by Rosie Thomas
I stayed with them for two nights. Pete read the list of rally entrants I had brought for him with absorbed fascination, and we traced the route in the atlas.
'What a thing you're doing,' he kept repeating, without envy.
We drank more tea, and watched the uneventful street. On the second evening I drove them in their Ford to their favoured pub of the moment, and stuck to fizzy water so they could enjoy a few drinks together. Drink-driving is a big taboo in rural North Wales, although it wasn't always so. I remembered the roaring days when Pete and Edith were younger than I am now, and the rivers of booze that flowed.
When it was time for me to go they came out and took photographs beside the Amazon.
'Have a good time. We'll be thinking of you with every turn of the wheels,' my father said. We embraced each other, briefly.
I wanted him to say, echoing and returning my unspoken childish plea, don't crash, don't die, make sure you come home safely because I love you.
He didn't, of course, but probably he thought it.
I drove the car back to Stamford Brook. There was a clunk in the transmission, most noticeable between first and second. Phil and Tony were waiting for me in the alleyway, had probably been standing there wringing their hands for the entire 48 hours of the car's absence.
'You made it,' Phil exulted.
'There's a clunk,' I said.
'Don't worry, love. Whatever you've done we'll sort it out,' Tony answered kindly.
June came and went. Phil worked all hours in the garage, and we met rarely. The car would be finished in time for shipping, but only just. The news of the other two British Amazons was relayed to us by Tony, who was supplying them with parts. Dan and JD were working hard on their car too, but had tight budget constraints. And the mechanic who was prepping the car for the matched pair of women, Jennifer Gillies and Francesca Sternberg, didn't seem to be ordering nearly enough heavy-duty spares. Tony said he thought he must be getting parts from some other source, although as he was the main UK Amazon supplier he couldn't imagine where it might be.
When I did see Phil, I thought he seemed tense. He reported that he didn't find it easy to work for Tony. I guessed that Phil was used to running tour groups and shouldering heavy amounts of responsibility, and wielding the authority that went with all of that. He didn't enjoy being treated as the garage gofer.
'Not much longer,' I consoled him. He was looking forward to taking a big group to Morocco in August, for Exodus.
One day we went up to the racecourse at Silverstone to learn some advanced driving techniques. We sat in the waiting area of the driving school amongst groups of nervily joshing young men waiting for their 'Silverstone experience', and watched the rain slanting across the windows. The Doppler effect of whizzing Formula 1 cars was just audible from the race-track.
Our instructor took Phil and me out to the shiny wet skid pan. The practice car had four fat rubber wheels on retractable legs mounted outside the regular wheels, making it look like a child's toy. Using a remote control device to lift one or more of the wheels, the instructor could simulate rear, front, or four-wheel skids, and teach us how to react to each of them. But a skid, he warned us ominously, was almost invariably the result of driver error. It was much better to drive well enough to avoid skidding in the first place.
Phil went first, and was pretty good. My turn came, and I wasn't. We spun merrily round and around which was amusing to begin with. At last, after the expenditure of much heavy instructor patience, I learned how to steer in a skid instead of just letting go of the wheel, and the importance of cadence braking. But privately I feared that if a real skid came I'd probably still panic, shut my eyes and slam my foot hard on the brake.
We moved on to emergency lane changing. The technique was to drive flat out towards a line of plastic cones until the instructor ordered a swerve, then to throw the wheel to propel the car into the next lane and to correct it sharply to continue more or less in a straight line.
My turn came. Cones flew.
Maybe I learned a little, but it was depressing to discover what a poor driver I was.
Another weekend we went back down to Somerset where a rallying friend of Tony's gave us an introduction to navigation techniques. Colin Bryce set us a series of routes to navigate at speed around the back lanes. Phil and I took it in turns to drive and map-read. I was better at this and it was much more enjoyable than being humiliated on the skid pan. The car climbed the hills and cornered like a dream.
These seemed pathetically small rehearsals against all the experienced rally enthusiasts we would meet in Beijing, but it was all we had time for.
At the last minute Tony and I fell out seriously about the provision of heat and sound insulation inside the car. He took the view that the car was the star and Phil and I would just have to get used to deafness and heat exhaustion. I insisted that the car could hardly star anywhere if no one remained in a fit state to drive it. Tony said there was nothing in the budget for insulation; he was already seriously out of pocket on the car. I said I would pay extra. It was not a cordial exchange.
In the end Noddy and Phil worked overnight to apply the layers of insulating material to the bare metal. We were glad of it later.
We assembled all our camping equipment, and the mountain of spares. Phil compiled painstaking lists of what was where, and locked everything into secure boxes in the boot and rear compartments. He labelled the huge bunches of keys with neat brown luggage labels.
On the morning of 10 July we drove our fully loaded Amazon up to Suffolk, to the CARS UK holding point for the docks. The only extra weight it would have to carry out of Beijing was our personal luggage – a couple of kit-bags, no more, Phil insisted. We studied the ground clearance of the loaded car very carefully. It looked generous enough to let us sail over rocks and rough ground and through rivers. There were front and rear steel plates protecting the underbody from damage, and thorough waterproofing. We assured each other that everything that could be done had been done, and we kept our separate anxieties to ourselves.
