On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (5 page)

There was a violent side to Aden. Britain was tussling with the Yemen and sent Meteor jets to quell rebellious tribes. Photos were passed around the school playground, of severed heads stuck on stakes outside the city of Sanaa, where an imam ruled the country on the lines of an ancient Persian satrap. Those who fell out of his favour either ended up in chains in his dungeons or their heads were used to decorate the city gates. Closer to home a commanding officer’s wife swam outside the lido net and was attacked by a shark. She lost her leg and bled to death before anyone could save her. An Arab fisherman had jumped out of a canoe and beat the shark, in relatively shallow water, with his paddle and earned the respect and admiration of the whole colony. Incidents of this nature were part of the life and death of Aden, and of not especial concern to a youth on his way to manhood.

Always I was torn between the outdoor life, which I loved, wanting to emulate Kipling’s
Kim
, and reading. I adored reading and went through dozens of books during my time in Aden. The ‘Just William’ stories, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Herman Melville, many many others. Fortunately there was time for both in the land of prickly heat and sunburn. There was time for running wild in the desert with no shoes on and time for lying on my bed devouring fiction.

I still had my Brownie box camera and would photograph things like the Aden Protectorate Levies doing their drills. These were a British ‘cavalry’ regiment mounted on dromedaries. I’m not sure whether they had British officers but the soldiers and NCOs were local Arabs with turbans and khaki uniforms. Their base was right outside our home and I used to be fascinated by the camels racing by my bedroom window each with a soldier on its back waving a rifle.

Towards the end of my time in Aden, when I was around fourteen, Max and I did our ‘Journey’ badge, which we needed if we were ever to reach that ultimate goal of obtaining our Bushman’s Thong and also becoming Queen Scouts. To do our Journey we had to plan a two-day hike, camping out on our own. Because we were in a land that held more potential hazards than the UK, where unusual situations might develop, the scout master had wisely decided to meet us at a rendezvous point on the first night. Once he had reassured himself that we were safe and well he would leave us to our camping. This proved to be a life-saving plan on the part of our Skip.

Max and I set off with packs on our backs, full of zeal, and enthusiasm for our task. We started the hike by following the beach that closely skirted the colony’s large extinct volcano. This would take us a few hours until midday. There was initially a margin of black sand between the sea’s edge and the steep, rocky sides of Crater, but to our consternation this strip of beach eventually disappeared once the tide came in. Cut off and unable to turn back, we were forced to climb up the sides of the volcano cone. To worsen our situation, while climbing a rock chimney to escape the rising sea we lost the backpack containing our water. It fell, bouncing from crag to crag, down into the dark waves below. The incline of the hillside was very precipitous and the going was incredibly slow and difficult. There were goat tracks among the jagged outcrops, but we were not goats with small, nimble feet.

When the evening came we were still following these narrow dusty tracks that were barely visible between boulders, still trying to find a way down off the sheer slopes. There was no habitation in sight and we still had the wild sea far below us. Once, we saw an Arab fisherman in a canoe and tried to hail him, but I don’t think he saw us. With our water gone, we were in a desperate situation. It doesn’t take long in the high temperatures of South Arabia for heat exhaustion to set in. Even as schoolboys we knew that kidney failure was fatal. We knew if we did not get water soon, we would be in serious trouble.

There was a whole town deep down inside the volcanic cone up which we were scrambling, but it was a long, difficult, rugged climb to the top. Perhaps an impossible one, with many overhanging crags and steep faces. And who knew what we would find on the other side? Perhap sheer drops and an impossible descent. The sea was now a long way below us, a much more difficult climb down than it had been going up, and there was no telling whether we would again be able to navigate the goat paths we had used to get where we were.

Although all the water had been in the lost backpack, we still had some of our food in the surviving pack. We sucked on raw potatoes to try to alleviate our thirst. My head was full of visions of frosted Coca Cola bottles, waiting for us when we eventually reached safety. Then there came a point, late in the evening as it was getting dark, when we realised there was a good possibility that we would not be rescued that day. I felt ragged and exhausted, as well as having a mouth lined with sandpaper. We slept fitfully on the rocks, throats raw and bodies aching for water, waking frequently and trying to comfort one another.

The next morning brought no immediate relief and with no rescue imminent we were both thoroughly scared. We continued to scramble along the hillside, sometimes among loose scree, at other times on solid but jagged igneous rock that had knife-sharp edges and points. Certainly we could not travel quickly. Foolishly, we tormented ourselves with talk of water. The sun blazed down unrelentingly and the day grew hotter with every hour, until we realised we could go no further over such difficult ground. The track had disappeared, to be replaced by unending furrows of serrated rock. With raging thirst and swollen tongues we rested on a landscape crawling with scorpions, lizards and spiders. I’ve never been concerned about lizards or spiders, but I do loath scorpions.

