Table of Contents

- DEDICATION

- Thanks

- INTRODUCTION

- 1. York, Rochford and RAF Felixstowe

- 2. RAF Newton

- 3. Aden

- 4. Rochford, then RAF Bridgenorth

- 5. RAF Cosford

- 6. RAF Coltishall and RAF Horsham St Faith

- 7. RAF Uxbridge

- 8. RAF Changi

- 9. RAF Gan, Maldives

- 10. Ministry of Defence

- 11. RAF Rheindahlen

- 12. RAF St Mawgan

- 13. RAF Eastleigh and RAF Steamer Point

- 14. Ministry of Defence (again!)

- 15. RAF Luqa

- 16. RAF Episkopi, Cyprus

- 17. RAF Strike Command, High Wycombe

- 18. Shoeburyness, Essex

- 19. King’s College, London University

- 20. Wychwater, The Chase, Ashingdon (First Time)

- 21. Hong Kong

- 22. Bali, Thailand, Japan, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Sarawak, Sumatra

- 23. Wychwater (again)

- 24. Tattingstone, Suffolk

- Afterword

On my way to

Samarkand

memoirs of a travelling writer

GARRY DOUGLAS KILWORTH

On my way to Samarkand: memoirs of a travelling writer

Garry (Douglas) Kilworth is a varied and prolific writer who has travelled widely since childhood, living in a number of countries, especially in the Far East. His books include science fiction and fantasy, historical novels, literary novels, short story collections, children's books and film novelisations.

This autobiography contains anecdotes about his farm worker antecedents and his rovings around the globe, as well as his experiences in the middle list of many publishing houses. The style is chatty, the structure loose - pole vaulting time and space on occasion - and the whole saga is an entertaining ramble through a 1950s childhood, foreign climes and the genre corridors of the literary world.

Published by infinity plus at Smashwords

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© Garry Douglas Kilworth 2012

cover image © Garry Kilworth

ISBN: 9781301494361

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The moral right of Garry Douglas Kilworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

DEDICATION

For Annie who has made life’s journey a magical experience and to Rick and Shaney, who have added to the wonder.

‘We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. However, we are devastated to say that if we were to publish your story, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our unfortunate regret, compelled to return your divine composition and beg you a thousand times to overlook our short-sightedness.’

Rejection letter from a Chinese publisher

Thanks

Thanks go to Kathleen Mitchell for reading and commenting on earlier drafts and also to my brilliant editor Lesley Levene for the hard work she put in on this manuscript.

There have always been very close friends in the writing world necessary to my confidence and writing spirit. They know who they are and I value them beyond fame and fortune. However over the years there have also been those who were, at the time when their interest was first offered, simply acquaintances or people completely unknown to me, who unselfishly encouraged me, assisted me and boosted my morale, while expecting no returns.

These good people are:

Mike Stone, Guy Adams, Ian Alexander Martin, Claude Lalumiere, Keith Brooke, Steve Newman, Nick Royle, and just in case he doesn’t think of himself as a good friend, though I certainly consider him such, the irreplaceable Pete Crowther.

Among the great and famous who have helped me in the past are:

Mike Moorcock and J.G. Ballard in the early years and always the well-loved, Brian Aldiss.

INTRODUCTION

On my way to Samarkand I have lived a life.

The word Samarkand has always evoked in me a longing to visit that exotic-sounding city. I know that the Mughal sultans who ruled India before the British came from around Samarkand, but apart from that I am ignorant of that city’s culture, customs and architecture. I could look it up on Google but that would spoil my eventual visit. I like to be surprised. I have been surprised and awed by many wonderful places by going there before finding out anything about them: Petra, Wadi Rum, Kyoto, Raratonga, the Australian Outback. One day I will go to Samarkand, before darkness overwhelms me.

At the time of writing I am seventy years of age, still happily married to my first real love, Annette. My two children, Richard and Chantelle, are in their forties and likewise still happily married to theirs. Five grandchildren are already overtaking us in the fast lane, four of them boys and one lone but bright and determined young lady. I trust them to take care of the world after I’m gone and I know they will make a good job of it. I can see it in their demeanour and in their eyes.

The following paragraph consists of lists. I make no apologies for that. Lists tell you a great deal in a short-hand way.

I have to date had published over eighty books – novels and collections of short stories – and over a 120 single short stories. My work has been translated into twenty-two different languages, from Korean to Indonesian to Hebrew. Among my many publishers have been Faber and Faber, Penguin, The Bodley Head, Random House, Harper Collins, Hodder Headline, Methuen, Little Brown and Gollancz. While writing works of fiction and poetry, and now non-fiction, I have lived for several years at a time in nine countries and travelled to sixty others, some of them more than once: Singapore a score of times, Australia six, USA five, Canada six, Malaysia twelve, India, the Polynesian Islands, Thailand, Maldives, Indonesia, New Zealand three, Caribbean ten times, European countries countless times. I am a scribbler and a traveller, I love backpacking around the globe and will do it until I am physically unable. Samarkand has been on my list since the age of twenty.

1. York, Rochford and RAF Felixstowe

I was born in York, in 1941. My mother came from Sherborne in Dorset. She was the daughter of Frederick William Vincent Hodges, a civil servant and naval marine who died young from a wound he received in the Great War. My mother, Joan Elizabeth Hodges, was the eldest of four sisters and a brother. There was a mystery surrounding the birth of my grandfather. He was born in a workhouse, his mother Mary Toop being a chambermaid at Lord Digby’s home, Sherborne Castle. The family myth is that one of the lord’s sons had seduced Mary and then disowned her and her illegitimate child.

The baby was later raised by the castle’s gardener and his wife, the Hodges, and my grandfather took his surname from these adoptive parents. As he grew up he was given a good education and a position in the civil service, courtesy of an ‘unknown’ benefactor.

My father George Edward Kilworth, born in 1918, was also the eldest of his siblings. A farm labourer’s son, he was one of five children raised in a tied cottage in Canewdon, Essex. There have been Kilworths in Canewdon since the mid 1700s, when the first of them came over from Ireland to farm the land. Some of them spell their name Killworth and some Kilworth, but since my grandfather was the only one of his eight siblings who spelled his name with one ‘L’ my guess is that they all come from the same Irish root. They originated from in and around the Kilworth Mountains in County Cork.

My paternal nan was a Salwood from Swindon and beyond that I am ignorant. Her faded birth certificate, issued much later, states that Fanny Kate Salwood was born ‘Around 1897’. Grandad was born in 1881, so he was about sixteen years older than Fanny.

My father was an airman when he met my mum in London at the beginning of the Second World War. His RAF ‘Certificate of Service’ describes him as an ‘Electrician’ but I never saw him wire a plug or even change a light bulb in my whole childhood. He was five feet six inches tall, with hazel eyes and brown hair. My mother Joan, on the other hand, was five feet two inches, with brown eyes and dark hair. With parents of this stature and colouring, I stood very little chance of reaching my desired goal of being a six-foot-tall, golden-haired, blue-eyed Adonis who might one day win a freestyle swimming race at the Olympics.

When mum became pregnant she was evacuated to York to have the child, probably to leave the hospital beds in London available for victims of the Blitz. I was later quite pleased about that, because it meant I could have played cricket for Yorkshire at a time when you could do so only if you were born in the county. I never did of course. My ability at cricket has always only ever been average.

The Second World War had four years to run after I was born. My early memories are few and hazy. I know there were bombs and Doodlebugs, and V1s and 2s. I remember seeing fighter planes in the sky spitting fire at each other and I recall being woken in my bed at nights and given a candle to carry to the air raid shelter. In those shelters there were faces that showed pale and white in the light of my candle flame. People rarely spoke above a whisper, almost as if they were afraid they would not hear the bomb that killed them. We huddled together wrapped in blankets. Someone usually had an arm around me as we listened to the drone of the aircraft passing overhead. The German bombers often flew over Essex on their way to London without bothering us, but there were times when they wanted to jettison their payload early or late and dropped it in the estuary of the Thames, close to us.

My pal in my paternal grandparents’ backyard was Black Mick, a dog I grew up with until the age of twelve.

Food during the war, and after, included plenty of stuff not seen on the shelves very much now, if at all: powdered egg, Camp coffee made out of chicory, lemonade powder, crab paste made from crab essence, dandelion and burdock fizzy drink. Some things are now banned from our healthy dining table: bread spread thickly with dripping-fat from the frying pan, for instance, and thick sugar sandwiches. Shame. We were actually quite poor in those days, but I think my grandkids are now sick of hearing me say that we were sent to school with water sandwiches wrapped in newspaper.

The yard was full of clucking chickens. My grandparents’ terraced cottage had no water or electricity (a situation which did not change until the late ’50s). Downstairs had gas lighting, and the wireless was powered by an accumulator battery. In the two bedrooms candles were used. Men slept in one room, women in the other. Sometimes five or six in each. I liked the company of brothers because candles were always blown out when the adults went downstairs and darkness filled the room. We huddled together, terrified, after listening to The Man In Black on the wireless: ghost stories read by Valentine Dyall. Water could only be had at a big-handled pump which stood in the middle of the row of ten cottages. The outside toilet was tagged on to the house, but was always freezing in the winter. We used torn strips of the daily tabloids for toilet paper. Invariably a hare hung on the back of the door. Those dead hares would stare at me with knowing, glinting eyes while I performed.

Sunday evenings saw us all using the tin bath. Three inches of kettle water bathed three dirty kids. My youngest brother, Derek, always got the dirtiest water. I never heard of my grandfather taking a bath, but perhaps he did when I was not present.

The bedroom was always very cold in the winter. By the candlelight I would secretly watch my grandad take off ancient dirty trousers that smelled of horse dung and then remove his false leg. I used to grimace at the white crinkled stump which appeared out of the socket. Kids are fascinated by gruesome sights. He lost this limb in the Great War, but every time I asked him how it happened he told me a different story. This is all in my semi-autobiographical novel Witchwater Country but I think the scenario which is closest to the truth is that he was hit by shrapnel. This wound probably saved his life, because he would have been sent home. His brother Victor Charles Kilworth (my great uncle) of the 9th Battalion, Essex Regiment was killed in action near La Boiselle at the Battle of the Somme on 3 July 1916, aged nineteen years. So far as I am aware, Victor was the only one of the six brothers to lose his life in the war, though I never remember meeting any of my great uncles.

My grandad also had two sisters, Rosa and Daisy. Years later I would hear from the vicar of Canewdon Church that Rosa and Daisy were ‘quite mad, you know’ and that many of the Kilworths suffered from mental illnesses of some kind.

‘You don’t stand a chance of staying sane,’ he said to me, pleasantly.

There was in the alleyway a hutch containing a ferret named Pugerchov, who belonged to Uncle Peter, who used him for poaching on nights when the sound of a 12-bore shotgun would bring the gamekeepers running. It was me who named the creature, after seeing a film about a Russian revolutionary. The only other tame animal in the house was Ginger the tom, who could leap on the sashcord window, his weight forcing it to slide down in order for him to escape. However, in the coal cupboard under the stairs lived wild mice, who would make a dash for the coal-fired range where nan did her cooking, often only to be trapped there by the tom and tragically slaughtered.

Once the Second World War was over, Uncle Charlie became the town’s postman and had a red bike to prove it.

Uncle Peter (the youngest by far) was already the local burglar, poacher and street-fighter, though occasionally he worked the land, using a heavy horse to pull the plough. I learned much later in life from a very reliable source that Peter had a twin who was given away at birth because my nan could not afford to keep them both. The whereabouts of that twin remains a total mystery, since anyone who would know about the affair is dead. Who he was ‘given’ to and what happened to him after that went to the grave with my dad, aunts and uncles.

My aunt May took me to the cinema to see my first film when I reached eight years. The film was King Kong and though it scared the pants off me, it also amazed me. I believed every scene, every word, and thought the world a wonderful place to have giant apes in it. By that age I knew Father Christmas was a lie, and that there were no such thing as fairies, but it took a little while for King Kong to catch up.

~

Aunt May was a seamstress at the shirt factory and aunt Amy got married and settled neatly into housewifery. Grandad was by then a lengthsman, chimney sweep and sexton. He owned a horse called Custard and everyone outside the family called my grandad ‘Rhubub’. Custard pulled a rickety old wagon which Grandad used for his business.

Mostly it was the lengthsman work that kept him busy, cutting the verge grass alongside the roads between villages. I have a mind’s-eye picture of him still, wielding that heavy scythe of his like the two-handed sword of an Anglo-Saxon warrior. The great blade would flash in the sun as he swept it back and forth and the smell of the cut grass and dry ditch weed seeds began to fill the air of a hot summer’s day. He would work for two or three hours on end, stumping along a verge and swishing the scythe, while I walked Custard forward to keep pace. Then he would stop, take out his pipe, and smoke a bowl full of tobacco, before going back to shaving the county’s face with his giant razor.

In later life I tried handling that same tool, but the one-legged countryman of Irish descent, with his broad shoulders and heavy bones, must have been a great deal stronger at seventy than I was at forty. I was exhausted within a few minutes. His heavy scythe was awkward to hold by the two small handles that protruded from the main shaft and while I could pick it up, it started to weigh a ton after a very short use.

He was a crusty old man, Rhubub, and rarely said much more than ‘Mornin’’. I would ride with him and Black Mick on the wagon, through Rochford, Stambridge, Hockley, Canewdon and Ashingdon, but we rarely talked. Sometimes though, he would quietly hand me Custard’s reins and would then take out and play a rusty old penny whistle – Irish tunes from somewhere deep in his bones – and Black Mick would howl along with the music.

The summer fruit from the orchard and the various bushes was bottled for the winter months. I used to watch my nan steam and seal the jars of blackcurrants, greengages and gooseberries, a mysterious operation that fascinated me. Her larder walls were lined with shelves out of an apothecary’s shop. My nan was a woman of many talents and I did think some of them were closer to the magic than the mundane. She stirred the clothes in her scullery copper with a short thick staff that had grown as white as a wizard’s beard over the years. I have a photograph of her that I treasure and it makes my eyes water when I look at the dress she is wearing in that picture: shapeless, ragged at the hem. My dear old nan hardly knew the best things in life. It was just a long term of drudgery and toil, with very few rewards.

I think it was mostly my nan who tended the allotment. Although they were poor, my grandparents did not go short of plain food. The various harvests from the allotment ensured there were always vegetables in the larder and if there was no money for meat, Peter would go out and shoot something: rabbits, hares, pigeons, pheasants, partridges.

I would often go with him. There is little to equal strolling over forbidden fields in high summer, looking to find some game for the pot, occasionally catching a glimpse of a hot fox looking for shade or sending up a black explosion of rooks from the treetops. Again, on a winter’s frosty morning, when all the world is silver, the clods of earth in the furrows as hard as Christina Rossetti’s iron. I would kick at the long ditch grass to fill the air with sprays of ice-stars and use my home-knitted pullover as a bag to collect old crab apples. Such memories are infinitely precious. The countryside runs in my blood and where the choice has been mine I have lived rurally rather than in towns or cities.

When I was ten Peter let me fire the 12-bore and it knocked me flying backwards off my feet. I had a bruise the size of a penny bun on my shoulder for days afterwards, but I was proud of myself for some strange reason. When the gamekeepers were about and we couldn’t risk using the shotgun, we would take nets and Pugerchov the ferret, and do our illicit poaching silently under the moon and stars.

Years later, when I bought a house down an unmade road in Ashingdon, I offered to help with the garden of an elderly woman called Mary Sweetlove. (She called herself an anarchist, though I never knew her to carry out anarchy of any sort except against the stinging nettles which surrounded her porch.) Mary brought me a cup of tea as I was clipping the hedgerow around her Gothic-looking dwelling, and she said, ‘Your grandfather used to do that for me.’

Those words gave me a wonderful sense of continuity, a feeling that we are all walking along a generation track, an ancient way, and that when I am gone, one of my grandkids might just step neatly into my footprints for a few moments.

The very elderly Mary, I discovered, had once been a publisher. The house whose hedge I had cut had been the office from which she had published many of the works of Tolstoy. She showed me first editions of books she and her husband had published from their small, now very leaky dwelling in our small Essex village. Her dark-gabled home, with its twin towers like witches’ hats, was falling apart at that time and would have taken a fortune to repair. Mary Sweetlove the anarchist, with whom I had many wonderful conversations over endless cups of tea, died in the early part of the new millennium. I’m sure she’s now with her beloved birds, foxes and badgers that used to mill around her garden, safe from harm.

~

At the end of the war dad left the RAF to return to his old job as a greyhound trainer at a greyhound farm in Essex. Either the money was bad, or dad couldn’t stand his bosses, because he rejoined the RAF after a year in civvy street. In 1947 he was posted to Felixstowe, where they had seaplanes such as the Sunderland Flying Boats. I don’t know what he did there, but he was always in general administration, so I guess it was counting things and writing the figures in books somewhere.

We lived in married quarters – dad was a corporal by that time – and I went to Langer Road Primary School to begin what was to become a very nomadic education. The headmistress at Langer Road was a gruesome woman with a tongue like a rasp file. We had assembly every morning in a hall that smelled of dinner-time cabbage and there we used infant lungs to bawl out hymns. I still know the words of many of the ‘Ancient and Modern’ hymns. My favourite was ‘Eternal Father, Strong to save’ with the refrain ‘for those in peril on the sea’. It meant something in Felixstowe. We had the cold grey North Sea on our doorstep and one day it would come for us in the dead of night and overwhelm and envelop many of us. I get misty-eyed even now when I hear that hymn: it has a very emotional tune and deeply moving words.

We seemed to learn everything by rote in those days, especially our ‘times tables’. Day in, day out, we chanted those tables, until they were so lodged in my brain they’ll be with me into senility and beyond. Some nursing-home carer will ask a delivery man, ‘What’s seven times eight?’ and I – who by that time will not even know my own name – will interrupt with, ‘Fifty-six,’ without even pausing to dribble.

Classrooms in the ’50s had coal fires, whose warmth failed even to reach the front row of desks. They heated the backs of teachers until they steamed, leaving the pupils to freeze. Those same teachers were already inflamed by our uselessness and ignorance. They threw chalk, blackboard dusters and other handy missiles at us in the vain hope that such barrages would instil knowledge into our heads. If we lifted our desk lids as shields, the teacher would spring forward and whack our fingers with a ruler. I was never caned at Langer Road, as I was at my several senior schools, but I still collected a few scars there.

Felixstowe took care of my early formative years. I played cowboys and Indians on the ‘plains’ between the married quarters and the seashore. There was a boy called Colin Colenso, and his sister, and the three of us used to light fires in the old Languard Point fort and roast potatoes. In the summer months the Territorial Army used that area behind the beach for camping their soldiers and we would earn money cleaning boots and belt buckles. The tents had duckboard floors. When the summer was over and the army had gone, we would run our fingers through the grass where the tents had stood for coins that had dropped through the duckboards. We became surprisingly rich.

When we weren’t playing games on the dunes, my middle brother Ray and I (Derek was born at Felixstowe and was still a baby) would go fishing off the dockside pontoon where the ferry to and from Harwich used to moor up. Using just a line, wine cork and hook we caught smelt, dozens of them, and took them home for tea. Felixstowe docks is now a massive commercial enterprise, the third largest container port in Europe so I’m told, but in the ’40s and ’50s it was a small open square surrounded by granaries and warehouses, big enough for one or two medium sized ships, but nothing like the monster it is now.

Around the docks were yards full of giant buoys of the sort used by ocean-going liners for mooring. They were as big as small houses, some hollow metal balls, others square blocks of wood wrapped in iron bands. There were mountains of them and on a certain night in 1953 they became lethal battering rams that smashed into houses, and crushed prefabs and caravans. Whether they were actually responsible for any of the deaths of my schoolfriends I do not know, since I never went back after that murderous night to find out why so many of them failed to survive.

~

When I was about six years of age I had whooping cough and heard my mother and father debating about calling the doctor. It was 1947. Years later I realised that the National Health Service had not then come into being. So my parents would have had to pay for any medical help. In those days families like ours were paid weekly. The money often ran out. There was barely enough for food. Indeed, there was certainly none left for holidays. In my whole childhood I do not remember my parents taking us away for a single holiday which did not involve staying with relations. Us kids were sent to grandparents for the summer, or took a train to my mother’s younger brother, Douglas, in Ilkeston. Also in the late ’40s and early ’50s we still had food rationing. I used to cadge sweet rations from elderly neighbours who liked my curls.

My mother had four siblings. Like my father, she was the eldest of the family. Next came Aunt Barbara, who lived in Catford, South London and whose only daughter was Christine, my favourite cousin. Then Aunt Daphne, who lived in Shepherd’s Bush, whose daughter Molly was born with a hole in her heart and died at the age of ten and also Harvey, who had diabetes and died in his late thirties. There was a much younger half-sister, Aunt Margaret, but before her in age came my Uncle Doug, whom I adored as a kid. Though my mum’s family had been mostly born and raised in Dorset, they had all gravitated towards the capital, probably to find work.

Doug was a lorry driver working for the British Coal Board at the opencast mines in Derbyshire. I used to ride passenger in his lorry during the holidays and search for fossils among the coal he carried. I found several fern and tree impressions, which I treasured and took back to show my class at school. Uncle Doug was the spitting image of the actor Nigel Patrick and any film in which the actor starred, such as the Pickwick Papers or Raintree County, had me riveted. I found it fascinating to see my uncle up there on the screen, even though I knew it wasn’t he. The likeness, the gestures, the speech were all Uncle Doug. He and Aunt Jessie were good, kind, honest folk and I was extremely fond of them. Doug had moved to Ilkeston at the age of seventeen, yet until the day he died at the age of eighty the Ilkeston men called him ‘the Londoner’. He was held in great affection by them though, especially at the working men’s club, where he was elected chairman several times during his life.

~

Christmases at that age were magical. I can remember looking out of the window and seeing a lone star fading in the early morning sky. My favourite Christmas present – the one that thrilled me with its colours and textures – was a chemistry set. I was never good at school chemistry, but this was different. You could make all sorts of wonderful concoctions with a home chemistry set. Stink bombs, salt petre fuses for bombs, copper crystals. You could do litmus tests, change the state of liquids and gases, play with a Bunsen burner without getting told off, make explosive mixtures, kill wasps by creating a vacuum in test tube, make electricity and magnets. Wow. I loved that gift.

I never became a famous chemist of course, which would have made a nice round ending to the story. You know the sort of thing, Albert is given a tin whistle for his birthday and eventually grows up to become an international flugel horn player. No indeed. Nor did I become any kind of chemist whatsoever, not even a gifted teacher of the science like my friends Chris and Fe Evans. I became a writer. Just as Arabic newspapers would come to thrill me with their strange writing patterns, so did those test tubes with their coloured powders and crystals stir the latent apothecary and alchemist in me. Not that I wanted to cure or poison people, or turn base metals into gold. I just loved the idea of doing those things with magical ingredients. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Gold Bug. Words in Arabic, tubes of coloured chemicals, these were full of mystery and awakened strange imaginings. Imaginings that became tales of the fantastic kind, which I later burned on to blank white paper.

Also I have come to realise that the writer must have been in me from a very early age. It was not so much the chemistry that excited me, but the names of things. Words. Labels with saltpetre and ferrous sulfate printed on them. But the one gift that really brought home this revelation was the ubiquitous water colour paint box. I don’t think a Christmas passed without a paint box in my stocking. But it was not the colours themselves, or the thought of using them that excited me. It was the names of the paints: burnt sienna, yellow ochre, crimson lake, cobalt blue, burnt umber. These names hovered on the edge of my imagination, like keys ready to open doors to strange and wonderful story-worlds.

~

Early in the morning on 1 February 1953 my brothers and I were abruptly woken. My parents were dashing down then up the stairs with perishable things like photo albums. When I stood on the landing and looked down the stairwell I could see about a foot of water swilling around the hallway. Bleary-eyed and confused I went back into the bedroom and looked out of the window to see a wall of water combing the fields behind the house with white surf. A moment later a tidal wave struck the side of the house, breaking one or two panes of glass, and thundered round the corners of the building. Soon seawater was gushing in below and my parents stopped their evacuation of the lower part of the house and gathered us all in the main bedroom.

‘It’s a flood,’ said dad. ‘The sea wall’s collapsed. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. These houses are very solid.’

However, kids can see concern in adults who might be the greatest actors in the world. My brothers and I knew we were in trouble. We could hear the wind screaming around the eaves, see the water swirling halfway up the walls of the house, and were aware of distant cries of those in the houses a little lower than ours. Hell had opened its sluice gates and not fire but water was surging through the gaps. Then a short time later there was a loud bang on the side of the house and the whole place juddered. Looking out we saw one of those massive ocean liner buoys swirl past after hitting our brickwork. It went on to strike another house in the next row and we could see bits of brick fly up on impact.

‘We’ll be fine,’ said mum. ‘We’ll be fine.’

Staring out of the window again I could see a meteorologist’s mast on the top of which was an anemometer. There were rungs going up the mast, each about a foot apart. I watched the water level climbing those rungs one by one. We were probably going to drown. I was scared but not terrified. I thought we might die, but I also thought we might be rescued. It was a strange, ambivalent feeling, looking out at the ocean that had swallowed my garden. There were animals floating by now, cats and dogs, being swept along with the force of the tide. Thankfully I saw no people, though there were plenty who died that night, some of them horribly. I learned later that water rose six metres above mean sea level. In Britain, Holland and Belgium 2,400 people lost their lives. Ours were saved by my dad, who tied us to the chimney stack with strips of blanket until the water began to subside. My mother stayed in the attic, but the water never did reach that high.

My brother Ray had the flu. He was quite sick and since it was very cold – it was February, remember, and though the wind speed had dropped a little it was still extremely fierce – my parents took us back down into the house as soon as they thought it was safe. I’m not sure how much time we spent on the roof, but I don’t think it was a long period. As soon as it was light we were rescued by the army in rowing boats – by that time the tide had gone out and the water had dropped to about two metres in depth – taken to the Sergeants’ Mess, which was a tall building, and thence to the docks where we were packed into a launch. There were other families of course, with dark grey RAF blankets draped over them, and we huddled together with bleak expressions. The launch, which must have done many trips, and probably there were more boats ferrying people across the haven, took us to Harwich. We then boarded coaches and were taken to USAF Waterbeach in Suffolk.

Thirty-eight people lost their lives in Felixstowe, and a great many homes were rendered uninhabitable. Fifty-eight died on Canvey Island and thirty-seven at Jaywick, a small village in nearby Essex. Many, many more were drowned in Holland, and several in Belgium. Ships and trawlers went down in the channel and the North Sea with loss of life. Scottish forests were flattened by the wind. The flood was the result of a combination of a hurricane, a spring tide and an ocean tidal surge. The disaster began building during the day of 31 January, starting on the Scottish east coast, and working its way down to the south. There were no warnings broadcast on national radio. To this day I have not received a satisfactory answer as to why that should have been. Local radios in the ’50s did not broadcast at night, so by the time we were hit, about 1 a.m. on 1 February, local stations had closed down. In those days too there were very few home telephones. No one I knew owned a telephone.

2. RAF Newton

We stayed on a short time at Waterbeach, then dad got a posting to RAF Newton, near Gunthorpe in Nottinghamshire. I was bussed to the Robert Thoreton School on the Fosse Way, which I have Googled without success. My old school seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth. There I was taught English by Mr Whitehouse, who was one of those teachers who light fires in kids. He was an inspiring man who taught me not grammar, spelling and punctuation, but how to love the written word, whether in stories, poems or novels. In his own way he was brilliant and as a writer I owe him a great deal.

At that time my actual skills at writing something grammatical, with correct spellings, were almost zero, but Mr Whitehouse introduced me to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Richmal Crompton’s Just William and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and I was absolutely hooked. I did not stay long at Robert Thoreton, but from that moment on I wanted to be nothing but a writer of fantastic tales. I lost myself in Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. Admittedly some of these authors’ works came to me in the form of Classics Comics, but hey, I liked the story, not the delivery.

Mr Whitehouse also gave me a copy of my all-time favourite book, Plain Tales from the Hills. Kipling’s short stories are a masterpiece of laying fictitious experience down on paper. The short story has always been my forte as a writer and as a reader I cherish the form. It is too bad that these days it tends to be neglected by most readers, who seem to want only fat novels of 200,000 words or more. To me the small tale is incisive, keenly observed, hard-hitting and shines brilliantly.

Thank you, Mr Whitehouse, wherever you rest today.

In general Robert Thoreton School was like any other: boring, tiresome and anti-Kilworth. I was caned three or four times and still bear the scars of one of those beatings (it was for drawing fighter planes in my maths exercise book). On our honeymoon my wife asked me what the three white scars were on my bottom and I said, ‘Funny, there should be six.’ Humiliation accompanied beatings at Robert Thoreton, since they took place at Assembly in front of the whole school.

I also fell in love for the first time at RAF Newton, with an officer’s daughter named Nicola. She did me wrong. She was caught behind the bike sheds with another boy and I was taunted mercilessly by my enemies. Nicky was pretty though. I have always been a sucker for a pretty face.

~

Not long after we arrived at Newton, dad was posted to Aden, in the Middle East. He went on ahead, then sent for us. I was absolutely eager to go to Aden. Other service brats had been and had told me of the great times they had had there. You only went to school in the mornings and the afternoons were spent swimming in water that was as tepid as a Sunday bath. Then there was the whole exotic atmosphere of a land which at its heart had an extinct volcano cone with a whole town inside it, Arabs on camels, sharks in the sea, oases out in the desert, open-air cinemas, and a host of other remarkable experiences.

I was then, as I am now, absolutely captivated by other cultures and the atmosphere of foreign lands. This includes Scotland, Ireland and Wales. I have visited all three of my neighbours and find their beauty and charm as remarkable as those of any other country in the world. I have already said I have Irish ancestors. Indeed, I also have Scottish ancestors. My sister-in-law is a Scot and my daughter-in-law is a McKenzie and therefore my grandchildren are part-Scottish. We are becoming, in the United Kingdom, not a box of all sorts, but a wonderful blend which includes those more recent arrivals from other corners of the globe.

~

This is probably a good place to state my religious beliefs. I was raised a Methodist and in my twenties and thirties sometimes attended services with the Church of England. However, I have never been wholly convinced by orthodox religions and in my late forties I found a spiritual home with the Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers. Here I intend to stay, since I have always needed to contemplate spiritual matters and the Quakers are good at meditation. They are tolerant, not requiring any sort of fundamentalism, even to the point of accepting nontheists who are prepared to honour the main principles of Quakerism. Nontheist Quakers see ‘God’ either as a symbol of human values or simply accept it as significant to others but not themselves.

At the Meeting House we have the Silence, lasting for one hour, which I find challenging, but also cleansing. There are no readings, no spoken prayers, no surmons, no liturgies, no sacraments, no rituals. There is no Quaker hierarchy of priests: a clerk, usually in office for three years, presides over the meeting. He or she is supported by elders who are also in office for the same period. They are required to oversee pastoral matters i.e. informing the meeting of any illnesses or hard times amongst the members and other such issues.

