ERIC NEWBY
Departures and Arrivals

Dedication

To Wanda with love

Many thanks to Lucinda McNeile and Kate Morris for all their help

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Up to Ther Bend and Back

Travels with a Baby

Days and Nights on the Orient Express

Under the Crust of Coober Pedy

Walking the Plank

Follies and Grottoes

Journey through Syria

The Palio

Seeing the World on Two Wheels

Some Canals

The Land of the Camels

The Land of the Elephants

Two Degrees West

In Calabria

Way Out in Anatolia

Winter in Beijing

The Yemen

A Brief Trip to the Pontine Archipelago

Below the Purbeck Hills

Plates

Index

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Whatever else we remember of our travels, we remember our departures and arrivals. Often they are the most enduring of all our memories of them. In 1963, together with Wanda, my wife, I embarked on the Ganges in an open boat to row from the foothills of the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean. Some 200 metres from our starting point, from which we had been seen off by an old man who dropped sacred sweets on us as provisions for the journey, and some 1,900 kilometres short of our destination in the Bay of Bengal, the boat grounded in some 40 centimetres of water which proved to be the uniform depth of the Ganges at this season at this point, and it took five-and-a-half days to cover the next 56 kilometres, mostly by pushing it.

Nothing in the course of the entire trip, which took three months to accomplish, left such an indelible imprint on our minds as the moment when we discovered that the Ganges was only 40 centimetres deep and that our boat drew 46 centimetres when loaded.

To depart is often more satisfying than to arrive unless you are the first on the scene. Nothing was more deflationary to Scott and his companions than to find that they were the second party to reach the South Pole. Would I have set off at all if I had known what the journey would be like or what I was going to find at my destination are questions I have often asked myself, reminded of the wartime poster which read ‘Don’t waste food! Why did you take it if you weren’t going to eat it?’ To which some wit added a codicil: ‘I didn’t know it was going to taste like this!’

For years explorers attempted to reach Timbuktu, the mysterious city on the edge of the Sahara that, ever since the twelfth century, had been the hub of the North African world, and in which salt had been traded for the seemingly inexhaustible gold of Guinea, a city in which, according to the Muslim traveller Leo Africanus, who visited it in 1526, there were plates and sceptres of solid gold ‘some whereof weigh 1,300 pounds’.

The first-known European to reach Timbuktu and return in one piece was Réné Caillié, a penniless young Frenchman who had been inspired to become an explorer by reading Robinson Crusoe. Too late to see it in its heyday – the trade in gold had more or less come to an end – he reached the fabled city after a terrifyingly dangerous journey on 20 April 1828. ‘I looked around,’ he wrote, ‘and found the sight before me did not answer my expectations of Timbuktu. The city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in all directions but immense plains of quicksand of a yellowish-white colour.’

No one really enjoys arriving anywhere by train. (Nor does anyone in their right mind enjoy departing or arriving by plane, with the possible exception of the pilot whose toy it is.) Will there be any porters? Will there be any trolleys for the luggage if there aren’t? Will there be any taxis? Will they be fitted with meters? These and similar questions that even the most hardened travellers ask themselves as the train comes into the platform all help to contribute to the particular form of angst, the generally non-specific but nonetheless acute form of anxiety described by Cyril Connolly (disguised under the nom de plume Palinurus) in The Unquiet Grave as the Angoisse des Gares, the Agony of the Stations: ‘Bad when we meet someone at the station, much worse when we are seeing them off; not present when departing oneself, but unbearable when arriving …’

The best arrivals are by sea, that is unless your engine has broken down and the Cliffs of Moher are a lee shore. The first sight of a great city from the sea is big medicine, powerful magic, unforgettable, however much of a let-down it may prove to be on closer acquaintance. New York seen from the Hudson in the early morning with the sun roaring up over the East River turning the tall buildings into gigantic Roman candles; Venice as your vessel runs in through the Porto di Lido into St Mark’s Basin with the domes and campaniles liquefying and reconstituting themselves in the mirage; Istanbul as your ship comes up the Marmara and sweeps round Seraglio Point towards the Golden Horn and you see silhouetted against the evening sky the fantastic, improbable, incomparable skyline of Old Stamboul.

It is not only the great cities that have this effect on the arriving traveller. This is how T. E. Lawrence described his first sight of Jidda, the then little port of Mecca, seen from the deck of a passenger ship in the Red Sea while he was on his way to meet the leaders of the Arab Revolt in 1917: ‘When at last we anchored in the outer harbour off the white town, between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless … There were only lights and shadows, the white and black gaps of streets: in front, the pallid lustre of the haze shimmering upon the inner harbour; behind, the dazzle of league after league of featureless sand running up to an edge of low hills, faintly suggested in the far away mist and heat.’

It is these and similar vistas, whether wild or civilized, that make one want to shout ‘How beautiful the world is!’, that made an elderly lady of my acquaintance, when taken on an outing from her native village in the Po Valley which she had never previously left, cry on arriving on the watershed of the Apennines from which there was an extensive view, ‘Com’è grande il mondo!’ … ‘How big the world is!’ … and insist on being taken home.

Up to Ther Bend and Back

Castelnau Mansions, Barnes, SW13, the block of flats in which I was born, in 1919, on the south side of Hammersmith Bridge, was one of several such blocks built in the 1900s on what had been marshland and open country.

Our flat was on the first floor – Three Ther Mansions, as it was known to the tradesmen who sent their delivery boys out on bicycles from the nearby shops to deliver my mother’s orders. And it had what the estate agents used to describe in the twenties as ‘commanding extensive and splendid views over the Metropolitan Water Board’s Reservoir and Filter Beds’. The filter beds were lovely, full of golden sand that I longed to play with, but was never able to do so as they were fenced in.

Castelnau, the main road which separated our block of flats from the reservoir, was and is the almost dead-straight road which runs from Hammersmith Bridge to the pub called until recently the Red Lion, and, although it is only about a mile long, it appears to be much longer. It was built in 1827, at the same time as the original Hammersmith Suspension Bridge, a beautiful, slender structure designed by William Tierney Clarke. In 1887 it was replaced by another suspension bridge of cast-iron, a rather elephantine structure designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the man who designed the London sewers. (The IRA tried to blow it up in 1939, but was thwarted when a heroic passer-by picked up the bomb and threw it into the river.) The street was named Castelnau after the family seat of the Boileau family, Castelnau de la Gard at Nîmes, the head of the family being a General de Castelnau.

The Boileau family also had a house by the Thames at Mortlake, upstream from Barnes. In fact the family must be still turning in their graves to hear their beautiful street called ‘Castlenore’, and the Boileau Arms, the handsome pub at the bridge end of it, built in 1842, ‘Ther Boiler’.

Castelnau has only one almost imperceptible kink in its entire length, again known to almost everyone as ‘Ther Bend’, which effectively prevents anyone from looking up or down its entire length from either end, except from the top of a bus.

‘We’ll just walk up to Ther Bend and back,’ my mother would suddenly say when I no longer had a nurse and was too old to travel by mail cart – which my nurse pushed while I sat looking ahead with my back to the engine.

And we used to set off for this short walk up Castelnau, something less than half a mile, suitably clad against the elements, which were as unpredictable in Barnes as anywhere else.

Facing our front door on the same landing as ours, which was the only place for me to play when it rained, was Number Four. It was occupied by a friend of my mother’s. A jolly, long-legged dress-buyer at Derry and Toms, the large department store in Kensington High Street. She loved parties.

She was known to me as ‘Auntie Lil’ and she had been installed in Number Four by her friend, to me a rather elderly dentist who had his practice in an elegant little house behind Kensington Church Street. He was known to me as ‘Uncle Max’. I wasn’t as keen on Uncle Max as I was on Auntie Lil, as he was also my dentist and not surprisingly I associated him with pain. But ‘Auntie Lil’ was all right, and she gave me bars of Fry’s Chocolate Cream to munch, which made more visits to Uncle Max inevitable.

On the whole things were not going well at Number Four. Then Uncle Max left Auntie Lil, and I remember a good deal of wailing taking place while she was being comforted by my mother; but she still stayed on at Number Four, and then, some time later, she went away. I missed Auntie Lil, and her Fry’s Chocolate Cream bars.

The descent to the ground floor, where One and Two were to be found, was by a linoleum-covered staircase with shiny wooden banisters, down which I used to slide. In fact I could slide the whole way down the banisters from the topmost floor to the ground floor, if so inclined.

The only other occupants of the flats on the upper floors I knew were a Hindu doctor named Dr Wallah and his Scottish nurse/girlfriend. Dr Wallah bore a striking resemblance to Gandhi in early life (in South Africa), but both were so desperately shy that it was difficult for even a five-year-old to talk to them.

Down on the ground floor Number One The Mansions was occupied by Mr and Mrs Ludovici. She was called Marie, was French and clever. He was partly Italian and known to his friends as Ludo. He was something pretty important in the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Company in Regent Street, and had dealings with Indian princes. He went to work each day by taxi, dressed in a double-breasted black jacket, striped trousers, starched white collar and cuffs, and he always wore a clove carnation in his buttonhole, supplied by a florist near the Boileau Arms. Neither Mr nor Mrs Ludovici suffered fools, and/or small boys, gladly or ungladly and I wouldn’t have dared call them Uncle Ludo or Auntie Marie for all the tea in China.

Although posher than the Newbys, the Ludovicis, I was pleased to note, had a much poorer view of the reservoir than we did on the first floor of The Mansions, due to a privet hedge in front of their windows having been allowed to grow to an excessive height. In fact they couldn’t see the reservoir at all. Perhaps they were the sort of people who didn’t care for views of reservoirs.