Finally, when we were absolutely desperate, we heard distant sounds coming from somewhere down on the beaches. I jumped up to see an RAF launch cruising near the shore far below us. They were using a megaphone. Max and I stood on the highest point available and waved our shirts, yelling with hoarse voices. Some time later, quite a
long
time later, Skip and a couple of other men, with ropes and climbing gear, had reached the spot where we were waiting for them and everyone began talking at once. We were given a little water. Then we were taken down to the boat and transported back to Khormaksar, where our parents were waiting, having spent many anxious hours hoping for news.

My mother, I knew, would be calm but distressed. Dad, well it was always difficult to tell what dad was thinking or feeling. Deep down he was still a farm boy, who said very little and gave away almost nothing. Mum was furious, with everyone but me, and most understood why. Said, the quiet Somali of our household, came privately and gave me his prayer beads. ‘You keep these,’ he told me, ‘and Allah will protect you from any more terrible adventures like this one.’ I paraphrase his actual words of course, since I cannot remember them verbatim, but even as a callow youth I was extremely touched by Said’s gesture.

Rosemary visited both Max and I separately, as we recuperated in our beds. She brought me some chocolates.

Not long after our adventure, Rosemary’s father’s tour came to and end and they left by ship. We bought her a porcelain sheepdog between us, Heaven knows why or where we got it from. She gave us our one and only kiss before she left. Max she kissed first, on the cheek, but I wasn’t having that. When she came to do the same to me, I twisted my head and kissed her full on the lips. She screwed up her nose and smiled.

I wrote to Rosemary for two years after that, then somehow, somewhy, the letters stopped. No doubt she had found a new boyfriend and felt she was being disloyal by writing to an old one. I don’t know whether Max kept up any correspondence with her. Anyway, I still have some of Rosemary’s letters, in my
Cabinet of Curiosities
. They’re typical schoolgirl letters of the time. My own letters were probably full of spelling mistakes and errors of grammar. I wanted to be a writer in those days, but my skills at the craft were horribly limited. I read widely and loved literature, but found the craft of writing difficult.

~

My family left Aden on the MV
Devonshire
, a sister ship to the
Dunera
, and that episode of my boyhood was over. However, my time in Aden as a youth shaped the rest of my life. My memories of those years remain vivid and when I try I can still smell the heat and dust. Aden remains embedded in my spirit, part of who I am today.

Strangely, I would reluctantly return to its shores as a man, as a telecommunications corporal in the RAF, to take part in Britain’s withdrawal from a violent and blood-drenched colony in 1966-7.

Still that second experience, one of the most hated periods in my life, could not overshadow my earlier time in Aden when I was hopelessly in love with its romantic desert places.

4. Rochford, then RAF Bridgenorth

After the voyage back to England, us kids were initially sent to my nan and grandad’s house in Stambridge Road, Rochford, the place where I’d spent my infant war years. There I went to Rochford Secondary Modern while Ray and Derek went to the primary school. I hated the Rochford school and bunked off as much as I could. I made friends with Scotty, Milky and Dinger. We used to walk out at low tide on the mud of the River Roach with our feet hooked into metal dustbin lids. When the tide was out there was only a thin stream of water in the middle of the mud flats and the fish were concentrated there. We would spear them with metal rods and take them home to cook.

When the tide was in we swam in the same river from the wharves of Stambridge Mills. One boy dived off a gantry and never came up again. They found his body further down river a week later. There were stumps of posts in the river, you could see them at low tide, and I suppose the diving boy struck one of them on entering the water, knocked himself senseless and then drowned.

When we weren’t swimming, we were gathered in Milky’s back garden shed, feverishly turning the pages of
Spick and Span
. This half-foolscap black-and-white magazine displayed photographs of naked women with their private parts blanked out. We used to draw in the genitals and after a while we were probably on a par with Picasso when it came to that part of the human anatomy. The nude female body was a source of great wonder to us at that age, especially since our own bodies were going through changes which both amazed and excited us. These days we would be regarded as late starters, I know, but at fourteen I had only
Spick and Span
, and mail-order magazines that sold ladies underwear, to give me any sort of information on what these soft, wonderful creatures looked like without their clothes on.

School days were ghastly. I was both bored out of my brains and felt lonely and lost. I had few friends at the school, though I did pal up with a boy named Bob Nottage, whom I was to run into quite coincidently a year later, when I joined the RAF.

The caning master at the school was the woodwork teacher, who enjoyed handing out punishments. My uncle Peter had been thrashed many times when he attended the school, once for climbing on the roof of the building and throwing roof slates down to shatter in the playground. Peter Kilworth was infamous at Rochford school, both for his frequent absences and for his bad behaviour. Naturally as a Kilworth I got tarred with the same brush. Uncle Peter was only a few years my senior, perhaps seven or eight, so several of the same teachers that had taught him were also teaching me. Peter had destroyed many a music teacher in his time and myself and others carried on this fine tradition. I was sent with a couple of other boys to receive six strokes, but it was winter and we stopped by a hot radiator, pressed our palms on it to give us red weals, and returned to show the music teacher the results of our ‘caning’.

