On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (46 page)

Life has been good. Life is good now.

We are still travelling, both as tourists and as backpackers, more recently to Iceland, Hungary, Sweden and Denmark – new countries for us – and returns to India, Australia, Indonesia and Singapore. We have just made our visit to Darwin (
‘The city where today’s newspapers arrive tomorrow!’)
where we were welcomed into the home of fellow Quakers John and Elaine Edwards, two North Americans who emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, driving overland from Europe with their 8 children in a VW Dormobile. They arrived in Darwin just in time to experience the worst disaster the city has ever known when in 1974 Cyclone Tracy completely destroyed the city, flattening almost every building and killing many residents. The Edwards survived the night by cramming into their VW, which fortunately jammed itself between two concrete pillars, but their government house was destroyed.

The Edwards still live in a similar dwelling made almost completely of perforated metal (for coolness) which stands high up on stilts in a green tangle of palms, trees and undergrowth. However, nights in their tin house (‘
Termites would eat a wooden one
 . . .’) were incredibly noisy, with ’possums running riot on the roof, bush turkeys screeching just inches away from the windows and other less identifiable birds, reptiles and mammals adding the chorus. ‘We residents don’t hear them,’ John told us, with a grin.

Darwin was like a village, with everyone knowing everyone else and we were introduced to citizens from every walk of life. I even kissed a Supreme Court Judge on the cheek, though on reflection I was probably expected to just shake her hand, since there was some consternation in the wings.

Darwin was our jumping off point for Kakadu National Park, Litchfield Park and Katherine Gorge, the land of dueling didgeridoos, where we saw salt water crocodiles on the Yellow Water wetlands, fresh water crocs at Katherine and in Anbangbang Billabong, and a great multitude of birds including eagles, kites and kingfishers. Pete and Carolyn Worth arrived, coming up from Melbourne to act as our tour guides and a damn good job they did of it. They gave me a 70th birthday present of a flight over Jim Jim Falls in a light aircraft. Absolutely brilliant.

From Darwin we flew to Bali, where my good friend Andrew was having his 60th Birthday party. As we went through immigration the officer inspecting our passports looked us up and down, grinned, and then said wryly, ‘On honeymoon, are we?’ Have they no respect for their elders, these young men of today? After the party at Sanur we went on to Ubud then the small island of Lembokgan, where young Aussie surfers rode giant waves known as Shipwreck, Razors and Lacerations – oh, and a smaller wave known as Playground – more my mark.

On Lembokgan I met a young Mexican composer by the name of Rodrigo Solorzano and we discovered we shared a great admiration for the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, mentioned earlier in this book. Personally, there is nothing quite so enjoyable as sitting under a tropical evening sky, the sunset turning the tall waves on the distant reef a deep scarlet, discussing favourite writers with an enthusiastic like-minded person. Rodrigo was a welcome island in a sea of youths who talked of nothing but surfboard wax. He introduced me to
The Double Flame
by Octavio Paz, which is now on my shelf.

On our way back to UK, we stopped off for a few days with Robin and Glynis Moseley, in Singapore. They too gave me a birthday gift, a dinner at the Raffles Hotel, where Sam, the piano player in the Writer’s Bar, wears one red and one yellow shoe and won’t play it again, even when begged. That evening I had a Singapore Sling (naturally) and threw my peanut shells on the floor of the Long Bar, just as I had done at 17 years of age. Ah, nostalgia is everything it used to be, and reaching the biblical three-score-years-and-ten didn’t seem so bad while sitting with friends at a table with a blinding white linen cloth, silver cutlery, and a wonderful meal in front of me.

There was a rather bizarre incident the following day, when we took our hosts for tea and cake at another very solubrious hotel. There were large birthday-size cakes in the coffee shop, behind glass of course. I pointed to one and asked for a slice with my coffee. There was some consternation behind the counter and the manager was sent for.

‘We don’t sell slices,’ he informed me politely, ‘only whole cakes.’

‘This is a coffee shop,’ I said, to confirm my suspicions. ‘Not a bakery or cake shop?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But you only sell wacking great cakes, not slices of the same?’

‘Exactly, sir,’ he replied, as if I understood completely the
raison d’etre
of his establishment.

‘And you don’t see that as unusual?’

‘No, sir.’

I sighed and bought the whole cake.

~

There are certain health concerns creeping in, not so much me at the present time but with Annette. She remains adamant that she wishes to continue wandering. It may be that we shall have to visit nearer horizons, but since we’ve never been to South America, that might be a good place to start exploring. It’s closer to home than Australasia and the Far East, and probably just as interesting. Africa too.

I have enjoyed telling stories and will ever remain the storyteller, the priest of fiction, the campfire orator whose job it is to instil a sense of wonder into those who go out gathering and hunting and return at the end of the day hoping to be entertained. I can say with all honesty that I have never wanted to write the ‘great novel’, a literary masterpiece often more style than content. So many of them are based in ordinary, everyday life. I revere the extraordinary tale which takes the reader into a world of sharp corners around each of which is something strange.

