Cobra in the Bath

by Miles Morland

  Then we had the Mackenzie letter. Five days before Sam was due to take over as Blue Boat coach, Jim Rogers,* who was coxing Isis, approached Ronnie and me with a letter that had been written by Sam to Jim’s father, an Alabama businessman. He had fowarded it to Jim with ‘Is this guy nuts or am I?’ scrawled over the top of it. The letter said that Sam would soon have responsibility for crew selection and implied that he could be influenced to promote Jim to the Blue Boat to replace Mike Leigh, the present cox. Sam had provided the number of his bank account in Henley.

  Ronnie and I found Sam after that day’s outing. He had been coaching Isis. We asked him to join us in the back of Ronnie’s VW minibus.

  I produced the letter. ‘Sam, this letter is open to serious misinterpretation. People could say you are selling seats in the Blue Boat.’

  Sam, six foot six of solid sinew, snatched the letter from me with a hand the size of a ham.

  ‘Strewth, Miles, you can’t think that’s serious. It’s a joke, a bloody joke.’

  ‘Sam,’ chipped in Ronnie, ‘we’d like to believe that, but if it’s a joke why give the number of your bank account?’

  An hour later the minibus was rocking from side to side as Sam threw his mighty frame about, pounded anything he could find to pound and said he could see no reason to resign. Rowing in a Boat Race is one thing but being threatened by the strongest oarsman the world had ever seen in the back of a minibus was a scary experience. Finally we told Sam that if he didn’t resign we would have to resign him. He eased his huge frame out of the minibus muttering oaths and telling us we could do what we wanted.

  Next day we announced that, owing to a misunderstanding, Sam had decided to resign as an Oxford coach. The press were all over us as Sam was always good copy, but we agreed to say no more and eventually the fuss died down. I was sorry. I liked Sam and I would have loved to have been coached by him. We now had six weeks to the Boat Race and no coach. Ronnie, imperturbable as ever, got permission from Radley to take another four weeks off teaching, and Lawton Fage, a calm, smiling presence who had rowed in Ronnie’s 1959 crew, filled in the remaining two-week gap. By then Ronnie had laid such a solid grounding that we were rowing on autopilot.

  We knew we had something special, but we also knew that odd things happen in Boat Races, and overconfidence has resulted in many fine and favoured crews being beaten on the day by a weaker crew. The race is different to a timed trial; it is two crews next to each other over more than four miles of winding tidal river with psychology playing as big a part as physique.

  Tideway Scullers, a crew of powerful adult oarsmen and indisputably the fastest in England, challenged us to a race over the Boat Race course. We accepted and two weeks before the Boat Race found ourselves on the stake boat at Putney looking across at one of the top crews in the world packed with oarsmen who nine months earlier had won Olympic silver in Tokyo. There had been a lot of talk in the Putney boathouses about the race, and the Scullers had let it be known that they were glad finally to have the opportunity to put one of the Boat Race crews in its place.

  I can remember just about every stroke of the race. As had happened so often, we were led off the start but, as was always the way with Ronnie’s crews, we knew we were fitter. Just like in the 1963 Boat Race, we were down by just over a length after the first four minutes. Getting back was going to be difficult. We had a crew of Olympic medallists ahead of us, not the 1963 Cambridge crew.

  For the next seventeen minutes we swapped the lead. As we approached the finish we were just ahead, and they came at us like madmen. Both crews were flying. They began to close. In the words of The Times: ‘As they came to the Brewery [a landmark close to the finish] it seemed just possible that they might get on terms. But Trippe [our stroke] was not having it and Oxford came in at a blistering pace to finish in 17 minutes 37 seconds, four seconds ahead of the Tideway Scullers. This was a great triumph for Oxford and must do much to restore the image of the Boat Race.’ Richard Burnell, the Times correspondent, himself an Olympic gold medallist and one who had been critical of the breaks we had made with tradition, had begun his report, ‘Boat Race practice at Putney tends to be prosaic enough. Just occasionally it has moments of real excitement. This was one of them. I have never seen a finer row over the Boat Race course, or a better race.’

