouting
that I was sure to find something with my address on if only he just held
on, but he was having none of it, he waved one hand behind him and
without turning shouted ‘It’s OK’ as he fumbled frantically with the catch
on the front door and then rushed down the stairs.

‘What about my car?’ I rushed down after him and jumped into the panda
car just before it took off. It bumped forward then screeched away. They
looked relieved; they had just escaped hippytitus.

They drove back to the police station, picked up my car keys then drove
me back to my car. ‘If the hand brake is defective you must not drive this
car’, said the policeman. ‘You understand I am not giving you permission
to drive it?’ I nodded. Having said this, he handed me the keys and drove
off, and then so did I.

A few weeks later a formal note arrived from Fulham Police Station
informing me that ‘In this case the police have decided not to proceed
with the prosecution for wrongful parking’. That evening we used the
parking ticket to light a celebratory joint.
So you see this life had its’ difficulties, but it had lots of fun too. It
seemed silly really to change it, but as someone once said ‘the only
constant in this universe is change’.

Fred gets a bug (or two) and Pete proposes the journey

I had found my way to Notting Hill and the flat some years after leaving
school and dropping out of conventional life. Fred had found a job in a
library, got the travel bug and started taking breaks around Europe. These
weren’t regular holidays; he just got a cheap bus ticket and travelled. He
liked Ibiza before it became the club/sex/drugs scene it is today, and he
toured Spain.

Live and let live is Fred’s philosophy of life, as he accepts and has a
natural enjoyment of everyone he meets. I envied him that easy
acceptance of the strange and bizarre, as I always had to fight my own
inbuilt prejudices. He told me he met some incredible people in his early
travels, two of these, Dutch girls, turned out to be lesbians. Fred enjoyed
their company. These two girls invited him to come to their home one
day. We would visit them on our way to India.

Without any guidance in his early travels Fred made some basic mistakes
regarding food hygiene and had to be hospitalised back in England when
105
he caught Hepatitis. I went to visit him in hospital and was quite shocked
to see him so weak and yellow, he had to make an effort to talk. He
stayed ill for some time after his release from hospital, but despite the
illness he had caught the travel bug real bad. Asia was now in his sights,
it only needed someone to pop the question and he would be off to the
other side of the world.

My travel inspiration probably came from my rather restricted reading;

the IT, (the International Times), a politically motivated underground
magazine with a chip on its shoulder, and Oz, an Australian inspired off
the cuff spoof magazine, that majored on sexual liberation. As well as
promoting the drop out society these magazines often carried features on
India and travelling to India. India was promoted as the place of
enlightenment and cheap dope. It sounded interesting. Oz in fact ended its
publication life when the editors were imprisoned for pornography in
1972, the year we set out for India, but I think by then they had done their
dirty deed and opened their Pandora’s Box of sexual liberation and
Feminist confrontation, releasing Germaine Greer et al upon us. Strange
to think that the person considered a founder of feminism got her start in
what was defined by a court as a pornographic publication.
Pete was the third part of our schoolboy triangle. He had stayed at home,
taken on his parent’s left wing political leanings and was doing his best as
a young socialist. He had entered the print industry and refined his
cockney accent. Where he got it from I don’t know because his parents
didn’t speak it. However there were some cockney accents at school,
perhaps he’d picked it up there.

Pete

106
He also said he acknowledged my so-called alternative life style in
Notting Hill. In fact he probably took it more seriously than I did. For me
it was a pleasurable way of life, but for Pete it was a political act of
defiance. Pete saw everything as political. He agreed with people
dropping out of the capitalist system and he agreed with travel, it
broadened the mind of the proletariat, hence his inspired idea. One
evening over a drink in Finch’s Pub, Pete proposed we travel to India. I
sort of agreed, and spoke to Fred the next day and he said he was up for it
too. Pete had started something.

Research and Planning

India was a big project, how to implement it? What funds would we
need? How would we get there? What were the risks and dangers? We
had already seen Fred come close to death through a lack of knowledge;
we needed some research.
I wrote off for some information packs advertised in the IT and over the
following weeks we started to discuss the options. Pete took a back seat,
he had had the big idea; Fred and I could sort out the detail. So we
discussed things together and then Pete generally agreed.
The mimeo’d fact sheets I had obtained told us how to get what visas we
needed and what jabs to take. It told us about the gastric problems
westerns faced in the east and recommended we carried our own water
flasks, adding purifying tablets to them. We could drink boiled water
drinks such as tea and processed soft drinks like coke. We could eat well-
cooked food, but no fresh salads or uncooked vegetables. I was a
vegetarian, but the idea that this eating limitation could be a problem
never crossed my mind. I knew there were vegetarians in India and the
overland trip would only take a month or so I thought, I could manage.
They also told us to get a sheet sewed into a cylinder shape and insert this
in our sleeping bag. Then if it got dirty we could wash it rather than the
heavy sleeping bag. This turned out to be of great idea because of all the
dirt and mud we encountered.
How much money would we need? The consensus was £300 to £500,
exchanged into US Dollars, which was the preferred currency most
everywhere. Many travellers did it for less, but my, how they suffered.
Stories of disasters where people left the country with just a few pounds
and ended up somewhere begging for food were rife. It seemed the
British Foreign Office tried to wash their hands of young people trapped
without money out in the East, there were so many of them. Fred and I
decided to take about £350 each and worked out how we could get more
wired to us from our friends. Pete agreed to match it.
How were we to travel to India? There was a bus of sorts advertised in
the IT that went there. It was called the Magic Bus and for £50 it took
you all the way. I wasn’t keen on a bus and said no; I just couldn’t sit
passively in a passenger seat for that long a journey. It was a wise
decision for other reasons as it turned out; we met the Bus and its’ sad
107
passengers on our travels. With nowhere to sleep and nowhere to wash
these passengers were like refugees.
Transport? We needed a vehicle. Before we planned anything further we
needed to go and look for a vehicle.
But before we had a chance to look for a vehicle, a vehicle came looking
for us.

You open the bottom draws first

We thought Pete had many peculiar political acquaintances, and probably

his political friends thought us strange too. But really there was
something not quite right about many of the people in Pete’s socialist
circles, like they had a screw or two loose.

A good example because I knew his background, was my late Uncle

Maurice. Uncle Maurice was a socialist from his boyhood in the late
1930’s. His post war Trotskyist socialist party was in the Guinness Book
of Records as the smallest political party on earth, with just three
members. They believed that Russia was a degenerate workers state,
which apparently made them different from mainstream Trotskyists, who
believed it was a worker’s capitalist state or a capitalist workers state or
whatever, I’m not quite sure, it was all very confusing. Don’t ask me to
explain the difference between a socialist, a Trotskyist and a communist,
maybe like gulls in a colony they instinctively knew one from another,
although we could never tell.

Uncle
Maurice

When he was a young man the rest of the family shook their heads at my
uncle’s antics, but he was serious. During the war it was my Uncle
Maurice who organised the painting of most of the ‘Second Front Now’
108
slogans on walls all over London. He got a duplicate key made for a
cellar under the house of one of my aunties in North London and stored
huge quantities of black market paint there, obtained with funds from a
foreign ‘friend’. When my aunt found the stash whilst looking for an old
pickling jar, she threw a fit and the foreign ‘friend’ had to provide more
funds for a lock up garage down the road, and then the paint had to be
smuggled there bit by bit in an old pram. It was a shame really; I spent
my baby years in that house. It would be nice to claim that I was brought
up in the house, which had been the centre of the English struggle for the
second front, namely 120 Osbaldesdon Road, London, N16.

As I grew up, every time I met my uncle at Weddings or Funerals he

would take me aside and smiling shyly, tell me how things would shortly
change as the workers rose up. I think he had a list of people who would
be stood up against the wall and shot. I loved him, but he was mad.

And, yes, zany Uncle Maurice was a socialist acquaintance of Pete’s.

One of Pete’s more peculiar friends had a habit of coming around to our
flat completely unannounced. He would just turn up, make himself tea,
partake of any joint that was going around, flop down and chill out. He
had come around with Pete one day and decided he liked the ambiance. It
wasn’t that we minded people coming around, we liked it, but he had one
or two of those loose screws. He must have come from a middleclass
background, he was well spoken and he had a Physic’s degree so he
wasn’t stupid, but he was mad. He robbed people’s houses. Or had. I
wasn’t quite sure if he still did it when he came around our flat, but it was
his only other topic of conversation when he discovered we didn’t follow
politics. Generally he just sat quietly and listened to other people, but
when he did make conversation it was to describe how he robbed these
homes. It seemed you had to rob quickly and there was a lot of skill in
robbing a home quickly. His eyes lit up as he revealed his robbing
methods,
‘How do you open drawers?’ he asked suddenly one evening as he came
out of a doped state. At the shake of heads a smile came to his lips, ‘You
open the bottom ones first so you don’t have to close them as you work
your way up.’

He freely admitted he did housebreaking for the thrill he got from the
possibility of getting caught. Really screwy; all that unhappiness caused
to so many people just for a perverse thrill. At least regular robbers did it
because they just couldn’t produce and exchange enough to get the things
they wanted in life. Not fair on others, I grant you, but you can
understand their reasons. Not this guy’s, he was just loopy.

One day for a change he turned up with a problem. His old 15 cwt
Bedford Viva van had failed its annual vehicle test. He wanted to know
where he could find a breaker’s yard. Now this was strange, I’m sure
most people with old broken cars just left them by the side of the road,
109
there were lots around our streets. The van looked all right to me. I asked
him why it had failed. He showed me the list of defects; the major one
being that the van was just a rust bucket, it needed major welding. I tried
to persuade him to keep the van and fix it. He would have none of it. He
wanted rid of it.

I looked again. The van had a roof rack, it ran OK, you could stretch out
and even sleep in the back and the rust didn’t matter where we were
going. It looked perfect for the India trip. I offered him £5 for it and he
accepted. He had the vehicle title document with him, which showed him
as the owner, so I was quite happy.

I thought we had our transport.

Not so fast, a few days later when Fred, who was a self-taught mechanic,
tested it, he said the big end shells could do with changing. No problem
though, he would pull the engine out with a small mobile hoist he had and
change them, the parts were only a few pounds. We then got two old
headlights off an abandoned mark 9 Jaguar and tied them on the front
grill of the van with coat hanger wire, and then wired them with the other
headlights. Now we had four headlights, though they didn’t all exactly
point in the same direction. The suspension was working lose in places,
but some good old coat hanger wire soon had that snug. Then after we
road tested it I asked Fred to add another feature; a loop of wire that
could go over the accelerator, so we could take our foot off the
accelerator pedal during long stages of the journey. Fred made two holes
either side of the pedal for the wire and with a bit of experimenting we
adjusted it so it could be put on with one hand reaching down and kicked
off with a foot at any time, and it worked perfectly, a prototype, budget
priced cruise control, we should have patented it.

Our Fact Sheets told us we would need a ‘Carne’, a sort of international

car insurance. For a reasonable price the carne covered every place we
wanted to go except India; the addition of India was for some reason
hundreds of pounds. We were told that the Carne provider was the only
source of these Indian documents, it was take it or leave it, so we left it;
the carne would not cover India. We’d have to sort out what to do with
the van before we got there. This Carne information turned out not to be
true, we met other travellers on the road who told us we could have got a
Carne for India for £30 in Munich from the ADAC. This omission based
on wrong information was to lead to a lot of extra work and a most
strange romance.

We decided the van needed decorating. I painted a Union Jack on the

bonnet. My mum announced a word she’d found that she thought would
be appropriate. The word was ‘Anticrephagous’, which means vegetarian.
We painted it on one side of the van. How many people read and puzzled
over this word on our journey I do not know, but those we met when we
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stopped often asked us to explain it. On the other side we painted a
rainbow with a few cartoon characters. Now finished, it looked a
complete dog’s breakfast.

Our route was roughly planned; France, Holland, (Fred’s two friends,)
and then Germany, (my friends - Alf and Co), then over the Austrian
Alps into Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Turkey. We had maps for Europe, but
because of the expense, we decided to economise and not buy any further
maps. We assumed everyone would know the way anyway. We had by
now also acquired the visas to take us through Iran and Afghanistan.
British passport holders didn’t need Indian or Pakistan visas. We needed
travel permits though through Bulgaria, but these were only available at
the frontier. Our visas gave us entry into Iran during a window of 12
weeks. We had to go. A leaving date was set, 1 November 1972.

And then Pete announced he couldn’t make this date. He was broke. He
said he would fly out and meet us at the beginning of January at the post-
restante in Delhi. That would give us lots of time to get there and give
him lots of time to get the money together. And so just the two of us
drove to the Ferry and landed in France.

(The storey of our journey to India continues on Page 31 – The chapter

headed: Trust the Dutch. The next eleven pages are about my experience
of working on a cross channel ferry and two unique experiences of
France. ( So if you are a pure travel buff jump to Page 31 now.)

Blimp, blimp

This wasn’t my first trip to France, I had travelled there and back nearly
every day many, many times without ever putting a foot ashore. On a
summer holiday, two years before I left home, Pete had got us a three-
week job on a cross channel passenger ferry that plied between
Gravesend and Calais. We worked as assistant waiters in the restaurants
and earned some money for a camping holiday we had planned. The ferry
was called the Royal Daffodil and this boat and its’ sister, the Royal
Sovereign were then the main passenger ferries in the summer across the
channel; not many people wanted to take cars across then. Two years
later, away from home for the first time I determined to work on this ferry
again for a longer period and earn lots of money, so I signed on as a cross
channel ferry waiter.

This ferry was a real anachronism, all the waiters wore white jackets and
black bow ties and served food with a silver service on linen covered
tables just like the 1930’s, and yet all the public who came on board
would have been pretty happy eating off paper plates with plastic knives
and forks; they were out just for a good time and a lot of drinks. However
the ferry company carried on its’ pretence of a high-class cross channel
ferry service because the government subsidised it to do so. Everyone on
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the catering side of the crew were on the make; the barmen watered the
gin; the waiters pocketed not just the tips, but whatever part of the bill
they could; and the store keeper made up sandwiches from the ships
stores and sold them to barmen who sold them on. The officers and
managers took their cut too. Most of the catering crew were regulars; they
worked and fiddled away on the boat during the summer, then signed on
the dole in the winter and claimed back all the tax they’d paid in the
summer, as they were then ‘unemployed’.

There was a poker school in the evening when the boat tied up and as I
was OK at cards I soon learnt how to win without too much risk. One of
the poker regulars was a professional gambler called Nick the Greek, who
signed on as crew just to play poker in the evenings and relieve the more
stupid crew of their pay and fiddles. He confided this to me when he
realized that I was regularly winning and he couldn’t take me for much. I
wasn’t half as good as him but I enjoyed his grudging respect.

There was also a big homosexual fraternity on the boat, just as there were
on most merchant navy boats. These guys tried to take me, like all new
young recruits, under their wing, but my mind being healthily fixated on
the other sex, there was no chance of that. However they were very
sociable and the stories they told me of the shipboard life of ‘queens’
were highly entertaining though not suitable even for this direct narrative.

The crew slept in small cabins low down in the ship on metal bunk beds,
normally six or so to a cabin. The cabin I was in backed on to the rear of
the ship’s linen store. Someone had drilled a number of holes in the
bulkhead between the two. I had no idea what these were for. Then one
day I heard a whisper going around some of the more older hands in the
restaurant, ‘blimp,blimp’. Quickly these waiters vanished and were gone
for some time, leaving me and a few other green crew to deal with a
packed restaurant. I found this very strange because they had left half
finished customers whom we could then finish off and collect tips from. I
reasoned that if these hard-headed money-makers found it beneficial to
desert their income generation for half an hour or so, I had to investigate.
The next time I heard the whispered ‘blimp, blimp’ I downed tools and
chased the old lags. To my surprise they lead me straight down to my
own cabin, which they entered with the all the lights out. As I followed
them in I automatically reached for the light switches and turned them all
on. There, along the side of the cabin, was a row of people with their
heads glued to the bulkhead with one eye. As the lights went on there was
a great cursing rumble, (a sort of series of whispered roars,) ‘switch the
bloody lights out!’ ‘What do you think you are doing dope?’ ‘ Hey
knuckle head, Oh no, it’s the kid, who brought him down’.

‘This is my cabin’ I said.

‘OK turn the effing light out and shut up!’

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I turned the light out and pushed my way eventually to the bulkhead.
They were peering through that series of peep holes. Eventually I got my
eye to one, and boy did I get an eyeful? There was a live sex show going
on, on the other side of the bulk head, only the people giving the show
didn’t know it.

What was happening now became obvious. With all these people coming
on board for a fun day out and some having a few too many drinks there
was bound to be the odd couple that needed desperately to be alone.
Where on a day passenger ferry with no passenger cabins do you go?
Well it so happened that the linen keeper had a nice quiet place with a
mattress at the back of his store, and they could rent this for an hour, or
so. Once they entered the little room and were alone nature would take its
course and the daffodil’s catering crew would take theirs.

My seventeen year old eye boggled as I witnessed the first act of sexual
intimacy I had ever seen. The next time and then every time after that I
made sure that I was one of the first down the gangway when the ‘blimp,
blimp’ call went out. As each of the various sexual acts took place my
voyeur colleagues would comment on the proceedings, ‘look she’s got a
shaved one’, or ‘the way she’s wrapped her legs round him she just wants
him to finish now’, or ‘he’s drunk, he can’t even get it up’. My only
regret was that I could not be on the other side as it were, God how I
wished I could be in those carousing men’s place with those willing girls.
Was it ever to be?

Well, after three months on the boat with most of my pay intact and a
good gambling profit I felt rich. But the boat had changed me; made me
sort of more street-wise, but it had also coarsened me and I didn’t like the
feeling of that. I left the boat without much regret. In earlier times a
French business friend of my father, a man called Romu, had invited me
over to stay with his family at his home in the Pas de Calais any time I
wished and I decided after the boat that this was the time to take up that
invitation. It would, I felt, ease me into a new life and let the taint of the
boat wear off.

I phoned Romu and he renewed his offer. On my arrival Romu and his
wife Elianne and their young son and daughter took me into their home
and their family life and made me welcome. Romu was soon taking me
all over the Pas de Calais area as he travelled around on business. In the
evenings we often went out as a family group to one of the many superb
regional café/restaurants they knew so well and I must say I ate like a
prince. I also got an early taste for driving fast. Romu drove a Peugot
404. He drove it everywhere fast, no, he drove it very, very fast. We
travelled everywhere at over 100 miles per hour down the narrow route
nationals, the car managing to grip the road by I’m sure only the smallest
of tyre treads. Romu liked life in the fast lane. One evening we came
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across a rabbit in the road, transfixed in the headlights of Romu’s fast
advancing behemoth. The car’s front bumper hit the rabbit square on its’
little head. Only then did Romu apply the breaks. He stopped, reversed to
the rabbit, got out and threw it in the back of the car. It would be part of
tomorrow’s supper, and very good it was too. His hunting dog got the raw
rabbit bone carcass, which it consumed in about ten seconds. Apparently
its’ only cooked bones you mustn’t feed to dogs, because they are brittle
and cut their insides.

Romu had been in the French foreign legion, was crazy about weapons
and had a room full of rifles including a second world war German
mauser, which weighed a ton. He hated Germans, he said, with a
vengeance, and as a young boy at the end of the war he had fought them
whilst they retreated from his area of France, shooting one dead he
believed as a group of them moved over a bridge, (he pointed the bridge
out to me). His dad had been decorated with the Legion d’Honour for his
work in the resistance fighting Germans. I met him briefly; an old bald
headed man with strong shoulders and penetrating eyes. For these people,
I realized, the Second World War was only yesterday.

I travelled with Romu to many shooting competitions; he had been the

French national .22 rifle champion, so he usually won these competitions
easily and still had time between shooting sessions to teach me how to
shoot.

Well life was turning out just great, I was driving around the beautiful
French countryside at exciting speed with a person who would be
anyone’s boyhood dream hero, enjoying the most marvellous food in the
world, learning to shoot a rifle, and discovering an attitude to life that
puts an emphasis on pleasure. That should have been enough for anyone,
but guess what? My young libido kept rattling my cage every time I
began to sink into a complacent frame of mind; I wasn’t enjoying any
intimate female company, was I? So how could life be complete? The
next-door neighbour’s pretty daughter laughed at my poor attempts to
seduce her with my schoolboy French, and my face turned bright red, I
was shy. What to do?

Now a mile from Romu and Elienne’s home was a little village bar in a
town I think was pronounced Byengom. Romu often took me there to
enjoy a Ricard aperitif or two and chat with his hunting friends. The
barmaid was, I thought, a pretty little girl with one unfortunate
impediment, her two upper front teeth were discoloured black, which
gave her a very funny, even stupid appearance when ever she smiled,
which was very often. I decided to walk there myself whenever Romu
had to go to a business meeting without me and very soon I found this
pretty little girl smiling at me a lot. I told myself I didn’t mind the black
teeth, my libido would probably have made me overlook two complete
rows of black teeth in a girl, never mind just two. With my halting French
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I found out that she finished work at 3pm and yes she would be pleased to
promenade avec moi.

It was mid summer, the sun shone down hot and bright as we walked out
along those dusty French country lanes. I led her into a field of green
wheat and laid my jacket down for her. She seemed as shy me, but also as
determined as me as we fumbled our way through that first act of love.
She asked for nothing, just continued to smile at me, but as we walked
away from the scene of our brief juvenile passion she plucked a white
flower from a tree.

We returned many times to that wheat field over the next few weeks and
after each occasion she would pluck a white flower from that tree. ‘Pour
quoi la fleur blanc? I asked in my crummy French. She didn’t answer,
just smiled and held that flower to her face. Was it a sign perhaps of
virginity taken? Or virginity lost?

I remember after the first occasion trying to sum up how I felt in my own
mind, Did I feel different? More mature? More complete?

No I didn’t. I just felt a great relief at the removal of an irrational fear that
I would never know a woman intimately.

Silly really.

A few weeks later Romu summoned me to his study and said without
further explanation that it was time for me to leave. Whether he was
concerned about the ramifications of my liaison I do not know. Perhaps
he felt I had taken all their hospitality and given little in return, I know I
did. I left France then with many, many happy and sweat memories.

Love, Motorbikes and Death

There is one more thing I must talk about regarding France. I would
return there ten years later, after our trip to India and my final break-up
with Chris, and this trip would be a far more frightening affair.
It happened just before my wedding. I had met a beautiful girl with a
venus of a figure and soon after we became boyfriend and girlfriend she
moved in with me. She told me she couldn’t get pregnant, but one day six
months later she was walking on air out of the doctor’s surgery; he had
told her she was pregnant. After some humming and haring on my part
we decided to get married. I had to pay for the wedding and the reception
and the wedding cars etc. as her parents only agreed to pay for the drinks,
which was very kind of them, and which they got duty free. My money
gone on the wedding we never had the money for a honeymoon.

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The week before the marriage ceremony my friend Joe at work
discovered that I could not have a stag party because I was broke, so he
invited me to Paris for the weekend as a passenger on his motorbike.

Now Joe’s motorbike was an old 350cc Honda that had seen better days
and I wasn’t at all sure it would get us there and back in one piece, but
Joe re-assured me that he often did the journey, and it was true that he
spoke very good French. I suppose I was generally a little afraid of old
motorbikes as my Dad had one with a sidecar when I was very small. I
used to sit in the sidecar when we travelled around. The sidecar wasn’t
really designed to fit his motorbike as it was from a different
manufacturer, so he just tied it on with some string. One day (before the
age of motorways), my Dad was riding the motorbike with my uncle
Maurice in the sidecar from London to Leicester and they came to a fork
in the road, my Dad turned to the right on the motorbike and yes, the rope
parted, and my uncle Maurice went left in the sidecar. ‘Well he did lean
to the left’ said my Dad. My Mum was terrified of that old motorbike and
I guess I picked up some of that fear from her.

Anyway you can see I was wary of taking lifts on them, but still, I had to
mark the passing of my bachelorhood in some way I guessed, and this
was all that was on offer. Better not look a gift horse in the mouth then.
The journey to Paris that Saturday morning seemed to go quite well, with
fate firing just one ‘warning shot’ across our bow. As we rode from the
ferry out of Calais there was a sharp report from the engine and
something wizzed passed my right leg at great speed and buried itself
about 20 feet away in the grass verge. The bike immediately slowed
down and stopped and then Joe went back and dug out a spark plug from
the soft earth. It seemed spark plugs tended to work loose on this ‘model
of motorbike’ and then would be ‘fired’ out of the engine by ignition
pressure. I’m not sure that by the word ‘model’ he meant Honda 350cc’s
in general or just his old rust bucket. Anyway if my leg had been another
inch or two further up to the front of the bike I would have been married
on crutches.
Perhaps I should have understood the portent of this omen, but I was a
modern person and didn’t believe in stupid fate or omens. Little did I
know. Joe washed the spark plug off in a puddle, dried it with his scarf,
checked the spark gap with his penknife, and reinserted it in the engine.
When we drove off again I kept my legs well back.

We reached Paris without further problems at about mid-day and drove to

the quarter, which had many low cost hotels. We had, of course not
reserved a room and Paris was very busy in June, being as it was the
height of the tourist season. Eventually we found a hotel with vacancies.
It turned out that the reason it had vacancies was the smell. It stank. More
accurately it stank of hair dye. The concierge who was between sixty and
seventy I guess, had a mass of rich colourful tresses on her head, which
for some bizarre reason she kept dyeing with a new hair colour every
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night. The result was her small hotel constantly stank of hair dye, but
albeit, it nearly always had cheap vacant rooms. We took the last double
room available, which was on the top floor. As we climbed the
impressive marble staircase with its’ oak balustrades we passed a
handsome old gent coming down. He sported a huge greying moustachio,
a flat Parisian beret on his head, a three-piece suit, and a fob watch and
chain around his waist. A waft of French cigarettes, stale wine and cheap
brandy descended the stairs with him. This odour seemed to add to his
bravura and he cut quite a figure as he made his way carefully down the
stairs with his walking stick. As we approached, he paused to catch his
breath on the mezzanine landing and wished us ‘bonjour’.
After depositing our small bags in our room we rushed back to the
motorbike and off to catch the major tourist sites of Paris before they
closed for the evening. This was my first visit to Paris; we did the Eiffel
Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the left bank all at a brisk pace before
they closed.

Then we had a meal and returned to the Hotel. Our idea was to have a
quick shower and then head downtown for the nightlife. As we climbed
the stairs, who should we pass again but the old man puffing his way up?
As we reached him, and the alcohol fumes wafted over us, we said our
‘bonsoir’. All he could do in return was grunt between gulps of air. He
seemed to be making little progress up the stairs in the few seconds it
took us to pass him, but that was of no concern of ours at that moment as
we were in a hurry. We rushed on up to our room. I grabbed my wash bag
and rushed down the stairs to the shower room, which was on the first
floor, passing the old man again who still seemed to be making little
progress towards his room. On entering the shower room I discovered the
shower needed some new franc coins inserted into a meter to make hot
water, and I, of course, had come out of our room without any. I rushed
back to our room, passing the old man on the same step it seemed,
grabbed my loose new franc coins, then rushed back down past the now
permanently puffing old man to the shower room. I put the coins in the
meter and nothing happened – no hot water, damn. Perhaps I needed
more francs. I rushed out of the shower room and headed back up to our
room to borrow some franc coins off Joe. It was then that I saw the old
man lying on the floor; he had made it to the second floor, and had
collapsed there. I headed back to our room and called for Joe to come
down; he spoke good French and could therefore better handle the
situation I thought. Joe arrived at the scene of the old man’s collapse and
judged him to be drunk, needing no more than some assistance to his
hotel room. We fumbled in his pockets and found his key. Sure enough
his room was just ten meters away. With the help of two Dutch boys who
were coming up the stairs we lifted the old man into his tiny hotel room
and laid him on his bed, fully dressed with his lower legs bent over the
edge of the bed, and his shoed feet touching the floor. He was making
quite a lot of noise now in his breathing and I was uncertain if he was
OK. Joe insisted he was just drunk and we all left him there. When we
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got back to our hotel room I foraged for some more francs and made my
way down the stairs again to the shower. I couldn’t however pass the
second floor without putting my head around the old man’s door to see
how he was doing.

What I saw was a shock. The old mans eyeballs were standing right out
of their sockets, big and bulbous. His breathing heaved and retched. I
rushed back up stairs to Joe, told him to run down to the concierge and
get her to order an ambulance because the old man was seriously ill. I
then rushed back down to the old man’s room. His chest was working like
a forge bellows, and his eyes bulged even more.

I couldn’t speak to him in his own language, my French being so simple,

so I sat down on the bed held his hand and wiped his forehead with my
other hand whilst repeating ‘hold on, hold on, help is coming, help is
coming’. After about thirty seconds the heaving of the lungs ceases and
then loud croaking noises came from his throat. He was not breathing and
I was sure he was either dieing or dead. What to do? What to do? I had
seen mouth to mouth resuscitation given on television, so copying this I
pushed his head back, and with the fingers of one hand I pinched his nose
while with the other hand I pressed his chin to open his mouth wide. His
mouth was full of bubbly saliva and the aroma of cheap alcohol and
nicotine, and that croaking sound kept coming right out of his throat. I
felt repulsed, but I steeled myself, put my mouth over his stubbly mouth
and blew, then blew again, and then again, for about a minute. The
croaking gradually subsided, and his eyes became very still. I supposed
that he was probably dead and that my paltry efforts had failed.

I stood up from the bed tears streaming down from my eyes. Around the
room were photographs, some of him as a soldier from the first world
war; a cavalry man in long gleaming leather boots, riding crop and riding
breaches, that huge mastachio brimming jet black on his face; there was a
look of power and confidence emanating from his direct straight backed
gaze.

An old soldier, weren’t they supposed to never die? And now alone with
him in his room, What was I, the only witness to his death trauma to do?
How do you acknowledge a man’s spirit in that passing moment of death?
Well I didn’t know, so, (and I know how silly this sounds,) I stood up as
erect as I could, and with tears streaming down my face, I saluted him. If
he was dead I hoped his wraith might appreciate the acknowledgement,
but I also prayed that he was still alive, and the ambulance men would
revive him.

A moment later I heard the wail of sirens down in the street. That must be
the ambulance arriving I thought as I walked out of the room and heard
the clatter of boots coming up the stairs. Imagine my surprise then when
it turned out to be the fire brigade, they came up the stairs in their brown
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leather jerkins and polished brass helmets, and one fireman carried a
wood and canvas stretcher under his arm. It seemed they did the
ambulance work on the weekends when fire department work was slow.
Gosh knows what they knew about treating medical emergencies. The
leading fireman popped his head around the door of the old soldier’s
room, and then looked at me enquiringly. . I wanted to ask him if the old
soldier was really dead, so I decided to say in my simple schoolboy
french ‘I’ll est Mort?’ (He is Dead?). At least I wanted to say it as a
question; Mort (dead) spoken in a higher pitch to turn it into a question,
instead I said, all the words in the same pitch, ‘I’ll est mort’ (He is dead)
making it a factual statement rather than the question I intended.

The senior fireman looked at me with something akin to respect, thought

for a moment and then nodded agreement, ‘I’ll est mort’ he said.

The second fireman picked this up, ‘ I’ll est mort’ he said to the others.
They had both said it as though agreeing with me, but I didn’t know,
perhaps he was still alive? For heavens sake we needed a Doctor or a
medical person; someone more knowledgeable in these things than
myself, or a fireman.

Without a backward glance they walked off back down the stairs with the
stretcher still rolled up. What about the old man I thought?