Down here on the ground floor there was a space under the stairs in which my chained-up mail cart had been parked until recently, still awaiting my parents’ decision as to how to dispose of it. Eventually, they bequeathed it to a tramp – what was then known as ‘a gentleman of the road’ – who was on his way to spend the summer in the vicinity of Penzance but had got blown slightly off course. He said it would be invaluable to him for carrying his gear when sleeping rough in the open. At that time the main roads of Britain were full of tramps, many of them ex-soldiers on their way southwards to the sun, or else, in winter, travelling from one workhouse to another. There were even some women tramps, but they were rather more frightening than the men. Our particular tramp was about forty and had been a corporal in a Rifle Regiment. He was smart as tramps go, but when he left us, pushing what was now his mail cart, after having transferred his possessions to it from a sack and after a slice of fruit cake and a nice cup of hot sweet tea, the following day we found some strange, cabbalistic chalk marks on the wall outside the entrance, which I later learned years later was tramps’ language to the effect that the occupants of Number Three were a decent touch; but none ever came to try us out.

Now, down on the ground floor, we pushed open the main door, which had a glittering pair of brass doorknobs on it, polished by Edwards, the Head Porter, an ex-Guardsman. He was the custodian of all the flats which belonged to the London County Freehold and Leasehold Company. He was also in command of a number of lesser staff – some of them ex-soldiers who limped, having been wounded. They performed more menial functions, mostly in connection with dustbins and their contents. Edwards also polished the buttons on his navy blue tailcoat, using a button stick to prevent the polish getting on the material. Fifteen years later, when I joined the Army, in 1939, I also found myself using a button stick.

And now, out in the front garden of The Mansions, where the hedges were too high to see over, we turned left on to Castelnau for the long walk up to Ther Bend. Well, it seemed long when you were only five.

On our right now was Glentham Road, at that time a working-class street which encompassed the only part of Barnes at the Hammersmith Bridge end that boasted a bit of downhill. In it was the Sunlight Laundry, which took in our washing and employed numbers of cheerful, noisy girls from Hammersmith. This was the street, too, in which my parents’ chauffeur, Mr Lewington, lived, and where he kept our car, an open Citroën, in his garage. Beyond it was Fanny Road (now renamed St Hilda’s Road). It was to be years later, long after the war began, and I was abroad, before anyone living in Barnes found anything remotely funny in the name Fanny in association with a road. That was, until the Americans arrived in Britain in 1942/3. They had somewhat different ideas of what a Fanny was and when they saw Fanny inscribed on a street sign, they fell about. Soon, Americans from as far away as Piccadilly Circus began making pilgrimages to Fanny Road, SW13, on the Number 9 bus.

Then we used to go on, my mother and I, past where the shops began; past the butcher’s and Hewett’s Stores, which had dead ducks, and geese and pheasants, partridges and grouse, all hanging outside on hooks, in due season.

And inside, dressed in white, and wearing a straw boater whatever the season, was Mr Hewett who never failed to stop doing whatever he was doing, to doff his boater to my mother, a customer of some importance, as she sailed past with or without me in tow.

And next to Hewett’s there was the chemist’s, which I liked just about as much as Uncle Fitz’s surgery, as it had a wealth of what I called ‘Nasty Things’ on offer. And next to that there was a haberdasher’s full of boxes bursting with mother-of-pearl buttons and knicker elastic – important when large numbers of ladies kept their handkerchiefs somewhere in their knickers; and there were rolls of lace that kept on unrolling.

This very dark, even then very old-fashioned shop, was run by a pair of what at that time were quite young people. They were still operating after the Second World War, by that time incredibly bent and ancient. They hardly ever spoke, except to say how much the bill came to, and transacted their business with all the animation of a slow-motion film of a ritual. I was frightened of them, all dressed in black.

The next roads on our left, opposite Ther Boiler, were Arundel Terrace and Merthyr Terrace, which led away down to more reservoirs and more filter beds – this end of Barnes had more water than land in it. It was also the road that led to the council allotments, one of which Wanda put in for as soon as she came to live in Barnes, the scourge of the pensioners who predicted that everything she planted would come to a sticky end. ‘All that foreign stuff won’t do ’ere,’ they prognosticated when she started planting ‘foreign stuff’ in appreciable quantities – all of which did marvels, much to their disgust.

On the corner of Merthyr Terrace there was a dairy with a plaster of Paris – well, it looked like plaster of Paris – cow in the window, and walls tiled with dairy scenes. Here, on the premises, fresh-faced girls dispensed the beverage and the milkmen delivered it to their customers from churns loaded on to horse-drawn carts.

On the opposite side of the road there was Ther Boiler. Behind it was then, and for years to come, open country. There was a farm – it must have been one of the nearest farms to the centre of London – which employed numbers of women as casual labourers. When lifting potatoes, or whatever, they worked in all weathers short of a downpour, and they wore sacks as aprons and over their shoulders, and men’s caps. They, too, came over the river from Hammersmith, but they were much tougher than the girls at the Sunlight Laundry. And there was the fishmonger’s, and the Post Office and a florist’s and the newsagent.

The last shop on our side of Castelnau was an ironmonger’s, otherwise the Oil Shop. It was painted green and had two massive amphorae over the front of it of the sort that in Mediterranean lands are used to store olive oil, which here were painted a vivid, pillar-box red.

A short distance up towards Ther Bend was the Holy Trinity church, a rather sad, perpendicular construction of 1868, a not altogether auspicious time for building churches.

I never liked it, nor did I like the Church Hall, the scene of an unsuccessful attempt to ‘interfere’ with me by a bun-faced curate when I was a member of the Wolf Cub pack. The interference only amounted to my being bounced up and down on his knee but I didn’t enjoy it, as I felt that I was too old to be bounced up and down on peoples’ knees, and I told my mother and she told my father, and my father told the vicar and the curate was sent away to wherever curates who tried to ‘interfere’ with Wolf Cubs went at that time.

Near the church during the Second World War there had been an air raid shelter which had received a direct hit by a German rocket at a time when it had been filled with local inhabitants.

Here, on the opposite side of Castelnau to the church, were the premises of Boon and Porter, motor-car salesmen. The most memorable feature of Boon and Porter was an enormous advertisement for French Amilcars painted on a brick wall a couple of storeys high. It showed them roaring round a steep bank, driven by what looked like Michelin Men.

As we approached Ther Bend the houses became progressively finer, the best of all beginning at Ther Bend itself. They were semi-detached brick and stucco residences known as Castelnau Villas, built in 1842, the earliest early Victorian, with coach houses to match, and shaded by noble trees. Even to my five-year-old mind the Villas made the Mansions and the Gardens look a bit feeble – the epitome of an elegance that has rarely been repeated.

What my mother and I most enjoyed about going up to Ther Bend was that it was there that two members of the Constabulary operated what were known as ‘Speed Traps’.

These constables were always the same ones. Both had identical bushy moustaches and both were fat and had very red faces. They could have been twins. When they saw with the aid of binoculars a car coming up Castelnau from the direction of Hammersmith Bridge that in their opinion was exceeding the speed limit, which at that time, in the twenties, was only twenty miles an hour, they rushed out of their hiding place behind one of the massive gate posts of Number 122 Castelnau Villas at Ther Bend blowing their whistles and waving a large red flag at the offending motorist. This dramatic event, which we looked forward to witnessing, invariably took place at three o’clock in the afternoon, by which time they had, presumably, digested their ‘dinner’.

On one occasion they flagged down a Rolls-Royce, the sort in which the chauffeur is isolated from the passengers and exposed to the elements.

They, the constables, were happily engaged in taking down the chauffeur’s particulars when a very small, open motor car driven by a very boozy-looking man came round Ther Bend at about sixty miles an hour, roaring with laughter and thumbing his nose at the constables who had no chance of flagging him down, let alone taking down his particulars.

And it was always at this point, at Number 122 that we turned back. Beyond it was terra incognita so far as my mother was concerned.

Later, when I was given a scooter, I was allowed to scoot up the footpath from our flat past Number 122 to Number 54 Castelnau alone. Number 54 was, and still is, an Edwardian house equipped with barge-boards and decked with finials; one of a whole lot of similar houses which extended southwards on both sides of the road as far as the Red Lion, a pub with a rampant lion over the entrance. Number 54 was the house of a Jewish family called Rosenthal. Their youngest son, Martin, was my best friend when we were both at a pre-prep school run by two impressive ladies in yet another Edwardian house called Castelnau College, and later at Colet Court, the prep school for St Paul’s and after that at St Paul’s which were opposite one another in Hammersmith Road. Mr Rosenthal, who was very all there, had worked for many years with the East Africa Company, which had laid the foundations of what are now Kenya and Uganda. Mr Rosenthal had been an intimate friend of Trader Horn, otherwise Alfred Aloysius Smith, whose reminiscences of Darkest Africa (edited by Ethelreda Lewis) had become a best-seller. Both Martin’s father and Trader Horn were heroes to us. The only trouble was that neither of us had ever set eyes on Trader Horn; but Martin very kindly said that I could pretend that I knew Trader Horn, which was what he was going to do. We soon found out that if anyone asked you, ‘I say, man, do you know Trader Horn?’ and you said yes, you were assured of social success at Colet Court, something which, up to then, Martin and myself had stood in real need. The Rosenthal house was full of African memorabilia – the very walls groaned under the weight of huge guns for slaying elephants, dinner gongs made from elephants’ tusks waiting to be banged, and the skins and heads of wild animals.

The adult Rosenthals played bridge incessantly, usually with other Jewish families to whom they were linked by marriage. Most of them lived in the same sort of houses as the Rosenthals. One of the younger sons who was about the same age as Martin and myself used to charge his mother half a crown to kiss him goodnight; but he made up for this when the war came by joining a gunner regiment and getting killed in Tunisia.

