Contact!: A Book of Encounters

by Jan Morris

  I loved to sit on a Hong Kong ferry and contemplate the remaining Britons of Hong Kong. They were trapped for me there, like historical specimens, deep in their tabloids or compiling their shopping lists. What a line they represented, I used to think! What generations of exile culminated in their persons, listlessly looking out across the passing harbour, or doing the crossword puzzle! Their forefathers blazed a way across the world, veld to outback, pioneering in shacks, beachcombing on reefs, disciplining recalcitrant Sioux or bayoneting fuzzy-wuzzies; and there they were beside me, the last of the long parade, indifferent to their origins, unconscious of them, perhaps, unexcited on the slat-seated ferryboat between Kowloon and Victoria!

  The boat shudders; the gangplanks clatter down; the blue-shirted Chinese seamen swing open the iron gates; and in a trice, as the crowd streams off the vessel, those unobtrusive imperialists are so utterly overwhelmed by their Chinese fellow citizens that you would hardly guess there was a Briton left in Hong Kong at all.

  Icelandic allegory

  Beauty and the Beast is an Icelandic allegory. Everybody who goes to the island is struck by the splendour of the girls. Pick a choice example now–the shop girl, say, who is packing your stuffed puffin in the souvenir shop, or pricing your lava-stone powder box. What a gorgeous strapping girl she is, what a terrific golden girl, with her wide-apart eyes, her hair bleached in Arctic sunshine, her exquisite complexion mixed out of snow and pink blossom!

  Take your eyes off her for a moment, though, and observe the young man shambling down the street outside–towards his trawler, perhaps, or off to his fearful shift at the fish factory. He is the original Viking, I suppose. His forehead and his chin symmetrically recede, his cheeks are wolfishly sunken, his eyes blaze, and there is to his loping walk a suggestion of immense loose-limbed power, as though a tap on his shoulder would unleash his doublebladed battleaxe and send him off to Greenland with horns on his head.

  Wedding pictures

  When King Hussein of Jordan married it was supposed to be a ceremony of liberated modernity. However, as I joined the society ladies for the occasion I could not help feeling that we were close in spirit to the huddled jealousies and school-girl excitements of the harem. At the head of the stairs were two bold lancers in scarlet tunics and white breeches, as the eunuchs would have stood sentry in an earlier age, and the body of the room was a seething mass of women. They were dressed magnificently, a glitter of satins and brocades and furs, a mosaic of lipsticks and mascaras, a tinkling kaleidoscope of earrings, a flurry of sequinned handbags. Chanel and Dior thickened the air. How often and how brazenly did the women of the court eye each other’s coutures! How heavily accentuated were the outlines of their eyes, like eyes seen through diaphanous curtains in forbidden corridors of the Seraglio! How scratchy and talon-like were the fingernails, how pinkly fleshy the figures, and how passive and doll-like those emancipated ladies looked, in serried and perfumed phalanx, as if some lascivious Sultan were about to pass through their ranks, picking a beauty here and a beauty there with a lordly gesture of his forefinger!

  But presently a cameraman in a crumpled jacket suddenly pressed his way past the guards and said (as it were), ‘Just one more, ladies, please, give us a nice smile now.’

  A holy clock

  In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem a little chapel stands shrouded in black curtains beside the site of the sepulchre itself. One morning I found myself all alone before this shrine, and as I stood there in the silence I thought I heard a faint ticking noise from the inside. For a moment I stood hesitant, thinking it might be the working of a perpetual censer, or perhaps the swinging of an ornate lantern on its chain. But it was so regular and so insistent that I pulled the heavy curtains aside and looked in, and there on the altar, all alone among the ikons and candlesticks, a red moon-faced kitchen clock ticked away robustly, for all the world as though it were timing the eggs. I laughed with pleasure at this unexpected discovery, and there was an answering chuckle behind my back. Standing among the tall pillars of the rotunda, all but hidden in the shadows, there stood a gigantic Abyssinian priest in an attitude of serene meditation. When I turned to look at him a white gleam in the darkness testified to the smile upon his black bearded face.