Joe and the concierge were making their way slowly up the stairs just as
the firemen descended. When the concierge overheard the firemen saying
‘I’ll est mort’ she started wailing like a cat. And so she arrived at my side
still wailing with the overpowering smell of hair die wafting around her.

This awful smell and the taste I had left of the mouth to mouth made me
now think of vomiting. Joe questioned her between her wails as to who
and what the old fellow was. It turned out that he had rented the room for
over five years; he had no family except for brother in a town somewhere
in the south. She plucked up courage and peeped into the room and then
began to wail even louder.

A few minutes later when she had descended into quieter sobbing the
French plain-clothes police arrived. They looked into the room.

‘I’ll est mort’, wailed the concierge again.

‘Oui’ said the lead policeman ‘I’ll est mort’.

‘Oui’, said Joe, ‘I’ll est mort’.

‘Oh non, non’ said the concierge, ‘I’ll est mort’.

‘Mais Oui madame’, said Joe, I’ll est mort’

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I pulled Joe aside by his lapels and whispered, ‘How do you know he’s
dead?’

‘Cos everyone agrees he’s dead silly’ said Joe, looking at me like I was
an idiot.

‘We don’t know that’, I said. ‘I just happened to say that to the firemen
and they repeated it, and now everyone’s saying it.’

‘Well more fool you then’, said Joe.

In my high emotionally charged state it suddenly struck me that perhaps

someone isn’t really dead until there is a consensus of opinion that he is.
If everyone agrees he’s alive on the other hand what then? Could he be
alive? Perhaps he could be. Perhaps that’s how Jesus raised Lazarus.
Everyone knew the power of this man to change things, therefore if he
said arise Lazarus, well then everyone agreed he must now be alive and
hey presto he was. So all I needed to do was get everyone agreeing he
was alive!

‘Joe, please, you must ask them to get a Doctor, please’, I pleaded.

To his credit, Joe did his best. There was a long conversation in French
between Joe and the policemen, during which the policemen looked at
Joe in a very bored manner. The only word I think I understood during
the whole conversation apart from ‘Mort’ was ‘Week-end’.

Eventually Joe turned to me and said ‘I’m sorry he’s dead’.

‘Vous vous appelez comment? ’

They wrote down our names.

‘Ou est le porte-clés?’

I handed them the key to the old man’s room. The senior policeman
promptly locked the door and slipped the key into his side pocket, leaving
the old soldier, worldly possessions, bent knees and all, locked on the
other side.

‘They’ll sort it out Monday’ said Joe as the police walked away down the
stairs.

‘They can’t leave him there,’ I said, ‘If he’s not dead he will be soon
without a Doctor, and if he is dead he’ll start to decompose and the smell
will be even stronger in this bloody place than that hair dye, and his legs!
His legs are hanging at right angles down to the floor Joe, rigour mortis

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will set in and they’ll be fixed solid in that position, how will they move
him on a stretcher then?’

Joe shook his head, ‘This is France,’ he said, ‘and this is le weekend.’

The concierge had accompanied the policemen, wailing and wafting back
down to her apartment on the ground floor and we wandered back
upstairs.

‘There’s another more serious problem,’ said Joe as we got back to our
room. ‘During that conversation the policeman said we are material
witnesses we must make ourselves available for interviews after the
weekend’
.
‘Oh my gosh! I’m getting married. I can’t stay here Joe’. ‘What if they
keep us here for a coroner’s court?’ My own plight had now become
more important than the old mans.

‘No you can’t stay’ said Joe, ‘but its’ OK. I’ve got a plan!’

We waited till very late, then when everything was really quiet, we crept
down the stairs with our bags. On the second floor I took a last hesitant
look at the locked door of the soldier’s room and imagined again what
was on the other side,

‘God, what if he’d crawled off the bed and was even now clawing at the
other side of the door?’

‘Come on’, said Joe, ‘He’s dead mate.’

On the ground floor we posted our keys and some money through the
concierge’s letterbox, then headed out of the hotel onto the motorbike and
out of Paris towards the coast. It was raining of course, and on the
journey back to Calais we got very wet, but I thought as we sped towards
the French coast ‘well, that’s the worst over with, I’ll be back in good
time now’.

Fate however, had placed one final uneven paving stone in front of me on
my accident prone pathway to the altar. As we neared Calais the bike’s
engine started to cough and splutter and finally it stopped, Five miles
from the port we became stranded.

‘It’s never done that before,’ said Joe encouragingly.

I didn’t feel encouraged, and all his efforts at fixing it seemed to come to
nothing; he was flummoxed. I knew then I had to leave Joe and get back
home otherwise there would be no wedding. I apologised to my good
mate and walked off thumbing for a lift.
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I was very fortunate as a series of bikers seeing me thumbing with my
helmet stopped for me and I was taken swiftly back, first to the ferry and
then to London and home to my flat. Later Joe said he had found out what
was wrong with the bike soon after I left; it was a wet paper air filter. He
took the filter out and the bike roared into life again. Never mind, I ended
up with a marriage certificate and a startling canvas of new French
memories. I will never forget that old soldier.

Trust the Dutch

OK, onwards to India. In the early hours of the morning Fred and I rolled
off that Ferry in Calais and took the coast road north. Our route lay
through Europe, but we would not stop in France. Holland was our first
stop, and after this we would head for Germany, then through Austria to
Yugoslavia.

Fred’s Dutch friends were expecting us. On our arrival they greeted us
and made us welcome. We would sleep nice and snug for a few days in
our sleeping bags on their living room floor.

I was very nervous about Fred’s friends being that they were lesbians. I
had never met a lesbian, but the stereotype I had in my mind was
something of a cross between May West and King Kong. Fred insisted I
would be surprised and so I was, surprised and surprised and surprised.

First surprise: they were both nice, in fact the ‘female’ was a sweet girl.
The butch, if I can call her that, was a bit ugly as a girl, but I guess made
an OK sort of guy. Although they both worked, ‘he’ had a manual job and
his hands were calloused. She held a part time office job and looked after
the home.

Second surprise: they had children, a young boy and girl. Well to be
precise, they were her children.

And third surprise: the children’s father; her legal husband, came around
most evenings and visited. He said he was quite happy with the
arrangement when we got chatting with him. But I felt he was a bit sad,
knowing his wife was being rogered by another female with a dildol each
night. I wondered how the kids would grow up emotionally; well I guess
at least he was there for them.

One thing I’ve found about homosexual couples is they like to show off
their sexuality to those who befriend them. One way is to snog like young
teenagers whenever they can. Whatever the reason for this, they duly
performed this juvenile teenage ritual each evening. I found two women
at it a little upsetting. Fred thought it fine and photographed it.
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However, moving aside from this strange sexual scene, in all other
respects these people were exactly like the educated working Dutch I
have now come to know and respect. Very open, generous, clever with
languages, good-natured and most tolerant.

In the mornings we cycled around the countryside with the family. It was
Autumn and frosty most mornings. The air was fresh and crisp, raining
sometimes, and a ride would leave us with good appetites and sore
backsides. We bought all the different Dutch cheeses, two in fact; Edam
and Gouda. and butter, fresh rolls and real coffee. Breakfasts were a treat.
In the afternoons we drove around Amsterdam as sightseers and one
evening the girls showed us around the red light district, which has all the
attributes of a zoo, but much funnier.

Four days later, greatly relaxed, we had put England, and everything it
meant, a thousand miles away in our minds. These sweet people had put
us at our ease. We bought them some chocolates, packed up our sleeping
bags, said our goodbyes and drove into Amsterdam for a pre arranged
meeting with Alf and all my other German friends at the American Hotel.

I had met Alf in very strange circumstances, which all had to do with my
two passions; cars and making business.

(Once again if you are a purely Travel type reader, move on to Page 47 –
We meet a Sex Goddess. Otherwise I will now transgress into my early
years and how I met my German Friends.)

Passions combined

I once took a great American sales trainer, called Les Dane, for a meal in
London’s Chinatown. He had come to the UK to give some sales
seminars, and having read his book I joined the seminar. I cornered him
over a drink afterwards and we agreed on a meal the next evening. I took
him and his friend to my favourite restaurant, the New Fook Lam Moon,
where the belly pork and yam hot pot is the best outside of China. We had
a great blow out of a meal and over this repast I got him talking about his
early successes. He told me that as a junior car salesman he had his first
run of luck when he realized that if a driver sits down behind the driving
wheel of a car he gets plugged into it. Its’ like there is an invisible
umbilical cord connecting him to the car. The sale then becomes easy,
you just have to get him to sit in the driving seat and start talking about
what he sees in front of him and about the car in general. The cord then
connects the two and bingo, you’ve made a sale. I know this is true; this
connecting phenomenon takes place every time I climb into a car, I am
joined to it and it gives me all its power, speed, protection and comfort.
I have driven a huge succession of vehicles since passing my driving test
right up to this day. I have a passion for them. I love driving. I have this
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irrational fear that someone in authority one day will blow a whistle and
say ‘that’s it, no more cars’.

I passed my driving test after just one lesson, which quite surprised my
Dad. I promptly started borrowing his very smart new Vauxhall 101, and
with myself having lots of young driving aggression and no experience he
was quite rightly concerned for the safety of his nice car. I loved driving
that car; The 101 looked really smart, following American design lines,
and it smelt wonderful because there was loads of plastic and chrome
inside giving off that distinctive ‘new car’ odour. It had bench seats and a
column shift, so you could seat six, and it had a top speed of about 90
mph; a little slow I thought. However the 101 was also inherently
unstable and with a compliment of six passengers, narrow tyres and a
young driver, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

One morning at about 2.30am, six of us, three boys and three girls, were
driving home on a deserted road from a party in Hertfordshire. There was
a fine misty rain coming down, just enough to lift and soften that layer of
hardened oil that gets deposited on the road by leaky engines. Going into
a gentle bend at ninety mph I decided to adjust the speed down by gently
applying the breaks. Of course this was wrong I should have braked
before the bend. The heavily ladened and unstable car started to skid, I
turned the steering wheel hard left to follow the bend and lost it
completely. The car started to spin around and around like in a slow
motion dance. All the girls screamed and in panic all I could think of
saying was ‘It’s all right, it’s all right’, time and time again as the car
followed its’ pirouetting trajectory completely out of my control.
Fortunately as it turned, it slowed, and as if by a miracle it followed the
middle of the deserted road, until it had nearly lost all its’ momentum and
then finally it clipped a lamppost with the corner of its’ bright chrome
bumper and came to a halt. Everything was fine, the girls eventually
stopped screaming and calmed down, and on inspection I found the car
was OK except for a little dent in the bumper, so we drove home. I told
my Dad I had been doing 25 mph when some lights changed and had
skidded on some oil and clipped a metal pavement barrier. From the look
on his face I could see he didn’t believe me. A few weeks later on my
way into London a car pulled out from a side road directly in front of me.
With my inexperience, seeing the car too late and speeding, there was no
avoiding a head on collision and the 101 was a right off. The other guy
was prosecuted and my Dad got the insurance paid in full, but he’d had
enough, so he bought me a little green second hand mini van for £75,
handed me the keys, said that was it on driving his cars, and wished me
luck.

But I rode my luck, I’d had my accidents at his expense; the mini was
never once scratched until that day some years later when I had ridden it
into the ground I watched sadly as it was dismantled.

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This mini had a fold down seat in the back, so you could seat four or fold
down the seat and fill the back with more people or material. I once had
eight of my Wanstead C rugby team mates crammed into the back, boots
and all when we had a long trek from a remote playing field back to the
club house. We beat the rest of the team there by a mile and got first into
the steaming hot communal bath and made it lovely and muddy with our
dirt long before the rest of the two teams returned.

The little mini was home from home for me and became my most
important asset later when my Dad kicked me out.

Back in those days there were no breathalysers, people ignored any

drinking and driving laws there were as you would only get into trouble if
you were really obviously, seriously drunk. I drank socially most
evenings and drove home afterwards. I think most people thought if you
could get your key into the ignition lock you were sober enough to drive.
I remember driving home to Ilford, Essex from North London one night
after a regular evening of bridge with Pete at a pub in North London. The
loosing pair paid for drinks at the end of each rubber of bridge and we
rarely lost. I think I had consumed about six or seven pints of free best
bitter before time was called. I climbed into the little mini, passed my
own sobriety test by getting the ignition key in and drove home. On my
way home I passed through the Black Horse Lane traffic lights at
Walthamstow where there had been an accident, but I didn’t notice the
accident and sailed through at 50 mph in what was a 30 mph zone. About
five miles further on I heard a little squeaky horn behind me and looking
in my mirror I saw a policeman on a noddy bike (a police moped)
flashing his head light. I slowed down to let him overtake, but it was me
he wanted. We stopped at the side of the road. I had no idea why he had
chased me, but I was sure I was way over any alcohol limit for driving. I
got out, carefully positioned myself against the body of the mini so as not
to appear unsteady and asked him what was wrong, being careful not to
exhale in his direction.

‘Did you see us slowing traffic down by that accident at Black Horse
Lane? You went passed at some speed.’

I hadn’t seen the accident; I hadn’t even seen the policemen.

‘Yes’. I said, ‘ I saw you, but I thought you were waving us on’.

‘Do you know how fast you were going? This bike only does 45 mph and
its’ taken me five miles at full pelt to catch up to you.’

‘I’m sorry’, I said, I was going at the speed of all the other traffic’
.
‘Well slow down’, he said. ‘ You are very lucky the motorbike traffic
policeman at the accident was too busy taking statements to chase you,
otherwise you would have got a speeding ticket’.
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‘I’m sorry to have dragged you away’ I said, but I really thought you
were waving us through’.

‘OK’, he said, ‘This a just a caution, I’m not going to issue a ticket, but
you must understand I had to stop you, for all I knew you might have
been rolling drunk.’

I thanked him and carefully climbed back into the mini trying not to
fumble the door handle or blow bubbles as I subsided into the drivers
seat, and then drove home. It all seemed like another country then in the
60’s. I wouldn’t drink and drive now, not even after half a pint of beer.
Well anyway, even half a pint of beer now gives me heartburn, how could
I ever have drunk six or seven pints in one night?

Enough on cars, I must not be tempted to write chapters of driving

stories.

The other passion was finding business opportunities. I’ve started many
businesses, in fact one or two have nearly bankrupted me. Even today I
get a buzz when I think I have found a new business opportunity. Now,
however, I will mostly sit down until the feeling goes away.

My first opportunity to start a business came a year after I left school, a

friend of my father’s got me a job driving an ice cream van. It was sort of
self-employed, but really I worked for the ice cream van fleet’s owner. In
fact I worked for a couple of different owners, but they both ripped me
off, charging a fortune for the ice cream stock. The job did combine
driving, which I liked, but it really wasn’t my own business. The final
crunch came one evening outside Tottenham Hotspur’s football ground.
Now you could earn a small steady income driving round the streets
selling ice cream, but it was hard work and the police laid in wait for you
if you sounded your bell after 7p.m. which was illegal. It was also after
7p.m. during the week that you earned most of your money when people
were home, and to tell them you were there you had to sound your bell.

Catching offending ice cream van drivers sounding their music after 7
p.m. was much easier it would seem than catching burglars or other
criminals and many police officers were very vigilant after 7pm when
they heard those nasty chimes. It seemed that for a policeman, the number
of convictions, irrespective of type, was an important statistic in the
promotional stakes. But it made us feel like criminals, having to attend
courts and pay fines even though we were only trying to make an honest
living. The alternative to the streets was a pitch; park up somewhere
where lots of people went past. This was more difficult than the streets
though because pitches were hard to find. You had to take risks parking
in restricted traffic areas. One obvious place to make a quick killing was

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near football grounds on match days; you could earn one or two days
income in an hour or two.

On this particular day, before the match, I had already been moved on
once by a police inspector from the road called White Hart Lane by the
side of the ground, but that evening as it grew dark towards the end of the
game I drove back and found the narrow street completely deserted. I
parked up and waited for the gates to open and the fifty thousand or so
crowd to empty out. My vehicle was a big 3 ton Commer van with a
separate TVO engine in the back to power the ice cream machine. The
TVO engine also powered all the lights inside the van and two fridges.

As the match ended I stood ready to shoot ice cream into cones as fast as
I could and my young lad assistant who helped me on weekends looked
forward to taking lots of money as he got a percentage of the take. What I
hadn’t calculated on was the effect of thousands upon thousands of soccer
fans pouring out into the narrow funnel like road now partially blocked
by my van. At first as the gates opened we got a line of purchasers who
we quickly served, but within a minute the line had become a scrum and
the street became jammed with bodies as they tried to push past the van.
The noise of the TVO engine also blocked out the fan’s football chants
and a few started to get mad at this and not being able to get past. Soon
the crowd started to get nasty as they identified my van as the culprit of
their delay. People started to shout curses at us, and one or two started to
rock the van about. That was it for me. I stopped serving and closed the
window, but I couldn’t move the van off. The rocking became more
violent and the shouts more abusive now. There was only one more thing
I could do now apart from abandoning the van; I jumped out of the van
with my key for the back door, pushed my way round, opened the door
and switched off the TVO engine, which shuddered to a halt.
All at once the engine noise stopped, everything went quiet and all the
lights, which had lit the ice cream van up so garishly, flickered off. It was
as if the van had died. There was an eerie moment of silence, and then a
huge roar of approval went up from the fans all the way along the road.
Justice having been done they felt and the beast being slain, they now
ignored the van and gradually got past it and dispersed. Within ten
minutes all that remained in White Hart Lane was a load of refuse, me,
my helper, the van, and an angry police inspector. Surprisingly enough,
or perhaps because he already had his promotion, he let me off with a
severe warning.

I needed to change my business and there was one waiting for me. In the
winter when ice cream wasn’t very popular, my ice cream van owner
delivered bags of potatoes door to door. He got me to join his sales team.
They went out each weekday in a van and knocked on doors persuading
people to try bags of his ‘farm fresh’ potatoes that he really got from the
market. Actually he bought them in big 52 pound paper sacks and re-
bagged them in the yard in sixteen pound sacks.
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I was taught their sales pitch in an hour and sent out to do my thing
knocking on doors. When you got someone to open their front door you
had to give that person all this bull about representing a group of potato
farmers who were delivering ‘farm fresh’ bags of potatoes in their area
and ask them if they would like to try a 16 lb bag for the cost of eight
shillings (forty new pence). I was told that a good salesman could close
thirty deliveries a day at five shillings commission (twenty five new
pence) per sale. Each fortnight then they’d deliver another bag (for which
the salesman got nothing more.)

After a month or two I changed the sales words and started closing a
hundred a day, the refusals (that is the persons who said yes on the door
and no when the delivery came,) stayed exactly the same with my new
pitch. My employer then wanted me to run my own team, but I did better
than that. I thought I could run my own company. I bought some old
vans, rented a small warehouse, constructed a primitive bagging machine
and went into business. It seemed easy, but soon I just couldn’t do it all
myself, and so I started to employ other people. Fred was fed up with his
job in the library so agreed to join me. I had him bagging up and selling,
but I needed deliveryman as well. Fred didn’t drive, but I didn’t see that
as an impediment. I drove one of my old vans full of bags of potatoes
around the car park adjacent to our warehouse a few times with him in the
passenger seat explaining how I was driving. Then got him to do it
around a few times himself. That seemed a bit jerky, but OK, so I gave
him a delivery list and a book map of London, and told him to get going.
And he went.

That evening he came back drenched in sweat, (he must have lost
pounds), but he was very proud, he’d delivered all the potatoes and only
hit one vehicle. The insurance would soon sort that out. From then on
there was no stopping Fred and vehicles. He drove every day, passed his
test and started taking vehicles apart to see how they worked, which
turned out to be very useful on our journey.

The business folded the next summer when potato prices rocketed and my
outgoings far exceeded my income. But it had been a lot of fun. I
determined to look out again for something that catered to both passions
and many years later in early 1970 I found something.
I had ridden that little A35 I had into the ground. Poor thing; it became a
wreck outside our flat until an enthusiast offer me £4 for it and towed it
away. That was a £2 profit. I bought a little blue mini, which was
plastered over its rear end with different oval country stickers, like GB, F,
DK etc. It looked very swish and had more poke than the A35, and I
proceeded to drive that into the ground as well.

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 Me and the Mini

A few weeks after acquiring the mini someone told me that the West
German Post Office used right hand drive Volkswagens so that their
postmen could empty post boxes without climbing out of their vehicles
into oncoming traffic. This was an absurd idea, which I discovered was
true. Once these bright yellow cars got old they were sold for next to
nothing by postal auction, as few people in Germany wanted right hand
drive cars. ‘Uh huh! Here’s my opportunity to start my own business and
handle lots of cars’, I thought, ‘These Volkswagens were ideal for our left
hand side drive roads, I could bring them back to the UK and sell them at
a big profit.’

I found out from the German Embassy that the next Post Office region to
auction old cars was Dusberg. I sent off for auction documents from
them. The short descriptions in German of the cars they sent me didn’t
tell me much, I guessed they were broken down, but I took a chance and
bid £30 for each of three cars. I got two of them! Hmmm. Well what do I
do now? The cars were in Germany and I was in England.

First things first or rather second things second, I advertised for a German
Translator. I couldn’t go to Germany on a business trip without one,
could I? My advert brought in the ideal person, Hannalore. She was over
in England as an au-pair, but would like to go back to Germany for a little
while and be paid for doing it. Hannalore was what most men would call
voluptuous, a classic 38-24-36 or whatever it was in European
centimetres. I say most men for although I have a healthy enough
appreciation of the opposite sex, I really didn’t see her like others
reported they saw her. Maybe because of this she never tried to impress
me, or perhaps the more mundane is true, she never really fancied me so
never tried to impress me. She was, however, a very able person and
organised the trip in a few days.

We soon set out in my little blue mini for Dusberg. Half way across
Germany the engine boiled up. We were stuck, and I wasn’t covered by
the ADAC, the German equivalent of the AA. Like most of my cheap
bought cars that broke down, I thought this one would cost more than it
was worth to repair. Now I had one broken down car on the autobahn and
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two broken down cars in Dusberg. It’s at moments like this that even the
most enthusiastic, devil-may-care, swashbuckling, vehicle entrepreneur is
forced to glance back in his life’s rear view mirror and see his too human
frailty. There was no way out of this I thought but to cut my losses,
abandon all three cars and hitch a lift home.

Saved by the German Cavalry

Hannalore would have nothing of this, the car could be fixed and she new
the very man to call. She took 50 phennigs and made the phone call, then
came back and told me her German student boyfriend would come and
help.

‘Huh’, I thought, ‘If he works for the ADAC perhaps’. Still I had no other
hope.

An hour and a half later a small cream and green NSU TT roared past,
horn blowing like a trumpet. It screeched to a halt 50 yards past us then
reversed at high speed to within a yard of my mini. The German cavalry
had arrived.

The
German
Cavalry
Charger

The NSU TT

Out of the car came an amazing crew. Alf, Hannalore’s ‘boyfriend’ got
out from the driver’s seat, he had long, curly, mousy hair, a curly beard,
pebbledash glasses, a full-length black leather coat, and he was smoking a
huge pipe. Clary, A little guy with a sallow complexion, lanky, dark hair
down to his shoulders and a bright smile climbed out from behind Alf,
and then Porky, a huge boy with a big round grin squeezed out of the
passenger’s side. Porky was good with cars they said. He proceeded to
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immerse his fat frame in the little mini engine compartment and throw out
bits of my mini’s engine around the car.

‘Oh well,’ I thought, ‘ It’s broken anyway.’

Alf and Hannalore

Alf and Hannalore went off for a serious chat. I think Alf soon realized I
was only Hannalore’s employer, not his competition. He brightened up,
came back and asked me all about my enterprise. Clary listened and
confirmed that he knew people who had bought these cars but they found
them a problem because they only had one seat for the driver and they
usually had major mechanical problems. Oh dear, I didn’t recon on that.
After about ten minutes to my complete surprise Porky emerged from the
mini engine with a two-inch length of rubber hose and pointed to a hole
in it. That was the problem.

We all five piled in the NSU and headed for a British Leyland Garage
they knew. Once on the road I made the mistake of asking Alf how the
NSU compared to a BMW. Alf scowled at me, ‘BMW shizer,’ he said. It
seemed he was keen to prove this to me and put his foot on the
accelerator. Soon we were travelling at over 180 KM per hour down the
unrestricted Autobahn. The little car with its five big passengers swayed
frighteningly about the motorway. The other passengers didn’t seem to
mind, but I felt my time was at hand, I could hardly hold my sphincter
closed. This was it; life in the fast lane was about to become death.

‘Yes, yes,’ I said urgently, ‘this NSU is great, Yes, yes BMW is shizer.’

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But he didn’t slow down. Somehow we got to the Garage and back
without me becoming a headline in the Daily Mirror – English Boy dies
in Shock Horror German Autobahn crash at 140 MPH!

With the part obtained and the mini repaired Alf asked me to accept their
hospitality. He probably wanted to renew his acquaintance with
Hannalore, but the offer was very kind. Some time later that evening we
followed the NSU back into their hometown of Krefeld, and as I mussed
as I do when I’m driving, a very funny thought struck me; I now had
something in common with a great man from European History, the Duke
of Wellington; we had both faced our Waterloos, and we had both been
saved by the German Cavalry. One day after this life I might meet up
with him in heaven and say ‘Hello Welly old boy, nice to see you in this
Saved by the German Cavalry Club in the sky, did I ever tell you that an
Audi TT is every bit as good, if not better than a BMW?’

Krefeld is an industrial town, flattened by the RAF and American Army

Air Force during the war and then rebuilt with German efficiency as a
series of boxes along its ancient cobbled and tram lined roads. It had
nothing to recommend it as a tourist attraction except a statue of its’
founder, who had apparently turned up one day with a roll of silk on his
shoulder and started a silk factory. At least that’s what the statue implied.
All the people I met in Krefeld were at first astonished that I was there at
all and wanted to know why I had come, then they spent the next 30
minutes apologising for the town. They really didn’t need to, I found the
town had a marvellous attraction; it had a host of young people all
seemingly friendly, keen to practice their English, and out for a good
time.

Alf & Co.

Alf and Co. were amazing. They were mostly students and knew every
bar in every town within fifty kilometres of the centre of Krefeld, so
when we ran out of bars in Krefeld they insisted we visit all the other
towns. None of these guys seemed to spend much time at the University.
In fact Alf had been a student for eight years, and he kept sitting and re-
sitting his exams. It seemed that the student grant, plus some clever
playing of a card game called Scart, a game I could never fathom, and an
allowance from his retired teacher father was enough for the good life.
Alf was one of those kind honest people you meet sometimes around
whom everyone else revolves. I’m not sure he had any central passion in
his life, but alcohol, nicotine, cars, cards and girls would do until he
found one.

Hannalore was clever and beautiful and Alf’s girl friend. She was just
there like a sort of ornament. She seemed sophisticated and over dressed
whenever she came out with us. Alf adored her. I bet he still does. She,
however, had her own very definite game plan that didn’t include
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Krefeld. She left him forever a few months after our stay at Krefeld, and
within a few more months she was a Lufthansa airhostess.

Porky ran a ‘garage’ down a back alley. He understood cars and could fix
anything. Unfortunately, he didn’t understand ownership very well and
got into lots of trouble when he fixed cars that didn’t really belong to
their drivers. Porky was, as his name implies, very fat. His shape you
would think denied him a good sex life, but he knew some very nice
prostitutes and seemed jolly about the whole affair of life and love.

Clary was one of the nicest people you could ever wish to meet; you
could not help but like him. He said he was relaxed about everything, yet
he passionately detested mainstream German life. He had decided early
on that he wanted to be a freak, a freak being the alternative name for a
Hippy. A freak took drugs and dropped out from general society as far as
possible. I think Clary’s choice was based on rejection. His mum had
been quite an old woman when she conceived Clary, her only child, after
the war. His dad had been a master sergeant in the American Army and at
the end of his term abroad he had gone home to his wife and family in the
States leaving the poor lady with the baby, so to speak. Clary was born
into a society, which still held antecedents to be very important. Clary’s
mum was ostracised and libelled in whispers and as Clary grew up no
doubt he felt the rejection around him. Its no wonder the freak culture,
turning things upside down and rejecting mainstream culture, appealed to
him. He could reject the rejecters and belong in this alternative world.
Clary worked hard at not working. His flat was fully furnished from the
monthly ‘spurmule’ collection day when people put out their old furniture
to be collected. He never worked; he worked the system. For him
happiness was a dole payment and a few grams of dope shared between
friends in a squat.

Eventually this rejection of mainstream life overwhelmed his personal

life. Francy was a beautiful doe eyed girl who loved Clary very much.
She had no English, but her smile enchanted you. One afternoon we
visited some disused clay pits in a pretty valley where we had a picnic.
Francy stripped her top and dress and dived in. she swam gracefully over
to far bank and back again, then climbed out soaked and near naked.
What emerged from the water could have come directly off a Pre-
Raphaelite canvas, an image of serene gentleness.

Francy stayed by her man and shared his life until he moved to Berlin and
joined Germany’s most vociferous political freaks, who took over whole
tenement buildings and organised violence against the police. He wasted
such a lovely woman and never realized it, all for a sense of belonging.

Of all the people I met in Krefeld, Manfred was the most dominating and
impressive. He had a massive head of hair and an enormous moustache.
He was a huge, great lion of a man, who started drinking at lunchtime and
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finished at 3 or 4 am without a trace of it effecting him. Perhaps he was
drunk, but his sheer presence stopped you from considering it. When he
spoke to you he put his face very close to yours, smiled, exhaled and
enveloped you in a cloud of smoky 70% proof. Manfred was older than
the rest of us; he had been a young boy at the end of the war. His sister
had looked after him then by doing whatever a young woman alone had
to do to put food on the plate. She still looked after him in his official
business now. Manfred was an agent for a Japanese music equipment
company. Not that he sold anything as far as I could tell, but the little
Nips paid him anyway; perhaps they were scared of him. I think they
were. Manfred was Alf’s best friend. They were very different in most
respects, but shared a love of the good life. Manfred treated Krefeld as his
playground.

One evening he visited a bikers’ bar and dragged everyone along. Now a
German biker is a hell’s angel with a chip on his shoulder. For German
bikers, bikes come a poor second to fights, and bike chains have the
alternative use of driving bike wheels, if you couldn’t find a fight to use
them in. This bar had some of the biggest drunken bruisers I have ever
seen, film and TV included. Some were standing, others were prone
across the bar counter and floor. As we walked in I knew this was a bad
call. Those bikers still standing looked us up and down and felt in their
pockets for their chains. Before anyone could move Manfred punched the
largest biker in the shoulder, pulled his head down to within an inch of
his own and challenged him to a drinking contest. Our presence was
forgotten as both threw back glass after glass till the biker collapsed.
Without paying, we turned and walked out. I guess the big biker had the
tab.

Manfred’s real love was rock and roll. He couldn’t play an instrument
although he had a shop full of them. One morning in the flat above the
shop, Manfred brought up two electric guitars and put a heavy rock LP on
the Hi-Fi at high volume. For the next hour we jammed through some of
the greatest air guitar numbers I have ever played, with real guitars.

Bristol Fans

Sleep is something Krefeld students don’t seem to need at night. What

they need is Alt and Korn. Alt is a great beer matured in wooden barrels,
and Korn is a spirit so high proof that I think it could fuel planes. During
my first evening, we toured the student bars and clubs till the early hours,
and over God knows how much Alt and Korn we hatched a plan for the
Volkswagens. Alf and Porky would help me sort them out. Hannalore
would spend time with her friends, Alf would have Hannalore, and I
would pay Porky at trade rates. Everyone would get something out of it.
Sure enough over the next few days we ‘flew’ in the NSU to and fro to
Dusberg in the daytime and hit the nightlife in the evenings. I was
growing to love the NSU, and came to ignore that phantom horsemen of
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the apocalypse; Death, I perceived riding along side the car gesturing for
me to join him. At night we did the bars, once we had done all the
Krefeld bars we went on to Dussledorf.