The market town of Rochford is just outside, almost tagged-on, to Southend-on-Sea. I thought Southend in those days was a great place, full of excitement and wonder, and spent many weekends wasting time and money there. The ‘Longest Pleasure Pier in the World’, one and a quarter miles from shore to end, was a big draw to teenagers, as were the promenade fairgrounds and Peter Pan’s Playground. Then also there were amusement arcades full of penny slot machines. Westcliff and Leigh-on-Sea were a little too far away in those times, to pull me away from the magic mile, and I certainly never travelled to Shoeburyness or the posh Thorpe Bay end, where I was to meet my future wife.

It was at Rochford that I built my first bike out of separate sections, purchased with money I had earned at potato picking alongside gypsies and newspaper rounds, or from parts cadged from uncles. Uncle Charlie, being a postman, had a really wide comfortable saddle which he gave to me and then requisitioned another, saying the old one was damaged. Peter gave me some cowhorn handlebars, which were really cool. I went everywhere on that bike, especially to Canewdon and Stambridge, with Milky, Scotty and Dinger.

A bicycle in the ’50s was cheap transport to travel to distant regions, and of a weekend we might find ourselves in far Paglesham, or Foulness, or Fambridge, one of those remote villages at the ends of the earth where men spoke with a strange dialect and savage dogs chased you along the lanes, snapping at your ankles. I could do many tricks on my bike too, like steering with no hands, or standing on the crossbar going down a steep slope. We came off, we took tumbles, but no one broke their neck. They should have, I suppose. Boxcarts too, were great fun, and since there were few cars in those days we could zoom down Stambridge Road hill four abreast in a boxcart race.

Days were spent out in the fields, hunting rabbits and hares and poaching pheasants with my Uncle Peter. I learned to whistle shrilly with two fingers in my mouth and any hares hiding in the ruts of the ploughed fields would prick up their ears, thus informing us of their whereabouts. I also had the aforementioned ferret Pugerchov, which I would send down rabbit holes to chase up the rabbits into the nets. These I was taught to skin and gut with a razor blade by my grandmother, Nan Kilworth. I was allowed to fire Peter’s 12-bore shotgun occasionally, though it hurt my shoulder like hell, always leaving a bruise.

On those days I spent alone, I would lie down in lush meadows and watch the clouds scudding over a summer sky and roll in the snow of a winter’s day with just as much enjoyment as I now feel when I go to see a show in London. The year 1955 marked a beautiful period for me, when sex had not quite put its head above the parapet and boyhood had not yet completely vanished. Time itself seemed elongated then, the years like decades and a long long life stretching ahead.

Still, the hedonistic existence of a boy without parents to curb his excesses continued only past conker time, then my brothers and I were sent to join mum and dad at RAF Bridgenorth in Shropshire, where dad was now a drill sergeant training National Service recruits.

In Aden I had wanted to live the life of Kipling’s Kim but in Rochford I did indeed live the life of another of my heroes, Richmal Crompton’s William Brown.

~

Bridgnorth Married Quarters, where we found ourselves living, were separated from the main camp by playing fields. I quickly made friends with a boy with rufous coloured hair. To my disgrace I can’t remember his name now, yet he was my best pal for the next year. I called him Ginger. Well, you did in those days. I found a another girlfriend, also named Rosemary, but I guess I really only wanted to be with her because of her name. She insisted I join the Ballroom Dancing Club at school, which wasn’t half as much fun as the Bee Club had been at Robert Thoreton School. I learned to do the waltz, foxtrot and quickstep.

My school was St Mary’s Low Town Secondary Modern. It was situated close to the River Severn. Bridgnorth is split into two halves, Low Town and High Town, with a connecting hill or a funicular railway to choose between to get from one to the other. The headmaster was Mr Gower – the kids called him Donkey, as kids will always find a suitable nickname for headmasters – and I believe he was a relation of David Gower, the ex-captain of the England and Wales Cricket Team. Mr Gower was not a man I liked. When I left the school a year later he took his pipe out of his mouth and called after me, ‘You’ll never amount to anything, Kilworth.’ I pretended I hadn’t heard him.

There was the usual mix of pupils at the school, mainly farmers’ boys who often failed to turn up for lessons on market days. Looking at my old school report, I see two subjects on there which reveal the nature of the area:
Rural Science
and
Agriculture
. I see I got
Good
for both in July 1956. Surprising. The only subject I got excellent for on that report was
Maths
(note the abbreviation – not a posh school at all) which astounds me as I’ve always considered myself a bit of a dunce at mathematics.
English
has
Very Industrious
beside it. Any school that equated English with industry was not the school for me.

