On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  Singapore, with its oppressive heat and magnificent odours is deep in my blood. While on boxing training I ran its roads, I swam its waterways. Most of the rainforest has gone now, and certainly all the kampongs, but the flavours remain. Orchard Road is my favourite street in the whole world. The parks, the Botanic Gardens, the parkways with their bike paths and skating lanes. If I had to live anywhere for the rest of my life, politics apart, I would choose Singapore.

  And of all the places I visited in Singapore, both in my youth and throughout my later life, the one that stands out is the Tiger Balm Gardens. I first visited the gardens at an age when I was less critical than I am now. Then the painted statues of both culture and myth were enough to fire any would-be writer’s imagination. Yes, the exhibition was gaudy, and cheap-looking, trashy even, but it dazzled one’s imagination in the bright Singapore sunlight. Scenes of Hell with men being cut in half by red-hot swords or disembowelled by demons or chopped into bloody quarters. Statues of giants and gods and goblins. Tableaux of elephants crossing mountains and herds of horses charging through valleys. Monkeys, ogres, huge serpents, dragons, mice, warriors, kings, princes, harlots, all painted in bright brash colours, their expressions twisted into masks of fury or horror. The Tiger Balm Gardens was a unique experience. Some would hate this show for its tawdriness and vulgarity, but I came to love it in my unsophisticated youth and remained ever a devotee.

  ~

  On the 2 January 1960 I had my weigh-in at 6 o’clock in the morning for the coming boxing matches in the Far East Air Force Boxing Championships. My diary tells me I was beaten on points. I had a few cuts and bruises, but nothing to cry about. Johnny Ball won his fight and Chid won three of his bouts. I was feeling pretty low but I hadn’t realised at the time that poets and short-story writers aren’t meant to slug it out in the ring with boilermakers and road builders. At least they can, but they’re most likely going to get thumped unless they have names like Ernest Hemingway or Jack London.

  ~

  Airmen in Singapore were sent to Frazer’s Hill in Malaya for jungle training. I was looking forward to this expedition training immensely, despite my misgivings regarding the leeches I had heard so much about. However, it was not to be. On the 19 February 1960, I was told I had been posted to RAF Gan, a coral island in the south of the Maldives. Gan was a staging post and a rescue airfield for aircraft which got into trouble crossing the wide blue Indian Ocean. Quite a few personnel from Singapore were sent there and served less than a year before being sent back to UK. I hated the idea. I loved Singapore and wanted to stay there forever. Now I was going to an island which measured one mile by half a mile. Nothing there, so I thought, but coral dust, work and endless boredom with nowhere to go.

  On the 25 February 1960, I boarded a Hastings aircraft and had a flight to Ceylon (not yet Sri Lanka), stayed the night and the next morning flew on to Addu Atoll, a ring of coral islands of which Gan is one. The atoll is the southernmost group of the many atolls of the Maldives, right smack-bang on the equator. No gloaming to be had in these islands, where the noons are absolutely vertical. Darkness drops down like black tar at 6 p.m., dawn jumps up from the horizon at 6 a.m. and twilight is but a fleeting shadow. The inhabitants of the Maldives are small of stature, but lively and quick to smile. They speak among other languages, Urdu. They are Muslims, brilliant sailors, great fishermen, fine cricketers. A delightful bunch of people.

  I was nineteen years of age when I stepped from the plane and I’d already lived in several countries and had been to twenty-two different schools. I still had no civil exams to my name. I’d been studying rather indifferently and had begun to write poetry. I still felt cheated of an education at Eton and Cambridge, having as my literary meat novels where the hero went to a good public school, then Oxbridge, and thence into an exciting career as a pilot or diplomat.

  I was, as ever, absolutely convinced that one day I would become a writer, though what made me so sure when I had no real skill at the art – in fact my diary at the time shows me to be completely lacking in basic grammar, spelling and punctuation – can be put down to the fact that my mother always told me I would be a famous author one day. My mother and father were both unschooled and though mum wrote poems these were of the Patience Strong variety. I had nothing going for me except desire and determination, a love of reading and a feeling that I had it in me, somewhere, to write well.