  The record for the Boat Race course had been set by Cambridge in 1948 at 17 minutes 50 seconds. Our 17min 37sec had just broken that record by thirteen seconds.

  After that the Boat Race itself seemed destined to be an anticlimax. We knew that on paper we had the beating of Cambridge, but on a number of occasions the tensions of Boat Race day have caused an oarsman to black out, allowing the other crew to sail past. That is one reason why psychology plays such a large part in the race. We worried that that could happen to us. One of our crew had blacked out in a race a couple of years earlier, and we prayed that he would not go over the edge this time.

  The race was held on a very hot day for spring. I had won the toss and we were once more on the Surrey station on the outside of the first bend. Cambridge were again thought to be planning a fast start. As it was, we led them from the start and moved steadily away. We won by four lengths in a respectable time, the third-fastest ever, but when we saw Ronnie after the race he was clearly disappointed. He had been hoping for a margin larger than the six lengths by which we had lost in 1964. So had we.

  The strange thing was that the race was the opposite of the one against the Scullers. Then we had been flying the whole way with the boat in full song throughout. This time, against Cambridge, it felt as if we were going through treacle. Several of us, including me, didn’t remember the second half of the race at all; it had been simple drudgery. And at the end, far from feeling ready to race back – as we had against the Scullers – we could hardly summon the energy to row ashore.

  We had probably peaked too early; we had probably over-warmed up; we had probably done too much in the days leading up to the race. But we would never know exactly why we had not had a better row. Despite that, the Daily Telegraph in its report on the race said, ‘This could be the best Oxford crew of all time, though we have seen them going faster than today.’

  I stepped out of the boat at Mortlake after the 1965 Boat Race and knew I would not be stepping back into a racing shell ever again.

  *One of these was calligraphy, and it was this which gave him a lifelong interest in the subject. When he began making Apple computers it was his fascination with calligraphy that got him to include so many wonderful fonts, a feature later copied by Microsoft. If he had never dropped in to calligraphy classes we would probably today have 5 rather than 205 different fonts on computers.

  *A few years ago I was helping to find a new sponsor for the Boat Race. This involved knowing what kind of audience it attracted on television. To my surprise it normally attracts about seven million viewers, more than the Derby or the women’s final at Wimbledon. That is just in the UK. It is also broadcast all round the English-speaking world.

  *Jim coxed the Blue Boat to victory next year. This is the same Jim Rogers who later became George Soros’s original partner and, after he left Soros, a famous investor and motorbiker, author of the best-selling Investment Biker and various other books combining investment with adventure.

  PART III

  THE GROWN-UP WORLD

  15

  On the Beach in Greece

  The first thing I did on leaving Oxford was put off getting a job. Instead I became a beach bum in Greece. I saw an advertisement for a replacement minibus driver for Murison Small in Corfu. Colin Murison Small and a firm called Continental Villas invented foreign villa holidays and the chalet girls who went with them. They rented villas and chalets in Greece and the Alps, recruited girls who wanted something more exciting than secretarial college, told them to cook moussaka and fondue, provided cases of strong local wine, and sold the package to the English middle classes for villa parties. A brilliant idea.

  Colin Mur
ison Small’s girls were known as Muribirds. There were three Murivillas in Corfu, all close together just up the hill from Corfu town. The villas had a capacity of fifteen punters, six chalet girls and two drivers. There was a VW minibus and a Fiat to take the punters to the beach for the day and into town or up to a hill-top taverna in the evening. I was to be a Muriboy, as the drivers were known. I went out to replace a previous Muriboy who had dived into the deep end of a swimming pool after too much ouzo. The pool had had no water in it. We crossed at the airport. He looked like a mummy with most of his limbs wrapped in plaster and a bandage at a rakish angle across his head. ‘Oh, hello, you must be Miles,’ he called from his wheelchair. ‘You’ll have a fantastic time.’