  Silly question

  Wildness, freeness, recklessness–not in Vienna! I went to a police court there one day and, noticing one of the accused studying a road map between hearings, asked him if he was planning an escape. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am deciding the best route to visit my aunt at Graz.’

  Expertise

  I visited the Pioneer Museum, in Fremont County, Wyoming. During my visit a schoolmistress was taking a group of children round the exhibits, and I heard her drawing their attention to a chair that stood in a corner of the gallery. It was made all of bleached white horn: legs, seat, back and all. ‘That is an example’, she was saying, ‘of the craftsmanship of the very first pioneers to come to Fremont County. Isn’t that beautiful, children?’ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ most of them replied, but after the main body had moved on to the Shoshone relics, a section of the museum I preferred to circumvent, I noticed a pair of laggard urchins trailing along behind. They had not heard their teacher’s encomium of the chair, but they too paused as they passed it, and inspected it with no less knowledgeable admiration. ‘Jeez,’ said one to the other. ‘Take a look at that elk.’

  First time lucky!

  I crossed to Hoboken on the very last voyage of the very last Manhattan railroad ferry, and the shabby old boat was full for the occasion with reporters, cameramen, roistering office workers, people with banners and leaflets and comic hats and crates of champagne, and a trio of Salvation Army girls singing unaccompanied hymns indefatigably above the hubbub. I sat down on a grubby bench beside an elderly habitué of the ferry. ‘You sound kinda British,’ he said. ‘Funny place for you to be, ain’t it? You ride this boat regular?’

  ‘Never before in my life,’ said I.

  ‘Well, you don’t say. Some people have it easy. I’ve had to ride this ferry forty years to make the last crossing. You come over and do it first time!’

  Advice

  By and large, it seemed to me, British businessmen in Hong Kong pursued their various careers in a pleasant state of half-speed ahead, eating well, enjoying their friends, gossiping in the club bar, taking the junk out on Sundays–‘Whatever you do,’ they used to tell me, ‘don’t go out with Bill [or Simon, or Ted], you’ll be drunk before you get out of the harbour.’

  Racial tension

  Six or seven miles out of Pretoria, on my way to catch an early flight, I saw a black figure running helter-skelter down the road towards the city. A moment later another followed, and then two or three more, and they panted by us, with serious faces and bulging eyes, like participants in some strenuous sunrise celebration.

  ‘What are they doing?’ I asked my driver.

  ‘Those Kaffirs? They’re on their way to work. They’ve probably got to start at seven, and they’ve got a long way to go, so they’ve got to run fast. It won’t do them any harm.’

  ‘You don’t like Kaffirs?’ I surmised.

  ‘Kaffirs?’ he replied with a genial twinkle. ‘I love them like they was vermin.’

  Kurds on the move

  How’s this for a glimpse? Once, once only, I encountered a tribe of Kurds on the move. It was spring, the grasslands were thick with flowers, and in the distance the mountain barriers stood blue and purple and formidable, with a fleck of snow on their summits and a cloudless sky above. Against this heavenly background the Kurdish nomads moved triumphantly across my field of vision. Their herds of sheep and floppy-eared goats scrambled and jostled in the sunshine, and behind them the bold horsemen lorded it across the plain, riding their stocky horses like avenging marauders, rifles across their backs, bandoliers across their chests, sheepskin jackets slung about them grandly. The women walked alongside, carrying the baggage; the children scampered or lagged behind; the great herds eddied abo
ut and spilled over the landscape; and the effect of the procession, glimpsed in so wide and airy a setting, was that of a community of unusually cheerful brigands crossing a steppe to commit an atrocity.

  Before fame hit him

  A couple of days after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkay became the first climbers ever to reach the summit of Everest, I was near the foot of the mountain on my way home. It was a still, oppressive, grey morning, and I saw away up the glacier, coming down from the mountain, a solitary figure moving swiftly and gracefully down the valley, swinging and buoyant, like some unspoilt mountain creature. A wide-brimmed hat! High reindeer boots! A smile that illuminated the glacier! An outstretched hand of greeting! Tenzing!