  9. RAF Gan, Maldives

  I found much depression and dissipation among the airmen stationed on Gan. There was an arch which stood near the billets on which were written the words ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ When they were not working, young men lay on their bedbugged beds and stared listlessly at the ceiling fan turning round and round. All they wanted to do was to go home to the UK. They had ‘chuff charts’: home-made calendars on which they crossed out each day nearer to the aircraft home, which was naturally called the ‘Happy Bird’. A few did a little sport, but most just lay on their ‘pits’ (RAF slang for beds) for n (the symbol for ‘infinity’). The only sounds they emitted were long, drawn-out sighs. Not long after I arrived in Gan I asked someone, ‘Have you got the time?’ and they replied wearily, ‘April.’ It was not a good introduction to a place where I was to spend the next eleven months of my young life.

  When I saw how much time I would have to myself I immediately drew up a programme of reading. There was a good library on the island, well-stocked with books. I decided to take out one serious novel each week (starting with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Kararmazov), a humorous novel and a book of poems. Thus I was introduced to P.G. Wodehouse, Tennyson, and a host of other authors, some of which I knew, many of which I did not.

  During my time on Gan I read at least three or four books a week, both classics and contemporary works, and thus filled the literary larder in my head with good books. I was already fairly well read, having devoured books from the age of ten, and with Russian and French authors I was entering pastures new. Gogol’s Dead Souls amazed me. The short stories of Maupassant, O. Henry, H.G. Wells and Kafka I found absolutely magical. I read both the Iliad and the Odyssey in the right order. Poe, Hawthorne, Jack London, Victor Hugo, Dumas, John Steinbeck, Colette, Karel Capek, oh and dozens more, including an incredible writer, Stefan Zweig, who wrote The Royal Game, Fantastic Night and Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman. It was writers like Zweig that had me aching to write short stories.

  It was here on Gan that I found the genre that was to become the love of my literary life: science fiction. My first introduction to this wonderfully imaginative writing was a paperback anthology Penguin Science Fiction edited by an author called Brian Aldiss. These were stories that took my breath away. I was soon reading novels as well as short stories, though the latter were always top of the list. Authors like Ron Goulart, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, William Hjortsberg, John Wyndham, J.G. Ballard, Brian himself. Now I have a whole library of these legends in the science fiction world.

  I devoured books without criticism, took them in without analysis, simply enjoyed the fact that I was reading works that my old headmasters would have said were beyond my capabilities and intellect, may those unimaginative schoolies all whirl in their graves.

  It was on Gan that my poetry began to emerge as something a little more than just verse.

  Gan is actually an amazing island. During my time there it had been stripped of vegetation almost completely. The other islands in the atoll, which could be reached by walking along the reef at low tide, were thickly jungled. Fedu, Mattadu and Hittaddu were the closest to us, the latter being only yards away. So, Gan itself was bare except for the buildings down one end – huts mostly – and the runway and control tower. Coral dust was everywhere. The island itself was mushroom-shaped, with about four to six feet of the top of the mushroom above water level. Yes indeed, only that much! The reef protected these low-lying coral islands from the savage sea during times of storms. Later, these islands inspired two of my novels: In the Hollow of the Deep
-sea Wave and Cloudrock.

  None of the local people actually lived on our island, but arrived for work – cooks, cleaners, road workers, etc. – by dhoni every morning. The dhoni was a traditional boat similar in shape to the Arab dhow. They were sailed and rowed from island to island. There were also Pakistani workers employed by the RAF and a sprinkling of British civilians. The Queen’s Representative had an isolated house on Gan. Chid and I met him on one of our round-the-island walks.