The old town of Dussledorf has the most amazing downtown area.
Uniquely for a Ruhr town it seemed to have part escaped the attention of
the allied air forces and a huge downtown area was dedicated to nightlife.
It was awash with alcohol. There was every type of bar for every type of
clientele. Strip bars, disco bars, singles bars, gay bars, student bars, you
name it. One establishment was an ancient brewery and bar combined.
The barrels of Alt were pulled up from the cellar brewery and rolled
across the pub floor to the bar where they were immediately tapped by
the bar men who then just poured and poured until the barrel was empty,
often in 30 minutes. Great beery evenings were spent there.
The other side of this nightlife was sex. This was available everywhere,
displayed openly on the streets and in shop windows where girls
disported themselves in ways that left little to the imagination.
There were three types of people who came downtown: those who came
for the alcohol, those who came for the sex, and those who came for the
sex and the alcohol. The last type were dangerous, they tended to be
aggressive males who had problems with normal methods of
communication. They paid for their sex and hid their personal inadequacy
in a fog of alcohol. Inept socially, they were often large and powerfully
built, and they travelled in packs. I knew nothing of this until I met a pack
one night.

Alf, Hannalore, Clary, Porky, Myself and two or three other German boys
and girls were walking back through the busy streets of Dusseldorf old
town after a long night of Alt and Korn. We were all happily drunk.
Hannalore was out in front. Actually she was out in front in two ways, out
in front of our group and out in front in a mammary sense.

Suddenly a huge giant of a man walked straight into her and grabbed her
by her outstanding features. Not being schooled in the ways of drunken
German etiquette, I was not sure if this was a friend saying hello or the
start of an assault, but to my fuzzy, Alt and Korn besotted, English mind
it certainly looked like bad form. The other people in our group seemed to
freeze. Hoping not to commit a faux pas I came up quietly behind him
and gently put my hands on his arms and guided them away from those
melon like wonders.

As the half formed thought past though my head that I had done this with
great sensitivity, a pain shot through in the opposite direction smashing
directly into the original thought. A fist had arrived at the back of my
head. As I turned a rain of blows came down on me. It seemed I had
indeed broken etiquette in this matter and that the aggrieved melon
fancier had a group of friends who wished to inform me of this using the

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only method of communication nature permitted them, brutal physical
contact.

I defended myself as best as I could. They were handicapped as they were

drunk and there were so many of them they got in each other’s way and
couldn’t easily land the punches I so obviously deserved. I backed into a
shop entrance and using both my arms and legs fended off the blows. As
anyone who has been through a terrifying experience can tell you, time
slows down in these moments, and I seemed to have time to look around
and even consider my circumstances. I saw my friends standing petrified
on the pavement opposite, either that or they were following some finer
point of the etiquette I had not yet picked up. Porky however decided to
break rank and tapped the biggest bruiser on the shoulder and asked him
why they were attacking me. I saw the fist land in his face, ouch!

Porky’s
shiner

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All the while as the punches and kicks came in I was asking myself how
on earth does this thing end, do I have to become a bleeding pulsating
mass in the gutter? Perhaps my attackers were thinking the same thing,
but we couldn’t discuss this because for one thing I didn’t speak German
and for another thing they didn’t speak in any other way than by foot and
fist.

Suddenly I saw a gap open up in the throng; perhaps they were changing
shifts or something. I ducked through the hole and raced out of the shop
door and down the road for about 50 yards. I thought perhaps I might find
a policeman ready to restore order, (oh, how little I understood).
To my great surprise however the melon fancier’s supporters club didn’t
follow, it seems honour had been served; their foe had withdrawn.
Amazing.

At my insistence we trouped into a police station to report the attack. My

friends thought this very strange. The German police thought it even
stranger and turfed us out.

The next morning we reviewed the damage. My arms and legs were
covered in bruises where I had blocked the punches and my head was
really sore from landed punches, but there was nothing broken and there
were no marks on my face. It was obvious that in trying to jostle each
other out of the way and in their state of inebriation they had done me
little real harm. Poor Porky however was a sight to see. He had a huge
great shiner where one eye should have been. Well he shouldn’t have
broken etiquette should he?

Meanwhile, over the next few days despite his disfigurement the
Volkswagens were sorted out, one was a write off; the engine was gone.
The other could be salvaged with some of the parts from the write off.
Porky found new seats and got the salvaged car re-sprayed. When the car
was fixed I was almost sorry to leave my newfound friends, but I had a
business to build. Or so I thought.

Later I got the car sold at auction in England and did my expense
calculations and found I had lost three hundred pounds. Oh well, back to
the work harness.

I would visit my German friends again now on the road to India and they
would entertain us again in their unique way, in that wonderful ugly town
of Krefeld.

We meet a sex goddess

It was great to see my friends again in Amsterdam. Alf had a new

girlfriend, Monika, a tall, thin manikin of a girl, a little older than Alf and
much more experienced. Clary was there also with his pretty girlfriend,
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Francy, my big doe eyed, earth child. Clary knew Amsterdam from a very
different viewpoint than our Dutch hosts. His was the freak club scene
and that evening he acted as a tour guide as we went to some
extraordinary clubs that were themed on psychedelia, alcohol, drugs and
rock & roll with lots and lots of young people from every western country
busy being part of this scene. The boys were very serious about imbibing
lots of whatever it was they were trying to get hooked on, whether it was
beer, music or drugs. The girls didn’t seem to feature much in this
activity; they mostly frowned or rolled their eyes when anyone spoke to
them like they were concentrating on something with a much higher
purpose than getting hooked, or perhaps it was the loud music; they could
not hear what anyone said. I found the whole thing boring. Perhaps if we
had stayed there for some nights I might have joined in and found it
exciting, but I don’t think so. We drank our expensive beer then moved
on to the next venue and drank another expensive beer.

We left Amsterdam later that night and drove to the Dutch border with
Germany where Alf’s parents lived, and we slept on their living room
floor. Alf’s parents were retired schoolteachers. This belied their
beautiful home with its views over a valley. Obviously teachers earned
much more in Germany than England. His parents were old, in their 80’s
I think. Alf was an only late child. He had obviously been spoilt. Up in
their huge converted loft was the biggest working train set I had seen in
my whole life. It took up the whole loft. Alf and his dad had built it over
many years. Both parents doted on Alf and were happy for him to stay at
University.

They were very formal and a little cold with we two English boys. It was
probably the war. I hate to think of what hell they had gone through. Alf
remembered as a toddler running at night into air raid shelters with his
Mum, and the RAF bombs banging and crashing outside. Perhaps we
reminded them of those dreadful times.

From his parents’ home we went back via the autobahn to Krefeld. On the
way we stopped at a Rasthaus, a sort of German motorway services, but
with edible food. We climbed out of the van and I made a beeline for the
toilets. A sharp order in German made me turn before I reached the
building and two German policemen walked towards me. Interpol, I
thought, they’d spotted our one green earringed van.

They barked at me again in German. I hadn’t a clue what they were

saying. Then Clary shouted over that they were telling me off for walking
on the grass. Now anyone could see that the grass had been walked over
till it was nearly mud, but yes there was a sign which I guessed said keep
off the grass in German and the policeman was pointing to it. I shook my
head, said I didn’t know what they were saying, and when they realized
they were talking to a stupid English person they walked off in disgust. I
made it to the toilet in no time flat.
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Back in Krefeld, the nightlife resumed as if I had never gone away. Fred
just loved it. The Alt beer was magnificent, the girls wonderful. We
stayed for nearly three weeks and spent lots of money.

Monika was a revelation too. When we got up after our first night on
Alf’s floor, she had a breakfast of coffee, cheese and fresh roles for us
plus a surprise; she had sitting at the table the most amazing sexy, blonde
girl I have ever seen in my life. This girl was about five foot six inches
tall with curly blond hair down to her shoulders. She had a lovely face,
high cheekbones, big red lips, a sweet little nose and beautiful blue eyes.
Her figure even sitting at the table was what could only be called
voluptuous. She gave off an aura; she was like a vision any man might
have of his most perfect sexual partner, and I swear that this girl’s eyes
said ‘come take me I’m yours’.

She was Monika’s sister, a photographic nude model, who was staying
with Monika and Alf for a few days. When Monika introduced this sex
bomb Fred and I were just gob smacked. We sat there like dummies,
fumbling with our bread rolls and cheese, unable to string a meaningful
sentence together whilst this apparition was in the room. She smiled
sweetly for half an hour and then departed. We then took our first deep
breath for over 30 minutes.

The mad thing is her eyes had definitely said ‘come take me I’m yours’,
we found out later she couldn’t resist men, went out at night to bars just
to find one that didn’t freeze up when she looked at him. We met her a
few nights later in a bar with a Dutch guy who had so much alcohol in
him it acted like antifreeze. He would walk her home that night. Damn!
The first time a female sex goddess had spoken to me, and I couldn’t
respond.

Monika was thinner and older than her sister, and I think she felt jealous.
She harboured the belief that she too could be a nude photographic model
and she had a folio of sexy nude photos of herself revealing all, kept
under a glass coffee table in the lounge. When Fred and I found them I
was amazed. I think Alf was embarrassed because we were looking at
them and I found it embarrassing that I was looking at them with Alf and
Monika in the room, but Fred pored through them all. After a while Alf
and I left Fred with Monika and we went out for an early coffee. As we
went out they were deep in conversation over the folio, perhaps
discussing comparative vulvas.

On one of our first evenings out we went to the Krefeld student club, a
non-descript box of a building with trams rattling by just outside the front
door. It was raining hard and apart from the shiny rain washed cobbles
everything in the town was a sort drab yellow sodium colour. Inside the
place heaved; Alt and Korn at fire sale prices, and lots of girls attracting
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lots of boys attracting lots of girls. Fred had taken to Alt like a proverbial
fish to water, and within an hour they decided to apply the ‘boot’ to him.
Not throwing him out, no, this was a huge glass boot filled with Alt that
had to be drunk in one go. I had miserably failed in my attempt on my
first visit and in truth the only person who could empty it was Manfred,
who I had witnessed do it followed with two Korn chasers. Fred tried
manfully. Now the shape of the boot causes a problem. If you drink with
the ‘foot’ down you can’t empty it, so you have to drink with the foot up.
Fine till you drink some and the air reaches the ‘foot’. At this moment the
Alt being heavier than air, the air rushes up the ‘foot’ and the Alt rushes
down the ‘leg’ to meet the drinkers face like the surf hits the shore. With
technique you can be prepared for this by vacating your mouth of Alt as
you see the wave approach and absorbing much of it. However, if your
mouth is full of Alt, the new delivery has nowhere to go but over your
face and head and thence down your clothes. The result is a wet, beer
sodden object that few wish to approach. Fred was already quite sozzled,
or I am sure he would have desisted after the first inundation, but no he
carried on, again and again till he had emptied the boot, in the most part
over himself. Ignoring his sodden condition he continued with Alt and
Korn till he was truly plastered. He then tried to chat up a series of girls
who all backed off and vanished into the heaving mass of students.

Over the coming days we proceeded to visit every bar in the Ruhr valley,
plus parties and events, which seemed to be the standard nightly fare, I
guess, unless they were specially arranged for us. Everyone we spoke to
was interested in our journey and, yes, laughed at our van. Life was good,
we had no end of things to do and the beer and the company kept us very
happy.

We would get up around 10.30 am after a night’s sleep on Alf’s living

room floor. Whoever got up first went out and bought a dozen fresh rolls,
which smelt just wonderful, some cheeses, milk and ground coffee beans
if needed. Then back to the flat where everyone there, Fred, me, Alf,
Monika and assorted others would tuck in. We would then all wash and
the day’s itinerary would be discussed. Information on all coming events
was channelled through Alf, who was an epicentre of young social life in
Krefeld, this included parties, concerts, nights out in other towns, beer
fests, and student events.

One day Manfred and Clary had arranged a party by a private lake. The
lake belonged to someone else, a local institution, who didn’t let anyone
near it. Somehow the gates were mysteriously opened and young people
poured in with barrels of Alt and a high-powered music system. The
barrels were tapped and the music turned on loud. However, they had not
accounted for the weather. It poured. There was nowhere to take cover
from the rain other than a single bare Oak Tree. Here we huddled while
Clary got a wood fire going by pouring liberal amounts of petrol on it to
stop the rain putting it out. Enthusiasm for the party started to wane. Then
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Manfred thought he’d liven things up with a party trick. He took some
cans of petrol, poured them out on to the water and set fire to the lake,
very spectacular. Unfortunately for him he was still standing in the lake
when he set it on fire, and his antics as he put out the fire in his trousers
certainly raised our spirits. That was the high point, but we were wet and
needed to dry out. We packed up and drove off with the remaining Alt
slopping around in a barrel on our knees so it wouldn’t spill.

The following week the local paper carried a big article about a
mysterious group of ‘Tramps’ who had had a party by this ‘verboten’ lake
and finished the party off by setting fire to it.

Manfred was the manager of Krefeld’s own rock band, Trash. He

financed them. Actually the band was very good, but it was just one of
hundreds trying to make it, and well, Krefeld was not exactly the centre
of the rock industry. Manfred asked us what we thought of the band
name, like everyone else we told him it was great. He wanted the band to
be like the best Liverpool rock band and would happily have employed a
band of all Liverpudlians if he could have found them. He had found just
one, Paul the lead guitarist. Actually Paul was from Manchester, but to
Manfred one Northern British accent was much like another. Manfred
introduced us to Paul just before an open-air concert by Trash.

I asked Paul how he found things. He said Manfred was paying him for
something he enjoyed doing and would have done for nothing. He had
booze, could get stoned, and have any number of girls. Life was just
perfect. When Paul got up on the stage he dedicated their next song to his
new found friends from England and gave us a wave. A lot of young
girls’ heads turned our way. Thanks Paul.

We could have stayed in Krefeld indefinitely, perhaps our journey would

have ended there with the last of our money, but we had an obligation
that drove us on. In my alcohol induced dreams I sometimes heard Peter’s
voice calling us on to India. Our boyhood friend must be waiting for us.

The Catalyst

As a boy I had lived with my parents and sister in a council flat in North
London. Fred and I had been friends for about ten years before our trip to
India. Brought up on the same estate, we had got together through a
mutual friend, Pete, who I came know at the comprehensive school we
both attended, (or didn’t as our school reports indicated).

I was known to most of my friends as Yogi or Yoge. I had been named

after the TV character, Yogi Bear, who apparently I looked like when I
wore a certain lose fitting brown jumper during a skiing holiday.

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Pete and I spent much of our time fishing for perch and pike at the
Walthamstow Reservoirs and enjoying a pint, a meat pie and a game of
darts at the Ferry Boat Inn. This was an old establishment that had been
around when the reservoirs were just natural lakes from which plus-
foured Victorian Anglers pulled enormous Pike and Carp, some of which
were stuffed and displayed around the Inn in glass boxes, (the fish that
is). Our fishing activity commenced from the age of thirteen. We also
tried to smoke pipes and Pete rolled his own cigarettes. We were
completely disabused from the educational system. How we got away
with this truancy for so many years I do not know, but all our ruses
seemed to work. We killed our fish and took them home for cooking. I
still believe that this is the only legitimate way to fish; to catch, cook and
eat them; I cannot see the sense in catching them and then putting them
back.

The wilderness like quality of those reservoirs in those days before they
became major leisure assets and bird sanctuaries became a wonderful
trouble free world to us, and no one ever challenged our age or asked us
why we were not at school, or were we old enough to go into the pub.

These were balmy days. In the height of summer, perching. As packs of

perch drove small fry into the shallows the fry would jump out of the
water en masse to get away from their attackers and then hit the water
again like a sudden rain shower. Some would jump right out onto the
gently sloping concrete sides of the reservoir and flap around and roll till
they got back in the water. The Perch in their feeding frenzy would take
anything, a worm, a maggot, a spinner, even a shiny hook. I’ve caught a
quarter pound perch that took a lure nearly as big as itself. Once one
really hot day our worms boiled in their tin in the heat of the sun.

On another day I remember we waded out into a shallow bay in one of

the reservoirs that had been a natural lake, and we spun for perch. Pete
got a huge take. As he fought with his rod and line the perch came up to
the surface and flipped over. It was the biggest perch I have ever seen,
bigger I’m sure than those giants in the glass cases in the Ferry Boat. The
big fish turned on the light line and bang, the line snapped and the fish
was away. I know this sounds like a fisherman’s story, but it wasn’t one
of my fish.

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 Me with a pike, not that big, but big enough to eat.

One late summer’s day we saw a family of swans flying over the
reservoirs. One youngster, miscalculated the effort needed to fly over an
electricity line and hit the cable. Later in the day we took a detour around
to the spot to find the signet sitting below the cable, quite conscious, but
unable it seemed to move. Taking my life in my hands, as we had been
told that swans could break your neck with one flap of their wings, I
climbed over a wire fence and approached it. Avoiding the swan’s hissing
darting beak, I grabbed it by the neck and picked it up. It was as big as a
turkey. Pete took my fishing gear and we carried the bird back to the
reservoir gatehouse opposite the pub. Old Bill, the gatehouse man said we
could leave it with him and told us to place it by some filter beds (square
ponds, used for filtering large quantities of water). Within a day the swan
mother had found the signet and stayed with it whilst Bill fed it up and it
recovered. Then one day they both took off together and flew away.
Wonderful.

Those hot hazy summer days spent by the mirror like lakes seemed to go
on and on until reluctantly summer would recede into autumn and then
autumn into winter. In the cold of autumn and winter we went Piking
with live bait, dead bait or spinners. The days would pass slowly and we
would heat soup up over a primitive primus stove and listen to pop music
on the newly opened pirate radio stations whilst waiting mostly in vain
for our lines to run out as those huge pike we hoped for made off with our
dead mackerel or live roach. Finally when we felt frozen solid we would
retire to the pub and huddle around the Ferry Boat’s great coal fire with
meat pies and pints of mild.

There was one spot on the River Lee, which ran beside the reservoirs
where we always lost our spinners when we went after the pike that
lurked there. Opposite this spot were huge wood warehouses that had
been used during the war to store the wood for the manufacture of
Mosquito aircraft. The German air force had regularly bombed these
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warehouses. It was only years later during a water shortage when the
river level went right down that they discovered a huge unexploded
parachute mine there in the river, covered in fishing hooks and spinners.
I’m glad we hadn’t used high breaking strength fishing line when we
snagged it.

As well as fishing, a group of us played lots of cards, often to the early

hours of the morning; Poker, Pontoon, Whist, and the beginnings of
Bridge. My friends were a loose group of about 6 to 8 boys: Pete and his
elder brother Mike, Fred, me, Jeff Jenner, Jeff’s two friends, of whom
one, Alan, went on to become a famous business man, and other friends
from school like Robert and Len who sometimes skived off too. Music
was always there; it was the heyday of the Beatles and the Mersey sound,
the Byrds, the Kinks, Roy Orbison, the Beachboys and of course Bob
Dylan, the 20th century’s master of musical prose.

A word about Alan. We were playing cards one day in the kitchen of
Jeff’s parents’ first floor flat when Alan came in raving about his new
business venture. Raving is a strong word for Alan. He was very rarely
emotional or should I say soft, what came across from Alan was hardness,
lots of it. He was a hard man at sixteen and I bet he’s as hard today. But
anyway, he insisted we went downstairs where he presented a beaten up
old Commer van to us stuffed full in the back as far as I could see with
car radios and aerials. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is my new business venture. I am
going to drive around garages selling these radios and I’m going to build
up a big company.’

What did we do? We laughed. ‘Forget it Alan, there’s no money in that,

come back up to the flat and play cards with us.’ Little did we know,
Alan sold so many radios, he decided to by-pass the warehouse he bought
them from, went straight to the makers in the Far East, and had them built
for him. ‘What will the brand name be?’ the manufacturers said. ’Hmm’
said Alan, ‘let’s see, Alan Michael Sugar Radios – AMSTRAD’ - Nice
one Alan.

Pete’s parents were dyed in the wool socialists; his father was a Jewish
boy from the East End and his Mum a lassie from the Highlands of
Scotland. A very strange coupling, he quiet and retiring, she loud and
overt, and she smoked like a chimney. Peter got his political convictions
from them. Whilst I had no time for something I could see no personal
benefit from, Pete went on about workers rights, Trotsky and the 4th
International, or was it the 5th? I thought his politics and ideas were
completely loopy, but his attitude to school and the rightful pursuits of
young boys was right down my street.

Pete’s two brothers had a different outlook. Mike, the older brother was a
bit that way politically, but was more interested in his personal life, and
young John didn’t give a hoot. His love was for horse racing and from the
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age of 8 or 9 he could often name the winners of a race with uncanny
accuracy. Everyone took to John; he was just the sort of person you
wished the world was full of. There was one other inhabitant of Pete’s
house; a little bitch, taken from a rescue sanctuary. She was part German
sausage dog and part God knows what else. Pete named her Flush after
the dog in the Barretts of Whimpole Street story we had to read at school.
‘Flush,’ he said, ‘the story of a lavatory chain’.

Flush was taken with John, of course, and slept on the end of his bed. She
had bad teeth and halitosis, but John loved her. As John entered his teens
he got in with a group of boys who dressed in Dr Marten shoes, tight
jeans and flashy braces, and wore their hair close cropped. It was a game,
for they were anything but aggressive. When John was killed in a terrible
knifing at a dance his family seemed to implode emotionally; where there
had been warmth and a strong family spirit, there was just desolation.
Later when the boy who had killed John was tried, it turned out that he
had gone out that night looking for someone to knife; he didn’t even
know John. A truly wonderful young boy had been killed on a whim.
Flush continued to sleep on the end of her master’s bed, waiting for him
to come home. All this sadness, however, was to come later.

Pete’s family was different from the rest of our families for another
reason. They actually lived in a house. We all lived in flats with little
balconies, but they had a real garden. In this garden his mum had a
compost heap and from here we often dug out our worms for fishing.
Once we pulled out a worm that was over a foot long and an inch thick.
Pete lost it on the first cast of his rod and some lucky fish had a free
banquet.

Pete was always full of ideas, ‘lets do this, or lets go there’. He was a
great tonic to me, for as part of what is now called a dysfunctional family
I had withdrawn from life somewhat when he first made friends with me.
Perhaps he did not recognise my withdrawn nature for he never spoke of
it, and this attitude and his sincere friendship drew me up and out of my
woes.

To Pete, school was just part of the capitalist conspiracy and his right to
play truant was equal to that of any workers’ right to strike. Pete was an
instigator. It was Pete, of course, all those years later, who suggested we
go to India.

That’s not his name, that’s what we call him

One day a few months after Pete and I had teamed up, we went out on a
trip. We often used the underground to go any great distance, and there
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was a station close by. As we started to walk down the downward
escalator we saw two boys walking down the upward escalator. Of course
they didn’t make very good progress. They rushed down then stopped to
get their breath and then got carried back up. It was like something from
our favourite often-mimicked radio program, ‘The Goons’.

‘Hey’ shouted Pete.

‘Pete,’ shouted back the larger of the two boys, who I could see was quite
a giant and dressed in a huge dark green jumper.

‘That’s Fred’ said Pete, ‘he’s a great laugh. I’ll introduce you to him
tomorrow’. We went on our way. As I turned onto the platform, I looked
back. The boys had been taken up nearly to the top, but I could see they
hadn’t given up. Later I asked Fred why he had done this. He asked me if
I had ever tried it. When I said ‘no’, he said that’s why, because no one
had tried it. Hmmmm.

The following day we crossed the road from Pete’s house to a block of
flats very like my own and we entered Fred’s drab home. His mum was
divorced, and had Fred and a young daughter, Jenice. Fred’s mum was
nice enough, but Fred seemed to have been abandoned by her. His small
room was a miniature junkyard framed by walls of sad, peeling
wallpaper. There were old comics and magazines spread 3 or 4 deep over
the lino floor, and an old record turntable on a shelf with some LP records
stacked next to it. There was also an overpowering smell of old socks,
which were accumulating under Fred’s bed. Fred wore the same dark
green jumper I had seen the previous day. It went down nearly to his
knees and had to be rolled up on the arms. His mother had knitted this all-
purpose garment for him some time before and he wore it for every
occasion for many years come rain or shine, excepting to school.
He was eating some buttered white bread toasted only on one side and an
avocado pear. He slowly peeled the avocado from the pointy end and
spooned the contents out into his mouth. He said avocados had very high
protein levels, not that I knew then what protein was then. We sat on the
bed because there was nowhere else in the tiny room to sit and he started
talking about an exciting project for that night. He had heard about an
abandoned railway line and he proposed we walk along it. Finishing his
pear he put on a very slow, sad piece of music. This he said was
Sibelius’s 6th symphony. His dad had been an American air force P47
fighter pilot stationed in England during the war. Fred had discovered that
he was of Finnish origin and Sibelius was the national composer of
Finland. Fred had every piece of Sibelius music now. When I said I
thought the music was a bit sad, he changed it for something called the
Karelia suite, which fairly whistled along and got us in the mood for that
evening’s event.

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We arrived on the railway line after dark that night. Four or five of us
walked out under a clear cold starry sky. The sleepers and rails sparkled
with tens of thousands of tiny frosty gleamings reflecting the light of the
moon and stars above. The railway line was on an embankment and we
felt lifted up above the world, roving free.

We could see into the lighted windows of the houses down on either side,
and surely everyone in the house windows we could see so clearly could
see us, and would phone the authorities? But no they didn’t. We walked
on for an hour or so unbothered until suddenly a train raced towards us. It
seemed the line wasn’t quite abandoned.

Along the way we had found a workman’s shed with what looked like
round red painted capsules with lead strips attached to them scattered
around it. We collected them and stuffed them in our pockets. They must
be good for something we surmised. A few days later Mr Ross, my next-
door neighbour identified them as railway signal percussion caps, one
hard knock he said and they would explode mangling whatever part of the
body was in their proximity. The word went out and everyone dumped
their percussion caps, everyone except Fred. Three years later as I held
my breath and ducked down to look under his bed for a lost coin I found a
cardboard box full of them. Fred saw no problem, maybe they would
come in useful sometime, in fact he said when he heard what they were
for he considered hitting one with a hammer. At least here caution
prevailed, instead of that he stuffed them all back under his bed and
forgot about them.

On another late evening we climbed over the fence into a local public
Park. We had done this a few times before. The park was wonderfully
empty, A huge great adult free place where we could have fun. We didn’t
mind the dark. In the centre of the Park were a refreshment house, a small
open theatre and a lake with rowing boats tied up near an island in the
middle covered in trees. Unknown to us there was a family placed by the
local council in the upstairs apartment of the refreshment house. They
were a big family with 7 or 8 children and this large apartment was the
only thing the council could find for them. Thinking we were on our own
we would make lots of noise, climb up on the stage of the theatre, turn on
the lights and start to sing or disclaim rather rude poetry very loudly. The
family never came out, but they must have been furious. That one
evening Mike, Pete’s brother made a bet that no one could get across to
the island and bring a boat back. Fred took on the challenge, stripped off
and swam across to the moored boats and climbed into them.
Unfortunately these boats were made of steel. As Fred clambered across
them, crash, crash, clunk, crash went the boats, the sound reverberating
around the park and into the restaurant apartment.

The shouting and the banging and bashing went on for some time till
suddenly we heard some commotion and saw headlights from the other
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side of the park where there was an entrance for cars. Someone was
coming in. We shouted at Fred to get back quick. He swam over. Mike
picked up Fred’s clothes and ran off with them. Fred climbed out of the
lake, dripping wet, with no towel and not a stitch of clothing on. Across
the park we could see a line of torches bearing down towards us. We ran,
Fred completely naked and sopping wet, running on his bare feet,
‘ouch,ouch,ouch,ouch’.

I ran after Mike, retrieved Fred’s clothes and came back to Fred. But we
had lost very valuable time, by now only the two of us remained and the
line was getting close. We bundled the clothes and shoes up, and ran over
a lawn and down the main path. Fred was hobbling, he had to stop to put
his shoes on. We could now hear the men in the torch line talking. Time
was running out, ahead were long open playing fields to the perimeter
fence, which was lighted by the sodium lights from the street along the
side of the Park. We were too late, our friends had made it to the fence,
but we were still on the main path in the middle of the park, trapped. We
turned down a side path, along which was a narrow hedge. With the line
of torches just around the corner from us we jumped into the hedge, Fred
still naked and wet. ‘Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch’ – ‘shut up!’

When the line came to our side path it had two ways to go. Most of the
line carried on up the main drive, but three or four turned down our path.
‘This was it’ we thought.

We could see clearly they were policemen, and they were obviously out
to get the troublemakers. What they would think of finding us two and
Fred shivering naked I hate to think. Fred went very quiet next to me as
they approached shining their torches back and forth. We stood dumb and
amazed, as the torches swept past us no more than a few yards from our
concealment. When they were well past, Fred dressed and we doubled
back the other way across to the far side of the Park and climbed over the
fence. Escape! With Fred still decidedly wet we walked back around the
streets and alleys surrounding the park. There was one more scare in
store. After about 15 minutes, as we turned down a narrow ally, a
policeman with a bicycle and torch, turned down the other end. It was
about 2.30 in the morning and we had no story to explain our late night
amble or Fred’s rather damp condition. We could not run this time, we
were tired, the roads were lighted and anyway there must be many others
from the search party near him who he could whistle up. We braved it
out, and strolled as casually as we could down the alley to meet our
nemesis. As we came up to the policeman, he said something very
sharply which I didn’t catch. We pressed up to the wall of the alley and
squeezed by, then walked on to freedom.

‘What did he say?’ I asked Fred, who was laughing.

‘He said “breath in”.’

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We walked home without any further bother and fell gratefully into our
beds.

One other little point about Fred; just as my name isn’t Yogi, Fred’s real
name isn’t Fred: it’s Terril. However boys being boys and Terril being
such an unusual name, it was soon changed. One boy decided he looked
just like a Fred and announced it to him and everyone else, and hey
presto! Fred he became.

One day as we walked into Fred’s flat his mum accosted us.

‘Why don’t you call him Terril?’ she asked belligerently.

‘Who?’ I said.

‘Fred!’ she exclaimed.

I rest my case.

Goodbye Western Europe

Our pre arranged meeting with Pete meant that we must reach India by
early January. Without Pete calling us on I don’t think we would have
made it. After three weeks with nearly a quarter of our money spent we
decided reluctantly to push on. Alf helped us plan our journey through
Austria, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria to Turkey. We stocked up on some
food and Alf gave us a huge pile of Playboy Magazines in German. He
thought they might cheer us up during the journey. The fact that we
couldn’t read German meant that the pictures of undressed gorgeous girls
got a bit tedious after the first 20 or so magazines. We also completely
forgot to consider the implications of taking ‘pornography’ into Muslim
countries, because of course they would consider them such. However
their use as a means of exchange proved useful.

So one morning in late November Alf saw us onto the Autobahn to

Munich and waved us goodbye. Off we went, down those fabulous
autobahns at the breakneck speed of 65 miles an hour. We seemed to be
almost stationary as huge Mercedes, BMW’s and Porches caught our
little van in their slipstreams as they glided majestically by at 120 Miles
per hour.

It was getting decidedly cold. We had prepared ourselves for what we

thought of as cold. I had long johns, vests, two ex-air force jumpers and
an army surplus parka. Fred had much the same.