  He took off his big hat, smiling still, and sat down upon a rock. He was going to rest and wash, he said, and then traverse a neighbouring ridge towards his home village, where his mother lived. We had breakfast together, and he pulled from his wallet a snapshot of himself with a number of little Tibetan terriers. ‘Given me by the Dalai Lama,’ he explained with pride, and taking a pen from his pocket he slowly wrote his signature (the only word he could write) across the bottom of it and handed it to me with a deprecatory grin. The last I saw of him there, he had stripped his lean lithe body to the waist and was soaping himself with water from a tin basin. It looked a chilly operation.

  By the very next day he would be one of the most famous men on earth.

  ‘Mamma mia!’

  A veteran fisherman took me out into the Venetian lagoon to find an island house I had read about, but when we reached the spot we found that nothing remained of it but a pile of rubble. The old man was astonished, but even more affronted. ‘Now why should a thing like that happen?’ he asked me indignantly. ‘Mamma mia! That house was there when I was a child, a fine big house of stone–and now it’s gone! Now why should that have happened, eh? Tell me that!’

  He was an urbane man, though, beneath his stubble, and as we moved away from that desolate place, and turned our prow towards San Pietro, I heard a rasping chuckle from the stern of the boat. ‘Mamma mia!’ the old man said again, shaking his head from side to side: and so we chugged home laughing and drinking wine until, paying insufficient attention to his task, that fisherman ran us aground and broke our forward gear, and we completed the voyage pottering shamefacedly backwards. ‘Like a couple of crabs,’ he said, unabashed, ‘though even the crabs go sideways.’

  An apartheid queue

  In the evening all the poor black workers of Johannesburg, forbidden to live within the precincts of the city, rush for the buses that will take them to their slums and sprawling estates. You can hardly watch such a scene without the stirring of some crusading instinct, some Byronic impulse, or at least a stab of pity. As dusk falls, and as the bitter winter night begins to whistle through the buildings, a vast tattered queue moves in raggety parade towards the bus depot, and thousands of Africans shuffle their slow way in double file towards their shabby buses. There is an air of unutterable degradation to the scene, so heartless and machine-like is the progress of the queue, as the white folk hasten off in their cars to the rich city districts, and the lights glitter in the windows of the department stores, and those poor lost souls are crammed into their buses and packed off to their distant ill-lit townships. Many of them are half starving. Most of them live in fear of robbery or violence when they step off the buses into the dark streets of the locations; half of them spend almost all their leisure hours travelling between the city and the far-flung patches of high veld in which they are obliged to live; they reach their homes long after dark at night, and they start work again when the morning is still only a suggestion.

  Old-school flying

  In earlier days of transatlantic flying it was generally necessary for passenger aircraft to refuel en route, at Gander in Newfoundland, Shannon in Ireland, or somewhere or other on the way to San Francisco. I was travelling to America on a British Overseas Airways Corporation aircraft when we were told that because of favourable winds we would not for once have to make an intermediate stop. About halfway across, the aircraft’s captain came chattily around the passenger cabins, as was the BOAC custom, in the full glory of his regalia–they ran their planes like ships then, and he was very much the Master.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked courteously, in a clipped public-school accent, when he came to me. ‘Having a comfortable flight?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I told him, ‘but there is one thing: are you quite sure you’ve got enough fuel to get us over without a stop?’

  ‘Never fear,’ he replied in the best old-school British style. ‘We’re terrible cowards up front.’

  Festivities!

  On Princes Street that day, when the Edinburgh Festival was in full fling, half a dozen sideshows were performing. An old-fashioned socialist demagogue was haranguing the crowd from his soapbox. A man in full evening dress was singing ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ from the steps of the National Gallery. Two comedians dressed as ancient Egyptians were doing a comic act, and a tipsy old fellow in a kilt was dancing a reel to the music of a wind-up gramophone. All of a sudden amidst the hubbub two young toughs in shirtsleeves struck up a bit of a fight, punching each other in a tentative way and exchanging high-pitched Scottish insults. Instantly all attention turned to them. The orator found his audience dwindling before his eyes, the ancient Egyptians were soon playing to an empty pavement, and swirling here and there across the pavement went all the audiences, wavering and staggering with each exchange of blows. Through the melee, as it disappeared behind the Scott Memorial, I could see the fierce squabbling heads of the contestants, mouthing festive curses.

