Hemingway Adventure (1999) (29 page)

As we disembark and make for the thick and thorny undergrowth, I notice for the first time that Francis’ injury causes him to limp quite badly. But he pushes on with gusto, knocking aside the branches until we come across a telegraph pole, abandoned and weathered to the colour of the undergrowth around it. This, he tells me, is the remains of the old telegraph line that brought down the Hemingways. After more cutting and slashing we break through into an open sandy area at the bottom of a rocky cliff where the plane actually came to rest.

There were many more elephants around then and the area would have been much less thickly wooded.

Francis leads me to the top of a rocky outcrop, a climb of about a hundred and fifty feet. The morning after the crash Hemingway and the pilot carried Mary up here to avoid the elephants and it was from this bluff that they first saw the approach of a sight-seeing launch, the SS
Murchison
, which was carrying a party celebrating a golden wedding. The son-in-law proved to be a surgeon, who diagnosed Mary as having two broken ribs. The boat proved to be the one on which Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart filmed
The African Queen
, and best of all, for Hemingway, it boasted ‘An excellent refrigerator containing Tusker beer and several brands of ale’.

Francis and I slowly make our way down to the beach from which the Hemingway party was rescued. I ask him if there is anything left here from the accident - an unpublished novel perhaps. He smiles and shakes his head. Everything was collected and taken down to Butiaba, which is where we have to go if we want to know more about the saga of Miss Mary’s Christmas present.

A
terrifying cry rends the night air. A harsh and fearful screech, repeated three or four times until the noise dies to a whimper. I lie, frozen sleepless and full of awful imaginings. Something torn from the trees by a creature from the river. Fighting to get away.

Despite the fact that modern man was born in the cradle of these African Rift Valleys, mortality, of one kind or another, always feels close at hand in Africa. Maybe that’s why Hemingway liked it, student of death that he was.

I’m idiotically keen on keeping things alive. It probably comes from some deep need to be liked, even by ants and bluebottles.

I remember once in India seeing a naked man, surrounded by a small crowd, being escorted down a street in Delhi. I assumed he’d been arrested for indecent exposure. It turned out that he was a religious leader, a holy man of the Jainists who believe in non-injury of living things. If he dressed then there would be the danger of his clothes squashing some tiny creatures. They call this practice
Ahimsa
.

All this weighs on my mind for two or three seconds, then I fall back to sleep until five o’clock, when I wake to find a bat flying around in my tent. Unzip the front flap, but for all their much-vaunted powers of radar, it takes fifteen minutes for the bat to find its way out.

We are into our vehicles and off towards Butiaba even before the party of Austrians who arrived last night has stirred. The road is so bad that we have made little progress by sunrise. Outside one village we pull to a halt, beguiled by the sight of a woman, in a T-shirt and brightly patterned skirt, striding through the fields carrying a bale of cotton on her head. Our local assistant approaches her, tells her we are from the BBC and would she mind if we filmed her as she walked.

At which moment heads pop up from all over the long grass and before we know it the fields are alive with the sound of directors.

‘Do it once more! They want you to do it once more!’ the ever-growing crowd shouts at the hapless woman.

‘You must walk faster! You must walk more slowly!’

The pitted mud road tips and sways us on between fields of maize and sweet potato, trees crowded with black kites, and Manhattan-like termite mounds over ten feet high.

The town of Masindi, where we arrive mid-morning, is the administrative centre for the region and its dusty pot-holed streets are lively. The buildings are single-storey and some are laid out with steps and shaded arcades which bear the names of the Asian shopkeepers who built them and who were later ordered out of Uganda by Idi Amin. The current President, Museveni, is encouraging them back.

Masindi offers a rich variety of products and services. One shop advertises the ‘Mandela’ Human Love Charm, another, ‘Good Morning’ Lung Tonic. There are businesses like The Honest Brothers - Dealers In Essential Commodities, ‘In God We Trust’ Electrical Suppliers and Wiring, and the alarmingly candid New Fracture Driving School.

