As the crowds grew and swirled around us we found our open-topped vehicle hemmed in by thousands of distraught Arabs. They were packed so densely around us the Land Rover was being rocked on its wheels, with us simply sitting there and swaying with it. Ramsey was unable to drive due to the mass of people around us. It was one of those times in my life when I have been thoroughly scared. I could now make out shouts of ‘Nasser! Nasser!’ and knew that something had happened to the Egyptian ruler who was a symbol to the whole of the Arab world. Women were screaming and sobbing, men were shrieking and yelling. One or two climbed on to the bonnet of the Land Rover, while others were using the parapet of the bridge to get by us.
It would have only taken one of those thousands of hysterical men and women to recognise the fact that there were two Western military men in their midst and to point us out, for this mob to attack us in their frenzied state. I had visions of us being hung from a lamp post or, if we were very lucky, thrown from the bridge into the water.
Fortunately, no one seemed to notice us. They flowed past us in both directions, even hammering on the sides of the vehicle with their fists, but not one pointed to us and cried, ‘Infidels!’, which was what we were expecting to happen at any moment. In fact the whole island, not just the city, was swarming with grief-wracked Arabs. Gamal Abdul Nasser had died in his bed that morning. This man who was a hero and a giant to the Arab in the street was now lying in state in Egypt. After about half-an-hour of anxiety we saw an ambulance forcing its way through the crowds on its way to the hospital. Luckily it was going in the same direction as we were and we quickly tucked in behind it, following it to the hospital where the throng was a great deal thinner.
~
Cyprus had been a slice of heaven, but eventually the time came when we had to go home and were posted back to UK for my last couple of years in the RAF. The posting was to Strike Command at High Wycombe, Bucks. I would be a Duty Signals Master there, with responsibilities for a watch of men numbering around fifteen to twenty, and also cryptographic duties, coding and decoding messages in the Enigma style.
Annette and I decided to drive home overland in our new Volkswagen 1300, taking car ferries over any stretches of water. I booked a passage on a Greek ship which had been a French destroyer during Second World War. By 1971 it was a rusted tub, still painted grey, with instructions for the firing of its anti-aircraft guns embossed in French on the metalwork. Our precious Beetle, containing all our worldly goods packed in a box on the roof rack, was winched onto the deck, covered with tarpaulin and strapped down. We were given a cabin next to the hold. Everything on that boat was inch-thick cold metal and comfort was not to be found anywhere above or below.
On the first night out we experienced the worst storm of our lives and the whole family were convinced they were going to die. The kids fell out of their bunks when we hit huge waves that threatened to swamp the whole vessel. All night long we crashed through monstrous seas. It was a voyage that put me off all other ocean trips for life. In the hold next to our cabin an enormous steel hook, as large as a curled-up man, swung free on the end of a thick chain. We had to time any dash across the hold to the toilets on the far side as this great pendulum swung erratically this way and that, smashing against the gong-like bulwark. Every time the hook hit metal the hull reverberated with sound. Annette and I, and the kids, were seasick to the depths of our stomachs, until we were all dry-heaving and wishing, yes, that the ship really would sink. Waves continued to swamp over the bows all next day, until we finally came in sight of Rhodes, which was our first port of call.
The voyage from Rhodes was less dramatic, but by the time we reached Athens, the weather had turned colder. It was October and while Greece is often warm at that time of year, there was an unusual drop in temperature, with a chill wind. We left the ship and found a campsite intending to settle for a couple of days. It was Sunday when we arrived and there were no shops open. All we had were some potatoes and onions, but Annette has always been skilled at making a meal out of nothing. She sliced and fried these two vegetables in butter and olive oil, and we went to bed that first night with full stomachs.