There is no vote and actually no consensus taken on issues that need a decision. After hearing the fors and againsts, the ‘feeling of the meeting’ is offered by the clerk as a decision. In nearly twenty years of attending meetings I have never yet known any dissention once that decision has been announced. In debates, a member is permitted to stand and speak his or her mind on the subject only once, thus eliminating cross-floor quarrelling and descent into heated arguments. You have your one say and that is an end to your particular input into the discussion. Again, I have never witnessed anyone leaving a meeting disgruntled. It may have happened, but not in my experience.

This may sound a very negative place to take your spirit for recharging, given all that Quakers do not have and do not agree with. In fact Friends are doers. They have the Four Testimonies to guide them: Peace, Equality, Simplicity and Integrity. With these ideals in mind – though of course they are ideals and therefore not easy to adhere to – the best of them attempt to resolve conflict by non-violent action wherever they can in the world; support the eradication of poverty as far as they are able; try to assist where there is injustice; and influence various other ‘concerns’. Quakers are not a perfect bunch of people by any means and their success in these endeavours is limited by their numbers.

One of the Quakers who attends my meeting is now in his eighties. In his time he has been instrumental in helping to bring an end to apartheid in South Africa – not from a distance, but by being there. Until very recently he has flown to the Eastern regions of India and talked with warlords in Nagaland to persuade them to lay down their weapons. These I know of, but I am aware he has been involved in many other such actions. There are more than a few like him, working in conflict resolution, in the eradication of poverty, in the fight against injustice, whose courage and determination puts my own feeble efforts to shame.

It was Mally Ross, a colleague and friend of Annette’s, who introduced us to Quakers. She and her husband, a financier and mountain climber, have been close friends ever since Annette trained alongside Mally to become a social worker. David is not a Quaker. He satisfies his spiritual needs by ascending to places with a high topography.

Having been a warrior, it may seem strange to others that I have thrown in my lot with the pacifists, but it is precisely my experience with military action that led me to them. Yes indeed, I write books about war, not to glorify it but to show it for what it is, an abomination. Read All Quiet on the Western Front or The Naked and the Dead. Of course, I’m no Remarque or Mailer, but I like to think my novels share the points of view these authors reflect.

The question as to why human beings indulge in the destruction and misery of war is one which has puzzled several philosophers and many ordinary people since Man had understanding. As an activity it is time-wasting, money-wasting and, above all, life-wasting. We seem as a species to be unable to operate without doing so within an hierarchical structure. Such organisations allow for the rise of maniacs to unassailable positions in society and once there they wreak havoc upon those who were responsible for their ascendancy to power. It is a bewildering thing that with this rigid structure we lose control of our own destiny, carrying innocents with us into the dark depths of carnage and desolation.

3. Aden

I’ve already written of my voyage to Aden in the MV Dunera in my novel Standing on Shamsan, but I will repeat a little of what is in that supposed work of fiction. The Dunera was around 12,000 tonnes and in 1954 was being used as a troopship. On board were forces and families travelling to the Middle and Far East, where Britain still had the remnants of an empire. Dad was already in Aden, having got there by way of Suez, where there had been some bother. I’m not sure what he did in the Suez emergency, being a clerk by work and nature, but I’m sure he gave it his best shot. Now he was stationed at RAF Khormaksar and on arrival my life took on an excitement I’d yearned for ever since I had heard other sons of servicemen talking about their time in Bulawayo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and such exotic places.

As soon as I got on board the ship and was shown my cabin (thankfully well away from my mother’s) I met Max. Graham Maxwell, a Welsh boy, was to become my best friend for my time in Aden. We would become inseparable, even sharing a chaste but sweet love affair with Rosemary Burns, a thirteen-year-old lass from Kilmarnock in Scotland. Max had already lived in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, so his status in my eyes was high.

It was evening when we set sail. The first thing Max and I did was go into the communal wash room and put a tin mug under the fierce shower. The ways of youth are strange and unfathomable. The tin mug under force made a terrific ringing noise which echoed throughout the lower decks. Looking back on it I think we just did it because the tin mug was there, handy as it were, and the shower water was coming out like lead shot. Anyway, we enjoyed making a din for about ten minutes, then left the washroom, only to find people rushing about with their lifejackets on.

‘Quickly,’ cried my mother, on seeing us, ‘get your lifejacket on and follow me to the muster station.’

Women and children, and men too, were milling around wearing faces the colour of flour.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked, still a bit bemused by the panic.

‘Din’t you hear it?’ shouted my brother Ray, gleefully. ‘The alarm bell’s bin ringin’. The ship’s sinkin’ down in the water, I expect.’

Ray seemed rather pleased about the fact that we were all going to go to the bottom of the North Sea.

The ship wasn’t sinking, of course. It was the brutal shower water on the hollow tin mug that had imitated the ship’s alarm bell. Naval officers came and assured the families that it was a false alarm, though they too were puzzled by what had actually caused the ‘ringing’ noise. No one ever discovered the source of the sound. Max and I certainly weren’t going to own up to causing a panic among the passengers and it would have been a very astute person who could guess what had happened. We went to bed in our respective cabins shortly afterwards and I don’t remember that Max or I ever mentioned the incident again.

We entered the Bay of Biscay, famous for storms, and seasickness overwhelmed me for two days. Once I was able to leave my bed, I went up on deck and stared out over the vast ocean. Sailors have a unique spiritual adventure, every time they go to sea. It has probably been so since the beginning of time, when Man first left the sight of land behind. Water, water everywhere, and always changing shape, always altering colour. Sometimes choppy and churning, sometimes giant waves, always a momentous swell. Various shades of green, grey and blue, depending on the state of the surface, the time of day and the light. The planet’s fluid coat. It fascinated me, even as a twelve-year-old, with its endlessness and variability.

We were supposed to go to school on the MV Dunera, but the idea that we would have to suffer classes during this wonderful experience of our first ocean voyage left us boiling with indignation. I think Max and I went to about two hours’ worth, before losing ourselves between the decks. My brother Ray went a little longer, but then he and his new friends soon followed suit. Derek was only six years old, so he did as he was told. We ignored ‘school’ for the rest of the voyage, arguing that there was much more to be learned from the world at large.

We reached Gibraltar after a few days and entered the Mediterranean Sea, which was sunny and warm after the wintry Atlantic weather. I had a Brownie box camera with which I recorded our progress through the Med. Mostly they were photos of Max standing on his head, or pretending to throw up into a lifeboat.

We passed Malta and Crete and were approaching Egypt’s Port Said when our captain received an emergency SOS call. Another British troopship, the SS Empire Windrush, was on fire somewhere in the Med. However, we were too far away from the tragedy to assist in the rescue operation. The passengers of that ship, service families like us, had taken to the lifeboats. Eventually the crew did the same and the rescue ships that reached the area attempted to tow the fiery hulk to Gibraltar, but apparently this was unsuccessful and the Windrush sank. This was all grist to the mill of my imagination. I did at last feel I was living the life of Kipling’s Kim and that daily crises would be the norm.

I awoke one morning to the sounds of a bustling port. There were cries all around the ship, with dogs barking in the distance and the hum of a busy harbour at the entrance to the Suez Canal, which led to the Red Sea. Port Said. When I went up on deck I found passengers leaning over the sides of the ship. Down below were the owners of small craft known as ‘bum boats’, these vessels full of goods such as gambia knives, bullwhips, wooden carvings, brass trays, and all sorts of paraphernalia, casting lines up to potential buyers on the main deck.

There was a basket tied halfway along these lines into which the Arab sellers were putting their wares. These would be hauled on board and the buyers would then put the price of the item they had purchased into the basket to be hauled down again. A certain amount of trust was required of the passengers, who could if they were of a criminal nature not bother to put the money into the basket. There was no way the Arab seller could get on board to demand his money. However, I don’t recall any problems of this kind. I do remember fierce haggling going on, before the purchase of the goods, but once the price had been agreed then honesty seemed to be the order of the day.

One of the baskets which I observed being used was lined with an Egyptian newspaper. I was fascinated by the Arabic writing with its centripetal swirls and alien flourishes. Not just a foreign language, an exotic one with (to me) an unintelligible alphabet. I was given that newspaper by the vendor, who flashed me a golden smile and told me to ‘Keep it – a present for you!’ I treasured those pages as I might have done diamonds. Here was ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, the ‘Thief of Baghdad’ and ‘Sinbad the Sailor’. This was the land of bedtime stories and I was in it, living it, part of it. Amazing.

Over the flat rooftops of the whitewashed square houses of Port Said strode Johnnie Walker. The Johnnie Walker sign was a huge two-dimensional man in top hat and coat-tails, carrying a cane, caught in eager mid-stride. It did not seem as incongruous then as it does to me now. A giant whisky advertisement in a land where alcohol was banned by religious edict? Egypt was not then a European colony, though of course it had been at one time, but Johnnie must have been up there for the benefit of ships like ours. At the time, to me, it was just another one of those wondrous symbols of the Middle East, like the newspapers and the bum boats, not to mention the Gully-Gully Man.

The Gully-Gully Man was an institution in Port Said and I had been told by ex-Aden boys back in England to expect him.

The Gully-Gully Man visited most passenger liners that stopped in Port Said. He was quite simply an Egyptian magician who performed amazing feats for the grown-ups and children from a dull and insipid land: doves came from his nose, silver coins that glittered in the Eastern sun came from between his toes, bright ribbons and scarves came from his ears. His body was a treasure trove which required only the magic words – abracadabra, open sesame, zebristi – for that body to mysteriously relinquish its contents. He entertained us for a whole afternoon. In the evening young Arab boys swam out to surround the boat, yelling for coins. Passengers threw them in the water and the boys would dive down, retrieving them from the depths. I was twelve years of age and didn’t know whether those boys were collecting coins because they were starving or because they were – as I had been when selling home-made lemonade to passers-by outside my house in England – simply earning a bit of pocket money. I didn’t know. I still don’t know, but I suspect they relied on those tossed sixpences and shillings to eat.

Next day we entered the Suez Canal and glided gently through that magnificent waterway. On the banks of the canal were fields being worked by Arab farmers. I could see men drawing water using Archimedean screws to fill their irrigation ditches, and donkeys turning wheels with pots on them, doing a similar job. Between the ship and the banks of the canal were hundreds of feluccas, some fishing, others carrying bales of goods. There was a dusty, musky smell to the air which pervaded everything on board. The East was enveloping us, packaging us in its sights, sounds and smells. I was entranced by the whole biblical scene. It was as if one the pages of my Sunday school books had suddenly sprung to life before me. There were the palms that were spread before Jesus as he entered Jerusalem.

Suez was the line between a pleasant temperature and an uncomfortable heat. Once we entered the Red Sea we were in the furnace. It didn’t bother us kids as much as it did the adults, who complained constantly about the heat, just as they had complained about the cold and wet back home. There was no satisfying grown-ups. We knew that from experience. If you had offered them the best climate in the world, they would probably have called it boring.

The Red Sea voyage confirmed my sense of wonder in the Middle East. We passed Ethiopia, the Yemen, and went on down to Somaliland. One morning the deck was covered in silvery flying fish. On another Max and I were looking down into the water and saw giant manta rays cruising just below the surface. Then there was the occasional shark, when the ship’s butcher threw offal into the water. And of course dolphins that played around the bows and in the ship’s wake.

All this is commonplace now, in the 21st Century, but back in 1954 very few working class people left the shores of Britain. There were those on passage to Australia of course, and one or two shipping out to India and Hong Kong, but for the most part the experience I was having was a rare one. I felt very special and also privileged to be able to see such wondrous things and come into contact with such exotic cultures. I don’t think my parents appreciated it as much as I did. They enjoyed what they were doing, but I believe they were more impressed by the cheap alcohol and the fact that we – a common-or-garden family – would have servants in our new home. We had been raised to the status of imperialists simply by leaving our own shores and by being British.

It sounds very high-colonial, but my parents were people of their time, ignorant of any wrongdoing. Their government ruled a foreign land and they had not the mental tools to question it. They were not unkind, that I can state emphatically, nor were they arrogant, being too close to their own peasant roots for that. My dad’s father still scythed the grass on the byways of Essex. My mum’s mother still gutted fish in Harwich fish market. Mum and dad were the offspring of parents whose work was similar to that of Said, the Somali cook-bearer we eventually employed.

Said was an African. He came from a land with deeper, richer smells. Musk and animal dung and the earthy odour of coming rain. A place where the sunrises enveloped the landscape, enfolding it in a blanket of swirling colour, mostly dark and fiery reds. Where the sunsets could cause one’s heart to skip a few beats. Africa had shaped his tall, shiny-black, angular body and had formed his sharp mind. I was always, as a child, very much in awe of this quiet, secretive man who, it always seemed, found me faintly amusing and in need of guidance in life. Said had a family but rarely spoke of them. His work and his loved ones were separated by the Red Sea, an impossible commute.

Mum’s daily orders to Said were very occasionally overridden by us boys, since she was a female. Said much preferred to receive his daily duties from a male member of the family.

Once, mum said, ‘We’ll have lamb today, Said.’

When she’d left the room my brother Ray, who hated fatty meat at that time, whispered, ‘Change that to egg and chips, Said.’

We duly got egg and chips, but rightly so it wasn’t Said who got it in the neck, it was us boys.

We rarely did countermand our mother’s orders for dinner or other things, since mum was definitely the head of the family and a very fiery-tempered head at that. Dad was a meek fellow, not given to confrontations, and was happy for mum to rule the roost. I never blamed him for that. Despite being five feet two inches tall and weighing six and a half stone, mum was a veritable termagant when crossed. We were all afraid of her. I loved her of course, as did my brothers, for she could be as fierce in her love and protection of her sons as she was in the condemnation of their wrongdoings.

My parents did of course find the Middle East ‘dirty’, being people of their time. Post Second World War many housewives seemed to be obsessed with cleanliness. This was in an era when people were fascinated by modern inventions, such as nylon and rayon, and were contemptuous of anything old fashioned. I doubt my mother looked out over those fields on the banks of the Suez canal and got excited by waterwheels and irrigation ditches as I did. She probably shuddered and went down to her cabin to play with her new electric hairdryer.

~

In 1839 an obscure British sea captain by the name of Stafford Bettesworth Haines sailed into the harbour of a poor Arab fishing village and claimed it as a possession of Queen Victoria. A local sultan’s son took exception to these Europeans on the beaches of Aden and engaged the British in a smart little war. The British marines overcame the opposition and eventually the sultan signed a lease allowing the British to use the village as a ship’s coaling station. One hundred and ten years later that same fishing village had been transformed into the second busiest harbour in the world (after New York). At the time of the occupation Aden was thickly forested. Mimosa, tamarisk, camel’s thorn and myrrh shrubs grew in abundance. These were populated by rabbits, hares, gazelles, foxes, hyenas and a great deal of bird life. By the mid-1800s the land had been deforested by the successors of Captain Haines, to build houses and ships, and other things necessary to the flourishing of a great port.

The village was 180 miles from an ancient city once known as Sheba, the home of King Solomon’s regal visitor, Queen Bilquis. Their child’s descendants became the emperors of Ethiopia. The people of Sheba were descended from Qahtan, the Joktan of the Bible’s Genesis. Today that city is known as Sanaa. It rises out of a tall plateau of red stone like a geometrical flower the petals of which are sandstone houses and the rigid stamens, gold-tipped minarets. Sanaa is in the Yemen and Aden is to the south of that city, separated by a narrow desert in an area known to us as the Radfan. If you want to know more, read The Barren Rocks of Aden by James Lunt, an informative book.

We duly arrived in Steamer Point, or Tawahi, which is surrounded by red volcanic rocky hills and sand. Sand everywhere. It was extremely hot and unbelievably sultry, being the Cool Season. When we complained about the high temperatures and cloying atmosphere we were gleefully told to ‘wait until the Hot Season’ which was indeed much much hotter and much more humid than the Cool Season. Stepping off the boat after two weeks my legs felt like jelly on the static ground. I was immediately assailed by Arabs in cotton kilts and turbans selling watches and wallets. I was told that if I didn’t buy anything their children would starve and I wouldn’t go to Heaven.

My dad met us on the quay and of course mum burst into tears, then berated him for leaving her alone in the first place, in the full knowledge that dad had had no choice in the matter. Then, after the drying of the tears, we climbed into a bus and were taken to RAF Khormaksar. Dad’s work was there and we had married quarters on the edge of the desert, out of which gazelle used to roam. The house was whitewashed, inside and out, with red-tiled floors. I loved it. I did not love the fact that on entering my bedroom I saw that the wall was decorated with the largest spider I had ever seen. I learned later that this monster, as big as a dinner plate, was a camel spider which had a nasty poisonous bite.

Dad then did something which I now regret, since I’ve grown to love and respect spiders, and think them the saviours of the house. He squashed it with a large encyclopaedia. Even flattened under this monster tome, the spider’s hairy legs stuck out all around the edges of the book. They were as thick as my little finger and as black as jet.

There was other wildlife present. Red ants thrived in the wall’s cracks, as did bed bugs. Quite a few smaller cousins of the camel spider inhabited the cupboards and under the stairs. Chit-chats (gecko lizards) lived on the walls and around the curtain rails. A bootlace snake had made its home in the garden and proved impossible to catch. Large brown kites nicknamed shite-hawks perched on the flat roof and glared down at us as we went to and from the house, as if the place belonged to them and we were the intruders.

Mum blitzed through the place with DDT sprays and various newspaper cudgels, until it was a clear zone. She was persuaded to leave the chit-chats alone, since they ate mosquitoes and were at least a little more cuddly than the camel spiders and white scorpions. An invisible sign went up outside our front door after that, telling the creatures of the desert that they were not welcome in our home. Even the mild wide-eyed gazelle were chased off the veranda by mother’s broom, since they did indeed eat the vegetables she planted and then thanked her by crapping on her clean tiles.

Around the married quarters the lone and level sands stretched far away. Nearby was the airport, where Constellation passenger planes and military aircraft took off and landed. In the other direction, just a few miles away, a giant extinct volcanic crater rose from the earth to dominate the area. This was Crater, whose peak was known as Shamsan. Inside the cone was a whole town, accessible from the sea side, but with only a narrow gateway on the land side. Crater was in later years to become a terrorist hotspot when the British were being chased out of Aden Protectorate.

The sea was about a mile from the house, beyond the black volcanic sands. No golden beach for us, but a grey-black shore which curved all the way along the coast. Near to the water’s edge was the station’s salt-water swimming pool, fed by the sea’s tide. This was the meeting place for the kids after school finished at one o’clock on most days and here I perfected my swimming until I was a veritable fish.

Max and I started at RAF Khormaksar School straight away, much to our chagrin. The headmaster there was a Mr Currie, who wasn’t a bad sort as far as headmasters went, though he caned me once for smashing a window with a football. The school itself was not far from home, perhaps a quarter of a mile. The road went past the BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) offices. I wore khaki shorts, sandals and polo shirts to school. Max’s hair was Brylcreemed into a glossy quiff, but as mine was tangled curls I didn’t bother with hair oil.

Since there were two of us, Max and I didn’t have to go through the ‘Hey, new kid!’ stuff that usually ensued on arrival at a strange school. We presented a formidable front. Max was a well-built lad with a body like a boxer’s. I was somewhat leaner and to be honest still a bit pretty-looking even at twelve, but I had learned to deal with changing schools by setting my jaw in a defiant manner. It didn’t always work, especially on psychopaths, but on this occasion it was effective. I didn’t have to have that initial playground fight to prove my worth. In fact we joined in a game of cricket, a pastime at which I have always been only average, but which I enjoyed as much as any English boy.

Khormaksar School proved to be a little less dull than all the other schools I had been to. I was to get a much better education in Aden, since there was only one school and naturally it taught to the higher level. Many service children missed out on a grammar school education due to the fact that they moved every eighteen months to two years. If two children were competing for a single place in a grammar school, and one was a local resident while the other was from an RAF camp, it made sense to the authorities to give that place to the local child. I am vehemently against that early grammar school system, which was totally unfair. It also lacked any logic, since in adulthood several of my secondary school friends obtained good university degrees.

So, in Aden I was to learn Latin, algebra and poetry all of which I came to love, though my Latin fell away very quickly afterwards. The poetry, taught by an enthusiastic schoolmistress whose name on the one school report I still have is undecipherable and lost from memory, stuck with me all my days. Rupert Brooke’s ‘Granchester’ was my first introduction to poetry and I thought it a most marvellous piece of writing. Since then I have gone on to many more poets who leave me breathless with admiration – William Carlos Williams, John Masefield, Ted Hughes, Alfred Lord Tennyson, W.B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, Robert Burns, William Souter – many many more. Max hated poetry and we had a fight about it. He called me a name and I called him a name, then we came to blows. This was all forgotten as soon as we had got up from the dirt and dusted off our clothes.

Outside of school I learned enough Arabic to get by in the company of local boys and the chowkidars, the Arab nightwatchmen and guarders of the gates. Languages come easy at that age. Max and I, and other boys, went swimming almost every day. We also joined the Air Scouts and after what seems to me now to be a short time, we both became patrol leaders – I of the Hawk Patrol and he of the Eagles. There were only two patrols, so between us we had cornered the market in leadership roles. I’m not bragging here, it just happened. Maybe we were lucky and showed more enthusiasm than others. I had already been a Sea Scout at Felixstowe, so perhaps experience told. Anyway, we both loved it. At heart we were Boys of the Empire, wanting to emulate men like Baden-Powell of Africa, and John Nicholson of India. Stories like Kim and King Solomon’s Mines were our bread and butter. One day we were going to conquer Africa and India, or Malaya, or Burma. Why, here we were in South Arabia, kings of the sand!

After a couple of months in Aden for some unknown reason my mother had the bright idea of putting me into Maalla Technical College. It was run by Arabs for the sons of Arab civil servants. Classes were mostly in English so that was not a problem, but I was the only white boy in a class of thirty Arab boys, and got a bit lonely. They weren’t unkind to me, quite the opposite and we were fascinated by each other. I was even invited to one fourteen-year-old’s wedding and ate sheep’s eyes. But I naturally felt out of place and can empathise with anyone of any nationality who find themselves in a similar position. You just feel an odd outsider. I made one really good friend among my classmates, a boy called Salem Yafu. He lived at Sheikh Othman, where we used to go camping, and I met his family there. Adenis were always so very hospitable.

Mum took me out of the college when she saw how miserable I was and I went back to Khormaksar School with the colonial kids. They were not all service children. Some were sons and daughters of oil workers, or diplomats, or civil servants. There was a one girl, a Scottish lass named Rosemary Burns, who was the daughter of a meteorologist.

One day we were collecting razor shells and scallops on the beach to whizz into the wind and get back like boomerangs, when Maxy shyly confessed to me that he was infatuated with Rosemary Burns. He didn’t put it in those words of course, but we’re talking teenage crush here. I had not noticed her until that point, but took the time to study her over the next week. She was not a classical beauty, but she was pretty and glowed with health and was probably the most intelligent student in our class of twenty. She wore plaits, had blue-grey eyes and had a trim figure. Her Scottish burr was wonderful. The more I saw of her, the more I tumbled into the pit to join Max. She was lovely and I fell desperately in love with her. OK, I was thirteen, but don’t tell me you can’t fall in love at that age. I fell like a brick down a well. However, to my great shame I didn’t tell Max of my feelings. I don’t know why. Perhaps I didn’t want to upset him and get beaten to within an inch of my life.

Anyway, one day on our way home from school we walked with Rosemary to her house. It was in the officer’s patch, so we were a little overawed to begin with. Max finally confronted her and said, ‘Rosemary, I like you a lot. Will you be my girlfriend?’ Almost immediately I followed up with, ‘I like you too. Will you be my girlfriend as well?’ Max shot me a look of astonishment, which might have turned to blistering anger if Rosemary had not laughed and replied, ‘I’ll be a girlfriend to both of you, you dopes.’

And so she was.

I was ecstatic. Max was ecstatic. To give him his due, he only asked me once if I was sincere and I apologised to him for the surprise but explained, ‘Couldn’t help myself’. He understood that. Rosemary was unique. There was no other girl to touch her. It was unsurprising that a young, impressionable boy should fall in love with her. From that point on we visited her house at least three or four times a week. Her parents were extremely indulgent and only once did I cross them, when I made a stink bomb with my chemistry set and turned their veranda into a temporary sewer. They took us with them to Tarshyne Bay, the officers’ swimming pool, though we did get banned from there for rowdy behaviour. Rosemary’s dad was a strong-backed Scot, who awed us with stories of his voyages on weather ships to the Arctic. Her mother was a genteel woman of shining intellect, whose brainpower had been passed on to her daughter. Then there was Brian, Rosemary’s younger brother, who disdained us as much as we disdained him. A good lad, for all that. Just younger.

We never did do very much except sit on the veranda and talk. There was no touching, which seems very strange in this day and age, not even holding hands. Normally, Rosemary had a great sense of fairness, but on the odd occasion the two Celts ganged up on the Anglo-Saxon. I felt aggrieved at those times but rifts never lasted very long.

The Burns family had a gramophone and a heap of classical records, but there was one particular long-player by an American singer I loved called Eddie Cantor, who sang Al Jolson songs. It was my first experience of the jazz music which was to influence my life as an adult. Eddie Cantor sang songs like ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ and ‘Row Row Row’. Not jazz exactly, but in the same vein.

‘You and your Eddie Cantor,’ groaned Max, whenever I asked Rosemary to play the LP, ‘you’ll send us all barmy.’

Those long hot innocent days in the company of a boy named Max and a girl named Rosemary were the most wonderful of my childhood. We would talk while watching large brown hawks gliding on thermals over the desert sands and jump, startled by the sudden crack of a dhow’s sail as it filled with wind out in the Gulf of Aden. I have never forgotten those afternoons and the sense of happy contentment.

That triangular friendship awakened new depths of emotion and thinking in me. Contemplations which turned me eventually into the writer I am today. It was magical, my time in Aden, when I was close to desert cities that were symbols of stories like Tales from the Thousand and One Nights and The Thief of Bagdad. I had the Hadhramaut Desert on my doorstep, an extinct volcano with a whole town inside its cone, a sea full of strange fish both harmless and dangerous, a harbour crammed with ocean-going liners, the sleek racehorses of the waves. The east was draped over my head and around my shoulders, a light mantle, warm and wonderful, and I never ever wanted to leave and go back to that cold, grey forbidding place which ironically we called ‘home’. This was my spiritual home, this land of dark-skinned people with gossamer souls and fire in their feet.

So, that was Aden. Rock climbing up Shamsan; visiting Rosemary; swimming; scouting; camping at Sheikh Othman; reading Classic Comics, Captain Marvel, Batman, and a host of real books in my bedroom; venturing out (but not too far) into the Hadhramaut Desert, which was on the hem of the vast Empty Quarter, a place where men could and did get lost forever by wandering just a few yards off the track; going to the open-air cinema and leaning back to look up at the night sky full of still and shooting stars when the film got boring. A hell of a life for a boy. It seemed a long long childhood out there, though in fact it was quite brief in adult terms.

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.

5. RAF Cosford

I left secondary modern school a the age of fourteen, since we broke up for the summer holidays before I reached fifteen years. There were no exams for secondary modern children in those days, so like all my classmates I left without proof of an education of any kind. I went to work in a grocery store in Bridgnorth, one of those grand stores we had in those days with sacks of grain and other produce standing on the floor with little trowels stuck in them to shovel the stuff into bags. In the shop itself there was a huge wooden bay-shaped counter with around four or five assistants in dustcoats, waiting to serve customers. It was my job to dash back and forth between the counter and the cellar, carrying cheeses and hams, and anything else that the public might demand.

After working there for a month, for sixpence an hour, my mother stopped by at the shop. The manager called me up from the cellar and my mother asked him how I was getting on. ‘Very well,’ said the manager, beaming at me, ‘very well. If he keeps this up we’ll have him on the counter in five years.’ My mother was clearly pleased to hear such praise, but looking along the counter I had a panic attack. All I could see were five grey-faced men, bloodless figures in khaki dustcoats, looking as my mother would say, ‘like Death warmed-up’.

I went home that evening and told my parents that I wanted to join the Royal Air Force. It seemed my only avenue of escape from a life of tedium and dullness. The easiest way to join at the age of fifteen was to apply to the Royal Air Force for Boys’ Service. Their schools provided courses of education and technical training. The ‘graduate’ was then expected to do at least twelve years’ military service.

I tried for the Apprentices first, the cream of these schools, and took the train to RAF Halton in Bucks for my interview. My weak education immediately exposed me. I fared badly in the entrance examination. I was told that if I improved a little over the next six months I stood a chance of getting on to the Administration Branch course. I didn’t want to be a ‘pen-pusher’, though it doesn’t seem so terrible to me now. I was a romantic in those days and had seen too many war films starring John Mills. Obviously I couldn’t be a pilot with my background, but I wanted something more exciting than an office.

So off I went to RAF Cosford in Staffordshire, to try my luck there, where they were not so fussy. The Boy Entrants examination board snapped me up. Why wouldn’t they, when they snapped up ex-Borstal Boys just as swiftly. I was shown around the ‘workshops’, where the Boys received trade training. I was impressed by Photography and Radio Mechanic, found the idea of being a Cook or Supplier not to my liking, but finally came to the Telegraphists’ classrooms. Here were Morse keys, teleprinters and radio sets to be operated. Yes, it said to me, you can be the ‘Sparks’ (the shoulder flash of a telegraphist was a hand clutching javelins of lightning) in John Mills’s Lancaster bomber.

‘Send a message to command, Sparks – the port engines are on fire, the tail gunner’s shot to pieces and the navigator’s gone mad.’

Yes, that was for me. The romantic figure of a wireless operator hunched over his key, clicking out Morse code at twenty-five words a minute, thus saving the lives of the crew.

There is also something about ‘secrets’ which appeals to a romantic mind. Morse was a secret code, a foreign language known only to a very few special mortals. I was to learn that code and be one of those very few. I would also learn to touch-type (very useful later in life, when I became a writer) and be taught formulas for the mathematics of electronics, learn about valves, resistors, circuits and other secrets of the radio world. The job appealed to me enormously. Of course, when I left Cosford and actually came to do the work, it was not as romantic as I imagined it would be, but still it was sometimes exciting and interesting, which is as much as you can expect from any daily job.

The RAF is a way of life and one I was used to, my family having been part of it since I was born. I said goodbye to my mum and dad, and my two brothers, and took the train from Bridgnorth to Wolverhampton, a relatively short distance since the counties were adjoining. On the steam train from Wolverhampton to Cosford I shared a carriage with John Chidlow, a miner’s son from Mansfield. We became firm friends and would follow each other around as we were posted from station to station, once we had ‘passed out’, which is the military term for ‘graduated’. I have always called him ‘Chid’ because are were too many other ‘Johns’ around.

Arriving at No 2 School of Technical Training our hair was shaved off and we were marched into a large room to take the oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II. Our overall loyalty was not to the RAF, not to the officers who lorded it over us, but to Her Majesty, the monarch of Great Britain and several remaining colonies. This, we were told, ensured against a military revolution. There were ninety-six would-be telegraphists of the ‘29th Entry’. Some of the fifteen-year-olds in that room, they told us, would ‘fall by the wayside’.

