On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  My parents did of course find the Middle East ‘dirty’, being people of their time. Post Second World War many housewives seemed to be obsessed with cleanliness. This was in an era when people were fascinated by modern inventions, such as nylon and rayon, and were contemptuous of anything old fashioned. I doubt my mother looked out over those fields on the banks of the Suez canal and got excited by waterwheels and irrigation ditches as I did. She probably shuddered and went down to her cabin to play with her new electric hairdryer.

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  In 1839 an obscure British sea captain by the name of Stafford Bettesworth Haines sailed into the harbour of a poor Arab fishing village and claimed it as a possession of Queen Victoria. A local sultan’s son took exception to these Europeans on the beaches of Aden and engaged the British in a smart little war. The British marines overcame the opposition and eventually the sultan signed a lease allowing the British to use the village as a ship’s coaling station. One hundred and ten years later that same fishing village had been transformed into the second busiest harbour in the world (after New York). At the time of the occupation Aden was thickly forested. Mimosa, tamarisk, camel’s thorn and myrrh shrubs grew in abundance. These were populated by rabbits, hares, gazelles, foxes, hyenas and a great deal of bird life. By the mid-1800s the land had been deforested by the successors of Captain Haines, to build houses and ships, and other things necessary to the flourishing of a great port.

  The village was 180 miles from an ancient city once known as Sheba, the home of King Solomon’s regal visitor, Queen Bilquis. Their child’s descendants became the emperors of Ethiopia. The people of Sheba were descended from Qahtan, the Joktan of the Bible’s Genesis. Today that city is known as Sanaa. It rises out of a tall plateau of red stone like a geometrical flower the petals of which are sandstone houses and the rigid stamens, gold-tipped minarets. Sanaa is in the Yemen and Aden is to the south of that city, separated by a narrow desert in an area known to us as the Radfan. If you want to know more, read The Barren Rocks of Aden by James Lunt, an informative book.

  We duly arrived in Steamer Point, or Tawahi, which is surrounded by red volcanic rocky hills and sand. Sand everywhere. It was extremely hot and unbelievably sultry, being the Cool Season. When we complained about the high temperatures and cloying atmosphere we were gleefully told to ‘wait until the Hot Season’ which was indeed much much hotter and much more humid than the Cool Season. Stepping off the boat after two weeks my legs felt like jelly on the static ground. I was immediately assailed by Arabs in cotton kilts and turbans selling watches and wallets. I was told that if I didn’t buy anything their children would starve and I wouldn’t go to Heaven.

  My dad met us on the quay and of course mum burst into tears, then berated him for leaving her alone in the first place, in the full knowledge that dad had had no choice in the matter. Then, after the drying of the tears, we climbed into a bus and were taken to RAF Khormaksar. Dad’s work was there and we had married quarters on the edge of the desert, out of which gazelle used to roam. The house was whitewashed, inside and out, with red-tiled floors. I loved it. I did not love the fact that on entering my bedroom I saw that the wall was decorated with the largest spider I had ever seen. I learned later that this monster, as big as a dinner plate, was a camel spider which had a nasty poisonous bite.

  Dad then did something which I now regret, since I’ve grown to love and respect spiders, and think them the saviours of the house. He squashed it with a large encyclopaedia. Even flattened under this monster tome, the spider’s hairy legs stuck out all around the edges of the book. They were as thick as my little finger and as black as jet.

  There was other wildlife present. Red ants thrived in the wall’s cracks, as did bed bugs. Quite a few smaller cousins of the camel spider inhabited the cupboards and under the stairs. Chit-chats (gecko lizards) lived on the walls and around the curtain rails. A bootlace snake had made its home in the garden and proved impossible to catch. Large brown kites nicknamed shite-hawks perched on the flat roof and glared down at us as we went to and from the house, as if the place belonged to them and we were the intruders.

  Mum blitzed through the place with DDT sprays and various newspaper cudgels, until it was a clear zone. She was persuaded to leave the chit-chats alone, since they ate mosquitoes and were at least a little more cuddly than the camel spiders and white scorpions. An invisible sign went up outside our front door after that, telling the creatures of the desert that they were not welcome in our home. Even the mild wide-eyed gazelle were chased off the veranda by mother’s broom, since they did indeed eat the vegetables she planted and then thanked her by crapping on her clean tiles.