The campsite was swarming with Australians and Kiwis, either heading back towards their homelands or coming from it on their way to Britain. In those times borders and countries were less dangerous than around the turn of the century. You could travel through countries like Iraq and Afghanistan without too much concern and drive almost all the way down to the Antipodes on a shoestring. Beat-up old Volkswagen Dormobiles and clapped-out Minis littered the site. Many of these Aussie and Kiwi travellers had very little money and seemed to exist on thin air. One man sold us a film for our camera and said he could live on what we paid him for the next week.
Rick was a keen fisherman from a very early age. He didn’t get the sport from me. I’m too impatient. It must have been in his genes. Wherever we went, Rick would have his rod and line with him. The campsite outside Athens was not far from the sea and he used to take his tackle and a basket and we would lose him for half a day. On the second day there he came home with the basket full of fish for the pan.
‘You caught all these?’ I cried, astonished.
Rick has never been good at telling untruths.
‘Lady gave them to me,’ he confessed. ‘She said to tell you I’d caught them.’
The ‘lady’ was a young newlywed named Carolyn. She was English but recently married to an Australian, Peter Worth. Carolyn’s relations came from our home town. We made friends with this couple who were travelling around Europe in a minivan. That night we all drank retsina and ouzo round a campfire, cooked the fish, and sang a few songs along with some Greek sailors who had somehow found their way among us. During the next forty years we would retain strong ties with Pete and Carolyn, visiting them in Melbourne whenever possible, they in turn staying at our house when in England. Much later, when I was approaching the age of seventy, it would be Pete who would persuade me to join him on a motorbike rally across the Outback of Queensland, from Brisbane to Cairns via the Gulf of Carpenteria.
We stayed with Pete and Carolyn for the next few campsites, visiting Delphi and other places of interest on the Greek mainland. Annette and I had studied ancient Greek history while in Cyprus and we retold the stories of the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae to the kids as we drove along roads lined with olive groves and orange trees. We also read them the The House at Pooh Corner, the final book in the Pooh series, and it was me who dissolved into tears when Pooh had difficulty in understanding that Christopher Robin had grown up and was going away for ever.
After a week or so we drove to Igoumenitsa, a port on the west coast of northern Greece, and took the ferry to Corfu. Corfu was wet. It rained almost every day, but we camped alongside Carolyn and Peter inside a Dutch barn. There was a table tennis table in the barn, so Pete and I battled it out for several hours a day. I have always fancied myself as a table tennis player and indeed won a championship once in Singapore against Chinese players, but somehow if you don’t play it every day you lose the skill. Pete won as many games as he lost and I’ll say no more on the subject.
From Corfu we took the ferry to Brundisi in Italy. As I left the boat and turned right, I saw Peter and Carolyn turning left. We had lost each other on entering Italy. We drove across the Italian boot and into a campsite near Naples. The weather was turning cold again and when we asked where we should put up our tent the Italian owner said, ‘Ah, the little ones will get cold – you must have a cabin for the same price.’ How kind is that? He even lit a fire in the cabin and when it started to rain while we were out on a sightseeing tour, he took in our washing.
We had a pleasant night in the cabin, then drove north, along the West coast, to Pisa. Naturally we went up the tower. Then on to Switzerland and finally into Germany. The German toilets had central heating and we were tempted to spend our nights camped out under the washbasins, but knowing the Germans they probably policed the joint before lights-out. On,
on, into Holland, where another kind campsite owner let us stay the night in a bungalow, just like his Italian counterpart. Where do these lovely people come from? In those days we were not well off enough to afford cabins and bungalows, so we felt like hugging them.
Finally we got back to England where Bill and Betty welcomed us into their home in Church Road, Shoeburyness.
17. RAF Strike Command, High Wycombe
We did not have the points to move directly into married quarters. Once again we found a hiring, this time in a village called Hazlemere. High Wycombe was a short drive away. Places of interest nearby were Disraeli’s Hughendon Manor and Lord Dashwood’s Hellfire Club cave. Burnham Beeches were not far, and Thame, and Beaconsfield, and Amersham, and other interesting towns. We joined the camping club and spent many weekends down by the River Thames, where Rick could fish and the rest of us could applaud when he caught something.