One of these families had a business in Hammersmith market. When they played bridge all of them sat at little card tables and the ladies were very elegant and made up, and whatever the weather outside – it could be a day of blazing heat – it was with the blinds drawn and the lights on. Too young to play bridge, we played vingt-et-un with the family’s ex-nurse, a rather forbidding woman of indeterminate age called Edith, and Martin’s younger sister Eva, and anyone else who could be roped in to form a quorum for a game. We ate matzos and Gentleman’s Relish, an unsuitable summer snack, while the atmosphere became more and more insupportable as the men puffed away on their big cigars. It was as someone from the Christian world outside that I attended Martin’s bar-mitzvah and the celebration of the Passover.

The Rosenthals had a garden large enough to play cricket in with a tennis ball which was always getting hit out of bounds, over the banks of the reservoir at the bottom of the garden. When it did we used to squeeze through an iron fence and climb the bank in order to look for the ball, but generally speaking it could be seen bobbing about out on the water and we had to wait for the wind to blow it back towards the wall of the reservoir. Usually it blew in the wrong direction and someone else picked it up, so we never saw it again. This was the biggest reservoir in Barnes, which was a wonderful sight in winter when birds from the far north congregated on it in astonishing numbers.

Sometimes, at the age of about seven or eight, when we got bored, we used to play ‘rude’ games together in one of the bathrooms, and on one occasion when playing ‘Doctors’ we gave one another a soap and water enema using a garden syringe that happened to be handy. Martin’s attempt to give me one was a failure but mine to give him one had spectacular results. We were discovered by Edith who gave us a good smacking and I was sent home for the day, but she never told the Rosenthals and I continued to be invited to their house. After this we gave up ‘rude’ games as being injurious to health.

Although the various blocks of flats – Castelnau Mansions, Riverview Gardens, Castelnau Gardens – presented a series of fairly prosperous façades to the outside world, kept up by Mr Edwards’ knob-polishing, from their backs they gave a somewhat different impression. In fact some of them bore a distinct resemblance to the slum tenements on the Hammersmith side of the river, past which I used to battle my way to Colet Court.

For example, Castelnau Mansions had several flights of steep, unlit, narrow backstairs with a very primitive privy on each landing but no washing facilities, intended for the use of domestic servants, who also had a minute bedroom next to the kitchen in each flat. Whether it was intended that the domestics should use these backstairs facilities was not clear. Our domestics never used them – they shared the bathroom and loo with us. In all the forty years my parents lived at Three Ther Mansions, these backstairs were never painted. In some other blocks of flats the occupants had to put their dustbins into lifts and lower them away down to the ground floor, where again the porters and the dustmen took over.

And behind our block there was a sad-looking garden that was no one’s responsibility, with patches of grass that looked as if they had lost the race and innumerable docks that hadn’t and a wooden shed. This garden led away into a series of alleys smelling of cats in which the dustbins were stacked up by the porters awaiting the arrival of the dustmen.

All in all it was a good place for children, who loved it. Fortunately, although I was an only child and the only one in Castelnau Mansions, there were others in other blocks such as Riverview Gardens, some of whom had already formed a gang, which Martin and I were invited to join, which wasn’t difficult as there was no leader because everyone wanted to be leader.

The gang included Philip Turgle, who was Belgian – goodness knows how the Belgians pronounced his name; and there was Roderick Blaine (‘Roderick Blaine had a Pain and it wouldn’t go away again/Tee-hee!’ we used to chant mindlessly). And there was Twinkle, who was American Jewish and whose father was a tailor. And there were one or two others, whose names I have forgotten. And last but not least there was Margaret Evans, the only girl in the gang, who could do anything that boys could and was braver.

It wasn’t much of a gang, really, because there weren’t any other such gangs in the neighbourhood, except those in Hammersmith, on the other side of the river, which were solidly working-class and dangerous whereas ours were solidly middle-class and feeble.

So we fought imaginary battles with one another in the noisome back alleyways, pretending they were trenches, and bombed one another with clay bombs which we began to manufacture when Twinkle discovered an almost endless sticky supply of the stuff in one of the back alleys. (How Twinkle came by his name was a mystery, for he was really a quite outstandingly ugly little boy.) Then we found that we could launch the bombs from the end of a nice, springy sapling; they went twice as far as they did when you simply threw them by hand.

Then we started baking the bombs over a fire made with old boxes, in order to produce a shrapnel effect, and ended up by breaking someone’s kitchen window on an upper storey of a flat in Riverview Gardens. And that was the end of clay bombs.

Every so often in the winter there were thick, pea soup type fogs which sometimes lasted for days and brought London to a halt. Knowing how lethal these fogs were, it seems incredible that our parents let us out to play in them, but they did.

And when it snowed we snowballed one another, which was a good deal less painful than being clay-bombed. And on 5 November we attempted to blow ourselves to smithereens, using what were then really powerful fireworks. And when there was a spring tide we got our feet wet on the towpath. And when it was Boat Race Day, we bought what were called ‘Favours’ – crossed oars made of bamboo decorated with light or dark blue ribbons – from men and women who had been selling them on Boat Race Day from the year dot. And on the towpath there were scenes of Hogarthian strangeness with men chewing glass for a consideration, and drunks male and female being carted off by policemen. I was for Oxford, I thought Cambridge’s light blue sissy, and for years and years Oxford never won, testing my loyalty.

It was when one of the great fogs enveloped London that, equipped with a single lantern containing a single candle, and with scarves wrapped round our mouths to stop the fog getting in, we braved the pitchest of pitch-darkness down in the central heating tunnels that ran under the flats at the bottom end of Riverview Gardens, the ones with a view over the river, in which red-sailed Thames barges could still be seen going down on the ebb tide. At that time it was not a very salubrious situation. Facing the flats on the left bank of the river was the huge refinery of Manbre and Garton – the smells that emanated from it owed more to saccharine than sugar and at times the whole area reeked of it. A little further upstream towards Hammersmith Bridge were the Hammersmith Borough Council’s tips, where all the rubbish was shot into lighters and taken away down the river – that is the parts of it that were not blown across the river and over Riverview Gardens in the form of thick clouds of dust.

Down there in the tunnels all of us were frightened, except Margaret Evans who told us not to be ‘funky’. Down there in the tunnels there was not a sound except for an occasional clonking noise from the heating system. Down there we were looking for the spookiest place in Riverview Gardens and this was it. But the most memorable time for our gang was when my mother, who liked the idea of a gang, rigged us out as ghosts, using old dust sheets. Dressed all in white, with tall, conical hats stuffed with tissue paper to keep them upright and slits for eyeholes, we looked like miniature members of the Ku-Klux-Klan, or penitents in Holy Week.

Wearing these outfits, we used to swoop down The Gardens, making ghastly ghostly noises, alarming the inhabitants of the flats and gesticulating at the passengers on the upper decks of the Number 9 buses.

By the time I married Wanda in Florence in 1946, I had already lived for nearly twenty years in Castelnau Mansions and I felt that I had had enough of it. Already, by the time I was nine or ten and was at Colet Court, the alleyways that had served as trenches in which we played our war games, pelting one another with clay bombs of varying degrees of hardness, now seemed nothing less than squalid, and the smell of dustbins and cats insupportable. And with all this against it our gang simply melted away, and the whole tiny area became intolerably sad.

I made what I now see to have been two attempts to get away from Castelnau Mansions, the first in 1938, when I became a sailor, the second in 1939 when I became a soldier. Both times I found myself inexorably drawn back to them. Even when Wanda came to England in 1947 and we had to find somewhere to live, we had to stay with my parents at Three Ther Mansions. They were heroic because the flat was pretty small for four of us. There was a double bedroom which just took a double bed, with views down The Gardens to the astonishing great hulk of Harrods Furniture Repository, a single bedroom, which had been mine, a small drawing-room and dining-room, both overlooking the reservoir, a very small hall and a minute bathroom. And there was a kitchen and the minute domestic’s bedroom, which my father kept his suits in as there was no living-in domestic any more. And in it he also kept, done up with string, hundreds of back copies of the Morning Post. And there was the terrible loo on the backstairs.

Why my parents, who were only badly off intermittently up to that time, chose to live in such crowded quarters when there was no need for them to do so was a mystery to me. I can only think that they weren’t really interested in homes in the accepted sense of the word at all. Years of rag-trade travelling, anywhere from Bradford to Berlin and Perth to Paris, where they bought ‘models’ to copy, most of the time living in hotels, with all the advantages of having room service at the press of a button and not having to make beds, may have blunted their taste for the homely hearth. Whether this was true or not they used to spend several months of the year travelling, which seemed like whole ages to me.

It could have been worse. They left me in the care of a housekeeper, a Miss Roy, a good, kind woman whose Liverpudlian accent I used to try and copy, and of whom I was very fond, so that I could not have had any real need to be sorry when my parents set off on what they called ‘The Journey’ in order to sell their productions, something that I was to set off on some twenty years later. Nevertheless, I always found myself crying as they went down the stairs and through the door with the brass doorknobs to the taxi waiting outside The Mansions, wondering if I would ever see them again.