~

Ginger and I used to walk home over a wooded hill called the Hermitage. There was a school bus, but we only caught it if we felt we wanted to riot with the rest of the kids. I was becoming intensely interested in sex at the time. I had no courage at the game and here I confess that I never touched a girl in a sexual way until I reached the age of 18. I did a lot of kissing and cuddling in the back seat of the bus, and in the long grass around the playing fields, but nothing more. I wanted to do more, I dreamed every night of doing more, but I was scared of rejection and being accused of molesting a female. I didn’t know in those days that many girls would have liked to experiment just as much as I wanted to. I thought they were above it all and only let boys touch them because they wanted to be cherished by someone. I was good-looking, but only five feet tall at fourteen, so my pick of the girls was restricted by their respective heights. The tall ones only wanted to mother me.

Ginger and I learned a strange game from someone. We would squat down, hunch up, and breathe very quickly in and out about a dozen times. Then we would stand up suddenly and put a thumb into our mouth and blow hard, without actually releasing any air from our lungs. This would result in us blacking out and having subsequent liquid dreams that lasted only for a minute or more. One of us would always stand behind the other to catch him as he fainted, so that he didn’t hit the ground with a bang. I don’t know why it felt good to play this probably medically dangerous game, but it did, and no doubt the weird dreams had something to do with it. Our preoccupation with the fainting game didn’t last long. I bought a 0.177 BSA air rifle and we went round shooting things instead. Poor bloody rooks and magpies mostly, which the farmers boys told us were better dead than alive.

Like most stations, RAF Bridgnorth had a cinema called the Astra. Astras were always very cheap, being subsidised entertainment for the National Servicemen, who were paid a pittance. I went at least three times a week, sometimes more. It was that lure of fiction again. Movies filled my head with a desire to write stories.

I won a prize at school at the time for a story about a woman pilot (I was influenced by reading about the aviator Amy Johnson’s feats) who flew round the world and stopped in fascinating lands like Aden and Rhodesia. Mr Hough, my form master, thought I showed great potential at creative writing and encouraged me. I’m sure the story was fairly colourful but still my spelling and grammar were very weak and because of the kind of education I’d received so far, I saw no real reason to study to improve them. I just didn’t make the connection between writing stories and good English. It was the tale that counted, not the way in which it was told. Once I linked the two together, I was on my way to becoming a writer, but it took quite a long time to do that.

My interest in pop songs was beginning to grow. Pat Boone brought out ‘Love Letters In The Sand’ which I went around singing to myself and there were some good songs coming from another American group called Bill Haley and the Comets. For the most part music in the early fifties did not interest me a great deal. We had a wireless of course, but no television and I spent most of my time outdoors. When we did get a telly, we had a wire coat hanger for an aerial and the monochrome picture was too fuzzy to entertain.

In those days hardly any youths had cars. If they had a car it was an Austin 7, a vehicle which looked as if it was a coach that had lost its horses: boxy, black, with thin metal and cable brakes. You had to wind it up with a starter handle and if you were lucky the engine fired just as you were about to pass out from exhaustion. The wheels were very narrow and the springs non-existent. A long journey in an Austin 7 was for wild, careless adventurers, not for ordinary people who wanted to get to their journey’s end.

As I was approaching fifteen years of age I remember becoming very interested in weapons of singular destruction. For my final experiment with explosives I made a pipe bomb out of Swan Vesta match heads and iron filings, with a fuse from a piece of string soaked in liquid saltpetre. My bomb managed to blow a hole in the coal-shed door. I was awestruck with the power of the device. My mother was a lot less impressed and I got whacked with the cane that was used to adjust a slope-backed wooden chair. My best friend Ginger and I also fashioned a flame-thrower out of a horseshoe-shaped pipe, filling the middle bend in it with white spirit, and tying a flaming rag to the exit hole. When you puffed down the pipe a huge flame shot out and singed the bushes. I shudder now to think that if either of us had accidentally sucked instead of blown, we would not have seen our fifteenth birthdays.

Before I reached that fifteenth birthday I got it into my head that I wanted to walk to the Welsh coast. Indeed, I did, with a tent and cooking stove on my back, ending up at Barmouth, some seventy miles away from Bridgnorth. I camped on the beach and then walked back.

It was during this period at Bridgenorth that I owned the only dog in my life, Chota, a midnight-black King Charles Spaniel. He was a lovely dog and my brothers Ray and Derek adored him as much as I did. I understand that
chota
means ‘small’ in Hindi. Chota was small in stature but he had the heart of a Rhodesian Ridgeback. If I was Just William at that time, then Chota was my Jumble. We went everywhere together. Eventually I had to leave him to go to military school.

Around about my fifteenth birthday I broke my leg doing handsprings: the bone still aches in the cold weather.