  Aloofly towards the dawn

  I once heard a pair of Venetian inebriates passing my window at four o’clock on a May morning, and looking out into the Rio San Trovaso I saw them riding by in a gondola. They were sitting on the floor of the boat, drumming on its floor-boards, banging its seats, singing and shouting incoherently at the tops of their thickened voices; but on the poop of the gondola, rowing with an easy, dry, worldly stroke, an elderly grey-haired gondolier propelled them aloofly towards the dawn.

  Mother Russia

  In Soviet Russia during the Cold War the foreign writer was generally at the mercy of Intourist, the government tourist organization. It was efficient and courteous enough, though speckled no doubt with agents of counter-intelligence, and its younger employees were often refreshingly undogmatic. Now and then, though, Intourist would send you an interpreter of the old school, a woman of severe bearing and inflexible party loyalty. Polite but unmistakably chill such a lady was likely to be, as though you were an emissary of capitalist encirclement, and a day with such an ideologue could be exhausting. I found there was a solution, though, an exorcism. When my companion was particularly severe about my bourgeois deviations, I would turn to her with an expression of deeply wounded sensibility, allow the warm tears to well into my eyes, sniff a little, blow my nose shakily, and tell her I thought she had been unkind.

  This was a magic word. Instantly there would be released from her bosom a flood of immemorial Russian emotion, dimly lit with ikons and scented with incense. In a trice all thought of norms and Seven-Year Plans would be driven from her kindly mind, and she was likely to be on the telephone half the night, making sure I was warm enough.

  ‘Nobody’s used this cup’

  One of the notorieties of the Cape of Good Hope is the ‘tot’ system, which legally allows a wine farmer to pay his coloured labourers partly in cheap sweet wine. ‘You’re just in time,’ a Huguenot farmer told me when I asked to watch the process. ‘We give them six tots a day, you see–one when they start, one at breakfast, one at eleven, one at two, one at four and one when they finish work.’

  There stood the labourers in a quavering crew, seven or eight tattered coloured men, and on the steps of a barn a white overseer was doling out the tots. He had a big bucket of thick red wine before him, and as the workers came shambling
up with their old baked-bean tins he scooped them their ration in silence. It was an eerie spectacle, for it was plain to me that those dazed and ragged half-castes were in a state of perpetual dissipation. Quaffing their tots in one experienced and joyless gulp they shuffled away again. It was as though eight elderly machines were being greased or refuelled.

  ‘Yes, we give them six tots a day,’ said the farmer chattily, ‘that’s the law. It comes to a bottle and a quarter a day. They sweat it out very quickly–it gives them kick, you see. It’s a good wine–here, taste it.’ And with fastidious courtesy the foreman, producing a tin cup from inside the barn, wiped it carefully with his handkerchief and drew me a ration. ‘It’s quite all right,’ he said kindly, ‘nobody’s used this cup.’

  Expatriatism

  Almost anywhere in the world of the 1950s I met expatriate Britons of the upper bourgeoisie, and almost always they liked to tell me their memories, personal or inherited, factual or fictionalized, of an England long extinct: a garden party England it seemed to have been, where nobody talked too loud, and there were parasols on the lawn, and we so often used to visit Sir Henry…Sir Henry…what was his name now?–Never mind, I shall remember it later–Anyway, he had this lovely old house. Oh, the smell of the honeysuckle and such gay tennis parties we used to have. ‘Of course I know it’s all changed now and I could never go back, it would break my heart to see it all so different, socialism, and strikes, and white girls with black men in the streets, they tell me, and all these death duties and so on. But it will always be home to me, Mr Morris–you may be a little too young to understand just how I feel–that’s Lindley Hall there, by the way, above the mantelpiece, painted by Robert…Robert…you know, very famous–but I’ll remember later, I always do…’