A Traveller's Life (24 page)

To get into the box you first of all had to remove a block of cement which was held in place by iron pegs. This was because in a southerly gale the wind forced the door open and sucked the telephone book out of the box. The winds were of fantastic strength. In 1953 a wind of over 125 miles an hour was recorded on the north side of Hoy; the only trees on Fara were a few plantations of battered elders – how these survived was a miracle.

Mrs Watters was very proud of her telephone-box, which was certainly very smart. The Post Office paid her to paint it once a year. She liked people to use it because she was afraid that otherwise it might be taken away. It was their only link with the outside world in an emergency. I found the temptation to put money into it, in the same way as one put money into a collection-box for the repair of the fabric of a church, almost irresistible.

Mr Watters's only real relaxation was his weekly visit to the social club at the naval oiling station at Lyness on the other side of Gutter Sound. If anyone in Britain deserved a drink he did. He liked Highland Park malt whisky best, from the distillery in Kirkwall. ‘Tastes of methylated,' was what he said of a well-known proprietary blend.

Mrs Watters did not go with him, partly because she did not like boats but really because she loved the island so much that she never wanted to leave it. She had not been ashore, even to Hoy, for more than a year. Were it not for this Mr Watters would probably have sold the island, and they would have been living in the small cottage, in the shadow of the oil tanks, that they had bought against the sad day when they would finally have to leave. ‘It will break her heart when we have to go,' he said.

We crossed the Sound for the weekly outing in the middle-sized boat, the one with the outboard. The weather was filthy; it was
blowing hard, wind against a strong tide; night was coming on. Mr Watters was a first-class helmsman; even so we bailed all the way across. There was a destroyer in the berth by the oil tanks and we had a wild night of it in the social club. The return journey was like the crossing of the Beresina or the Styx; fortunately the wind had moderated.

‘I like a good laugh,' said Mr Watters when we were half way across, ‘a good laugh and a good story. Nothing to worry about. I once took sixteen people and a coffin all the way to Flotta. That's where the cemetery is.'

Most of the remaining houses on Fara were empty shells, with grass growing on the roofs in which crows and pigeons nested. However, the one in which Mr Watters's father had lived was still in good condition. In it there was a great bed, like an open matchbox.

We crossed a headland on which there were many gulls' nests. On the way he killed a rabbit blinded by myxomatosis; he did it as if he disliked killing things. We came to a building that had once been the island shop, now reduced to rubble. ‘There was a fire in this house. They never let it go out until the end. It burned for a hundred years.'

I told him about the American in Rome who, on being shown a candle that was said to have burned for a thousand years, promptly snuffed it with the words, ‘Well, it's time somebody put it out.'

‘I like that,' he said.

It was very clear weather. ‘That's a bad sign,' he said. ‘There's a pole on Binga Fea on Hoy – when you can see it, it means bad weather. Besides, I can feel it in my bones. My father always used to say he could feel bad weather in his bones, but when I was young I never believed him. Now I'm older I can feel it, too.

‘That's where the German Fleet was scuttled in 1919,' he said,
pointing northwards towards Cava. ‘There and at the top of the Gutter. Seventy-one of them. It started about midday on June the twenty-second. By five o'clock they were all on the bottom. I reckon it was a put-up job. When they were doing the salvage work here there was a man called Cox, the firm was called Cox & Danks. It was a big job. The ones off Fara were in seventeen fathoms. They had to cut off the superstructures and the barbettes first. I used to hear Cox cussing and swearing in the middle of the Sound. “There's a stupid bugger born every minute and I reckon I'm one of them, taking on this bloody job.”'

He had a great appreciation of natural things. ‘I like to see the geese when they're on passage, on the way to Norway. It's a right lovely sight. I walk down to the shore so I can see it.' And of a duck carrying a weakling on its back, he declared it ‘the most wonderful sight I ever saw'.

‘When you've gone it will be terribly lonely for a bit,' he said. ‘I like somebody to talk to and I like a good laugh.'

On my return from the lonely islands, David Astor offered me one of the most coveted posts in Fleet Street, that of Travel Editor of
The Observer
, and for the next nine years I led its readers a merry dance: down huge rivers; through feverish swamps and jungles; across deserts and savannahs; up pyramids, minarets and mountains, some of them holy, most of them inaccessible; into hitherto unvisited seraglios; down sinister blind alleys in search of Bulgarian tailors who made astonishing suits from black felt; and into previously unsung eating houses and cafés, not all of them salubrious. Nearer home I took them in search of grass-grown Roman roads and ridgeways, of follies and grottoes as well as tin and arsenic mines, canal tunnels and other even more exotic monuments of industrial archaeology. These were just a few of the places and things to which I contrived to conduct them, at least on paper.

What I liked about
The Observer
and still do, for up to the time of writing it is largely unchanged in spirit, was that unlike the Partnership, no one gave a damn what one did with one's spare time, and in all the years I worked for the paper no one ever told me that I was doing badly, just as no one ever told me that I was doing well.

What follows are some descriptions of some of the, to me, more memorable, not necessarily wildest journeys I made during what I can, without exaggeration, describe as some of the most diverting years of my life.