  Around the married quarters the lone and level sands stretched far away. Nearby was the airport, where Constellation passenger planes and military aircraft took off and landed. In the other direction, just a few miles away, a giant extinct volcanic crater rose from the earth to dominate the area. This was Crater, whose peak was known as Shamsan. Inside the cone was a whole town, accessible from the sea side, but with only a narrow gateway on the land side. Crater was in later years to become a terrorist hotspot when the British were being chased out of Aden Protectorate.

  The sea was about a mile from the house, beyond the black volcanic sands. No golden beach for us, but a grey-black shore which curved all the way along the coast. Near to the water’s edge was the station’s salt-water swimming pool, fed by the sea’s tide. This was the meeting place for the kids after school finished at one o’clock on most days and here I perfected my swimming until I was a veritable fish.

  Max and I started at RAF Khormaksar School straight away, much to our chagrin. The headmaster there was a Mr Currie, who wasn’t a bad sort as far as headmasters went, though he caned me once for smashing a window with a football. The school itself was not far from home, perhaps a quarter of a mile. The road went past the BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) offices. I wore khaki shorts, sandals and polo shirts to school. Max’s hair was Brylcreemed into a glossy quiff, but as mine was tangled curls I didn’t bother with hair oil.

  Since there were two of us, Max and I didn’t have to go through the ‘Hey, new kid!’ stuff that usually ensued on arrival at a strange school. We presented a formidable front. Max was a well-built lad with a body like a boxer’s. I was somewhat leaner and to be honest still a bit pretty-looking even at twelve, but I had learned to deal with changing schools by setting my jaw in a defiant manner. It didn’t always work, especially on psychopaths, but on this occasion it was effective. I didn’t have to have that initial playground fight to prove my worth. In fact we joined in a game of cricket, a pastime at which I have always been only average, but which I enjoyed as much as any English boy.

  Khormaksar School proved to be a little less dull than all the other schools I had been to. I was to get a much better education in Aden, since there was only one school and naturally it taught to the higher level. Many service children missed out on a grammar school education due to the fact that they moved every eighteen months to two years. If two children were competing for a single place in a grammar school, and one was a local resident while the other was from an RAF camp, it made sense to the authorities to give that place to the local child. I am vehemently against that early grammar school system, which was totally unfair. It also lacked any logic, since in adulthood several of my secondary school friends obtained good university degrees.

  So, in Aden I was to learn Latin, algebra and poetry all of which I came to love, though my Latin fell away very quickly afterwards. The poetry, taught by an enthusiastic schoolmistress whose name on the one school report I still have is undecipherable and lost from memory, stuck with me all my days. Rupert Brooke’s ‘Granchester’ was my first introduction to poetry and I thought it a most marvellous piece of writing. Since then I have gone on to many more poets who leave me breathless with admiration – William Carlos Williams, John Masefield, Ted Hughes, Alfred Lord Tennyson, W.B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, Rob
ert Burns, William Souter – many many more. Max hated poetry and we had a fight about it. He called me a name and I called him a name, then we came to blows. This was all forgotten as soon as we had got up from the dirt and dusted off our clothes.

  Outside of school I learned enough Arabic to get by in the company of local boys and the chowkidars, the Arab nightwatchmen and guarders of the gates. Languages come easy at that age. Max and I, and other boys, went swimming almost every day. We also joined the Air Scouts and after what seems to me now to be a short time, we both became patrol leaders – I of the Hawk Patrol and he of the Eagles. There were only two patrols, so between us we had cornered the market in leadership roles. I’m not bragging here, it just happened. Maybe we were lucky and showed more enthusiasm than others. I had already been a Sea Scout at Felixstowe, so perhaps experience told. Anyway, we both loved it. At heart we were Boys of the Empire, wanting to emulate men like Baden-Powell of Africa, and John Nicholson of India. Stories like Kim and King Solomon’s Mines were our bread and butter. One day we were going to conquer Africa and India, or Malaya, or Burma. Why, here we were in South Arabia, kings of the sand!