The holding point was a barn and a farmyard. Over the barn doors was a huge banner that read PEKING TO PARIS. START.
Some of the other cars were being loaded, two to a container. As we waited to wave off the Amazon, a bright yellow 2CV with twin exhausts up the sides of the chassis rolled into the yard. The friendly driver introduced himself as Maurizio Selci. We both thought he was a dead ringer for Danny DeVito.
'You have rallied before?' Maurizio asked us.
We shook our heads and he grinned. 'You picked a big one to start with.'
Oh God, I thought. We are as mad as snakes to be doing this . . . but luckily it's too late now to change any of it. I didn't want even to think about not going.
The Amazon was being loaded into a container with an immaculate Aston Martin DB5. We peered inside it and saw that the crew's kit was all packed in matching leather bags stamped 'Aston Martin Owners' Club'. There was that subtle scent of money in the air. Phil and I just hoped that the poor old Amazon didn't break loose in transit and damage their paint job.
Phil put the Namche turquoise in one of the side pockets. We patted the bonnet of the car, wished it a safe journey, and accepted the shipper's offer of a lift to the nearest railway station. With Maurizio, we took the train back to Liverpool Street. In a little under two months, we would be reunited in Beijing.
Chapter Four
Life should have been easy once the car was on its way to China, and for more than a month it was exactly that. In August Phil went to Morocco and we flew to Turkey for a wonderful family holiday.
I decided that I needed to gain some upper body strength in order to be able to drive such long and tiring distances without the benefit of power-assisted steering, and my trainer at the gym suggested I take up boxing. He introduced me to another gym member, John Davis, who had been a super-middleweight fighter. John was kindness itself. Twice a week we met to train: he taught me bag work and sparring,
working on my punches and posture and footwork with as much attention as if I were a world champion in the making. My fitness improved dramatically, and John taught me boxers' skipping, the best calorie-burning exercise there is. I loved the discipline of trying to be a fighter. During a 2-minute round you forget everything – work, worries, the outside world. All you can think of is dodging, weaving, landing a punch, keeping your body together. On the rare occasions when John forgot he was only playing with me and almost let a punch of his own fly, I understood what speed really is. His right cross was faster than the flicker of a snake's tongue. I was proud of myself, and pleased with the strength and stamina I was building up.
The crisis began on a Saturday, two weeks exactly before I was due to fly out to Beijing. I came back from a week in the French Alps, where I had been writing an adventure sports story for The Sunday Times, to find a dozen or so messages on my answering machine. Most of them were from friends, of the 'good luck, for whenever it is you're finally off variety, but one was from David Burlinson, the director of Exodus handling the China leg of the journey. He said that he needed to speak to me urgently about the Peking to Paris, and would I call him immediately at his office.
Which meant that I couldn't now get the news – and whatever it might be it was unlikely to be glad tidings – until Monday morning at the earliest. My immediate thought was that something terrible had happened to Phil in Morocco. He was in jail, or in hospital, or worse. Trying to decide what to do I sweated for an hour or so, and then rang Phil's mother in Dorset. We hadn't spoken before.
Mrs Bowen listened politely and then told me she had heard nothing from Exodus or directly from Phil, so the news couldn't be too serious, but would I call her if I did learn anything more? I apologised for stirring up her anxiety, but she answered calmly that with all the travelling and risk-taking Phil did, she had long ago stopped worrying about him. Except, she added, within some unacknowledged inner recess where mothers always worried no matter where their children might be or what they were doing. I agreed sombrely with that, and rang off. I managed to convince myself that Burlinson only wanted to discuss some administrative detail to do with insurance, or maybe an air ticket problem, and sat down to write about whitewater rafting.
First thing on Monday morning, I spoke to him. Oh yes, he said, it certainly was urgent. The Chinese were refusing to give me a visa.
I felt a cold stone of shock dropping into the puddle of my equanimity. Ripples of it raced through to my extremities as the implications added up. No visa, no Beijing. No Beijing, no start line, no contest, no rally at all. No money back either. After nine months preparation, all the work that Phil and I had done going for nothing, just because there was no little stamp in my passport. I thought I had considered all the possible pitfalls but even in the iciest of 4 a.m. sweats I hadn't reckoned on this one.
I was gasping and shouting into the phone.
'Why? Why not? Why me?'
Poor David Burlinson tried to explain. I had put 'author' on my visa application form. Along with a handful of other competitors and members of the film crew who had written 'photographer' or 'cameraman', I was regarded as potentially dangerous by the Chinese authorities. I might write something subversive about the People's Republic; I might already have written something in between spinning stories about women's lives. They would have to check out my professional record. No, he didn't know how long it would take, or what the chances were.
'Do you realise,' I managed to utter, 'what a hole this leaves me in? Not to mention Phil Bowen?'
'I wouldn't like to be in your position,' Burlinson agreed, a little too smoothly.
I'm ashamed to recall that I slammed the phone down.
