Contact!: A Book of Encounters

by Jan Morris

  Schooner travel

  At Granada the schooner captain kindly signed me on as crew, and to avoid awkward questions stuffed me away in a cubbyhole of his vessel until the heavy footfalls of authority had died away along the quay. When I was released I crept out blinking to find the schooner already scudding gaily out of harbour, and the captain grinning beside the wheel with a tin mug of rum in his hand. African, British, French and Indian ancestors had all contributed to his ship’s company, and in the tiny starboard deckhouse, I presently discovered, there resided a seductive mulatto camp follower, immured there silently like a lady about to be sawn in half. We all slept on the open deck, and when the moon came up I heard somebody murmur to this nubile shipmate: ‘You got your moonburn lotion, honey?’

  The clock and the nougat

  ‘My brother-in-law,’ said the woman I had given a lift to, who was dressed funereally and clutched a posy of lilies in a sanctimonious sort of way–‘my brother-in-law has told me that the British are more honest than we Calabrese. Is this so?’ I had taken a peculiar dislike to this person, and had noticed that she was eyeing my travelling clock with an interest unmistakably covetous. So when she asked me again, wriggling in her seat in a manner at once obsequious and obscurely arrogant–‘Eh, is it true?’–I answered her harshly. ‘Perfectly true,’ said I. She was unperturbed. When I dropped her she said nastily, ‘Haven’t you got some small memento to give me, some small gift or souvenir?’ ‘Only the memory of our meeting,’ said I firmly, shoving the travelling clock out of sight beneath the dashboard–and she shamed me then, by pressing into my hand a large and rather nasty bar of nougat.

  The portrait

  Brigadier Abdul Karim Kassem has today led a violent coup d’état which has suddenly made him the prime minister of Iraq, and he has invited the gentlemen of the press to meet him at the Ministry of Information. Soldiers stand guard with tommy guns, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Information (since this morning) are in attendance, and pointedly on the floor of the room is the new leader’s camp bed, with a pair of green striped pyjamas folded primly on its pillow. In a corner stands a large, enthusiastic and evidently freshly painted portrait of the brigadier. ‘May we ask the Prime Minister’, says an American reporter with a courtly air, ‘if that is a new portrait of His Excellency, and, if so, who painted it?’ The Prime Minister smiles a glittering smile and is silent, so his deputy answers for him. ‘Yes, it is a new one. It was painted by the people. It is a present.’ ‘All the Iraqi people like this government very much,’ adds the Prime Minister then. ‘Ask the people yourselves. When I go into the street everybody is friendly.’ The American clears his throat. The American public would be interested to know, he feels sure, if it is not too personal a question, if any particular one of the Iraqi people painted the portrait, and if so, which? But ‘Gentlemen,’ intervenes the Minister of Information, ‘I think we are all very tired,’ so we shake hands with His Excellency and filter through the sentries into the street.

  ‘For heaven’s sake’

  One Christmas in Vienna I went for a walk in a park before returning to the hotel where my Christmas dinner was roasting. There was hardly a woman in the park. Everywhere the husbands of Vienna, with their children, aimlessly but expectantly loitered, expelled from under the womanly feet of the city while Gretchen and Helga got on with the job. Christmas is a time when old hierarchies are restored. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I could hear the housewives of all Europe grumbling that day, ‘go out and get yourself some fresh air, and take the children with you.’

  Wine of the country

  The Colonel’s family had lived in the same Scottish Lowlands house for several centuries, but as a retired widower he lived unostentatiously, and I was greeted with a homely plate of scones and raspberry jam, and a pot of tea in a blue flowered teapot beneath a bobbled cosy. He ate and drank his ration with enthusiasm, but very soon afterwards fetched a bottle of whisky from the sideboard and poured a couple of glasses–‘Wine of the country–I always say, you should drink the wine of the country.’