I was determined the wayside would not experience me falling into it, since I had a horror of returning to that grocery store.

Coming from an RAF family I at least knew what to expect: much was familiar to me, from the accommodation to the yelled orders from Drill Instructors. My own father, at that time, was a Drill Instructor. Some of the boys however, hailing from the backstreets of Liverpool or from a remote farm in Wiltshire, were completely shell-shocked. They did not know whether they were coming or going and wandered around in a sort of bemused haze while fierce, hard-eyed men in blue serge uniforms barked unintelligible sounds at them.

The first three months at Cosford would be spent in the Initial Training Squadron (ITS) lines. These were wooden huts spaced apart in a row with a spinal corridor running down the middle. The spinal column was where the toilets were situated, the ironing rooms and the drying rooms. The long wooden billets, exactly like the huts you see in prisoner of war films like Stalag 17 and The Great Escape, each housed twenty boys in two rows of ten down each side. All the billets had a potbellied stove in their middles. Every boy had a bedspace, a tall locker and a short locker. We were issued our kit and immediately had to go to work on it, shining boots, brasses and blanco-ing belts with blue blanco, which I now see as an anomaly, blanco meaning ‘white’ in Spanish, but there you go, the word is now an English one.

When polishing the raw boots, which would eventually have to shine like polished mirrors, we were shown how to melt the polish in its tin lid, pour it on the boot toe like wax, and then spend several centuries rubbing it into the leather with a tiny finger-swirling motion.

Our kit, if you are at all interested, consisted of the following:

blankets

sheets

PT kit

greatcoat (which, unlike the rest of the clothes, remained the property of the Queen)

rain cape

battledress

webbing belt

webbing backpack and straps

ceramic mug

irons (knife, fork and spoon)

socks

shirts

detached collars, collar studs

vests

aertex shreddies (underpants)

peaked cap for formal occasions

beret for informal

Best Blue (Sunday uniform) made not of worsted like the battledress but of gabardine

brass button slider

housewife (sewing kit)

kit bag

towels

woollen gloves

shoe brushes

We sank under the weight of all these items. Our civilian clothes were taken away from us. While we were in ITS we would not be allowed to wear anything but uniform. In fact for the next quarter of a year we were strictly confined to camp: it was the longest three months of my life.

On the far side of the parade square from where we lived there was a huge building called the Fulton Block. Initially, we were kept away from this place, I suspect, in order to prevent older boys corrupting our innocence. The Fulton Block housed four entries at any one time. When our entry was in ITS the 26th Entry was the Senior Entry in the block, feared simply for its seniority and the fact that the boys in it were seventeen years of age or more, and thus bigger and tougher than fifteen year olds. There were also four wings to the building, each wing occupied by different trades. Rivalry was therefore between entries, between wings and between trades. Everywhere you looked you could find someone not of your kind and therefore a rival. Fights were not particularly common, but nor were they rare.

Our peaked caps, as I have said, was part of our Best Blue uniform and the best part of our peaked caps was the hatband. The 29th Entry teleg’s band was chequered yellow and red. We were called, or rather we called ourselves, ‘The Blood-and-Custard Boys’. I love that nickname. It smacks of something similar to an American Western gang, like ‘The James’ Boys’, or ‘The Dalton Gang’. At a recent reunion of the 29th on our 55th anniversary, I read a poem I had written entitled ‘The Blood-and-Custard Boys’, and noted the beaming faces and heard the cheers of men who were now in their seventies when I used the phrase. Identity is an important aspect of military life and one’s loyalty is pinned to that identity. In the army the regiment demands a soldier’s loyalty. With us it was entry, trade, squadron, then wing, in that order. Who were we? We were 29th telegs, No. 1 Squadron, No. 1 Wing.

Over the first two weeks, rising at 6.30 a.m. to the sound of Chris Barber’s ‘When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-bob-bobbing Along . . .’ over the billet tannoy and going to bed at 10 p.m., we spent all our time cleaning kit, learning to march, polishing the billet floor (a place so sacrosanct no man was allowed to touch it with his foot), being shouted at by adult NCOs and Boy Entrant NCOs for everything and nothing, having kit inspections, learning to fold blankets in the correct manner, laying out our PT kit in the correct manner and presenting the rest of our kit in the correct manner. There was the RAF way and there was the wrong way. We did indeed wonder if Hell had come for a long visit and was probably going to be outstaying its welcome.

That linoleum on the billet floor.

It was indeed holy ground.

Floor pads were made out of strips a foot wide, torn from our issue blankets and folded into two squares. (Short blankets meant cold feet at night, but everyone did it without a murmur.) These pads would be worn like slippers and boys simply skated with a gliding motion, not only to prevent scratching the surface of the hallowed lino, but also to polish it further to that glorious sheen required by the Inspection Gods. This did not mean that it would not require polishing again. Every Friday night, the evening before the weekly major inspection, boys would throw globs of yellow polish from a huge can on the main floor and on their bedspaces, and work that polish with elbow grease, often past the hour of midnight. Some boys, anxious not to incur the wrath of the Inspecting Officer and NCO, would lay out their kit there and then, and sleep under their bed so as to be absolutely ready in the morning.

The inspection itself was a nightmare. If the officer’s white gloves found dust on a surface, punishment was swift to follow. Even minor offences, such as a mark on a drinking mug, would result in that vessel being hooked up by the NCO’s pacemaker (a measuring stick that opened like dividers to check the length of an airman’s marching pace) and flicked out of one of the open windows to smash on the concrete path outside. The boy who owned the dirty mug would of course have to clean up the shards and buy himself a new mug out of the five shillings a week pocket money he received from the RAF.

Sunday was Church Parade. Some boys asked others to lock them in their lockers, hoping to avoid this hour-long visit to God’s barracks. They were confined with a bunch of comics and a torch until the return of the churchgoers. But of course the authorities were up to every trick and NCOs went through the empty billets rocking the tall lockers back and forth, finding heavy, yelling Boy Entrants inside. Others tried hiding up in the water tower, playing cards while the rest of us sang hymns and prayed. They too were found, were put on a ‘charge’ and were sentenced to jankers or fatigues (working in the cookhouse and other onerous duties during one’s free time) and had to peel spuds or clean greasy pans. Being of another religion did not get one out of Church Parade: Jews and ODs (Other Denominations) were gathered together and either went to their own religious buildings or were given onerous tasks.

At weekends senior boys would go into Wolverhampton, looking for pubs that would sell underage youths a pint of beer. Naturally they had an eye for the girls too and naturally got into fights with local youths. Late at night they would take the train home and, if lights out had passed, scrambled over the fences and gates, some of them getting caught and punished, others making it back to their billets home free.

As I have written, I knew what to expect more than most, my father being one of those dreaded and hated NCOs. I thanked God that dad was not at Cosford, but at RAF Bridgnorth, drilling conscripted recruits. I would not have survived had we been on the same station. Corporal Joliffe was our main drill instructor and he had a wonderful array of sayings, such as ‘Don’t march so close to the boy in front, lad. Do you want to get your name in the News of World?’ and ‘Fall out for a smoke. Those who don’t smoke go through the actions.’ The parade square was a loathed piece of ground and if we ‘eyes righted’ the damn flagpole once, we did it a thousand times before we left Cosford.

There were NCO drill instructors who marched us around and gave us weapons training, and instructors who taught us technical trade skills and education. The most famous NCO of all was Sergeant Rudge, nicknamed ‘Whatsay’. No matter what was said to Rudge, in a low or a loud voice, in a Scottish, English, Irish or Welsh accent, he would always come back with the question, ‘Whatsay, boy?’

We learned to march smartly, shoulder arms, slope arms, present arms and shoot with our Lee-Enfield Mk IV bolt-action .303 rifles. The bloody things weighed a heavy nine pounds, had a muzzle velocity of 774 yards per second, a range of up to 3,000 yards and a kick like a reversing Number 9 bus which left lovely blue-black bruises. I had a very weak right eye so I always shot my rifle using my left shoulder. They only made Lee-Enfields with bolts on the right side and though these weapons had magazines, usually holding five rounds, they were single-shot and needed to be reloaded every time. I used to reach over and work the bolt with my left hand. It was a very awkward movement, which once on the range had me lagging behind the other young would-be killers of the enemies of Britain, but I still managed to attain my Marksman’s badge. Bulleyes and magpies were good of course, but the main object was to group your shots inside a one-inch diameter circle somewhere near the middle of the target. If you did that you would get your Marksman, a cloth badge of crossed rifles worn on the left sleeve.

We also rattled away on the range with .303 Brens – light machine guns on bipeds – which we learned to strip down and put back together swiftly and efficiently. These were all obsolete weapons from Second World War and went out of service shortly after I joined the grown man’s air force, but we Boy Entrants thought they were state of the art.

I made many friends at Cosford of course, including a big Scottish lad named Tam Keay, who used to take me to his parents’ farm in Perthshire while on summer leave. Tam was quickly promoted to Leading Boy, then Corporal Boy, and finally Sergeant Boy. He was a born leader, someone who I looked up to with great respect. Like all good leaders he was fair, just and tough as they come.

Then there was Alan Cake, who was not a leader in any sense. A tall willowy boy with a dark complexion, but along with Rod Williams he formed the intellectual lobby of the 29th Entry Telegraphists.

Mike Ormiston, the son of a colonial policeman, was very assured, elegant and confident. Mike knew all about etiquette, was knowledgeable and worldly, and if you wanted to impress your girlfriend’s parents, you went to Mike for lessons first.

John Chidlow, already mentioned, was a miner’s son whose wiry body whipped into action when a fight was necessary.

Johnny Ball was a London boy, full of a cockney’s sense of humour, with a square muscled body and a love of adventure. Johnny was not 29th but 27th Entry, but had been put in charge of us in ITS to teach us the ways of Cosford before we went up to the Fulton Block.

Finally, there was Bob ‘Titch’ Nottage who had been in my class at Rochford school. We had both been surprised to see each other at Cosford, not knowing that we were joining at the same time.

Many other good guys, too many to list.

Then there were the bad boys, of course.

Blake (not his real name, but close to it) who tried to strangle a boy with his bootlace, and thereafter became known as Bootlace Blake.

There was also a hard Glaswegian from the Gorballs, whose head-butt was greatly feared.

At the far end and far side of the Fulton Block, resided another tough boy in the Senior Entry who made everyone’s life a misery, but fortunately the telegraphists and those in other wings rarely mixed.

Finally, there was Boy Entrant Mallet, whose younger sister Rosemary had been my girlfriend at St Mary’s school. When Mallet went away to Cosford, I started going out with a girl named Valerie. She had once been Mallet’s girlfriend. Mallet was in the Senior Entry when I was in ITS and he was therefore quite a bit older than me. He took exception to the fact that I was dating his ex-girlfriend and sent one or two thugs down from the Fulton Block to beat me up. He never came down himself. The bully boys that came searching for Kilworth took one look at me (I was 5 feet-nothing in those days and weighed seven stones) raised their eyes to heaven and went back the way they had come. They would not get the reputation they desired by thumping the hell out of a squirt like me. If they had come back in two years’ time, they would have found a boy who had grown 8 inches and put on a few more pounds. By that time I was a flyweight boxer and probably worth punching.

I did see some nasty incidents. A ‘hard man’ came down to ITS one rainy day and demanded Alan Cake give him his cape. Alan said no and the result was that Alan went down like a felled tree, blood pouring from his nose and mouth. He was kicked and told to get up. Alan, wisely, stayed where he was. It wasn’t a terrible incident. Just a one-hit confrontation and no real damage done, but it did shake us new kids up somewhat. Was this what it was going to be like when we finally went to the Fulton Block? People stealing kit and striking out if denied? I began to wonder if I’d done the right thing by joining. At least in the grocery store you didn’t get your face smashed in for nothing.

On another occasion a senior entry youth arrived in our billet around midnight waving a .22 revolver. It had no trigger and the hammer had a thick elastic band around it. He got us out of bed and took us all onto the marching ground. Then using the elastic band he casually fired a round across the parade square. The sound of the shot cracked out over the frosted concrete and the richotets echoed through the night. The youth then strolled away into the darkness, towards the Fulton Block. We never found out who he was, or to which trade or wing he belonged. We simply stood there in the cold night air gaping at his departure, most of us wondering if this youth was typical of all the seniors.

Once they saw what kind of hell we were in, some of the boys tried to leave. Our parents had signed papers guaranteeing that we would remain to be trained at the school and then serve twelve years in the RAF. Several boys wrote home, begging to be released. One of these was a boy with a terrible stutter named McGarvey, who hated it all so much he began acting as if he were going mad, cleaning his boots with toothpaste and lacing his tea with polish. At inspection we stood by our beds and shouted number, rank and name when the officer walked past us. McGarvey’s stammer made it quite impossible for him to get this out before the officer had long since gone, so he was ordered to start the sequence the moment the inspection commenced.

However, the only way to get out was to buy one’s release from the Royal Air Force. In ITS it was relatively cheap. Twenty pounds would secure a boy’s freedom. When our weekly pay was five shillings, that amount of money was almost out of reach. One needed sympathetic parents. And it got much more expensive after initial training was over. Eventually McGarvey managed to raise enough money to buy his freedom and almost ran out of the camp gates to get away. One or two others left too. Some were thrown out for various offences. I don’t remember how many, probably only a very few.

Once we had completed initial training, we were allowed to go home on leave. Like many others, I was as proud as punch, parading before my parents in my new Best Blue uniform and peaked cap with its blood-and-custard band. I would have given a king’s ransom to tell them I was a Senior Boy, or Leading Boy, but I never got promoted. It wasn’t my size that held me back because an even smaller lad than me, an Irish boy called Louis Patterson, made it to Corporal Boy and Louis made a good Corporal Boy too. I was as smart and as sharp as any of them, both in mind and in appearance, but I’ve always been slightly introverted, and that’s a death knell in the services. You have to stand out, be the man who shows the others the way, and that I never have been. I make a good second-in-command, but I’m no leader.

~

Around this time my grandad, old Rhubub, shuffled off his mortal coil. The one-legged lengthsman, sexton and chimney sweep, a Rochford character known by everyone in that market town, died at seventy-two. I had expected a Dylan Thomas exit for Grandad, raging at the passing of the light, but he went in his sleep. In his will he left me his rack of pipes that had been smoked and chewed for over fifty years. I can’t remember what happened to them, but even now I can smell the odour coming from the bulge in his shapeless jacket pocket.

Nan followed him shortly afterwards, but was less lucky. She went out with lung cancer at a much younger fifty-six years, which didn’t surprise me, since she’d been cooking on a coal fire for most of her life. It wasn’t until they’d both gone that I started to think about them and their lives. Nan had slept on a sofa bed in the living room ever since I’d known her, so I very much doubt their relationship in their latter years was a sexual one. Every Sunday Nan would take the bus into Southend. She told us boys she was going to the pictures, but she never took any of us with her. I believe she had a boyfriend in those years, for which I don’t blame her, because Grandad was so self-absorbed and unwholesome I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting him in that way. I was sad for him, though I don’t think he cared that much. I was much sadder for my country-girl nan, whose life had been all childbearing and drudgery, and had ended in prolonged pain and distress.

I missed them both, for they meant a great deal to me. I never knew my maternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother seemed a very shrewish woman who didn’t seem to like children very much. I met her briefly, perhaps twice in my life, and I can’t even remember the date of her passing. My Rochford grandparents were people of the soil, close to the earth, and though they obviously did not get on together that much, they shared a wealth of country knowledge and managed to get by in the same house. I suppose practicalities must have dictated that they stay under the same roof, but it says a lot for them that we children did not sense any bad atmosphere. It is only now, in retrospect, that I see that all was not harmonious.

~

When the 29th returned to Cosford, we packed our kit bags, threw them over our shoulders, and marched to the Fulton Block. There we joined the 28th, 27th and 26th Entries. Here were the barracudas and sharks and we sprats were tossed into the same pond.

As with public schools at one time (who knows, maybe still?) the lowest form of life became ‘fags’ for the senior boys. At Cosford these slaves were termed ‘bull boys’ because they had to ‘bull’, or clean kit, for the entries above them. For a short while I became bull boy to a kid called Jock Mowatt, a piper in the band, but since he was the worst scruff alive and couldn’t punch his way out of a pair of bagpipes, it wasn’t long before I told him to clean his own kit. Fagging was totally illegal of course, but who was going to run to the authorities? Only some idiot who wanted to get his head used for a football. The idea that bullies are cowards is a wonderful sop, but it’s really not true. Some of them are and some of them are not. Those who are not will come looking for you after lights out, when the adult NCOs have all gone home, and tip you out of bed and proceed to kick the living daylights out of you.

So it went on. One or two of us rebelled, bigger lads, harder lads than me, and fought things out in the drying room. Some rebels were taken away and ‘spooned’, which was sort of like the Chinese water torture. A wet flannel was laid on their bare chest and a spoon would be tapped on the same spot for a prolonged period. It was very painful and left large blue bruises. One lad was dangled out of a third-storey window by some drum straps and threatened with sudden release. Many were too frightened to go against the tradition of bulling for the seniors and did as they were told, promising to look forward to the day when they too could become a despot and could command their own junior entry slave. It was one of those vicious cycles that are hard to break.

(Actually, towards the end of our time at Cosford a 31st Entry boy did go to the authorities and complain about ‘bulling’ for a senior boy. His name was John Storrs and his protest resulted in a 29th Entry, Jeff Limback, doing seven days in the guardhouse. Boy Entrants at that time were as strict as the Sicilian Mafia in observing the rule of omertá. This breach of the code of silence incensed groups of youths who went looking for the stool pigeon, intending to rough him up. Unfortunately, one of the 29th Entry had almost the same name and our John Storr kept being woken at midnight by vigilantes wanting his blood, John having to call on his mates in the billet to verify his total innocence.)

~

The Fulton Block was a huge building. It had over a thousand windows and with its sixteen paddle-shaped wings looked like two giant stone octopuses joined by dual halls that were the kitchens and dining rooms. Three storeys high and flat-roofed, all it needed to complete its gruesome appearance were machine gun posts and you would have a Russian prison. It housed more than a thousand boys. The Fulton Block was a monstrosity that must have been built to awe and subdue any thoughts of revolution among the boys. It is one of those legendary structures on a par with such buildings as the Gestapo HQ in Berlin, or the KGB’s Lubyanka block. It loomed over the rest of the camp like a brooding monster that devoured boys at night and vomited them out just after dawn the next morning.

Over the next year or so I laboured to become a telegraphist and for the first time in my life I took education seriously. I wanted to pass the exams and become a Senior Aircraftsman in my chosen trade. And I started to enjoy learning. I was taught to touch-type on a teleprinter. I learned to take and send Morse at twenty words per minute, which increased later to twenty-five wpm in plain language and 30 wpm in figures. (Now, in this day and age, it is about as useful a skill as making flint axe heads.) Other accomplishments were learning the Murray Code, how to use and service a Marconi 1475 radio receiver, how to use a petrol electric set engine, and all the theory and maths that went with becoming a telecommunications man, in the field or on a camp. In short, I was immersed in the romantic world of the Sparks, a man who knew the secret of sending and receiving coded messages through thin air or over copper wires.

Of all the skills I was taught at No 2 School of Technical Training, the Morse code remained the most fascinating. Those short patterns of dots and dashes need to become deeply embedded in the brain of any Morse code operator. You can’t access them directly while you are sending and more especially when you’re receiving a message. To do so would mean the loss of several characters. The letters and figures come so fast the brain needs to react instinctively and the pen hand write them down without conscious thought. By that I mean you can’t pause to recognise the sequence, ‘Dit-dah-dit-dit (.-..)’ as the letter L. A concentrated thought that long takes at least two or three seconds, by which time five or six other characters would have gone by. Most Morse is sent at twenty-five words a minute. The average word is five letters long. That means the operator is receiving a letter every 0.4 of a second. The action has to be an instinctive, from hearing straight to hand, almost bypassing the brain altogether. Personally, I found myself musing on mundane things – shopping lists, sport, last night’s party – and allowing the message in Morse to take care of itself. Only when the signals ceased in the earphones did I re-emerge and read what I had written.

In education classes I began to find my feet and discovered I was good at English, geography, history and science, but lousy at maths.

We marched to classes in the mornings behind the pipe band, with Mowatt shuffling along blaring his bagpipes. In the afternoons we had drill or gunnery practice, or sports. Tam Keay was brilliant at rugby and was Captain of Sports and Captain of Games for the whole entry, including all the other trades. John Chidlow (Chid) was extremely good at hockey. I could run a fair cross-country race, but a boy named Talbot was better, and Tony Burslem and Paul King were close behind him. There was no room for an almost in the team.

Sporting excellence has always eluded me, though I have been reasonably good at a number of sports and games. And I have tried many sports, from fencing to rock climbing. Those I was fairly good at – golf, tennis, swimming, running – I still do. Except running. I can’t run for toffee these days, not without falling over and sucking in breath by the laboured lungful. However, I am a septuagenarian.

I read no novels at Cosford. There was no time. Almost every waking moment was spent drilling, at weapons training, at sport, cleaning kit or in one classroom or another. Meals were taken in a huge dining room where we used to hammer with our spoons on the underside of tables to register our rebellion when a drill instructor came into the room. Once we’d eaten we washed our ‘mug-and-irons’ in a trough of greasy water that a thousand boys had used before us. You could have made farmhouse soup from it. Sunday, after Church Parade, was our only day of rest, when we would go into Albrighton or Shifnal villages looking for elusive, probably non-existent girls. There was a transport café just outside camp, known as the ‘tranny’ (this was before trannies were transvestites, which was not in our vocabulary in those days) where the senior entry would gather. If a junior entry went into the tranny he was likely to end up with a black eye and a few teeth missing.

Late Sunday night was my favourite time. The lights would be out and there would be twenty boys hidden in the darkness of the billet. The pot-bellied stove would still be glowing and Mike, who slept in the bed next to me, would have a radio on low volume. We listened to Top Twenty on Radio Luxembourg. I remember being bowled over by Neil Sedaka’s ‘Diana’ and I still know all the lyrics to that great song. Mike had recently started going out with a girl at home, but he told me it could not last because she made a terrible noise stirring her tea and clinking the cup. ‘And you know,’ he told me seriously, ‘if she does that, she probably farts in bed. Women do fart, just like us!’ After that warning, I have always steered clear of girls who clink their teacups.

It was at Cosford that I received my last letter from Rosemary Burns, who must have found her Scottish prince around that time.

Only once did I meet a girl while at Cosford, at a dance in Shifnal village. Out in the cold air of a winter evening she let me touch her breast through her overcoat. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to me since birth. So excited was I, I ran full pelt for the bus along a street where the metal dustbins had been put out for collection the following morning, and hurtled straight into one. My knees were skinned and I had bruises all down one side, but still my heart raced with the knowledge that sex had reared its wonderful head, and that there were other things in life besides passing exams and being promoted.

I had learned to iron my serge trousers using dry soap along the inside seam to make a sharp crease. I had learned to fold my blankets into a box shape that a mathematician would have admired for its precision. I had learned to bull boots to a mirror gloss. I had learned how to take care of myself and do all those things that mum used to do for me, but now I had learned how to charm a girl into letting me touch a bump on her coat.

I was king for a night.

Recently, thinking back on those days, I remember befriending many boys from different nationalities, but with notable exceptions. We had Welsh, Irish, Scots and English, but no Asians or people from the Caribbean, or dark-skinned boys of any kind. I wonder now why the immigrants of the 1950s were not interested in joining the Boy Entrants. It was not that they were kept out by a racist induction board, because once I was in the RAF I met quite a few Asians and West Indians. After all it was not long after the war and the Indian army, and other nations had fought for their colonial rulers, and I’m sure Britain was glad to have them. I met one corporal, a man from St Vincent in the West Indies, while in Cyprus and he became one of my greatest pals. Trinny Sutherland and his wife, Lorraine, are two of our closest friends and will for always be I hope. The mix of various cultures enriches our country. Life is dynamic and change will come. You can’t keep the world of your childhood England intact until you leave this Earth. How totally dull it would be if we were all exactly like each other.

Talking of our close neighbours reminds me that one frosty dawn a Scottish Drill Instructor arranged the whole 29th Entry Telegraphists in one long line on the parade ground. We stood there with our breath coming out in clouds of steam, wondering what this new formation was for, and whether we were going to get a long talk or a photo. Then the DI screamed out, ‘All the Irishmen take three paces backwards.’ No sooner was this order executed than he cried, ‘Now all the Scots, two paces backwards.’ Once done, the final order, ‘Now the Welsh, one pace backwards.’ Then he strode along the long line of Englishmen in front, muttering in anger, ‘So this is the bloody master race, is it?’ Someone, a colleague in the Sergeants’ Mess probably, had obviously attacked his Celtic heritage and caused this incident.

As I explained earlier, Tam Keay invited me to join him on his parents’ farm in Perthshire for the holidays. I was delighted. I have always loved farms. It’s in the blood of my ancestors. Tam went on ahead of me and I had to catch the train from King’s Cross, London, to Logiealmond a little later. On boarding the train I found I was in a carriage with three uniformed Scots Guards who were in holiday mood. They were young men, full of high spirits, and were playing cards and drinking whisky. One of them turned and waved to me. ‘Come on, Jock,’ he said, ‘come an’ have a dram.’

I don’t know why, but I suddenly had a need to tell them I was not of their nation.

‘I’m not a jock,’ I replied. ‘I’m English.’

The young Scot winked at his friends and laughed, then said, ‘Oh, well, we know what we think of Englishmen, don’t we?’

Thereafter I was left alone.

When we drew into the station at the other end of the journey, this same young soldier stood up and grabbed his kitbag. I could see Tam and his parents standing patiently at the end of the platform, so I alighted too with battered brown suitcase in hand. The soldier and I began walking the length of the platform and about halfway there realised that both of us were heading for the same group of waiting people.

‘Who the hell are you?’ whispered the soldier, out of the side of his mouth.

‘Tam’s mate,’ I replied in a normal voice. ‘I’m spending the summer with him.’

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, clearly upset. ‘Tam’s my brother. Look, be a sport and don’t tell my ma I was drinking and gambling.’

He seemed genuinely worried, so I slapped him on the back as if we’d been pals for the whole journey and said, ‘I wouldn’t do that to a fellow countryman – after all, we’re both British, aren’t we?’

He laughed out loud and thereafter we became good friends, spending the next few weeks helping to bring in the harvest and shooting game birds, hares and rabbits with a 12-bore shotgun. It was a wonderful summer, hot and sultry, as that season should be. I even bought my own shotgun, a bolt action .410, that was good for small slow-moving game but not much else. I also purchased my first 78 record, ‘At the Hop’ by Danny and the Juniors. We played it endlessly on a wind-up His Master’s Voice gramophone, until Tam’s grim-faced dad came in holding his head and we knew enough was enough.

Logiealmond is in the heart of Scotland and the Celts there were hospitable and friendly, not at all scathing of Anglo-Saxons. There was the odd joke or two, of course, but nothing with any bite to it. It was not my only visit to the farm; I also went the following year and enjoyed it just as much. I felt extremely privileged to meet Tam’s family, good men and women of the land, just like my own father’s relations.

This is probably the poet speaking, certainly not someone who has worked the soil for most of his life like my grandad Rhubub, but there is something about a farm which reaches deep into the soul. It’s not just the sight of a honed plough, the scent of sickled hay, the chickens clucking and the geese cackling, but the whole package. Working dogs, obstinate bulls, a sea of corn on an undulating field, a fox gliding away from a coop with a mouthful of feathers, leather tack hanging in the stables, buckets clanking in the cowshed, early mornings, dark evenings, mud, straw, horse sweat, dung, milk churns, tractors, everything.

Yes, idyllic, a scene from a Burns poem, but real too. I’ve experienced several snap shots of farm life, and while it’s undoubtedly not a profession for an effete writer, there is the thought that if life had turned out differently it actually wouldn’t have been so terrible.

Near the end of our time at Cosford the 29th and other entries did a forced march to the Wrekin, a strange rounded hill in Shropshire said to be a the contents of a shovel wielded by a giant. We slept out in the open for a night and then marched back to camp again. This was, I believe, training for our camp in Southport when several entries went under canvas like boy scouts for a few days. The only thing I can remember about Southport is that some of the lads came back into camp late at night having been beaten up by civilian youths. The following evening the whole camp, several hundred boys, marched into town looking for the perpertrators of the previous night’s violence. There were battles, I am sure, but they have faded from my memory. Certainly my own bunch never met any of the enemy, who probably wisely stayed home that night and watched television in the safety of their living rooms.

~

The eighteen months I spent at RAF Cosford, No. 2 School of Technical Training, seemed to last forever. Yet they did come to an end on Tuesday 25 March 1958, when the 29th Entry had its Passing Out Review, its final military parade. My dad was there to see me doing my bit in the ranks. I was as smart as hell and knew all the moves, which as an ex-drill instructor must have pleased him a bit.

Dad had recently been demobbed after twenty-two years service and was struggling to make a living in civilian life as a ‘tally man’: a door-to-door salesman of women’s clothing. He had commuted most of his pension in order to buy a house and so had to work at something which, to my mind, went totally against his character. He was no more a salesman than I was a fish. When he got the cancer that killed him three years later (probably through the stress of the work) he lay dying on our living-room sofa and said to me, ‘You know, I would have liked to work in a hospital, as an orderly. That would have suited me very well.’ And indeed it would have done. He liked people, but not enough to push goods into their faces. And vulnerable people who appreciated his help would have left him feeling that he had done something useful.

I believe I passed out sixth in the telegraphists for Trade and Education, but I can’t be sure as I was lying sick with some fever or other in the camp hospital while the announcements were being made. I had to go on hearsay. I know Alan Cake came First in Education, with Rod Williams coming second. Tam Keay got a prize for General Service Efficiency. (Tam eventually got an MBE, of which he was justly proud, when he sorted out a mess for the RAF at one of their communications centres.) Anyway, I had found I was actually good at exams and had passed my Final Education Examination and Trade Examinations to qualify for the grand rank of Senior Aircraftsman (SAC). I would have to spend six months as a Leading Aircraftsman first, to gain experience, but in effect I had done the best one can do.

Fifty-eight boys out of the original ninety-six had qualified to Aircraftsman only, two ranks below SAC. (Thirty-four had failed to qualify in Education and twenty-four had failed in their Trade exams.) With drop-outs, buy-outs and those dismissed from the service for infractions, this appeared to leave around twenty-five of us who had made the required grade. I had avoided falling by that ‘wayside’ we had been warned about.

Military school had been the making of me, as they say.

6. RAF Coltishall and RAF Horsham St Faith

My first posting was to a fighter station. A fighter station. How cool was that? I thought it was awesome.

RAF Coltishall, not far from Norwich, was out in the wilds of Norfolk, where clear streams flowed between grassy banks and wooded countryside. As a rural boy it was ideal for me. There were South American feral coypu running wild in the streams, hares in the flat fields and falcons flying above the hedgerows. I was over the moon with excitement. The fighter ace Douglas Bader had served at Coltishall. In 1958 Wing Commander Laing was its Commanding Officer. This was the real Royal Air Force. I was to be one of four personnel in the Communications Centre (comcen), with special duties in the control tower (which actually meant nothing more than transmitting and receiving weather reports).