  This was Humphrey Arthington-Davy. He invited the two of us into his thatched-roofed bungalow, which looked nothing on the outside – a sort of Robinson Crusoe affair – but was lavishly furnished and stocked with good food and fine wines. Once inside we were given a drink and asked if we played chess. It felt a little out of the ordinary because men of Arthington-Davy’s high office do not normally fraternise with common callow youths like Kilworth and Chidlow. However, we made two good attempts at beating him at the royal game. The Queen’s Rep had soon disposed of me on the chess board, but Chid gave him a good run for his money. Besides being a better boxer than me, Chid was also better at chess. I do not have the temperament for games which advance so slowly there is enough time to draw a detailed map of Borneo in between moves. Chid is also better at card games than me, though I think I could take him at golf or tennis. I would like to think so.

  I made a statement that Gan was actually an amazing place. What made it amazing was not the island itself, but the lagoons within and around the atoll. There were fantastic coral gardens below the waves. It didn’t matter that our island was bare. All one had to do was put on a mask and snorkel and enter the water. There, in the huge lagoon ringed by Addu Atoll, was a magnificent world of colour, with many varieties of coral and a multitude of fish. I saw manta rays like delta-winged bombers gliding through the shallows. I swam with sharks, barracuda and poisonous lion fish. Deadly stone fish littered the submerged rocks. Puffer fish ballooned when I touched them and huge groupers with the mouths of clowns raced away. There were trigger, parrot, angel, zebra and a thousand other reef fish covered in stripes and spots, all in startling primary colours. Moray eels as thick as my thigh lurked in holes in the coral, showing only their heads with their tiny piercing eyes. Starfish, several kinds of crab, sea cucumbers, plants of many varieties, molluscs in shells which formed astonishing architecture. It really was an amazing paradise of strange and wonderful creatures. I had seen coral gardens in Aden, but none to match those in the waters of our atoll. Hans and Lotte Hass, famous subaqua film-makers, came to Gan while I was there and told us that the coral at Addu Atoll was the best in the world.

  Once Chid had joined me on Gan we went snorkelling almost every day. The pair of us went to parts of the island where no one else could be bothered to go. The waters of one side of Gan were choked with palm trunks, where they had been bulldozed into the sea by the builders of the runway, Costains. This maze of rotting woodwork became a haven for moray eels and Chid and I would go looking for the biggest we could find in the dark tunnels created by the discarded palms. We started a collection of marvellous shells we found on the beach and soon had a showcase of them. This was best after a storm, when freshlydead gastropods and bipods would be thrown up on to the coral sands. We would get them before the sun bleached them and they lost their sheen. Harpa majors, turbans, razor shells, mitres, olives, combs, spires. They were like jewels, this bounty of the ocean, and when we came across a new one in perfect condition it was like finding a ruby or an emerald. Our hearts would race with pleasure.

  Chid and I also played tennis, drank a lot of beer, and played a lot of records by Connie Francis and Brenda Lee. We were missing female company at an age when testosterone was surging through our bodies in raging wild rivers. Chid discovered an author he loved who wrote novels about a British spy called James Bond. I tried one Diamonds Are Forever and thought it pretty good, but I preferred Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with wonderful lines like, ‘He was about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a piece of angel cake’. I wanted to write lines like that. Although Bond was a new and exciting character in the world of fiction, an Englishman with no conscience or compassion who had a licence to kill, quite unlike Biggles or Dick Barton, it was Chandler’s art that led me to admire him more than Ian Fleming.

  When another of our old 29th Entry, Mick Rule, a confident guy with a great sense of adventure arrived on Gan, he devised new schemes to make the best of our time on a tropical island that had no women. Mick was one of those youths whose body and good looks were enough to capture any female he might want. Handsome as a film star and charismatic, Mick had been out with more girls than I had read good books. Now there were no females to woo, if that’s the right word, Mick spent his time thinking up adventures for himself, Chid and me. We hired a dhoni between us and rowed to the islands on the far side of the atoll and there chased wild pigs, and ate and drank coconuts. We went fishing for sharks with just a fishing line wrapped around a beer can and we caught and ate them too. We took spear guns and hunted for our suppers, catching red snapper and taking them to the cookhouse. We had drinking games and races and organised cricket matches against a mixed Pakistani-Maldivian team. The winners would provide a meal afterwards and it was my first taste of hot curry. I hated it. I dreaded losing the match, knowing I’d have to eat that stuff and smile doing it. How ironic then that my favourite meal these days is prawn madras.