  He looked like an Irish deerhound, very tall and elongated, his figure only slightly stooped with age, and he was dressed tweedily, with shoes that looked handmade. At first sight he did not appear to be Scottish at all, but after a while, through that expensively anglicized exterior there began to appear something pricklier, more gingery, more ruthless, perhaps, and I realized in fact that I was talking to a man almost aboriginally Scots. His attitudes were mellow. His subjects of conversation ranged from Bonnie Prince Charlie (‘All those Stuarts were a rotten lot’) to the price of claret (‘I used to get it from a man I know in Bordeaux, but now I just go to the supermarket’) to snooker on TV (‘They’re very sporting fellows, extremely sporting’). He alludes now and then to some duke, marquis or other (‘by way of being a relative of mine’), but only to tell a comic tale about him, discredit a medieval anecdote or explain the genesis of a portrait. It was raining when I left him, but he came to the bottom of the garden to wave me away, and as I turned the corner of the drive I glanced in the driving mirror to see that old inheritor of blood feud and cattle raid regain the shelter of his door, as though he were escaping a royal posse, in a single mighty stride.

  Holy experiences

  Consider this family of Irish people, sitting beneath a canopy in the drizzle of a Marian shrine in County Waterford. The image of the Virgin is not very old, but stands strangely half in shadow on a rock wall in a frond-filled grotto, with a stream running below. During the last few months it has repeatedly been seen to move of its own accord, and to be transfigured. Sometimes its face changes into that of Christ, and sometimes it apparently comes to life–early last night, a bright-eyed lady at the gate tells me, she met the Virgin walking silently by the stream. The family sits there, mother, father, adult son and daughter, in a determined common trance, their eyes fixed immovably upon the statue on the rock–willing it to move, praying for a manifestation, clutching rosaries, lips moving sometimes but bodies still as images themselves. They were like addicts at a gaming table. The rain fell all around.

  Sacred memories

  I went to the 300th-anniversary march of the Prentice Boys in Londonderry (aka Derry), by which the Protestant Orange Order remembers a famous victory over the Catholics, and never did I see such a variety of remarkable faces, pinched, florid, genial or fierce beneath their bowler hats or tam-o’-shanters. Never were pipe-and-drum bands more fervent. Never was I in a crowd so absolutely united in its bigotries. Thirty thousand Orangemen took part in the march, and for five hours an air of perfervid dedication enveloped the city. There were tiny boys of three or four marching with the rest. There were half-crazed bass drummers and clown-like drum majors, juggling their batons, balancing them on the ends of their noses, strutting and gesturing like circus performers. There were ranks of stern elderly men, bowler hatted, some carrying swords, all swathed in the regalia of the Orange Order. Halfway down the procession the hero of the day, a large Presbyterian clergyman, came swaggering by with a cohort of aides, smiling here and there and cheered along the way like a dictator moving among his adoring subjects. Hour after hour the beat of the drums reverberated, and when I left Derry the Orangemen were still streaming across the Craigavon Bridge, banners flying, drummers prancing, strutting infants, determined old men in medals and bowlers marching in steadfast line abreast.

  Reciprocal ill will

  I can see to this day the face of a Benedictine monk I encountered at the Bavarian monastery of Andechs. In his late twenties, I would guess, he looked more like an interrogator than a confessor, far more accusatory than forgiving. Tall, thin, pale, unsmiling, cold eyed, pious as all hell, when I asked him the way to the monastic cemetery he did not at first reply at all, but simply turned his cod-like features upon me with raised eyebrows. When at last he gave me a curt and loveless answer I hardly had time to thank him (not that I was planning to be very fulsome about it) before he turned on his heel with a fl
ounce of his cassock and disappeared inside the church. I hope he choked on his vespers.

  ‘Oes heddwch?’