At work in the Strike Command comcen, I found I shared a watch with Bill Fedden, the sergeant I’d met on the golf course at Masirah. He had quarters in the next village to Hazlemere, a place called Holmer Green. He explained that there were very few married quarters actually on the station and private houses had been purchased and turned into married quarters in various locations around the county. The furthest site was up near Oxford, quite a distance from work.
‘Hopefully you’ll get quarters in our street,’ he said, though we both knew there were only twenty houses in that street.
The gods were with us. We did indeed land up just a few doors down from Bill. We met Lisa, his wife, and their two kids. We all loved camping and so most of our holidays were spent under canvas, some in pouring rain, others in sunshine. Everyone was into wine and beer-making in the beginning of the ’70s. Bill made some very potent saki which we drank one evening on a camping holiday. I woke the following morning tangled in a camping chair that had somehow managed to thread its aluminium spars between my legs and arms, effectively binding me.
Since we were due to leave the air force within a short period of time Annette took a job as a post lady. We needed money for a deposit on a house and most of my pay went on household expenses. Annette was given a round which covered the countryside farms around High Wycombe. She enjoyed it immensely, getting up at 5 o’clock every morning and riding her bike on the round, delivering mail and emptying the post boxes. Annette maintained that the weather was always good at that time of day and she got to see the creatures of the wild when no one else was about. The farmers and their wives grew to like this pretty blonde woman with a cheery smile and would give her presents of eggs, pork sausages, cabbages, sprouts, and at one time, a whole chicken. We hardly needed to buy meat and vegetables any more. After one summer Annette had accrued enough to put a deposit of £1,000 against a mortgage of £9,600. For this we got a brand new semi-detached house on an estate named after famous painters. The house was only just being built, but its plot was off Picasso Way and stood in Raphael Drive.
We drove down to Shoeburyness, to the house, and stood proudly gazing on what would one day be ours. Our first. It seemed something of a miracle to us. If the king had given us a mansion in its own grounds, we could not have been more awestruck. Once it was built we let it to army personnel in Shoeburyness Garrison and it became a hiring. All our service life we had lived in hirings, but now we owned one. The rent paid the mortgage while we finished our time in the RAF and everything seemed to be panning out fairly satisfactorily. However, while there we found that the Essex way to pronounce Raphael was ‘Rayful’. So we were to live in ‘Rayful’ Drive among civilians, something that would be very strange to me at first, never ever having done so before.
That which I imbibed in childhood and early manhood on RAF stations has always stayed with me. Even today I have a subconscious desire for an environment which consists of white-painted kerbstones, flagpoles on neatly mowed greens, married quarters-type houses, neatly kept roads, gates with guards on them, smart men in uniforms, aircraft, and all the other things that go with an air force station. Once, we were driving through Spain in the twilight, looking for a place to spend the night. The road was on a rise and down below I could see a neat-looking establishment with lights lining the whole area.
‘There’s a nice hotel,’ I said to Annette, enthusiastically. ‘I like the look of that.’
Annette peered out of her window and shook her head at me sadly.
‘You silly dope,’ she said, ‘that’s an army camp.’
I passed by the place with a wistful sigh, remembering that I still fold my jumpers and shirts the air force way, I keep my socks and ties in rows in the cupboard, I like my bed made with the sheets drum skin tight, I iron creases in my trousers that you could shave with, I polish my shoes with the same brushes I was given on entering the service, I clean the brasses in the house and stand staring at the result with a heart full of pride, and I am as neat and disciplined in my living habits as any sergeant-major still serving today. My study, unlike those of other authors I know, has the pencils lined up, the notebooks in neat order, research books in their right places on the shelves, my completed and half-completed manuscripts in military-order files.
