by Rosie Thomas
'We're a team, aren't we?' he would say cheerfully, as if that left nothing else in question.
When he had committed the entire route to film we went out again into the hazy June sunshine. It was warm in the sun but a chill wind whipped the national flags mounted on some of the cars. A French entry had 'marche ou crève' painted in a jaunty script on both front wings. The queue for the scrutineers had dwindled to a handful of cars. Phil was right, probably not for the last time. By the time we had inched the Amazon to pole position the officials were ready for a break, and much less eager to nitpick about our non-standard first-aid kit and as-yet missing fire extinguisher or anything else.
The RAC scrutineer looked briefly under the bonnet and ticked at a list on a clipboard. A friendly film crew came by and interviewed me about our entry while the official business went on behind my back and I tried to listen in to the praise that Phil was getting for having prepared the car to a properly high standard for the thin yellow route ahead. We had only owned the Volvo since March, and since then Phil had worked almost full-time for Tony Barrett, under his tuition dismembering and rebuilding and servicing Amazons and other Volvos as they passed through the garage, as well as helping Tony's mechanics with a complete rebuild of our own rally car. He was in the process of turning himself from a novice into a competent mechanic, and as the shipping deadline came closer he had been eating and almost sleeping beside the car as well as working on it. He referred to it as 'she' and talked about 'her' to the point where I wondered what went on in the garage underneath the arches by night, and whether or not his girlfriend minded about it.
The RAC man signed his form with a flourish and, unfairly, handed the little Peking to Paris scrutineering – OK sticker to me for the windscreen. The car was judged to be safe and roadworthy. Phil and I gave each other the double thumbs-up once his back was turned.
The next official visitor was the man from FIVA, the Fédération Internationale des Véhicules Anciens, an organisation I wouldn't have imagined needed to exist, let alone to wield the power that it evidently does. An old-car federation? Is there a clapped-out washing-machine owners' club or a Fucked Fridge Federation somewhere too, with eligibility rules and membership codes? An enthusiasts' magazine with tempting small-ads?
But I had learned that we couldn't take part in the rally at all without a FIVA Passport for our vehicle. The official checked out the bodywork and went over the engine and brake and exhaust systems, frowning in concentration and referring to the four-page questionnaire Phil and Tony had already filled in. I handed over three passport photographs of the car; full-face, plain background, no hat or false facial hair. There were no incongruous or out-of-period additions or adaptations to the Amazon for him to balk at, I knew that perfectly well, because although Tony had made enough rally pro-finish-or-die modifications to it he was too careful and too expert to have tried to get away with anything out of order. But still it was like waiting for sentence to be pronounced.
At last the man stood back.
'That will cost you thirty pounds. I can accept a cheque.'
For a confused second I wondered if this was a bribe, some kind of used-car-lot backhander that I was too naïve to know about, but this man was altogether too official and too gentlemanly to be in any way bent. He was asking me for the passport fee. We had passed. Hastily I handed over three tenners, and thanked the man from FIVA as if he had given me a present.
Phil winked. 'Nice one,' he said.
We went off for lunch in the museum cafeteria.
Brooklands Motor Museum is a fine example of one of those once real and now fully preserved Heritage Trail features of British history and culture, like the Cornish tin mines that have become Tin Mining Experiences and the focus of resigned family days out. At Brooklands there are neat thirties room sets and period paint colours, and old cars drawn up behind velvet ropes with wax-faced model drivers at the wheel all kitted out in leather helmets and driving goggles. The signwriting and chairs and tables and anaglypta in the cafeteria itself were all subduedly in period too, but the food was Standard Brit Basic. The duke sat alone at one of the tables, behind the shield of his name badge, with only a morose-looking ham roll for company.
For the afternoon's briefing session we were back in the lecture theatre. The proceedings began with a slide show and the first image beamed up on the screen was one most of us had seen before, the watering-can-in-the-Gobi-Desert shot. The photograph had been taken by Luigi Barzini, a reporter from the Corriere della Sera who was also filing the story for the Daily Telegraph in London. He was the third crew member, with Borghese and Guizzardi the mechanic, of the Italian entry in the first Peking to Paris.