Indeed, I will admit to being a little envious of more successful writers who have crossed my path and have gone on to greater fame. The talented Neil Gaiman, that young man who joined our circle in those early workshops at Milford-on-Sea. Michael Morpurgo, who I toured Scottish schools with in the ’90s, and whose
War Horse
is a smash hit play on Broadway. Philip Pullman, shortlisted alongside me on my second attempt at the Carnegie Medal, and who beat my novel
The Brontë Girls
into a mere runner-up. It’s true that no one ever remembers the also-rans and I would not be a creative storyteller if I did not feel a tweek of jealousy at roaring successes like these. All writers want their work recognised and regarded as special or they would not have put pen to paper in the first place.

But these are like the odd twinges in one’s knee joints in later life: they irritate occasionally, but are fleeting and do not seriously impinge on a very fortunate career. I could probably have been more successful commercially had I taken more interest in promoting my work or writing the same type of book over and over again, but the enjoyment has always been in creating something different to the last work. If I’m not writing what I love to write, I’m not living the life that makes me happy.

Recently there was some icing on the cake. You may recall that the first book of science fiction stories I ever read was
Penguin Science Fiction
, an anthology edited by Brian Aldiss. This volume has been updated and reissued over the many decades and is now published under the title
A Science Fiction Omnibus
. Brian recently added one of my own stories, ‘Alien Embassy’
,
to this famous anthology, the book that started me reading and then eventually writing science fiction.

Thus to my immense satisfaction a circle has been completed.

Afterword

In 2008 my novel
Rogue Officer,
a Fancy Jack Crossman book set in India, won the Charles Whiting Award for Literature. Charles Whiting is probably best known by one of his many pseudonyms, Leo Kessler. He wrote some 350 fiction and historical books. I received the prize from Charles Whiting’s widow, who had set up the award with the assistance of the author and actor, Steve Newman. My French Canadian chum, Philippe, was staying with us at the time and he came with me to Stratford-on-Avon to help me carry the cheque home in triumph.

At this point in time my novels and shorts stories, covering various genres, have garnered ten awards and have been shortlisted for fourteen others.

It was in 2008 that I reached the respectable age of sixty-seven. Still fit and healthy I decided I wanted to undertake a physical challenge before I had trouble bending down to put on my socks in the mornings. I had been a full-time writer for thirty-two years, was neither rich nor famous, but had somehow managed to earn a good living at it. I was rich in family and friends. My worries were few and my regrets even fewer. Apart from some earlier tragedies, losing my youngest brother and my father too young, I had led an extremely fortunate existence. There was nothing that I needed, nothing that even winning the lottery could give me that I actually wanted. I have an intelligent and beautiful loving wife, two wonderful children and five amazing grandchildren.

What else could I possibly need?

So, what to do to test my vim and vitality as I closed in on my dotage? Climb Mount Everest in flip-flops? Do the Round the World Yacht Race wearing roller skates? Do a free-fall jump after letting a year seven pupil from an inner city school pack the parachute? All these were very attractive and probably on the list of a thousand things to do before one dies. However, the challenge which I finally took on was actually chosen for me by my Australian pal Pete.

‘Let’s do the Postie Bike Challenge,’ he said. ‘Four thousand kilometres through the Queensland Outback on a Honda 110 motorbike.’

‘Sounds good,’ I said, ‘but there’s one drawback. I don’t have a motorbike licence. Never took the test.’

Pete stared hard at me in that uncompromising way of gritty Aussies who already have motorbike licences, pilot licences, yachting certificates, mountain rescue certificates and just about every piece of paper needed for dangerous adventures.

‘Get one,’ he said.

I got one, not without difficulty and set off for Australia in 2008. In the company of my Aussie mate Pete and a pommy friend of his, John Hales, I did indeed do 4000 kilometres through the Outback of Queensland on a small but robust Honda 110 normally used to deliver the mail. The trip had all the wonder and magic one expects of such a journey. We camped in one-man tents under the stars at night and rode through a red-dust mystical landscape for eight hours of every day. Fifty riders started out and forty-four of us finished without broken bones. I met some great Australian bikers, including one I've kept in touch with, Ewan Grenenger from Darwin. Annette and I met up with Ewan and his wife Linda when we visited the top end of Oz in 2011.

We saw eagles, snakes and various marsupials, met crusty old Outbackers, found evidence of a great sense of humour in places where even lizards find it hard to sustain life. My favourite moment was coming across a dry creek deep in a rocky, broken-tree wilderness a thousand kilometres from human habitation. It had been named ‘Christmas Creek’ by early cartographers of the Outback. Someone had recently decorated the bushes with tinsel, paperchains, glittering angels and a bright tin-foil star. That, my friend, is Aussie humour at its very best. In another incident a startled lady, skin wizened by the fierce Austalian sun, stood on the street of a tiny Outback town as we roared through on our red mail-delivery bikes. She yelled after us, ‘What the hell are all you posties doing out here?’

A full account of the Postie Bike Challenge of 2008 is the subject of a short book I have written entitled
Pom on a Postie Bike
.

By the by, I’d like to know who actually gave the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere their Latin names? Star formations which presumably had not been seen by Europeans until Lopes Goncalvez in 1471? It’s a thing that puzzled me while meandering in the Australian bush.