My experience of fighter stations to that point began and ended with the John Mills war films: Spitfires and Hurricanes. Now there were even faster and sleeker fighters, jets that flashed across the sky so fast you had to whip your head back and forth to follow their flight. These were the Hawker Hunters with swept back wings and a deadly looking fuselage flown by pilots of 74 Squadron. There were also the fighter-bombers of 23 Squadron Gloster Javelins, or ‘flat irons’ as they were known, because of their delta-shaped wings.

Another boy from my Rochford school days, Tom Hasler, was an instrument technician assigned to 23 Squadron. The Hunters were of course the aristocrats of the pair, but the Javelin pilots always taunted the Hunter pilots with the fact that the Javelins could fly at night and in bad weather, whereas the Hunters could not.

‘Get some windscreen wipers fitted,’ was the common jibe of the Javelin pilot, when the Dukes of the air were coming it too strong.

When I was posted back to Coltishall, at a later date, the Hunters had been replaced by sleek English Electric Lightnings. Lightning fighters looked like rifle barrels with wings, but I did miss the Hunters, which to me were beautiful if deadly weapons of the air.

Work in the comcen was not hard. We were given messages hand-written on message pads to send out by teleprinter, and received messages by the same medium. We had to be on the alert for FLASH messages, which were of the highest priority and caused a stir on the station, since their importance was denoted by their speed. Apart from having to watch for PRIORITY, TOP PRIORITY and FLASH messages, each message had a security tag, which might be SECRET or even TOP SECRET. EYES ONLY was well known to us even before the Bond books and films came into being. Some messages were encrypted and had to be decrypted by a sergeant with Red Seal Clearance, a job I was later to be given just before I left the RAF in 1974.

I enjoyed a brief spell at Coltishall before being posted to a neighbouring fighter station, RAF Horsham St Faith. The duties there were similar to those at Coltishall. Horsham was a much livelier station and I fell in love for the second time in my life with a WRAF named Silvia, who preferred the name ‘Trudy’. Trudy and I had a chaste relationship for around six months before she broke my heart. She left me for a ‘squadron boy’ who worked on the aircraft. There was an hierarchy among us airmen as well as among the officers. Telecommunications was Trade Group 11 – above cooks and clerks and suppliers and RAF Regiment ‘Rock Apes’ – but a long way below the aircraft engineers of Trade Groups 1 – 5, where the Brylcreem boys of the world of electronics and mechanics held sway.

Also, I was still a young boy of seventeen, had had no real sexual experience, and Trudy was nineteen. Trudy was small, round-faced, had brown curls, and was very pretty. I have always had a yen for ‘pretty’, rather than beautiful women. It’s probably for the best. Beautiful women do not go for shortish, nice-looking boys, which is what I was at the time. So I said goodbye to my first real romance and went out with the lads drinking and bombing around in Louis Patterson’s Austin 7 car, which broke down more times than a thin-skinned actress. We would go to the Samson and Hercules dance hall in Norwich to pick up girls, or to jazz venues like Studio 6, or simply down the local pub. Louis was only one of several of my ex-Boy Entrant class mates at Horsham.

Ironically I had my first sexual experience after I had been dumped by Trudy. It was a one-night (well, actually a two minute) stand with a girl I met at a bus stop going home after a dance at Southend’s Kursaal Ballroom, who after a short introductory chat to my delight and utter astonishment she proved equally keen to experiment with the dark but delightful side of nature. I can’t remember how the subject was broached, but somehow we came to an agreement to try it out there and then. I had on a white jacket peppered with black spots (not so garish as it sounds here, folks) which she told me I looked ‘smashing’ in. She had on a thin cotton dress and wore a cardigan back to front. Her coned bra made her breasts stand out like pointed volcanoes, but there was no lust in me, only an eagerness to have a go at something completely new which every other boy of my age seemed to have been doing forever.

The experiment didn’t go that well, because neither of us had any real idea of what we were doing. The act was performed on a soft-earthed grave in a little churchyard next to some shops in the centre of the town. I believe the only satisfaction either of us got was the knowledge that we had at last ‘done it’ with someone, even though a stranger, and I for one was left with a nice glow of achievement. I had worn what we called in those days a French Letter, so it was safe enough sex. There would be no babies or nasty surprises for either of us in the way of spots and rashes. I never learned her name, nor she mine, and the whole very, very brief encounter seems incredibly mystical to me now, but it did happen and it was a maturing experience. I hope that girl was not put off for life by my ignorance and ineptitude, and has since found that ‘doing it’ with someone you love is rather wonderful and enlightening.

I could rock ‘n’ roll in those days with the best of dancers, being light on my feet and quick to learn the moves. The NAAFI was the place where we spent most of our evenings, dancing to the juke box. Just outside the station was a speedway track where I used to watch Ove Fundin, a Swedish speedway rider of incredible skill. Ove was called ‘The Fox’ because before a race he would moan and complain that his motorbike was not up to scratch and that he felt unenthusiastic about the coming race, thus giving his opponents a false sense of security. Then he would go out on to the track and blow them away, spraying coke dust in their faces as he overtook them and roared to the lead. I don’t know where Ove is today, but he gave me a lot of spectator pleasure.

It was while at Coltishall and Horsham that I was approached several times by the authorities, as were all my colleagues, asking if I wanted to earn some extra pay by going to Porton Down, a government experimental station. We were told that they were trying to find a cure for the common cold and needed volunteers to ‘catch a cold’ then be given various treatments. There was something a little sinister about it at the time and I never went. Since then it has been mooted that experiments were taking place with nerve gas and that some servicemen had been experimented on in the mistaken belief they were assisting medical science. LAC Ronald Maddison died aged twenty after having serin nerve agent toxins dripped on to his sleeve. The authorities still claim these were not unethical human experiments, but somehow I’m glad I never took up their offer of extra pay.

During my night shifts, when there was little to do while at Coltishall and Horsham St Faith, I began writing stories in the vein of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Tell-tale Heart. Those night scribblings continued throughout my RAF career until when I left I had written some fifty short stories and three novels. The novels are pretty bad and are still gathering dust in my attic. Some of the tall tales however have since been published. A selection of them won the Victor Gollancz/Sunday Times Competition. I’ve always felt more comfortable with the short story than I have with anything of great length. I try to break new ground with short fiction.

I was pretty miserable at Horsham after Trudy gave me the heave ho and was glad when a posting came through, though it was to RAF Uxbridge, where the majority of work was telecommunications for the meteorological boffs. Going there from a twenty-man-billet to a four-man-room, which was an unexpected upgrade. It was still only 1959 though half my life seemed to be over. How long those years seemed then and even now. Within three years I had been through one technical training school and three RAF stations. I had had my first love affair, my first shag, and many other experiences besides. Now I was on a station I disliked for its anonymity and blandness.

7. RAF Uxbridge

Uxbridge is on the tube line, with easy access to London, but strangely I never went into the Big Smoke at that time. Instead I joined another boy, Roy, and spent most of my time at the Pear Tree Riding School, owned by a tall efficient, young man of our age. Terry lived with his invalid mother in the Pear Tree Pub. His mum was confined to a wheel chair but had a fully active business brain. Terry doted on his mum and they were both huge fans of Shirley Bassey.

There were two seventeen year old girls who worked at the stables: Susan and Patricia. I liked Susan, a lovely young woman, but she was not interested in me. Patricia was interested in me, but I had eyes for no one but Susan. What a familiar story!

Terry taught me how to ride horses. I was never an ‘expert’ but I was competent enough to take out parties of sometimes twenty riders. I often rode a big grey mare called Lady, but also a frisky little pony that was difficult to control and gave me the satisfaction of knowing there were few people who could ride such a nervous beast. Terry once gave me the opportunity of riding his own precious mount, Texas, who promptly bolted towards a ditch and threw me in a magnificent somersault over the hedge on the other side. I landed on my back, winded, and was thoroughly annoyed with Terry because he seemed – damnit he was – more concerned that Texas might have been hurt by the event. He fussed over the animal long after I had got up, checked myself for broken bones, and then scraped the mud and twigs off my clothes.

I enjoyed my part-time job at the riding school and was eternally grateful to Terry for passing on his knowledge of horses. Years later in Bahrain I would mount one of the famous Sheikh of Bahrain’s stallions bareback and give a good account of myself in a race over the desert. I would never have been able to do that had I not been taught by a man who knew and liked quadrupeds better than he liked bipeds. After leaving Uxbridge I never heard of Terry again.

While working in the comcen at Uxbridge two superior-looking airmen returned from Singapore sporting gold watches and golden tans. I listened to their stories of Singapore with great envy, remembering my childhood in Aden, and wishing I could go to the Far East myself and turn into one of these golden people again. It was a yearning that was to be fulfilled. Many times in my life I have hungered for things – not money, I hasten to add, but such postings and work as would make my life a wonderful experience – and they have come through. Whether that’s due to a burning desire making it happen, or a belief in a greater spirit than Man, coincidence or simply fate, I do not know, but a guardian angel watches over me.

A posting to Singapore came through just four months after arriving at RAF Uxbridge, and what was more my old mates Chid and Johnny Ball were on the same flight. We were going to the mystic east together, Chid, John and I, to RAF Changi comcen. Life was about to get 100 percent better. Goodbye, grey old England. Hello, sunshine, bull frogs in storm drains, colourful birds, jungled islands, great food, oriental girls, Tiger beer, gambling until the short hours, good pay, cheap cameras and watches, terrific tailor-made clothes, expeditions into Malaya (not yet Malaysia), cicadas, swimming, boating, and oh, just the good good-life.

8. RAF Changi

We flew out to the Far East on 20 November 1959, in a Bristol Britannia, which had four turboprop engines. It was an airliner built to fly across the British Empire, but only eighty-five were made before pure jet-engined aircraft took over. The flight, which refuelled in Istanbul and Bombay, took almost a whole day real time. On board were three young airmen, still not yet out of their teens, keen to start life in the Orient. When we landed and stepped from the aircraft the heat and smells assailed us, smothering us like a hot wet blanket made of herbs and spices. It was wonderful. I breathed deeply, went down the steps and once more stood on eastern tarmac.

John and Chid had never been out of England before and I can only guess at their thoughts and emotions at being flung from a dreary English winter into a land of sunshine, colour and vibrant life. We were now in Singapore, land of the twenty-four-hour made-to-measure suit, the free port where Rolex watches and Minolta cameras were affordable to ordinary young men.

The billets at Changi were huge blocks containing three open-plan floors in which something like 250 men slept. We were on the top floor of Block 42, the roof supported by several enormous concrete pillars. There were no internal walls and several wide gaps led out on to the surrounding veranda in the outer walls. It was like living on one of the floors in a multi-storey car park. We had a bearer by the name of Bunti, an Indian with a magnificent body and a man who took no cheek from young sprats. He cleaned our kit for us, made our beds and did various other tasks. Since he looked after the whole floor of eighty-odd airmen, he probably earned a good wage. I liked Bunti and I think he liked me. One day he gave me a praying mantis, a pet I kept on my small locker for months. The mantis was not caged. Bunti taught me to ‘box’ it lightly with two fingers and it would seem to punch back with its forelegs. That was the reason, Bunti told me, it would stay with me, interested in our encounters.

Our greatest animal friends in the billet were the chit-chats, gecko lizards that stuck to the walls and ceiling with their sucker feet. They ate the mosquitoes and other biting insects. However, they did nothing to curb the bedbugs by which we were plagued for our whole Far Eastern tour. Every morning I would wake with splodges of blood on my sheets and little black bodies where I had rolled over and crushed the bugs while they were in the act of draining my veins. Their bites didn’t actually itch or hurt at all, but the vampire aspect of these parasites gave everyone the chills. Even putting the four legs of the bed into cans of oil did not help. Bedbugs came out of the cracks in the walls and on the ceiling, and dropped down like a parachute regiment of the insect world, to feast on the alcohol-charged blood of sleeping airmen.

The one other member of the natural world I remember with less than affection is the Singapore bullfrog, who would get into the storm drains at night and bellow. The drains were built like tunnels, so they amplified any sound that occurred within their walls. Bull frogs they were, but they made a noise like a rogue elephant.

One of our first introductions to Singapore was a lecture on Chinese secret societies: gangs of criminals. In 1959 they were averaging a Mafia-style murder a night, mostly involving rival gangs. Each gang had an identifying tattoo, which they wore with pride and for recognition in different districts. Airmen were told by an officer that he would inspect any tattoos they had to make sure they weren’t going to be mistaken for a rival gang member and bumped off in some alley. The favourite weapon of the Chinese gangs was a light bulb injected with sulphuric acid. This was tossed like a hand grenade.

To combat the Chinese Secret Societies the British had formed squads of Gurkha soldiers, who had vehicles similar to fire wagons. The wagons were manned by about 20 armed Gurkhas ready to swoop on any area in which a gang was operating. These Gurkha patrols had colourful names like ‘Dragon Squad’ or ‘Shark Squad’ and their wagons were painted with their symbolic creatures. If the squads couldn’t deal with the problem, a major riot for instance, the RAF could be called in. We were taught to form squares, rifles pointing outwards, with various officials inside the square. A man with a megaphone would order the crowd to disperse, then someone would read out the Riot Act and the consequences of not dispersing, and then finally tear gas and (God forbid) live rounds would be used on the rioters. It never happened while I was in Singapore and I never heard of it happening at any other time.

Lee Kuan Yew was the new first prime minister of the Republic of Singapore, though the island was not yet independent of Great Britain and would not be until 1963, when it would join the Federation of Malaysia. It became fully independent in 1965 when it left the federation and Lee Kuan Yew took it forward on his own. Even as I arrived Harry Lee (as he was known to the English) was cleaning up the colony of its ‘vices’ – sex, drink and opium. Lee Kuan Yew was a puritan of sorts who even had cinema posters of actresses with low necklines painted over so that they were not ‘revealing’. Later he would ban chewing gum and failing to flush a public toilet would become a criminal offence. Corporal punishment and execution have been retained to this day.

In his later biography Lee Kuan Yew spoke of his disappointment with the British Army when the Japanese defeated them in Singapore during the war, coming down as they did through the Malayan peninsula. Lee said Singaporians had until that point believed the British to be invincible and were devastated to find that they were as vulnerable as any other nation. This seems a bit naive to say the least, coming from an intelligent man who must be aware of world history. The British have lost many battles in the past – and that’s what it was, simply a battle – but what Singapore’s prime minister failed to underline was that the Japanese were eventually defeated and sent home with their tails between their legs. The war was won.

~

Lee turned a colony into a wealthy, thriving nation despite its being populated by three separate groups – Malays, Chinese and Indians – as well as expats from several ‘white’ countries. Since I left in 1960 Singapore has flourished beyond recognition: the kampongs have all gone, the people are housed in flats, business is booming, the harbour is full of foreign merchant vessels, the trade in computer parts soaring, banking is flourishing. There are beautiful parks and walkways and numerous places of harmless entertainment, including the offshore island of Sentosa which has among its other multifarious attractions, a terrific golf course.

More recently Annette and I have walked in the clouds up on the Skypark, a liver-shaped platform straddling three tall skyscrapers, looking down on a city of the future. There are viewing areas, bars, restaurants and an infinity swimming pool up there. You can stroll in the heavens and enjoy tremendous views over Singapore and its magnificent port. Singapore is now one of the most modern cities, nay countries, in the world. Pristine clean, wealthy, thriving, its architectural landscape amazing, yet it has retained many refurbished old traditional buildings to keep a flavour of the past in its streets. It is a democracy which has never been tested by any change in its leadership, Lee having been its Prime Minister for over fifty years, but the politics seem to have worked for it, since there does not appear to be any overt corruption and its citizens enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world.

Singapore rivals Hong Kong and Shanghai for being one of the most prosperous and crimeless cities in the world. In the first decade of the new millennium my daughter, Chantelle, and her husband, Mark, along with their three boys, lived for several years in Singapore. Annette and I took every opportunity to fly out there and stay with them. We love it still, even with Harry Lee’s modern-city makeover.

~

However, back in 1959 there were still dance halls where girls could be met. I have already mentioned that the Great World was one of these, where you paid for a dance, got to know your partner and then met them after work finished in the early hours of the morning. Bedok Corner was a stretch of beach along which there were many many food stalls selling cooked fish, lobster, squid, beef, pork and rice. Paper lanterns hung from strings connecting the stalls and swayed in the night breezes. We would go drinking Singapore slings in the bars, especially the Long Bar of the Raffles Hotel, until midnight, then meet Chinese or Malay girls on Bugis Street. Thence to Bedok Corner for Hokkien prawn mee or some other local dish (the Singapore Chinese speak the Hokkien dialect of the country of their origin) and finally return to camp thoroughly washed out, fatigued and happy as Larry, ready to do a full day’s work.

Sometimes airmen would have to do guard duty on the edge of the airfield, a short ‘jungle’ .303 rifle in their hands. Malaya was still in a state of emergency with the War of the Running Dogs. Chinese-backed guerrillas were still causing mayhem just over the water on the mainland of Malaya, the ‘running dogs’ a derogatory term for those who remained loyal to the government. In 2007 the Malaysian government sent me a medal for assisting in that war, though I did little but walk about peering into the rainforest hoping not to see anyone with a weapon.

I had not long turned 18 years of age.

Singapore evenings were the best, when the heat was not quite so hot and the humidity not quite so humid. If we didn’t go into the city itself we sat in the Malcolm Club and drank Tiger beer while the moths and mosquitoes battled with the lights. Sometimes evenings were quiet, on other times they developed into a party. (It was a time when ‘party’ was still only a noun.) Other clubs were the Cameron Club and the Chalet Club. Plenty of clubs for all tastes. Every so often I would order an ‘egg banjo’ from the food counter. This was simply a fried egg sandwich, but everything in Singapore had an exotic name. If not an egg banjo, fried rice from one of the stalls in the village. It was in Changi village one evening when I bought my first really good camera, a Minolta, which took excellent photos. I used it for black-and-white, but also for colour slides, which were the popular medium then.

Later, when I left Singapore for a year on Gan Island, in the Maldives, I hocked the camera at a pawn shop. On returning on leave some six months later, I thought I would have trouble retrieving the Minolta, but the instant I stepped inside the shop the owner said, ‘Ah, Mr Keewuff, you come back for your camera!’ He had only seen me once, when I pawned the item. The man had a phenomenal memory, as do many Chinese, probably due to the fact that their written ‘picture’ language requires memory, not encoding and decoding twenty-six characters as ours does. To read a newspaper only, requires remembering 4,000 different characters. To do anything scholarly, from 10,000 to 20,000. Their memory boxes have a wonderful capacity, to be sure.

We visited Changi jail one afternoon. Behind those walls were a thousand nightmares left over from the Japanese occupation of the Second World War. Graffiti abounded and I seem to remember a small chapel outside the prison confines with some heart-wrenching prayers cut into the wooden seats and altar. We knew what had gone on inside that place and it sobered our teenage minds for a day, which was quite a feat. It got me thinking about the place and I purchased a book written by a POW entitled Bamboo and Bushido. Harrowing.

One afternoon I ran into Petal, the pretty WRAF lass from Coltishall, who was living with her brother and his wife in Singapore. We went on a date to the pictures. I took her to a rather sedate restaurant for a meal, then we went home in a flying taxi. I went on several more dates with her, but neither of us was serious. She was a nice girl but she had no interest in a young airman who, it seemed, would never amount to much more than what he was already. For my part I liked her, but it went no deeper than that.

Now, the ‘flying taxis’ were something else. Mercedes cars that picked up people like buses until they were full. Singapore means ‘Lion City’ and if four of us were going into the beast-city, we would each take a separate flying taxi and pay the driver extra if he could beat the other three to Bugis Street. The road was our race track. If the driver had to stop for other passengers, that was all in the game. Picking up or dropping another passenger was a pit stop. The winner would be given free drinks by the others for the rest of the evening.

I already spoke a little Arabic from my youth and in Singapore picked up some Malay, but these days I can do little more than say ‘Good day’, ‘Thankyou’ and ‘Please’ and count up to ten in both languages. I can in fact count up to ten in about a dozen languages but can speak none fluently. I believe this comes from living in nine different countries and visiting sixty others, which is my current tally at the time of writing this autobiography. Since I have flitted here and there, around the world, my learning has been of a similar kind. I am interested, and dip and dive, into a thousand different spheres of knowledge. Seashells, birds, animal life, plant life, sailing, climbing, history, geography, poetry, music, etc etc. I am not one of those people who know a lot about one or two subjects. I am one of those who know a little about a lot of things.

As I have already written, I loved the scout movement as a boy, and this enthusiasm stayed with me into my youth as well. While stationed at Changi, Chid, Johnny and I joined the Rovers, which was then a grade one step beyond Senior Scouts. The Skip who ran that Scout group was called Chips. (If you’re going to be a lifelong Scout you really do need a name like ‘Chips’.) We had some great times camping and doing scouting stuff with the Rovers in Singapore, and once did a walk the whole length of the island. I say ‘did’, but for Chid and me it was an attempt, because we both dropped out halfway due to blisters. I blame the army boots we were told to wear. If we’d worn plimsolls as we wanted to, we might have finished the walk. Johnny Ball, however, indomitable as ever, did manage to get all the way. The walk took place at night and it was well beyond dawn the next day before the survivors, three including Johnny B., crossed the finishing line to glory.

Johnny was a boxer and he suggested Chid and myself get into the ring too. I weighed a magnificent eight stone thirteen pounds at the time and so became a featherweight (under nine stones). I think Chid was welter and Johnny was one weight above that, whatever that weight might be. I was the odd one out, being small, slightly built, and fashioned more for tennis than thumping the hell out of an opponent. Johnny Ball had a body like Tarzan. Chid was lean and rangy like Clint Eastwood: in fact he was a dead ringer for the film star. They could both box well. And me? I learned the techniques but spent most of my time in the ring ducking and diving hits rather than handing them out. I didn’t want my face turned into mashed potato, and I don’t blame myself for that. One Indian boy I fought was so skinny that even though he was a featherweight like me, his arms were twice as long as mine. I couldn’t get near the bloke and he gave me a bloody nose and two black eyes for trying. Boxing was not the best thing I ever took up, though I was to continue with it for over a year and a half.

I had one or two Chinese friends when I was there as a youth, a young man called Cheong in particular. The RAF in foreign climes used to recruit local men to assist with communications and other areas of expertise – Malta and Singapore especially – and this of course gave me the opportunity to meet and make friends with people who had been born and raised in the country I was simply passing through. Cheong was good at table tennis and taught me how to play the game Chinese-style, which stood me in good stead in the Far East Championships, where I acquitted myself much better than I had done at boxing.

A diary I kept at the time, the only one I have ever kept, tells me that Johnny Ball and I bought a record player between us and at the same time purchased a Johnny Mathis long-playing record The Twelfth of Never, along with Dave Brubeck’s Sounds of a Loop. I recall buying Brubeck’s ‘Brandenburg Gate’ but not the former. MJQ was another of my favourite modern jazz bands and I like most traditional jazz, from King Oliver and Bix Beiderbeck to Monty Sunshine. It was Johnny Ball who first aroused my interest in jazz and I have been an enthusiast ever since. Today I love the now ageing but still-brilliant French pianist Jacques Loussier, who plays jazzed-up Bach. His Play Bach album, the one recorded in Israel on the church organ and not the purified version on the piano recorded in France, is astonishing for its power. Whenever I play it, the first few bars hit me like a typhoon. I never cease to gasp at the breathtaking strength of its notes.

I have recently discovered another band who have taken the works of a classical composer and warp and weave with them. The Red Priest, who call themselves the ‘pirates of baroque’ do modern jazz versions of Vivaldi’s works. I will always be grateful to Johnny Ball for showing me how music can be twisted and turned to produce wonderful sounds, because like they say, if I hadn’t caught jazz in my youth, I would probably never play it in my more appreciative years. It has had a huge impact on my life and I can’t see that changing now.

Probably my love of jazz is why I also catch the peripheral and lesser-known types of music which seem to have a connection with jazz. I heard Cajun music for the first time in the film Southern Comfort and now have several CDs which I thoroughly enjoy. Oscar Wilde said that the definition of a gentleman is someone who can play the piano accordion – but doesn’t. Cajuns, descendents of French Canadians who live mainly in Louisanna are no gentlemen. They play the accordion like men possessed and the music they produce is phenomenal.

Likewise, since going to Spain I have come into contact with Spanish gypsy music, cante jondo, which usually involves a drummer, a guitarist and a vocals man with a voice like a landslide in the Sierra-Nevada. The first time you hear cante jondo it nearly blasts you out of your seat. You instinctively push your chair back from the stage and look round frantically for the fire exit. Cante jondo means ‘deep song’. It is an experience not to be missed, though my dear friend Ben Connor would disagree. A fan of Frank Sinatra, Ben believes cante jondo is the music of the Devil and crosses himself every time I play it. I once thought it derived from Moorish music, but I learned recently that cante hondo goes even further back, into some dark pagan era of the early Spanish mountain tribes.

I also see by my badly written diary that in 1959 I was reading Island in the Sun by Alec Waugh, which impressed me. Alec is the brother of Evelyn Waugh, who of course wrote Brideshead Revisited. I much prefer Alec and his love of sunshine islands, than Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh, whose name tells you all you need to know about his subject. I also read Arthur Grimble’s A Pattern of Islands during the same period. It was the beginning of my fascination with the Pacific and the Polynesian peoples, whose magical history of migration throughout their wide ocean inspired me to write a trilogy with the title ‘The Navigator Kings’, a series of novels which sold miserably, but of which I am enormously proud. That trilogy contains some of my best storytelling.

Singapore, with its oppressive heat and magnificent odours is deep in my blood. While on boxing training I ran its roads, I swam its waterways. Most of the rainforest has gone now, and certainly all the kampongs, but the flavours remain. Orchard Road is my favourite street in the whole world. The parks, the Botanic Gardens, the parkways with their bike paths and skating lanes. If I had to live anywhere for the rest of my life, politics apart, I would choose Singapore.

And of all the places I visited in Singapore, both in my youth and throughout my later life, the one that stands out is the Tiger Balm Gardens. I first visited the gardens at an age when I was less critical than I am now. Then the painted statues of both culture and myth were enough to fire any would-be writer’s imagination. Yes, the exhibition was gaudy, and cheap-looking, trashy even, but it dazzled one’s imagination in the bright Singapore sunlight. Scenes of Hell with men being cut in half by red-hot swords or disembowelled by demons or chopped into bloody quarters. Statues of giants and gods and goblins. Tableaux of elephants crossing mountains and herds of horses charging through valleys. Monkeys, ogres, huge serpents, dragons, mice, warriors, kings, princes, harlots, all painted in bright brash colours, their expressions twisted into masks of fury or horror. The Tiger Balm Gardens was a unique experience. Some would hate this show for its tawdriness and vulgarity, but I came to love it in my unsophisticated youth and remained ever a devotee.

~

On the 2 January 1960 I had my weigh-in at 6 o’clock in the morning for the coming boxing matches in the Far East Air Force Boxing Championships. My diary tells me I was beaten on points. I had a few cuts and bruises, but nothing to cry about. Johnny Ball won his fight and Chid won three of his bouts. I was feeling pretty low but I hadn’t realised at the time that poets and short-story writers aren’t meant to slug it out in the ring with boilermakers and road builders. At least they can, but they’re most likely going to get thumped unless they have names like Ernest Hemingway or Jack London.

~

Airmen in Singapore were sent to Frazer’s Hill in Malaya for jungle training. I was looking forward to this expedition training immensely, despite my misgivings regarding the leeches I had heard so much about. However, it was not to be. On the 19 February 1960, I was told I had been posted to RAF Gan, a coral island in the south of the Maldives. Gan was a staging post and a rescue airfield for aircraft which got into trouble crossing the wide blue Indian Ocean. Quite a few personnel from Singapore were sent there and served less than a year before being sent back to UK. I hated the idea. I loved Singapore and wanted to stay there forever. Now I was going to an island which measured one mile by half a mile. Nothing there, so I thought, but coral dust, work and endless boredom with nowhere to go.

On the 25 February 1960, I boarded a Hastings aircraft and had a flight to Ceylon (not yet Sri Lanka), stayed the night and the next morning flew on to Addu Atoll, a ring of coral islands of which Gan is one. The atoll is the southernmost group of the many atolls of the Maldives, right smack-bang on the equator. No gloaming to be had in these islands, where the noons are absolutely vertical. Darkness drops down like black tar at 6 p.m., dawn jumps up from the horizon at 6 a.m. and twilight is but a fleeting shadow. The inhabitants of the Maldives are small of stature, but lively and quick to smile. They speak among other languages, Urdu. They are Muslims, brilliant sailors, great fishermen, fine cricketers. A delightful bunch of people.

I was nineteen years of age when I stepped from the plane and I’d already lived in several countries and had been to twenty-two different schools. I still had no civil exams to my name. I’d been studying rather indifferently and had begun to write poetry. I still felt cheated of an education at Eton and Cambridge, having as my literary meat novels where the hero went to a good public school, then Oxbridge, and thence into an exciting career as a pilot or diplomat.

I was, as ever, absolutely convinced that one day I would become a writer, though what made me so sure when I had no real skill at the art – in fact my diary at the time shows me to be completely lacking in basic grammar, spelling and punctuation – can be put down to the fact that my mother always told me I would be a famous author one day. My mother and father were both unschooled and though mum wrote poems these were of the Patience Strong variety. I had nothing going for me except desire and determination, a love of reading and a feeling that I had it in me, somewhere, to write well.

9. RAF Gan, Maldives

I found much depression and dissipation among the airmen stationed on Gan. There was an arch which stood near the billets on which were written the words ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ When they were not working, young men lay on their bedbugged beds and stared listlessly at the ceiling fan turning round and round. All they wanted to do was to go home to the UK. They had ‘chuff charts’: home-made calendars on which they crossed out each day nearer to the aircraft home, which was naturally called the ‘Happy Bird’. A few did a little sport, but most just lay on their ‘pits’ (RAF slang for beds) for n (the symbol for ‘infinity’). The only sounds they emitted were long, drawn-out sighs. Not long after I arrived in Gan I asked someone, ‘Have you got the time?’ and they replied wearily, ‘April.’ It was not a good introduction to a place where I was to spend the next eleven months of my young life.

When I saw how much time I would have to myself I immediately drew up a programme of reading. There was a good library on the island, well-stocked with books. I decided to take out one serious novel each week (starting with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Kararmazov), a humorous novel and a book of poems. Thus I was introduced to P.G. Wodehouse, Tennyson, and a host of other authors, some of which I knew, many of which I did not.