It was a heroic and absurdly risky journey, undertaken out of audacity simply because the French newspaper Le Matin had issued the challenge. The original proposal read: 'WILL ANYONE AGREE TO GO, THIS SUMMER, FROM PEKIN TO PARIS BY MOTOR-CAR?'
It was also a declaration that the age of the car had arrived. There were no maps for the first 5,000 miles, for much of the route there were barely any proper roads, but five drivers finally took up the newspaper's challenge. All but one of them reached Paris, but the clear winner after just sixty days on the road was Prince Borghese in the Itala, nearly three weeks ahead of his nearest competitor.
After the show the blinds went up and the audience blinked again at the map screens and their wavering yellow route. Superimposed on it now were mental images from the slide pictures of Lanzhou and Nagqu and Lhasa, Multan and Eşfahān and Tabrīz, places that we would pass through on the way to Istanbul and the gates of Europe. I thought of my childhood in the hills of Wales, when a trip to Liverpool meant a thrilling sortie through the booming artery of the Mersey tunnel and when 'abroad' was an abstract concept like trigonometry.
Back then, to see Paris was a dream of romantic impossibility; I was eighteen before I went abroad at all, and that was on a runaway trip to France with my first boyfriend. His parents were vehemently against our going anywhere alone together, and although my father was easier to deal with because he was unconcerned about what I did, the lack of support gnawed at me and made me unhappy and anxious. The adventure became an ordeal almost on the first day. Ianto was funny and diverting and quite glamorous back in Caerwys, Flintshire. Hitch-hiking around northern France, however, revealed him to be disorganised and dishevelled, as well as an irrational optimist. We had no plans and quickly ran out of money, and we ended up shoplifting food from supermarkets. I had no talent for it either, emerging with jars of apricot confiture or tinned anchovies stuffed up my jersey instead of the staples we needed.
I was glad to creep back home to Wales.
I didn't travel at all in my twenties, on any of those druggy Marrakesh or overland to India sorties that were so popular at the end of the sixties, because I felt too poor, and not just financially. Travel was dangerous, and demanded a sense of inner strength and adjustment that I didn't possess. If I let go of my steady unglamorous job and my poky flat and set off, I might fall straight through the holes in the world and disappear altogether. There was no safety net to catch me, and so I clung to the rope of security without attempting any acrobatics.
Then, once I had met my husband, there were well-planned excursions together that turned into family holidays, and now my children were almost grown up and I was setting out on a competitive drive half-way around the world through places called Lanzhou and Quetta. I turned to glance sideways at Phil. He was sitting face-forward with his arms folded and one leg hitched over the other, apparently listening to the proceedings. A needle-prick of anxiety jabbed at me.
Who was this person, and why was I doing this or anything else in his company? I would soon turn fifty. I had a husband and two kids and a couple of novels still to write, and enough friends and some money and opportunities to do enough of the things I liked to make life interesting.
There was no real answer to either question, not yet anyway. No doubt I would find out as much and probably
more than I wanted to about my travelling companion. And as for why undertake the journey at all – the closest approximation to an answer I could manage was that I just wanted to see if I could.
I held all the threads of my life in my own hands now, and if I wasn't going to travel while I was at the peak of my abilities and still had some physical capacity left, then I probably never would. Even this much was rationalising after the event. In the beginning Phil had asked me to be his partner – just say yes – and I had snatched at the chance of such an adventure without thinking about what it might really involve. And now I was in, for better or worse.
A small silver-haired man came to the microphone and introduced himself as Colin Francis, Clerk of the Course for the European leg. He had a soft voice with the buttery sound of the Welsh valleys in it, and he had that enviable knack of commanding attention without apparent effort.
He told us, 'This is a great motoring challenge you are embarking upon. But it is most definitely not a race. You are trying to achieve a clean sheet. That means zero penalty points. And it can be done.' He added, in a much lower voice that made us shift in our seats, 'in theory.'