In the autumn of 1965 I went to New York. This, apart from the pleasurable but abortive visit to
Holiday Magazine
two years previously, was my first visit to the city, and my aim now in going there was to attempt to find out how the impoverished British could survive in it, faced with a strong dollar, and armed with nothing but their native wit and intelligence and a handful of old-fangled pounds.

Starting at the top and working my way downwards through the innumerable stratas which make up New York – and which are encountered long before you get down to the mud, sand and gravel, decomposed rock, schist, Inwood limestone and Fordham gneiss on which man-made New York is set up – took a long time, because everything was so different from anything I had known back home in Wimbledon, SW19. Even my favourite author, the American Richard Bissell, on whom up to now I had relied implicitly for information on the New York scene and how to comport oneself within it, was sometimes floored for an answer. The following passage from his book
Say Darling
, which describes how he came to write a musical called
The Pajama Game
, demonstrates this, as well as indicating that it was the sort of problem New Yorkers were having to face up to every day:

In boarding a bus or any public conveyance should the gentleman assist his companion on first, or should he get on first? Suppose I and Miss Gloria Vanderbilt was boarding a bus to go have a Giant Idaho Potato at Toffenetti's and I fouled up the embarkation rites. She would tell Sinatra I was as square as a coffee table.

So that I would run out of steam before I ran out of money (I really was playing the game of doing the whole thing with a minimum of cash), and eschewing the bus and subway services for reasons that are immediately apparent to anyone who has ever been confronted by them, I carried out my investigations either on foot or by bike, starting on Fifth, Park and Madison Avenues. At that time you could still see, not locked away in huge automobiles but walking the streets of the city, something rare in Europe – where the waxy, exhumed, dandruffy look had spread like the Black Death – rich, beautiful girls dressed in garments by Norell, Chanel and Balenciaga bought from Bergdorf Goodman and Henri Bendel and similar emporia. In London, where the daughters of the rich were busy camouflaging themselves as members of the proletariat and taking elocution lessons in Birkenhead, they would have been the daughters of South American ambassadors. Here they were homegrown and could be seen not only in the streets but also up at the Plaza Hotel on Central Park – as I zoomed through the Palm Court around four p.m., too fast for the maître d'hôtel to sit me down to a muffin – taking tea with their mothers, some of whom were wearing the most fantastic hats. (One of the treats I was preparing for the penniless readers of my column was a free zoom through the Plaza.)

But as an un-rich, and now not so young Britisher, I had to get along without the rich girls and their even richer mothers, and what I found most fascinating about New York was the life of the streets in those huge, submerged areas in which I could see for myself the miraculous and painful process by which Chinese, Armenians, Transylvanian Jews, Negroes, Germans, Puerto Ricans, Italians and Gypsies (to name only a few of those who were undergoing it) became Americans while still remaining basically and stubbornly what they were. London had produced nothing like these great enclaves of immigrants, even at the height of the
Russian pogroms, and not even the recent influxes of Jamaicans, Sikhs and Pakistanis had succeeded in producing anything like the huge concentrations of foreign groups that existed in New York. Even London's Chinatown down in the docks was no more. It had gone up in smoke during the blitz and had not yet risen again, as it was later to do south of Shaftesbury Avenue.

In New York, Chinatown flourished and Mott Street was filled with shops with what were, to a frivolous Englishman, names that somehow suggested the occupations of their various owners, such as the Lun Fat Co., Grocers; the Wing Woh Lung Co., Importers; and the Go Sing Coffee Shop. Here in Chinatown, unlike most of New York, the inhabitants really appeared to be enjoying themselves. And nearby, on East Broadway, where Grossman's Wine Shop announced that ‘All our wines are made on the premises', Jewish territory impinged on Chinese.

The Jewish enclaves were more melancholy, presumably because the greatest humorists in America who were Jewish had fled from them. On Allen Street, where Jews from the Middle East made neckties for half the world – and you needed a sense of humour to be seen dead in some of their productions – I watched them playing cards after their day's work, sitting with their black hats on, on the upper floor of the Tirana Café.

On Hester Street they sold one another dill pickle and sturgeon by the chunk, and
kapchunkes
– whatever they were – were ninety-eight cents a pound. Not knowing about everything, such as not knowing about
kapchunkes
, was one of the pleasures of New York, letting the city wash over you like a mighty, highly discoloured sea.

On Essex Street there were shops, selling Jewish religious articles, that were so small and their stock so shop-soiled that one wondered how they could survive at all; and on the Sabbath, in what were, some of them, almost equally small synagogues, I
listened to the readings in unison of the scriptures and watched the rhythmical rockings of the worshippers, many of whom emerged to attend these services from old red-brick tenements covered with fire escapes such as those on Broome Street, down towards the Williamsburg Bridge; there in the shop windows down at street level, men and women, some of them very old, sat on non-Sabbath days darning, weaving and ‘stoteing', which were forms of invisible mending, just as, until recently, invisible menders sat doing similar work in a shop window in Piccadilly Circus.