  All the women I have ever fallen for have been the same type – brown hair, medium height, good figure – and there in the departure lounge at Luton Airport waiting to board the Corfu flight was a medium-height brunette with the grace of a butterfly. I found a way of starting a conversation with her and discovered that she too was bound for Corfu and on the same plane as me. And she was going out as a replacement Muribird. I discovered over Marseille that she had a fiancé, a brilliant young barrister, but by the time we had started our descent into Corfu I further discovered that she couldn’t decide whether she really wanted to get married, so she had gone away for the summer to give her the time and perspective to think it over. Better news. I shall call her Diana.

  Life as a Muriboy was good. Corfu in the mid-1960s was still the island that Gerald Durrell had written about with such charm in My Family and Other Animals, an island whose beauty had not yet been scarred by budget air travel. I soon learned my way around, although locating the bumpy goat tracks that led down to Corfu’s long yellow-sand beaches took a little time. On beaches where today stand hundred-room hotels and ranks of jet skis there was nothing but a donkey and a lonely bar. After breakfast I would drop the punters off at one of these beaches, where they would spend the day drinking ouzo and burning in the sun, while I popped off to Corfu Town to buy supplies for the villas and to hang out with the Spiros.

  St Spiridon is the patron saint of Corfu. Since his body arrived there following the fall of Constantinople it has kept the plague at bay and twice repulsed the invading Turk. The Corfiots repay him by naming their first-born sons Spiro. As a result half the male population has the same name. But, just as in Wales you have Dai the baker and Dai the miner, in Corfu I soon got to know Spiro the electrician, Spiro the builder, Spiro the carpenter, Spiro the taxi driver, and Spiro who went to the airport every day to ‘watch the movement’.

  The Spiros were very friendly. They plied me with drinks and entertained me to long lunches in the course of which we would argue vehemently about politics. At that stage in my life I was flirting with communism, a creed the Corfiots, with memories of the terrible civil war of the late 1940s, found abhorrent. In exchange I facilitated access to the female punters. Many of the women who came on Muriholidays were single and looking for romance. Some were not finding romance in England. The Greek taste in women is not the same as that of the English. The Spiros could not understand my attraction for Diana, whose graceful and willowy figure they regarded as far too thin. What was more she was a brunette. The Spiros liked women with lots of blonde hair and plenty of meat on their bones. They were not fussy about the other things.

  The Muribirds served dinner at a long olive-shaded trestle table in the garden of the largest villa. On changeover days while the new punters were eating I let the Spiros in. They hid at the bottom of the garden smoking Papastratos. At the end of dinner, while coffee and Metaxa, the cheap Greek brandy that tastes of burned cork, were being served, the punters would get up from the table and wander around. At this point the Spiros leaped from the bushes and presented themselves. It was seldom long before the blondest and fattest of the women was borne back into the bushes. Sometimes Spiro the electrician, ever the romantic, would balance a giant blonde on the tiny pillion at the back of his moped and take her off, squealing and wobbling, to a bar. Everyone was happy, and I was the most popular man in Corfu.

  The Spiros at work

  I had justified my decision not to get a proper job on leaving Oxford by announcing to my family and anyone else who asked that I was ‘writing a book’. This seemed like an excellent substitute. In addition to my slender baggage I took with me to Corfu a small, somewhat dented portable Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter, which had followed me through university. I loved my Olivetti. On the days when I stayed on a beach with the punters rather than going off to argue about communism with the Spiros I would find a seat and a table in some shade near the bar, order a Fix beer, light up a Papastratos and insert a sheet of paper into the Olivetti.

  I was good at beginning novels; in the course of the summer I began ten or fifteen of them. However, they had a habit of stalling after the first chapter. I would create characters, often based on people I knew, and invent situations, usually based on things about which I had no first-hand knowledge. I worried that if I based the situation on something from my personal experience that might be too boring, so I dreamed up more exciting situations that people would want to read about. I sat there in the shade, straw hat on my head, cigarette burning in the ashtray, sometimes two at the same time, a bottle of lager warming in the sun, tap-tapping away at the Olivetti, every inch a novelist.