We drove on to Munich, which turned out to be a bit of a sad place really.

The beer fest had finished in October and now just the locals were left
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drinking their steins in cold, damp beer halls. They all looked pretty
browned off. No brass bands, and the waitresses buttoned up at the neck
to keep the cold out. Shame. Hitler started here I remembered. I bet he
began his politics of frustration after a winter night spent browned off in
one of these halls. The best of Munich was the stalls selling delicious
paper cones of French Fries called pom frits mit mayonnaisser. The
railway station was also something special, huge marble floors and
vaulted roofs. But there was nothing else to delay us, on to Austria.

It was now close to December. The rain in Krefeld had actually been
kind, keeping the weather mild. Now it turned still colder and started to
snow as we crossed into Austria at Salzburg. We had to cross the Alps to
Graz in southern Austria and then we had a short journey down to the
Yugoslav border, which is now Slovenia.

I had experienced winter road conditions as a passenger in the Austrian

Alps when I was a schoolboy in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Each year
we travelled by train and bus to the Hotel Gestrine near Kitzbuhl, where
we learnt to ski. Although the hotel offered a little limited skiing we were
often bussed out to the better mountain slopes in small Volkswagen taxi
buses. According to Mr Smith, our gym teacher, who was an ex-desert rat
sergeant major and spoke passable German, these taxis were driven by
ex-wermark guys in their late 30’s or early 40’s, who had all fought on
the Russian front. One of them proved his soldierly expertise by taking an
air rifle we had found in a basement and with one shot hitting the exact
centre of a ten-groshen piece (about the size of a new penny), mounted on
the basement door. We had been firing around it and peppering the door
with lead pellets all evening.

All these drivers had bits missing. The most alarming had most of his
fingers off from frostbite and drove with the palms of his hands and one
long finger; another had a wooden foot. The cabs had bags of stones over
the rear wheel arches to give them more grip, and when filled with 10 or
so large boys plus our ski kits on back racks, they probably applied a
great grip through the chain covered tyres on those very icy roads. The
drivers took great delight in tearing around these ice tracks at incredible
speeds. We all survived, but now I wasn’t looking forward to crossing the
whole Alps in our little unchained death trap.

On a lighter note I also decided not to order any food from an Austrian
Menu. I remembered one night that a group of us rolled into a café in
Kitzbuhl to get warm after spending all our Austrian shillings in the local
shops. One guy, Meadows, had a few shillings left and we had to order
something to secure our seats in that haven of steamy heat. The only item
he could afford on the menu was something called ‘egg englass’. Now we
all joked when he ordered it that would be a raw egg in a glass, and that’s
exactly what it was. We all took sips to see how it tasted. It tasted ‘yuk’,

150
but apparently for those Austrians with acute hangovers it did the trick. I
should think it would, it would make anyone throw up.

There was no thought of food or skiing, as I had to confront those icy

roads as a driver. Soon the autobahns ended and we became part of a
stream of traffic mostly composed of giant trucks. These vehicles seemed
to accompany us all the way to Afghanistan, their huge wheels
threatening to obliterate our little tin can in a trice. We were low down
and hard to spot without any lights, so we tended to leave them on even in
the daylight hours. This caused a further problem, as our four headlights
were, you might say, cross-eyed. Two were set for British left hand side
driving so shone directly in the eyes of oncoming traffic on dip so we
screwed the adjustments to the maximum to make them point right and
kept them on full beam. The other two tied on with coat hanger wire
moved around on the bumpy roads and pointed whichever way they
wanted to really, in the eyes of the oncoming motorists, into the sky
perhaps dazzling the odd airline pilot or into the roadside ditches dazzling
Austrian drunks. We bent them down as best we could and if they moved
back to dazzle the oncoming trucks we got out and bent them round
again. This was done for a purely selfish motive of course, we didn’t
mind the odd truck driver being dazzled, but we didn’t want them to steer
dazzled into the little toy car below their wheels.

As we drove up into the Alps the snow started to get heavy, sorely testing
our little wiper blades. There were trucks ahead, trucks behind, trucks
roaring past on the other side of the road. Whoever was driving our van
was blind to what was oncoming ahead; we couldn’t see a thing because
our steering wheel was on the right, the kerbside. Only if the other person
sat in the passenger’s seat and told the driver it was safe ahead could we
overtake some of the slower trucks. Not that there were many slower
trucks, most of the trucks had no trouble matching our speed.
It was colder than we had ever expected. All vehicles are fitted with
heaters, but in those days vehicle designers considered them as an
afterthought. Heaters had to be there as an accessory on the list of
features on a new vehicle, but they didn’t have to work, or work very well
that is. We had to cross the Alps in mid winter in our old banger being
both blind and blinding and with a pathetic car heater that was also well
past its sell by date.

As the road climbed higher our toes and fingers froze. The driver had to
drive with one gloved hand on the wheel and the other hand stuck under
his lap or armpit, changing hands every few minutes. I had nightmare
flashbacks of those Austrian Taxi driver’s hands, where the frost bite had
removed fingers. It became so cold in the front of the van that we took
turns in the back lying on the 4 inches of foam, fully clothed in our
sleeping bag, with the other’s sleeping bag on top, and a blanket over
that. This helped us thaw out a bit. No thought about overtaking now, just
follow the truck in front. The snow was deep. I mean seriously deep. At
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one point our little van was buried up to the door windows by drifting
snow in a car park when we stopped briefly for a comfort break at a
restaurant. We had to dig the snow away from the wheels with our hands
and then push the van out onto more compressed snow.
We travelled exclusively it seemed over this compressed snow or ice.
Without chains our little van slid around the road alarmingly so we
quickly learnt to stay in the tracks of a big truck and make no sudden
steering wheel movements. The end of an accidental slide on a corner
could have been a drop of many hundreds of feet over boulders into the
valley below. I remember pleading to any higher being that might be
listening ‘Please let us get through this,’ but all that came into my head
was, ‘Drive, just drive.’
Graz took us about 24 hours. Then sometime the next day we reached the
Yugoslav border and drove down onto a flat plain.

Yugoslavia then was one county or at least one political entity. The
communist war leader, Tito had united the disparate Balkan factions by
force. Yugoslavia was open to the west because Russia had never gained
entry; the Yugoslavs had fought their own very resourceful partisan war
with a little help and arms from Britain. It’s a shame Tito didn’t leave a
political system in place when he died that could have sorted out his
successor away from factional ethnic differences. Anyway at that time no
one knew of the ethnic horror that was to follow a few years after his
death.

As we entered Yugoslavia it was still a little snowy, and cold, but much
easier to drive. The road was straight, narrow and boring. It was used by
masses of heavy trucks and the occasional little Yugo car. They must
have held demolition derbies on these roads every so often as we passed
many, many, wrecked and burnt out trucks and cars. The countryside was
uninspiring after the Alps. Flat landscapes dominated by fields
occasionally fringed by trees. The houses and shops looked decidedly run
down. We drove on to Zagreb to spend the night, it was a Sunday, There
was nowhere open to eat and we were desperate for some hot food and a
warm place to sit. Eventually as evening came on we saw a café, which
looked open. We stopped the van and went in. In fact, it wasn’t open to
the public; there was a wedding party going on inside. As we entered and
discovered this, our faces dropped, and we turned for the door. The
bride’s father, I think it was, in the wedding party called over to the
proprietor, and said that we were not to be turned out. A small table was
set aside for us in the corner and quantities of the wedding food and drink
were brought over to us. We ate and drank our fill in the midst of that
wedding feast. When we rose to go no one was prepared to take anything
from us, they smiled and wished us a safe journey.

On to Belgrade the next day. I am sure Yugoslavia is beautiful country,

the mountains, the coast are often praised in travel guides, but our route
along the main highway between Zagreb and Belgrade in winter was
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uninspiring, the only things of interest were the minarets and domes of
mosques here and there, for we had entered our first Muslim area.

In Belgrade we stocked up with bottled beer and wine. We needed a

supply of drinks out of Europe that was going to be more satisfying than
chemically purified water, and drinks with alcohol in were of course our
preference. Our mimeo’d travel guide had told us Yugoslav beer and
wine were the cheapest and amongst the best in Europe, and they were.
The red wine especially at about 30 US cents per bottle was great. We
filled up the van with crates of beer and wine to see us through to our
journey’s end. We now had two forms of contraband on board that
Muslim countries were likely to throw us into rat infested prisons for,
alcohol and pornography, but it seems though that fortune favours the
stupid. In blissful ignorance we drove on without being challenged.

On the road

Although Yugoslavia was a communist state, and we felt very sorry for
most of its’ people, who looked rather poor compared to Western
Europeans, we didn’t feel any repression. The police seemed the same as
in Western Europe, they just drove around in cheaper cars. Yugoslavs
seemed pleased to see the Union Jack on the van and one that spoke
English said Great Britain was an ally during the war, which was news to
me then. The food was simple, cheap and wholesome in the cafes. We
carried American Dollars and had piles of single dollar bills. One dollar
went a very long way.

Yugoslavia gave us our first experience of non-European toilets. They

had toilet seats, which were better than later in our journey when a hole in
the floor sufficed. However they had a separate waste bin for the toilet
paper. Their sewerage systems could not cope with paper. The result was
that every toilet room stank. Later on when even the nicety of toilet seats
and paper went, but the smell didn’t. The fields and open roads were
often more pleasant places to do what comes naturally, but often in towns
the toilets had to suffice.

To stretch our money out and make ourselves less reliant on locals
providing food, we had brought along a primus stove with spare gas
bottles and lots of ‘meals in a tin’ type things plus good old British brown
sauce. We bought bread and cheese whenever we could and used purified
water to make tea if we wanted a hot drink. Otherwise there was lots of
beer and wine. We would stop on the roadside, spread out an old blanket
and get the primus going. One pot would hold the contents of one or two
cans whilst the food heated. Then we would consume the meal al fresco
using two spoons. After a while we found food vendors and cafes so
plentiful, varied and cheap that we stopped this practice all together.

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.

Roadside Food Breaks

Roadside Food Break

It was in Belgrade that we got in for the first time with other westerners
also travelling to India. From then on I was amazed at the mixture and
variety of people who were on the road. There was every nationality,
although I guess the largest contingent were British. It was their
differences as people that I found most remarkable. It wasn’t just a
‘hippie’ trail. In fact I guess that many we met didn’t smoke dope and
could be described as normal. No, that wasn’t correct, they were not
normal. These young people were going to India, travelling thousands of
miles through strange countries expecting harsh conditions, experiencing
who knows what on the way. They had chosen this rather than fly, or not
going at all and switching the TV back on.

Over the next few weeks as we met more and more travellers all heading
for India, if it wasn’t obvious from our initial conversations, I made a
point of asking them why they were travelling there. Here are the main
reasons:
 Spiritual enlightenment
 Cheap and easy to obtain drugs
 Experiencing other peoples and cultures
 None of the above

Yes, the last one was added tongue in cheek, as it was my own response.
All of the previous reasons were given to me, but I couldn’t quite identify
with them. Rather, I could agree with all of them, but felt that no one of
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them was my main reason for travelling. For my part I was there for the
ride. Whatever their first response when pressed further most people
talked of a spiritual dimension to their journey, so I’ve put that first. It
also seemed that the journey itself was spiritually important, not the just
arriving there.

Apart from a shared spiritual dimension in these individuals, this journey

gave them a commonality of purpose; an unspoken fellowship that united
perhaps 95% of those on the road, who would help and trust their fellow
travellers the instant they met.

One of the people we met in Belgrade was Mike, a huge 6 foot 4 inch
Canadian. He stood out, yes, because of his height, but also because of an
item of clothing. He wore what was then the ultimate in cold climate
apparel; a highly expensive Canadian quilted artic eiderdown jacket. One
thing the Canadians are prepared for is cold weather, and this jacket was
the epitome of rough travelling chic and the envy of every shivering
westerner who met him. Mike needed a lift to Istanbul and offered to pay
for the petrol there, a good deal all round we thought. It meant one
passenger would have to sit in the passenger seat whilst the other slept in
the back. However, what we didn’t expect was that Mike would spend
most of his time sleeping. He handed us his documents and money for
fuel and apart from getting out when we stopped for calls of nature or
food, he retired into the back of the van. We christened him ‘the bear’.
Well at least the driver would always have company.

Now our way lay through Bulgaria to Turkey. We set off at lunchtime
from Belgrade, we would need to get visas at the Bulgarian border in
order to travel on.

Welcome to Bulgaria, and Goodbye

This was our first taste of a real communist state. We all know Ian
Fleming’s fictional stories about 007 and the horrible people in the iron
curtain countries whom he confronts. The scene is set as our western hero
draws up to the border in his fast flashy car. A dozen border guards
dressed in drab uniforms with riding breech trousers, putties wrapped
around their lower legs and red stars on their forage caps, point tommy
guns at his car. Then a sour faced woman with her hair in a tight bun on
the top of her head peers out from behind the bars of her office as he
hands over his passport and sneers at him contemptuously, ‘What do you
want here?’ He just smiles a relaxed ‘he-man’ smile and lights a cigarette,
they’ll never discover the contraband in his car.

OK, these are terrible cold war stereotypes that we were fed in the West
about Communism and its horrors, and I think we can agree that those
who approached the iron curtain from the West with these stereotypes in
their heads were indeed stupid.
155
As we approached the border that evening it grew dark. The landscape
was a dull steel colour. Ahead we saw low cement buildings, traffic
barriers and high fences. We drew up to the border in our rusty van. A
dozen border guards dressed in drab uniforms with riding breech trousers,
putties wrapped around their lower legs and red stars on their forage caps
pointed tommy guns at our van. Then a sour faced woman with her hair
in a tight bun on the top of her head peered out from behind the bars of
her office as we handed over our passports and sneered at Fred and
myself contemptuously, ‘What do you want here?’

I had the strangest feeling of déjà vu, although I knew I had never been
here before.

We did not have a chance to reply before one of the soldiers noticed
something hidden in the back of the van; under a huge pile of sleeping
bags and blankets something stirred. The soldier shouted and pointed
through the back window of the van with his gun, an alarm sounded,
some other soldiers race around with guns at the ready and looked in.
Were we sneaking in 007 to blow up the socialist workers party
government? More soldiers who had stood idly by now ran around
shouting and pointing their guns at the van, at each of us and at each
other. Ten more pairs of riding breaches appear from a door at the rear of
the building looking for something to shoot at. Finally with all guns
cocked, one soldier gingerly open the back door of the van.

As the door opened the bear rolled out. He stood up, scratched his crotch
and looked around for somewhere to pee. There was lots more shouting
and gesticulating with tommy guns and the bear was hustled grumpily
towards us. Then finally as the soldiers line us up by the side of the van,
bunhead came to our unlikely rescue by pointing out that we had given
her Mike’s Passport along with our own. The soldiers grudgingly accept
that we weren’t smuggling in an 007 agent, and settle back to sneering at
us.

‘You want tourist visas? Asked bunhead.

‘Yes we want to be tourists and go and camp by the black sea,’ we lied.

Huh! No,’ she says pointing to our hair. ‘No tourist visa for long-haired
people.’

‘What about if we put it in a bun?’

‘No. You can have only transit visas for 48 hours, no stopping, stay more
than 48 hours or you will be arrested.’

And that will cost us $10 each. Thanks.

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We had been warned about travel visas. They give tourist visas free, but
they had long ago decided that young westerners were not good tourist
material, better sting them on the way in by charging them for travel visas
and kick them out quick.

Fred and I were both concerned about this short period, the old van was
playing up a bit, the gear lever had shifted its position all by itself and we
felt that boded trouble. No good telling these refugees from Pinewood
Studios though, because our journey would probably end there. We had
to cross our fingers and cross the frontier. We paid our hard currency and
got our passports stamped. The Bear climbed back in his den, we climbed
into the front seats and the barrier was lifted. The road was straight, about
300 miles on the map, (this was the last bit of our map, it ran out at
Istanbul.) There was only 50 miles to Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia,
where we would stop for the night and try to sleep in our cramped seats.
The guns pointed at us ominously as we drove away. Soon Mike was
gently snoring again in the back.

I vill show you zer good places

We drove into Sofia without any trouble, parked in a square just off the
city centre and slept as best we could in our seats. In the morning we
looked out at our surroundings; drab grey cement and granite buildings, a
few private cars, but mostly buses, trucks and horse carts. The people on
the streets were drably dressed too, like they wore a sort of camouflage,
to keep attention off themselves. Our brightly painted jalopy was a centre
of attention, like the only point of colour on a grey painted canvas. People
kept coming up to it and peering in. They tried to speak to us in other
languages, often German, then gave up with a small smile and walked
off. After a while a real strange ‘dude’ approached us. He was no more
than 18 years old. He had on a wide brimmed hat, with long black curly
hair protruding from under it, and a shoulder to ankle black leather coat.
He looked like a cross between a Cowboy and a Gestapo trainee. And he
spoke broken English.

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 The Strange Bulgarian Dude

‘How are you?’

‘Vhat are you doing (here)?’
‘Vhere are you coming (from)?’
‘Vhat do you want (to) do (here)?’
‘I vill show you zer good places.’

We really didn’t know what to make of him, he spoke English like a

German. We were told Bulgaria banned long hair and ‘hippiness’. How
come he had been able to grow his hair? Could we trust him?

‘I love heavy metal, I love Led Zeppelin.’

Led Zep? He couldn’t be all that bad. He could help us.

The three of us crammed into the front of the van and drove off, Mike
was still dozing, he knew we would wake him for any E&P; eating and
peeing.

First of all toilets. He took us to some with washbasins, wonderful. There

was no such thing as hot water, but we spruced up. Then something for
breakfast, we had to buy some bread and cheese from a drab government
food store, cafés were hard to come by here. Then some tourist things, he
showed us the river, then this building, then that building, all very
uninteresting.

‘I love Led Zeppelin, do you love Led Zeppelin?’

‘Sure we do, that album with the Zep catching on fire, bet you like that -
one of the greatest albums of all time.’
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‘Do you have Led Zeppelin music?’

‘ Sure, at home.’

‘Oh’ Silence for a while.

‘What other music do you like?’

Fred chimed in ‘Mahler, Sibelius, Brahms and I love Far Eastern classical
music too.’

Our newfound friend said nothing, but his face went a sort of blank.

‘And I like Pink Floyd.’ I said.

‘Are they a band?’ asked our new friend.

‘Yes, brilliant, like Led Zep.’

‘Like Led Zeppelin?’

‘Yep.’

‘I must write that down please.’

I hoped Pink Floyd were a little like Led Zep, I wasn’t into Zep as much
as him, don’t even think to be sure that Pink Floyd was like them, or
perhaps they were to the young Bulgarian ear, but I needed to say
something to make him happy. Perhaps he thought all young westerners
listened exclusively to Led Zep type bands. Now he had a new band to
find out about. Life was great.
As the morning wore on we decided Sofia’s charms as they were would
have to be put aside and we told our new found friend that we had to
move on because of our visa restrictions. Before we left he asked me for
the names of other bands I could recommend to him. I gave him King
Crimson, Country Joe and the Fish and The Incredible String Band. I
hope he liked them.

Now we had to drive and drive. There were mountain ranges both sides of
us and the country was quite hilly and green. We tried to sleep a few
hours in our cramped seats early the next night then drove on again.
There was nothing by way of cafés or services, just the occasional petrol
station that accepted Deutsche Marks. The country was ragged, the roads
were empty except for the occasional heavy truck and horse and cart,
hardly any private cars. The lack of decent sleep and the pressure to get
through was draining us, we had to find somewhere to stop for some
relaxation and food.
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Tired and haggard we drove till the early morning, then somewhere near
a place called Dimitrograv we saw a sign saying ‘Hotel’. We looked at
each other, maybe there we could sit down and perhaps eat. No matter
what our passport visas said we were going in.

We travelled up a gravel drive to an imposing modern 60’s style building

on a small hill and parked our bucket of rust right outside, what the hell?
If they won’t serve us because of our visas what did the van matter? As I
got out of the van my legs creaked, my back ached and my stomach
rumbled. Mike climbed very groggily out of the back of the van, like he
was emerging from hibernation, and he was hungry too.

Inside it looked quite modern and expensive. The big dining room took
up most of the space on the ground floor and they had obviously had a
party there last night; the tables still sported dirty tablecloths and the
chairs were in disarray. The place smelt of stale tobacco. A young, very
smartly dressed manager came out of the kitchen. I heard one or two pans
banging in there, a good sign, the kitchen was occupied. Did he speak
English? He squeezed his lips together, shook his head slowly and held
his middle finger and thumb a quarter inch apart, a little perhaps.

Could we have breakfast? Food? We made signs as we spoke. His head

went to one side. One moment, he turned back into the kitchen, spoke for
a second or two then returned. Bread and eggs? Yes?

Yes, Yes, Yes, please.

A young waitress came to clear one table for us, and whilst pots and pans
continued to bang in the kitchen, we were directed to the toilet, and it had
hot water! We grabbed our wash bags from the van and 15 minutes later
returned washed to a table, which was laden with fresh crusty bread,
butter and a mountain of scrambled eggs. There was fresh coffee too.
Heaven.

After a huge breakfast we relaxed for an hour then paid the bill, which
came to about six dollars. I think everyone was pleased, including the
staff, who had probably earned an extra day’s pay in an hour. Invigorated
we returned to the van and headed for the border, suddenly this didn’t
seem such a bad place after all.

We pause

That afternoon without any further trouble we arrived in Turkey. It was

the 3rd December 1972. We drove to Istanbul, over the Bosporus, into
Asia and off our road map. From now on we would have to ask the way.

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The Turks didn’t mind the length of our hair or if we stayed a while, and
we needed some rest and recreation, and some running repairs. We had
discovered that the gearbox was falling out of the van; the steel on a cross
member bar holding it in place had rotted away. A lot more than coat
hangers would be needed.

Istanbul was a brash clashing honking city of old classic American cars
that served as the city’s taxis. They trundled around the poor quality
roads constantly blaring their horns at every slow pedestrian or horse and
cart. The city is a meeting place. It always has been. So many routes lead
through it and to it. At this time it was awash with young westerners,
some coming, some going, some just hanging around. The Hotels that
catered for the travelling youth were off the bottom of the Michelin
guide, usually –5 Star. Cold rooms, hard beds, cold water and light
fingered staff, and these were the better ones to be found on our journey.
It got much worse as we travelled on, however most people didn’t seem
to mind, the hotels were cheap. They also formed a focal point around
which we met with other travellers and made new friends.
Near our hotel we found another English group travelling in a
Volkswagen Camper, by far the preferred method of cheap travel (unless
you only wanted to spend a fiver). They were nice and the camper was
nice and within a day the bear announced he was now to travel on with
these guys – bigger sleeping quarters being the obvious motive. One of
the Volkswagen people, Graham, a teacher from Manchester took me
aside, they hadn’t actually asked Mike to join them, if we minded they
would tell him no. I explained that we were very glad to get our bed back
and I apologised for bringing the big snoring brute into their lives, but
Graham didn’t seem to mind.
In a way I envied Mike, another of the Volkswagen people was Charlotte,
a beautiful twenty something redhead from Surrey. She was gorgeous, a
voluptuous figure all covered in freckles. I wondered if the freckles went
all the way down. She seemed intense and remote at the same moment,
which I took to be quite sexy. Later I found out it was a stress condition
and she was travelling to India for mystical purposes. One of those people
to be avoided I would say, but I didn’t take my own advice.

A group of us set out to do some sight seeing. I was eager to explore the
history of this old city; this was Asia, a strange culture, a different
religion, and a fantastic history. However, I was to be disappointed, the
Turks were very funny on ancient monuments; they liked to ignore them
or keep them buried. In reality most of the buried past wasn’t theirs; it
was mostly Greek with a later Roman influence. In 1453 the Turks who
originated in Iran took Constantinople from the Romano/Greeks, and they
renamed it Istanbul. I’m sure if the two sides had the same religion, the
next five hundred years would have sorted out the language differences
and they would have become one people, however, today they are still at
each other’s throats. The Greeks had occupied most of Asia minor
continuously for two and a half thousand years before a million and a half
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of them were ‘sent back’ to their ‘homeland’, Greece, in the early 1920’s
and a half million ‘Turks’ returned to Turkey from Greece at the same
time.

Apart from strange bits of broken statues discarded in quiet back gardens,
the only recognisable Romano - Greek monument in Istanbul is the St
Sophia, the huge eastern Christian cathedral, turned into a mosque and
then a museum. Inside the tourist authorities had recently taken off paint
covering the walls for hundreds of years to reveal beautiful paintings of
the Madonna and child and the saints, ancient and exquisite, painted over
500 years ago. It was still a sad empty echoing place though, with only
one other interesting feature, Vikings had carved their names on the stone
balustrade on the balcony above the main hall. These incredible men had
travelled a thousand miles over the rivers of Russia to get here, hauling
their long boats around rocks and rapids, and had taken up jobs as
personal guards to many of the ruling class in this city that they called
Micklegard. As strangers to the eastern Christian religion, they were
probably kept away from the main cathedral concourse and had probably
carved their names in boredom whilst waiting for their patrons, who were
involved in services below. One of these Vikings, Harald Hardrada got
homesick. He crashed his Viking ship over a huge chain that was strung
out over the Bosphorus to stop ships, then subsequently fought his way
back to Denmark, raised an army and invaded England, only to be
defeated and killed at the battle of Stamford Bridge. He did however
weaken Harold of England’s army, who were then defeated by the
Norman army of William the Bastard, who renamed himself the
Conqueror. Hence a bored Viking irrevocably changed the course of
English history. Well maybe he wasn’t one of the bored ones, but
otherwise it’s a true story.

Next to St Sophia was the blue mosque, built it was said to match the
beauty of St Sophia and in my books every bit as dull. Topkapi, the
sultan’s palace, although mostly ruined was a much more interesting
place.

In the palace’s museum was an emerald as big as a bar of soap with just
one corner chipped away. There was a huge diamond and ancient gem
encrusted swords. We were shown the dilapidated rooms, which were
once the sultan’s harem, apart from some wall tiles the interior splendour
was gone, but the vivid story of how a brutal system of sexual servitude
had worked, lived on. The harem girls would have to climb into the
sultan’s bed from the bottom to show their respect and then do everything
to please their master. If he was dissatisfied he would clap his hands and
say ‘let her disappear’. Two eunuchs would then tie her into a weighted
bag, row her out in a boat and drop her into the cold Bosporus to drown.
They say that the bottom of the Black Sea is salt water containing
hydrogen sulphide and free of any dissolved oxygen, this environment is
sterile. It will dissolve metal, but preserve organic matter. If strong
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currents carried those weighted bags into the Black Sea, which is the
direction that deep Bosphoran currents head, then these displaced
members of the Sultans harem will still be there, sealed in their bags and
perfectly preserved in every detail.

Our final tourist destination was the Souk, a huge labyrinth of passages,
once the palace stables, now a market. Early travel writers had once
enthused about the range and diversity of goods on sale in this market,
but a sad change had taken place. Nearly every stall carried just two types
of goods; the usual inscribed brass junk bits and pieces found in any
middle-eastern market, and coloured embroidered sheepskin jackets by
the tens of thousands. The original beautifully embroidered Turkish
shepherds jackets had been popular among young westerners for a few
years in the sixties and it seemed a whole Turkish rural economy had
been diverted to produce cheap poorly made copies. The Souk merchants
had moved to corner the market, but I had a sneaking suspicion that the
market was gone. Well not quite. After many hours wandering in twos
and threes through the Souk we met up again and found the Bear had
swapped his wonderful comfortable Canadian thermal jacket that
everyone had coveted, for a really awful example of the embroidered
sheepskin art. It was short on the sleeves, tight around the armpits and
scruffy round the neck, but he was sure he had a bargain. Hmmm.
Anyway, I had found some stalls deep in the market that had missed the
sheepskin bubble and in one I found a rack of beautiful antique silk
kaftans being sold for a relative song. I bought two, which were soon on
their way back to Chris and Baz.

We did find one other bit of Greek architecture; the steam baths. A group
of us from the hotel decided that the cold showers were just not good
enough and we went en mass to the ancient Greek steam bath that was
still in use. We stripped off and stretched out in the main chamber on
marble slabs. The patrons already there mumbled and grumbled amongst
themselves, then one of them then came over and with a few gestures
made us tie our towels around our wastes. It seems the sight of nude men
by other men is proscribed in Turkey.

We had also read the warning about western girls never going about by
themselves in Muslim countries and even in Turkey they were told to
cover their arms. Now it registered that although eastern people seemed
to adopt western ways, they didn’t think like we did, they had another set
of values that we needed to understand as we travelled through their
country. If we presumed everything was like home we would get a rude
surprise. More than one traveller coming from Iran assured us, that a
German driver, who had stopped in a town recently when he had hit and
killed an old lady with his car, was summarily beheaded by a mob and
had had his head stuck on a pole and paraded around the town. We
decided not to stop for old ladies whether we hit them or not, or anything
else come to that.
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The following day, we got on with fixing the van. We tied the gearbox
member back up in its correct position with coat hanger wire, but a
particular point on the gearbox needed precise anchoring and this needed
a weld, which we couldn’t do. A few enquiries with a taxi driver led us to
a most amazing place; the street of a thousand mechanics. This road on
the edge of the city ran on for about a mile. Along each side were
hundreds and hundreds of sheds/garages housing specialist car mechanics
for any conceivable vehicle fixing purpose. Every possible type of repair
for any make of car or truck could be undertaken here. This was the
reason that thousands of Classic American Cars could still taxi around
Istanbul after travelling millions of miles. Given time I’m sure these
mechanics could have done a complete makeover of our little van; had it
mechanically perfect with a shining new body, but that wasn’t what we
needed. Half an hour and a few well chosen welded points and our van
was back on the road for three dollars. We decided to move on.

Heavens revealed

We took the road to Iran. Our Volkswagen friends had helped us plan our
route with their map the day before when they set off. Now we were not
sightseeing. Having no map and no picture of the scale of our journey, we
had no idea how long it would take us to get to India, and our money was
down because of our long break in Germany. We needed to move on.
We took the route through the mountains swapping over driving and
sleeping positions regularly so we could make good progress. The first
two hundred and fifty miles was good highway up to a town called
Gerede. Here we found a café with some hard beds for the night. Fred
brought in some Playboys to read and suddenly we became the centre of
attention. A very good room rate with breakfast was agreed if we left a
few magazines. Other people there asked us for copies which we freely
supplied. They also allowed us to crack open a bottle or two of
Yugoslavian wine and a great time was had by all. Without any words of
English all the truck drivers tried to tell us their life histories. We kept
nodding and looking at pictures of their families and girl friends. It was a
great pity we couldn’t really speak to them, at the very least they would
have given us sage advice on the road ahead.

The next day we left the good road and travelling along dirt roads went
higher up into the mountains. It got colder and colder as we ascended into
the mountains and now in December the countryside was bleak. What
trees there were, were bare, everything seemed a drab, lifeless colour.
Higher up the earth turned to rock, stones and shale. We seemed wholly
alone, in a bare landscape. We rarely saw other vehicles, when they did
appear they were usually trucks. For a while we treated it like a rally,
tearing around the corners, dust clouds from the dirt on the road flying
up. Then we got bored and just drove. Fred constantly checked the oil and
water.
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 Oil and water check

As evening arrived the van pulled one of its tricks; the lights failed. Now
auto electrics are one area where coat hanger wire has no application.
Everyone hates their car electrics failing, once you’ve changed all the
fuses you have to concede you haven’t got a clue. In the growing twilight
we drove back up the highway then off the main road into a sizable town
we had seen a little earlier. The town had one garage and it was open
though bereft of any customers. We pulled up on the forecourt and got
out to speak to the proprietor who was reading a newspaper in his office.
A little bit of sign language and he indicated he could help. He shouted
into the shed that comprised what I thought was the service bay and a
large gang of kids came out and proceeded to open the bonnet and with
screams and laughs started to examine the car. The eldest was perhaps
fourteen and the youngest I guess no more than seven. They seemed quite
unconcerned that this was the first Bedford Viva van they had ever seen.