Travels with a Baby

In January 1947 the British coal industry was nationalized and in one of the coldest winters anyone could remember there was no coal. In these inauspicious circumstances Wanda gave birth to a daughter in Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital across the river near Stamford Brook. At that time we were living in a small, top floor flat round the corner from Three Ther Mansions at 24 Castelnau Gardens, for which we paid what seemed the high rent of £63 a year. If anyone thinks that life with Wanda was dull in that flat, or later, when we lived in Riverview Gardens, then they have got it all wrong. It was in Castelnau Gardens that she let slip a can full of garbage which she was trying to insert into one of the lifts on an upper floor of the building – it fell on one of the porters down below. He didn’t sue us. It was a miracle. Later, in Riverview Gardens, she forgot to turn the gas off. This led to a spectacular explosion which destroyed a stuffed fish; but not as spectacular as the one when she boiled a kettle full of methylated spirits, under the impression that it was water, while camping on the banks of the Somme en route for Italy.

In the summer of 1947, when the baby was about seven months old, Wanda decided to take her to visit her parents who lived in the Carso, the strange limestone country around Trieste, leaving me to get on with the execution of the autumn orders, some of which we would soon be delivering to the shops. At the time I was working for the family firm as a commercial traveller in the fashion business.

Although she had been very reluctant to do so, being of an economical turn of mind, she had eventually been persuaded to travel by wagon-lit. At this period, with large areas of Europe still in a state bordering on chaos, it seemed a justifiable extravagance for a woman travelling alone with a baby.

I had also arranged for her to travel in a through coach from Calais, which meant that when the train reached the Gare du Nord, instead of getting down there and taking a taxi across Paris to the Gare de Lyon, she could remain on board and be shunted round the city on what is known as the Ceinture to the Gare de Lyon, where it would be attached to the Simplon-Orient Express.

I got the two of them to Victoria in good time for the boat train to Dover, in our Hillman Minx; but as we were walking to the platform preceded by a porter pushing the remainder of her luggage and with the baby swinging between us in a portable cot, Wanda suddenly said, ‘I’ve forgotten the basket!’

The last time I had seen the basket was in the hall of the flat. It contained all the mysterious necessities of weaned-baby travel, many of which I had myself regarded as mandatory when I was a baby – huge quantities of nappies, boiled water and a complete menu of baby food and drink for three days on a train. The extra day’s supply was in case the train broke down. At that time, with the war only recently over, baby food was not so easily obtained in Europe as it is today and Wanda had prepared purées of fresh vegetables and farmyard chicken, none of them out of tins. ‘Where I come from,’ Wanda said, ‘we don’t give babies tings from tins.’

‘Hurruck,’ she said, which at that time was still the nearest she could get to a correct pronunciation of my Christian name, having considered the implications, ‘I must have zat basket.’

In 1947 traffic in London was not yet the problem that it was shortly to become. In fact it was perhaps less dense than it had been before the war. I had something like half an hour to get to Hammersmith Bridge from Victoria and back again before the train left; but in spite of everything en route being in my favour I arrived back at the station with the basket just in time to see the end of the train disappear beyond the end of the platform. I asked for an interview with the Stationmaster and explained the situation to him. He was dressed in a morning coat and black top hat, having just seen off some distinguished personage by the same train. ‘That’s a bad business,’ he said. ‘You can’t have a baby eating all sorts of messed-up foreign stuff, I can see that.’ And he busied himself with the telephone, but to no avail.

‘We can’t stop the boat train,’ he said. ‘It’s not as easy as that. I wish I could send an engine after it but we can’t do that either and, anyway, it would never catch it up,’ which evoked memories of Mr Toad being pursued by an engine-load of beefeaters and policemen all shouting at the tops of their voices ‘Stop, Stop, Stop!’

‘Have you thought of the air?’ he said finally, speaking of it as it must have seemed to him, an unfamiliar element from another world. ‘Why not try the air? Ring up the airline people. You can use my telephone.’

On the telephone, however, I was once more a man of no account, a man without qualities – ‘I am speaking from the office of the Stationmaster at Victoria Station’ cut little ice with the man I was speaking to at the airline’s office, who was soon convinced when I unfolded my problem to him that he was dealing with a lunatic. And it became obvious that the only thing to do was to go to their office, taking the basket with me, which I did.

There I was told that if the basket was to stand any chance of getting to Paris that day I would have to take it to the airport myself, and hand it in to the Air Freight office there in person.

I suddenly remembered that I had an appointment to show evening dresses to the model dress-buyer at Harrods, an appointment which I had only been able to make with great difficulty and exertion; but by this time the problem of the basket had begun to exercise such an obsessive fascination over me that any sense of proportion I might have possessed had vanished.

‘Pity,’ she said when I telephoned her to tell her what had happened, and could I possibly come tomorrow. ‘I’m finishing up here this morning and going on holiday this afternoon.’

What I ought to have done was to have taken the dresses to Harrods, and shown them to her. She was in fact fascinated by the dilemma I was in and I would probably have got an order. Once in the store I could have contacted the manager of the Food Hall as an account customer, although a not very important one, and persuaded him to telephone Paris and ask some caterer, such as Fauchon in the Place de la Madeleine, to deliver a hamper of food suitable for infants to the Gare de Lyon. Instead I rashly took it upon myself to see whether I could get a basket of baby food from London to Paris by air.

It was midday before I got to what was then London’s embryonic airport. At that time it consisted of a number of dreary-looking huts, which gave incoming passengers the sensation of arriving in some beleaguered fortress and those taking off the sensation of leaving one.

In a hut occupied by ‘Air Freight’ I began to fill in a declaration form, writing ‘Baby Food, etc.’ under Contents. Dire penalties were threatened for any misinformation I might give.

‘’Ullo, ’ullo, what’s this – baby food?’ said a gloomy-looking man – almost everyone was gloomy in 1947, the promised land being still just around the corner. ‘Got an Export Licence?’

‘Export Licence?’

‘Yur, Export Licence. Board of Trade. It’s food. You need an Export Licence for Food. Two kinds of licence, Specific and Bulk. You need a Specific.’

‘No one told me. Where can I get one? Can you give me one?’

‘Theobald’s Road.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘In the City.’

Finally, having cut me down to what he estimated was my appropriate size, he relented and allowed me to fill in Form 91b, relating to ‘Export of Specific Articles of Food to the Scheduled Territories’ I think it was, which he kept up his sleeve he told me, as he became more genial, for just such emergencies as this – that is if any similar emergency could be envisaged.

Now things began to look up. I fell into the hands of what at that time was still referred to as ‘a good type’, one with a large RAF moustache, and what was more important with a human being behind it. And I began to see that my fortunes or lack of them were developing a kind of rhythm that if expressed graphically would look like one of those wildly fluctuating temperature charts which are suspended over the patients’ beds in funny cartoons about hospitals. First I forgot the basket. Then I got it. Then I missed the train. Then I met a nice stationmaster and so on, and now I was being helped by a nice man with a huge moustache.

‘Hm,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a rotten day so far by the sound of it. Let’s see what time the Simplon-Orient leaves the Gare de Lyon. George, ring up Victoria, Continental Enquiries, on that special number, otherwise you’ll never get through, and find out what time the Simplon-Orient leaves the Gare de Lyon tonight, French time … No good at the Gare du Nord, she’s on the Ceinture in a through coach … Leaves the Gare de Lyon at 21.05, French time … Right, I’ll ring Le Bourget’ – and to me: ‘You don’t happen to have the voiture number and the compartment, do you?. Pity … Hallo, Armand … I know … Well, you’ll have to … That’s right, send Alphonse, by motor cycle. He can hand the basket to the Chef de Train personally.’

‘One of our best men,’ he said as he put down the receiver, ‘Alphonse. He was a courier in the Resistance up near the Belfort Gap. Unfortunately there’s no plane until this evening and I can’t risk sending it by passenger plane for reasons which I don’t want to bore you with. But don’t worry, he should just make it. Between ourselves if we charged you for all this it would cost you a fortune. As it is, have it with our compliments.’

When I finally reached Great Marlborough Street, my parents’ London premises, later in the afternoon I was handed a telegram. It had been sent from Dover Harbour and read: ‘Don’t send basket. Wanda.’

This is what subsequently happened to it. It reached Le Bourget but the plane was late and Alphonse, hero of the Resistance, whirled it to the Gare de Lyon on his motor cycle a bare eight minutes before the Simplon-Orient pulled out. Owing to a clerical error, none of the boards displayed outside the wagons-lits which gave the passengers’ names had Wanda’s name on it and the Chef de Train disclaimed any knowledge of a woman named Newby with a baby, perhaps because she had not joined the train at the Gare de Lyon but had been shunted round the Ceinture in the Istanbul coach. He also refused to take delivery of the basket. In a last desperate attempt to hand it over, Alphonse approached the Stationmaster and begged the use of his public address system. The Stationmaster, like the Chef de Train, was a bureaucratic monster. He refused permission for this, and also the request to hold the train for a few minutes while Alphonse went through the sleeping cars, with the words, ‘It is in this way, at the moment of departure of a great train, that accidents can occur if orders are reversed.’ And the train left without the basket. All this I learned from Bill, my moustachioed friend, the following morning. The news plunged me into unspeakable gloom.

Three days later I received a letter from Wanda, postmarked Domodossola, at the Italian end of the Simplon Tunnel.

‘I am glad I was able to send a telegram telling you not to send the basket,’ she wrote. ‘You remember that silver we bought for Valeria?’ (Valeria was Wanda’s greatest friend. She lived in Fontanellato and was getting married shortly. We had bought her six place settings of cutlery from George Jensen in Bond Street, the most expensive wedding present we ever bought anybody before or since.) ‘This seemed a good time to take it to her,’ she continued, ‘and because of the Customs I put it in the basket under the food. It will have to wait now until next year. There was no need to worry about Sonia. Everyone was very kind. The cook on the ship cooked just the right food for her and let me into his kitchen to see for myself, and on the train from the Gare de Lyon the chef in the ristorante made purée with lots of fresh vegetables. He even had spinach. In a couple of hours we shall be in Milano and there the controllers of our vagone is going to get me more fresh food, which will also be cooked for me.’