During my time on Gan I read at least three or four books a week, both classics and contemporary works, and thus filled the literary larder in my head with good books. I was already fairly well read, having devoured books from the age of ten, and with Russian and French authors I was entering pastures new. Gogol’s Dead Souls amazed me. The short stories of Maupassant, O. Henry, H.G. Wells and Kafka I found absolutely magical. I read both the Iliad and the Odyssey in the right order. Poe, Hawthorne, Jack London, Victor Hugo, Dumas, John Steinbeck, Colette, Karel Capek, oh and dozens more, including an incredible writer, Stefan Zweig, who wrote The Royal Game, Fantastic Night and Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman. It was writers like Zweig that had me aching to write short stories.

It was here on Gan that I found the genre that was to become the love of my literary life: science fiction. My first introduction to this wonderfully imaginative writing was a paperback anthology Penguin Science Fiction edited by an author called Brian Aldiss. These were stories that took my breath away. I was soon reading novels as well as short stories, though the latter were always top of the list. Authors like Ron Goulart, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, William Hjortsberg, John Wyndham, J.G. Ballard, Brian himself. Now I have a whole library of these legends in the science fiction world.

I devoured books without criticism, took them in without analysis, simply enjoyed the fact that I was reading works that my old headmasters would have said were beyond my capabilities and intellect, may those unimaginative schoolies all whirl in their graves.

It was on Gan that my poetry began to emerge as something a little more than just verse.

Gan is actually an amazing island. During my time there it had been stripped of vegetation almost completely. The other islands in the atoll, which could be reached by walking along the reef at low tide, were thickly jungled. Fedu, Mattadu and Hittaddu were the closest to us, the latter being only yards away. So, Gan itself was bare except for the buildings down one end – huts mostly – and the runway and control tower. Coral dust was everywhere. The island itself was mushroom-shaped, with about four to six feet of the top of the mushroom above water level. Yes indeed, only that much! The reef protected these low-lying coral islands from the savage sea during times of storms. Later, these islands inspired two of my novels: In the Hollow of the Deep-sea Wave and Cloudrock.

None of the local people actually lived on our island, but arrived for work – cooks, cleaners, road workers, etc. – by dhoni every morning. The dhoni was a traditional boat similar in shape to the Arab dhow. They were sailed and rowed from island to island. There were also Pakistani workers employed by the RAF and a sprinkling of British civilians. The Queen’s Representative had an isolated house on Gan. Chid and I met him on one of our round-the-island walks.

This was Humphrey Arthington-Davy. He invited the two of us into his thatched-roofed bungalow, which looked nothing on the outside – a sort of Robinson Crusoe affair – but was lavishly furnished and stocked with good food and fine wines. Once inside we were given a drink and asked if we played chess. It felt a little out of the ordinary because men of Arthington-Davy’s high office do not normally fraternise with common callow youths like Kilworth and Chidlow. However, we made two good attempts at beating him at the royal game. The Queen’s Rep had soon disposed of me on the chess board, but Chid gave him a good run for his money. Besides being a better boxer than me, Chid was also better at chess. I do not have the temperament for games which advance so slowly there is enough time to draw a detailed map of Borneo in between moves. Chid is also better at card games than me, though I think I could take him at golf or tennis. I would like to think so.

I made a statement that Gan was actually an amazing place. What made it amazing was not the island itself, but the lagoons within and around the atoll. There were fantastic coral gardens below the waves. It didn’t matter that our island was bare. All one had to do was put on a mask and snorkel and enter the water. There, in the huge lagoon ringed by Addu Atoll, was a magnificent world of colour, with many varieties of coral and a multitude of fish. I saw manta rays like delta-winged bombers gliding through the shallows. I swam with sharks, barracuda and poisonous lion fish. Deadly stone fish littered the submerged rocks. Puffer fish ballooned when I touched them and huge groupers with the mouths of clowns raced away. There were trigger, parrot, angel, zebra and a thousand other reef fish covered in stripes and spots, all in startling primary colours. Moray eels as thick as my thigh lurked in holes in the coral, showing only their heads with their tiny piercing eyes. Starfish, several kinds of crab, sea cucumbers, plants of many varieties, molluscs in shells which formed astonishing architecture. It really was an amazing paradise of strange and wonderful creatures. I had seen coral gardens in Aden, but none to match those in the waters of our atoll. Hans and Lotte Hass, famous subaqua film-makers, came to Gan while I was there and told us that the coral at Addu Atoll was the best in the world.

Once Chid had joined me on Gan we went snorkelling almost every day. The pair of us went to parts of the island where no one else could be bothered to go. The waters of one side of Gan were choked with palm trunks, where they had been bulldozed into the sea by the builders of the runway, Costains. This maze of rotting woodwork became a haven for moray eels and Chid and I would go looking for the biggest we could find in the dark tunnels created by the discarded palms. We started a collection of marvellous shells we found on the beach and soon had a showcase of them. This was best after a storm, when freshlydead gastropods and bipods would be thrown up on to the coral sands. We would get them before the sun bleached them and they lost their sheen. Harpa majors, turbans, razor shells, mitres, olives, combs, spires. They were like jewels, this bounty of the ocean, and when we came across a new one in perfect condition it was like finding a ruby or an emerald. Our hearts would race with pleasure.

Chid and I also played tennis, drank a lot of beer, and played a lot of records by Connie Francis and Brenda Lee. We were missing female company at an age when testosterone was surging through our bodies in raging wild rivers. Chid discovered an author he loved who wrote novels about a British spy called James Bond. I tried one Diamonds Are Forever and thought it pretty good, but I preferred Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with wonderful lines like, ‘He was about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a piece of angel cake’. I wanted to write lines like that. Although Bond was a new and exciting character in the world of fiction, an Englishman with no conscience or compassion who had a licence to kill, quite unlike Biggles or Dick Barton, it was Chandler’s art that led me to admire him more than Ian Fleming.

When another of our old 29th Entry, Mick Rule, a confident guy with a great sense of adventure arrived on Gan, he devised new schemes to make the best of our time on a tropical island that had no women. Mick was one of those youths whose body and good looks were enough to capture any female he might want. Handsome as a film star and charismatic, Mick had been out with more girls than I had read good books. Now there were no females to woo, if that’s the right word, Mick spent his time thinking up adventures for himself, Chid and me. We hired a dhoni between us and rowed to the islands on the far side of the atoll and there chased wild pigs, and ate and drank coconuts. We went fishing for sharks with just a fishing line wrapped around a beer can and we caught and ate them too. We took spear guns and hunted for our suppers, catching red snapper and taking them to the cookhouse. We had drinking games and races and organised cricket matches against a mixed Pakistani-Maldivian team. The winners would provide a meal afterwards and it was my first taste of hot curry. I hated it. I dreaded losing the match, knowing I’d have to eat that stuff and smile doing it. How ironic then that my favourite meal these days is prawn madras.

~

Many years later, in the first decade of the millennium Annette and I were on a plane from Singapore to the Maldives. It was my first visit to the islands since 1960. There had been a tsunami since then, which had destroyed much of the coral. On the plane Annette was sitting next to a Maldivian woman flying home from Thailand. The woman had been to the funeral of her father, who had died of a heart attack while working in Bangkok. We commiserated with her and then learned that her father had been the captain of the cricket team who had played against my old cricket team in 1960. These small-world coincidences are what has made life so interesting. I have been fortunate enough to experience several such encounters.

~

My memories of Gan are threefold, as with any country where I have spent time: the good, the bad and the humorous. On the humorous side is the day the monsoon rains arrived. There were small frogs everywhere, not just hundreds but thousands. You could hardly walk for treading on the poor creatures, a live moving green carpet that covered the ground. We did our best not to crush them. At the same time, our water for washing and showering on Gan was salty, having been pumped up through the coral. So when it rained fresh water we would be out under the eaves of the huts, naked as babes, soaping ourselves down and enjoying the thorough cleansing of our sunburned, salt-encrusted skins. On such a day, with around 200 naked airmen scrubbing their young bodies, an unexpected aircraft full of navy wives landed on the island. The plane had to taxi past our billets and the faces at the windows had wide open mouths and even wider eyes.

Chid and I often used to wade out to the reef. From the land it looked like we were walking on water, because at low tide between the island and the circling reef – around 500 yards – the water only came up to a walker’s knees. We did this one late afternoon, intending to throw out lines for the BIG fish in the deep, deep ocean on the other side of the reef (‘There are giants out there in the canyons . . .’ sings Billy Joel in ‘Downeaster “Alexa”’). As usual we caught zilch. That day we stayed much too late on the outer reef. The sky darkened with a coming storm, the tide rose to our necks, and we ended up struggling, chilled to the bone, through fields of brain coral in darkness and driving rain, unable to see the shore. It would not have been too bad – we were after all teenagers with absolute faith in our own invulnerability and immunity from death – but Chid had to go and quote from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

‘Like one that on a lonely road,

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head,

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread . . .’

Where he learned that quote I never knew and even then it would have been all right had he not joked at the end, ‘I can smell evil in the air this evening.’ That did it. I had seen too many horror films. Read too many horror stories. We were suddenly spooked out of our skins. We thrashed our way through the wild waters in a great panic, having a desperate need to see land and lights, and feel safe and warm again.

~

On the not so humorous side, our eggs were preserved in isinglass and when you broke the yolk the stink was awful. Still we ate them, just as we ate the bread that was full of the small blackened bodies of dead weevils. You could always tell a newcomer to the island by the fact that he picked the weevils out of his slice. After a while it got to be a tedious exercise and one simply ate the dead weevils along with the bread, murmuring, ‘Extra bit on the meat ration.’ The tea too, being salty, tasted like seawater. In fact there wasn’t a lot going for us in the cookhouse, but one has to eat to live. The fish we caught from the jetty were cooked to a turn though, and thus we survived.

One guy almost didn’t survive Gan.

One day on the beach an airman was loading an elastic-driven spear gun. He had almost got it hooked up when the spear slipped in his fingers and flew from the gun like a bolt from a crossbow. It struck another airman in the chest, right above his heart. The injured man went down like a felled tree, one hand clutching the rusty spear that was sticking from his chest, just like in the movies. Fortunately, if there can be anything fortunate about such an accident, it was a trident spear. The bar of the trident, from which protruded three two-inch-long barbs, prevented the spear from going too deep into the man’s heart. Had it been a spear with a single head, like an arrow, he would have been dead.

Either we had a surgeon on the island or one was flown in promptly, because the injured man underwent an operation within hours and happily he survived.

~

On Addu Atoll we often had electrical storms, many of them dry, without accompanying rain. Out in the tropics these storms are much more dramatic than any experienced in Britain. The whole heavens light up with scores of lightning flashes that occur simultaneously. Thunder claps crash across the sky, cracking in from a dozen different directions. It’s not just one flash, followed a short time later by a thunderclap. It’s thirty or forty zigzagging spears coming down from thick cloud, followed by two dozen explosions in the air. And there’s very little respite. These brotherhoods of lightning and their sisterhood thunderclaps come one after the other, overlapping, relentless.

One night we had such a storm. A Hastings aircraft was due to arrive with the Commander-in-Chief Far East Air Force on board. The biggest brass in that corner of the world. By the time the aircraft was circling over Gan, the storm was at its worst, punching the guts out of the sky, with many a fizzing lightning flash streaking down the black face of the night. The pilot of the Hastings executed a swift neat landing.

Unfortunately it was not on the runway. He had mistaken certain lightning flashes on the surface of the sea for the runway guiding lights. He actually made a perfect landing in the middle of the lagoon. Everyone got out of the plane, but it sank within minutes to the bottom of the ocean. The Air Commodore was not a happy man and I would hate to dwell on the fate of that poor pilot.

While I was on Gan I sent to Singapore for a Longines watch I had saved up for. It was a beautiful slim timepiece and I was immensely proud of it, the way young men usually are of such jewellery. Later in life I gave it to my son Richard, who still wears it. He also has my South Arabian Campaign medal, awarded for Active Service in Aden in the withdrawal of 1966-7. He doesn’t wear that of course.

Just before we left Gan, Chid and I had our nineteenth birthdays. We both got drunk and threw stones at the guardhouse. Once in July and once in August. Chid is a month younger than me.

Chid and I were due to go back to UK at the same time, but we still yearned for Singapore. So we joined the Gan boxing team and went to the FEAF Championships on our way home. As I have said, I lost my fight yet again.

On arrival in UK, the Customs and Excise people went to work on us. Everything depended on when one had purchased a watch or camera, or whatever, because if the item was over a year old there was no duty on it. Chid and myself had both got our respective Chinese watch sellers to backdate our receipts. Chid had a gold Rolex. I had my Longines. I got away with the deception, but as I was leaving through the green door I saw Chid being led away by grim-faced Customs officials with narrowed eyes. I thought at the time they were going to execute him, but he later caught me up at the station having merely been fined.

~

John Chidlow actually went back to Gan in 1966, for another year-long tour of duty, while I went to Aden. We were both newly married and these two postings were ‘unaccompanied’. Naturally neither of us was happy with the RAF administration for parting us from our families.

10. Ministry of Defence

Probably the less I say about my posting to the MOD in London the better. I hated the place. I was in the main comcen, deep in the bowels of MOD, which stood close to the Thames and had Scotland Yard for a neighbour. I shared a flat in Earls Court with two other airmen who worked on different shifts to me. The flat itself was a single room about fifteen feet by ten feet, with a gas ring that swung out from the gas fire on which we made beans on toast. There was just about enough room to walk between and around the beds, while our clothes hung on a rail at the end of the room. There was no other furniture. No chest of drawers, no wardrobe, no chairs, no table. The only saving grace about that flat was the landlady’s daughter, who was quite attractive. I used to pass her on the stairs and she would smile at me and wish me a good day.

While I was at the MOD my father George was diagnosed with stomach cancer and had a life expectancy of six months. My brother Ray, only sixteen at the time, had joined the Merchant Navy and was away at sea, somewhere near Capetown, South Africa. Derek was at home, but he was thirteen and of course as upset as mum herself. I was at home when my mother was told the bad news and naturally she broke down. It was a weekend, I was on leave at my parents’ house in Rochford, due to report for work on Monday morning. I rang my warrant officer and told him the situation and he said, ‘Get into work right away, Kilworth – I want no bloody skivers on my watch!’ I left my distraught mother and caught the train to London, only to find that wiser heads had persuaded my watch commander that I should be with my mother at such a time. I was told to return home and did so, but I will never forget the bitterness I felt towards the officers in charge.

~

Close to the flat in Earls Court was a jazz venue called the Café des Artistes where I used to hang out in my off-duty hours. At other times I would go to the Marquee or Ronnie Scott’s, two other jazz joints. I was very lonely at the MOD. This haiku reflects my mood at the time:

Poem by a Lonely Youth in London

Comely city girls,

sacred as parkland flowers,

for viewing only.

I would wander along the Thames Embankment, or visit the museums and art galleries, praying that I would get posted to another camp very soon, preferably an operational flying unit with real Air Force planes. The only NCOs at work whom I respected at all were two sergeants. One elderly man whose name I can’t remember and the other a unique character, a young Sergeant Nelson, who later became my warrant officer DSO when I was a sergeant DSM (Duty Signals Master) at Strike Command. Nelly was one of the smartest most intelligent airmen I ever came across. At the MOD he wore a suit and bowler hat, and carried a black umbrella. Indeed, he looked like one of those figures from Renee Magritte’s paintings: a bourgeois banker striding through the streets of London. But that was the showman side of Nelly, who was a deeply complex but caring man who looked after his watch of young telegraphists as if they were his own sons.

I once met Nelly outside of a work situation, when I took him home to a dinner Annette had cooked one Sunday, not very long before I was demobbed in 1974. In that situation all his confidence evaporated and he became intensely shy. He visited just that once, though I invited him back many times after that. To my knowledge Nelly never had a relationship outside of work with anyone, male or female, and indeed never spoke of any friends. However, the respect he had within the RAF, from both his superiors and his men, was unequalled. Warrant Officer Nelson was indeed a legend in his time, a man so competent you wondered why he had never put himself forward in the political arena. He would have made a great prime minister.

Before he got sick, dad had his ‘tally man’ job, selling women’s dresses door-to-door from the back of a van. He hated the work but jobs were hard to find. An old friend of his had given him employment. I could see the stress it was causing in him and it worried me. He was gambling too – at the dogs mostly – and, as ever with him, losing his hard-earned wages. He would wait for me to come home of a weekend, then ask me quietly for a loan, out of earshot of my mother. George was not a waster, but he had a gambler’s blood in his veins and when times were bad he turned to it for comfort.

Dad’s end was almost scripted. The boys of our family have always had a partial blindness in the right eye. Dad had it, I have it and Ray has it. I can’t remember whether Derek suffered from it too, but I suspect so, since it only becomes apparent in early manhood. The medics seemed to think they could correct the imperfection in dad and he underwent an eye operation. During that operation he was given an epidermal injection that damaged a ganglion and left him with a painful right leg, the nerves all shot. More or less at the same time as he was recovering from the eye operation and complaining about the injury to his ‘leg’ he also complained of stomach pains.

The doctors dismissed the latter, saying it was a result of dad trying to compensate for the poor leg performance when he walked. In other words, they believed it was muscular. When they discovered it was stomach cancer it was too late: he then had only a few weeks to live. Raymond was sent for and was flown back from South Africa. For the next six months dad lay on the living room sofa, drugged and listless. He was never told him what was wrong with him, because mum knew it would terrify him. So we kept up a pretence that it was a muscular problem which would eventually be cured.

Dad was taken into hospital for his last few days. They said at the moment of death he sat up, looked around him, smiled at a fellow patient, then fell back onto his pillow.

~

In London one day, sitting in my flat, I heard a knock on the door. Opening it, there stood Chid! He was at the time serving at RAF Compton Bassett, the giant hub of the RAF’s telecommunications, and a place he hated as much as I did the MOD. Neither was a good posting. They were large communication centres with no heart, no spirit, no real camaraderie and too many chiefs.

‘Hello, mate!’ I said, glad to see him. ‘Come up for the weekend?’

‘I’ve deserted,’ Chid replied. ‘Or gone AWOL.’ He frowned. ‘Is there a difference?’

‘Dunno, mate.’ I was a bit shaken by his news. ‘You’d better come in.’

He did come in and gave me his story. It was one of those tales of finally snapping after months of harassment. I never learned exactly what had got to Chid, but I knew it had to be bad because he was a toughie and could put up with a great deal before snapping. I didn’t try to persuade him to go back. I could see that he was determined to run away and stay away. We spent the day together, knocking around the capital, then he said goodbye and left. He needed money but I only had a fiver to give him at that time. Later he wrote for more, but again I was travelling backwards and forwards to Rochford and had none to send. I felt really bad about that, but I had no friends at the MOD, at least none I could ask for money, and by the next payday Chid was already in custody.

So Chid had his rebellion against authority and it was time for me to kick the traces, though I was less dramatic in my revolt. I was absolutely sick of the MOD by that time and asked for an exchange posting to an operational station. It meant someone changing places with me. An exchange posting was frowned upon by authority. They were looked on as bothersome and not usually taken notice of – but my superiors at the MOD were as desperate to get rid of me as I was to leave.

A miracle happened. Of all the RAF camps in Britain, the one that had the man who desired to go to London was working at RAF Coltishall, the very station I loved the most. I can’t remember his name but I know I prayed for that airman’s soul when I next went to church. I expect he came to hate the MOD as much as I did, but by that time I was in the company of old friends, and familiar Norfolk pubs.

However, before that exchange took place, a momentous event happened in my life. My old friend Tom Hasler’s parents lived just two miles away from my own. So when I went home at weekends we used to meet up and go out looking for girls. Tom was tall and handsome, and he had little trouble impressing women. I was somewhat shorter, but had cheek and ego on my side. One Saturday evening we went to the Halfway House, a pub in Thorpe Bay, Southend. There was a jazz festival on at the time: the Dave Mills Band were playing. We walked in and saw two girls sitting together, both of them very good looking. One, a slim blonde about five feet four inches tall (very important), was wearing a light blue angora cardigan and her eyes matched the colour of it. She was so pretty she took my breath away and when I asked her for a dance those blue eyes sparkled and she gave me a stunning smile and said, ‘Yes.’

As we ‘stomped’ (the jazz equivalent of jiving) she told me her name was Annette and she lived nearby. Tom was dancing with her friend, Hilary, and there was a third girl with them. They had all been to the ‘Miss Exquisite Form’ competition at the Grandstand in Westcliff-on-Sea and the three of them had come First, Second and Third. Annette confessed she was the one who had come in third because, she had a thirty-two-inch bust, unlike her pals who had somewhat larger bosoms.

Annette’s prize had been an enormous rigid-coned bra and we both laughed as she told me. Although she was rather shy, I made up for it with my unreservedness. I was totally smitten by her clear skin and lovely face: with her tall slender neck, the gazelle-like quality of her body, and her long beautiful legs. More important to me, she spoke the Queen’s English. That enchanted me. I was aspiring middle class and here was a girl who was intelligent, spoke grammatically in wonderfully clear tones, laughed a lot, was blonde and stunningly pretty, with a slim and attractive figure. Annette had left grammar school at sixteen and now worked in a local government office. Here was a lass who was above my station and education, yet miracle of miracles, she seemed to like me.

I could not believe my luck in finding such a girl.

In fact I fell in love at first meeting.

I asked if I could walk her home, which apparently was quite near at hand, and did so. It was a large house in a residential area. Thorpe Bay was the posh end of town, where the stockbrokers and bankers lived, and Annette told me her father was an accountant. ‘In the war he was the pilot of a Catalina air-sea rescue aircraft,’ she told me, ‘but he left the RAF to become the accountant to the Southend Borough Engineer.’ I was duly impressed. A Catalina has a crew of eight, so Flight Lieutenant Bill Bailey had been an important man just a few years ago and probably still was though in less dramatic employment. Annette Bailey let me kiss her goodnight and I went home walking on air. This wonderful person actually liked me. This sweet-lipped girl of seventeen years had let me kiss her goodnight. My cup not only ranneth over, it flooded the ground beneath and caused a river to swell its banks.

I phoned her the next day and we arranged another date.

~

Over the next few weeks we went to the pictures, to a show in London called The World of Suzie Wong and to France on a day trip, where I wore a Frank Sinatra hat and felt I was the man. I fell completely head over heels in love with Annette Jill Bailey. We had enormous fun together, just walking along the seafront, or sitting listening to records. Her parents tolerated me because I think they believed this was a transitory affair and I would be gone very soon. Bill Bailey called me every name but the right one – Barry, Larry, Harry – and made seeing Annette as awkward as he could without actually forbidding his daughter to meet with me. Betty Bailey was a softer person, but I don’t believe even she wanted me to be a permanent fixture at that point in time. Things got a little worse when in order to increase my visits to the house I bought a motorbike which woke neighbours when I left.

Annette and I had one or two tiffs, as lovers do. Once I wanted to see a Western movie on a bright sunny afternoon when Annette thought we should be walking ‘somewhere nice’. Another time I was supposed to join her family for Christmas and got on the wrong train, ending up in Cromer at midnight instead of Thorpe Bay. So I was a day late and fifty years later Annette still hasn’t forgiven me for that. But these were small bumps in an affair that was to end happily ever after.

We mostly had fun together. She taught me stuff like ‘art’: something outside my growing-up experience. We would visit the Westcliff Art Gallery, which had a painting by Tristram Hillier entitled Cutler’s Green: a vivid landscape scene of a pastures and haystacks with one leafless ghostly-white tree dominating the scene – the first piece of fine art I ever felt passionate about. More recently we have managed to obtain a print of Cutler’s Green which is now on our stairway wall to remind us of what I still call our ‘courting days’.

Annette also gave me for my twentieth birthday the one book which has been my faithful lover since being introduced to literature: Palgrave’s Golden Treasury expanded by C.S. Lewis. The poetry in that volume lifted me up and carried me off to nights of cloudless climes and starry skies. I still have a copy on my desk as I write this, though Annette’s original present, with its olive-green cover, has long since fallen apart at the seams.

Eventually I asked Annette to marry me and she said ‘Yes’. She was still only seventeen and I was twenty but at that time a lot of my friends were getting married and none of us thought it unusual for our age. Possibly it was because we were servicemen and had grown up quickly, having lived and worked abroad, borne arms in foreign lands and seen life in the raw in oriental cities. I knew no civilian boys of my age, so I have no comparisons to make. What I do know is that almost all my airmen friends got married around the same time and the vast majority of them have stayed married to the same partner.

I don’t kid myself that one of the things that attracted Annette to me was the fact that my air force career took me to foreign lands. She had not travelled abroad at that point, except on a school exchange to France, and was desperate to do so. Her heroines were women like Jane Goodall and Freya Starke, and the man she married would have to have the same desire to travel overseas that was in her blood. The idea of foreign travel may seem pedestrian to people these days, but in the fifties very few ordinary British families had the opportunity to travel to places like the South Pacific, India, Hong Kong or even Cyprus.

There was an impediment to us getting hitched.

Annette was still a minor in the eyes of the law. She needed the permission of her parents to marry. Bill and Betty absolutely refused to give it. I don’t blame them. Here was this oik of an airman, with prospects drear, wanting to marry their bright intelligent fledgling daughter of seventeen years, hardly yet out of the schoolroom. If it had been me in their place, I would have blown a gasket. Instead they told me politely, in their middle-class way, to sling my hook.

It was the anniversary of our first meeting and unhappily I was no longer welcome in the Bailey home. Annette’s parents started encouraging other young men to go out with her. I was told later that one of these rivals was a schoolteacher. Fortunately, on impulse and without knowing how they would be received, I sent Annette a dozen roses accompanied by a poem on the very evening she was due to go out with this man.

One rose for every thirty days

that we have shared together.

One thought with me remains always,

may roses bud and bloom forever.

Love, Garry xxx

Annette told me later that she burst into tears and the schoolteacher’s evening ended in ruins. Impeccable timing saved my life. I doubt she would have ended up with the schoolteacher, but fate can be a rotten cow sometimes. I was still sure we were made for each other and no one was going to get in the way of that, parents or rivals. In fact I knew of only one really dangerous rival, an airline pilot, but luckily for me he was not committed enough to present me with a challenge. Maybe if he had pressed his case I might have had to fight a lot harder.

As it was her parents, wearied by our dogged persistence, eventually relented. The wedding took place at Christ Church in Thorpe Bay on 30 June 1962. The best man was my brother Ray. The maid of honour was Annette’s friend Valerie. We had the reception at the Rosalind Hotel, on Thorpe Bay seafront. Her cousin Mike drove us to London in his van and we spent one night there in a hotel before going on to a bed-and-breakfast in Bude, Cornwall. Bude was pleasant and the honeymoon was calm and enjoyable. I had my twenty-first birthday while we were there. We visited Tintagel, saw the supposed remains of King Arthur’s castle, ate crab sandwiches, got to know each other a bit more, fought a little over small things, made love a lot. Annette bought me a new dressing gown for my birthday and we spent just about all the money we had in the world. Everything was paid for, though, and we had the train tickets home so we were not in any trouble.

In those days airmen had weekly wages and we did not have to wait long before we felt flush again. Life in the early ’60s was breadline. We ate well at the beginning of the week, but were on cheese sandwiches by the time the weekend came along. We had no bank accounts: those were for doctors, lawyers and officers.

11. RAF Rheindahlen

Not long after the honeymoon I got on the boat train for West Germany. I had been posted to Rheindahlen, near Cologne. It was the headquarters for the Royal Air Force and I was to work in what was generally known as the ‘Big House’, a building not unlike the MOD in London. However, this time I was not in the main comcen but working with the meteorological office, providing them with their communications. Annette had to stay in England until I found us accommodation. There were married quarters for airmen, of course, but they were few. One had to have rank or a lot of points gained by doing unpalatable postings to get married quarters. What most of us had to do was go out and find a flat, get the RAF to take it on as a ‘hiring’ and then pay the RAF the rent.

I found us a two-roomed garret flat in a small village called Wickrath. The flat had no running water, so we had to carry it up in a enamel bread bin from the bathroom on the floor below. The heating was a pot-bellied stove in the living room. The bedroom was an icebox in the winter of 1962-3, which has since become known as the Great Freeze. Temperatures in England fell to minus 16 centigrade and was far below that in northern Germany. Water left in a glass by the bed froze solid overnight. At night we piled coats as well as blankets on the bedcovers to keep warm. Still, we were reasonably happy. There were two single beds in this attic room, of different heights. We put them together and placed books under the legs of one to bring it up to the level of the other. The snow lay on the ground from November to April.

I bought a push bike and rode the five miles to work each day, coming off a dozen times on every journey because of the icy roads. Frau Pfeiffer was our landlady. Not a great landlady, but not a bad one either. We managed to save enough to buy ourselves a second-hand Fiat 500 car and felt we were truly blessed. Those little utilitarian vehicles were brilliant. Cheap and easy to run, and in those days they really did have only a 500cc engine. Ours sounded like a motorbike, rather than a car. You could even buy spares for them at the local post office.

John Chidlow came and stayed with us that Christmas. He was stationed about ten miles away at RAF Wildenrath and he told us he had a girl back home called Grace and was going home on leave in the New Year to propose to her. We had a nice German Christmas that year, playing cards, walking in the snow. Annette was big and round as a barrel, but with a full healthy colour to her cheeks.

On 31 December I was getting ready to go to work at around eleven in the evening, to do night shift.

‘I think my bottom’s falling off,’ Annette said. ‘Better call the ambulance.’

I took the stairs three at a time and used Frau Pfeiffer’s telephone. The ambulance duly arrived, skidding to a halt on the icy road outside. Annette waved goodbye and got in, while I cycled to work. Had the birth begun just a few hours earlier I might have been able to arrange a stand-in, but not on New Year’s Eve. On the way to RAF Wegberg Hospital, the ambulance managed to get lost, but Annette hung on until they found their way and she was in a bed.

Richard John Kilworth was born just after midnight on 1 January 1963, the first baby in the hospital after New Year.

‘It’s a boy,’ murmured a tired Annie, when I finally got to the hospital the next morning. ‘Isn’t he lovely?’

No, he was not. He was a red-faced wrinkled little prune, like all other newborn babies.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Absolutely.’

Once they were home, the pair of them, we began being ‘parents’, a profession for which we had no training whatsoever. We took Richard out in a pram in subzero temperatures without any knowledge that we might harm his lungs. He was well swaddled of course, wrapped up so that only his nose could be seen, but when I think of that time now I wince with guilt, realising our ignorance could have caused him harm.

Often he was in his carry cot, on the narrow back seat of the Fiat, as we drove here and there. Richard was a blessing. We felt so privileged to have him. It made us a family and with that feeling came contentment. I was never happy as a single man. I didn’t like the drinking culture of single servicemen and much preferred to be in the company of people who could talk without slurring their words. Annette, Rick (as we had begun to call him) and I went on outings as we pleased, visited other married friends of the same age, and generally enjoyed life. We discovered a passion for camping, something that Rick took to with zest, even at the age of two, since he could run around as much as he liked and go into other camper’s tents, and simply stand and stare at them.

John Chidlow went back to UK in January and returned with a very lovely wife, a Scot. Grace was everything the word means. She was dark-haired, slim and had a naturally happy disposition. She was gentle and sweet, and softened the tough edges to John. We all saw a lot of each other in those days, playing bridge, chess and other games. Once they had a baby themselves, young Craig, we used to stick the two children in a cot together and whoever was the dummy hand at bridge would look in on the little ones. John and Grace had a ground-floor flat in a large house near Wildenrath. Their ‘club’ was 6 Petrol Depot, run by the army.

