On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (44 page)

Like my accountant, Stuart, Maggie was only in her fifties.

We caught the plane to Australia a few days later, bereft of Maggie Noach, and spent Christmas with Shaney, Mark and the three boys on Phillip Island south of Melbourne, where we saw the mutton birds flying in of an evening. We played cricket on the beach and went to see the small fairy penguins march up the sands to their homes as the mid-summer sun went down. It was a strange Christmas with the heat and the flies, but then Aussies do live in this upside-down world.

Then Annette and I went off with Pete and Carolyn to Tasmania, to the Bay of Fires, where we stayed at a fabulous house we had exchanged with two KLM stewards for two weeks in our Spanish apartment. There’s not much to say about our stay on Tasmania, except that it is one of most beautiful islands on this Earth. The wildlife was prolific and mostly visible around twilight. We saw wild wombats, pademelons (small kangaroos), echidnas, blue-tongued lizards and a huge variety of birds including brilliant blue fairy wrens. There were dolphins that roamed the surf below our beach house, the water of which was absolutely freezing, as it stretches out into the South Polar Ocean. Tasmania is the Botanic garden of southern Australia.

Much later we did another house exchange with a family who owned a deconsecrated wooden church in a ghost town near Ballarat. The wooden buildings had sprung up during the 19th century golf rush and many were now empty and derelict. It would be a great setting for a vampire movie. Our editor friend Lesley Levene was with us for a couple of weeks. She refused to sleep upstairs, which was the darkest part of the house and I didn’t blame her. Here the scenery was the opposite to Tasmania, being mostly dry and sandy with sparse vegetation. One day I said to the girls, ‘I’ll drive you somewhere for a cup of tea and a cake.’ Foolish man. We drove, and we drove, and we drove, and all we found was empty wilderness.

The car was almost out of petrol when we came across a small settlement of about a dozen shacks. One of the shacks had a sign outside which read: TRADING POST. We went in and found a combination general store, cafe and post office, though all those titles were a little bit highbrow for the rickety wooden building we had entered. We ordered tea and sat on tattered camping chairs at a table whose fourth leg was about three centimetres shorter than its brothers. The tea came in mugs and with a good deal of chat from the hostess.

After a few minutes an Aborigine man entered, sat down with us and began, without ceremony, to talk. ‘Anyway, I’ve just been out in the bush and Willy lit a fire. I told him there’s a drought on and the fire might spread but he took no notice. You’ve got be careful of fires in this weather . . . etc etc etc.’ He was a nice old man who seemed keen on company and I asked him where the nearest petrol station might be. He said, ‘Joe’s got one in his back yard, three doors up.’ So I drove to Joe’s and knocked on the door of his shack. Eventually Joe answered and I asked, ‘Can I fill my tank? I’m almost out.’ Joe pointed to a rusty old hand-pump in the back garden and said, ‘Help yourself, mate.’ I filled up and paid him no more than I would a petrol station.

By that time Lesley had asked the woman in the trading post if there was anything of interest in the region. The woman directed us to the ‘sculptures’ out on a dust road a few miles away. On our way back to Ballarat we found these carved tree trunks which lined the highway and told the history of Australia, from prisoners and settlers, to the First and Second World Wars. They were beautifully crafted, standing out in the middle of nowhere, and had probably only been seen by a handful of visitors at the most. All around us was the Australian bush, a landscape of dust and scrub, and here were these wonderful sculptures. No name of the artist could be found anywhere, I would have guessed they had been carved with a chain saw by a local man. I would definitely replace the bricks in Tate Britain with one of these works of art.

There wasn’t a great deal to do in Ballarat. Their lake had dried up, since there was an eleven-year drought in Victoria state and thus the vegetation in the park was not in any great shape. We were taken around a local graveyard by one of the residents of the town. In that graveyard was the tomb of young man in his late teens. The woman explained that he was a relative of hers who had died in a car crash.

‘He was going too fast,’ she said.

Since arriving in Australia and especially around St Kilda where Shaney lived, we had experienced young men driving like maniacs, yelling out of their car windows at passers-by, and had been told they were ‘hoons’, the equivalent of Britain’s yobs.