Many other authors I have found to be untidy. For instance Rob Holdstock typically had a study that looked like the inside of a council litter bin, with books and papers lying everywhere gathering dust, scrappy notes stuck together with last year’s jam, beer and coffee splashes on the monitor screen. John Clute, a writer and critic, once entered my study and cried out in alarm. He was concerned for my state of mind, believing that a creative person could not possibly work in such a clinical atmosphere. I suppose, had I never been in the RAF, I might be regarded as anal. But these habits have been drilled into me from birth and are impossible to prise out. When I finally leave this world I shall go lying to attention in my coffin and if there is an afterlife my soul will cry, ‘Fire in the hole!’ as I slide down the chute into the furnace.
What a fortunate thing it is that my wife is so understanding.
~
At courses in and around High Wycombe, Bill and I continued with murdering the golf we had begun at RAF Masirah. In those days I knew very little about individual club distances and indeed had no technique on the course at all. I was lucky if I went around under 120. Bill was much the same, but we enjoyed being in the open air and swearing a lot. As always, Annette and I took the kids camping for weekends and longer holidays, down by the early part of the Thames, and in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, the Lake District and Wales. They were fun days, with Rick, me and Shaney playing rough hockey and Annette taking us on long country hikes. On one of these treks over the Yorkshire Dales, Rick was getting very teenagerish. He just did not want to walk. Annette kept saying to him, ‘Once we get to the top of that hill, it’ll all be worth it – you’ll see a beautiful view from up there.’
When we did indeed reach the crest of the hill Rick put his hands on his hips and said in disgust, ‘So that’s beauty, is it?’
This has become a catch-phrase for the family, whenever one is determined that something is not going to come up to expectations.
~
Bill eventually got posted to Germany, I think for the second time, though I’m not certain about that. Annette began a three year course to become a school teacher, majoring in art. The teachers’ training college was at Chalfont St Peter, but she would have to do her last two years at Brentwood College, in an outpost at Southend-on-Sea, the closest to our new home in Shoeburyness. Her art tutor during the latter two years would be an eccentric Welshman, Eric Robinson, a talented artist with a wonderful personality. He would later re-enter our lives (or we, his) when we found ourselves chasing the sun of Andalusia. Eric and his wife, Gaynor, would become close friends.
~
In the early Spring of 1974 I prepared to leave to leave the RAF and the butterflies were rampaging in my stomach. I discovered I was entitled to career preparation and I decided to take a two year course leading to an HND in Busi
ness Studies. The RAF would pay for it and they would give me time off for classes, though much of it would be down to private study at home. The course consisted of economics, commercial law, applied economics, industrial relations, human relations and principles of business administration. To my surprise, I passed with a distinction in economics. Funny really because the only subject I really did take an interest in and enjoy was commercial law, which consisted of learning lots of different cases, mini-stories in their own right. In economics I discovered the perfect sleeping draught for insomniacs.
Although on certain postings it had not been possible to write creative fiction I was now back to writing short stories in my spare hours. Mostly science fiction and fantasy, but others genres too. Publishing them was another matter. I did send one or two off, but I was never very confident that they would be accepted. Indeed, the only writing that got into print at the time was my poetry, in a magazine called Envoi, run by a chap called Meredith Scott. He was a wonderful man who lived a sort of hermit’s life in the Scottish Highlands. Rather than choose which poems to publish himself, he farmed them out to a whole yardful of ‘editors’ who passed them among themselves and eventually came up with a batch for publication in the next issue. JCMS, as Meredith Scott was known to us, spent his life encouraging and praising, rather than criticising. Sadly, he died of cancer just as I left the RAF.
Len Kendall, an Essex poet, also read my work and was also very encouraging and helped me develop an individual style.
I continued to send the odd short story off to science fiction magazines. One of these was edited by a writer called Mike Moorcock. Mike was a well-known and much-published science fiction author, but he still took time to write me long letters about my stories, telling me which bits he liked before saying where he thought I’d gone wrong.
On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer Page 18