With screwdrivers and spanners and torches, as it was now dark, they got
to work. The proprietor noting the concerned look on our faces led us off
gently into his office where he made us strong black tea. By the time we
had finished the tea the kids were jumping up and down around the car.
One was inside testing every electrical device, they all worked, even the
window washer, which had packed up in the Alps.
We paid the trivial amount of money the proprietor asked for and then
searched around to find something to give the kids. Fred discovered a
plastic wallet of spanners in his tool set that he never used, and we gave
these to the delighted kids along with some sherbet lemons I’d been
saving.

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We then carried on up into the mountains. I must have dozed off for the
next thing I remember is that we had stopped on the side of the road at a
high pass and Fred was shaking me and asking me to get out and look. As
I got out of the van I had to do a double take at the sky. The Milky Way
lay in magnificent repose in the night sky. It was filled with millions of
big bright diamonds. We were both astounded, never had we two townies
who lived in a polluted city seen anything like this before; the stars were
like a bright tiara crowning the earth. They weren’t all white, there were a
few yellow ones and blue ones and red ones, but it was the whole massive
quantity of stars that seemed arrayed just above our heads, they couldn’t
be as far away as our science books said, they were too bright, too
vivacious. Something of such scale and beauty works on your heart, on
your metabolism even. I found myself taking deep breaths as my eyes
swept the sky for what must have been many minutes till the muscles in
my neck ached. I remember thinking that this awe is what ancient man
must have felt when he considered what he saw in his unpolluted sky.
After a few minutes of dumbfoundedness the cold got to us. We got back
in the van and drove on through the high narrow mountain roads, which
hugged the side of the mountains bending and twisting with their
contours. The air was sweet, but very cold.

For me this witnessing, as it were, is part of the unique pleasures of

travel. Looking at a photograph or watching a television documentary has
never given me more than inkling of the actuality. I remember spending
time with some great friends on their canal boat moored at Chester near
Liverpool. My friends, along with a few other narrow boat residents,
formed a tiny community in the Chester narrow boat basin. It was an old
and neglected place grown wild from lack of use. Cliff and Mandy were
artists, who loved each other dearly and rejected mainstream life. Cliff
had recently saved a derelict wooden hulk of a narrow boat called
‘Betelgeuse’ from being broken up for fire wood and was slowly
restoring it, but already in its’ primitive state it was home for them and
their two children. I loved them and I loved their attitude to life. I would
sneak off from the comfort of my London home and hitchhike north for a
few days of rough sleeping in a narrow cot. There would be the constant
evocative smell of a coal stove and the yellowy light of a pressurized
paraffin lamp providing some warmth and light during those many cold
and rainy days as we discussed the disorder of the mainstream world and
practiced their sweet alternative low tech life style.

On one of the first days I arrived there, the harsh cold got me up at the
crack of dawn and I walked out along the towpath to get my circulation
going. I hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards along the canal when
there was a screech from behind me, and a translucent arrow shot past
and alighted on a tree on the far side of the canal. The bird seemed very
angry at having its’ tranquillity disturbed and studied me with
unconcealed animosity. I studied it back, not from anger but from shock.
I was looking at my first Kingfisher. His brilliant iridescent colours were
166
incredibly beautiful. How many books, TV documentaries and films had I
seen Kingfishers reproduced in? Very, very many, and they all lied. They
told me ‘this is what the bird looks like’, well perhaps yes if a three year
olds’ picture of an elephant prepares you for the real thing, they did.

In the Turkish mountains on the evening of the second day we caught up

with the Volkswagen. We stopped together at a road junction and shared
some food and a hot drink. Then we roared off ahead of them up another
mountain, and then a couple of hours later, calamity: the engine began to
steam. Fred diagnosed a split hosepipe. We had no replacement. Perhaps
we shouldn’t have driven the thing at such breakneck speed, but there
again we were in hurry. An hour later the Volkswagen caught up with us.
We were frozen. Being the splendid people they were they produced a
towrope, they would tow us to the next town. Fred got the short straw and
had to stay in the van to steer it. I snuggled up to Charlotte in the
Volkswagen.

We had broken down at the top of a mountain road; the next town was in
a valley. The tow was therefore mostly down hill on a winding road with
lots of precipitous drops. Fred had got a very short straw. An hour or so
later we pulled up by a likely looking garage and a very shaky, wild-eyed
Fred climbed out of the van. That, he said, had been the worst drive of his
entire life. With the Volkswagen engine switched off, we heard very
strange bubbling noises from the van wheels. There was also a strong
smell of burning, and in the dark of the evening the hubs seemed to glow.
Fred said he had had to drive with his foot on the brake all the way down
because the towrope was short and he couldn’t see around the
Volkswagen to predict when he needed to brake. Towards the end he said
the brakes had failed and he had only the weak handbrake to rely on.
What had started out as a split hosepipe now seemed a lot more serious.
Everything in the town had closed for the night including the garage, so
the Volkswagen people said they would stay with us for the night to see
that we got fixed up and we enjoyed their company for an hour or so
before everyone got to sleep. Charlotte had smiled at me a few times that
night and I went to my cold sleeping bag feeling very good; to hell with
the broken down van, a pretty girl had noticed me.

In the morning the garage proprietor was very pleased to see his first
customers waiting for him on his forecourt and he and his assistant got
straight down to business. The hosepipe they fixed easily but the wheels
got them very agitated. When they took the wheels off and took the brake
cylinders apart they were totally amazed. The heat from the brakes had
boiled off all the brake fluid and burnt the piston rubbers to cinders. The
brake linings themselves were also scorched and this was amazing as they
were made out of asbestos. The garage men had never seen anything like
it before. At least the hubs were O.K., otherwise we’d be walking to
India.

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After a few hours and with the help of another specialized mechanic in a
different part of town they had the brake shoes relined, and with their
natural Turkish flair for fixing all things mechanical they had the brakes
working by lunchtime.

The Volkswagen had set off earlier in the morning when they heard all
could be fixed. We followed on in the afternoon, very gingerly at first.
What more could go wrong with the van? We were to find out later in our
journey. It had more tricks up its metal sleeve, but thankfully not in
Turkey. We drove on through the sweet mountain air and under those
brilliant stars to the Iranian border.

We crossed into Iran at a place called Bazargan, we had fifteen days on

our visa, which we probably wouldn’t need completely. Allowing for any
little problems we should be in Afghanistan for Christmas. At the border
we met the sad, mad and hungry occupants of the magic bus. The bus was
having some repairs made to one of its springs and its occupants were
scattered around the area of the bus looking like survivors from a
concentration camp. They all had deep, black eye sockets, dirty clothes,
and filthy hair. Many were coughing; God knows what they had caught in
sitting weeks in that unhealthy bus compartment. One of the lads shared
our bread and cheese. His girlfriend had gone off with some other girls to
find somewhere to wash. His gratitude for the food was immense. As he
polished off the food with a bottle of good Yugoslavian beer he told us of
the horrors of the journey so far; cramped filthy conditions, nowhere to
lay out to sleep, no washing, no heating, toilet stops on the side of the
road for both sexes, everyone catching each others coughs and colds, and
then there was the smell of fifty closely packed, unwashed human beings.
It was hell on wheels and they had not gone half way yet.

That way

The Iranian roads were full of trucks, horse drawn vehicles and Hillman
Hunter Cars. I must explain to anyone who was not around in the UK in
the 60’s that the Hillman Hunter was a popular car then. When the design
got out of date, Rootes, the car’s maker sold the design and production
line to Iran and within a few years the model seemed to have overtaken
all the roads in Iran. A traffic jam might have a thousand Hillman Hunters
bumper to bumper.

The first night in Iran we were still high up and stopped for the night
above a small town. The lights of the town twinkled up at us and the stars
twinkled down. It was really cold and Fred and I emptied the van of its’
contents and climbed into the back in our sleeping bags. The interior of
the van was covered in condensation. After a few hours I woke up with
the most enormous asthma attack.

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I had contracted asthma at two years of age after bouts of pneumonia as a
baby. The cause of this illness was the cold damp house we had to live in,
in post World War II blitzed London. My elder brother had died of the
same pneumonia when just three months old. There was nothing my
parents could do, as there was nowhere else to live except the terrible
damp and drafty garage from which they had moved. The reason I lived
on and my elder brother died was that I got the first of the antibiotics
released for general medical use, before that they had been reserved
solely for the armed forces (antibiotics cured sexually transmitted
diseases many soldiers caught). I believe we were really some of the late
casualties of that dreadful war; poor living conditions and poverty caused
by war can kill and maim as well as any bullet or bomb.

From my teenage years a simple inhaler was all I needed to ward off an
asthma attack, but that night nothing could hold that attack back. I
couldn’t get my breath, it was a bit like drowning, I rocked back and forth
to try and bring some calm to my fevered state, for on that very cold night
with water condensing on the inside of the van I was extremely hot just
from the exertion of breathing. A thought went through my head again
and again, I was more than a thousand miles from home with no chance
of help. Fred couldn’t help me that night, I just rocked back and forth as
my lungs heaved and I wished desperately to go home. Eventually I fell
asleep from exhaustion. In the morning the worst had passed.

As we drove off the mountains and travelled the hundred miles or so to

Teheran it got decidedly warmer. At the approach to the city the roads
started to look better, straighter and more modern with a crash barriers
running down the sides. On the side of the road now was also a shoulder,
just like our hard shoulders on Motorways, but made of packed earth. I
decided we needed to stop a while to change drivers so I pulled over. As I
did so Fred said ‘What are you doing?’ Perhaps he had seen something I
hadn’t, but it was too late. I manoeuvred the van neatly on to the hard
shoulder, where it promptly sank. The hard shoulder was apparently re-
designated as a soft shoulder during the winter rains.

We sank up to our axles, our back wheels spinning without any purchase
in the soft ooze. Another fine mess you’ve got me in, Ollie! I climbed out
gingerly through the window onto the bonnet and jumped onto the road.
There was no Automobile Association here, but we were to find that
Iranian drivers all helped each other instead. In less than a minute a
pickup truck stopped. Without a word of English the driver got a huge
towrope out of the back. He fixed it to his truck and I lay on the bonnet
and attached it to our van. The pickup revved up and slowly applied force
on the rope. Nothing happened. He increased the revs, his wheels started
to spin and smoke on the metalled road, and, nothing happened. We were
stuck good, but the driver was not to be outdone. He flagged down what
seemed the biggest dump truck in the world. The dump truck backed up
and had the rope attached to it, then it slowly put force on the rope.
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Nothing happened. The dump truck engine started to reverberate as the
wheels failed to move the van one inch. By now there was a crowd. Lots
of motorists had stopped to encourage and give advice on the work. After
this failure they all stood in a huddle on the side of the road discussing
things for a minute then breaking up suddenly like an American football
team, walking to different positions on the road ready for the next play.
The large dump truck was unhitched and the oncoming traffic was
stopped both ways as the vehicle did a three-point turn and brought his
front bumper up to the edge of the mud shoulder. The towrope was re-
attached and ever so slowly in low reverse gear the great beast of a truck
pulled back. With cheers from the crowd the front of the van slowly rose
out from the mud, and the van came unstuck from its hole. As the van
completed its return onto the road the cheers rose to a roar of approval
and there was a lot of backslapping.

Being unable to speak to them in Parsi we quickly got out some of our
bottle store, but these knights of the road would accept nothing. They
smiled, shook our hands and went on their way.

I found myself driving again as Fred had done the driving part in the
sinking van and was looking a little shattered. We drove on for an hour
through the traffic until we got to a policeman, who was allowing traffic
to turn right, but not go ahead to the city. We turned right, then thinking
we could outsmart the system I turned left, left again and right, back onto
the road we wanted to be on and straight into the middle of a line of the
most enormous tanks you have ever seen. The novelty of our situation
was tempered by the fear of being run over, as the high up tank drivers
could hardly see our little van. At any moment the huge metal tracks of
the monster behind us might crunch our little tin box into what would
look like a larger version of the flat empty coke cans you see on the side
of the road. The noise was also dreadful with the un-muffled tank engines
revving away, and storms of sand dust were rising everywhere. Fred was
shouting at me to get off the road, at least that’s what I think he was
shouting because I couldn’t hear very much. However I wasn’t going
back into that mud again, not for the life of me, I’d rather take my
chances as a coke can, thanks very much.

I could see the line of tanks on a bend ahead, there must have been fifty
of them ahead of us and I couldn’t see how many there were behind.
After five minutes we came across a senior Army Officer on the side of
the road by his jeep. He seemed to be inspecting these £500,000
leviathans or taking the salute. A look of astonishment appeared on his
face as we passed him in our £5 rust bucket resplendent with its Union
Jack bonnet. I gave him my smartest salute and we were spirited away in
the line of tanks before his astonished eyebrows had time to drop. In my
minds eye I imagined him making an entry at the bottom of his inspection
form under Army Vehicles – Misc: ‘One personnel transport ex–GB’, and

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then another little note: ‘Get the damn thing properly camouflaged and
get that driver’s hair cut!’

A few moments later I saw a turning on the right and we shot down it and
away. Phew! We seemed to pulling in potential disasters faster than we
could handle them. Well perhaps that was it, from now on Iran would be
kind to us we thought. No way, the biggest calamity was yet to come.

We drove into Teheran and found a fleapit of a hotel with cold and cold
running water in the middle of the old town.

It was here in Teheran that I began to witness the medieval feel of

Muslim lands and that strange anachronism of the middle-ages side by
side with modern technology; it was a surreal experience. We walked
down narrow winding back streets populated with what seemed to be an
ancient shrouded and hooded people who occasionally had to jump aside
to avoid motor scooters, the only form of modern transport that could
navigate those narrow streets.

I found nothing in Teheran to detain us, we visited a few mosques and

viewed some gigantic monumental architecture and then went back for a
cold shower and bed on a concrete floor. The sooner we got on the better.
Our advisors in the hotel told us there were two roads to Afghanistan; one
along the mountains, which was a good road, the other through the desert,
which was a bad road. We should head for the mountain road. All we
needed was some engine oil because our engine had drunk all we had
brought. That shouldn’t be a problem in one of the world’s leading oil
producers. We bought some at a garage, but to our amazement it was
watery thin, we bought another brand at a second garage, it was just as
thin. This was a bit worrying with such an old engine, but we had a
simple choice, it was that oil or nothing. We crossed our fingers filled up
with the thin oil, and drove east out of Teheran. We had decided to ask
our way a number of times to make sure we were on the right road, and
so we did. Every time we asked people on the road or at various garages
they just smiled and pointed on without hesitation and so on we drove on
quite content. Thinking about it, we shouldn’t have been so sure of their
answers, it was a bit like asking a pedestrian on a London street the way
to Scotland in Dutch.

The road wasn’t that good. It was only a dirt road. We soldiered on for a
few hours expecting the road to improve but it didn’t. In fact it got
considerably worse, and became a continuous series of corrugations or
ridges, it was then that we heard our exhaust box come off. We were in a
hurry so we didn’t stop, exhausts didn’t seem very important here
anyway. Then for an hour or so we didn’t see a soul, till as afternoon
came on we found a person at the side of the road and by luck he had
pretty OK English.

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‘Is this the mountain road to Afghanistan?’

‘No, this is the desert road to Afghanistan’

‘Is it all as bad as this?’

‘No, this is the good bit!’

For reasons you can never quite fathom we decided to drive on through
the desert. We had no compass, no map, no knowledge of the desert, no
rough road vehicle, no survival kit, and in fact no idea at all of what we
would face. We just thought we were smart enough.

The shear absurdity of our decision now makes me laugh. Sometimes

intelligence and absurdity are not far apart, and before I continue I must
tell you a story about this.

Someone once persuaded me to take a Mensa IQ test. I did it and got 154,
a respectable score. I joined Mensa, but found the majority of Mensa
meetings quite boring. Mensan’s seemed to say ‘if we have such
remarkable IQ’s our gatherings must be interesting,’ but sadly they were
not. However there were notable exceptions in terms of people, some
bright, interesting and personable, and some unknowingly naturally very
very funny. One was so unintentionally gut wrenchingly, funny that he
made me quite Mensa.

I had joined the Mensa Research Committee to see if I could find some
interest there. The research committee didn’t have any funds so it spent
its’ regular fortnightly evening meetings at the National Liberal Club in
London discussing what research it might do if it ever got any. Like some
inverted Mad Hatter’s tea party it could not discuss the present, only the
future. I bet there are many committees and sub-committees that have
nothing to do, but only exist because the parent organisation would loose
credibility if it ceased, or perhaps its’ existence brings the parent some
political correctness.

Albeit that the current research committee never produced anything, but a
smug feeling in the Mensa Board, it did have some bright characters
involved in it and some interesting topics of discussion. One thing that I
found out was that many many years ago it did, it seems by accident, get
some funds, and being so loosely controlled it conducted a completely
non-politically correct research project into intelligence by racial and
sexual types. It found that:

 Statistically, the most clever racial group were blue eyed red
heads. Hmmmm, is it a co-incidence now that I think blue eyed
red heads are very sexy?

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  And statistically, male intelligence goes much higher and much
lower than female intelligence, i.e. men tend to be very clever or
very stupid in comparison to women. After years of considering
this fact I believe the solution to it is to be found in women’s need
to be in control. However like Fermat and his last theorem I must
resist the temptation to explain this in detail, as I haven’t the
space!

Anyway one evening there was a new member of the committee co-
opted on after me, who had an IQ of 180 or something. He told the whole
room loudly that this placed him in the top one percentile of human
intelligence and that people of his mental calibre were actively recruited
by MI6 to work on ciphers. He spoke throughout the evening with a
completely deadpan face, and didn’t show a trace of interest in those
around him or anything they said or did.

The second time he attended the research committee he announced his

earth shattering theory, the essence being that some of us were descended
from Neanderthals, and he now believed that this could be clearly
demonstrated……………. by measuring people’s feet. I’m quite serious
about this, he wanted to set up a research project to measure everyone’s
feet, haaaaaaaaaaaaa. Oops, Sorry. I’m sure his proposal had great merit,
and he was a very clever guy, but that was it for me.

For the first few minutes I was able to contain my amusement and keep a
serious look on my face. Then he started to describe his methods of data
collection, which involved removing peoples shoes in the street, and the
various foot measurements his researchers would undertake using his
special shoe box type measurer. He continued to talk with a completely
deadpan face and with all seriousness and soon everything he had said
seemed so utterly queer that I started to titter. I did it as discreetly as
possible but I saw other members picking up on my hilarity. He never
seemed to notice, like the straight man in a comedy sketch, his facial
muscles remained frozen. That night, after he left, in the bar my titters
became guffaws as with a little alcoholic lubrication I embroidered his
plans to hunt for Neanderthals by pursuing their feet.

Now everything about him, which before had seemed so deadly boring,
became extremely hilarious to me; his demeanour, his monotone voice,
his claim to intellectual greatness, and his theory. At the next meeting
anything he said triggered my thoughts about the hunt for Neanderthal
feet and I became a convulsive ball of giggles. He could say just
anything, even ‘what’s the time?’, and I would start to splutter and cough
to try and hide my laughter. In fact I started to convulse, and worse still I
set the others off as well, and that worked as a feed back loop to me and
then to them and there was a great heaving and coughing and whooping
as people who had endeavoured to avoid thinking of what I was thinking,
by that very process set off that funny button in their own minds.
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Throughout this coughing and heaving our man continued his diatribe,
seemingly oblivious of the condition he was causing as he elaborated on
the subject of Neanderthal feet. I eventually had to leave the committee
room and I couldn’t return. After that the chairman asked me to stay in
the bar whenever the chap showed up, but inevitably I saw him in the
entrance hall or heard his voice somewhere in the building and then I
would break up as I described to others in the bar what was going on
upstairs and why I was laughing. I would laugh all the way through the
meeting even though it was being held two floors above me. Apparently
everyone upstairs in the committee room was also giggling as this chap
sounded off, perhaps they were thinking of me down in the bar or they
heard the noise of laugher two floors below.

It was no good, the committee chairman decided, when the outcome of

two successive meetings was just a jibbering mass of committee
members. Until things settled down I would have to keep away from the
committee and the National Liberal Club itself she said.

The final straw came when I tried to attend other Mensa social events and
this gentleman would turn up, for he seemed to follow me around,
perhaps searching for his own elusive element of interest, or perhaps
discretely examining everyone’s feet, haaaaaaaa. On each occasion to the
great surprise of my hosts I would immediately have to retreat into some
hidden corner as I started to convulse just at the sight of him, and this
convulsing would become quite painful as my lungs heaved to replace the
wind knocked out of them by my spasms. Eventually I found myself
unable to attend functions if I didn’t know the guest list in advance and so
I withdrew my membership subscription.

Back to the desert; we should have turned around, why we didn’t then I
do not know. Perhaps it was just in my nature that I didn’t want to retrace
our steps and Fred just went with the flow as he so often did, but it was a
bad call.

As I said we had no compass, and no maps, when we came to cross roads

or a fork we went on what looked like the main route or the more
easterly. The further we got into the desert that day the more uncertain we
became and the rougher the roads became. There were rarely people here
except the occasional heavy truck driver. Sometimes the route or road
looked exactly like the desert ground, except perhaps a little rougher. Our
Van wheels bumped from one corrugation to another on the road, surely
all these desert roads couldn’t be as bumpy as this? Yes they were and
worse. We could manage only 15 to 20 miles per hour as we bumped
along up and down. After a while the van seemed to slow down, the
engine strained; it was like the brakes were on. We stopped. An
inspection revealed that a cross member that held the chassis rigid had
been bent around as it hit the bumps and had stuck against the back
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wheels acting like a brake. With a great deal of ingenuity and our scissor
jack, Fred levered it back. We travelled on a while and the same problem
occurred, once again the scissor jack was used and so it continued for
three days as we crossed the desert.

The desert was called the Dasht-e-Kavir. It wasn’t like any desert I had
ever imagined; no romantic vistas of sweeping sand, no camel trains, no
oasis with pools of cool water and palm trees for shade. This was more
like an abandoned building site. It was thousands of square miles of
rubble; rocks and shale, sand and grit. If the Turks and the Kazaks and the
Samarians before them had crossed this region on their way west they
would not have lingered long, or it must have been better then. Perhaps
this desert was the result of over grazing, could it once have been green?

We did come across one oasis, there was stockade with a sign ‘hotel’ on
it and a beaming young boy who stood outside trying to sell us drinks,
possibly the hotel owner’s son because he had authority over the other
people there and spoke some English. When we asked him the way he
pointed on again but said we wouldn’t get through with our van. We
ignored him and drove on.

We had decided to drive some of the night and all of the day, switching
drivers, one resting or trying to rest in the back whilst the other drove. We
did in fact manage to get some sleep whilst being rocked around and
shaken, which was quite an achievement. I found myself driving the first
night when the corrugations seemed extremely large. I couldn’t see much
ahead either, as the cross-eyed head lights just managed to show the next
few corrugations. Still I drove quite fast. Fred, I knew, drove more
cautiously, but I got bored unless I was driving on the edge, as it were,
even if this was only twenty miles an hour. This was our downfall.

I had been driving for some hours that night, it was well after midnight.
Fred was tucked up in the back. The moon was out which helped the
headlights a bit, but I really should have been driving slower or been
more awake. Suddenly ahead was a sharp turn in the road and as I steered
the van around it I saw the biggest ‘corrugation’ so far in the desert road,
it was as high as a small wall; about two to three feet high, at least twice
as big as any corrugation we had rode over so far. At the speed I was
driving at there was no time to stop, I decided to crash through and put I
my foot down on the accelerator pedal, shouting to Fred to hold tight a
moment before impact. With a great bang the van hit the wall, the front
rose in the air and to my amazement, like a thorough bred point-to-point
racer it glided over that huge hurdle, only to crash however, into a water
trap beyond. Yes water! The van raced on under its’ own momentum
carving up bow-waves until it came to a stop.

As we slewed to a stop the water started to come in and the engine died.
We had driven into a lake. Sorry, I had driven into a lake. I switched off
175
the ignition. Fred screamed to know what the hell was going on as his
sleeping bag had suddenly become very soggy. I was damned if I knew. I
shouted for him to get out and he climbed out after me through the
driver’s door window onto the roof dragging his soggy sleeping bag
behind him. There on the roof in the moonlight we could see a huge
expanse of water all around us. Being as we had driven through a desert
as dry as a bone, this ‘lake’ was quite a surprise; swimming had not been
on the itinerary. The water had risen to about a third of the way up the
van and stopped; at least it was a shallow lake. We were not going to
drown.

We decided to wait the few hours till daylight to consider our options. We
dared not try to start the engine until we could get out of the water and
just hoped the battery was above the water line, otherwise it would short
circuit. How we were to move the disabled van through the lake was
beyond us.

What a sad sight we must have made sitting there in the moonlight on the
roof of the van, isolated and shivering in the midst of all that water, a
shared soggy sleeping bag the only insulation we had. Whilst we waited
we tried to figure out what had happened. We guessed part of it; this was
a flash flood. Then later talking to other people we sorted it out more
exactly. It appeared that rain storms in the mountains create surging rivers
that pour down on to the desert. Some depressions in the desert form huge
natural bowls or containers that have very impermeable surfaces, and
here the waters gather. These huge expanses of water can form and then
vanish in the heat of the sun in just a few short days. Of course everyone
that crosses the desert knows this, or should. The trick was probably not
to be there when they formed. Our timing was bad.

A few hours later I thought I must have been dreaming for as the dawn
broke, it seemed a great monster rose out of the misty waters. With eyes
blazing it roared towards us parting the waters in huge waves. As it got
nearer I could see it was a huge truck, its axles above the water line, it
was negotiating what to it, was a small puddle. We both cheered. As the
driver reached us, without hesitation, he did a u-turn and reversed up to
us, then he climbed out of his cab on the back of the truck, tied on a tow
rope and threw the other end to us. We got the van secured and then the
lorry pulled us along through the lake to other side. Without further ado
the truck driver opened the hood/bonnet of our van and proceeded to
disassemble the carburettor, take out the spark plugs and the points and
dry them all off. He then re-assembled the whole thing, turned the key
and started the engine for us, all this without a word. He would accept
nothing, not even our thanks, as we didn’t speak his language. He just
smiled, waved, got back in his cab and drove off back through the lake.
We emptied the van and laid everything out to dry in the sun, then after
some breakfast drove on.

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Such remarkable ordinary people had helped us all through our journey,
putting our £5 bargain back into working order again so we could proceed
on. If they were following a code in the Koran then they were a great
advert for it.

After this incident our attitude changed. We were absolutely sure that we
would get through the desert; nothing apart from the compulsory regular
work to free the back wheels would stop us. We drove and drove and
drove, through heat and cold, night and day, we were going to kiss this
building site goodbye. When our water ran out we switched to good old
Yugoslav beer. On the third afternoon, slightly inebriated, we came out of
the desert and approached the holy city of Mashhad near the Afghan
border.

As I have said from the time of our brief stay in Teheran I believed urban
Iran had a definite medieval aura to it. Modern technology existed, but in
a Middle Ages ethos. The fact that many people wore long ‘medieval’
clothes did nothing to rid me of this idea. I once read that the middle ages
were a state of mind. I don’t mean that they didn’t exist, but they were
dominated by a belief system that saw everything as good or sinful, there
was nothing in between. In the Muslim era this is the 15th century.
Perhaps this is their middle ages in which there is only black or white,
good or bad, believer or godless, just like the west in the middle ages,
when Christians burnt witches and believed in a physical place called hell
inside the earth and heaven up in the clouds. Perhaps the difference of
attitude between Western, Muslim and Hindu reflect the age of the
religions. As religions get older and the diversity of the universe
establishes itself in the minds of the believers and teachers, perhaps their
value systems mature. What was only a two valued system; black or
white, good or evil in medieval times is today re-interpreted in a multi
valued, shades of grey moral system rather than stark a black or white
system. We say that something has good aspects to it, another thing has
bad, this is good in this context, but bad in another. The ancient Hindu
religion, which is older than Christianity, welcomes and tolerates new
ideas of spiritual value and they see good and bad, creation and
destruction in the same God with different aspects.

Mashhad had a crazy disorganised feel to it, traffic and pedestrians

mingling about the hot dusty streets. As we approached the mosque in our
gaily-painted van we started to get rather withering looks from people.
The front approach to the mosque was littered with small trader stalls
selling postcards and holy bric-a-brac. We climbed out of the van and
asked one of the vendors if we could walk into the forecourt of the
Mosque to view its stunning architecture. He spat at us and growled
something, which sounded like a curse; we were non-believers, hence we
were evil I guess, or at least we were not interested in his holy postcards.
The other vendors all turned and sneered at us, and others around looked
peeved as well. They were obviously all part of the non-believer
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welcoming party. Discretion being the better part of valour, and
discretion in this case being a fear of losing our heads, we withdrew into
the van and drove away.

Since that time I’ve often thought of picketing St Paul’s Cathedral in the
same way, spitting at anyone who didn’t look like a true believer. Mind
you, today that would include most of the population; I’d run out of spit.

We drove on up into the cold mountains and arrived at the Afghan border
that evening.

Little Prince

The border post was closed at night. When we entreated the hashish
smoking border official to let us through, he shook his head and said
bandits would catch us. We scoffed at this, but I think now it was wise
council, we certainly did not understand the wild and violent ways of the
country we were entering. As we spoke with the sleepy eyed official, his
little, bright faced, son or nephew, who could not have been more than
ten years old, processed our documents. My passport was stamped with
the fact I had brought a vehicle into Afghanistan. He told me that I would
not be allowed to leave Afghanistan unless I took the van out again or had
the stamp cancelled in my passport by selling it. That didn’t sound too
difficult. We had decided that once we got to Kabul we would sell the
van anyway because of the Carne problem, and go on to India by bus and
train.

A strategically placed hotel between the border posts took in guests as

they arrived after sunset, fed them, made a space available for them to
sleep on a dormitory floor and charged just a little more than was
customary. The maitre de was a jolly Afghan who had a little English. He
forced food on us. Now being a vegetarian I had eaten only a little hot
food on the journey. The stew he offered smelt good, but I had a sneaking
suspicion it had meat in it. I asked him if it did.

‘No’ he assured me ‘it didn’t.’

I smelt it again; yes I was sure I could smell meat.

‘No,’ he said with wide-eyed honesty, ‘no meat at all.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, absolutely,’ he said, watching me with benign smile.

I took a spoonful. I tasted meat! I confronted him again eyeball to

eyeball. ‘This does have meat in it!’

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He turned his head slightly and pressed his lips together, ‘Well,’ he said
with a sweat smile, ‘very, very little.’ What could I do? His heart was in
the right place. I passed over the hot food and had some bread and cheese.

Many people arrived in the hotel that night, washed up like flotsam, as it
were, on a strange shore by a receding tide, all caught there because the
border had closed. The dining room was very large and well heated by a
large wood burning stove, everyone conversed openly and loudly and we
mixed and mingled, delighted to be out of the desert and in strange, but
friendly company.

One oldish, very stern faced, western dressed Afghan seemed to make a
big effort to get friendly with various other westerners and then me. I
didn’t feel too comfortable talking to him, as he seemed to have some
other agenda apart from general sociability. It didn’t seem in his nature to
mix with young foreign people, but he tried ever so hard to be nice.