'I would ask you to consider your objectives. A rally is not like a tennis match, but a game of darts. You are competing against yourselves, and the organisers, not each other. Your first task is to get to Paris. And the second is to do it with the minimum number of penalty points.
'The best way to do that is to start every day.'
Someone embarked on a laugh, but quickly decided against it and the sound died back into silence.
'Get your car to the start line on your start time every day. Even if you have to push it there. Don't oversleep, don't get your start time wrong, don't think you have five minutes to spare when you don't.
'And if you start every day, and keep going, you're on your way to a silver medal at least.'
At the back of the auditorium, Phil and I exchanged a look. We wanted one of those medals. But most of all I was grateful to Mr Francis for making the getting of it sound so simply and graspably just a matter of having a decent alarm clock.
The next arrival at the microphone was Rudolf Aghebagian, an Iranian ex-rally champion who was here to reassure us about driving the breadth of his country. He was a large, handsome man who looked as if he enjoyed life.
'Okay, everyone', he charmed us. 'You have no problems in Iran. You have no visa problems, you are all welcome into Iran, especially the Americans. Getting out again is maybe different.'
We all laughed obediently, haha. The women crew members were assured that we needed to make no major amendments to our dress. We were to cover up our arms and legs and wear a headscarf, that was all. Fears about driving to hell in a chuddar faded away.
After Mr Aghebagian came a succession of officials responsible for different aspects of the trip. Mike Leahy would be running the vehicle service units, Vauxhall Fronteras equipped with winch and tow-rope.
He advised that if we maintained 100 per cent concentration on the road ahead, we wouldn't be needing recovery assistance. 'Be aware of other vehicles, people waving, children at the roadside . . . when you are tired, stop for ten minutes . . . drink water, take salt tablets . . . and carry some small bribes.'
Piece of cake, I thought. No different and no more difficult than driving London to Cornwall in the traditional summer weekend sizzler tailback with a couple of whingey kids in the back, small bribes particularly.
'As for river crossings, if and when you get to a deep one, send the navigator to wade or swim across with one end of a ball of string tied around her waist. You can tie rope to the other end of the string, pull the rope over. Take off the fan belt and fix the tow-rope to drag the car across . . . Make sure your vehicle is fully waterproofed.'
Although crossing the Tamar never seemed as complicated as all that.
Mick O'Malley of Exodus, the adventure travel company who would provide camping and support facilities as far as Kathmandu, stood up to tell us about the advantages of dome tents and flexible alloy poles and using liberal quantities of anti-bacterial handwash. Mick was a dry and laconic-mannered Irishman who usually worked as a base manager in Kathmandu. Phil also worked for Exodus, as a Himalayan tour-leader, and he knew Mick of old, as well as Phil Colley, the Exodus speaker of Mandarin who would be our liaison man as far as Nepal. I thought this family connection might well come in quite handy on the road.
There were more instructions about shipping cars in containers from Felixstowe to Xingang, about insurance and medical precautions and last-minute mechanical preparations. At last we were sent streaming out into the paddock again and the flood diverged in two directions, back to the old cars or into the bar.
In the queue for a stiff drink I bumped up against the sexy-dolphin Bentley owner.
'Oh, yours is the lovely Bentley,' I inanely remarked.
The man looked at my badge, proclaiming me as Volvo.
'Yes,' he curtly agreed, and turned his back.
Phil mouthed one word. 'Wanker . . .'
We sat and had our drinks with Mick and Phil Colley and Dan and his co-driver JD, Jon Davies. Here was a nucleus of company already. Phil Colley said that he would be bringing his guitar, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined soft singing around a camp-fire under a powdery-starred sky, and maybe the scent of an exotic roll-up mingling with the camp cooking. It would be good, perhaps even better than good. Why had I doubted the sense of making such a trip?
As we drove back to London Phil and I were both quiet. I could still hear the faint tinnitus of long-gone racing cars, insistent in my head even though the engine roar of the Volvo was deafening enough. We needed sound and heat insulation, and better seats, and more waterproofing and wired exhaust joints; there was too much to do and the shipping date was less than six weeks off. Anxiety seeped back and darkened the smooth surface of pleasurable anticipation. But Phil leaned forward around the steering-wheel and patted the dusty black rexine of the dash.