A week or so later Bill, the man with the moustache, telephoned to say that someone on the French side of the Channel with a horrible sense of humour had returned the basket to him full of what was now putrescent baby food.

‘I don’t suppose you want it,’ he said. ‘It means you’re coming all the way here and going through Customs, all for a few nappies and feeding bottles.’

I told him about the silver. There was nothing else to do in the circumstances, and there was just a faint hope that it might be still there.

‘Half a mo,’ he said. ‘I’ll just take it outside and turn it out on the concrete.’

Soon he was back. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re having a run of bad luck. There’s nothing but a nasty smell.

‘I expect it was Alphonse,’ he went on. ‘I told you he was in the Resistance. He might be soft-hearted about babies but not about anything else.’

Days and Nights on the Orient Express

Long before I acquired employers well enough off to enable us to travel in a wagon-lit if we wanted to do so, which was when I became a fashion buyer in the early sixties, the real Orient Express had ceased to be a practicable means of getting to Istanbul.

The only sensible way of getting to Istanbul by train was on the Simplon-Orient, later named the Direct Orient Express, from the Gare de Lyon. The Direct Orient finally ceased to run in May 1977, by which time it was infested with malviventi who drugged and robbed the passengers and subjected them to even worse indignities, which was the end of it.

In order to join the Simplon-Orient, or the Direct Orient, from London, you took the boat train from Victoria to Dover. A more chic way was to board the Golden Arrow All-Pullman train at Victoria and the equally luxe Flèche d’Or on the other side of the Channel. This just gave time for anyone of an adventurous disposition to take a taxi from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, stopping off at the Ritz Bar in rue Cambon on the way. Otherwise you could stay on the train and be trundled round Paris with your luggage, as Wanda had been, on the Ceinture to the Gare de Lyon. The scenes on the platform of the Gare de Lyon, for anyone interested in such trivia, and most people are, were in their way memorable. In those now far-off days the travelling rich could actually be seen travelling: on trains, transatlantic liners, even in aeroplanes – how they contrive to move about now is a mystery – and at the Gare de Lyon the platform was crowded with conspicuous consumers. Very few of these conspicuous consumers on the Simplon or the Direct Orient held sleeping-car tickets for the through carriage to Istanbul by way of Bulgaria. The majority boarded cars bound for Milan, Rome, Naples, Venice, Thessalonica or Athens, which could be detached from whichever of these two expresses they were part of along the line and, if necessary, attached to other expresses on other lines.

Wearing heavy overcoats (let no one tell you that it isn’t cold in Istanbul in winter), armed with passports stamped with hard-to-get Yugoslav and Bulgarian transit visas, without which the journey could not be made, we walked up the platform at the Gare de Lyon past the big blue sleeping cars with the bronze ciphers of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grand Express Européens embossed on their sides until we reached a voiture-lits with the magic words PARIS – LAUSANNE – MILAN – VENEZIA – BEOGRAD – SOFIA – ISTANBUL displayed on it in black letters on a white ground.

There, with the words of the wagons-lits conducteur ringing in their ears, ‘En voiture, s’il vous plaît, Madame, M’sieur!’, we set our feet on the portable mounting block which he had placed there for the convenience of his passengers and hoisted ourselves up the two tall steps to the interior.

Once inside the wagon, having distributed largesse to the porters who had unceremoniously shoved our heavy leather luggage through an open window, and to the conducteur in anticipation of further rewards, we were able to take a brief look at the compartment that was to be our home for at least the next 48 hours and 3,041 kilometres.

We admired the wealth of inlaid mahogany, the shining brass-work, the glittering mirrors, the water carafes, heavy enough to lay out the most thick-skulled train robber, the white linen drugget on the floor, the spotless bed linen and towels which would become progressively less so as the journey unfolded, the little hook on the bulkhead beside one’s bunk to hold a man’s pocket watch in a world in which almost everyone now possessed a wrist watch. We were also pleased at the thought, although we did not actually inspect it, of the chamber pot hidden away like a bomb in its special receptacle which when sufficiently filled enabled it to be up-ended and its contents deposited on the permanent way below, which was less hazardous than attempting to throw it out of the window in the Simplon Tunnel.

Then after whoever was driving the thing had caused it to give its habitual, shattering premonitory lurch in anticipation of the actual departure, we were off.

Because we were hungry we set off immediately for the dining car, in anticipation of the announcement of the premier service, as the train clonked out through the 12ème arrondissement, past the Entrepôts de Bercy, the great warehouses on the left bank of the Seine – now no more, as no more as the Simplon-Orient Express. The cutlery and the glasses tinkled on the snowy tablecloths, which even before the train left the station had begun to be speckled with tiny flecks of soot from the coal-burning engine.

And while we drank our aperitifs we studied the interesting menu which had the name of the chef de brigade and his team inscribed on it, while the train, gathering speed now, passed through Maisons Alfort and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, where Balzac’s widow once resided, places we would be unlikely to visit then or ever.

Then to bed with a little violet light burning high up in the roof of the coupé, as the train roared down the line towards Dijon, only to be woken at some ghastly hour to find it at a standstill, 462 kilometres from Paris, at Vallorbe, a station on the edge of the strange no man’s land between France and Switzerland, with a man plodding past groaning ‘Vallorbe! … Vallorbe!’ Here the train erupted with Swiss guards and customs men, all full of fight, who were content to look at the passports which the conducteurs held for their inspection in neat piles without harassing the wagons-lits passengers, saving their energies for those they would harass in the lower-class carriages.

Breakfast was coffee and fresh croissants – put aboard the train at Lausanne and eaten as it snaked along the shores of Lake Geneva in the grey early morning. Then up the valley of the Rhône, still in dark shadow, to Brig, where the Finsteraarhorn and the Jungfrau loomed over us, and then into the Simplon Tunnel to run 12½ miles under the Lepontine Alps, with the little violet light burning in the coupé. Then, out into the golden winter sunshine of Italy.

On Lake Maggiore the cork and cedar trees and the oleanders rose above the early mist that enshrouded the Borromean Islands.

At Milan there was plenty of time to buy a Corriere and stock up with Chianti, prosciutto di Parma, salame di Felino, black olives and the white bread called pane di pasta dura, for whatever periods of enforced abstinence awaited us in the Balkans.

Here, too, at Milan, a restaurant car was attached, in which you could eat delicious pasta al forno and drink Barbera, while the train drove on through the pianura, the great plain of Northern Italy. Then, some four hours outward-bound from Milan, we rumbled through the hideous environs of Mestre and out along the causeway to the beautiful, dying city in the Lagoon, which there was no time to visit.

After Venice we crossed rivers that in the First World War had literally run with blood – the Piave, the Tagliamento and the Isonzo.

After Trieste there was the Yugoslav Customs with rather smelly officials rooting in our luggage before the train climbed into the great limestone wilderness of the Carso, 1,200 feet above the sea; and from there it ran down through the Javornik Range, the densely wooded Slovenian mountains in which wolves and bears still lived. No more restaurant cars on the Direct-Orient after Trieste until we reached Turkey – we were glad of the food and drink we had bought at Milan Station. The conducteur brewed us tea and coffee. Things were better ordered on the Simplon-Orient – at least there was a Yugoslav dining car as far as Belgrade.

After Ljubljana, the train ran down the valley of the Sava to Belgrade behind a big steam engine that howled as it went, as if to express its feelings about the human condition. From now on it was steam all the way and it was difficult to sleep and everything became grubbier and grubbier. We spent hours talking with the conducteur of our wagon, who was from La Villette, behind the Gare de l’Est, and could by now have done with a shave.

He told us stories about such eminences grises as Gulbenkian père and Zaharoff, the armaments king, both of whom commuted on these trains; tales of the express being snowed up and attacked by bandits in Thrace; and girls being put on, and later taken off, the train. It was very cold now and he spent much time stoking the coal-burning stove in what was now, after Belgrade, the sole remaining wagon-lit on the train. Whenever the train stopped at a station, it was besieged by country people carrying huge, crumbling paper parcels in lieu of luggage. In the fields we saw men and women clustered around fires, wearing thick waistcoats and tall fur hats.

At Nis, 2,216 kilometres from Paris, the guide book said that there was a tower constructed with Serbian skulls by a Serbian despot in 1808, but it was invisible from the railway, and when we finally contrived to visit it years later, rather disappointing. At Dimitograd Bulgarian Customs officials were more friendly, less prying than the Yugoslavs. Perhaps they were too cold to care. Here, a huge steam locomotive was attached to the train which panted up with it through a rocky defile and in thick snow to the Dragoman Pass.

We were beginning to be hungry now. Our Italian food was finished and we had no Bulgarian leva to buy anything with: huge queues at the stations made money-changing impossible.

After Sofia lay the wildest country of the entire route, on the borders of Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece. Then, from Edirne (in Turkey further great difficulties with money) with a Turkish dining car attached at last, across the windswept, snowy plains of Eastern Thrace, past Çorlu, where the train was snowed up in 1929, and down to the Sea of Marmara. Then round the seaward walls of Istanbul and out to Seraglio Point, where the Sultan used to have his unwanted odalisques drowned in weighted sacks, and into the Sirkeci Station 3,041 kilometres from the Gare de Lyon.

Under the Crust of Coober Pedy

In 1971 Wanda and I flew to Coober Pedy in the Stuart Range, in South Australia, the location of the world’s biggest opal field.