Lured by the sign outside the Bamugisa Barber Shop, which ‘Cares To Make You Smat’, I go inside for a trim.

So pleased is Fredrick Magembe with the job he does that he insists I have my portrait painted so he can add it to the display board outside the shop. I am greatly honoured to be chosen to represent style Number 8 at the Bamugisa Barber Shop in Masindi.

We spend the night at the old railway hotel. It is basic. Inside, a narrow bed, with no mosquito net and lots of mosquitoes, bare bulbs and dodgy wiring. Outside, a long verandah and a spreading jacaranda with copious blue blossom. We’re sitting out here at the end of the day, trying to find the cool breeze, when a group of curious and very polite schoolchildren come by. One of them, who cannot be more than ten, regards me for a moment and says, solemnly:

‘We are here to make friends.’

*

B
utiaba is an hour’s drive from Masindi. It’s a spectacular drive, over the escarpment, past a memorial to the Scottish engineer who laid out the road and who was trampled to death by an elephant for his pains.

The air on top is fresh and invigorating. By the time we have wound our way down to Butiaba it’s hot and listless. The town is low and scattered and poor, its limited resources strained by a steady influx of refugees fleeing from the unrest in the Congo, twenty-five miles away across the lake. The livelihood is fishing and as we get there the morning boats are coming in and most of the town, as well as their goats, cows and thin bleating sheep, is gathered at the beach.

As soon as the catch is landed the women slit and gut the fish, mostly Nile perch and the smaller tiger fish, and set them out to dry on racks. Directing operations is a genial middle-aged Ugandan wearing a striped shirt, thick brown trousers and bright blue rubber boots. His name is Abdul. He is one of the village elders and he knows where we can find the last piece of Hemingway’s Ugandan jigsaw. By the time the SS
Murchison
had brought the party safely to Butiaba, word had gone out, via the wire-services of the world, that one of the greatest living authors
(The Old Man and the Sea
had just won a Pulitzer Prize) was missing, believed dead, in the heart of Africa. Bounty-hunters were already searching the area and the lucky one, a Captain Reginald Cartwright, had tracked them to Butiaba. He had a de Havilland Rapide refuelled and ready to whisk them out of this hell-hole and back to Entebbe.

Hemingway was not so keen and felt that he would rather proceed by road, but he was overruled and the three of them - Ernest, Mary and Roy Marsh, the pilot of the plane that had just crashed - squeezed into the Rapide.

Hemingway described for
Look
magazine readers what happened next.

One third of the way down the alleged airstrip, I was convinced that we would not be airborne successfully. However, we continued at the maximum rate of progress of the aircraft which was leaping from crag to crag … in the manner of the wild goat. Suddenly, this object … became violently air-borne through no fault of its own. This condition existed only for a matter of seconds after which the aircraft became violently de-air-borne and there was the usual sound, with which we were all by now familiar, of rending metal
.

The tone of Hemingway’s casually flippant description doesn’t accord with what Abdul remembers of the aftermath of Reggie Cartwright’s failed take-off.

Standing amongst grazing cows in the wispy grassland which, apart from a rusted pole on which a wind-direction arrow still turns, is all that remains of Butiaba airstrip. Abdul remembers seeing the pilot climbing in, last of them all.

‘He was just a young boy,’ he says, as if by way of explanation.

He confirms that the plane took off, ‘just a little way, then landed again,’ hitting the ground, bursting the right wing tank and beginning to burn. Mr Hemingway was the last to come out of the plane (thinking he was trapped he’d head-butted a door open).

Abdul frowns in concentration.

‘He came running towards us. His hair was on fire and he was crying.’

Abdul beckons us to follow him through the yellowing grass to a point beneath a solitary goblet-shaped cactus tree they call a euphorbia. This is where the plane came down and this is where Abdul found pieces of the wreckage, some of which he has kept. He shows me parts of a cylinder, a battery and torn shreds of fuselage fabric. I ask him if anyone has ever shown any interest in these relics of one of Hemingway’s most serious accidents. He shakes his head. No one has been out here.