He told me he had just been on his Haj; his pilgrimage to Mecca. He

talked about the pillars of his faith and the importance of Haj. Finally,
seeing there was nothing else he could think of saying, he got to the point.
There were two things of major importance for a true Muslim to achieve,
one was Haj, and the other was to convert a non-believer, would I like to
convert? I politely declined and mingled on. Well, that wasn’t too bad, at
least he wasn’t after my body, just my soul. I found out later that if you
convert, which takes just a minute, then change your mind later, Muslims
have a right to kill you. Ecumenical this religion is not.

Of the many people there that night one stood out. Or rather everyone
else stood out, because he was a midget. He was about 20 years old,
perfectly formed but with a short lower torso. His name was Robert and
he was Malaysian. It turned out he just travelled all the time. His dad was
a police inspector, who apparently paid him enough of an allowance to
travel the world, third class. He was looking for a lift to Kabul, the capital
of Afghanistan, and our next big objective. He would be pleased to pay
his way.

Well. I thought, even if he did sleep in the back all the time like the Bear,
he was so small we could probably squeeze in next to him. I spoke to
Fred and he agreed we would take him. I dubbed him the little prince
because he seemed to me so regal and quite serene.

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 Centre Picture - The Little Prince and Fred

The next morning the border post opened and we took off on the Afghan
roads. These were, in comparison with what we had covered so far
outside Europe, superb. The Russians had laid out a beautiful concrete
road system all the way to Afghanistan’s neighbouring borders. This
great civil engineering project was undertaken not for altruistic motives,
but for strategic military reasons; Russian tanks could drive straight to the
borders in double quick time if Afghanistan ever asked Russia for
military help. How very considerate.

The roads were long and flat, and virtually empty, at first a delight, but
soon deadly boring. With Fred sleeping in the back, Robert seemed just
fine sitting in the passenger seat, his little legs dangling down hardly
touching the floor, talking to me and taking things in. To drive on these
roads you hardly needed to do a thing. The gas pedal was fixed down half
open with that loop of clothes hanger wire, and you didn’t need to engage
your feet at all because there were no junctions or traffic lights to stop
you. Really you only needed the lightest touch on the driving wheel, the
van almost drove itself. Robert asked lots of questions about driving;
what did the pedals do? Why do you change gear? He said it was sad that
he would never drive because his legs were too small. Now hearing him
say that got me upset. I believe passionately that everyone should share
the thrill of driving. In fact I laughingly say the only major omission from
the American Constitution, is a clause on the inalienable right of
everyone to drive.

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There was no major reason for Robert not to drive. I knew that pedals
could be modified so they need not be a problem. Come to think of it
there was no major reason that Robert could not drive now, no, none at
all. He didn’t need to press the pedals, I could get the thing going and yes,
he could drive. I put it to him, would he like a go? Yes he said if I was
absolutely sure it would be OK.

We stopped the van and swapped places. I put the coat hanger wire loop
over the gas pedal so it was revving about half revs, got my leg across
from the passengers seat and pressed the clutch, put the van into second
gear and let the clutch out very slowly. We were away! Robert looked
terrified as he realized he was in control of the van, or not as the case
maybe, and we weaved from one side of the road to the other as we
jointly tried to get the van going in a straight line. Once this was
achieved, with a gentle voice and a slowly lighter and lighter touch I
encouraged Robert to steer the van positively. Within a few miles I was
able to take my hand off the driving wheel and Robert was driving. And
soon he was loving it. His face lit up as he got the feel of the wheel and
the road. Soon he wished to go faster and I changed up gears and quickly
he was driving in top gear. We flew along in the Afghan sunshine, Robert
and I laughing like children.

After about half an hour I realized breaking might be a bit of a problem

because my legs didn’t get to the pedal easily, but that was something we
could experiment with later, I thought, as we turned one of the few
corners on these roads and came across an Afghan Police check point
waving us down.

The first stupid thought that entered my head was perhaps they’d been
tipped off by the British police about my traffic violation on the way to
Dover. I had not foreseen the long arm of British law stretching out over
Asia to arresting me here.

We had to stop the van. I pushed the gear stick into neutral whilst
stretching over to my maximum length to knock the wire off the gas
pedal whilst braking with the hand brake, it worked, we shuddered to a
stop before we hit the road block. Robert lowered the driver’s window.
The Afghan policeman looked in. He saw Robert’s little feet dangling
down by the seat and just stared. I tried to look as blasé as I could; a
passenger interrupted by a tedious check point, and Robert, bless him,
kept his eyes straight ahead in a bored manner, like a chauffeur asked to
stop, awaiting orders to continue. All he needed was the chauffeur’s hat.
The theatre seemed to work. Unsure of his ground, the policeman did
what all government employees do; he reverted to procedure.

‘Passports!’

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Keeping our faces very bland we casually handed over the passports. He
took them back to a central control box. What he was saying to the other
policemen there I do not know. Perhaps he was trying to guess with them
by what magic the pedals worked themselves in this strangely painted
circus like vehicle complete with dwarf driver, or perhaps he thought this
vehicle from the West didn’t need pedals. I guessed at least he would
come back and ask to see Robert’s non-existent licence, but then again
did they have driving licences in Afghanistan?

Hell, never mind the licence, I thought, this was the first time Robert had
ever had control of a vehicle, and I use the word control in a very loose
sense. What about if they made enquiries with the Malaysian police?
Robert’s dad would let the cat out of the bag for sure:

‘What crazy bastard let me son drive? You should shoot him as an
example!’

‘Sure chief, just hold on minute, Abdul where’s that rifle?’

At the very least I presumed we were heading for the clink and I
personally was in real hot water. We waited and watched, whilst
pretending to be not the slightest bit interested in what the policemen
were doing. I told Robert to smile and we feigned joviality in the van.
Five minutes past. It seemed like five hours. Perhaps they were phoning
head office for advice.

Finally he came back. He handed Robert the Passports and made a sign
for us to drive on as the barrier was lifted. I sat back with a huge surge of
relief, but then I saw Robert’s panicky face, and looking down I could see
his little feet frantically gesticulating at the pedals, Oh Gosh! What
should he do now? He can’t drive through the barrier; he can’t drive!
All pretence gone I shoved both my legs across his lap, jamming my right
foot down onto the far gas pedal and my left on the clutch, I put the van
into gear shouted at Robert for heaven’s sake to drive in a straight line
now and not drive over the feet of any of the policemen who were
inquisitively lining the road ahead of the van to look in. With me
straddled across him like a secretary across the boss’s lap, Robert drove
the van forward through a group of totally amazed Afghan policemen,
who were scratching their heads at my strange antics whilst I smiled back
at them and patted Robert’s face. Then with my foot hard on the gas we
were through the barrier and down the road before they could swap notes.

Robert, the son of a police inspector, should have known better, but once
through he thought the whole thing greatly exhilarating and laughed like
a drain as he ‘drove’ the van all over the road on purpose. Once we had
calmed down and the van was cruising again, we got into intense
discussions about how he could get a car modified so he could learn to
drive. He had decided then and there to go back home and to pass his test
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in a modified car, then buy a Porsche and burn up the Malaysian roads,
his dad could always sort out the speeding tickets.

Throughout all of this Fred had slept. I think he was still feeling the
exhaustion of the desert and I had let him sleep on. About half an hour
later as Robert very skilfully negotiated a quite rare camel cart on the
road, at speed and with great aplomb, Fred woke up. He sat up, rubbed
his eyes and looked at me in the passenger seat. Then slowly his head
turned to the driver’s seat with no one apparently sitting in it, then a
double take back to me in the passenger seat. I just smiled and raised my
eyebrows. Was the van was driving itself? He looked up a bit over the
driver’s seat and could just make out Robert’s head. The colour drained
from his face, yes, the truth is sometimes shocking. He shook his head as
if trying to get rid of a bad picture and then panicked.

‘What the hells going on? You’re going to kill us,’ he shouted. He was
scrabbling out of his sleeping bag as he said it, with the obvious intention
of grabbing the driving wheel. We both assured him it perfectly fine, but
he was not to be placated. Reluctantly I knocked the gear stick out of
gear, put my foot across and kicked off the accelerator pedal wire and
braked with the hand brake, and then we two co-drivers relinquished
control of the van to Fred.

But we’d had our day, we smiled at each other, no one would take this
away from us.

We drove on through the valleys, the mountains rising to our left.

Towards late afternoon the engine started making some bad noises. We
soon identified these as the steam sewing machine noise you get when the
big ends go. The thin Iranian oil had done our engine in. The new big
ends that Fred had put in before we left England had worn through.
Fortunately Fred had kept the old ones with his tools. We had no choice
but to change them back.

We had to stop soon. Every so often huge mud built forts would appear a
little away from the road. These were probably traveller’s resting places,
however they looked very forbidding and we drove on. Then a town
called Kandahar appeared on the road, there was no garage, but there was
what looked like a tourist guesthouse on the right. As we drove the now
steaming sewing machine of a van onto the drive of the hotel, what
should we see in front of us, but the Volkswagen. It turned out they had
driven without problems through the Iranian mountains and arrived here
relaxed the day before. They were all fine, Charlotte was looking even
sexier than ever and made a point of talking to me. I decided things were
not so bad.

The hotel was good by tourist standards; hard beds, cold showers, what
more could you ask for? We took a room, had a cold shower, then relaxed
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with our old friends and a few new ones. Tomorrow we needed to fix a
sick van, and there was no local help. Fred’s ingenuity would be taxed to
the full.

Missing

The next day Fred started on the engine, it was to be a Promethean effort.
No helpful garage, no hoist, just a handful of tools and a Holts do-it-
yourself Bedford Vauxhall viva service manual. I was not needed for a
while so I wandered around the town, bought some fruit and then went
back to the hotel. Out back of the hotel the proprietor had a monkey
chained to the wall. It was a rather angry monkey and bit anyone it didn’t
like, obviously the Afghan kids, who seemed to be everywhere, teased it.
I started to feed it grapes and could soon get it to sit on my lap whilst it
ate them. When Fred came to find me I asked him to get his camera and
he took a photo. Later back home I remember a pretty girl saw the photo
and told me how handsome I looked, then asked me with a smile who’s
lap was I sitting on?

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Me with
Monkey

Back with the van in the driveway, Fred had drained the oil and water,
disconnected all the feeds to the engine, uncoupled the springs and shock
absorber links and the drive shaft. There was now a rope around the
engine. Without the aid of a crane or pulleys we would have to take the
engine out of the van by muscle power alone. We recruited the help of
two German boys, tied a block of wood to the rope and heaved that
engine out. Then we turned it on its side and Fred removed the sump to
reveal the big ends. He soon had them in pieces and the ‘new’ big end
shells out. They were half cylinder metal pieces, which had special
smooth soft metal linings on the inside. These had all been scraped away
leaving large scars where the lining should have been. Fred then brought
out the ‘old’ shells in his toolbox, these were definitely old, but the
original metal lining was mostly intact. Where they were slightly scarred
the changing of position of them on the four piston big ends would
probably help. Back they went. Then the engine was re-assembled and
the next day we heaved it back into the van again.

I was once more redundant whilst Fred got all the bits reconnected. A
friendly freak from England offered me a bit of Afghan Hash. Why not
bide away some of the time smoking it? Now Afghan Hash has a
reputation of being about the best in the world. Huge fields of it grow in
the mountains and the collectors run through the fields with leather
jerkins on. The plants hit the leather and secrete the very highest quality
hash, which is scraped off and formed into bars. Whatever the pro’s and
con’s of hash smoking, and by the way I haven’t smoke it since my mid
twenties, I must say that the smell of this Hash is exceedingly beautiful, it
is like a distilled summer’s day. I would like to have some just to smell it

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sometimes, not to smoke it. But on that day having nothing to do, I
smoked it.

To me the sudden effects of this narcotic are like hitting a brick wall at
one hundred miles an hour, without injury. There is a sudden ‘donk!’ and
everything changes. Colours are brighter, textures are softer, sweet
sounds are sweeter, words have more significance, girls can be more
beautiful, and time becomes an irrelevance. To counter that, a perceived
hard word or look can be like a physical attack, some pain can become
torture, whilst some pain can vanish. You become less co-ordinated and
unable to undertake quite simple tasks. The great jazz trumpeter, Dizzy
Gillespie, once complained to his band, who smoked dope each night,

‘Boys, that stuff spoils your music.’

‘Nonsense’, said the band, ‘It makes our playing sweeter.’

‘OK’ said Dizzy. ‘I’ll tell you what. Tonight you stay off the weed and
I’ll smoke it, then you tell me who plays sweeter.’

That night they did just that, Dizzy smoked and the band refrained. Later
when he recovered back at the hotel, he spoke to the band.

‘Boys, you were right, I played more sweetly tonight than I ever played
before in my life.’

All the band slowly shook their heads, ‘no Dizzy,’ they said, ‘tonight you
were just awful!’

So the weed generates a false reality, it leads you to believe things that all
others cannot agree with. Those who understand the effects of this
narcotic will at least arrange controlled smoking sessions that have sweet
environments so the ‘trip’ is good.

I decided after I got the ‘donk’ that day to go out by myself. Bad call. I
wobbled down into the town. Soon Afghan boys gathered around me,
eager to make contact with a westerner. They realized immediately that I
was zonked to the eyeballs and started to make fun of my feeble efforts to
walk in a straight line. In my narcotic state I took this to be extreme
antagonism, unable to talk to them and afraid of attack I made my
winding way back to the hotel as best I could. That should be a lesson to
myself, I remember thinking.

After I recovered in my room I went back to help Fred. The next day the
engine fired up and sounded good, to everyone’s surprise, including
Fred’s I think. Wasting no further time there we paid up and drove off.
We stopped next in a town that had an impromptu market to buy some
food and we all got rides on a camel. OK as a once only experience I
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would suggest, but not to be repeated; you sway most dreadfully up there
and the camels stink.

Further towards Kabul we drove through a town with a cinema. It was a

cement box type building with no obvious fire exits and so a likely death
trap, but we were all three a little tired and the idea of sitting in
comfortable seats in the warmth, relaxed and being entertained appealed
to us. We bought our tickets for a few Afghan dollars, equivalent to a
couple of pennies, and went in and sat down. The auditorium was very
small but sloping like one of our own cinemas and the chairs were very
comfortable. The film however was a particularly bad bit of Bollywood.
It had all the usual clichéd plot lines. Two middle aged actors; a fat lady
and a moustachioed man, both pretending to be young, fall in love
without once kissing. They find themselves in a dire situation, but bravely
overcome all odds, including the terrible machinations of the ‘baddy’,
whose close up face on the screen goes through all kinds of contortions
whilst he thinks up horrible things to do. During their ordeal at the hands
of the baddy the hero and heroine manage quite often to break out into
spontaneous song, she in a high pitched wail, which sounds like a cat’s
bitten her bum, and he like he’s a forty a day smoker with a hang over.
This particular film had an awful additional touch; the ‘baddy’ was
surrounded by young western people, who lounged around a pool with
not much on, drinking alcohol and not saying much either. The good/bad
medieval computation was an obvious: westerners equal bad. For me it
was a nasty piece of racist propaganda, but probably very effective with
an audience who had nothing else to judge it by.

We had just absorbed all of this from the film when there was a slight
shudder, the picture flickered and died and someone screamed. People got
up and ran out of the building. We were mystified and sat there waiting
for the film to recommence. After a while we saw it was not going to as
the staff had run out as well. Then the realization came; we were sitting
there quite contentedly in a concrete death trap during an earthquake. We
arose and exited at some speed. The film wasn’t that good anyway.

We subsequently reached Kabul without further incident. On our arrival

we travelled around looking at what sights there were. It was all very sad
and nasty. The centre of Kabul had a few ugly multi-storey buildings, and
there were a few older Victorian looking government buildings, but the
rest were low-rise cheap cement walled boxes or wooden fire traps. A
huge gorge ran through the centre of the town, at the moment the water
level was low and a large rock shelf extended all the way through Kabul
by the side of the river. This was the public toilet; every foot was covered
with human excrement awaiting the spring flood to carry it down to the
plains of Pakistan where grateful people would welcome the ‘fresh’
water.

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Most Afghan people were swathed in long wraps and many of the women
and girls, who followed behind the men, had on burqas, black one-piece
garments covering everything head to foot with a little meshed eye hole
in the head part. This didn’t stop us identifying the young girls as their
heads turned to follow the western boys whenever they saw us. The place
was dusty and very cold. The cars on the roads were amazing, they were
all Russian made copies of those ugly 1950’s American cars, a bit like the
rounded shape Ford Zephyr my dad had driven 20 years before. A taxi
driver driving one of these monsters spoke a little English. He told us
fervently ‘ Russian good, give lots to Afghan, American bad, we go with
Russian.’ And so they did the next year, or at least the left wing Army
leaders did, but unfortunately it didn’t work out as they expected.

Robert, my little prince, said goodbye to us and headed for the Bus depot,
he was not stopping he said. We took lodgings in a cement block hotel
near the main open square of the town, and put a card in the window of
the van offering it for sale. It was late December, high up in the
mountains and freezing cold. Each hotel room had a small iron, wood-
burning fire in the middle, the hotel owner, at an exorbitant price,
supplied the wood. It was very hard to light the stove and so we cheated
by using some methelated spirit we had brought along for our primus
stove.

Everything of value we carried on our person for the rooms were often
robbed. Within a few days Fred lost his camera when he forgot to take it
with him. Luckily they didn’t take two rolls of exposed film, so we had
some pictures.

There were, some very nice restaurants in the town and Afghan dollars
being about a hundred to the US dollar they were very inexpensive.
Everywhere we went that was frequented by westerners, there were
pathetic little posters put up by embassies showing pictures of young
western people who had been last seen in Afghanistan and short messages
underneath the photos asking for help in finding them. When we asked
people about these photos they just shook their heads; these Westerners
would never be seen again. It seemed that the other side of the Afghan
warrior was a murderous thief. These photos upset us for a few days then
we stopped noticing them.

The tourist shopping was very interesting. There was every conceivable
type of hash accessory you could want to buy in many shops near where
westerners gathered. Other shops offered fabulous blue Lapis Lazuli
jewellery, the Lapis being mined in the mountains of Afghanistan. Some
of the older traditional necklace pieces were made of Lapis and coins and
weighed many pounds. It was the Lapis stone when crushed to a powder
and mixed with egg whites and oil that was to make the vivid blue oil
paints used by Europe’s renaissance artists. I remember standing in a
Venetian church in stunned silence looking up at a Titian painting of the
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Madonna resplendent in a most dazzling blue gown. Five hundred years
had not in the slightest way marred that beautiful blue lapis apparition.

Something of further interest to British Tourists were the strange, eerie,

antique shops filled with stacks of Victorian swords, guns, uniforms, and
watches; in fact almost everything that a British Army would need to
fight a battle in the late nineteenth century. Victorious Afghan tribesmen
had looted these items during a continuous on-off war against British
India in the previous century. Once they killed over 17000 people in the
Khyber Pass; the Pass that runs between Afghanistan and the then British
India. 4000 were soldiers, the rest civilians retreating from Kabul. Only
one man, a Doctor Brydon, had survived. The spoils from these battles
were taken back to the villages as symbols of a successful campaign.

Now, a hundred years later all this loot had accumulated in these antique
shops ready to be repatriated back by tourists. It wasn’t this irony that hit
me though; it was more a feeling of great sadness. Five of my great
uncles had fought in the Great War not twenty years after Victoria’s
reign. I saw those British soldiers who died in the Khyber Pass in my
minds eye before they were called upon to put on uniforms and be sent to
India. I saw the spirits of bright-eyed cheeky boys, everyone’s son and
brother, in all this forgotten paraphernalia of war.

The town contained large amounts of westerns all coming or going and
filling the hotels and restaurants, Kabul being on the main route to India.
We met some very interesting people including Mark, who had been on
the road for two years. He was over six foot tall, stern faced and
handsome. Over meals taken at long benches in the restaurants catering
for Westerners, he talked about his travels around Asia and the Middle
East and his love affair there with a sheik. When we showed some
distaste for things homosexual he turned on us and asked had we ever
done it, if we hadn’t how could we comment. He had so much presence
that we didn’t argue with him. One day we got talking about hash and the
laws in Europe banning it. At the end of the meal he took me to his room
and showed me a book he had just bought in the market. When he opened
it I saw it was hollowed out just big enough for the large slab of hash in a
plastic bag he had inserted into the space, He sewed the book up in a
hessian bag and stuck a label on it with an address in England. He would
post it he said from India. It was going to his mate who would send him
money. I laughed, that would never work. The customs people or their
dogs were bound to spot it and his mate would get caught and sent to
prison. Well he said, he’d been doing it for two years and hadn’t been
caught yet. I was flabbergasted. Was it that easy?

We met the Volkswagen people again and before long Charlotte invited
me back one morning to her hotel room in a wooden firetrap of a hotel in
the old quarter of town. During that day I got to know her much better, in
fact about eight times much better. Well, I had been without female
189
company for some time. For the next few days we enjoyed that thrill of
newfound love. Charlotte was well prepared physically with
prophylactics, but I don’t think she was well prepared mentally for the
attention of a lover.

After a few days she started to look slightly shell shocked. It turned out
that she had not had a boy friend for over two years and up to a year ago
she had been on valium to relieve a stress disorder. She also intimated
that she was psychic. I could see that our passion was causing her stress
again. The next day in a restaurant with a large group of us relaxing, I
believe she was still not thinking clearly when she announced that she
wanted to travel on to India through the Khyber Pass by horseback,
Afghan horses were famous for their sturdiness she said and she would
buy one and ride it to India. Would I go with her? I had never ridden a
horse, but it couldn’t be that difficult. Sure I said.

Mark heard this nonsense and got angry. We were mad. Hadn’t we taken
notice of all the photos pinned on the walls by the western embassies?
These showed the faces of young westerners, boys and girls last seen in
Afghanistan, some months, some years ago. The certainty was now they
had been killed when they were isolated somewhere in the country. Many
tribesmen had little or no respect for stranger’s lives, especially non-
believers, and would kill for the contents of your pockets, which
represented great wealth to them. We would never get to India.
I had forgotten the pictures. Mark was right and I saw Charlotte saw it
too. We were being stupid.

Whilst I had been otherwise engaged with Charlotte, Fred had stayed
around the hotel, and spoke to anyone who showed any interest in buying
the van. After a couple of days we discovered that the Afghans, although
many showed an interest, could not buy it. There was some government
vehicle import monopoly that was enforced by law. We would have to
sell the van to a foreigner or take it out again. Before this realization
though Fred had met a very smart, western dressed middle-aged English
speaking Afghan, who said he was interested in buying the van. He
seemed more interested in Fred though. Now Fred was a very open
person, as I have said and when this Afghan invited Fred back to his
house to discuss the sale, Fred agreed.

It turned out that the Afghan was a very wealthy aristocrat. His house was
fabulously furnished with hugely expensive hand made Afghan rugs
covering every bit of the houses extensive flooring. These were woven,
he told Fred, by the people of his villages. They chatted for a while over
coffee and food about many things but nothing about purchasing the car.
Finally when everything seemed relaxed the Afghan introduced Fred to a
very pretty Afghan girl, who, he whispered, had won a national beauty
contest.

190
Whilst admiring the girl, Fred was tickled by the idea of an Afghan
beauty contest. How would the contest work, would they troupe in in
burqas and be judged on their height or posture or the way they giggled
under that layer of black cloth? Anyway this girl was not in a burqa, she
was dressed in very expensive western designer clothes and she was a
beauty.

The polite conversation continued over more food and drink though the
van was never discussed, but later as Fred left, his host asked him if he
would return the next day. Fred told me all this later in the day with an air
of mystery, there was some ulterior motive for the aristocrat’s interest,
but he was damned if he could spot it.

The next day on his return visit all was revealed. The girl was an Afghan
princess, educated in France, she had returned and been forced into an
arranged marriage with an Afghan prince she highly disliked. Now she
was allowed to spend each day in this aristocrat’s house ostensibly
looking after his children, but in fact they had a strange sort of intimate
relationship. Her aristocrat friend had a sexual problem, he was a voyeur;
he wanted to watch others. She, with her western education, liked
Western boys, and now she had seen Fred and she liked him. Would Fred
be prepared to enter into a liaison bearing these things in mind?

She was very pretty. ‘Yes’, he said he would.

And so this peculiar affair started for him, the aristocrat called for him in
the morning, and then the ménage a trois commenced. On the first
occasion they decided to drive out into the countryside because the
Afghan was afraid his servants would notice something if they carried on
at home. So they drove out twenty miles or so and stopped in a very
lonely place. Fred and his new girlfriend climbed into the back of the van
and the Afghan sat in the front passenger seat, drinking whiskey and
keeping an eye out for anyone coming. It would seem a difficult thing to
do, to keep an eye out of the van knowing what was transpiring inside it.
However he must have done his job well because just as Fred got his
trousers down, the Afghan shouted ‘Quick, quick, there’s someone
coming down the road on a donkey, get back here and drive off.’

Doing his pants up swiftly Fred clambered back into the driver’s seat and
they drove off. The Afghan then suggested they go to the estate of one of
his friends who was out of the country. They gained entry somehow and
drove into a huge verdant garden/estate. There they found a secluded spot
and Fred parked the van and climbed into the back to recommence his
passion. This time things went on a little longer and Fred had his trousers
all the way down to his ankles before the Afghan screamed ‘Quick,
there’s someone coming around the corner right NOW!’

191
With even less time than before Fred jumped into the driving seat and
drove off, his trousers still around his ankles and his tackle hanging out.
That was it for the countryside. They decided to use our hotel room.

Once Fred started this liaison in the hotel I was left to sell the van, but
fortunately a Pakistani boy and his Dutch girl friend, who were returning
to Holland and wanted cheap transport, had approached Fred the day
before. Fred had already sold off the contents of the van including the
wonderful foam rubber insulation for a few dollars in the market; some
lucky trader’s family would sit comfortable and warm in their home
thanks to him. Fred told the prospective van purchaser that he didn’t think
the van would go far but the Pakistani was still interested, and a few days
later when I had taken over from Fred he returned to offer I think forty
US dollars; far more than we had paid for it. I agreed the price and we
drove off to the Afghan interior ministry building to get our passports
endorsed with the change of ownership.

As I drove off from the hotel around the main city square, I inadvertently
went through an amber traffic light. Too my utter surprise an Afghan
policeman jumped out from behind a wooden sentry box and landed in
front of my speeding van, nearly killing himself as I applied the brakes in
an emergency stop. He looked like all Afghan policemen, an unshaven
face, a long mud coloured greatcoat, a holstered gun and bare feet.
Shouting loudly and unholstering his gun he climbed into the back of the
van and signalled me to follow his direction.

‘What does he want?’ I asked the Pakistani in some alarm.

‘A bribe, you went through a red light,’ said the Pakistani, adding ‘don’t
give him anything. I know them, that’s all they want.’

‘Where’s he taking me?’ I asked.

‘To the police jail’ said the Pakistani, adding again ‘don’t give him
anything, they only want money.’

Now I had heard many stories of Afghan jails. They were filthy and
verminous, and you were chained to your iron bed where rough, stubbly
bearded warders sodomised you each night!

‘How much does he want?’ I asked.

They exchanged words.

‘One thousand Afghan dollars, but don’t pay him.’

I tried to work out in my frightened head how much that was in US

dollars. ‘I don’t want to go to jail, can you make him an offer? I said.
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Again they exchanged some angry words.

‘He will accept five hundred, but don’t pay him, Wait a minute I will
discuss with him again.’ More angry words, then nods.
‘200 hundred is his bottom price, but I would not pay him.’

I paid him.

The policeman grabbed the money and like a jackrabbit shot out of the
van and had vanished across the square.

‘You should not have paid him, they all do this’

.
Now two hundred Afghan dollars was, I found out, about a month’s
wages for these impressed policemen. But in side street money exchange
terms that worked out to about two US dollars. I’m glad I didn’t make a
principled stand.

We drove on to the ministry stopping at every light that threatened to turn

amber or red. The passport stamping took ages. We queued first in this
line to see an official behind some bars who handed us a form and sent us
on to other lines where officials behind bars did something to the form
and looked at our passports, entered something on the margin of the form
and passed us on to other lines.

We queued with rows of quiet Afghans who, each time they got to the
front of the queue passed over some Afghan money along with the form.
The official opened a drawer and casually swept the money in to it before
stamping the Afghan’s document, and then the Afghan moved on to the
next line. I asked my Pakistani friend what was happening with the
money. That’s the baksheesh he said; the bribe. Nothing happens with the
bureaucracy without a series of bribes. What about us? Oh, they have
given up with westerners; westerners don’t understand the system and
cause trouble so they don’t ask them for bribes.

Finally we got to the last queue. Bigger bribes seemed to take place here.
The official took our documents and passports into a room open behind
him, and presented them to a large self-important man behind a big desk
who perused them for a second and then set about applying stamps to our
passports. The job was done. I could leave Afghanistan now anyway I
chose.

It was Christmas Eve, that evening in our favourite restaurant I was

jubilant, any sadness of parting with the van was offset by the relief of
getting it off my passport. Charlotte over the other side of the bench table
seemed very subdued, repressed even. We all enjoyed our Christmas fare,
which was the same as any other evening, but eaten under a few
Christmas decorations put up by a thoughtful proprietor, and then
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departed to sleep. Charlotte asked me to come over later so I thought
everything must be alright with her. I spoke to Fred about moving on, he
seemed nervous about this. His Afghan Princess didn’t want to lose him.
He wanted to travel on although he didn’t want to part with her in tears.
He would have to make a decision. The strain of performing in front of a
live audience must have been affecting him.

I walked over to Charlotte’s hotel to meet her in the lounge/dining room,

if you could call an open area by the lobby, that. When I saw her I was
taken aback, her eyes had completely transformed. They looked intense,
rabid even. What had happened?

Charlotte told me she had had to take some valium. She said she had not
been ready for an intense sexual relationship, and that she had needed the
valium because it released her spiritually. To me it looked like it had
grabbed her mentally. She was now aware again of her spiritual element,
she said, and she realized who she was again; she was a female goddess.
She said this in all seriousness and with very starey eyes.

I told her to go to bed and get some sleep. Good God, why did people
take stuff that screwed them up like that? But then who was I to
comment? I hadn’t done much better with the hash.

For the rest of our time in Kabul we were still assumed to be an item, but
there was no real contact, and later in Delhi when she walked onto the
hotel roof lounge with Mark and announced a liaison with him I was
relieved for myself, but sorry for him. However if he was the hard nosed
pragmatist I took him for I was sure he would discard Charlotte during
her first performance of the hyped up, on valium female goddess routine,
otherwise he was in for big trouble.

I went back to my hotel room, Fred was out and the room was very cold. I
tried to light the wood stove. The wood got hot, smouldered, but failed to
really ignite. Ignoring the advice I had received about pouring methelated
spirit on hot stoves, I opened the front of the stove and splashed some
more in. I remember there was a sort of ‘wump’ sound and then I found
myself over the far side of the room, my eyebrows burnt off, hair singed
and my skin scorched. I had just blown myself up. After dowsing my
arms and face in some cream I thought would help, I climbed into my
sleeping bag and went to sleep. Apart from some peeling skin I wasn’t
hurt and I wasn’t cold anymore.