  After a couple of months in Aden for some unknown reason my mother had the bright idea of putting me into Maalla Technical College. It was run by Arabs for the sons of Arab civil servants. Classes were mostly in English so that was not a problem, but I was the only white boy in a class of thirty Arab boys, and got a bit lonely. They weren’t unkind to me, quite the opposite and we were fascinated by each other. I was even invited to one fourteen-year-old’s wedding and ate sheep’s eyes. But I naturally felt out of place and can empathise with anyone of any nationality who find themselves in a similar position. You just feel an odd outsider. I made one really good friend among my classmates, a boy called Salem Yafu. He lived at Sheikh Othman, where we used to go camping, and I met his family there. Adenis were always so very hospitable.

  Mum took me out of the college when she saw how miserable I was and I went back to Khormaksar School with the colonial kids. They were not all service children. Some were sons and daughters of oil workers, or diplomats, or civil servants. There was a one girl, a Scottish lass named Rosemary Burns, who was the daughter of a meteorologist.

  One day we were collecting razor shells and scallops on the beach to whizz into the wind and get back like boomerangs, when Maxy shyly confessed to me that he was infatuated with Rosemary Burns. He didn’t put it in those words of course, but we’re talking teenage crush here. I had not noticed her until that point, but took the time to study her over the next week. She was not a classical beauty, but she was pretty and glowed with health and was probably the most intelligent student in our class of twenty. She wore plaits, had blue-grey eyes and had a trim figure. Her Scottish burr was wonderful. The more I saw of her, the more I tumbled into the pit to join Max. She was lovely and I fell desperately in love with her. OK, I was thirteen, but don’t tell me you can’t fall in love at that age. I fell like a brick down a well. However, to my great shame I didn’t tell Max of my feelings. I don’t know why. Perhaps I didn’t want to upset him and get beaten to within an inch of my life.

  Anyway, one day on our way home from school we walked with Rosemary to her house. It was in the officer’s patch, so we were a little overawed to begin with. Max finally confronted her and said, ‘Rosemary, I like you a lot. Will you be my girlfriend?’ Almost immediately I followed up with, ‘I like you too. Will you be my girlfriend as well?’ Max shot me a look of astonishment, which might have turned to blistering anger if Rosemary had not laughed and replied, ‘I’ll be a girlfriend to both of you, you dopes.’

  And so she was.

  I was ecstatic. Max was ecstatic. To give him his due, he only asked me once if I was sincere and I apologised to him for the surprise but explained, ‘Couldn’t help myself’. He understood that. Rosemary was unique. There was no other girl to touch her. It was unsurprising that a young, impressionable boy should fall in love with her. From that point on we visited her house at least three or four times a week. Her parents were extremely indulgent and only once did I cross them, when I made a stink bomb with my chemistry set and turned their veranda into a temporary sewer. They took us with them to Tarshyne Bay, the officers’ swimming pool, though we did get banned from there for rowdy behaviour. Rosemary’s dad was a strong-backed Scot, who awed us with stories of his voyages on weather ships to the Arctic. Her mother was a genteel woman of shining intellect, whose brainpower had been passed on to her daughter. Then there was Brian, Rosemary’s younger brother, who disdained us as much as we disdained him. A good lad, for all that. Just younger.

  We never did do very much except sit on the veranda and talk. There was no touching, which seems very strange in this day and age, not even holding hands. Normally, Rosemary had a great sense of fairness, but on the odd occasion the two Celts ganged up on the Anglo-Saxon. I felt aggrieved at those times but rifts never lasted very long.

  The Burns family had a gramophone and a heap of classical records, but there was one particular long-player by an American singer I loved called Eddie Cantor, who sang Al Jolson songs. It was my first experience of the jazz music which was to influence my life as an adult. Eddie Cantor sang songs like ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ and ‘Row Row Row’. Not jazz exactly, but in the same vein.

  ‘You and your Eddie Cantor,’ groaned Max, whenever I asked Rosemary to play the LP, ‘you’ll send us all barmy.’

  Those long hot innocent days in the company of a boy named Max and a girl named Rosemary were the most wonderful of my childhood. We would talk while watching large brown hawks gliding on thermals over the desert sands and jump, startled by the sudden crack of a dhow’s sail as it filled with wind out in the Gulf of Aden. I have never forgotten those afternoons and the sense of happy contentment.