Outside heaven itself, not even in Jerusalem was there any place in which so many Christian sects had come together, or one in which so many of their churches were massed, as in New York: the Reformed Secret Mission of Divine Research on Eighth Avenue; Macedonia God's Pentecostal on 111th Street; Hungarian Reformed on East 82nd Street; the Pentecostal Powerhouse Church of God in Christ on St Nicholas Avenue; the Chinese for Christ at 2274 Broadway; not to mention, because there is no space, this not being a classified directory, churches of Swedenborgians, Nazarenes, Abyssinian Baptists, and dozens and dozens of strangely named churches in Harlem and Spanish Harlem, such as the Iglesia el Encuentro con Diaz in a decayed area largely occupied by spare-part dealers and transmission repairers, down towards the Hudson off Broadway, above West 125th Street.

German territory, at least where many of them congregated by day, was around Second and Third Avenues at East 86th Street. Shops here sold, as well as the beer steins, German and Swiss-German records (the latter making me thankful that my father had not executed a plan he had when I was young to send me to Switzerland to learn German), cuckoo clocks,
lederhosen
and female peasant garb with puffed sleeves. Where in New York did anyone, except possibly little children, wear
lederhosen
? In the privacy of some lovely schloss out in Queens? At the Berlin Bar,
round the corner on Second Avenue, where they sold oversize
wursts
, I had a Münchner Weissbier with a slice of lemon in it, after which I felt like the Graf Zeppelin about to take off.

Two blocks away, around 84th Street, where the Hungarians lived, there were travel agencies with names such as Duna and Carpathia, and from this part of the city many parcels went out to places behind the Iron Curtain.

And up in the north was Harlem, as remote to white-skinned New Yorkers as Lhasa. ‘Don't go to Harlem,' my friends said. ‘Don't go to Harlem,' taxi-drivers said, as well as being actually reluctant to take me there as a fare-paying passenger. ‘Go to Harlem,' counselled the thoroughly untrustworthy detectives in the Sixteenth Precinct House, which was far enough from Harlem for them to feel brave about it, pounding away with one finger on their hundred-year-old typewriters, filling in the charge sheets for the junkies in the small hours of the morning. ‘Go to Harlem, but keep off the sidewalks, don't fool around in hallways [whatever that meant] and keep your eyes off the coloured girls.' This last piece of advice came from a member of the vice squad who looked as if he had been taking advantage of the facilities.

Confronted with these and other conflicting opinions – with those of the police, if one observed their prohibition about sidewalks, making such an expedition sound downright impossible – I decided to go to Harlem, in daylight and by bicycle, but some other year. However, the morning following my nocturnal visit to the Sixteenth Precinct House, I found myself riding my bicycle in Harlem by mistake, while travelling from the area at West 215th and 10th Streets where the sanitation department performed certain rituals which I had come to the conclusion would not interest my readers, even if they were penniless. It happened because I was ordered off the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, which was forbidden to cyclists, by cops who looked exactly like the ones
who, two days previously, had suggested that I remove myself from the lower level of the George Washington Bridge on to which I had also strayed with my bicycle, and later from the upper level on which, as a result of their telling me to ‘gederhelloutahere' without telling me how to do so, I subsequently found myself. It was thus that I found myself in Harlem, cycling along Seventh Avenue and St Nicholas Avenue, where I paid a hurried visit to the Pentecostal Powerhouse Church of God in Christ. Otherwise I kept my head well down over the dropped handlebars in an effort to avoid looking at the coloured girls, some of whom were making friendly gestures to the white cyclist, and who were wobbling like chocolate blancmanges in the process, obviously trying to lure him on to a sidewalk or into a hallway for a bit of fooling about. At the same time I also tried to look as if I were not the only paleface currently in Harlem, which in fact I was, except for those in cars with the windows up, who were all doing fifty miles an hour whenever they could, in an effort to get out of it.

New York was so different from London in so many ways that it would be tedious even to attempt to enumerate them, but to me the greatest difference between the inhabitants of the two cities was that New Yorkers seemed to suffer from time to time – but at indeterminate intervals – from a curious affliction that caused them to up sticks and swarm out of the parts of the city in which they had been living into other areas and finally, after a succession of such swarmings, out of it altogether. In London there never have been, and perhaps now never will be, such vast tribal, almost lemming-like movements, as those which in New York drove the rich and fashionable first up-town, then over to Riverside Drive on the Hudson, and then scuttling across to the East River, in a huge game of musical chairs with the poor; so that although still inhabited the blocks of apartments on Riverside Drive, for
instance, once the wonder of the Western World with their Italianate wrought-iron lamps on either side of the doorways (at which no doormen in Ruritanian uniforms stood any more, as they still did outside similar blocks on Amsterdam Avenue), had no need of a sign proclaiming ‘The Rich have passed this way.' There never was, perhaps, a city with as many ghosts of failed ventures and dreams split asunder as New York: ghosts of old department stores, between 13th and 23rd Streets, ghosts of old hotels, everywhere; ghosts of old newspapers, on Park Row; ghosts of Vaudeville, on and off Broadway.