  ~

  Many years later, in the first decade of the millennium Annette and I were on a plane from Singapore to the Maldives. It was my first visit to the islands since 1960. There had been a tsunami since then, which had destroyed much of the coral. On the plane Annette was sitting next to a Maldivian woman flying home from Thailand. The woman had been to the funeral of her father, who had died of a heart attack while working in Bangkok. We commiserated with her and then learned that her father had been the captain of the cricket team who had played against my old cricket team in 1960. These small-world coincidences are what has made life so interesting. I have been fortunate enough to experience several such encounters.

  ~

  My memories of Gan are threefold, as with any country where I have spent time: the good, the bad and the humorous. On the humorous side is the day the monsoon rains arrived. There were small frogs everywhere, not just hundreds but thousands. You could hardly walk for treading on the poor creatures, a live moving green carpet that covered the ground. We did our best not to crush them. At the same time, our water for washing and showering on Gan was salty, having been pumped up through the coral. So when it rained fresh water we would be out under the eaves of the huts, naked as babes, soaping ourselves down and enjoying the thorough cleansing of our sunburned, salt-encrusted skins. On such a day, with around 200 naked airmen scrubbing their young bodies, an unexpected aircraft full of navy wives landed on the island. The plane had to taxi past our billets and the faces at the windows had wide open mouths and even wider eyes.

  Chid and I often used to wade out to the reef. From the land it looked like we were walking on water, because at low tide between the island and the circling reef – around 500 yards – the water only came up to a walker’s knees. We did this one late afternoon, intending to throw out lines for the BIG fish in the deep, deep ocean on the other side of the reef (‘There are giants out there in the canyons . . .’ sings Billy Joel in ‘Downeaster “Alexa”’). As usual we caught zilch. That day we stayed much too late on the outer reef. The sky darkened with a coming storm, the tide rose to our necks, and we ended up struggling, chilled to the bone, through fields of brain coral in darkness and driving rain, unable to see the shore. It would not have been too bad – we were after all teenagers with absolute faith in our own invulnerability and immunity from death – but Chid had to go and quote from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

  ‘Like one that on a lonely road,

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round walks on,

  And turns no more
his head,

  Because he knows a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread . . .’

  Where he learned that quote I never knew and even then it would have been all right had he not joked at the end, ‘I can smell evil in the air this evening.’ That did it. I had seen too many horror films. Read too many horror stories. We were suddenly spooked out of our skins. We thrashed our way through the wild waters in a great panic, having a desperate need to see land and lights, and feel safe and warm again.

  ~

  On the not so humorous side, our eggs were preserved in isinglass and when you broke the yolk the stink was awful. Still we ate them, just as we ate the bread that was full of the small blackened bodies of dead weevils. You could always tell a newcomer to the island by the fact that he picked the weevils out of his slice. After a while it got to be a tedious exercise and one simply ate the dead weevils along with the bread, murmuring, ‘Extra bit on the meat ration.’ The tea too, being salty, tasted like seawater. In fact there wasn’t a lot going for us in the cookhouse, but one has to eat to live. The fish we caught from the jetty were cooked to a turn though, and thus we survived.

  One guy almost didn’t survive Gan.

  One day on the beach an airman was loading an elastic-driven spear gun. He had almost got it hooked up when the spear slipped in his fingers and flew from the gun like a bolt from a crossbow. It struck another airman in the chest, right above his heart. The injured man went down like a felled tree, one hand clutching the rusty spear that was sticking from his chest, just like in the movies. Fortunately, if there can be anything fortunate about such an accident, it was a trident spear. The bar of the trident, from which protruded three two-inch-long barbs, prevented the spear from going too deep into the man’s heart. Had it been a spear with a single head, like an arrow, he would have been dead.