I look around. The wind-direction arrow squeaks and read-justs itself, the only landmark in the featureless bush. It’s hard to think that anything important ever happened here.

Hemingway’s survival of two consecutive air crashes was news across the world, and generally the cause of much rejoicing. But it had come at considerable cost. Writing to Harvey Breit ten days later Hemingway assessed the damage.

I
ruptured the kidneys, or maybe only one, the liver, the spleen (whoever she is) had the brain fluid ooze out to soak the pillow every night, burnt the top of the scalp off, etc. Also … had to take two breathes in the fire which is something that never really helped anybody except of course Joan Of Arc
.

He didn’t mention the sprained arm and leg and the crushed vertebrae and the paralysed sphincter and the temporary loss of hearing and eyesight.

We return to Masindi. Maybe it’s hearing the story of the crash that has darkened my mood, but I begin to notice the crueller side of life out here. Scrawled on the door of a house just outside the town is a slash of civil war graffiti. ‘Bondo Killers Boys’, it reads, ‘No Living - Child Rat Dog.’

That night a man comes to see me. He is called Ibrahim Bilal and he wears a pink knitted hat and sports a single very prominent white tooth. He and his friend speak Arabic. He worked for Ugandan Railways and remembers being sent from Kampala, the Ugandan capital, to Butiaba in January of 1954 to bring back an important group of Americans, one of whom was badly hurt.

He drove them back to Kampala in a Ford Zephyr staff car, with room for seven people, with a Ugandan, Dr Cabreta, in attendance. One of the men lay on a mattress in the back. Yes, Ibrahim remembers, he was in a serious condition.

‘Some of the time he was in agony.’

Appallingly enough, Africa had not finished with Hemingway. A couple of weeks later, recovering at a camp on the Kenya coast at Shimoni, he tried to help deal with a bush-fire nearby and fell into the flames. He suffered second and third degree burns.

W
e leave Entebbe for London tomorrow. The bad weather has cleared, the oppressive humidity lifted and, after bone-rattling rides through the bush, the pool at the Lake Victoria Hotel looks inviting.

Though we’ve not been here long it seems like a lifetime. Africa has a way of imposing its own time scale, reducing our busy western lives to its own pace, its own stately rhythm. In Africa the concept of the eternal seems much more meaningful. It also allows you more time to take things in. Events become clearer and impressions sharper and memories more indelible.

Perhaps that’s the way it was for Hemingway. He spent less than ten months of his life in Africa and yet from it came two books (one, admittedly, posthumous) and two of his greatest short stories - ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’.

Life in Key West and Cuba may have been safer, but never as intense.

On 28 March 1928, Hemingway wrote to his new wife Pauline from the Royal Mail steam packet Orita, westbound from La Rochelle:

‘We are five or ten days out on our trip or tripe to Cuba … I have often wondered what I should do with the rest of my life and now I know - I shall try and reach Cuba.’

Though the letter was mainly a moan about the slow progress and lack of creature comforts aboard the Orita it was oddly prescient. Twelve years later, with the help of Martha Gellhorn, his third wife, Hemingway bought a house in a village on the outskirts of Havana in which he lived for the next twenty years - the most permanent home of his life
.

I’d never been to Cuba until Hemingway lured me there in August and September, the hottest months of the year and the start of the hurricane season
.

A
t Jose Marti International Airport, Havana, jets are climbing into the sky above the gleaming facade of the brand new air-conditioned terminal but I’m in the car park, where the unconditioned air is 34 degrees centigrade and I’m leaning up against the side of a truck for some shade.

My bags are in the taxi, whose back axle is hoisted up on one side whilst our driver struggles to replace a flat tyre. The vehicle looks undignified, like a dog with its leg up.