A few days later a group of us, including Mark, Charlotte and Graham,
and Hans, a young, long-haired, bearded German boy and his girlfriend
decided to move on to Pakistan through the Khyber Pass by local bus.
Graham and Charlotte were leaving the VW because its’ owners were
heading north to visit some Buddhist shrines at Bamiyam, away from
India where they wanted to go. Fred I think was emotionally blackmailed
194
and decided to stay on until his paramour and her friend could arrange to
travel to India with him, and then he would meet me in New Delhi.
I entered the bus with one small bag of belongings and my rolled up
sleeping bag, and we drove off to Peshawar. The bus bounced down the
uneven bending road of the Pass, high rocky escarpments passed us on
either side. Yes, this was the ideal place for an ambush; those British
troops hadn’t stood a chance, and neither would we on horseback.

The hundred dollar note sting

The bus took us through the border with Pakistan without much trouble
although the border guards looked long and hard at the German passports,
whilst returning our British ones without a glance. We arrived hot and
sweaty but in one piece.

As we pulled in to the Peshawar bus terminus a whole posse of hotel touts

descended on us shouting room rates. We chose one tout at random with a
nice smile and an OK room rate and he herded us to a line of bicycle
rickshaws, to be carried to our hotel. Our rickshaw man insisted three of
us climb into his contraption; at least one too many. The thin and wiry
operator then heaved down on the pedals and slowly, painstakingly
moved the rickshaw forward. Witnessing this man’s struggle, I found
myself in a dilemma. I couldn’t help, there were only one set of pedals,
though I desperately wanted to. I couldn’t get out and walk, because I
would have deprived the driver of his income, or if I’d paid him anyway
and walked that would have insulted him. I had to sit there and endure
with guilt this poor, underfed wretch struggle with all his might to move
our well-fed, western bodies to our hotel. Perhaps this was good for the
soul. It was certainly good for his pocket as I gave him a big tip, but I
never allowed myself to be driven in a bicycle rickshaw again.

Our hotel was no different from the hotels we had just left, perhaps a bit
smellier; it was warmer in the day in Peshawar, being as it was at the foot
of the mountains, but it was still coldish at night. They called Peshawar
the City of Flowers. I couldn’t see why, the flowers must have gone long
ago, but Peshawar seemed a little more relaxed than Kabul. The houses in
the poorer quarter where we stayed were mostly two storey wood and
clay affairs, with more modern ones popping up of concrete. There were
shades along the road protecting the market vendors from the direct heat
of the sun. When we walked around the market the older locals mostly
seemed to ignore us with a scowl, if those two things can be undertaken
simultaneously, whilst the younger locals often grinned. A few locals had
acquired casual, western clothes. They perhaps wanted to become
involved in western culture. There were already small, but growing
populations of Pakistanis and Indians in the UK drawn there by the
opportunity of better their living standards, and there must have been feed
back to their folks here. We were told, though, that the intelligent

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traveller should be cautious, for just as in Afghanistan, there was still
hatred and envy of foreign people and non-believers.

The food was good and it was cheap, fresh bread cooked on the walls of
small clay ovens complemented by vegetable curry and rice, and there
was sweet tea or bottled coke to wash it down.

We spent the day visiting the fort and other tourist ‘musts’ in Peshawar,
and the tourist centre issued us with concession documents, which
entitled us to discounts off the already very low cost rail fares in Pakistan.
We bought Second Class train tickets for Lahore and departed the next
day on a train pulled by a steam engine, something we had lost from the
railways in England, The smell of the steam engines in Peshawar station
was a sensual event; I hadn’t realized how much I loved that smell from
my boyhood. I’m glad though we bought Second Class tickets rather than
the Third Class we travelled on later in India. Second Class meant that
you could usually find a seat, maybe of wood, but this was much better
than the scramble in third class with people sitting under your feet, or you
under theirs or jammed up along the corridors or even in the luggage
racks or on the roof of the train. The journey itself was tedious and slow.
Train travel on the sub continent is a rather lackadaisical affair, delays
being the norm. Later on I saw a sign in Delhi Station informing
passengers that the times published in the time tables were the times
before which the trains would not depart. Now that had a refreshing
honesty about it. The Pakistan countryside looked quite bare in late
December. The land was generally flat and uninspiring. We passed
through Rawalpindi and Gujranwala and many smaller towns, many of
them industrialized, though agriculture, industry, and domestic habitation
seemed thoroughly mixed.

When we got to Lahore Station that evening the customary posse of hotel
touts surrounded us. One offered particularly low rates and we followed
him. We were piled into scooter rickshaws and driven off. The dirt roads
were pot holed all over and carried a mixture of painted trucks, cars,
bullock carts, single decker buses, handcarts, and taxi-scooters, all
ridiculously overloaded. We were now much closer to sea level and had
moved nearer the equator, and although this was the Northern
Hemisphere’s winter, it was hot and dry. I doubt if it ever got cold in the
daytime.

The hotel, where we arrived was a two storey wooden building, and it
wasn’t nice, but then again we surmised the others were probably the
same as this one. We unpacked our few belongings, rolled out our
sleeping bags and got some sleep.

The next day we toured around. The streets were packed with people and
here in the older, poorer part of town every house seemed to support a
shop front. To a westerner it was hot and dirty. We viewed a magnificent
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red brick fort and had lunch in one of the many roadside cafes offering
freshly cooked food. Later when we returned to the hotel Mark threw a
fit. He said his belongings had been rifled through. I looked at my
belongings; nothing seemed to have been touched. The others said the
same, but Mark was adamant, he knew when someone had disturbed his
things, he said, because he set them up just to show him if they had been.
The manager and staff claimed complete innocence in the matter. Mark
insisted he would move hotels and packed and left immediately. I knew
he was concerned about the large mount of Hash he had revealed to me
he was carrying. Graham and I met him later that evening for a meal and
he agreed to meet us again the next day at the bus station where we would
catch a bus to the border with India.

On my return to the hotel I found that the police had visited it and taken
Hans away. His girlfriend was distraught and we all comforted her as best
we could and agreed a plan to visit the German Consulate with her in the
morning, for help. However the mystery deepened the following morning,
she had vanished from the hotel we were told. We guessed she had gone
to the Consulate the previous evening without us and stayed there. The
hotel staff looked very glum and seemed to avoid our eyes. Unable to
fathom these things out we paid our bills and took taxis to the bus
terminal. When Mark heard our story he just shook his head, these things
were linked he was sure.

The bus took just an hour to the border. This border was not a nice place.
Both countries, so similar it seemed to western eyes, hated each other
with intensity and had had a series of wars with each other since
independence from Britain in 1948. The border had to open to let tourists
through, because they provided important income for both counties, and
so the two countries co-operated, but with bad grace. The border officials
wouldn’t talk to each other or even go near each other; we had to walk
fifty yards between the two border posts to present our documents in each
country. I guess a lot of the tourist income thus generated was ploughed
back into guns so that they could knock the heck out of each other again
in the next war.

Once again the British Passport holders were swept straight through
whilst the other passport holders were carefully scrutinized. I realized as
my passport was stamped that it was the 3rd of January 1973. We had
completely missed all the usual New Year razzmatazz.

As we walked onto Indian soil we had a huge surprise; there smiling in

front of us were Hans and his girlfriend. After a moment of shock we
greeted each other with smiles and hugs and asked what had occurred.

This was Hans’s story: Early the previous evening a Police Major had
walked into their room along with a grinning hotel manager and had gone
straight to the place where Hans had secreted his little store of Hash. The
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major arrested and handcuffed him and took him to the police station
where they put a proposition to him. He could either, be tried for the
possession of cannabis, and be jailed in a Pakistani jail, or he could help
them by undertaking a very simple job. They showed him a $100 bill and
asked him to change it at one of the cities many illegal moneychangers.
The bill was a little old and creased and was of course phoney. These
moneychangers changed hard currency at much higher rates than the
government’s official rate and were therefore outside the law and could
not complain to the police about phoney money without admitting their
‘guilt’. If the moneychangers did spot the forgery and get rough the
police major would protect Hans. Simple no? Hans said yes he would do
it. The conspirators gave him the bill and sent him off.

However, when Hans came out of the police station he went straight back
to his girlfriend at the hotel, grabbed her and in order not to arouse staff
suspicion just took their small hand bags and no other luggage, walked
out of the hotel and caught a taxi to the bus station and a bus to the
border. And here he was, free. He showed us the faded forgery, I’d never
seen a hundred dollar bill before, not even a forged one.

What an incredible story this was, how devious the hotel manager and his
police major accomplice had been, how quick-witted Hans had been, and
how prescient was Mark with his unheeded warning. It made us all think,
we were surely innocents abroad and except for people like Mark we
were easy targets. After Han’s story I was concerned at how long this
predation might continue. All the way to India, the further we got from
Western Europe, generally, but with many bright exceptions on the road,
the less comfortable we felt. In Turkey only a little, then Iran and
Afghanistan and on through Pakistan you often felt like a ‘mark’, they
wanted to take something off you, hopefully only your money in a seedy
transaction. For we exhibited extraordinary wealth to these people; the
contents of our easily removed wallets might take them a lifetime to save.
We also represented evil according to some of their clerics; we were
unbelievers, we had loose morals and were here they said to seduce them
from the way of God, and finally we were stupid, valuing ancient, natural
and cultural things around them that they disparaged, and showing little
regard for the money we spent and the material things on which they
placed such high value.

Only as we entered India did this change. At once I felt the people were
pleased for us to be there and were not thinking how to take something
off us unless it was a little understanding. We would have less need to
worry here; whereas the culture in the countries we had travelled through
in some ways encouraged antagonism against non-believers, the culture
in India, based on a secular state consisting of mostly Hindu mixed with
Sikh and Muslim seemed to promote interest in others. There were
exceptions in India too, but when they tried to take your money they did
it with hint of humour and a smile.
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We took our first Indian bus to Amritsar, which was about an hour away,
where the Indian Railway awaited us.

Into India

The Sikhs are a people apart. They are good businessmen and often have
high personal ethics, which gives a true Sikh a human stature above many
other people.

Their scripture is called the Granth Sahib, which is stored in the Golden
Temple in Amritsar. The Sikhs exist or have existed between the Muslim
and Hindu faiths, occupying a no-mans-land both spiritually and
physically. A Sikh respects those of other faiths and does not demean
them.

We stayed in a Sikh run hotel, which I found a cut above all other eastern
hotels. The place was calm and the food on offer very good. We toured
the sites of the City and saw the Golden Temple. Then we purchased
foreign student travel passes, which greatly reduced all our train fares and
we bought third class train tickets to Delhi. The following afternoon we
entrained.

We set out on a local train, which puffed its way across the Punjab
stopping everywhere. Green parakeets in their thousands roosted on the
telephone wires along the track. As evening came I witnessed a glorious
sunset displaying those unusual colours you see on calendar pictures in
Indian grocery shops, a vivid violet sky back-dropping a tangerine-gold
sun. Here this really was the colour of the sunset, it wasn’t just imagined,
as I had believed.

The train would often stop, sometimes for hours. There was no
explanation, no one asked why. Indian trains ran that way. Once again, as
in Pakistan, although most was countryside, we passed through many
industrial towns with smoking chimneys. India was not just an agrarian
society.

The third class in which we travelled is an interesting class. This is the

poor class, hard wooden benches and crowded humanity. The train was
packed and I was sure many people had not paid. The farmer’s wife who
got on at Jalandhar with two live chickens and sat next to me was never
asked for her ticket although ours were inspected it seemed every other
hour. People sat on every bit of floor and that night I slept in the string
luggage rack above the benches, whilst Graham slept under them. The
other westerners got what sleep they could in sitting positions. The train
stopped everywhere and a stream of people always got on and off no
matter what time of day or night, they treated the train like we treated the
local bus.
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When the train finally pulled into New Delhi station we ignored the hotel
touts. We had the address of a hotel in the Sikh quarter and we took
scooter taxis straight there.

We had made the right choice; the place had a bright feel about it. The
common area was the roof of the hotel where everyone congregated
including the hotel owner and his wife and children. We sat under
awnings and sipped cold coke. The roof lounge was a sensible idea; Delhi
was very hot and you needed the open air because enclosed rooms were
stifling.

Sikhs pay especial attention to their sons and the hotel owner’s small son
was constantly handed around and cuddled and played with, by the Sikh
men more than the women, it seemed. There was a language barrier
between our hosts, and us, but we got along fine. Once again the food
was wholesome and we didn’t feel at risk of being robbed. The Sikh
community encouraged early rising because early rising meant you would
get more done that day, and the Sikh quarter in Delhi has its’ own unique
wake up alarm system which we discovered at very first light the first
morning. A large troupe of Sikh women and boys marched around the
streets singing at the tops of their voices and banging cymbals and drums.
The noise was tremendous and all in the hotel were wide-awake within
the half hour that this cacophony ran for.

One thing was becoming a great nuisance. Flies had become more and
more numerous as we came down from the colder mountains. They were
the big iridescent blue variety we call Bluebottles. There must be millions
per square mile in these hot, populated areas, and there is rarely any cold
to destroy them as their European cousins are destroyed in the winter.

With so much rotting material, India must seem a land of plenty to them.
There were so many flies that local people ignored them. Westerners
could not tolerate them and were constantly swatting and swishing to
keep them away because they knew flies were major carriers of disease. I
wondered if the horrible disfigurements we often saw in Indian people
were the result sometimes of fly borne disease. The flies however, to give
them their due, must be the most successful creatures on the Indian sub
continent, they have, as a group, a huge capacity, audacity and overtness;
nothing diverts them from their task of finding nourishment and breeding.
During our journeys through India flies would always be around in vast
quantities. They gathered in their hundreds and thousands around
anything edible or damp; food, excrement, animal eyes and sweaty parts.
They would be everywhere buzzing around our heads, and they bred like,
well, like flies. I watched two flies mating on a plastic chair on our hotel
roof. As they sat there, their rear ends conjoined, other flies landed
around them, turned away from them, and cooled them with their wings.
The noise of the other fly’s wings cooling them was quite audible. The

200
two lovers had a perfectly air-conditioned love bower. At that moment I
didn’t have the heart to kill them.

No Mail

In India, the Pax Britannica of over a hundred years had brought great
wealth creation and growth. I don’t disagree that Britain exploited India,
but India grew and prospered too. In Delhi you could see the legacy of
British India in two distinct ways in the Old and the New.

New Delhi is a nice place to explore. It is big and grand and could have
been designed for tourists. New Delhi clearly shows its British Legacy. It
has wonderful Lutyens designed marble and stone buildings flanking
wide ceremonial avenues. These imperial buildings were constructed to
reflect the greatness of the British Raj with broad avenues to take great
processions on state occasions. New Delhi is now the capital city of India
with the President occupying the old Viceroy’s house and the Indian
Parliament occupying the old Secretariat Buildings. It is a place where
tourists can relax, wander and shop, following their guidebooks around
the great buildings.

For me it was interesting for a while, but there was little shade and its’
really hot. Even in January you find yourself entering many of the huge
air-conditioned banks that have established themselves along Connaught
Place, and are staffed by the most beautiful Indian girls in saris. You take
a few minutes pretending to fill in forms, whilst you admire the pretty
girls and cool down enough to walk out again.

Travel just a little way beyond the New and you find the Old. Old Delhi
presents a picture of organised chaos. In the first instance you do not see
any British Legacy, all you see is a fantastic mêlée of hundreds of
thousands of people going about their daily routine of earning a living
whatever way they can; some more successful than others. But in fact this
is another aspect of the legacy; the huge volume of people that a hundred
years of internal peace, financial stability, a less bridled economy and a
developed transport infrastructure have made possible. The problem this
increased population raises is that the faster the population grows the
more they have to divide up the limited assets of the country. As the
Indian population boomed the ordinary people stayed poor. It seems to
me that birth control choice is vital if people are to enjoy any of the
material benefits that social stability brings.

People in hot eastern countries have different priorities to westerners.

Firstly you don’t need to protect yourself from the cold much, so really
apart from the rainy season, if you can’t afford it, shelter isn’t a must
have. If you are poor in a town, you can live on the street, or rather the
pavement; pedestrians won’t drive over you. Whole families squatted
sadly on spaces on the pavement the size of a small room. Where
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pedestrian traffic was not too high every bit of pavement was occupied. I
also saw women cultivating little patches of dirt a few metres square by
the side of their pavement bedroom between the pavement and buildings,
this was their kitchen garden, fertilised and watered I know not how, nor
wish to consider.

The road traffic was incredible, lots of 1950 style British designed oxford
cars and taxis, many fabulous but falling to bits pre-war British cars, giant
trucks, bullock carts, scooters, scooter taxis, motorbikes, holy cows, carts
pulled by men (and women), pedestrians and buses, all pushing,
rumbling, hooting, roaring, stopping, starting and polluting in one great
big jam. The smells, the sights, the sounds, and the heat were a shock at
first. Chandri Chowk, the great bazaar had all this and thousands and
thousands of shops and stalls all piling out onto the road. Down the
narrower side streets scooters and bikes were the only vehicles that could
penetrate easily and pedestrians seemed to have the upper hand as there
were so many of them. The huge press of humanity seemed to have a life
and consciousness of its own as it wove snake-like through the narrow
streets, yet each individual in this flux had a different purpose and a
different destination and they seemed quite comfortable to be there.
We were not in tourist spending mode, but certain essentials were
purchased. We all switched our footwear to water buffalo hide sandals
with a little loop for the big toe and a broad band of leather across the top
of the foot. They were beautifully tooled and we soon got the technique
for walking with them. The girls purchased light blouses and the boys
purchased longis. These are about a metre of brightly coloured cloth,
which we learned to drape around our waists. We often wore them
instead of trousers. Traditional things like sandals and longis tended to be
of good quality, but you had to watch out for anything else you bought. I
purchased a small green canvas holdall to take my gear. The maker had
left the cloth border next to the sewed seem so narrow it promptly blew
when I filled it. It was probably the penny saving made on a centimetre
strip of material that caused the bag to split.

One day whilst I was waiting for my friends to come out of our hotel, I
sat talking to someone who claimed to be a magician and who relieved
me of ten rupees with a card trick. He asked me why I had come to India?
When I said I didn’t know, he nodded his head and said that I would find
something. When I asked him why, he said this was because I had come
without preconceptions.

Later that day in our wanderings we passed a Hindu Book Shop, I think it
was the equivalent of a Christian Book Shop in the UK; it was there to
spread the good word. When I entered the shop I discovered a huge tome
four inches thick on the Bagavad Gita. Now the Bagavad Gita or Gita as
it is usually called, is only one short story from the Mahabarata, one of
the most holy Hindu books. The Sanskrit Language does not have past
tenses so the stories in these books come across to their public as now;
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these religious stories are now stories. This particular story holds an
intense spiritual/philosophical/emotional appeal to Hindus, who consider
all their holy books to be true history and the Gita to be a gem in that
history. The reason I was attracted to this translation was its detail in
depth. Each stanza was produced in the original Sanskrit, Then the next
paragraph showed word for word Sanskrit/English. Then the next
paragraph was just the English in the same order. Then the next
paragraph was the English re-arranged grammatically. Then any unusual
words were further explained. Then one or two renowned Hindu scholars
gave a commentary on the text.

This was the idiot’s guide to a little fragment of the Hindu Scriptures, but
it seemed an important fragment. My only hesitation in buying it was its
weight, about two pounds; I had made the decision after disposing of the
van to travel light.

I read the introduction, which explained that the Gita was about a great
ethical dilemma that the hero, Arjuna, had to resolve in order bring about
redemption. My curiosity was aroused. For the ridiculous equivalent cost
of two dollars I acquired some extra ballast. I assumed it would weight
me down all through my travels in India, then find its’ place on a dusty
book shelf at home unread. But I felt the better for having bought it.

If the act of buying something to weigh me down for the rest of my

journey seemed fairly stupid, the next day the act of buying something to
torture me was really stupid, and for the fifteen minutes that followed this
purchase I thought I was going to be broken or crippled; I had decided to
submit myself to a road side massage/manipulation.

Street masseurs or manipulators are to be seen in every town in India. The

rickshaw drivers and cart pulling coolies go to them. This clientele is as
tough as old boots, with strong sinewy arms and legs and powerful back
muscles. In order to manipulate these tough characters you need what
might seem brutally energetic levering techniques. Generally the
practitioners are judged on the number of joints they can crack and how
far they can contort their client’s body.

I forgot that we had no common language and that apart from screaming I
had no way of telling my manipulator that he should desist. Of course I
didn’t want to scream, that would seem whimpish. The chap I selected, as
my torturer was a little wiry guy, no more than five feet tall. I was sure
this titchy guy couldn’t be that tough. He had his establishment, a mat, on
the pavement under the shade of a lonely old tree that grew on the edge of
an English cemetery that was now in the heart of a teeming Indian city.
Being in the cemetery, the tree had somehow escaped the axe. Off to the
other side of the cemetery was an old Victorian chapel, which looked like
it had seen better days; it sat there dejected like a desolate old lady
forgotten in the midst of a scene of rape and pillage.
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As soon as I stepped forward and sat on his work mat a shout went up and
within a minute you couldn’t see through the crowd. I think this also
spurred on my would-be miniature tormentor, who saw the opportunity to
advertise his services to a wider public.

Using a thin cloth around my fingers and toes he proceeded to click every
one of them in each joint. That hurt but it was just tolerable. Then he set
to work on my ankles, wrists, knees, elbows and shoulder joints, twisting
and cracking them every which way at angles they had never assumed
before. The audience warmed appreciably as the pain seared through my
body. Then turning me onto my front he proceeded up my spine with the
heal of his foot. At this point I felt like a man being publicly flogged and
needed something to bite on. He then sat me up again and worked
through all my neck joints.

Then he started the real work. He got my body in various wrestling locks,
sometimes twisting different combinations of arms and legs and bending
my torso beyond extremes; at one point my head was between my thighs,
and I could see the backs of my legs. Next he started work on my head,
getting it into various vice-like grips. Finally he executed his piece-de-
résistance, He put the cloth over my earlobes, bit my earlobes through the
cloth and pulled on them until my ears clicked!

It was over, thank god. My tormentor smiled triumphantly at me and

stood up. I smiled feebly back; it felt great to be alive. I staggered to my
feet, pulled out twenty rupees from my money belt, which I knew, was far
more than the going rate and gave it to him. He seemed gratified. With as
much dignity as I could muster I wobbled through the crowd to my
friends, who had thought the whole thing a great sport, but on reflection
declined to follow my example.

The parting of the ways

Each day in Delhi I went to the central post office post-restante, to check
if mail had arrived or to hopefully meet Fred or Pete. No mail ever
arrived during the weeks I stayed in Delhi, but Fred arrived a week after
me and moved into our hotel. We then both made the journey to the Post
Office each day after that in the hope that Pete would show, but he never
did. It seems he never raised the necessary cash.

Fred’s Afghan princess had arrived also with her paramour and they had
established themselves in a smart hotel. Fred visited them, but soon
became discouraged. The girl was paranoid about being recognised by
anyone who knew her, even here in Delhi. Fred couldn’t understand this,
he thought they would travel around together, but this was not to be. I
think I understood her. Muslim law has a swift remedy for adultery; death
by stoning. In fact, as a party to it, I’m sure Fred could have shared the
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same fate. Whilst they were ensconced within a private hotel room in
Kabul I’m sure she felt pretty safe out of purdah, but not here in big,
teaming, wide-open Delhi.

Once we had decided that Pete was not going to arrive, we had to decide
on our next steps. At this point Fred’s princess was still undecided
whether she would stay or go home. Hans and his girlfriend were
departing to a beach in Goa, a place we all wanted to go eventually.
Charlotte and Mark were departing we knew not where, as Mark was
being mysterious. Graham wanted to travel in the steam trains he loved
around India, and he asked me if I ‘d like to go with him. I certainly did. I
presumed Fred would come with us if he could, but decided to set him a
dead-line as Graham would not hang around.

At this point his princess departed, but Fred had been speaking to some
Americans who were driving a Volkswagen beetle down to the love
temples at Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh and they had a spare seat. This
was something he wanted to see. So we agreed to meet again in Goa in a
month’s time and using a borrowed map identified the beach for our
reunion.

Two days later armed with Indian Railways 3rd class countrywide go
anywhere tickets, purchased for a song, Graham and I walked into
Delhi’s main train station and breathed in deeply that incredible infusion
of coal fumes, steam and grease which is to many men more
overpowering than the most expensive French perfume. We walked along
the front of the platforms admiring those huge steam engine Giants, the
noise and the smell taking us back our childhoods when steam trains were
the norm in England.

Graham was a good companion for me, full of that boyish enthusiasm for
any thing of interest. He was well organised too with good guidebooks
and lots of ideas. We would tour India visiting old palaces, temples, forts,
mosques and shrines, all by rail. It was quite feasible he said and would
be very cheap.

The train we departed on was crowded and the seats were hard, but we
were buoyed up and excited. The carriage was hot and the only form of
cooling came from the open windows. If the train stopped for any length
of time the heat became severe. Indians of all shapes and sizes sat around
us, on the seats and on the floors. Mostly they smiled at us politely.
Strangely the thing that would impress me far more than any of the sites
we visited were these people. The 3rd class was not used much by
educated middle class Indians, which was a pity because when we did
occasionally meet them I was often struck by their clever yet unassuming
intellect. We travelled always with common people, common in that they
had very little. They were mostly Hindu. They were friendly, kind, and
interested in us and always conversed if they had a little English. Maybe
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they were not as knowledgeable as the middle class, but then they were
not educated and could not read or write. Now, from my travels with
them I believe these people are the wellspring of India. Their Hindu
culture seemed to be all pervading with its easy to grasp ritual, its strong
base of history/mythology and its easily understood open philosophy.

First of all we were to stop in Agra, as everyone who goes to India is told
to visit the Taj Mahal there. This is the tomb built by Shah Jehan in
memory of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Like everyone who visits it I can
confirm that it is beautiful, but to really experience it I think you need to
visit it in moonlight with the one you love. We appreciated it a little too
academically, admiring the detailed inlaid precious stonework and
listening to its history. Later, I did however get some feel of the emotion
of the place when we went across the river to the Red Fort, and I climbed
up to the turret where Shah Jehan was imprisoned by his wicked son for
the last twenty years of his life. He could look out every day at his
beautiful Taj, but never come near to it again.

On our way out of the mausoleum gates I bought a small stone box inlaid
with semi precious stones like those in the Taj. The workers, who made
and sold these trinkets in front of you, claimed to be the descendents of
the original craftsmen who built the Taj. As it was built over three
hundred years ago I thought this was unlikely, but in India it was a
possibility as trades are handed down father to son.

We entrained again and travelled east through Uttar Pradesh to Lucknow

then Allahbad and Patna.

The trains are a world complete. We slept in our sleeping bags on the
seats or the floors, and bought our food on the platforms. There was a
huge amount of food and drink vendors at every station shouting their
wares to the passengers. The food consisted of deep fried vegetables in
batter or samosas. The drink was sweet tea or bottled soft drinks like
coke. If we grew bored of this limited repast we could eat cheaply enough
in restaurants between train journeys. I never saw meat eaten in India,
except for one restaurant at the end of my stay in India, when the
proprietor quietly offered me meat, suggesting of course that I would
enjoy it much more than vegetarian food. I remember one day walking
into one very swanky restaurant full of Middle Class western dressed
families; we presented ourselves replete in longhis and sandals, and with
our dishevelled hair and growth of beard we were quickly ushered onto a
side alcove table and served discreetly; obviously we disturbed the
refined ambiance that the owners and their customers were trying to
create.

On the trains our appearance was totally acceptable. We talked with other
passengers whenever we could and from the windows watched the people
of India go about their daily lives. I had quite gotten used to seeing
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wooden carts mounted on a truck wheel axle being pulled by one or two
men. This often with the blazing hot sun scorching their uncovered backs.
One day I looked out to see one of these carts being pulled by a man
stripped to the waist with sweat pouring off him and a young woman
dressed in a most beautiful red sari and covered in jewellery. That young
woman pulling the cart in the appalling heat unsettled me. Graham
guessed it was part of a marriage ritual.

At each station as new people came onboard, beggars came too. They
used the railway trains as others used the streets. We gave sometimes, but
mostly not, an Indian teacher had told us early on that we should not
encourage the beggars, especially the younger ones who got used to the
easy money. Later when their youthful appeal ended, they turned to crime
rather than work. Sometimes though we were moved, or we were
entertained into giving. There was one morning when we heard a rousing
song coming down the train. A group of blind musicians were making
their way along the train singing very marshal songs that seemed to lift
everyone’s spirits. One played an accordion and another a drum, and the
leader had a very fine tenor voice. They all smiled as they travelled in a
crocodile formation along the aisle singing gloriously. One sighted person
who held out a collection bag led them slowly along the carriages. Many
passengers dropped a coin into their collection bag as they passed by, we
included. Another day a young beggar of no more than 6 or 7 years came
along the train, and with a really bright presence seemed to have no
problem in willing money out of people all along the carriage. Having
taken on board what the teacher had told us I declined to give, but as soon
as the boy saw this; a rich westerner refusing to give, he focused on me
alone asking again for ‘baksheesh’, free money. When I said no he was
puzzled, he asked in a little English and lots of sign language, why. I was
sure he would not understand the long explanation of youth begging
leading to crime etc. so I just indicated I had no money. This was not a
clever thing to do; everybody in India knew that westerners were all as
rich as Croesus. The boy sat there with me for half an hour, his other
patrons completely forgotten, as he asked me questions in his pidgin
English to ascertain why I had no money. Then when satisfied he
answered some of my questions. He was a lovely child, and I couldn’t
help wondering what would happen to him as he grew older, how would
he end up? I understood from the answers he gave me that he was part of
a large family living on the platform of a big train station, and he and his
brothers and sisters were the income earners, and they worked
exclusively on the trains. After half an hour he said he had to go as his
return train was waiting on another platform in the station we had just
arrived at. At this point of course I weakened and offered him some
‘baksheesh’. With a surprising resolve he said no, I needed the money.
Then he arose and climbed off the train, waving and smiling at me as he
ran down the platform.

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There were so many acts of kindness other than this young beggar taking
pity on me. On one occasion we had caught a connecting train, which was
packed. A railway worker, who was stretched out at the end of a corridor
squeezed up and let us two weary travellers sit down. He then insisted on
sharing his food with us. This consisted of deep fried sour vegetables,
revolting to western taste, but we had no choice but to accept the offering
and smile as if we were enjoying it.

On another occasion an act of compassion opened our eyes to the social

unjustness of India. A passenger talking to us realized we had nowhere to
stay that night when the train terminated. We had no concern about this as
we were used to sleeping in stations, but he insisted we come to his home
for the night. His home turned out to be a galvanised sheet metal hut on
the side of a muddy hill amongst thousands of similar huts. There was no
running water or any form of sanitation. His wife and two daughters
made us completely welcome when we arrived unannounced, and went
down to the standing water pipe to get water for us to wash in. Their sink
or washbasin was a concrete area a metre square with a slightly raised lip
around it. Used water etc flowed out through a hole in the wall and out
onto the muddy path that serviced the huts. The hut itself was no more
than six square metres and there was just the one room. The girls
somehow kept themselves clean and tidy in their bright saris despite the
deprivation. One landlord owned this whole hill we were told, and the
family were lucky to call this home. Each week they paid their rent. No
rent money and they were out, with another family ready to move in, such
was the shortage of ‘good’ accommodation. We were appalled.
With huge open areas of land all around it seemed ridiculous that
thousands of these poor people should be crowded into tiny huts on this
stinking hillside, but that was the way the planning system worked.
Nothing happened without bribes; only the rich had the money to bribe,
so they controlled the housing developments. Putting up a tin shack
would cost only a few thousand rupees, and you could get that back in
rent in a year or two, and then everything after that was profit, apart from
the further continuous bribes to officials. Put up a thousand shacks and
you soon became a rupee millionaire. You bled the poor and called this
corrupt system a free market. I am not a communist and I value free
enterprise, but this was rotten.