‘Was he a hoon?’ I asked her.

She looked thoughtful for a moment, then replied, ‘No, I wouldn’t say as bad as a hoon – more of a larrikin.’

I liked that. It seemed there were three levels of bad behaviour in young men. Starting with the worst: hoons, revheads, larrikins.

Lesley stayed with us at the Worths’ for a few more days before going on to New Zealand. We oscillated between Pete and Carolyn’s house and Shaney and Mark’s place. The two were not more than six miles apart. We also went to Melbourne Quakers’ Meeting House while we were there, which was well attended. When we had first arrived in Melbourne we had purchased second hand bikes and did most of our town roaming on those. Where it was too far to ride we used the tram system which connects almost every area of Melbourne. It’s a city with art galleries, an opera house, a huge cricket ground, several golf courses, a Formula One race track, museums, open air markets, a seaside, a port, an Olympic swimming pool – just about anything you could want – all within a few square miles. I could live there very easily. The Aussies may make fun of Poms, but Captain Cook and Captain Flinders are great heroes of the Aussies. They name railway stations and towns after them, so you’ve got to think that deep down, they’re just kidding.

Sport of course, is massively big in Oz. The boys, Conrad, Christian and Jordan, were easily accepted being good at cricket, rugby and five-a-side footy. However, the Ashes of 2006/7 were on during our stay and any Barmy Army fan will tell you it was a disaster from the English point of view. The ‘England and Wales Cricket Team’ were slaughtered at all five venues. I went to the Melbourne games with my three grandsons and my son-in-law, all decked out in George Cross Flags, only to witness the complete destruction of Vaughan’s miserable team. Even the great Freddy Flintoff couldn’t save them. The only cause for a smile were the songs of the Barmy Army, who sang, ‘God save YOUR gracious queen, long live YOUR noble queen . . . long may she reign over YOU . . .’ all the while pointing at the stands where the Aussie fans were staring with seething eyes at the Pom contingent. They also sang a parody of Waltzing Matilda – something about taking her behind the bike sheds for a shag – which brought a smile to my face and a glower to those who love the Banjo Patterson folk song.

True enough though, cricket is the National sport of the Antipodes and though we may win occasionally, it can never last very long, because every kid in every back yard of Melbourne – and indeed all the other cities and towns – has a cricket bat in his hand and stumps in the lawn. In Engand I never see kids playing cricket, except on the beach. Only football. It’s only because we’ve got fifty million people to help make up a team, and even then we find we’re asking the South Africans to lend a hand in defeating the Aussies.

The cricket came and went. In our last few weeks of our long stay in Australia Annette and I took a trip up the Murray River from Adelaide on a paddle boat. The bird life alone was fantastic. I spent all day, every day on the deck photographing spoonbills, darters, pelicans, eagles, hawks and scores of others. Annette read and painted, occasionally lifting her head when I gave an excited yell and pointed at some creature doing something natural. There’s nothing for the soul like it, just drifting slowly along a great river, watching the wilderness slide by on either side. The wildlife is not wary of a great lump of wood out on the water, even if it is carrying a bundle of humans. Animals and birds seem to know when we are safely contained and no threat to them. If they are grazers, after one lazy look they carry on grazing. If they are killers, they do not even bother with the look: they pounce, they stoop, they strike, they eat their prey right in front of your wincing face.

~

In the early part of the new millennium Annette was recruited by one of our Hong Kong friends to teach as a volunteer at a school in Bihar, Northern India, near the border of Bangladesh. Bihar is perhaps the poorest state in India. An eye doctor who came to Britain early in his career founded the school in his old village, where he had grown up as an untouchable. His name was Mahto – I use the past tense for Dr Mahto recently died of old age – and somehow he was educated despite his low status. When he became relatively rich, by Indian standards, he wanted to give something back. English is a national language in India but many of the rural people speak it so poorly they have difficulty in being understood by Europeans. If they want to get a job in telecommunications, which many of them do, they have to iron out their accents and learn to speak English a great deal more slowly.