  Assembled on stage at the National Eisteddfod, the great cultural festival of the Welsh nation, are the Bards of the Druidical Orders, a strange conclave of eminent citizens, doctors and philosophers, writers and politicians, dressed in long hooded robes of white and grey. They are presided over by sages and attended by nymphs in green, by matrons with horns of plenty, by harpists and by trumpeters, and they are there to honour the victor of a poetry competition. The winner’s identity is a secret, but he is sitting, we know, somewhere in the audience around us. A hum of excitement and speculation accordingly fills the pavilion. Strange preliminaries occur on the stage: harpists pluck arcane strains, elves dance, a gigantic sword is half drawn from its sheath, then majestically slammed home again. ‘Oes heddwch?’ cries the Archdruid. ‘Is there peace?’ ‘Heddwch!’ thunders back the audience, and the trumpets blow their fanfares, and gathering their robes about them a deputation of Druids gravely leaves the stage to summon the victorious poet to his honours. The organ thunders. A spotlight plays at random over the auditorium. The television cameras are poised in their gantries. The audience strains forward in its seats. Presently the light steadies itself, sweeps deliberately along the seats, and falls at last upon the person of the winner–who, blushing with pride and self-consciousness, and pretending hard to be astonished, allows himself with mock reluctance to be led away by the Druids, up through the huge applauding crowd, up through the reverberating organ music, to the throne that is, for those few moments, the very crucible of Wales. Some years ago I was a member of that Druidical delegation, the man who drew the great sword from its sheath was a famous rugby player and my son Twm was the poet.

  Small change

  There is a Sydney street group called the Aussie Small Change Brass Band which might well represent the city at ceremonial functions, so alive is it with the authentic Sydney mixture of fun, fizz and chutzpah. Its players are three very small boys in very large hats, with two trumpets, a tuba and extremely powerful amplifiers, and I can tell you they play ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ like nobody’s business.

  Incidental music

  I was driving down the Adriatic coast from Istria to Montenegro, and I was playing a recording by Vladimir Ashkenazy of Mozart’s 22nd piano concerto. It seemed to me that the vivacious allegro movement of this work absolutely suited the swashbuckling landscape of karst, sea and island through which I was passing, and I drove down the magnificent coast road playing the tape repeatedly, laughing and singing out loud. In the course of the journey I gave a lift to a frail and elderly Montenegrin traveller, wizard-like with stick and black coat, and when towards the end of the journey, Ashkenazy still playing, me still singing, in the delight of my mood I narrowly escaped head-on collision with a convoy of armoured cars, this delightful old worthy seemed to find it just as funny as I did.

  The Algerian gardener

  The Algerian gardener at our hotel in the Midi was extremely tall and cadaverous, and his eyes blazed deep in their sockets. His luxuriant sideburns, however, gave him a noble scholarly aspect. He was like a professor in some medieval academy of Islam. As he trundled his barrow about, I used to think, surely he was debating within himself subtle mathematical formulae, or composing Sufi couplets? Once I got up at the break of day, when the place was deserted, and I came across the gardener feeding a black and white cat. He stood very erect above the animal, having placed a grisly dish of offal before it, and I heard him murmuring endearments to the creature. They sounded stately endearments–Koranic, perhaps–and he stood there gauntly as the sun rose behind him, looking down at the cat and murmuring. The cat kept circling around his feet, casting glances at the food, rubbing its head against the man’s ankles until it felt it had paid its proper respects. Only then did it fall, with snarls and rendings through its purrs, upon the unlovely victuals.

  The matter with me

  ‘Wazzamatterwidyou?’ hissed the angry cab driver, as I stumbled bemused across 45th Street. ‘Hey, you in the green hat,’ shouts the policeman from his horse, ‘can’t you see that signal?’ ‘You must wait for the green,’ says the passing lady slowly and sympathetically, assuming I speak only Welsh or Lithuanian, and am new to the mysteries of science. But it takes time to readjust, when you return to Manhattan from idler climes.

  To touch the owl

  I notice that for mistily religious reasons women in Dijon touch the little figure of an owl in the rue de la Chouette as casually as they might pull on a glove–except that, since it is perched rather high on a wall, small ladies have to jump a bit to reach the bird, and children have to be lifted one after the other, their mothers never interrupting, all the same, the flow of their own conversations.

  The friar’s warning

  At the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo the desiccated corpses of generations of citizens are on display, guarded by friars and climaxed by the body of a child labelled BAMBINA–SLEEPING BEAUTY GIRL. ‘Be very careful,’ one of the friars said in a flat sort of voice when I left this macabre exhibit–‘watch out for robbers.’ I thought there was a queer, occult look in his eye, and hardly had I left the sacred premises than two thugs on a motorbike snatched my bag and left me destitute.