'Good girl. You'll make it,' he encouraged the car.
Chapter One
Phil Bowen and I met on the road to Everest. When he sent me the challenge – you know you want to – I had only been back from Nepal for two months.
When I was a child, living amongst the purple-grey rounded hills that began the swell towards Snowdonia, Everest seemed both connected to me and also to be the furthest point away from where I was and what I was having to do.
There was a book about it in the glass-fronted bookcase that held the library of my village primary school. The book had a paper cover with the Union flag on it; probably it had been published after the Tenzing and Hillary conquest in 1953. I think I must have borrowed and read the book two or three times, and in the confusing and painful procession of those days, Everest came to represent a pinnacle of otherness that was both challenging and implacable, and therefore comforting. As time passed I used to think about it; not all that often, but in an occasional dreamy reverie peopled by ice-bearded and brave mountaineers. I conjured up the blinding sun on snow, and the terrible force of storms. When I grew up I kept the shape of it in the recesses of my imagination, the way the quintessential peak stood veiled in spindrift and half-masked by Lhotse and Nuptse. I read books about the various summit attempts, and kept a photograph cut from a colour supplement of the 1922 expedition led by General Bruce. It showed a group of men dressed in tweed jackets and scarves and plus fours, as if bound for a mildly rainy day out on a Scottish grouse-moor. One of them, Edward Norton, was the uncle of a friend of mine. I felt this tenuous connection as powerfully as a blood tie.
Then when I had babies and small children, Everest slipped out of my mind entirely. Reaching the end of each day was enough of a mountain to climb, and the peaks of emotional and physical involvement blocked out more distant views. It wasn't until the two of them were teenaged, and beginning the drift away into their own lives, that the landscape changed yet again. I had written eleven novels and was contemplating the twelfth. I
had the uncomfortable feeling that I was sending my bucket down the well of inspiration and it was coming up half-empty, because everything I knew and understood I had already written about. I found myself confiding this to Mark Lucas, a good friend who is also my literary agent. I didn't want to start a new novel, not quite yet. A view of distant, inviting scenery had suddenly come back into sharp focus.
'So what do you want to do?' Mark asked me.
The words came straight out of my mouth as if some body else was speaking them. 'Go to Everest.'
'Uh, what's stopping you?'
Immediately, I knew it was a done deal.
I booked myself on to a tour with Exodus. I chose a version of the Base Camp trek that went round in a loop via Gokyo Lakes and the Cho La pass instead of just there and back. I was warned that it was quite a tough trip.
It took about three months to arrange the details and to work up an attempt at a fitness regime. It seemed amusing if slightly unreal to go to an outdoor equipment shop and buy hiking boots, and a down-padded jacket that did nothing for the hipline, and a head torch and a penknife and numerous other accoutrements without which I had survived perfectly well until that moment.
An introduction was arranged for me to Rebecca Stephens, the first British woman to reach the top of Everest.
We met for lunch at the Chelsea Arts Club and I had to prop my chin up on my hand to stop my mouth gaping open with admiration. Rebecca had been there and stood on the top of the world, and there she was sitting across a table eating tuna salad as if the distinction counted for nothing. We talked about many things but the most crucial piece of advice she gave me was to get the best sleeping bag money could buy.
I did as I was told. The thing cost about the same as an Armani suit.
Departure day came, and in the check-in line for PIA at Heathrow I met my companions for the trip. There were three other women and a dozen men, all experienced trekkers and climbers, mostly much younger than me. The men had brutally short haircuts and looked as if they were taking a little holiday from abseiling down cliff-faces with the Marines. The women talked about their gym regimes, and previous experience of altitude. All the way out to Kathmandu I sat in a cloud of panicky foreboding. I wouldn't be able to keep up. I'd be an embarrassment and then an impediment, and there would be nothing for it but to do the decent thing and slip outside, murmuring about maybe being some time.