  As page after page of onion-skin paper came out of the typewriter I stacked them under the Fix so they didn’t blow away. Once a week I sat down to read the latest wodge. Few novels got further than one wodge. I realised after reading through ten pages of beer-stained onion-skin that if I, the author, was unconvinced by the situation, readers were certainly not going to be. Occasionally a novel reached a second wodge but none ever made it to a third.

  Life could hardly have been better. I usually slept under the stars on the flat roof of one of the villas. London and a real job seemed a world away. My horizon was bounded by the Ionian Sea and Diana. Her initial reticence had all but disappeared, and the brilliant barrister fiancé, let us call him Martin, seemed to be dropping out of her consciousness. We lived in the moment, and Martin was far away. The days drifted by, and there was little need to count them – days of Diana, bouzouki music, tap-tapping on the Olivetti, chatting with the Spiros and dancing at Nicky’s, a nightclub a short walk from the villas overlooking Pontikonisi, or Mouse Island, a view so romantic when lit by the Greek moon that you could have fallen in love with a cushion.

  Then, disaster. News came from London that one of the chalet girls in Tolon had had to return to London and, as Corfu was thought to be overstaffed, Diana was to be transferred there. Tolon was hundreds of miles away in the Peloponnese. The other five chalet girls were fun and pretty, but without Diana Corfu was going to lose its sparkle. I took her to the airport for the flight to Athens, from where she would travel on by Murivan to Tolon, and said a sad goodbye. Both of us had things we wanted to say but were not yet ready to. Our relationship was close to the tipping point but had not quite reached it. The timing of her move could not have been worse.

  Then, a miracle. I persuaded Murison Small in London to transfer me to Tolon too. I was instructed to drive the minibus the 700 kilometres from Corfu to Athens, where I was to pick up a group of punters at the airport and take them on to Tolon. This was wonderful. I would have only a two-week gap without Diana.

  There was a problem. The brakes on the minibus were shot, and the road from Igoumenitsa, the ferry port on the mainland opposite Corfu, to Athens was a mountainous one. Before setting off I took the VW to a garage. ‘Ta frena. Kaput,’ said I in my best Greek. An hour later a smiling man in greasy overalls popped out from under the VW to assure me that ta frena were poli kala – the brakes were very good.

  I set off with two punters who wanted to see Athens. One, Carole, was a psychotherapist seeking romance in Greece who had made it clear that I, not a Spiro, was the person she was seeking romance with. I had mentioned to her as often as I could the existenc
e of Diana, but as there was no Diana to be seen, she took this as a challenge. I was glad that Norman, a delightfully funny Manchester accountant, also wanted to make the trip, so I would not be alone with Carole for the nine or ten hours the journey was likely to take from the time we landed in Igoumenitsa.

  The first part of our journey consisted of a long climb up a windy road to the mountain resort of Ioannina. Halfway up it became clear that the brakes were far from poli kala. When I pressed the brake pedal there was no firm pressure back but just a squodgy feeling as the pedal went down and further down as brake fluid was expelled. I stopped and crawled under the minibus. Most of the tape that the garage man had wrapped around the tube was now hanging down, dripping.

  I told Carole and Norman the situation we were in and said that I would plough on and hope for the best while using the gears to brake the van, but we had a lot of mountain roads ahead of us and at the end we would be driving through rush-hour Athens traffic. The journey would not be without risk, and I would quite understand if they wanted to return to the safety of Corfu, in which case I would be happy to drive them to the Ioannina bus station. They left the minibus for a conference and when they returned announced that they would both go on with me. I am proud of that drive. The ten-hour journey took us fourteen hours, as going faster than 50 mph would have been suicidal. Whenever we passed a garage, and they were scarce in those barren hills, I stopped and bought brake fluid to put in the reservoir and a spare for after that. For the next ten miles or so the brakes would more or less function, particularly if I didn’t use them except when absolutely vital, but after a bit the fluid would once more have been squeezed out and we would hurtle on brake-less round the hairpins of western Greece. Coming into Athens at 10 p.m. was a further challenge. If I went too slow a queue of hooting traffic built up behind us, and if I went at a normal speed I knew I would have no hope of bringing the minibus to a halt if the lights went red at a crossing.