In the spring of 1963 Annette and I went looking for better accommodation, hopefully with water and decent heating. We found a farm in a village called Hehn. The bedroom of the flat was above the cowshed while the living-room was above the landlady’s living room. The farmer and his wife were Kathe and Heinrich Maurer.

Heinrich spoke no language but German, but Kathe had very good English. She had been in the army during the war as a telegraphist, which gave us a talking point. It was her job to listen in to enemy broadcasts and thus she had to have good English. At the end of the war she found herself in Austria with the Americans advancing from the south and the rest of the Allies from the north. Fearful of being raped by the conquering troops she asked an Austrian farmer to shelter her in return for work and pretend she was his daughter. The farmer was not happy at doing it, but eventually agreed.

Once the situation had settled Kathe wanted to get back to Cologne, where her parents were market gardeners. She hitched a ride on a coal train and arrived in the city black with coal dust. The first shop she came across belonged to a florist who used to deal with her parents, so she went inside and asked if she could have a bath. They said yes and gave her soap and a towel, and filled a tin bath for her in front of a fire.

Now Kathe told us this story the evening we were being interviewed for the flat, with Heinrich sitting beside her on the sofa. He said nothing the whole time, but simply watched his wife’s face intently. When she got to the bit about the bath he perked up and glanced across at Annette and me, and grinned.

Kathe then said, ‘I finished my bath and had just wrapped myself in a towel when the door opened – and in stepped Cary Grant!’

This was Heinrich of course, the son of the florists. When he heard the words ‘Cary Grant’ he slapped his knee in delight and his grin became even wider.

‘And so you married him?’ cried Annette, laughing.

‘Yes, I did. And here he is! Oh, and by the way, please do not make love on your living-room sofa. The last couple, who were Dutch by the way, were always making my chandelier tinkle.’

Very candid, was Kathe. No bones about that lady.

They were a lovely couple, Kathe and Heinrich, and Kathe was like a mother to Annette, who was still only nineteen and with a baby to look after. We got the flat of course and we both loved it. We were allowed to take vegetables and beer from the cellar where they were stored and enter what we took in a small exercise book, settling up later. When a pig was killed, we helped in the kitchen which was turned into a sausage factory for the day. Fresh fruit was always available and the Maurers were easy-going.

There was a cherry tree blossoming right outside the second-floor window, which our bedroom window overlooked, and the cows snuffling below the floorboards helped us get to sleep. I don’t remember any unpleasant smells but I suppose if there had been we would have got used to them. We were given a huge German goose-down duvet which kept us as warm as toast. In England we had known only blankets and the duvet seemed a great luxury.

I wrote reams of poetry about the farm, the German countryside, the seasons, all of which is in a folder I have never opened again.

Richard seemed to like his new home. There was an orchard for him to run around in (he was always a runner) and the savage farm dog, which would have torn us to pieces, seemed to take to this jabbering little English boy as if he were a puppy. One day he crawled into the dog’s kennel and began eating the food from its dish. Annette, horrified, tried to coax him out, but every time she went near the kennel the dog flew out, snapping viciously, I suppose protecting Richard from this threatening woman. Later Rick crawled out, hunger satisfied.

One night on the way to Cologne the engine on our little Fiat 500 caught fire and burned out. We had to abandon it. Annette and I walked a long way to find a guest house and it being one o’clock a.m. we had to stay the night. There was no phone at Maurer farm, so we couldn’t tell Kathe what had happened. She said later she almost had a heart attack thinking we had been in an accident on the autobahn. She was babysitting Richard and we were not able to return until late the next morning.

So, having no car now we started to save for another second-hand vehicle, keeping the money in a National Health Milk Powder tin. Unfortunately the tin got thrown away during housecleaning and we lost all the money. My father-in-law sent us a cheque but I was still a little angry with him for the obstacles he had put in the way of the marriage and my pride forced me to return it uncashed. So we started saving again and within a few months had enough for a five-year old Fiat 127, a 1200cc proper family car with a big boot and a decent engine. It was a great car, that Fiat, and took us to Austria, Italy and Switzerland.

Our part of Germany was staunchly Catholic and every year the local priest would lead a religious parade through the villages, blessing them as he did so. Kathe Maurer hated this festival, because the farmhouse was the first dwelling at the entrance to the village, which meant she had to get ready a huge wooden altar every year. It was stored in the loft and had to be dragged down, dusted and cleaned, then set up on the pavement outside the house for the priest to use for his ceremony. One year we had council workmen outside the house and she tried to bribe them to prolong the work so that she wouldn’t need to erect the altar. They refused, being afraid of the priest. The parade took place, but Annette had forgotten Kathe’s instructions and had inadvertently hung the duvet out of the window, thus decorating the front of the house with bedding. Kathe laughed it off, though the priest had admonished her for it.

Later that same day there was a terrific summer storm. We had been out shopping and as I drew up outside the farmhouse Annette stepped from the car in the driving rain. Lightning cracked from above, hit a nearby lamp post, fizzed down the metal into the water in the gutter, along the water in the gutter, and right between her legs. A passer-by screamed, thinking she had been hit, but she stepped onto the pavement unhurt. I have never seen lightning hit so close to a person before or since. I couldn’t see anything for several minutes. The flash had been so bright I had been temporarily blinded. Was this retribution from above for leaving our bedding on the windowsill? I think so.

Heinrich was a hard-working farmer. He got up at the crack of dawn and came in when it grew dark. Six days a week he laboured, but unlike God on the seventh he did not rest, he got drunk. Every single week. Kathe would bemoan the fact that she had cooked a nice Sunday lunch and Heinrich would roll in around five in the afternoon, absolutely plastered. Only once did he arrive in time for his meal and ironically on that day Kathe had decided to attack the Benedictine. Sauce for the gander! On one Sunday Heinrich decided to turn the hay in the barn and in his inebriated state he put the pitchfork through his foot and we had to drive him to the hospital.

On All Saints’ day that first year in Hehn some bulls got loose and began charging down village street. We were walking without Rick, having just been down to the local sausage shop. I’m ashamed to say I was first up on a high wall, only afterwards reaching down for the fair maid who was struggling to join me. It seemed those lightning reflexes worked for my survival as well as for my wife’s and in this case quite dishonourably. Luckily the bulls passed below us without goring anyone but, as I say, I acted without thinking and went away ashamed of myself.

On Friday 22 November 1963 I was on duty in the Big House, receiving weather forecasts on the Murray code tapes, when I came to a tape which read ‘. . . precipitation imminent, temperatures between 7 to 10 degrees, wind from the north break break President Kennedy has been assassinated break break . . .’

It was the only time I ever experienced the weather forecast being interrupted for a news message. I stood there in shock for a few moments before showing it to a colleague and we immediately left the comcen to listen to the radio in the forecasters’ room. I was aware of a strange buzzing in my head. That sensation has come only once more since that day and that was on 11 September 2001 when I was with my publisher from Constable Robinson in a pub restaurant discussing a new historical war novel. We saw people crowding around the restaurant’s television screen. Eventually we got up and went to see what the fuss was all about. I watched as a plane flew into one of the Twin Towers.

We had several camping holidays in Austria and Italy, once with a pram on the roof rack. It served as a baby vehicle but we also carried a wooden box top to make it into a table. There were a few adventures, of course. A delegation of German vigilantes confronted us, telling us that it was Sunday and illegal to put washing out on a line. Annette tartly informed them, ‘We are not in Germany. This is Italy!’ a fact that seemed to have passed them by in their righteous fury.

We went on leave to Southend for Christmas at the end of 1963, staying first at my mother’s flat in Westcliff-on-Sea. My youngest brother, Derek was then seventeen and lead guitarist in a local pop group called The Flowerpots. He was by this time a bright though spoilt youth, likable and full of enthusiasm for both music and poetry. I have no idea how he intended to earn his living. Derek would not have thought of going on to any kind of tertiary education. I believed he would be lucky to become a tradesman’s apprentice or something of that nature. When he talked to me it was always about things that interested him, like poetry and music.

Sadly, I never going got the chance to find out what he intended to do with his life.

On the morning of Christmas Eve there was a knock on the door. When I opened it a policeman asked me, ‘Is this the home Derek Charles Kilworth?’ I told him that it was and asked what was the problem, thinking that Derek had been involved some sort of fracas. ‘Is he in?’ asked the policeman. I went straight to Derek’s bedroom and checked. His bed had not been slept in. When Derek was on a gig he often came in very late and no one bothered him until around eleven in the morning. I had a horrible feeling in my gut as I went back to the front door.

By this time my mother was in the hallway and her face was white with anxiety. I shook my head and the policeman, obviously striving to be compassionate but clearly burdened by having to be the bearer of terrible news, said to my mother, ‘I’m sorry to inform you that your son was killed in a motor accident late last night. I will need someone, a close relative, to come down to the mortuary to identify the body.’ My mother let out a terrible wail and I dissolved into a mess of shock and tears.

It was Ted, my mother’s second husband, who went with the policeman and the rest of us stumbled about the flat, saying everything, saying nothing, completely useless to each other. Annette was the strongest of us and when a group of young friends of Derek came to the door she confirmed that the rumour they had heard was true and they went away sobbing.

Derek’s death was devastating. He was after all a young boy, full of life, and although my father had also died young at forty-two, his death was a relatively gradual one. These sudden unexpected tragedies are almost impossible to take in at first. I kept going to Derek’s bedroom, looking at the bed, hoping for the impossible. Surely, my mind kept saying, there’s been a mistake? Perhaps it isn’t Derek in the mortuary? He wasn’t a driver, so someone else must have been at the wheel. Who could that have been? Another member of the band? A friend? Who?

It turned out that Derek had hitched a lift and the man at the wheel had been drunk. He lost control of the car and struck a telegraph pole at high speed. The main impact was on the passenger side of the vehicle. The driver suffered a broken leg, while my baby brother died instantly. Even at this distance in time, nearly fifty years later, I still have difficulty in believing a life could be taken away so suddenly, without any warning from any source. I feel the tears and anger welling up inside me, not necessarily directed towards the driver, who though a deadly dangerous fool did not intend to kill anyone, but at the happenstance that snatched Derek from us. Why did my brother leave his gig at that one particular moment? Why was it that specific car that stopped to give him a lift? Why was he in the exact position in the vehicle to ensure his death?

Fate should be tangible, a living being that one can scream and shout at, someone to blame for stealing our so very precious lives from us. Fate should have to account for its crimes against us. Fate kills our loved ones and sometimes does it horribly swiftly and mercilessly.

Just days before his death Derek had written a poem which he proudly showed me. It tells of a car crash in which everything reduces to ‘burning rubber, burning wire, all consumed in a ball of fire.’

~

Annette became pregnant again at the end of the winter of 1965 and we looked forward to another child, a playmate for Rick. September was almost over. We were in the station library gathering reading material when I got a tap on the shoulder. Annette wanted me for something.

‘Just a minute,’ I murmured. ‘I still haven’t found the novel I want.’

‘My bottom’s falling off,’ she said firmly.

‘Oh no!’ I knew what that meant all right, but this was not good. She was only twenty-seven weeks gone. Fortunately the Medical Officer was next door to the library. We rushed round and shortly afterwards Annette was on her way to Wegberg Hospital. A beautiful four-pound baby girl was born and had to go into an incubator. The baby remained on the critical list for several weeks, needing blood transfusions. Why was she so early? Annette is rhesus negative, while I’m rhesus positive, which causes problems with the antibodies in the blood of a second child. In the mid-1960s there was no anti-D injection to deal with this condition and the result was babies like ours which had problematic births.

I have to say that at no time did either of us ever believe our baby girl was going to die. I have no idea now why that was, but we never talked of losing her even though she went through several crises during those first few weeks. The talk was only of when we were going to get her out of that glass case and into the real world. Eventually of course, this happened, for the little mite was a fierce fighter, with a strong will and determination that remained with her from that day onward.

Annette and I had long ago discussed the possible names of our children and had decided that if we ever had a girl we would call her Chantelle. Annette’s French pen-friend was called Chantal and we decided to fancify it a bit with the ‘elle’ rather than the ‘al’ ending. Shortly after the child was born Annette got a visit from the padre who said, ‘It’s probably advisable to christen your baby in case something happens to her.’ I’ve already said we had absolute confidence in the idea that Chantelle was going to survive, but Annette was in a groggy state, naturally, after giving birth. So she told the padre, yes please, but in her confusion had lost the spelling and pronunciation of ‘Chantelle’, so instead she told him to name the baby Yvette Anne.

So she became for a short while Yvette Anne Kilworth.

Then I visited the hospital, heard her story, and said, ‘Oh, no – I’ve already sent the telegrams telling everyone her name’s Chantelle!’ In the meantime Annette had also sent telegrams from her hospital bed informing all and sundry that the baby’s name was Yvette.

For a while we had a very confused set of relatives back in England.

Eventually the baby was re-christened (and very definitely registered) as Chantelle Anne Yvette Kilworth. And a right royal name it looks too. As when Richard was born, I had to drive to Düsseldorf within ten days to register the child at the British Consulate, otherwise both our kids would have been German and liable for military service. Since neither of them likes goosestepping very much it was a good thing I was on time. (That’s a cheap joke, but hey . . .)

Eventually, Chantelle got shortened to Shaney.

Chantelle is not actually a name they give to girl babies in France. Annette and I contrived it. Yet now there are a plethora of Chantelles, most of them coming out of Essex, though one or two of our friends’ children have also used the name for their offspring. It’s my firm belief that Southend-on-sea mothers-to-be heard the name of our daughter while collecting their children from school, liked the sound of it, and used it for their next girl child. Somewhere around the turn of the century one of these Essex Chantelles appeared on a reality television show. The name then naturally spread and flourished throughout the United Kingdom. The last I heard it had reached the USA. The name we invented was hijacked. ‘Chantelle’ has become a best seller by word of mouth, but sadly the two collaborating authors remain anonymous.

So, now we had what I regarded as the perfect family. A wife, a husband, a boy and a girl. Very symmetrical. Others might think that a dozen kids and two run-ragged parents make the perfect family, but for me one on each corner, two of each sex, is my ideal balancing act. My pride in my family has never diminished.

I have written earlier that Bill Bailey was captain of an American PBY Catalina flying boat, an aircraft that could land on the ground or on water. The tips of the Catalina’s wings could convert the floats to wheels. This elegant-looking aircraft was used in anti-submarine warfare, search-and-rescue, freight, convoy escorts and patrol bombing. An aircraft with beautiful lines, very versatile, the Catalina was the most successful flying boat of its era. The PBY stood for Patrol Bomber Y, the letter Y simply being a manufacturer’s code. It had a crew of eight men: the pilot (Bill), co-pilot, bow gunner, flight mechanic, radioman, navigator and two mid-aircraft gunners. To my knowledge Bill never crashed, nor was he shot down. He began his flying career in Canada, after joining the RAF as a common airman (just like his son-in-law) and then going for a commission (unlike his son-in-law) and eventually learning to fly. His patrol area, after leaving Canada, was the wide blue Indian Ocean. There he learned to navigate by the stars, a skill of which he was inordinately proud. He passed some of this knowledge on to Annette and her younger brother Colin and both can still name the major constellations.

It was in Canada that he did his flight training and I remember him telling me a story about that period. He was ordered by the instructor, who sat immediately behind him, to dive on a farmhouse they could see on the Canadian prairie below and only pull out of the dive when the instructor said so. Bill immediately went into the dive and went hurtling down towards the farmhouse. The roof of the house got closer and closer until Bill could almost see down the chimney pot. Finally, ignoring the instructor’s last order, he pulled out of the dive without being told to. However, when he next glanced behind he could see the instructor frantically trying to reconnect his communications cord which had become unplugged, sweat pouring from the man’s brow. Had Bill been a man who automatically obeyed orders they would have crashed and killed themselves and probably any occupants of the farmhouse. In a similar incident on patrol in the Indian Ocean Bill had been ordered to bomb a submarine, but he was not certain of his target and, ignoring the order from an admiral, went down for a closer look first. He discovered the ‘submarine’ was an innocent whale.

Like many men who had been through Second World War he was normally very reserved about his exploits. These were the only two stories I ever got out of him. However, he did tell me about his training period, on which he was given leave from Goose Bay. Going back to the UK was out of the question for the period of the leave, so he hitchhiked across Canada to Vancouver and back, paying for his trip by playing cards with lumberjacks and others. Bill was a brilliant bridge player. I never knew anyone as good. How the hell he found lumberjacks who played bridge rather than poker mystifies me, but he was not a man to lie about his history. Later in life he and Betty taught bridge in the local college in Southend-on-Sea and were probably responsible for most of the bridge players in the Thames estuary. They were legends at the game, which Annette and I studiously avoided playing except with our closest friends the Chidlows. There are no points to be had when your in-laws are experts at a game that needs the mental skill of a mathematician and you are useless at maths. Bill Bailey was not a patient man with his children, expecting them to be as brilliant as he was, and being taught by him was a horrible experience. I’m sure he was all right with unrelated students, but with his family he was severe.

Once Shaney was born, we had to move. The flat above the farm had only two rooms and now we were four. I found another hiring in Luttelforst in a huge, monstrous-looking house that was straight out of Gormenghast: a Gothic German mansion with witch-hat towers. Inside it was a maze of dusty and gloomy passageways. It was set in the grounds of a private park, complete with lake and swans. Some German baron or other lived in it at one time, but in 1965 the woman who owned it had to let out rooms to pay for the upkeep.

We had the whole top floor, an attic divided up into six rooms with sloping ceilings and sharp corners. The elderly landlady always dressed in black and had a mynah bird in the hallway that mimicked her daily greeting so accurately it was spooky. Her name was Frau Raut, but being terrible plebs we dropped a vowel from the surname. She looked like a formidable maiden aunt straight out of one of P.G. Wodehouse’s novels, but in fact after a while she thawed a bit. Not much, but a bit. The myna never did. It remained forever the frosty-voiced Frau Raut, startling us when we crept in at midnight after a party at someone’s house with a strident ‘Guten Tag!’ from its perch in a dark corner of the entrance hallway. It reminded me of the refrain from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, quoth the myna, ‘Guten Tag!’

We had learned a good bit of German since living there and that was lucky because Frau Raut, unlike our beloved Kathe, did not speak any other language.

While in Germany I wrote a lot of ‘nature’ poems, mostly about ice and snow, mountains and trees. They were good training. I stuck to traditional rhyming sequences and metres for the most part, feeling my way into less formal poetry later on. I’m a great believer in learning the craft from the beginning before tacking in a personal direction.

So, we had three years exploring Germany, including the Black Forest, the Eifel Mountains, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Cologne. We made several camping trips to Italy and Belgium and actually did our weekly shop in Venlo, Holland. Pay was better in Germany, with overseas allowances, but we were still not well off. Annette took a job in a flower shop and became a florist’s assistant for a year or two. She learned all the names of the plants in both Latin and German.

Chid and I joined the local Rover Scouts and went on several camping expeditions with others who enjoyed the outdoor life as much as we did. (I don’t think I’ve ever outgrown my love of scouting and even now yearn to be 12 years old again and singing songs round the campfire.) One winter we camped in sub-zero temperatures in the Eifel Mountains. When we tried to cook breakfast after an ice-bound night during which I slept not at all, the eggs were frozen solid in their shells and the bacon shattered in the pan. Chid suggested we use the eggs as missiles to stun a deer and thus earn a venison breakfast, but I had by that time cut my hand badly on a piece of bacon and wanted to go home.

The summer before returning to England I put in for ‘Expedition Training’ which the RAF provided for anyone who wanted adventure. One could go climbing mountains, potholing, jumping out of planes, gliding, rock climbing, many activities. In Germany, the RAF owned six sailing yachts which were based at Kiel near the border of Denmark. (At the time the Royal Navy had brought out bumper stickers proclaiming ‘Fly Navy’: the RAF responded with ‘Sail RAF’.) I found myself on a three-man yacht in the Baltic, ready to earn my Deck Hand Certificate. The course lasted a week. For seven grey stormy days ploughing through the waves I spliced ropes, tied knots, reefed sails and hung over the gunwhales emptying the contents of my stomach into the Baltic. I have never been a good sailor and the Baltic is not the kindest of seas to wimps with weak stomachs.

Towards the end of our time in Germany I took promotion exams and luckily leapt from Senior Aircraftsman to corporal. That meant two stripes on each arm and a small pay rise. Our first three years of marriage were over and we were going home to England with a complete family. I was twenty-four years of age and Annette just twenty-one. Rick was a chubby two year old and Shaney was still in towelling nappies.

Our new posting in 1965 was St Mawgan, in Cornwall, just outside Newquay.

12. RAF St Mawgan

After home leave in Southend, we drove to our new home in the West Country. We still did not have enough points to qualify for married quarters. Annette was determined that we should stay together as a family, so we hired a beach caravan at Mawgan Porth. To help pay the rent for the caravan, which was quite small inside, Annette took a job cleaning the other vans after holidaymakers had gone home.

Three or four months later we were given a quarter on a disused air base called St Eval, up on the cliffs above the Atlantic Ocean. It was a nice little terraced house with coal fires and two bedrooms, perfectly adequate for our needs. If we did get cold we warmed ourselves up dancing to two new pop groups: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. An American singer had also just entered the charts, a strange gravelly-voiced hippy called Bob Dylan. I was not dead keen on the Beatles at that time (it took ‘Elenor Rigby’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ to get my attention, before that I thought them pretty mediocre) but I loved the Stones. Bob Dylan was a revelation. Dylan and Joan Baez were singing ‘protest’ songs that I thought brilliant.

We were still not very well off at St Mawgan. In Germany we had received Overseas Allowance, lifting our standard of living a bit, but of course that was dropped once we got back to dear old Blighty. After paying all our bills for the week we had ten shillings left. That was five for the baby-sitter and five to spend at the pub. One round of drinks for four people. It was a good night out, though, and we were happy enough. At that time too the RAF had ceased paying us a weekly wage in cash and told us to open bank accounts. We chose the Midland Bank for reasons which have since left my head. Now we were a couple with a ‘chequebook’. That felt very middle class and grand.

As a corporal I had one or two more privileges around the RAF camp than before, but mostly I just went to work at the comcen and then home. The name of sergeant in charge of communications was Tony Sergeant. Sergeant Sergeant. Everyone, including the CO, called him Sergeant Squared. I recently contacted him. He now lives in Australia, but though he seemed very keen to meet me again, he confessed he had no memory of me or our service together. I was slightly peeved at that, since we were both in the amateur dramatics club. Obviously my performance as a stage actor was as unmemorable as my performance as corporal in charge of the comcen.

My mother visited us with her second husband, Ted. My new stepfather was a driver: buses, hearses, taxis, coaches. You name it, Ted drove it. He had been an acquaintance of my dad and had asked mum to marry him two years after George’s death. She was lonely. Ted was a kind and thoughtful man. He had a fine voice, in the style of Matt Monro, and earned good side-money singing and playing in pubs and clubs around Southend. Shortly after their marriage Ted was diagnosed with prostate cancer and had his prostate removed, so their marriage moved from whatever it was to celibacy.

13. RAF Eastleigh and RAF Steamer Point

After a few months at St Mawgan I was sent on what was known as a ‘Detachment’, which was a short, unaccompanied posting lasting no longer than three months. It was to RAF Eastleigh, near Nairobi, Kenya. This was Annette’s and my first real separation since marriage. Kenya was now an independent country and trying to build its own air force. I was to assist in training the Kenyan Air Force in telecommunications.

Eastleigh was stunningly beautiful: the trees dripping with brightly-hued blossoms and the grasslands covered with flamboyant flowers. Magnificent birds, some of them no bigger than my thumb, others huge and bursting their seams with colourful plumage, decorated the bushes. The climate is warm and gentle, Nairobi being on a plateau 6,000 feet above sea level. The name means ‘Place of cool waters’ in the Maasai language. One could envy the residents of that city if it had not been for the thousands of shanty dwellings where the poor existed. There was a lawlessness about the place too, the shops guarded at nights by huge local men carrying pickaxe handles. One of these guys let me spend the night in his shop doorway when I missed the last bus back to Eastleigh in the early hours, standing over me, occasionally chatting, then allowing me sleep off the excesses of an evening on the town.

Once again in a foreign land my excitement with being there bubbled over the minute I was free to walk around and appreciate the gifts it had to offer. I visited Nairobi Game Park as soon as I got a weekend pass and happily photographed wild animals ranging from giraffes to lions to warthogs. Some friends and I took a Landrover and drove over the plains and out towards Mount Kenya. The landscape was vibrant and alive with wild things. Birdsong woke me in the mornings, birdsong filled glorious sunsets with their trilling. The people were friendly, the work unoppressive. I missed my family of course, and wished Annette could share this wonderful experience, but I was also aware how lucky I was to be in such an enthralling place.

Then came a blow.

In 1966 the UK government announced they were leaving the Aden Protectorate within two years. This stupid and thoughtless declaration encouraged Arab dissidents to begin killing British servicemen there. If we had upped sticks and left without saying anything, there would have been far less violence and certainly fewer deaths all round. But the British government needed time to get the old sheikhs back in power (democracy? - forget it), rather than the communist insurgents. All the factions, from the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY) to the National Liberation Front (NFL), wanted to be seen as the group who drove the British out of Aden.

So they began killing as many of us as they could, as well as killing each other at an even faster rate. After one month in Kenya I was sent to RAF Steamer Point in Aden for the last two months. This was the land of my childhood. I had loved it back in those days, but now it was a violent place, full of restrictions and ugly duties, and I detested everything about it. My so-called enemies were those Arab kids I went to school with, for they were the sons of clerks and shopkeepers who had grown to rebellious manhood.

Out of Africa with its superb climate and wonderful topography and into a place of dark-grey sand and volcanic rock. The scenery was bleak and dreary, the heat oppressive. Steamer Point was crammed to its edges with depressed servicemen who wanted to be elsewhere. One’s eyes had to be everywhere, continually watching for the Arab with the gun or handgrenade in his fist. Guard duties, especially in the town itself or on the fringes, were fraught with unwelcome excitement. I would spend two hours on the roof of the Cold Store in Maalla with my balls tingling, staring out into the pitch black night expecting to see the flash of a weapon. I wrote a story about those long hours entitled ‘sumi dreams of a paper frog’ which the reviewer Colin Greenwood thought was pure imagination. It was not.

Two other stories came out of my third long, forced sojourn in Aden: ‘The Dissemblers’ and ‘The Invisible Foe’. All three tales appeared in my first collection of short stories, The Songbirds of Pain, published by Malcolm Edwards, who was by the end of the ’70s the main science fiction and fantasy editor at Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Aden was a war zone, ignored much of the time by the media, who were more interested in Vietnam and the American struggle there. Once more I carried a bolt-action Lee Enfield Mark IV rifle with live ammunition in the mag. We had a pink card telling us when we could open fire on a potential enemy. The card, using English and Arabic words said, ‘You must cry out the warning “Halt! Waqqaf!” three times. If on the third warning the person fails to halt, then you may open fire.’

Ha! By that time a sentry would have been blown to bits.

In any case we always altered the warning shout to, ‘Halt! Fuck off!’.

Well, we would, wouldn’t we?

It rained in Aden for one whole day during my two months. A biblical deluge. I’m sure the ark was supposed have been built somewhere near the Yemen. That rain was the first Aden had seen for two decades and six inches came down. There are no drains in that country, no channels or ditches. Nothing to siphon the water off the bare ground. Thus we had a flood which came down off the hillsides and filled the valleys. Everyone was walking waist-deep through water to get to wherever they need to be: the cookhouse, the work-place or a club. Snakes and rats swam by our bare knees. Aden is normally sand and bare rock and nothing else, yet after that rain it had a green coat six or seven inches deep. Millions of dormant seeds sprouted and tiny flowers bloomed within a very short time. Those seeds had been waiting twenty years for water and when it finally came they took advantage of it immediately. The whole of Aden – known colloquially as ‘the barren rocks’ – was a garden. It was bizarre, beautiful and wonderful.

Guard duties went on day and night. An average of two British servicemen were being killed every week. They were either shot at point blank range, or were victims of bombs. I was riding shotgun in a land rover in a back alley of Steamer Point when a hand grenade was thrown by a dissident. I wasn’t hit by the shrapnel but the noise of the grenade going off made me deaf for several days. I still have a deafness in my left ear and receive a disability pension. There was a young lad named Sam in the next bed to me on the balcony. He was a motorcycle courier. One day he was ambushed by two dissidents with machine guns. The medics said they could hardly lift him, he was so full of metal.

Sentry points were scattered throughout the colony, denoted by colour and number, such as Red 10 or Blue 7. You stood at your post for two hours waiting to be shot with absolutely no chance of seeing the enemy before you were hit. A lottery. The most hated post was Blue 16, the Cold Store Maalla, about which I have already written. The sentry was positioned on the top of the store and was surrounded by flat-roofed buildings, any one of which could hide a gunman. I remember standing with my rifle at the ready, cold sweat running down my neck and my heart keeping time with the second hand on my watch, thumping terror around my arteries. One of our number was unlucky enough to draw that post out time and time again. We dropped his name and started calling him ‘Blue 16’. A small chubby bloke, he had that haunted look that men get when they know the gods are against them. I can still hear his trebled groan of ‘Oh, Jesus, not again . . .’ as he put his hand in the bag and drew out the fatal plastic blue disc with the number 16 on it.

Ironically, I believe he went home safely, whereas others at the post were not so lucky.

Most of that two months was spent on sentry duty, at the comcen and swimming in the sea. It was the monsoon period and the Indian Ocean was kicking in its traces. Huge waves crashed on the beaches and swimming became quite dangerous. One day I was cultivating a tan on the sands when I heard a cry for help. I jumped up and saw a man struggling in the surf, clearly in a great deal of trouble. The waves were ten or twelve feet high and he was being dragged further and further out of his depth. I learned later he couldn’t swim. He must have had crap for brains to go into a monstrous sea without that skill.

There were a number of men on the beach. I rushed into the water along with one of my pals. Being a strong swimmer, it was me who reached the drowner first. However, he was so terrified by that time he grabbed me and climbed on my shoulders, wrapping his legs around my neck. I managed to prise his legs apart and pushed him away. Immediately he went under the surf again, thrashing and gasping for breath. My mate was now alongside me and we both left the man to take in enough water to calm him down. Then we each grabbed an arm and slowly worked our way through the dragging, thunderous surf to the beach. Battered and exhausted my co-helper and I staggered up the sand and fell down gasping for breath. Someone else took the victim over and began pumping the water out his lungs. An hour later I saw him being led away by friends, looking pale and wan.

He never did thank us, that wally.

When my two months in Aden were up I went home at top speed, full of joy and bonhomie to see my lovely wife and children. It was like being let out of prison. The world was sparkling new. I had toys for the children and presents for Annette. It was Christmas in July.