  One can always tell

  If the hitch-hikers are American I generally stop for them. One can always tell. They try harder for their lifts, holding up well-lettered destination signs and offering ingratiating smiles. They are in the lift-getting business, and they do the job properly. When they are on board they generally work for their keep, too. They tell me all about themselves, they learn all about me, they may give me a brief lecture upon the social customs of my own country, or kindly correct me when I appear to be going the wrong way. They are usually willing to oblige, too. ‘Are you going to Scotland?’ one young man asked me when I stopped for him just outside London. ‘No, I’m going to Wales.’ ‘OK, make it Wales’–and I drove him all the way to Bala, and left him smoothly chatting up the farmer’s wife at a bed-and-breakfast place.

  Marvellously goes the elk meat

  My favourite place for a Christmas meal is the Operakällaren restaurant in Stockholm. There the restaurant’s famous house aquavit is poured most generously by merry waiters of the old school, and everyone soon gives the impression of being acquainted with everyone else. Marvellously goes the elk meat, swiftly pass the herrings, one great salmon succeeds another on the buffet, and very soon I find myself on familiar terms with the Swedes at the next table, complimenting them on their fluent English, admiring little Eva’s Christmas frock or little Erik’s smart bow tie, exchanging grandmotherly confidences with Mrs Andersson, toasting them one and all with yet more aquavit. Stockholmers are not especially religious people, and I like to think they have been eating those Baltic herrings, downing those fiery liquids, since the days of the pagan kings.

  The red tarboosh

  Andrew Holden was one of the very last British officials of the Egyptian government, still a highly respected functionary of the Ministry of Finance when Egypt had long recovered its independence. By the time I knew him he was near retirement, but he still went to work each morning by tram, clinging to the outside like any other Cairene if he could not get a seat. The amiable Egyptians, helping him up the step, would make sure he had a place on the rear platform, where he could hang on to the pole, and there I can see him now as the tram swayed and clanked its way into town, so scholarly looking in his spectacles, so slight, so incongruously at ease–and on his head, tilted at a jaunty but not ostentatious angle, the red tarboosh which was the only badge of his commitment.

  Dance music

  One evening I came across a dance in a Cretan courtyard. The lights were very bright there. The deafeningly amplified music was a quavery sort of oriental theme. A high gate closed the yard, but along the wall of the road above, from windows and shadowy terraces all around, a crowd of villagers watched. Beneath the li
ghts inside, a long circling line of Cretans, men and women, danced a strange dance. I was bewitched. Gracefully, jauntily, thoughtfully, swankily, the dancers tripped their complex steps, and the music blared through the pergola. Round and round they went, to and fro, and sometimes the man at the head of the line, detaching himself momentarily from the rest, threw himself into a spasm, leaping, kicking his feet together, twirling about in an ecstasy of conceit and accomplishment, before the convulsion left him and he subsided into the music’s rhythm. When I tore myself away the half-tone music of the loudspeakers tracked me far into the night.

  The three days

  One of the most demanding of Irish pilgrimages takes the faithful to a grim island in Lough Derg, a remote and dispiriting mountain lake, where they endure a three-day fast, a twenty-four-hour vigil, barefoot peregrinations over stony tracks and the compulsory recitations of 63 Glorias, 124 Creeds, 891 Paternosters and 1,458 Hail Marys. I was once at a wedding at Drogheda, away on the east coast, when I heard a woman ask a worldly young guest with a carnation in his buttonhole and a glass of champagne in his hand where he was going for his holidays that year. I expected Mykonos or Barbados, but no. ‘I thought of giving myself’, he said, ‘the three days at Lough Derg.’

  At a Breton window

  My small daughter and I looked up from the waterfront of Douarnenez, in Brittany, to see an old woman smiling down at us from an open window. She had a shawl around her shoulders, her face was infinitely wrinkled, and her smile was so kind that it seemed to be reaching us from different times altogether–from before the Fall, perhaps. ‘I want that lady,’ my small daughter said.