As we came in to land, Coober Pedy and its environs looked like Verdun after five months under artillery fire; what appeared to be shell holes were shafts of workings which went down 20 feet or so beneath the surface, into the desert sandstone in which the opals lurk and are found, or not, according to the skill and luck of the miners. Other holes in the earth’s crust, not distinguishable at this height, were the chimney and air inlets of the underground houses in which the majority of the permanent inhabitants lived troglodytic lives, having dug their multi-roomed residences out of the sandstone and equipped them with every imaginable and unimaginable convenience (one of the more unimaginable being a revolving bed surrounded by mirrors, whose owner, a half-French, half-Hungarian gentleman, proudly demonstrated it to me).

The remaining unfortunates, who included the majority of the Aborigines, lived on the surface in the unimaginable horror of corrugated-iron huts or else in caravans, some of which were equipped with air-conditioning. Unimaginably horrible because in summer here the temperature rises to a shattering 140°F, shade temperatures reach the high 120s, and life is only tolerable underground, where the temperature never rises much above 80°F – less with air-conditioning. In winter the temperature outside sinks to the low 40s – the lowest ever recorded was 26°. Coober Pedy is a rugged place.

There was no surface water in the town. What water there was, which was very salty, was pumped from 350 feet underground into a solar still. The inhabitants were rationed to 25 gallons a week, not that many of them actually drank water. Until 1966 it was carted all the way from Mathesson’s Bore, 80 miles to the north.

There was not a lot to see on the surface of Coober Pedy (even the pretty little Roman Catholic church, which was like a catacomb, was underground) once we had seen the excellent hospital, the motels, the two or three eating places, played cricket on the cricket pitch, and had drinks in the Italian club to which we had been lucky enough to get an introduction. Even the buildings on either side of the dirt road which was the main street only had a skyline at dawn and at dusk. In the evening the great clouds of dust thrown up by the trucks and cars whirling into town against the sunset were a marvellous sight. By that time many of the Aborigines who spent their days scratching for opals among the spoil of abandoned diggings, the half-castes and the completely decayed white men, were all lying semi-comatose against a fence surrounded by empty port bottles.

There were few Australians born and bred among the miners. Almost all of them were Europeans who emigrated to this distant land because they found life intolerable in their own – Slovenes, Serbo-Croats, Italians, Greeks, East Germans, Poles, Czechs, Spaniards, all dreaming of the day when they would make a strike and take the next plane out.

Anyone could become an opal miner. No experience was necessary. All you needed were lots of guts, a partner you could trust when he was down the mine alone with the opals, and a Miner’s Right which you could buy for 50 cents at the Post Office. It entitled you to prospect a claim 50 yards by 50 for a month, after which, if you wanted to continue working it, you had to register your claim at a cost of under Aus$10 a year. You also needed a pick, shovel, hand auger, carbide light, windlass and ladders.

Professional opal buyers came here from all over the world. The miners would accept nothing for their opals but cash; not even traveller’s cheques would do. And they gave no receipts for fear of being identified by the Inland Revenue. All buyers were forced to have large quantities of cash about their person. Most buyers were therefore armed, but in spite of this some buyers still disappeared.

Digging started at dawn and soon after noon most miners had had enough. Then the long bar in the Opal Motel (men only) filled up and stayed full until about 10 p.m., by which time Slovenes, Poles, Irishmen, Czechs and even an occasional Englishman were either slithering to the floor or else collapsing as if pole-axed, according to their powers of resistance. During this time, ten hours or so, nothing had been discussed except opals, not even women.

This was a tough town which all through the hot months was almost entirely without women. The girls came to Coober Pedy at the beginning of autumn, around the first of June, as regularly as migrant swallows. They came in air-conditioned coaches and the first arrivals were met at the bus stop and straight away carried bodily underground. They cleaned up a packet. One wonders what would happen if an outing of lady school teachers arrived at the same time.

We quitted this amazing place with real regret and flew on eastwards over Lake Torrens, a ghastly, ghostly, dazzlingly white saline expanse, to Hawker, a pleasant little nineteenth-century town, in the middle of what used to be vast wheat fields, now sheep country, in the Flinders Ranges. Here I met Jeff Findley, who had been asked to take me into Outback country.

‘The Nips have got the six-cylinder Land Rovers licked with their Toyotas,’ he said gloomily. ‘If I was Lord Stokes I’d be real worried.’ I wrote to Lord Stokes pointing this out, but he was so unworried that he didn’t bother to reply.

We drove up through the Ranges by way of the Hills of Arkaba, where there was a sheep station but scarcely any sheep, which was not surprising considering that in this sort of country at this time of year there were probably only 10,000 sheep to 10,000 acres.

Finally, we arrived at the Parachilna Hotel, 57 miles from Hawker, but longer by the route we took, just at the moment when the sky fell in and this particular part of the Outback and a good 500 miles north of it were deluged with water.

It is almost as difficult in retrospect to remember this night at the Parachilna Hotel as it is to forget it. Difficult either way with the malt whisky flowing like beer and the beer like spring water, and Angus Donald McKenzie, the proprietor of this old and extensive hotel, playing a lament on the bagpipes, with the rain falling so thick outside that it was difficult to breathe and while all that was going on trying to listen to old Bert Rickaby, who was eighty or ninety, I forget which, but looked sixty, who the previous week had opened up his stomach with a pen knife and got out 26 ounces of fluid, presumably pure Glen Grant.

‘… so I got some salt,’ Rickaby was speaking about some more ancient affliction now, ‘cut the poisoned part three times on top and twice underneath, rubbed in salt from the lake, and then went into Maree and got piss drunk.’

The rain ended any serious attempt to reach the real uninhabited Outback. Having charged through Beltana, a ghost town deep in mud, population six families – three Aboriginal, three white – and water-courses which engulfed the transfer box on our Range Rover, all the next day we sat on the bank of Emu Creek waiting for it to subside while the mile-long trains of freight cars on the Central Australian Railway, from Alice Springs, hummed down the line triumphantly above us.

The magnificent Victorian hotels we came across might have been in the West Country. They had hitching rails outside which were not for horses any more, but had been reinforced to prevent the owners of Nissans and Toyota Land Cruisers, all fitted with winches, lifting hooks and kangaroo bars, from driving them through the retaining wall of the hotel and into the bar inside.

So far as I could make out most of the fighting in Outback pubs was on account of somebody refusing to have a beer with someone else.

‘Eric, meet Ron, John, Les, Stan, Alan, Willie, Jimmy. This is Eric from England. How about a beer, Eric?’

I stood in the wide main street outside the Birdsville Hotel in south-west Queensland, which was the epitome of all the Outback pubs I had seen, watching the sun race up behind the trees out of the Diamantina River, which was often nothing but a series of dry furrows.

The rain had accomplished what seemed almost impossible in country where the last drops of the stuff worth measuring fell four years before, a whole foot of it coming down in a single night early in March the previous year, and that was only the beginning. Since then Birdsville and its eighty-odd inhabitants had been cut off by flooding from the outside world except by air.

I had seen many interesting things during my travels round Australia. I had been to the East Alligator River on the edge of Arnhem Land, which had large and horrid estuarine crocodiles at its mouth and freshwater ones with red eyes further up. I had seen swarms of magpie geese, spoonbills, ibis and variously coloured cockatoos and lotus birds with giant feet which helped them to skid over the surface of the water lily pads, red wallaroos and wild horses up to their flanks in water, and wild Indian buffaloes with 10- and 11-foot spreads of horn.

I had been to Arkaroola in the northern Flinders Ranges on a road that was like an old-fashioned, dark red blancmange and seen the uranium mountains that were so difficult to reach that they had to use camels to get the stuff out for the Manhattan Project in 1943 and 1944, and had stayed in their shadow in a brand new motel.

I had flown hundreds and hundreds of miles, over the coal mines at Leigh Creek and the dingo fence which stretches right across South Australia from New South Wales to the west, and I had just missed being bitten by a deadly spider in the meat house of an abandoned homestead at Tea Creek, and now I just wanted to sit down quietly and think about the Outback without seeing any more of it because, quite suddenly, it had become a little too much for me.

Walking the Plank

‘You have rather walked the plank, haven’t you, Eric?’ Donald Trelford, then Deputy Editor of the Observer, said when he heard that I had decided to leave the paper and become a freelance writer. For almost ten years, from 1963 to 1973, I had been its Travel Editor, one of the few jobs in my life from which I had not been sacked and had really enjoyed.

But I was not as worried about the prospect of walking the plank as I probably should have been. I knew all about walking planks and what happened to the good guys who did so. I still remembered, back in the twenties, seeing Douglas Fairbanks Senior, suffering this fate in a film, The Black Pirate. He had been shoved off the end of one swathed in chains to the accompaniment of some frenetic work on the piano by a pianist who was located where the orchestra would have been if it had been a theatre (sometimes he would be accompanied by a drummer to simulate the sounds of gunfire). At that time all films were silent ones.

But in spite of this, now fathoms deep in the Caribbean Sea, and with apparently inexhaustible reserves of oxygen in his lungs, Fairbanks had been able to rid himself of his chains; and then, having swum under the keel, had clambered aboard the enemy vessel, found to hand a swivel gun loaded with grape shot, with which he swept the decks of the murderous scum who had tried to do him in. (At least this is how I remember it years later.)

He was a corker, Douglas Fairbanks Senior was, and he could fill a cinema such as the Broadway in Hammersmith, or the Blue Halls, over the river from where I lived in Barnes – both of which smelt strongly of disinfectant – with just the suspicion of a twirl of one of his elegant moustaches. I think he had moustaches. All this happened long before Donald Trelford was even thought of.

That year of my departure from the Observer, 1973, the year I walked the plank, was one in which, all of a sudden, everything started happening that was needed – to continue the gangplank metaphor – to keep me and the rest of our family afloat.