Once a year Annette has paid for her own air fare and internal fares to get to the school, where she and her friend Roz, attempt to help the children with their pronunciation of English. They stay a month living at the school in basic conditions. I remember a friend, who knew the extreme temperatures of the climate, saying to Annette:

‘Do you have air conditioning?’

‘Air conditioning?’ Annette replied. ‘We don’t have
windows
.’

The whole school, including visitors, live on buffalo milk and bean curds. At night there are watchmen patrolling, it being a dangerous area for bandits, who blow whistles to communicate. Naturally those whistles wake anyone who is not used to the sound. Annette finds the visits rewarding but exhausting, taking handfuls of sleeping tablets with her. She has not long done her final visit, having developed deep vein thrombosis and having entered her late sixties. The time has come to retire from her retirement work abroad.

Here’s a short story of resourcefulness in the young.

One of her thirteen-year-old pupils at the school, paid for his own school fees by passing on the knowledge he gained in the classroom. He gathered local children even poorer than himself in the shade of a tamarisk tree after daily lessons. There he charged them one rupee to teach them what he had learned in class that day. In this way he gained an education and helped to raise that of the other village children. We, who have so much more in the West, need to adjust our values.

~

Before Annette was to start her visits to the school in Bihar we decided to investigate India together. It was Fe Evans, Chris’s lovely and adventurous young wife, who whetted our palates for a taste of this vast exotic country. Fe had talked to us about her backpacking years in India and Nepal and it sounded great. Also I was preparing to write two novels set in North India, which meant that I could get tax relief for research, probably the only bonus a writer gets.

‘You’ve done Malaysia to death,’ Fe had said, a couple of times. ‘Try India – you won’t regret it.’

And we haven’t.

Our first visit was to the old perennial, the golden triangle. We went out of season and during a SARS epidemic thus ensuring that we were the only two tourists in the whole subcontinent. This was a good thing because the locals drive the wrong way down motorways, weave around potholes and end up on the wrong side of the road, triple-overtake on blind corners and force each other into ditches. Add to that elephants wandering down dual carriageways, slow camel carts crossing high-speed junctions and the odd pack of dogs careering through the traffic chaos and we might well have never returned to England.

We spent much time assisting people getting their cars out of ditches and gawping at horrific accidents. The temperatures were around fifty degrees Celsius. Mighty, mighty hot. One day, out in the Rajastan wastelands (they had been suffering a several-years drought) the air conditioning in the Fiat Panda exploded, scaring the hell out of us and our driver, Subish. In order to have some air in the car he dropped the front windscreen and we drove into a cloud of unbreathable dust and grit all the way across the plains to Jaipur. Even when the air was clean the wind came from a bank of hair driers on at full blast. When we got to the outskirts we learned our hotel had been closed for two years.

In the late 1900s the Indian government had told its rajahs and maharajas that the state would no longer assist with the funding of aristocrats’ estates, so we were staying at palaces and hunting lodges that had by necessity been turned into hotels. A traditional tour tailor-made to our requirements. These places were stunningly beautiful of course, with all the magnificent architecture one associates with an eastern palace. And in each place we stayed we were the only guests, which had the staff hovering and swooping on our every need. At the hunting lodges we found waiters wanted to take us out and show us the bird life of the region and name the trees for us, which of course was just superb.

I gathered a huge amount of information for my book,
Rogue Officer
, set during the Indian Mutiny, also called the Sepoy Rebellion or the First War of Independence, depending on your nationality. In the lodges too there were photographs of the British Raj – Indian princes and British colonels – each with one foot on a dead tiger. We abhor such killing now of course, but this was of its time and as such, fascinating to see the arrogant expressions and the display of pomp and riches.

At Jaipur we went to the Indian Tourist Agency to remonstrate with them over a closed hotel.

‘You must show you are very angry with them,’ said Subish. ‘You must hit the table with your fist and demand the best compensation.’

That’s probably what Subish would have done, but westerners with inhibitions were probably going to say, ‘Excuse me, sir, but the hotel you sent us to does not exist. Can you help us?’