I cried for a minute, mostly out of anger and disbelief and frustration, and then picked up the phone again. I called Caradoc, who was as surprised and disbelieving as I was. How was it that neither the professional visa service handling my application, nor the rally office, had thought to mention to entrants that describing oneself as a writer might not be the best route into Beijing? RO and his chums had been out there, recceing the route and schmoozing the authorities. A visa service was a visa service. Didn't they know the form by now? 'Housewife' would have done fine. Company director, businesswoman, barmaid, anything.
But it was too late now. My name was on some list, somewhere in the great bureaucratic machine of China, as a putative political undesirable.
Together Caradoc and I reviewed the list of publishing bigwigs, friends of friends in the FO, fringe members of the great and good, and whoever else we might conceivably call on for help pleading my case. We divided the list between us and began calling. Simon Master, deputy chairman of Random House, and Helen Fraser, managing director of Penguin UK, my two fiction publishers, both faxed eloquent letters of support addressed to the Chinese Embassy within an hour of being asked. Ian Taylor, international director of the Publishers Association, did the same. Each of them sensibly stressed that I wrote only commercial fiction for women, intended purely to entertain. I had never been a journalist, or a social or political commentator in any medium at any time. I was an entirely suitable person in every respect for admission into the People's Republic.
Armed with these documents, I called RO at the rally office.
Loftily he told me that he and Lord Montagu would be visiting the embassy on Wednesday afternoon to plead our case. We were all in the same boat, because the Chinese authorities were refusing to release any of the passports while there was still doubt about five individual members of the expedition. And all the Iranian visas still remained to be processed. I was on no account to do anything that might prejudice these important discussions, but I had his permission to telephone the office at the end of Wednesday afternoon to learn the result of the meeting.
I faxed my publishers' letters to him, so that he could present them in support of my case. It went against my every instinct to sit still and wait quietly with so much at stake, when I really wanted to fight my own corner with the visa section at the embassy and anyone else who might be remotely concerned, but I did it. I didn't sleep much, or eat a meal, and my preparations for departure day came to a complete halt, but I grimly waited. Ianto blew in unannounced from New York. He was in the middle of buying a motorbike design company; one evening he was CEO of the new team, the next night there had been some palace coup and he was demoted apparently to deputy teaboy. He thrived on all this; there were international calls at all hours on our line and my fax machine throbbed with his incoming messages. He had enough energy left over to want to involve himself in my troubles and offer advice, but I cut him short. He and Caradoc resorted to murmured conversations about tactics during which they shot speculative glances over their shoulders at the simmering subject. I did the ironing, cooked and washed up, and counted the hours until Wednesday.
Phil came back from Morocco at last. His handling of the crisis was impeccable. We discussed it endlessly on the telephone: we hadn't met for weeks, since before our separate summer trips abroad, and this made me feel cut off from him. But Phil was his usual even and optimistic self. If it had been he who was jeopardising our participation by some oversight or shortcoming, I would have shouted and blamed. Phil was philosophical. It was just one of those things, nobody's fault. He even apologised for suggesting the rally idea to me in the first place and so landing me in this mess. We talked about our Amazon, by now waiting in its container on the dock at Xingang for us to come and do what it had been made ready for.
'Do you want to ask someone else to drive with you, if I can't go?' I asked.
'Like who? No. It's you and me.'
If I did make it, I thought – if, if only – I would definitely have the right stuff for company.
Wednesday afternoon came. After counting the minutes to five o'clock I made the call to the rally office, with fingers like warm putty as I dialled the number.
But the answer was neither yes or no. RO's assistant reported that Lord Montagu felt th
e meeting had gone well, and I could call RO himself on his mobile phone if I wanted the news direct.
I wanted the news direct. RO was on a train somewhere, and I had to shout to make myself heard. He told me that everyone's chances were in jeopardy, not just mine. He hadn't wanted to confuse matters by handing over my letters of support, and in any case why hadn't the letters made it clearer exactly what kind of writer I was? His tone was distinctly admonitory. The signal broke up and then collapsed altogether. I waited, but he didn't call me back.
Time crawled by until Friday morning, eight days before we were due to fly to Beijing. I should have been buying last-minute necessities and wondering how to fit everything I would need for seven weeks into one kitbag, but there seemed no point. I called the Rally Office to see if there was any more news.
'Yes, the floodgates are opening,' RO trumpeted. 'The Chinese have started to release the passports so we can get them over to the Iranian Embassy. Time is very short.'
It was indeed. Since we had submitted all our documents for the Iranian applications way back at the beginning of April, and forms for the other five visas to Visa World, the recommended professional visa service, in June, I wondered why it had become such a last minute panic.
'What about mine?' I dared to ask.
'Not yours. Yours and four others are still retained for checking by Beijing.'
'What does that mean? That they may not grant it?'
'Well, nobody's said you're not going.'
'Nobody has said I am, on the other hand.'
'That's true.'
Something snapped. I started shouting at him. I'd been making preparations for months, going to the gym every day, and running, and boxing, for God's sake. I'd dreamed about the rally every night. No one was going to keep me from the start line. I was going to get that visa whatever it cost. Maybe I should take a tent and camp on the pavement outside the Chinese Embassy until they granted it. I could ask the Sun along to take a picture. It was the silly season, after all.