A few weeks after returning I received a devastating blow. I had new long-term posting, back to Aden. One whole year unaccompanied by my family. I was to return almost immediately to that hated place. Annette burst into tears and then sat down to write to the Ministry of Defence to tell them what she thought of them. It did no good of course. I was hauled up in front of the C.O. and told to control my wife. Control my wife? What did they think she was? A dog? Insufferable idiots.

It was a miserable, miserable time for both of us. Annette could not stay in the house in Cornwall, which was needed for the new man taking over from me. So we found her a flat in Shoeburyness, close to her mum and dad’s house. It was a dreary-looking flat but as ever my dear Annie put on a brave face and prepared to make the best of it. She has the most indomitable spirit and nothing gets her down for long. Ever the optimist and smiler is my lovely wife. We moved our belongings to Shoeburyness. We didn’t have much. No furniture or anything large. Just framed photos, clothes, books, that sort of thing.

I caught the train from Southend on a day when there was a downpour. I remember leaning out of the carriage window to kiss Annette goodbye and the train jolted and all the water that had collected on the carriage roof went down my neck. I was cold, soaked, and as the train pulled out and I could see Annie waving goodbye, getting smaller and smaller on the platform, I felt utterly depressed.

I arrived back in Khormaksar from where I had taken off just a few short weeks before and was driven by Land Rover to Steamer Point. I went back into the same billet I’d left, only this time I chose to sleep out on the balcony away from the noise. Aden billets were like those in Singapore, open plan with about eighty or so beds. Airmen were coming and going all the time with shift work and guard duties and indoors was mayhem. No one was meant to sleep out under the open sky of course, but the billets were so crowded with swaddies and airmen, there was nothing else for it. Personally it helped me get through that year, lying back at night on my bed and looking up at the clarity of the sky, encrusted with billions of bright diamonds, counting the shooting stars.

This time I had not been posted to the main comcen, but to a unit up on the hills: 123 Signals Unit. This was a listening post, intercepting broadcasts between Yemeni forces up-country. (The Yanks called enemy territory in Vietnam ‘in-country’ but we in Aden called the Radfan and the Yemen ‘up-country’.) I was not one of the listeners, but a communicator for them. Special telegs took down the messages which passed by Morse code between Yemeni government forces (mostly consisting of Egyptian troops), if they were not in plain English, they were first decoded by a cryptographer, and then passed to me to send to the UK or elsewhere for assessment and recording.

Up-country there was a civil war going on at the same time as we were being hammered by dissidents in the Aden Protectorate. When I was a boy in Aden, al-Yemen was ruled by an imam. As mentioned earlier he was a particularly cruel and medieval despot, beheading and imprisoning his subjects at will. Colonel Nasser in Egypt, sent the imam a message asking if he wanted any of his young men educated in Cairo University. The imam was a sage old ruler and realised that Nasser wanted bright young men to indoctrinate, so that they would come back to the Yemen trained to overthrow him. He agreed to send one boy, a young blacksmith’s son by the name of Ali Abdullah al-Salal, thinking that the son of a lowly tradesman would not have the intelligence to start a rebellion. So Salal went to Cairo University, learned how to foment a revolution, came back to the Yemen and overthrew the Imam.

This is a lesson in underestimating the intellect of those of lesser status, for blacksmiths’ sons have ever been thus gifted.

The imam was killed in a battle for Sanaa, the main city, but bedu tribesmen rescued his baby son from the rubble. They fled with the infant into the surrounding hills and deserts and to this day they are still opposed to the Yemeni government that took over. During the time I was in Aden the tribesmen were inflicting high casualties on the government forces. Nasser had sent troops down to assist Salal in his fight, but these were conscripted boys out of the shops of Cairo. They knew nothing of desert warfare and had probably never been far from their fathers’ businesses or workplaces. They were lambs thrown to the wolves, literally. There was a group of warriors known as the ‘Red Wolves of the Radfan’ who preyed on such ignorance.

The Qotaibi tribe had been a sore on the back of the British ever since the latter had been in Aden. British soldiers had regarded the Radfan as a punishment posting from as far back as 1839. The Radfan itself is sixty miles north of Aden, is high up on a barren, burning plateau, and covers forty square miles of blistering desolation. Waterless, roadless, with scorching heat up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit, the Radfan was dreaded by the English Tommy. The Qotaibi were merciless with those they captured, beheading them or handing them to their women to be slowly cut to pieces with knives. They controlled the Sacred Road, the travellers’ and tradesmen’s track between Aden and Mecca. While I was in Aden the Qotaibi numbered around 7,500. They were, like most desert tribes, crackshots with their ancient rifles. They did not waste a single bullet, for bullets cost money and they were a poor people. If you were ever in the sights of a Qotaibi rifle, you were a dead man.

Thus the Bedu of al-Yemen and the tribesmen of the Radfan slaughtered these Egyptian conscripts. The Egyptian and Yemeni government troops sent out heartbreaking messages which we intercepted. A poignant signal might read, ‘We are being shot daily by the Bedu [typically just a father and two sons on fast camels] and only half our number are left. We have run out of water and bread. Please try to find us, for we do not know where we are . . .’ Even as I was sending the transcript of such an intercepted message I knew that no help would come to those poor lads. They were doomed. Perhaps a whole company of them, numbering a hundred men. Boys who would no longer see their mothers, their sisters, their fathers. Boys who would be mourned as deeply as my family would mourn me if I did not make it home. Boys who were caught in a net of terror not of their own making, forced to go out with a rifle in their hands, and die for a cause they did not understand. I had no love for their government, which was sending assassins to kill my countrymen, but I could not help but pray for these young men in their peril.

Constantly receiving and passing on messages like these touched something in my conscience and laid the foundations for my later embracing of pacifism when I became a Quaker.

123 SU was situated on a hill above the Arab town of Tawahi, adjacent to Steamer Point. The communications centre was on the back of the hill, just below the brow. On the peak stood a square tower with a parapet. It was up in this tower that we did our sentry duties, usually two men, guarding the back end of the military zone and, obviously, our own section. We were given night-vision binoculars and were armed of course, and had a radio to call in to the incident centre should anything happen in the town below. I have to say that it was ten times better than the guard posts I had been doing when in Aden on detachment. We had all-round vision together with a good view of the houses and streets quite a long way below us, and the tower was open to the stars, which are always wonderful to look at while reflecting on the vagaries of life.

To the west of the tower, just under us, was a stark reminder of our mortality. A place called Silent Valley, the graveyard where British men were buried, far from the land of their birth. Even today I don’t know whether we had a policy like the Americans in Vietnam, and shipped the bodies home, or whether they were actually planted in Middle Eastern sand. All I know is there were many white crosses down below.

Life on the balcony was pleasant enough, though the yearning to be home was like a constant pain in my chest. I bought a pipe to smoke and thought myself quite the thing. I learned to snatch flies out of the air with my bare hands, played a lot of cricket, swam a great deal, went to the pictures, read a lot of books, wrote one or two stories. At that point in my life I had one novel on the constant go. Its title was Beyond the Silver Surf, a children’s book in the vein of Alice in Wonderland. My wonderland, however, was a submarine world where the fish and mermaids were the protagonists. There were lots of rhymes and creatures of the deep blessed with funny names. I spent hours revising this effort, but I never did send the manuscript to a publisher.

One of the other airmen on the balcony had a complete set of Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels. I borrowed them and was amazed by the author’s skill. Yes, they were ‘romantic’ novels, but they were in the vein of Jane Austen and easily as enjoyable as Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. I devoured the lot and have since read them twice over again and my enjoyment of Heyer’s prose has not diminished.

One day I was penning a letter home when the building rocked with an explosion. Then came another, and another. Dissidents inside the town of Crater were sending mortars over the lip of the volcano. Something like eight or nine hit the ground around our billet. I saw one man running across the area in a zigzag fashion, hoping the pattern of the mortars was not going to imitate his own. These mortar attacks were infrequent and not very accurate but they made your heart thump like hell. Once I was in the cookhouse when a mortar landed just ten yards outside the main door. A cook was ladling custard. He panicked and swung his arm in an arc, spraying the people at the front of queue with hot viscous yellow stuff. They screamed in pain. This caused more panic and men began running for the doors. It was a while before the scene settled down again and we could enjoy our puddings.

My year in Aden was of course far worse than my year on Gan. There was less to do in the confined area of the camp, there were killings going on, and now I was married and ached to be with my family. My hatred for the place which I had loved as a boy grew daily. All I wanted to do was go home. I despised the British government for sending me there and did not understand what the intentions were. The British Empire was dead. Why were we still pretending we ruled the pink bits on our old maps? The days of colonies were over and hanging on to places like Aden for the extra year or two made no sense whatsoever. Men were dying almost daily for nothing more than Whitehall policy. I would have been livid if I had been killed just because some politician thought it ‘in the interests of Great Britain’ to leave a few sheikhs in charge of the barren rocks of Aden. Someone had made a mock recruitment poster and pinned it up on the wall of the billet. It read:

JOIN THE ARMY

SEE THE WORLD

MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE

AND KILL THEM

This was not an attempt at humour. Like being angry when I was dead, it was meant to be ironic. Yes, we had joined the armed forces. Yes, we were ready to defend our country against attack by an enemy. Such was our job, though men do not join armies because they want to kill people, but often because they are in need of work. Aden was not our country. These people who we were killing, who were killing us, were defending their country and we were the aggressors, the enemy who had taken the land by force. Admittedly when we had first arrived in Aden it was a different time, different Britons with different mindsets, nearly two centuries previously. Right of conquest was then still an accepted rule throughout the world. This was not the nineteenth century though. We were now living in a world where colonisation was regarded as unacceptable. Yet, here we were, killing, being killed, in a land that did not want us. Why?

With the hot season came sandstorms which covered our beds on the balcony with grit. It mattered little, since most of our time was spent at work or on sentry duty. One day we were told the hill on which our comcen stood was being attacked. Dissidents were apparently attempting to storm up the slope, but though we were lined up along the ridge with our weapons I didn’t see any of the enemy. As an NCO I had been given a Sten to use that day, a weapon that was notorious for jamming, but thankfully I didn’t have to use it. The army soon arrived and relieved us. Some swaddy with a Browning heavy machine gun slung over his shoulder nudged me out of the way with, ‘Leave this to the professionals, Corporal.’ I was happy to do so. This infantryman looked like Rambo, with his belt of bullets and huge HMG.

Once or twice in the comcen I met with SAS men who went ‘up-country’, where the National Liberation Front was gaining ground and forming an army of some 25,000 men. There was talk that the colony might be invaded by this army, but since I was not privy to the secrets of generals I don’t know whether this was true or not. The SAS and their operations were known as the ‘keeni-meeni’, a Swahili phrase describing the slithering of a snake. These keeni-meeni included Fijians recruited by the British Army because their skin colouring was similar to that of the Aden local population and they could move among the Adenis more easily than could a European. One night one of these huge keeni-meeni Polynesians frightened the pants off me as he came out of the dark near our observation tower, silent as a ghost. With bandoliers of bullets criss-crossing his chest and carrying a machine gun he looked just like some South American revolutionary.

Automatically I croaked, ‘Halt! Waqqaf!’

‘Hey, man, I’m on your side,’ he said, and a broad grin flashed across his face. ‘I’m your brother.’

He was indeed.

After that I have always had a soft spot for Fijians and when Annette and I visited the islands, much later in life, I found them to be among the most loyal of Queen Elizabeth’s subjects. In a bus queue on Fiji we were asked by the person in front, ‘When did you last see the Queen?’ The man was shocked when he heard we had not been to see our royal monarch, even though we lived ‘just forty miles away from Buckingham Palace’. ‘You should be ashamed,’ said the man, ‘I have seen the queen twice and I live thousands of miles away from her.’ Indeed, when we were there last, in the late 1990s, the Queen’s profile was still on their stamps and her portrait on their money, despite the fact that Fiji had not only gained independence a long time ago but actually left the Commonwealth too.

On 5 June 1967 there was another distraction for the Egyptian troops in the Yemen: their country had begun a war with Israel. This was the six-day Arab-Israeli war. The local Arabs in Aden were cock-a-hoop on the first day of the war, yelling at us that Israel was about to be wiped from the map. ‘The Yahudi will all be killed!’ they shouted, as we walked around the town, or drove through dangerous areas in Land Rovers, ‘Then we will do the same to you!’ Quite the reverse happened of course. Within two days the Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi air forces had been shot out of the sky by the Israeli Air Force. Within two more days the combined Arab land force assault had been halted, encircled and smashed. Two more days, and it was all over. The Israelis had inflicted disastrous losses on the armies of four countries and established themselves as the major military power in the region, with far-reaching consequences that continue today.

Our Adeni Arabs were devastated, as they would be again when Saddam Hussein was defeated both times in the years to come. The military optimism of the Arab world has always been too high for its own good. Much later, when we lived in Hong Kong, the first Iraq war was about to take place. The Reverend Norman Jones, a close friend and the vicar of Christchurch Kowloon Tong, held a peace vigil the night before the ‘Mother of All Battles’. He got a call from local Muslims threatening him if he did not call off his vigil. They said, ‘We want this war to take place. We want to see the Americans defeated.’

Every time there is a conflict between the Arab world and the West, the former believe their troops are going to be gloriously victorious. I think they still live in the time of Saladin, who was indeed a great warrior and defeated Christian armies with ease, but those times have long gone.

Towards the end of my time in Aden, 1 Parachute Regiment and 42 Commando arrived to oversee the withdrawal of thousands of troops. The aircraft carrier HMS Eagle stood out off Steamer Point, in the bay, ready to use its Sea Vixen aircraft in the final days.

However, earlier in the year the local Aden Armed Police had mutinied and shot down eight unarmed British soldiers from a transport unit. So far as I can recall, there were no reprisals and the assassins went unpunished. The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers also lost men shot in separate incidents and armed dissidents finally took complete control of Crater. We in Steamer Point were horrified to learn that an enclosed town of 80,000 inhabitants in the middle of Aden was now in insurgent hands. Gunmen and bombers could slip out of Crater at night and assassinate men in the streets, before running back to safety. Lorries with mortar tubes on the back could drive here, there and everywhere, firing mortars into our midst. It was a situation that the authorities, including General Tower and the High Commission, seemed willing to accept. Colonel Colin Campbell Mitchell had recently arrived in Aden with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and he was having none of it,

‘Mad’ Mitch was a soldier through and through. He was incensed that the politicians and generals were happy to accept the deaths of the fusiliers without retaliation. He requested permission to send in a small reconnaissance patrol to ‘assess the situation in Crater’ and this was granted. Mitchell used this authority to mount a major attack on the enclosed town. Driving his Land Rover at the head of his regiment, with fifteen bagpipers playing ‘Scotland the Brave’, Mad Mitch led the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders through the only narrow pass into Crater and swiftly reoccupied the whole town. It was said to be the ‘last battle of the British Empire’. Only one man was killed, a dissident. Colonel Mitchell was then chastised by General Tower, by politicians and by the High Commission. He was never awarded any medals for his time in Aden, though colonels before him who had seen far less action were given OBEs. The media loved him, his men loved him, and we loved him, but he was afterwards forced to resign from the army.

Politicians and diplomats send forces out to fight their stupid battles and then expect them to stand still and be shot. Where oh where do they get their brains from? And where is their loyalty to those they use? None of us wanted to be in Aden while the politicians were safe on their fat bottoms in Parliament, but they expected their soldiers to police a totally hostile territory without defending themselves. They disgusted me then and they disgust me still.

After we left Aden the National Liberation Front took over, not the sheikhs that the government had wanted to see in power. If Mad Mitch made a mistake by going into Crater and ensuring the safety of the colony while we made ready to leave, then the British Government made a massive mistake in the first place, keeping forces behind in the colony for two years, allowing their citizens and soldiers to be assassinated because of idiotic undemocratic political aims which in the end came to nothing. What a waste of men’s lives, both Arab and European. What a stupid, insane waste.

I had the seeds of the pacifist planted in my soul at that point, though admittedly I did cheer with others when Colonel Mitchell and his regiment marched past our lines. The reoccupation of Crater was almost bloodless. A single dissident was shot when he fired on the Argylls. What a fuss the generals and politicians made of a battle that was not a battle, but merely a show of force. Over a hundred British servicemen and civilians had needlessly been killed up to that point. Two of my colleagues were among those who never came home.

In the 123 SU observation tower one night, just before I left, I was standing guard with a friend when we saw a stream of fireflies coming towards us. The ‘fireflies’ began smacking into the base of the tower and travelling up its length. It took but a second to realise we were being fired on and that these insects were tracer shells from a machine gun. I fell flat on my face. My companion had to lie on top of me, since with all our equipment there was no other space. Unfortunately his bottom stuck above the parapet of the tower, only twelve inches high.

‘I’m going to get shot in the arse!’ he screamed. ‘I’m going to get my arse shot off!’

The lad didn’t get his cheeks drilled, but he was pretty flustered by the time the shooting stopped. Later, when I was again posted to the MOD, he was there on my watch. He and his wife met with me and Annette several times and the incident was retold and retold.

‘It was your husband’s fault,’ he said to Annette. ‘Down in a flash he was, leaving my buttocks to be blown away.’

Annette, remembering my shameful action in the street of bulls in Germany, replied, ‘Garry’s always had a strong sense of survival.’

123 SU left Aden at the end of October, 1967.

We were one of the last units to leave the land that was to become South Yemen. Some wags had hauled a broken-down car on to the top of Shamsan, the peak of the volcano that was Crater, and left it balanced on a pinnacle. We were not sent home, as we expected to be, but on to Bahrain, to finish our tours of duty. While we were in Bahrain it was Ramadan and the local cannon was fired daily to signal that sunset had arrived. When that gun went off every day most of the men of 123 SU, late of the Aden Emergency, dropped to the floor instinctively. Then we got to our feet a minute or two later, sheepishly remembering that we were no longer in a place where they were trying to kill us, but in another place where they might want to kill us one day but hadn’t started yet.

While in Bahrain, two other lads and I rode stallions bareback in the sheikh’s desert races. My months at the Pear Tree Riding School outside Uxbridge were put to a severe test. None of us came anywhere near winning our race. I was quite happy to finish still clinging to the mane of a magnificent snorting beast that must have been thoroughly contemptuous of my efforts to bring him glory.

14. Ministry of Defence (again!)

Imagine my unbounded joy on my arrival back in England to learn that I had once again been posted to the MOD London, that hated place I had escaped from just a few years previously. This time I was prepared to wait it out, knowing I would be posted within six months or so. I had put down Cyprus as my first choice of overseas posting, with Singapore second and Hong Kong third. They ignored all three and told me my next posting would be the island of Malta. Ah, what the hell, Malta was as good as anywhere else and I’d never been there.

Annette was staying with her parents. I walked up the garden path in Church Road, Shoeburyness, to be greeted by two small children, one with a smile on his face. Richard was now five years of age and I was thrilled to see he remembered me after a whole year’s absence. Not so my little daughter, a pugnacious curly-headed blonde who stared at me with frank hostility and said, ‘I’m goin’ to tell my dad of you!’

‘I am your dad,’ I said gently.

She stared at me for a long while, thoughts going round in her three-year-old head, before giggling and running to fetch her mum.

Annette came out of the house looking as lovely as ever.

We were quite shy with one another at first, having been apart for so long. There had been no phone calls between Annette and me. Telephoning had been out of the question, unless an emergency occurred. Thankfully no such crisis had arisen during my absence. Such has been the progress in communication media to date that I have to say hand-written letters were in those days our only form of exchange. So we went for a walk, held hands like young sweethearts, and talked about those thousands of little things that sweethearts talk about.

Once we had set up home again, this time in Shenfield, with easy access to London and work, things got a little difficult. Probably Annette expected life to be one way and I another. It was nothing terrible. There were no rows or heated arguments, but there was a sense of disappointment in the air. I think I had been dreaming for a year of how things would be once I got home and Annette had been doing the same, but our separate dreams did not dovetail for some reason. Once we learned we were going to Malta, everything changed for the better. We both walked about with sparkling eyes, me knowing I would not have to catch a dirty train to work every day and Annette knowing she would not have to be just a housewife, which she found very dull.

Richard attended a local school for a few months in Shenfield. Chantelle went to nursery.

After the lease on the flat had expired, while I was still in Aden, Annette had been given married quarters at RAF Debden, an RAF police dog training unit in the north of Essex, near Saffron Walden. There she had been robbed by a woman she trusted, her next-door neighbour, who was subsequently charged by the police. There was also an accident in the van, when a car driver ran into her while she was doing a three-point turn, but thankfully no one was hurt. Richard had not been happy at school there and was pleased to get away from it. We went in the van and collected some stuff and then that chapter was closed.

At least while we were at Shenfield we were fairly near our parents and saw quite a lot of them, but our excitement with our new overseas posting was such we could not wait to get there.

15. RAF Luqa

We arrived in Malta in the autumn of 1968. The Americans were still having a hell of time of it in Vietnam, while a huge peace movement was sweeping the USA, but I was in a tranquil backwater of the Mediterranean and now far from the bullets and bombs.

At first we again did not have enough points for a married quarter and took a flat in Sliema, near to the harbour. Valetta city was just a bus ride away and though Malta is a small island there were plenty of places for us to visit. The flat was on the third floor of a four-storey building and the landlord was not a very friendly man. One day Annette shook the crumbs from the tablecloth from the balcony at the back. Unfortunately there was a side plate still in the cloth, which went skimming out on the wind like a discus, hurtling out then down towards the landlord who was tending his tomato plants. It narrowly avoided decapitating him and smashed into the wall of a neighbour’s house. The landlord indignantly jerked up to see who was throwing missiles at him. By that time Annette had ducked behind the curtain, so he never ever did find out who launched a deadly plate at his head while he wasn’t looking.

We loved the evening promenade along Sliema harbour, where the Maltese, young and old, would dress up in their best clothes and simply stroll along the water’s edge greeting neighbours. We too joined these light-hearted people in their evening walk.

There was much we loved about Malta. The people were friendly and had some very British ways. (After all, Malta was the ‘George Cross’ island, the medal awarded to it for the stoical bravery of its people during the Second World War.) The buses were gaily painted in gaudy colours, with Catholic altars just inside the entrance doorway so that Mary could assist the driver. Many churches had two towers, each with a separate clock, one showing the right and Christian time, the other showing the wrong time in order to confuse the Devil. English money was used. The people loved their fishing in the harbour and we would walk by a long line of rods each day. The beaches were golden sand and the water was only slightly murky. Fireworks were let off at regular intervals – any excuse was used for a display – and they were mostly bangers that were more like sticks of dynamite than squibs. The whole island used to judder during a festival. Maltese butcher’s shops displayed the words ENGLISH BUTCHERY, which looked like a political statement.

As with Singapore and other RAF camps abroad, local men were recruited and worked alongside us in the comcen. I made a good friend in a Maltese guy called Fred Azzopardi, who tried to teach me the Maltese language. Maltese is a mixture of Arabic, Italian, English and local words. Fred would amuse me when I heard him talking to one of his friends on the phone, and English phrases kept coming out. ‘Yabba-yabba-yabba-yabba safe as houses, mate,’ was a typical sentence that he might use, the yabba being Arabic-Italian of course. I could recognise some of the Arabic words from my years in Aden, but I never got much beyond yelling, ‘Fred, isma ha!’ Which meant, ‘Fred, come over here!’

~

We had been on camping holidays with Dave Thompson and his family in England on several occasions. Dave was another ex-Boy Entrant and we had been stationed together afterwards. He and his wife and kids were posted to Malta too. We all went off to Gozo, a smaller island off Malta where Calypso had her cave in Homer’s Odyssey. We camped on the beach below Calypso’s cave for several days, washing in the sea and getting thoroughly tanned and salty, then when the time came to leave, tried to get into a hotel for a meal. They turned us away at the door. We looked and smelled like tramps. The kids were incensed as we had promised them all ice creams, but there was nowhere else on Gozo to get such delicacies, so home we trudged, via the ferry.

One of my co-workers in the comcen was a young man who had converted to the Mormon faith. Neil was an Englishman with a nice family, who had been persuaded into the belief of the Church of the Latter-day Saints. We became firm friends. He did not preach to me and I wouldn’t have listened anyway, but we both shared a love of the outdoors. Once we climbed a cliff on the north side of the island and slept overnight in a cave full of spiders and bats in order to see the sunrise. We would take our families and camp on the beach using a bed sheet and broomsticks to make a tent for the children. Another outing was not so clever. We decided to canoe right around the island of Malta. I’m not sure of the distance, but we thought we could do it in a day.

We set off without life jackets in a flimsy double-canoe with a canvas-covered frame, thinking we would cling to the shore all the way round the island and so did not meet with any serious problems. We were both very good swimmers and could do two or three miles without too much trouble in warm water. However . . . there’s always that however . . . we came to a part of the coast with a deep wide bay and decided to cross it, rather than hug the shore.

When we got halfway across this enormous bay, the wind and sea suddenly grew stronger and wilder and we found ourselves about two miles out and in some danger of overturning the canoe. It was all we could do to keep it from capsizing in the choppy waves and not for the first time in my life I had those horrible ugly worms of fear in my stomach. If we did capsize we were in deep, deep trouble, because around the edge of the bay were steep, high cliffs, against which a turbulent sea was beating. There was no beach to swim to, nor any place to crawl up out of the surf. Just tall, smooth, forbidding limestone.

‘We’re in trouble,’ said Neil, his voice wavering.

‘I know,’ I replied, feeling the tendrils of fear quickly working their way through my gut. ‘Do a bit of praying, chum.’

And he did, bless his cottons.

Had we capsized we would most definitely have drowned. Throughout my life the sea has always been trying to get me – Stambridge, Felixstowe, Aden – and it was coming for me again. We said very little to each other, Neil and I, as we fought to keep the canoe upright. His face was as white as the belly of a fish and I had no doubt my own had a similar hue. We paddled and we paddled, water washing over the deck of the canoe and into the cockpits, occasionally getting that electric jolt of fear when the canoe nearly went over. After about half an hour we reached the other side of the bay. We made straight for the beach that began there and landed safely, then lay on our backs, the sweat pouring down our faces. I was shaking badly, as the relief flooded through me.

Neil said, ‘We’re not going on, are we?’

‘Not a bloody chance,’ I said. ‘I’d rather carry this canoe across the Sahara than go back into that sea.’

~

Annette had her own problems in Malta. Because it was a deeply Catholic island birth control was against the law. Visitors obviously had to obey the laws of the land but the British government had negotiated an arrangement with the Maltese government. Servicemen would be permitted to have contraband condoms in their homes, but they had to be issued at the Military Hospital. Since the condoms were issued only on Thursday morning, once a month, the men would be at work. It was left to the wives to collect them. Thus every condom day there would be a long line of servicemen’s wives stretching around the hospital grounds, waiting for their turn to collect the forbidden goods. It was, Annette said, humiliating.

At that time and maybe still, servicemen abroad were permitted to buy cars without purchase tax, so long as they kept them for a year before taking them back to the UK. I purchased a new Hillman Imp, a little blue beauty. We loved it, as one does a new car. I still had jazz at the top of my music listening, but apart from Bob Dylan, other singers of his ilk were coming along. Melanie Safka was a revelation to me. And Simon and Garfunkel. I was reading books by the dozen and writing poetry which was beginning to have a personal voice. We visited every nook and cranny of Malta, including the Neolithic cave complex, Marsaxlokk rocky headland, St Paul’s Bay, Valetta, and a dozen other sites and villages of interest. We finally got married quarters and moved to Luqa camp, where the first thing that happened was three of our fighter jets crashed on landing, two of them together. Tragic.

During the first three years of our marriage in Germany Annette had asked me what educational qualifications I had.

‘None,’ I replied, cheerfully. ‘Zilch.’

‘Then you have to get some,’ said my nineteen-year-old partner, who was wiser than a hundred-year-old sage. ‘Sign up at the education section and any they don’t do, we can do by correspondence courses.’

I began studying for seven GCE O-Levels. Since I had left school at fourteen without ever taking an exam, this was new ground. I had no idea if I had it in me to pass a GCE of any kind. But actually I found it easy, I enjoyed studying, especially English literature and ancient history, and that second summer in Germany I had passed six of them very well, but failed the mathematics. I retook mathematics and failed again. ‘You need to get a science then,’ said my already-qualified wife. ‘If you can’t get maths, get a science.’ I took human biology and passed with flying colours. It’s those damn figures I don’t get.

In Malta I moved on to A-Levels, but before I finished them I was called in to see the CO and he told me I had been promoted to sergeant and posted to Cyprus in charge of a signals unit.

Cyprus! Wonderful. We had only spent ten months in Malta, so we had two years and two months in Cyprus, a much larger island, and a posting which all servicemen loved. In Cyprus there were mountains where you could ski in winter and beautiful seas to swim in during the summer. There were shish kebabs and mezes, Greek dancing, Turkish festivals, long walks through orange groves. The navy shipped my Hillman Imp there to await my arrival. And I was going as a senior NCO. Life in the RAF, in any armed service, is a hundred times better as a senior NCO. Officers treat you with the utmost respect. You have your own mess, with squadron dinners, balls, dances, and a bar with flunkies to serve you drinks. You did not have to mix with drunken airmen or sleep in billets with eighty other souls. If you went unaccompanied you got a room to yourself, for a mess was like a quiet hotel, with kidneys for breakfast and newspapers in the coffee room. I had made it.

So, a brilliant posting and a wonderful position. I would be in charge of fifteen to twenty airmen on a listening post. This time, unlike Aden, we would be monitoring our own people. We would tap phones, listen to broadcasts, read letters. At that time the Cold War was going on and traitors were coming out of the woodwork. My job was to stop, look and listen for anyone giving away secrets, whether deliberately or unintentionally. There would be an officer in overall charge, but he sat in an office and wrote reports, while I took the men away to various places, including Malta, Libya, Masirah Island, Gan, as well as various other British outposts, to make sure everyone was behaving themselves.

As usual I left behind some good friends. Two men in particular: Sergeant Giy DeVri, a Frenchman who had joined the Royal Air Force after the war and was more British than I am, and Vic and Lila, a couple born in the Ukraine. Vic was a corporal and would rise no higher, since he was from the Soviet Union. The authorities would only trust someone from that area so far. He was a pale wisp of man, with gentle manners, and he had a lovely wife in Lila. They introduced Annette and me to salami sausage, which we had never seen before. I disgraced myself by eating the rind. Everyone, including Annette, had a nice little pile of rind on the side of their plates, while my plate edge was bare. Vic and Lila were too polite to join Annette in laughing at me.

16. RAF Episkopi, Cyprus

John and Grace Chidlow, with young Craig, had gone to Cyprus straight from UK. John was not going to be at 127 Signals Unit, but was in the main comcen, so we wouldn’t be working together this time. However, we were all stationed at Episkopi, so would see something of each other. They had married quarters on Episkopi camp, but once again we were not eligible. I wrote to John before leaving Malta and asked him if he could find a hiring for me. He and Grace were as good as ever and they found us a bungalow on the edge of Limasol with a view of the mountains. It had a small garden in front, with a carob tree just a few yards away, and was otherwise surrounded by what we in the RAF called ‘bondu’, which is actually bare wasteland. John and Grace ‘marched in’ for us, which is actually quite a stressful duty, and so they saved us the trauma of counting spoons and coat hangers.