We slept that night in one corner of the concrete floor, the family in the
other. The next day we departed. We offered some money, but this of
course was not accepted; the poor had their values.

The railway, like all transport systems, develops around it an economic

infrastructure; a hinterland of businesses all linked in some way to the
system. In India this has been greatly refined as everyone tries to find an
economic niche in this main transport system. For instance, trains are
often halted in India, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for days and
there’s never an explanation of why. So there is no way of knowing how
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long the train will be held up. You just have to sit and wait. If it’s due to a
derailment somewhere it will take days. We got stuck in just such a way.
In fact we realized it was a derailment when on the first day we saw huge
cranes on rails passing us. We were stopped in the middle of nowhere.

The food needs of a whole train of perhaps 500 or 1000 people in a

deserted area were completely ignored by the Indian Railway. We were
just a train that was delayed. Not one of the Indian passengers
complained or showed any concern. Within a few hours food and drink
vendors arrived at the train. Within a day the noise of vendors selling
their wares around the train was constant. Where had they come from?
How did they know we were here? A little later two guys turned up
humping great big sacks. They made a small camp and lit a fire next to
the railway line. In their bags they had masses of cow horns. Working in
front of us deftly with the heat from the fire and sharp knives they
fashioned those cow horns into representations of storks and then they
travelled up and down the train offering them for sale for a few rupees. I
bought a pair for my Grandmother’s mantelpiece. Beggars also gathered
and so did palmists and other diviners and tricksters. An abandoned bit of
countryside had become an instant trade centre. Then finally as the train
recommenced its journey, the gathering dispersed.

Along with this economic infrastructure came a very high density of

people. There is little privacy for these mostly poorer Indians living if
they are lucky in those tin shacks, if not, in the open by the side of the
railway line. The traveller will witness all of these people’s daily
activities, in both public and private, sometimes-shocking acts.
In one town our train did one of its many long stops in the middle of what
looked like an enormous abandoned slag tip, full of small hills of grey
slag with brightly coloured chemical waste pools in the troughs. Into this
scene of desolation rode a man on a bike leading a newborn calf. He
stopped in front of the train carriages and without a glance up to
acknowledge the existence of the train or its’ passengers, he got off his
bike, took out a knife and cut the calf’s throat. He then proceeded to skin
the calf. He neatly took the hide off from just below the head, and
retaining only the bones of the lower feet in the pelt. He then folded the
new pelt up, tied it to the back of his bike and rode off leaving the starry
eyed calf’s head attached to a bloody red carcass. The train’s occupants
had only a few moments to reflect on this gruesome act and its’ mystery
when a second, even more gruesome act, followed.

High up in every bit of sky above the sub continent, squadrons of huge
buzzards patrol, gliding on ever-rising thermals. They see the smallest
detail below and they can identify any type of carrion from the moment it
becomes available. Within fifteen seconds of the bicycle butcher’s
departure the first buzzard landed. It was about three feet high with a
wingspan of perhaps six feet. It was followed a moment later by three or
four more, and then ten and twenty and many, many more. Rather than
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tuck in to the tasty morsel before them, they decided to play tug of war
with it, screaming at each other and flapping their ragged wings as they
dragged the torso to and fro through the pools of chemical waste, so that
they got wet, and the once bright red meat turned dark brown, then black.
More birds were landing all the time; there must have been two hundred
within ten minutes. The calf’s body slowly broke up into various dirty
black bits and pieces and groups of birds started separate tugs of war for
each of these. After a while some individuals or pairs of birds secured
their own little piece, which they devoured chemicals and all. Then they
fluttered to the tops of the slag hillocks and spread their wings to dry in
the sun. With perfect timing, as the calf’s denouement became complete,
the train started up again and we, staggered by what we had seen, were
carried away from the carnage. This whole event could have been the
production of a macabre theatre, held on stage, with the vultures as extras
and the bike man and calf taking curtain calls at the end to a stunned and
enthralled audience.

I realized afterwards, that right from the early part of our journey when
we left Western Europe in Yugoslavia, I had undergone a hardening
process, blocking out the poverty and harshness of life I saw around me. I
justified this by saying to myself that I could do nothing to help, I could
only witness. The death and defilement of that calf had shaken my
conviction more than the poverty I had seen around me. I remembered a
Dutch girl we had met at one of the border crossings. We had been
travelling through some very poor areas and had witnessed much poverty
and associated human misery. This girl was crying, her friends said she
had been crying for days and could not stop crying. She cried about all
the human misery she saw around her, she had to go back she said, back
to Holland. Everybody called it culture shock. It was a useful label. Now
I felt I understood her a little better.

Coming to rest

Our journey had lasted about three weeks when we arrived in Bombay.
From here we could take a train to Goa later in the week. Bombay has
quite a lot of grandiose imperial British buildings just like Delhi, but it
seemed even more crowded than Delhi. The buildings reminded me of
London, and Bombay also had lots of old London red double decker
buses. These faithful beasts of commuter burden limited to 55 passengers
on board at any one time, had been retired from their London routes only
to be shipped out to Bombay to spend the rest of their days slowly
rumbling along the pot holed Bombay roads carrying in excess of a
hundred passengers. In London the bus conductors kept a strict rule of
only seven people standing in the bus and only on the lower deck and no
standing on the access deck area. No such rules here, the passengers
inside these busses were crammed in by those getting on behind them all
pressing in right back to last person, who would be only just on board by
a toe hold on the platform with one hand grasping the vertical white
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safety pole on the outside of the bus. How the bus conductor ever
collected the fares I don’t know, I guess most of those passengers rode
free. Later when we used the urban railway system I witnessed the same
cramming on the carriages with perhaps ten people hanging out of the
doors whilst the train whistled along. I’m sure the accident rate was
appalling, but then how else could the system cope with such huge
quantities of passengers. One day, in order to escape the pressure of
people, we entered a much more sparsely occupied first-class carriage,
only to be accosted immediately by an inspector who fined us on the spot.

There was one other reminder of home; a very strange one. At that time
in London in the winter of 1972-3, troupes of sparsely clad shivering Hari
Krishna devotees could be seen parading up and down Oxford Street
chanting their mantra of enlightenment to the tinkling of small cymbals.
They had become an accepted part of the London scene after the police
who had at first arrested them for vagrancy, got a good telling off from
the press and stopped molesting them. Harmless was the label that
became attached to these guys, and everyone thought them nice people if
a bit silly. In Bombay I quite expected to see Indians chanting mantras, it
was part of their religion, but I did not expect to meet western Hari
Krishna troupes, yet here they were, and not just one or two, there must
have been hundreds of them. Around every corner of the city centre you
would hear their little finger symbols and their Hari Krishna dirge.

The reason for these surreal apparitions was sitting in a huge bell tent on
a large area of open ground in the middle of Bombay. It was their swami,
His Divine Grace AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Curiosity led us
to enter the bell tent. The swami was sitting perfectly still on a huge
raised golden plinth buried in a mountain of flowers and looking
extremely bored. He looked not a day under two hundred years old with
an incredibly wrinkled and pale Indo-European face. The 400 or so seats
in the tent were about half full, and about half of the audience were made
up of western devotees in Indian dress and the other half were made up of
Middle Class Indian families in western dress. I don’t know if the Indians
were there to be enlightened or amused. In fact they looked quite
bemused, like they had sneaked into a cinema without paying, but were
now bored with the film. At the precise moment we sat down, the music
in the tent ceased and the Swarmi became suddenly animated, (like
someone had connected his batteries). He started to talk. He said that he
had tried very hard for many years to bring some enlightenment to the
minds of westerners, but had all of his efforts confounded; nothing of
spiritual value seemed to enter their confuddled western heads. Then he
had a brilliant idea, according to the Indian scriptures, God, Krishna had
said that there were many ways to enlightenment; through love, through
learning; through fasting and self denial, through serving others - many
many ways, but also through just repeating his name. That was it! These
dense westerners could be brought to enlightenment by just chanting
God’s name. The swami gathered together a group of westerners and
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taught them to chant. It worked; they got it. The rest, as they say, is
history. And here he was today in a huge bell tent talking to a group of
bemused middle class Indians, and being bored out of his skull, and they
likewise being bored out of their skulls. Well, that’s show business for
you.

Although I found him honest and good and full of that thing we in the
west call charisma, I think I’d prefer a less demeaning holy man.

We also met another Indian celebrity on the day we arrived at Bombay

Railway Station, at least he told us he was a celebrity. We had detrained
hungry and had entered a slightly smarter than average restaurant in the
Station. As we tucked into some rather good Indian vegetarian food a
chap on the next table smiled and nodded towards us, spoke to us in good
English and we entered into conversation. He was small and dapper,
smartly dressed and in his 30’s. He said he was a Bollywood film star and
took major parts in non-Hindi films. Now there were a large number of
regions in India where the spoken language is not Hindi, and it seemed
that Bollywood catered for these regions with their own language films.
As he chatted away very pleasantly asking about our journey and talking
about the Indian film industry, both Graham and I thought ‘Yes, you are
as much a film star as I am.’ So we were both very shocked therefore
when a gaggle of young Indian girls all pie eyed and giggling came up
and asked the star for his autograph. He was a film star! A continual flow
of teenagers came up to his table all woozy at the proximity of their idol.

He ascertained that we were looking for a hotel and invited us back to his
place. Now I’d seen a picture of movie star homes in that Afghanistan
movie house. He would have a huge pool in the grounds of his mansion
and it would be circled with beautiful western girls in bikinis who would
ply us with drinks and other lovely things. Wow – Bollywood here we
come!

The reality was however a little different; a one bed-roomed flat in a

Bombay high-rise apartment building with cement floors and a cold
shower. So this was how the stars lived in India. We stayed with him the
three days till we left for Goa. Giggling Indian girls, who had come into
Bombay from the sticks just to see their star, and get his autograph,
continually besieged the flat. We left him each day and rode into Bombay
centre on the over packed trains to see the sights. When we came back in
the evening there would still be girls around. He would then take us out to
restaurants, he said to show us good Indian cuisine, but I think he did it to
show us off. I got the idea that we were like trophies; it was cool to
associate with westerners, it showed you were worldly. Having said that,
he was everything that kindness could be, explaining Indian life to us, and
later advising us on our forward journey. When we left him we didn’t
offer him money, but Graham left him a pen that he had much admired.

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It was time to meet Fred again. We set off by rail for Goa. The railway
line to Goa passed through dense forest; almost jungle, the first dense
vegetation we had seen. Goa had been a little Portuguese enclave until
Indian Army tanks rolled in, in the early 1960’s. The Portuguese had used
Goa as a Trading Station. They left the tropical forests mostly intact and
despite the fact that the natives had converted to Catholicism there was no
over population problem. Goa had hundreds of miles of beautiful sun
filled, palm fringed, silver sand beaches, Goans were friendly,
accommodation was low cost, or free if you made your own hut on the
beach, and the food was delicious, plentiful and cheap. If you were
looking for a place where you need do nothing, this was the place to do it.
This was hippy heaven.

We arrived at midday and took a bus from the station to Colva beach
where we were to meet Fred. There were a few houses and a church on
the road to the beach and a restaurant with a shaded patio as you arrived
at the beach itself. The beach was a continuous ribbon of silver sand
fringed by palm trees, which looked out over a beautiful deep blue ocean.
One or two fishing boats were pulled up on the sand. The sun, however,
was quite fierce. We entered the restaurant, ordered some food and asked
about accommodation. There were three choices; a ‘hotel’ back up the
road, a bit like the hotels we had stayed at before, or we could stay in one
of the native huts for a few rupees (pennies really), or build our own
shelter. We chose the native huts and were directed to the fishing village
a few hundred yards away. On enquiry we were shown a palm-thatched
hut that looked quite suitable, paid our rent and moved in. It was dark in
the hut and our eyes took time to adjust as we went in and out. There
were bits of fishing gear lying around, but we made ourselves quite
comfortable in one corner. Huge palm trees shaded the hut, and there was
lots of natural ventilation, i.e. holes in the walls and roof, so it was not
stuffy. On the negative side, if you were squeamish there was a problem;
the hut had existing tenants; hundreds and hundreds of enormous spiders.
One had made a beautiful round marquee-like web almost floating in the
air just above where my head laid when I climbed into my sleeping bag.
If you could accept them for what they were then you could see the up
side; in this hut flies would never plague you. On the beach side of the
village was a well of sweet water where you served yourself by lowering
half a tin can down on a rope. Coming out of sea after a swim you could
douse yourself in the cold water taken up from the well in order to
remove the salt from your skin.

We roved the beaches talking to people and searched for Fred, but he was
not there. Sometimes we saw beautiful girls completely naked and
beautifully tanned coming stoned out of the self made beach huts. Vast
hordes of Indian men came down to the beaches on the weekends to see
these girls. They would spread out in a line across the beach from the
waters edge to the palm trees and walk up to twenty miles along the soft

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sand in the blazing sun in the hope of catching sight of these beauties,
who were fabled as ‘free love western lovelies’ in the Indian press.
At night with the shining moon, the long beaches are enchanting, but
beware if you decide on a barefoot walk by the water’s edge. A horrible
shock awaited you. The tidal area was crawling with thousands of crabs,
some of which could scuttle enormously fast across your feet. If you
panicked and ran you were likely to tread on three or four more, their
hard shells cutting into your feet. It gives you the shivers. No one, not
even the natives walk there at night.

Apart from the natives and the spiders and the night crabs, there was one
other group of local inhabitants that must be mentioned, the pigs. Huge
great sows installed in a mud pen adjacent to the village lavatory. This
lavatory like most in India consisted of cubicle with two bricks on the
floor. You placed your feet on the bricks and squatted down. For anyone
with a bad heart their first squat might be their last. As I squatted there
that first time, I heard a grunt. Looking down below my dangling
wedding tackle I saw the most enormous hairy snout sniffing up my bum.
In a second it gulped down the you-know-what I had just produced.
During that second I reacted. Jumping out of my squatting position, I
turned, picked up a handful of sand and small stones and threw it at the
snout, which retreated with a whelp. After I had explained what had
happened to a delirious Graham, who couldn’t stop convulsing with
laughter, I calmed down. Obviously this was an important part of the
villager’s food chain. I was glad at that point that I was a vegetarian.

Fred was not at the beach. We had looked up and down and talked to
everyone. He was definitely not there. So we settled down and relaxed
with a daily routine of doing nothing but swimming, sleeping, eating and
relaxing. The restaurant was the gathering point for everyone on the
beach. The food was good and plentiful and cheap. The proprietor was
happy for you to spend all day there if you wished and I found the
company very relaxing. Graham had brought a pocket chess set with him,
which we used if the train journeys became at all tedious. The restaurant
had a full sized chess set, which was much nicer. We got friendly with an
American, who came over to watch us play. He said, and I believed him,
that he was a contemporary of Bobby Fischer, the world champion and
had played with him in New York’s Central Park. He said at that time
anyone could play Fischer for $10. When I expressed surprise that
Fischer would play a game for just $10, he said they were very short
games; Bobby would make about seven to ten moves then say ‘ you lose’
and not play anymore. If the opponent challenged this Bobby would
explain how he had lost through his board position. It seemed unless you
dominated the middle of the board, you lost. You could lose a game in as
little as seven moves, wow!

The American eventually sat down opposite me to play. I was not very
good, in fact I would say I was lousy. I didn’t have the concentration
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needed and didn’t think through the moves. If I found someone at my
level then the games were fun. This guy was serious business. I needed to
concentrate big time. He was obviously showing off as he developed his
complicated position in the middle of the board, hardly hesitating
between moves. I must have spent three to five minutes on each move. I
knew he was setting me up to take me apart and I studied and studied the
board. Suddenly I saw the possibility of mate in four moves, if he didn’t
see it, that is. He didn’t seem too absorbed in the game talking to people
around us, and I’m sure this was part of his showing off. I made my first
move of the four. He didn’t see anything dangerous and moved one of his
pawns. I took my time before I made each of the two next moves. He
continued as before. Then BANG! Mate, I had him. He could not believe
it. How could he lose to such an amateur? It was impossible.

He challenged me to a re-match, this time he concentrated, and he took

me apart limb from limb. Another? No, I knew he would win every match
now. I wanted to walk away with the conceit that I had beaten a
contemporary of Bobby Fischer and that he had not won against me more
times than I had against him.

The sun bears down through the day on the beach so most sought shade
and coolness. Even the local mongrel, which slept under a palm tree near
the restaurant hoping for scraps, sat in the shade of the trunk of the tree.
As the sun moved around the sky so the mongrel shifted his position to
get back into the shade. You could almost tell the time from his position
by the palm. We had taken off our lovely water buffalo leather sandals at
the beach; no one wore shoes here, but this did cause me a problem when
once again Hash appeared.

Of course drugs were everywhere, but we ignored them, Graham, because

he was a straight up and down teacher who wouldn’t contemplate such
things, and me because I didn’t want to get stoned unless the environment
was right. One day however I was caught out. I was invited to a small hut
just erected on the beach by an Afghan and a red headed English boy
called, of course, Ginger. These two were as thick as thieves. In fact I
think they were thieves. Ginger had survived for two years on the beaches
without money. The Afghan had found and joined him after running away
from military service. Ginger had discovered that the Afghan could cook
and so they decided to open a café on the beach. I was invited to its
opening. We sat inside the palm frond walls and sipped tea. Then the
Afghan brought in cakes. These were all there was to eat and these were
Hash cakes. I felt obliged to buy a couple and ate them. The cakes did not
taste too bad. They tasted like currant cak……..ZONK! I hit a brick wall
at one hundred miles an hour. It wasn’t a bad experience, but sitting there
for perhaps a minute or was it two hours I felt decidedly uncomfortable.
There was no stimulus, nothing was said, nothing to look at, no music to
listen too. I said goodbye and wobbled out of the hut into the blazing sun.

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At first I could see nothing, only blinding brightness, but my feet, oh my
god, the sun-heated sand pierced the soft soles of my feet like a thousand
burning Gillette blades. The pain was out of this world and into the next. I
staggered up though the soft sand, the pain searing through the soles of
my feet, and eventually fell in a heap on my sleeping bag in the hut.
‘That’s it’ I thought when I awoke later. ‘There’s too much pain in having
casual drug fun, I quit.’

Apart from that, our time on the beach was what might be called idyllic,
but for two stimulus hungry people the idyll soon got boring. Unlike most
westerners who stayed in Goa, we wanted more than nothing to do. I
wanted something to focus on, and Graham wanted the rest of India.

Fred failed to show up and after a week we both agreed we needed to

move on. Later when I met Fred again in England it transpired that he had
been in Goa at the same time but on a different beach, Calengute. Our
carefully laid plan had failed over a basic assumption; that we knew
where the other would be. Even today I am sure I had the correct beach
and Fred that he had the correct one. When Fred realized we were not
going to show he took a ferryboat back to Bombay and had a fleeting
liaison on board with a Bollywood starlet in a lifeboat. He then travelled
by train back to Delhi, and found someone who needed drivers to take a
Volkswagen bus back to Europe, after which he hitch hiked home.

Graham and I travelled back to Bombay, where we met some travellers

who told us of Temple near Bombay where we could stay for free. Being
low on money, this seemed a reasonable idea. We took a suburban train
and arrived at a little village called Dahanu Road. The Temple was
situated at Dahanu Beach a few miles away and there was a bus
connecting the two. However it was late evening and the buses had
ceased. We saw a hotel sign and went to investigate. The owner showed
us a dormitory room with a line of bodies already asleep on the hard
floor. I could hear a strange buzzing in the room, which took me a
moment to identify. Flying high around the ceiling were a squadron of
mosquitoes. I watched as one after another they hovered, stopped
buzzing, and then dropped like stones onto their dinner resting there on
the floor. We decided to take our chances and walk to the Temple.

The countryside around us in the late evening was quite beautiful, huge
water buffalos were soaking in the village pond and gangs of children ran
along besides us keen to find out more about we strange westerners. One
little boy spoke English and when I told him where we came from his
eyes misted over and he said he dreamed of living there one day. We
walked out of the village beyond the children and down to a beach about
a mile away. Then following instructions we turned right and walked
another two miles to the temple.

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The temple was not a westerner’s idea of what an Indian temple should
look like. It was a single storey cement built compound across from the
beach. The gate was locked, but we knocked and waited not sure what to
expect. A little Indian, no more than 5 foot or so opened the door and
with a big smile welcomed us. He was the temple keeper. Immediately he
asked if we were tired and showed us to a room, or cell would be a better
description, like a holy order cell but more sparse, there was not a stick of
furniture in it. He asked us if this was OK, then said good night and
departed. We rolled out our sleeping bags, stuffed some clothes into the
sleeping bag cover as a pillow and went into a long refreshingly deep
sleep in the cool of the cell. Heaven.

The next day he showed us around. The temple building formed a square
around a big yard. Nearly all the other rooms in the compound building
were cells like ours, but there were no other visitors occupying them. He
then showed us into the Temple Chamber. There seated in a golden chair
on a plinth was a full sized model of a man, Dressed in western clothes
the model was in every respect lifelike, from the grip he had on the chair
armrests to the penetrating eyes. This was a statue of Sai Baba, an Indian
holy man revered by millions of Indians. Indian Holy men die and are re-
incarnated at regular intervals, so this incarnation in western clothes must
have been a recent one.

When we asked, the keeper said we could stay as long as we wished for
free. He offered to make us food each day for a few rupees, to which we
willing agreed. Apart from us, the keeper and his little son, and a little
puppy dog tied up in the courtyard, there was no one else around. Graham
loved it. Goa had had a sort of inverted stress to it, like an enforced ‘do
nothing’. Here he felt comfortable and happy. He could write the long
letters he loved at his complete leisure. He could walk out of the
compound gate onto the beach and swim in the sea for as long as he
wished hardly seeing a soul. The seawater at Duhanu was not as blue as
Goa, I think it had estuary water mixed in it, but there were no currents
and Graham liked it right enough. He read all his books, took his meals
and wandered into the village with me to shop in the little market for fruit
or wander into one of the shed-like cafes for something to eat or drink.

The tea or ‘chai’ was something special, made with condensed milk, hot
water and tealeaves in a little container, which the café owner would hang
on a string and whiz around his head. A meal of curried vegetables cost
no more than a few rupees and we found we could live comfortably on
the equivalent of five pence a day.

As for me, I got out my huge tome on the Bagavad Gita and started to
read. We stayed in the temple for three weeks, completely relaxed.

After a few days we received an invitation to tea from a prominent

landowner. The caretaker knew little about him except that he was a
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Persian. This information turned out not to be true, only his ancestors
were from Persia (Iran). He welcomed us into his home and we took tea
on the porch of his house. His people, he said, were Parsis, they followed
the ancient Zoroastrian Fire Worship religion but kept a low profile in
modern India. His ancestors had arrived with the technology for making
arid areas bloom, and by husbanding the water supply they had created
huge areas of fruit trees and lovely gardens. He had us try some fruit,
which tasted very pleasant. He asked about us and about our journey and
then at the end told us that we were always welcome to come again. I am
not sure if there was any reason for his invitation except curiosity, but he
was very kind.

I swam a bit with Graham, but I am a very weak swimmer, hate water in
my face or worse up my nose or throat and one day I overstretched
myself. There was a rowing boat anchored out about two hundred yards
from the shore. Graham challenged me to swim to it through the choppy
water and he swam off, so I followed. He then swam back with me still
making my way out. When I got to the boat I was exhausted by my
poorly co-ordinated swimming action. The boat was too high for me to
climb into. I turned for the beach but after fifty yards could not swim any
further. In the rough water the waves kept covering my head. I was
exhausted and terrified of drowning. I couldn’t swim any more. With the
last of my strength I waved and shouted at Graham. He waved cheerily
back.

Giving up the swimming I rolled on my back, and that, I think saved me.
My face out of the water I could kick with my feet and slowly, painfully
I came back to shore completely exhausted and vowing never to enter the
sea again.

As with most Indian habitations there were packs of feral dogs around.
They weren’t hostile, but Indians ignore them and would for the most part
not think of being kind to them in any way. The puppy tied up in the
Temple compound was from a feral dog mother. Each day she came and
visited him in the compound and if he was lucky he would get to suckle
from her. The caretaker had taken the puppy to entertain his little son.
Now it is quite certain that dogs need people, we have bred them to a
point over thousands of years where people matter most to them, not
other dogs. These feral dogs followed us around on the beach hoping for
a stroke we occasionally gave them or scrap of food. We didn’t
encourage them too much because they were full of fleas, but the puppy’s
mother was a special favourite and we fed her many scraps. Theses dogs
would however eat anything. Harking back to the pig toilet episode in
Goa, here it was exactly the same except a dog muzzle would appear
under your thighs. I also witnessed a dog eating another dead dog that had
been washed up above the high water mark on the shore. Their habits did
not ingratiate them to us, but their eyes always seemed to beg our
attention.
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There were times when the temple would get busy. Coach loads of
mainly middle-aged Hindu women would arrive suddenly and the temple
would fill with colour and sound. Many of them toured India, travelling
to all the holy sites, exactly like middle-aged catholic women did in
Europe. Their devotions however were a bit more hands on than
European women. They would adorn Sai Baba with wreathes of flowers,
light incense and chant their Vedic songs accompanying themselves with
small cymbals. They, in fact, would lead the prayers. The place would
come alive as these busy women made a beautiful place for their holy
saint.

This was a lovely time for Graham and I and we would sit quietly by the
wall of the temple drinking in the scene. We have a great problem in the
West understanding the Hindu religion and Indians have a great problem
understanding why we can’t understand them. Here are some points we
westerners might consider:

Firstly, there is no past tense in Hindi; but there is a ‘nowness’ about

everything: their history, their holy texts are now.

Secondly, there is no clear distinction in many Hindu minds between a

deity and a holy man, although there are degrees of spirituality. Add to
that the certainty of reincarnation, which makes a lot more sense if you do
believe in a spiritual dimension outside of our bodies and brains.

Personally, once I accepted these premises, I felt I got on much better in

my understanding.

As well as the coach parties there were individual pilgrims, who turned
up for a few days of retreat or rest. One old man, made mountains of food
and insisted that everyone eat it. He just seemed happy watching others
devour his own prepared meals, which were delicious.

The keeper relied on these visitors for his income. He was unpaid in his
job and lived on the handouts and leftovers from these visits. That is not
to say that he considered himself poor or destitute. He had an excellent
position compared to the poor farmers. Farmers and their situation are the
yardstick by which people in India compared themselves. Do you have a
larger income than a farmer? Do you work less hard than a farmer?
Actually you should be able to answer yes to both of these questions
otherwise you are hard done by indeed. Dahanu like all other villages and
towns was full of little shops with shopkeepers or restaurateurs staying
open all hours just to sell a few rupees worth of goods or food. We would
often stop on our way to the market at a little open-air café for a bottle of
coke. We never saw another customer there. For the shopkeepers this
boring poverty and idleness is much better than the grinding poverty and

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back breaking work of their farmer opposites; the farmers are definitely
lower on the social ladder, long live boring shop keeping.

Our pleasurable wanderings took up only part of our day, and we slept
long and deep and read copiously. The Gita was a revelation to me. I read
it methodically, one stanza at a time, from the word for word
Sanskrit/English translation, through the English texts, the commentaries
by scholars and special word definitions.

I had travelled thousands of miles without any clear purpose except to

experience new things, which indeed had happened; People had pointed
guns at me, I had been frozen and then overheated, spat at, blown up, tied
up in knots, and nearly drowned. I had been ship wrecked in a desert and
repudiated as a lover, and suffered torture under drugs, but then there had
also been so many magical moments, so much generosity and kindness,
even a beggar had taken pity on me.

I had not come to India for enlightenment and my purchase of a religious

text had been on a whim, but in that temple in the peacefulness of that
backwater, with nothing other than friendly influences all around me I
had some rare and precious time to reflect and consider the meaning of
things and I learnt something I will never forget.

The story of the Gita covers the time of a great battle, where Arjuna, the
hero, supported by his God, Krishna, who has taken the form of his
charioteer has to fight and kill members of his own family. This terrible
paradox of not being able to fulfil your destiny without causing terrible
things around you, and so therefore often refraining from action at all is
discussed and explained, along with the reasons for evil actions; our
passions or desires for self. In the process of this explanation Krishna
reveals and opens up an understanding of the nature of the spiritual
universe to Arjuna. Here are a few quotes from the text that may or may
not make you think about our earthly condition:

5. The senses, they say, are high; higher than the senses is the
thought-organ (brain); But higher than the thought organ is the
consciousness; While higher than the consciousness is He (the
soul- you).

6. One should lift up the self by the self, and should not let the self
down; for the self is the self's only friend, and the self is the self's
only enemy.

7. Let the disciplined man ever discipline himself, abiding in a secret

place, Solitary, restraining his thoughts and soul, Free from
aspirations and without possessions.

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 8. 'I am (in effect) doing nothing at all!' -- so the disciplined man
should think, knowing the truth, when he sees, hears, touches,
smells, eats, walks, sleeps, breathes.

One evening, towards the end of our stay, when I had completed my
study, I walked out of the compound onto the shoulder of the road along
the beach to watch the sun go down. Sunsets over the Indian Ocean are so
beautiful, especially when as on that evening there is some cloud to
reflect the colour of the sun as it turns from brilliant gold to deep crimson
during its’ descent into the sea. There was no rush to do anything that
night; I had all the time in the world. I could stay there until every drop of
light had gone from the western sky. I watched as the sun melted away
into the sea and the brilliant colours of sun, sea and sky mixed together
then gently faded off. The spectacular sun set left a bright glow in the
clouds near the horizon. Slowly the light diminished, but after an hour
there was still some light there. I waited on. After two hours I could still
detect light. After the third hour I was still sure all the light was not gone.
I watched on for one more hour, but the light never completely vanished.
There was to be no sudden end to the light and I would not witness its
moment of demise, but I had witnessed a graduation of change, so gentle,
so subtle, that it left me quite tranquil. I turned and went back to the
compound and into my sleeping bag for a very deep and peaceful sleep.

After three weeks at the temple Graham and I agreed to move on. My
money was running out and I didn’t want to ask Graham for help.
We returned to busy Bombay and on a fellow traveller’s recommendation
we stayed at a seamen’s hostel. This was clean and cool and relaxed. I felt
my journey to India, this time, was over. Graham wanted to go on to
Calcutta and then Sri Lanka. I went to a travel shop and found I could
return to London by Air India for about £100. I had only $20 left, less
than £10. I cabled Chris in London and she cabled £100 back. I bought
my ticket, and with most of my remaining Indian rupees bought the most
beautiful hand carved sandal wood statue of Krishna and his lover,
Radha, and a small one of Ganesh from the seaman’s hostel shop. The
next day I said goodbye to Graham and promised to keep in touch, then I
travelled by taxi to the airport and boarded a 707 for London Heathrow.

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Statue of Krishna and
Radha mounted on
Venetian Plinth.

The trip back took sixteen hours, which seemed inordinately long, even
though it had taken months to go the other way. We touched down once
in Beirut, which looked really pretty; this was before the wars that
destroyed it.

At London Airport I walked through Customs and Immigration dressed in

a green longi and leather sandals with a cane walking stick over my
shoulder carrying a tied orange longi loaded with some of my bits and
pieces and I carried in my other hand a small battered and torn green
canvas bag with its seems split, stuffed full. The immigration officer took
my passport and looked me up and down. Smirking, he said ‘I know what
you’ve been up to.’

Oh no he didn’t.

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