It was the year I was commissioned to write a history of exploration* for what seemed at that time a gigantic fee of £12,000, with the condition that the book had to be delivered in six months and that no royalties would be paid until 125,000 copies had been sold. A prodigious number for a book with a selling price at that time of £10.50. Sales actually came close to this figure, but then, mysteriously, stopped.

At the same time I was asked to become the principal figure in a BBC film, one of a series entitled One Pair of Eyes, the intention of which, I was told, was to find out what made me tick.

As if all this was not enough to contend with, Wanda decided that this was an appropriate moment to sell our house in Wimbledon, which meant that until we bought another one, so far as Britain was concerned, we would be homeless.

The house, a pretty, early-Victorian one, was hidden away in a cul-de-sac called Sunnyside on the slopes of Wimbledon Hill, and she had surprisingly little difficulty in selling it. There were two contenders, but only one of them was seriously interested. The eventual buyer was at that time a professional circus clown. It was Wimbledon Week when he came to see it and the spiraea was in full flower. The garden looked wonderful.

Suddenly, for the first time in our joint lives, we enjoyed the sensation of being quite well off. We extinguished our overdraft and, bubbling with euphoria, left the Midland Bank which had made our life a misery for so many years, to carry on without us.

The house was crammed from top to bottom with all the loot and junk accumulated in more than twenty years of travel: primitive paintings, among them some from Haiti, Ethiopia, Bali, the shores of the Mediterranean and the Côte d’lvoire. One of them, a spirited impression of the Turkish city of Bursa, in the manner of Osbert Lancaster, was painted in 1902 on a piece of linoleum. There was also a fine Aboriginal painting on bark, from Van Diemen’s Land, of an emu.

And there were kilims, flat weave rugs made by the Yürük nomads during their wanderings on and off the high Anatolian plateau, with which they used to cover the floors of their tents.

And there was the entire Ordnance Survey of Great Britain at one inch to the mile, all 189 sheets of it mounted on canvas. And about 2,000 books, including dozens of Murray and Baedeker guides; and the entire Observer Colour Magazine from its inception in 1963; and all the manuscripts of my books that I should have thrown away but hadn’t; and a complete set of the 1879 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in a demountable bookcase (useful if one needed to consult it in the wilderness while on yak’s back, all thirty-five volumes of it).

And there were bellows cameras with shutters that made a noise like the Traitor’s Gate being slammed shut when they were fired off; and there were models of the sort of ships and boats I had sailed or rowed in – a curragh from the Arran Islands, oolaks and panswais from the Ganges, a four-masted Cape Horn sailing ship, a caïque from Ruad, the Syrian island in the Eastern Mediterranean on which they are still built to this day.

There was a large, empty tin of what had contained a kilo of Malossol caviar – the two halves of the tin held together by what looked like the inner tube of a car tyre – which I had brought from Leningrad to Moscow on New Year’s Day 1965, and from Moscow to the Hook of Holland stuck on the front of a succession of steam engines in order to stop it going off in what were tropically heated carriages.

And there was a black felt suit with matching double-breasted waistcoat, so thick that it could stand up without anyone in it. It had been made for me by a Bulgarian tailor who had his premises in one of the sinister, labyrinthine lanes between what was then the Old Fishmarket by the Galata Bridge in Istanbul – a suit I never wore.

And there were cricket bats steeped in linseed oil which I hadn’t used for so many years that I had forgotten how to play the game; and a pair of sculls belonging to my father that I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of; and a couple of pairs of cross-country running shoes fitted with spikes which I didn’t think I was going to need while writing a history of discovery, and a pair of cycling shoes. And there were jellabs brought back from North Africa, long garments made from thick, creamy wool; and lots of straw hats in various stages of collapse – one of them of a sort that Galician women wore on their heads, which were sufficiently robust to support a basket with some 60lb of fish in it; and there were a couple of navy blue cotton suits of the sort that were currently being worn by something like a billion Chinese; and there was a dustbin full of sandals – mostly, for some inscrutable reason, left-footed – which we planned to leave at the Wimbledon rubbish tip.

And there were Chinese hats with ear-flaps; and a brand-new Romanian railway guard’s navy blue wool coat with an imitation fur collar and entirely lined with sheepskin, bought brand-new from a state pawnshop in Bucharest for around £12; and there were mowing machines and a garden roller and Primus stoves and Bergan rucksacks and bicycles and what were known as Itisa tents made from the finest imaginable cotton back in 1935 and still usable in 1996,* and real eiderdown sleeping bags which cost a small fortune; and walking sticks, one of which concealed within it a sword and another a cosh, which my father commissioned from Brigg, the umbrella and stick maker in Piccadilly, when he had to travel in ‘foreign parts’. And there were fifteen years of back numbers of Vogue and Harper’s, aides-mémoire to my life and times in the rag trade. And there was an enormous hammock made by ladies working in the gaol in Merida in Yucatan which could swallow up a family of five with ease. And thousands of prints without negatives and negatives without prints, and transparencies, some of which were already beginning to fade.

These were just a few of the things, objets retrouvés, which had swum before our eyes while the very old-fashioned-looking removal men – all of them wearing green baize aprons and themselves smelling of a mixture of, could it be linseed and old furniture? – removed and wrapped them up in old yellowing newspapers (that I would not have been surprised to learn had the date 4 August 1914 on them) before stowing them away in one of a large number of plywood tea chests with Army and Navy Stores stencilled on them in black.

The removal men had almost completed this packing-up process and had already begun to load into the van some of the chests from the upper parts of the house, comporting themselves with a stately slowness, when the director of the film in which we were to take part arrived on the scene and asked us to tell the removal men to bring all the containers back into the house as he wanted to film the process of the Newbys packing up and leaving for pastures new.

Mischa Scorer, who was responsible for this decision, was young, brilliant, charming and, as he now proved himself to be, utterly ruthless. What eventually resulted was a rather funny piece of cinéma vérité, based on there being nothing more likely to drive anyone to suicide than unpacking a whole lot of old tea chests, filled to the brim with things you will probably never need again, and then repacking them.

It was Mischa who told me that I would need my spiked cross-country shoes for a sequence in which I was to run across Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park, something I used to do quite often, mostly in winter just before dusk when they were wild and lonely places. I did this to let off steam and to think about what I was going to write next and how I was going to approach the subject. This was years before jogging became a worldwide pastime.

He also told me I would need my cycling shoes for the cycling scenes and they eventually turned up at the bottom of another box. I take size 12s in shoes and my bike had narrow, racing pedals, so there was no question of just walking into a shop and finding a pair – mine had to be made-to-measure. Both items were at the bottom of their respective tea chests.

After carousing in the mud on Wimbledon Common and less muddily in Richmond Park – both running events – the whole show was moved to Marble Arch. Here, if the venue seemed to Mischa to be sufficiently hazardous, I was to be filmed riding round and round it on my twelve-speed touring bicycle which had dropped handlebars. This, too, was long before mountain bikes with triple chainwheels and eighteen or twenty-one gears appeared on the scene.

After seemingly endless circumnavigations, eventually the filming took place with me wired for sound and the crew filming me from the back of a van as I pedalled towards them at about 15mph, at the same time gibbering into the microphone in an attempt to express my feelings about riding round the Marble Arch. The effect of a solitary cyclist talking away to himself, in fact shouting away to himself – the only way I could make myself heard above the roar of the traffic as I crossed and recrossed its bows – must have given other road users the impression that they were in the presence of a lunatic, which in effect I was. It was only when I saw some film of me and my bike taken through a lens which caused everything behind me in the way of traffic to loom precipitously overhead that I realized how dangerous it was.

Follies, Holy Wells, Great Cliffs and Storms were other subjects I had told Mischa I would be interested in elaborating on in One Pair of Eyes. All these were to be found in abundance on the West Coast of Ireland anywhere between Malin and Mizen Head. But storms, even in winter, were difficult to predict. At one moment we found ourselves standing by to fly to South Africa where a big storm was threatening to take place; but then a whole series of them, mostly force 9 and 10, began to blow up on the Loop Head Peninsula at the mouth of the Shannon in County Clare, which were stormy enough for anything a sane person would want to be involved in.

It was at this time, with a force 10 gale raging and very much against my inclination, that Mischa told me to traverse a large, inclined ledge of rock that was being swept by big seas and it was here, while I was standing on the edge, wondering whether to go through with it, that one of the waves picked me up and threw me down with such violence that a doctor had to be summoned to give me a shot of morphia. Meanwhile, Mischa carried on filming without giving me the opportunity to change out of my wet clothes. Working with Mischa could be a health hazard. I should have sued him.

When the excitement of being asked to write a history of exploration had to some extent abated and I was actually confronted with the necessity of getting on with it, I felt like Hillary and Tenzing must have felt at the foot of that Everest. What I soon realized was that I knew far less about the subject than my new employers thought I knew. They had already assembled a team of researchers of mature student age whose job it was, ostensibly, to help me in the search for material; but some of these had already been commandeered to do research on the pictorial content of the book, for which it grew ever more apparent the actual text had a more or less supporting role.

At first I decided to make a list of all the well and not so well known explorers, beginning with the Ancient World, and I eventually ended up with a lot of notebooks crammed with unhelpful entries, such as: ‘Egypt – Old Kingdom – Papyrus in the reign of Sneferu (4th dynasty c. 2613–3494). Records imaginary voyage and shipwreck – Cary and Warmington, The Ancient Explorers, p. 233 and 239. See note on Celinischef, Sur un ancien conte Egyptien, 1881, p. 4–8, and in Maspero.’ And so on until I felt my reason going.