  That triangular friendship awakened new depths of emotion and thinking in me. Contemplations which turned me eventually into the writer I am today. It was magical, my time in Aden, when I was close to desert cities that were symbols of stories like Tales from the Thousand and One Nights and The Thief of Bagdad. I had the Hadhramaut Desert on my doorstep, an extinct volcano with a whole town inside its cone, a sea full of strange fish both harmless and dangerous, a harbour crammed with ocean-going liners, the sleek racehorses of the waves. The east was draped over my head and around my shoulders, a light mantle, warm and wonderful, and I never ever wanted to leave and go back to that cold, grey forbidding place which ironically we called ‘home’. This was my spiritual home, this land of dark-skinned people with gossamer souls and fire in their feet.

  So, that was Aden. Rock climbing up Shamsan; visiting Rosemary; swimming; scouting; camping at Sheikh Othman; reading Classic Comics, Captain Marvel, Batman, and a host of real books in my bedroom; venturing out (but not too far) into the Hadhramaut Desert, which was on the hem of the vast Empty Quarter, a place where men could and did get lost forever by wandering just a few yards off the track; going to the open-air cinema and leaning back to look up at the night sky full of still and shooting stars when the film got boring. A hell of a life for a boy. It seemed a long long childhood out there, though in fact it was quite brief in adult terms.

  There was a violent side to Aden. Britain was tussling with the Yemen and sent Meteor jets to quell rebellious tribes. Photos were passed around the school playground, of severed heads stuck on stakes outside the city of Sanaa, where an imam ruled the country on the lines of an ancient Persian satrap. Those who fell out of his favour either ended up in chains in his dungeons or their heads were used to decorate the city gates. Closer to home a commanding officer’s wife swam outside the lido net and was attacked by a shark. She lost her leg and bled to death before anyone could save her. An Arab fisherman had jumped out of a canoe and beat the shark, in relatively shallow water, with his paddle and earned the respect and admiration of the whole colony. Incidents of this nature were part of the life and death of Aden, and of not especial concern to a youth on his way to manhoo
d.

  Always I was torn between the outdoor life, which I loved, wanting to emulate Kipling’s Kim, and reading. I adored reading and went through dozens of books during my time in Aden. The ‘Just William’ stories, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Herman Melville, many many others. Fortunately there was time for both in the land of prickly heat and sunburn. There was time for running wild in the desert with no shoes on and time for lying on my bed devouring fiction.

  I still had my Brownie box camera and would photograph things like the Aden Protectorate Levies doing their drills. These were a British ‘cavalry’ regiment mounted on dromedaries. I’m not sure whether they had British officers but the soldiers and NCOs were local Arabs with turbans and khaki uniforms. Their base was right outside our home and I used to be fascinated by the camels racing by my bedroom window each with a soldier on its back waving a rifle.

  Towards the end of my time in Aden, when I was around fourteen, Max and I did our ‘Journey’ badge, which we needed if we were ever to reach that ultimate goal of obtaining our Bushman’s Thong and also becoming Queen Scouts. To do our Journey we had to plan a two-day hike, camping out on our own. Because we were in a land that held more potential hazards than the UK, where unusual situations might develop, the scout master had wisely decided to meet us at a rendezvous point on the first night. Once he had reassured himself that we were safe and well he would leave us to our camping. This proved to be a life-saving plan on the part of our Skip.

  Max and I set off with packs on our backs, full of zeal, and enthusiasm for our task. We started the hike by following the beach that closely skirted the colony’s large extinct volcano. This would take us a few hours until midday. There was initially a margin of black sand between the sea’s edge and the steep, rocky sides of Crater, but to our consternation this strip of beach eventually disappeared once the tide came in. Cut off and unable to turn back, we were forced to climb up the sides of the volcano cone. To worsen our situation, while climbing a rock chimney to escape the rising sea we lost the backpack containing our water. It fell, bouncing from crag to crag, down into the dark waves below. The incline of the hillside was very precipitous and the going was incredibly slow and difficult. There were goat tracks among the jagged outcrops, but we were not goats with small, nimble feet.