In fact, mercifully for me, it soon turned out that there was not going to be enough time to do it in this way, or even decide what was to go in and what was to be thrown out. By now we had taken temporary refuge in the ground floor flat of some great friends of ours in Spencer Park, Wandsworth, and no sooner had we moved in than great piles of books and aides-mémoire began to arrive on the premises. They were either brought by special messengers on motor cycles or in taxis from the publishers’ premises off the Charing Cross Road. Then, having found the books I needed, many of which had come from the London Library (and a lot from the Wandsworth Public Library, which had enormous numbers of travel books in its vaults), and having, for example, identified those which dealt with the Portuguese voyages to Africa and the East in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, I opened them at page one and began to go through them and sometimes even began to write about them, without, usually, having the slightest idea what would eventually happen. Suddenly, the whole world began to spread out before me. It was all rather exciting.

Having done this, I used to send my typescript back to the publishers where the editors would mangle and rewrite it in their own, inimitable fashion. But I could scarcely complain. They had no choice. All my contributions were over-written by many thousand words. I had, and still have, the conviction that I must let the reader know if I discover anything interesting, and unfortunately so many things are interesting. At least they are to me.

Apart from a month in Italy, where I took on the Arctic and Antarctica in a temperature of 90°F, my daily programme was unchanging. I used to get up at dawn and run 2½ miles round Spencer Park, a beautiful, Arcadian place surrounded by noble trees, before returning for a good breakfast, produced by Wanda, who had been making the bed – unless she made the bed we couldn’t get into the room. Lunch was a sandwich. I then worked all through the afternoon until dusk, then ran another 2½ miles.

Meanwhile every day Wanda set off, pedalling a bicycle, for the house we had bought in Kennington, which she was refurbishing. Before dinner I had a large whisky and with dinner shared a bottle of wine with Wanda. Then we both went to bed, whacked. We didn’t have a television.

This kind of existence went on for five months, by which time I began to feel like the Beast of Glamis, or the Man in the Iron Mask. Now, more than twenty-five years later, I am awed by my industry and enthusiasm for what was a rather difficult task.

* The World Atlas of Exploration, Mitchell Beazley, 1975.

* Made by Camtors (Camp and Sports Co-operators).

Follies and Grottoes

In 1974 we bought Pear Tree Court, a house on the banks of the Harbourne River at Harbertonford between Totnes and Kingsbridge, in South Devon. It was a pretty, Gothic house, its principal disadvantage being that it was so far from London (about 200 miles) that we practically had to bribe our friends to come for the weekend. It also had a rather forbidding wall surrounding it which gave the impression that it was just about to fall on us, quaking away below, but it never did.

Having acquired a Gothic house, our thoughts turned to a Gothic grotto. The nearest grotto to Pear Tree Court – whether it was Gothic or not was conjectural – was in what had been the park of Oldstones, a burnt-out Palladian house near Blackawton, the property of the Cholwich family, in which there were said to be two grottoes.

The approach was by a path which led from the house through an avenue of trees to what was on this particular day a distinctly gloomy valley with three small, artificial lakes in it – nearby there was a grotto in poor condition.

Beyond the valley there was a wood, and at its far end, in a cold and extremely exposed position, a granite plaque was set in a stone wall and inscribed with the following:

Within a Wood unknown to Public View

From Youth to Age a Reverend Hermit grew

The Moss his Bed, the Cave His Humble Cell,

His Food the Fruits, his drink the Crystal Well.

Remote from Man with God he passed His Days,

Pray’r all his Business, all his Pleasure Praise.

And in the wood, at the end of a cutting, there was, it was said, the cave in which a resident hermit, the most rare of beings in such an inhospitable climate as that of Britain, spent many years holed up in order to gratify his patron, and without catching his death of cold.

We never found this second grotto. I told Wanda that the grotto by the lake was not the sort of grotto I wanted, anyway. What I wanted was a more dotty grotto. It was almost the shortest, certainly the coldest day of the year and Wanda was sufficiently depressed to the point of not wanting a grotto at all.

‘Let’s go home,’ she said. We did so and I promptly went down with what was called flu, but was really nothing more than over-exposure to the elements. A short time later, when I came downstairs to begin a convalescent Christmas, it was Wanda who advanced the idea of building a dotty grotto, as if it had been her idea in the first place.

Eventually, we decided to build a grotto that would also act as a garden shed – planning permission not being necessary at that time for garden sheds less than 12ft high, providing they had ridge roofs, 10ft with any other sort of roof. As a further insurance against the dead hand of the planner, which is inevitably set against follies, except those of their own creation, we were fortunate in being able to site it behind part of the high stone wall which would conceal it from the public eye. It would also enable us to have access to water, without which no grotto is complete, as the River Harbourne flowed conveniently close on the other side of this wall.

The first serious discussion about it took place in the kitchen of the house the following autumn.

2 November.

Beautiful limpid, cloudless morning after a slight night frost. About 10.30 Mr Perring, Wanda and I sat down in the kitchen and went through the Folly Book (Follies and Grottoes by Barbara Jones, Constable, £10, an essential work for anyone foolish enough to go into the folly/grotto business).

We are looking for a grotto I thought I saw in Barbara Jones’s book. It was Gothic, small and built of rough, uncut stones with finials sprouting from the pediment. I must have seen it in Country Life, of which I appear to have 5,000 copies in the barn. The one we eventually sketch out for ourselves on the back of an envelope is based on a dramatically scaled down version of part of the entrance to the Hell Fire Caves at West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, which in its original form would necessitate the introduction of slave labour in order to get it on the go.

Mr Perring of course immediately understands the sort of thing we have in mind. He is attracted by the great gaping entrances to the Hell Fire Caves with blackness behind, like the way into the lair of the Minotaur; but since our entire folly will only be about 6ft wide, such an entrance would leave no space for niches in the frontage, besides being rather draughty.

Eventually we agreed. Niches inside and out, slate ceiling. All to be filled with shell motifs; a marble head – Neptune, lion, satyr or whatever spouting water into a basin lined with variegated pebbles, from which it runs back into the river. Floored with egg-shaped stones from the beach at Branscombe, between Beer and Seaton. Chesil Bank, a 16-mile long beach of shingle with a clay foundation, between Bridport and the Isle of Portland, is too far away. God knows where we shall find the shells – we shall probably need thousands. Outside, ridge slate roof, masked by pediment with four rough finials to simulate living rock. The whole thing to be 7ft high, 6ft wide with a 3ft door and 7ft deep.

Mr Perring is a retired stonemason. He can do anything with stone except bend it and he knows how to make those huge stone balls that balance on pillars at the gates of the grander sorts of houses and occasionally fall on delivery vans. He is still a demon for work and not unnaturally thinks the country has gone to the dogs; if one accepts his standards of activity it is difficult not to agree with him. His immediate reaction is to mend a thing rather than ‘replace the unit’. Consequently he never throws anything away as ‘it might come in useful’.

He is also a vegetable gardener of near, if not actual, genius and he has won more cups for his vegetables than anyone else in these parts – there is a Perring Cup to be competed for by the less inspired.

Above all he is a man of natural taste, especially in anything to do with building – the country towns and villages in this part of the world are the results of the labours of generations of such men, now mostly dead and gone.

Mr Perring was chafing to begin and I was dispatched forthwith (from now on my role was no more than that of a drudge) to buy materials – just to be getting on with, and it didn’t go far – 5cwt sand, 2 sackfuls shingle, 2 sacks cement and a packet of chalk to mark the outline of the building on the back wall. We already had some dark limestone left over from rebuilding the porch, which would see us through for a bit.

By the end of the second day he/we had the foundations in, reinforced with bed-bars that Mr Perring found in a hedge. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘Never throw anything away. You never know when it might come in handy.’ And then, looking at a sky full of leaden clouds, he added: ‘If it rains we’ll be stugged.’

It didn’t and we weren’t, and the next day he began to lay the first courses of the walls, breaking the stone as he went. When it began to get dark he knocked off. Before he went home to his tea, prepared by Mrs Perring, he advised me, as it was 5 November, to stuff the letter-box with damp newspaper to prevent the village boys – ‘them lot of young toads’ – blowing it up with fireworks, also to bar all entrances, which gave us a feeling of being besieged. Thwarted, they blew the lids off two half-filled dustbins, with spectacular results.

6 November.

Fine early, gloomy later. Scour countryside with Mr P for stone suitable for grotto building. Those quarries that have it want £11 a ton and another £10 on top of that to get it home. Our last load of similar stone cost £5 a ton. Late in the afternoon find a worked-out quarry at Ashburton, said to be a thousand years old, which is on the point of closing for ever. £5.50 a ton if we sort it ourselves, so we pick out about 4½ tons by hand with the help of the last quarryman – the others have been made redundant. This quarry is the epitome of melancholy: trees on the cliffs above shedding the last of their leaves down the sheer black walls, defunct machinery, rusty coloured pools of water, the last small heap of usable stones – reminiscent, with a dark, tall-spired church looming over us, of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. The negation of a Jolly Folly; but what a place to do away with oneself.

7 November.

A lorry arrives in the a.m. and deposits the stone from Ashburton with such a thunderous noise that neighbours rush into the street thinking that someone’s house has collapsed.

At this time I was trying desperately to write a book, but I soon gave up. It was obvious that Mr Perring regarded me as being on permanent call. As soon as I got started writing, I had to wheel more barrow-loads down to him. One Sunday, in order to snatch a whole day of uninterrupted work – he worked on the grotto Saturdays too – I wheeled down about fifty barrow-loads. On Monday I got it in the neck. ‘Don’t you go getting me more than five loads at a time, or I’ll be stugged,’ he said. ‘Any road, a lot of what you brought is a load of old rummage.’

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