A tenant of RAF married quarters or hirings has to ‘march in’ and ‘march out’ of rented accommodation. This consists of a visit by the RAF Families Officer, sometimes a civilian, sometimes an RAF officer, who comes with a clipboard and is accompanied by an NCO to oversee the occupation of the house. An inventory of every item is taken, right down to the last paperclip.

Marching in is not so bad. It consists of following the Families Officer into each room and ticking off all the items on the inventory, because at the end of the day you will have to sign a form to say you have taken over responsibility for every little thing in the house, from bedding, to cups, to cushions, to gas bottles. Married quarters were always furnished by the RAF, but civilian hirings were obviously furnished by the owner of the property. If any of items went missing or were damaged, or even dirty, on ‘marching out’ the tenant had to pay for them. Everything on the inventory was listed generically. Thus under spoons one would get:

Spoons desert, 6

Spoons serving, 2

Spoons sugar, 1

Spoons tea, 6

etc.

The great fear on marching in is that you are so flustered by the new posting and hoping your absent wife will like the house, that you might sign for something either missing or wrongly registered. There is the apocryphal story of an airman who thought he signed for:

Hangers coat, 1

When actually what he had signed for and would have to cough up a huge amount of dough to replace was:

Hangars aircraft, 1

Marching out is without doubt the worst duty the RAF ever put a husband and wife through. Before the Families Officer arrived to inspect it, the house had to be absolutely spotless. He would lift carpets, take the oven to bits, climb up to inspect the tops of wardrobes, take out drawers and look behind them, hold blankets up to the sunlight to look for any stains, thoroughly investigate the interior of a teapot, etc etc. It was a nightmare experience which Annette and I went through at least ten times in our fifteen years in the service together. Every mother’s son (and daughter) loathed and feared marching out with every fibre of their being. It was an humiliating duty.

Two weeks prior to marching out the cleaning of the house and its myriad utensils and pieces of furniture would take place. Neighbours who had been kind and helpful enough before that time would now stand back and watch and wait. It was an unwritten law that you never assisted your neighbours or friends in a march-out. It was something that one had to do on one’s own. And it was not a pleasant task. The worst object was the cooker. There are legends attached to cleaning cookers. Everyone had their own method, from unscrewing each detachable piece and soaking it in a mild solution of acid, to covering the whole thing in fierce foam, hoping to shift the grease. Almost always there were several stains which refused to budge, no matter how much hard work went into it, or what shifting agent was used.

The bathroom was the next horror, usually because the grouting in the tiles had gone brown and had to be made white again or the kids had cracked the washbasin by knocking a bottle of something or other from the cabinet shelf down on to the porcelain. A new washbasin was not cheap and we were not well off in those days. Likewise a dropped and dented saucepan had to be replaced. Annette once threw one at me during a tiff and I tried to hammer out the subsequent dent to save money.

Such repairs never ever worked.

Children’s bed sheets and mattress covers, and indeed mattresses themselves, nearly always got stained. Mattresses are expensive items, but this mishap was accepted by airmen and wives with resignation, since tots will indeed pee in their sleep at least once in every bed, and if they fail to do that they will definitely wake up once or twice on a tour abroad with a bad tummy – and puke all over themselves. This is a fact of life as certain as taxes and death.

Always there were missing knives, missing spoons, missing forks. We did get an allowance for broken crockery, but that was often exceeded. There is the tale of Mr Airman who having broken the handle from the teapot secretly glued it back on for the marching out. However, once the marching out was complete, the Families Officer asked for a cup of tea and Mrs Airman, unaware of the repair made a whole pot of Rosy Lee. As the lady was pouring his brew and chatting to the dreaded officer, the glue on the teapot melted. The handle slowly peeled away from the pot, which then crashed on the floor below. That particular Families Officer sent the unhappy couple a cleaner’s bill for his trousers.

But . . . but at least John and Grace had marched in for us and we loved the bungalow. In the ’60s in Cyprus the locals often built houses and rented them out while they themselves lived in the garage. Eleni next door to us did just that. She was the mistress of the local baker, who had given her the deposit for her bungalow, and then she had let it out as a hiring to the RAF, knowing they were reliable and paid good rent. Eleni was a cheerful lady, who had two children by the local baker and occasionally got into a scrap with the baker’s wife. Every few months or so the baker’s wife would arrive in the middle of the night and do battle with the mistress, screaming, ‘Stay away from my husband,’ in English so that we and the other airmen in the district would know she was the righteous one and Eleni was the harlot. The next morning everything would be back to normal, with Eleni bestowing her favours on the baker, who would then go home to his wife for dinner.

Another apocryphal tale. The Families Officer gets a telephone call from a newly arrived airman’s wife. ‘There’s a lizard in my living room,’ says the panicking woman. The officer knows that all houses in the tropics have three-inch-long geckos running around the walls and ceilings that are tolerated because they eat flies, mosquitoes and other unpleasant bugs. ‘Don’t worry,’ he tells her gently, ‘it won’t hurt you. Just leave it alone and get on with your unpacking.’ A while later the same woman rings back. ‘It’s still here,’ she says. ‘Look,’ says the officer impatiently, ‘I’ve said it won’t bother you. Just ignore it.’ He slams the phone down. Immediately it rings again. ‘What?’ he yells. A calm voice says, ‘I just wanted you to know that it’s eating the furniture. Will we have to pay for that?’ The officer gets in his car and hurtles round to the quarters to find a six-foot monitor lizard happily chewing on the sofa, refusing to be budged by the lady prodding it with a broom handle.

Cyprus was a dream posting. My new unit was up in the hills and away from serious authority. As I have said, we did have an officer, but he was often away on other duties. Our work was not done at the Signals Unit, but on other stations throughout the Near East and Middle East. We would fly into an RAF station in a Hercules C130 aircraft and set up our listening post, tapping phone lines and listening to radio telephony channels and Morse channels. When we were on base we would spend a great deal of time playing volleyball on a court we had out back.

We had a football team too, which meant making a team of eleven men out of a total of fifteen to twenty staff. It wasn’t surprising that we lost a great majority of our games. I enjoyed playing football but I’ve never been good at it. Volleyball was different. That was a game I really enjoyed. There was another sergeant on the team, but he was the radio technician and had no staff responsibilities (lucky him!). His name was John Slowly, and my impression was that we got on well together.

Staff responsibilities. Most of my airmen (we had no WRAFs on the team) were good lads and men. We spent a lot of off-duty time in each other’s company as well as working together. But there are always odd-bods who cause headaches. One was not so bad, a Welsh boy, but he had a head the size of a beach ball. He believed himself to be an intellectual of sorts and was forever giving the rest of us lectures on English literature, science, mathematics, geography, history, you name it. When you spend a lot of time with other men in tents, you don’t need a chunter like that.

The other lad that gave me a great deal of heartache was a young man called Joe who was bi-polar. Several times Joe had been reported to the Medical Section as mentally unstable, but no one seemed prepared to do anything to help him. So we muddled along with other men filling in for him when he went into one of his violent or depressed moods. One day I was in the storeroom and the doorway darkened. There stood Joe with a fire axe in his hand and a nasty look on his face.

‘You only gave me a three in assessments this year.’

It was my job to assess the airmen in their duties and give them a mark between one and ten.

‘A three? As much as that?’ I joked, though my eyes never left the fire axe. ‘Um, what are you doing with that thing in your hand, Joe?’

‘Nothin’,’ he muttered. ‘Just bringing it back.’

‘Look, Joe, as far as assessments go, you don’t even want to be in the RAF, do you? A three is good. It’ll help you get out.’ I was making it up as I went along, the sweat running down my back. ‘Because when headquarters see the low mark I’ve given you, they’ll want to interview you and get your side of the story.’

‘I’ll tell ’em you’re a bloody bastard.’

‘That’s your prerogative, of course, Joe – and I have nothing to say to that, except that I do have a copy of my parents’ marriage certificate.’

‘Don’t get bloody funny with me, sarge.’

‘You used to like to joke, Joe.’

At that point relief flooded through me as he tossed the axe on a pile of ropes and walked out without another word. Shortly afterwards they came and took Joe away. I was shaking. I hope he got the treatment he should have been getting long before that point. Sometimes the authorities act extremely irresponsibly. Joe had been fine when I arrived at the unit but had deteriorated mentally over a period of a year. At his worst we were without an officer in charge and doctors in the RAF don’t take a lot of notice of an NCO in charge of a section. They’re always wondering what the angle is and why we’re trying to get rid of a man.

~

Annette and I, and the kids too, absolutely adored Cyprus.

There was a Roman amphitheatre at Curium, not far out of Episkopi, where the expat and service communities used to put on concerts and shows. It was open to the Greek heavens of course and we would take a picnic basket on a balmy evening and watch the local amateur dramatics society murder a play by Aristophanes or Aeschylus under the moon and stars, with the soft evening light shining on the Mediterranean Sea. Roast chicken and the local wine, Coccinelli, which tasted mildly better than petrol. Wonderful. I remember watching a particular pantomime there, performed by the Episkopi Players. One of the cast was our gynaecologist, a young doctor recently arrived on the island. Ad-libbing, he suddenly came out with the line, ‘You know what I am in real life? A spreader of old wives’ tails.’

There was a horrified gasp from many ladies in the audience and mutters of, ‘I’ll never go to him again.’

In the winter we would drive up into the Troodos range of mountains and ski on the slopes of Olympus. In summer we would camp and swim in Fig Tree Bay, near Famagusta, or on the panhandle, that bit that sticks out like, well yes, a frying-pan handle, north-eastwards of the island. There was a monastery at the end of the panhandle and the monks would give you a cell for the night if you didn’t fancy camping on the beach. At the other end of the coast was Paphos. Paphos in those days was a small village with polluted beaches. We camped at Aphrodite’s Rock (where the lass came out of the waves, as in Botticelli’s painting) and the mosaics were in those days unprotected by fences and admission prices. We carried a garden rake in the car boot to clear the seaweed from the sand.

We also frequently visited Kyrenia, the Turkish quarter of the island, where St Hilarion Castle and Bellapais Abbey can be found.

The Turkish Cypriots, after independence from the UK, did not appear to outside eyes to have been treated fairly by the ruling Greek Cypriots. British service families had to use a United Nations escort through the Turkish side of Nicosia and there were signs everywhere proclaiming the injustice towards Turks on the island. Apparently, building materials were restricted and the Turks had to use mud bricks to construct their houses. I remember placards which read: ‘Greek murderers of Turks go free in Greek courts’. Often at night in our little bungalow we heard gunfire as one side or the other attacked what they perceived as enemy villages. Everything came to a head in 1974 when there was a military coup against Makarios III and this event mobilised the mainland Turks. The Turkish army invaded Cyprus, partition was created and land redistributed between the two sides, much to Greek dismay.

~

It was about this time that we learned that Rick was extremely fast on his feet. His junior school in Limassol entered him in races against older children which he seemed to win with ease. I wanted to encourage my kids at anything they seemed to enjoy, whether it be ballet, ballooning or boxing, and Rick seemed to enjoy as well as excel at running. At first it was short distances – 100 metres – but later he went in for cross-country and middle-distance running. His best distance was the 800 metres and he continued to train hard and win races until he left school at sixteen. I still have dozens of newspaper clippings which mention the speed and technical ability of R. Kilworth. Once Rick left school he gave up competitive running, but he still does it now for fun.

Both Rick and Shaney showed an aptitude for swimming. Shaney actually achieved her bronze medal at the age of five, which was a remarkable achievement since it involved a half-mile swim out to sea. Once out there she trod water until I plunged in and swam to join her, quite against the rules. ‘Are you all right, sweetie?’ I asked her. ‘Yes daddy, I am now,’ she replied. ‘I was lonely.’ I turned and looked back at the beach and saw why. The figures there, of her mum and the examiner, did not look much bigger than matchsticks. It only occurred to me at that moment that we were very irresponsible parents.

Rick and Shaney would eventually get their colours for both athletics and swimming at Shoeburyness High, which was not easy in a school which boasted three students who were Olympic swimmers.

I believe my kids loved Cyprus as much as we did. They had their first pets there. I brought home a chameleon one day, which we kept for at least a week, then one of the kids took it out into the garden and, using its remarkable powers of camouflage, it changed colour and vanished on a pomegranate bush. Amazing creatures. We also had two cats. I was walking on the bondu when I came across a sack that was moving jerkily. Untying the string around the neck, I discovered two kittens inside. Someone had dumped them. So I took them home and we named them Cowboy and Indian. One night we left Indian asleep on the bottom of Rick’s bed. At about 2 o’clock Rick stumbled into our bedroom.

He mumbled, ‘Dad, there’s three cats there now.’

I investigated and, yes, Indian was in the process of giving birth to a litter of kittens of her own.

Sadly cats did not last long in Cyprus. They were vulnerable to all sorts of accidents and diseases. After giving it to all the family, including me, Cowboy died of ringworm. Indian had an even nastier fate. There were packs of feral dogs in Cyprus, stag hounds. These were the descendants of a hunting pack left behind by some irresponsible aristocrat in the nineteenth century. They raced around the bondu and the streets, huge devils with broad shoulders, knocking over infants and terrorising other wildlife. Every so often there was a dog shoot to try to eliminate them, but they could never quite be wiped out. One of these dogs caught Indian outside the confines of our garden and within seconds her back was broken and she lay dead in the street.

Unlike Rick who was older, Shaney does not have a lot of childhood memories of Cyprus, but she does still recall both ‘the tree of fire’ and ‘the wind of God’.

A landowner in Cyprus does not necessarily own the trees on that land. Trees have separate ownership and family parties can be seen on another man’s land picking olives or carobs from their trees. This quirk in the law causes a lot of arson. Should a landowner wish to build a house on his patch, he must first purchase any tree on that patch. If the tree owner refuses to sell, that tree often mysteriously catches fire.

As already mentioned there was a carob tree on the plot next to the house, a big old gnarled thing that looked as it had been planted by Gandalf in the days when magic was on the earth. One night our bedroom lit up and crackling was heard. Annette and I rose and went outside to find the carob blazing merrily, lighting up the landscape and sending sparks showering upwards into the darkness above. The kids woke up too and joined us in watching the bonfire just a few yards away from the bungalow. Neighbours were roused and nibbles and drinks were handed round. It was quite a sight. Carob trees are packed with oil and when set alight go up like torches. Our tree burned for three days, even though the fire engine came and put it out twice. It simply reignited within minutes of them leaving. They never did find the arsonist. When we returned to look for our old bungalow in 2003, a large house had been built next door.

The ‘wind of God’ was even more dramatic.

It was New Year. We were sitting on the veranda of our bungalow with John and Grace, and the three kids, enjoying a glass of wine in the weak winter sun. Suddenly the sky darkened and within seconds hailstones the size of marbles began hurtling down. They were so big and hard, and so unexpected, they stung mightily. This short storm lasted only seconds. Then came a noise like a squadron of bomber aircraft. It seemed to be coming from the south, out of the sea. Then we saw it. A huge tornado was heading towards us. Other tornadoes were hitting the island further down the coast. We rushed inside the house and closed the shutters, making the children lie down on the floor.

The noise outside was unbelievable and it was then that 5-year-old Shaney whispered, ‘Is that God out there, dad?’

I was minded to have a word with her Sunday school teachers.

John and I became curious and went up onto the roof with our cameras. The tornado passed about a hundred yards from the house. It was full of car parts and bricks and junk of all kinds. In a nearby yard there was a chicken coop which went up in nano-seconds, the chickens with it. They simply vanished into the clouds. Next, the tornado hit an electricity pylon and we saw the power of wind at its most fierce. The solid steel pylon twisted like a corkscrew, live cables snapping and electricity cracking and flashing when the ends touched earth.

‘There goes our leccy,’ said John, still peering through binoculars as the tornado wound its way into the mountains. ‘No turkey for dinner today, mate.’

Indeed, not only was there an electricity failure, but 400 homes had been left damaged in the wake of the wind. Cars had been destroyed, bikes, dustbins were gone, everything that had not been cemented down had been sucked up into the belly of the sky. There had been five tornadoes in all, created by the RAF when they had been warned that a waterspout of enormous dimensions was heading for Cyprus. The pilots had bombed the waterspout with dry ice to break it up. The whirlwind we had witnessed was but a child of a much greater parent. The other four tornadoes had not caused as much havoc as ours, since they had hit mostly open countryside, not towns.

Episkopi library had an exhibition of photographs at the end of January, pictures of the tornado taken from various vantage points. There had been one or two deaths and some injuries, but considering the force of that circular wind, I think the island got off very lightly.

~

One or two of the many assignments on which I took my 127 SU team are still embedded in my memory.

The first was our trip to Masirah Island, in the Persian Gulf, where there was an RAF base similar to RAF Gan, a staging post. On arrival there we found that no stores had been delivered for around six months and the cookhouse was out of bacon and other delicacies. We also had to wash our clothes and ourselves in seawater. Saltwater makes your skin and clothes itchy and you never feel absolutely clean. There were also scorpions everywhere and though I don’t mind spiders, I detest scorpions. We were only on Masirah for two weeks and I pitied the guys that were doing a year unaccompanied posting there.

One morning the Commanding Officer of the station, let’s call him Wing Commander Johnson, rang the cookhouse. When the phone was picked up the busy CO said briskly, ‘This is Wing Commander Johnson. Is that the Orderly Room?’ There followed a long silence as the recipient ran through probabilities in his head, then suddenly there was a triumphant reply. ‘No, it’s not the Orderly Room and Wing Commander Johnson can fuck off!’ Click. Phone down. We all agreed one had to admire the bravado behind this reply, if not the common sense.

Whoever had answered the CO’s call had believed he was safe from discovery. Had we not been monitoring the lines, and given that the CO failed to recall the exact digits he had dialled, the rash airman who had told his Wing Commander to ‘fuck off’ would have been completely safe. A Strowger telephone exchange does not keep records of numbers dialled. We found out who was on duty at the cookhouse at the time. It was a lone maverick corporal. We played him our tape in private. He went white and sickly-looking as he recognised his voice, but we assured him that his Wing Commander would never get to know.

I played a little golf while I was on Masirah. The fairways were hardened sand and the ‘greens’ were oiled browns. Halfway round I met another sergeant playing on his own. After a chat I found out that he was the local comcen sergeant, an ex-Boy Entrant telegraphist, but from an earlier entry than my 29th. We played the rest of the round then met in the mess for drinks that evening. Bill Fedden and I became firm friends before I left Masirah and we were to run into each other again.

The second assignment that sticks out was a return to Gan Island, where much had changed since I was there the first time. It was a lot greener, with more trees and a small golf course. I was with a new unit commander, a Flying Officer Ramsey, promoted from the ranks. He was a good CO for the unit but we went head-to-head on Gan. He ordered me back to Cyprus early from that assignment when we disagreed on something and though we made it up when the unit returned two weeks later I never quite forgave him for using his power to order me home.

This same flying officer was fond of the ladies. In the late ’60s the officer ranks of the WRAFs changed to match those of the men. A WRAF Flight Officer in 1968 became a Flight Lieutenant, just like her male counterpart. It took some time for these changes to register with elderly officers of the old school. I was on duty in June 1969 when an announcement came over BFPS (forces) radio.

‘Will Flying Officer Ramsey, known to be camping with Flight Lieutenant Swisher in the north of Cyprus, report immediately to Squadron Leader Cramphorn.’

I rang Squadron Leader Cramphorn immediately.

‘I don’t think you should broadcast that message again, sir,’ I advised. ‘As you know, Flying Officer Ramsey is a married man and I happen to know that Flight Lieutenant Swisher is a WRAF officer.’

‘Nonsense,’ growled the squaddie. ‘There’s no such rank in the WRAF as Flight Lieutenant.’

Fine. I had made my point. My responsibility was at an end. The broadcast went out on the radio twice more, as before, with the same names. Fifteen minutes later my phone rang again.

‘You’re right,’ barked the Squadron Leader, ‘The orderly room has just called me. Flight Lieutenant Swisher is a woman. What do we do?’

I wanted to call him a home-breaker but he sounded so horrified I felt sorry for him.

‘Nothing, sir. Flying Officer Ramsey’s wife is in England and not due out here for some time. But we’d better not broadcast the message again.’

‘No, Sergeant,’ he said, as if it were my fault all along, ‘we had certainly better NOT.’

Round about that time I was having cold feet regarding leaving the Royal Air Force and going into civvy street. I was due to go in 1971 but the air force was all I had ever known in the world. My dad had still been in when I joined myself, so my relationship with the service was seamless. I had gone from a child in married quarters to an airman in married quarters. I had never lived among people who did not wear a blue uniform. Naturally I was worried about getting work and taking care of my family in a completely alien environment. Were those people out there who wore suits or casual clothes the same as me? Could I talk to them, make friends with them, get them to know me? Or were they all cold people, interested only in themselves and their own?

In the end I applied to stay on for another seven years, after which I would receive a pension.

I was devastated to be rejected. There was a quota for sergeant telegraphists and that quota was full. A few years previously I would have been accepted without question, but the good years had passed, they no longer had any problems with recruitment. They had enough Senior NCOs to last them for the duration. In a panic I applied for three extra years, in order to finish my tour in Cyprus. This time I was accepted, but I would get no pension on leaving the service. All that I had coming to me was my last month’s pay and very little else.

In retrospect, having my application for further service rejected was probably the best thing that could have happened to me and subconsciously I probably left it too late on purpose. Given the choice, I would have stayed in the RAF, probably until the maximum of age fifty-five, and would have grown into one of those gnarled old Warrant Officers who spend all their time telling airmen to get their hair cut. That really wasn’t me. I was quite young still – thirty at the time – and though I felt over the hill, I still had a huge slice of life waiting for me. It was therefore a good thing that the choice was taken away from me.

So we had one more year or so in Cyprus and then we would be sent back to UK to finish my length of service and get demobilised.

Strange word that, demobilised. We usually shorten it to ‘demobbed’ which seems to fit better. Getting demobilised sounds as if one is going to get one’s legs chopped off.

A year or so before we left Cyprus, new neighbours moved into the bungalow opposite. Corporal Trinny Sutherland and his wife Lorraine became life-long friends and we still try to visit them every year at their house in Spain. Trinny originally hailed from the pretty island of St Vincent in the Caribbean, but emigrated to UK in the ’60s. He married Lorraine, a Buckinghamshire lass, and they followed us to Cyprus.

My last assignment for 127 SU again covered an old posting, Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, where I had spent a couple of months after my tour in Aden in 1967. We still had an RAF base on the island and I took my team out there to ‘listen’ to our chaps talking to each other on the telephone and on radio contact channels, such as air-to-ground communications. This was not particularly to discover if any secrets were being divulged to the enemy, but to make sure procedures were being following during exercises and day-to-day comms. There were set rules when using communications equipment and we would make transcripts of any contacts regarding say, a pilot talking to the control tower, or even the orderly room calling the blanket stores.

Flying Officer Ramsey joined us halfway through the assignment and he and I went out in an RAF Land Rover one day to visit a unit on the far side of the island. We had just reached a bridge over a river or gully, I can’t remember exactly where we were, when suddenly the streets started to fill with the Arab population. They came pouring out of buildings and houses, making noises of great sorrow. Men were shouting and beating their heads with their fists. Women were ululating in the way that only Eastern women can, their tongues vibrating in their mouths creating that sound which is so strange and fearful to Western ears. The whole city had suddenly erupted in grief and my CO and I knew that something momentous had happened in the Arab world. I wondered if Israel had swept through Syria and Egypt in a blitzkrieg, or something of that nature, and had stunned the Middle Eastern countries.

As the crowds grew and swirled around us we found our open-topped vehicle hemmed in by thousands of distraught Arabs. They were packed so densely around us the Land Rover was being rocked on its wheels, with us simply sitting there and swaying with it. Ramsey was unable to drive due to the mass of people around us. It was one of those times in my life when I have been thoroughly scared. I could now make out shouts of ‘Nasser! Nasser!’ and knew that something had happened to the Egyptian ruler who was a symbol to the whole of the Arab world. Women were screaming and sobbing, men were shrieking and yelling. One or two climbed on to the bonnet of the Land Rover, while others were using the parapet of the bridge to get by us.

It would have only taken one of those thousands of hysterical men and women to recognise the fact that there were two Western military men in their midst and to point us out, for this mob to attack us in their frenzied state. I had visions of us being hung from a lamp post or, if we were very lucky, thrown from the bridge into the water.

Fortunately, no one seemed to notice us. They flowed past us in both directions, even hammering on the sides of the vehicle with their fists, but not one pointed to us and cried, ‘Infidels!’, which was what we were expecting to happen at any moment. In fact the whole island, not just the city, was swarming with grief-wracked Arabs. Gamal Abdul Nasser had died in his bed that morning. This man who was a hero and a giant to the Arab in the street was now lying in state in Egypt. After about half-an-hour of anxiety we saw an ambulance forcing its way through the crowds on its way to the hospital. Luckily it was going in the same direction as we were and we quickly tucked in behind it, following it to the hospital where the throng was a great deal thinner.

~

Cyprus had been a slice of heaven, but eventually the time came when we had to go home and were posted back to UK for my last couple of years in the RAF. The posting was to Strike Command at High Wycombe, Bucks. I would be a Duty Signals Master there, with responsibilities for a watch of men numbering around fifteen to twenty, and also cryptographic duties, coding and decoding messages in the Enigma style.

Annette and I decided to drive home overland in our new Volkswagen 1300, taking car ferries over any stretches of water. I booked a passage on a Greek ship which had been a French destroyer during Second World War. By 1971 it was a rusted tub, still painted grey, with instructions for the firing of its anti-aircraft guns embossed in French on the metalwork. Our precious Beetle, containing all our worldly goods packed in a box on the roof rack, was winched onto the deck, covered with tarpaulin and strapped down. We were given a cabin next to the hold. Everything on that boat was inch-thick cold metal and comfort was not to be found anywhere above or below.

On the first night out we experienced the worst storm of our lives and the whole family were convinced they were going to die. The kids fell out of their bunks when we hit huge waves that threatened to swamp the whole vessel. All night long we crashed through monstrous seas. It was a voyage that put me off all other ocean trips for life. In the hold next to our cabin an enormous steel hook, as large as a curled-up man, swung free on the end of a thick chain. We had to time any dash across the hold to the toilets on the far side as this great pendulum swung erratically this way and that, smashing against the gong-like bulwark. Every time the hook hit metal the hull reverberated with sound. Annette and I, and the kids, were seasick to the depths of our stomachs, until we were all dry-heaving and wishing, yes, that the ship really would sink. Waves continued to swamp over the bows all next day, until we finally came in sight of Rhodes, which was our first port of call.

The voyage from Rhodes was less dramatic, but by the time we reached Athens, the weather had turned colder. It was October and while Greece is often warm at that time of year, there was an unusual drop in temperature, with a chill wind. We left the ship and found a campsite intending to settle for a couple of days. It was Sunday when we arrived and there were no shops open. All we had were some potatoes and onions, but Annette has always been skilled at making a meal out of nothing. She sliced and fried these two vegetables in butter and olive oil, and we went to bed that first night with full stomachs.

The campsite was swarming with Australians and Kiwis, either heading back towards their homelands or coming from it on their way to Britain. In those times borders and countries were less dangerous than around the turn of the century. You could travel through countries like Iraq and Afghanistan without too much concern and drive almost all the way down to the Antipodes on a shoestring. Beat-up old Volkswagen Dormobiles and clapped-out Minis littered the site. Many of these Aussie and Kiwi travellers had very little money and seemed to exist on thin air. One man sold us a film for our camera and said he could live on what we paid him for the next week.

Rick was a keen fisherman from a very early age. He didn’t get the sport from me. I’m too impatient. It must have been in his genes. Wherever we went, Rick would have his rod and line with him. The campsite outside Athens was not far from the sea and he used to take his tackle and a basket and we would lose him for half a day. On the second day there he came home with the basket full of fish for the pan.

‘You caught all these?’ I cried, astonished.

Rick has never been good at telling untruths.

‘Lady gave them to me,’ he confessed. ‘She said to tell you I’d caught them.’

The ‘lady’ was a young newlywed named Carolyn. She was English but recently married to an Australian, Peter Worth. Carolyn’s relations came from our home town. We made friends with this couple who were travelling around Europe in a minivan. That night we all drank retsina and ouzo round a campfire, cooked the fish, and sang a few songs along with some Greek sailors who had somehow found their way among us. During the next forty years we would retain strong ties with Pete and Carolyn, visiting them in Melbourne whenever possible, they in turn staying at our house when in England. Much later, when I was approaching the age of seventy, it would be Pete who would persuade me to join him on a motorbike rally across the Outback of Queensland, from Brisbane to Cairns via the Gulf of Carpenteria.

We stayed with Pete and Carolyn for the next few campsites, visiting Delphi and other places of interest on the Greek mainland. Annette and I had studied ancient Greek history while in Cyprus and we retold the stories of the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae to the kids as we drove along roads lined with olive groves and orange trees. We also read them the The House at Pooh Corner, the final book in the Pooh series, and it was me who dissolved into tears when Pooh had difficulty in understanding that Christopher Robin had grown up and was going away for ever.

After a week or so we drove to Igoumenitsa, a port on the west coast of northern Greece, and took the ferry to Corfu. Corfu was wet. It rained almost every day, but we camped alongside Carolyn and Peter inside a Dutch barn. There was a table tennis table in the barn, so Pete and I battled it out for several hours a day. I have always fancied myself as a table tennis player and indeed won a championship once in Singapore against Chinese players, but somehow if you don’t play it every day you lose the skill. Pete won as many games as he lost and I’ll say no more on the subject.

From Corfu we took the ferry to Brundisi in Italy. As I left the boat and turned right, I saw Peter and Carolyn turning left. We had lost each other on entering Italy. We drove across the Italian boot and into a campsite near Naples. The weather was turning cold again and when we asked where we should put up our tent the Italian owner said, ‘Ah, the little ones will get cold – you must have a cabin for the same price.’ How kind is that? He even lit a fire in the cabin and when it started to rain while we were out on a sightseeing tour, he took in our washing.

We had a pleasant night in the cabin, then drove north, along the West coast, to Pisa. Naturally we went up the tower. Then on to Switzerland and finally into Germany. The German toilets had central heating and we were tempted to spend our nights camped out under the washbasins, but knowing the Germans they probably policed the joint before lights-out. On, on, into Holland, where another kind campsite owner let us stay the night in a bungalow, just like his Italian counterpart. Where do these lovely people come from? In those days we were not well off enough to afford cabins and bungalows, so we felt like hugging them.

Finally we got back to England where Bill and Betty welcomed us into their home in Church Road, Shoeburyness.

17. RAF Strike Command, High Wycombe

We did not have the points to move directly into married quarters. Once again we found a hiring, this time in a village called Hazlemere. High Wycombe was a short drive away. Places of interest nearby were Disraeli’s Hughendon Manor and Lord Dashwood’s Hellfire Club cave. Burnham Beeches were not far, and Thame, and Beaconsfield, and Amersham, and other interesting towns. We joined the camping club and spent many weekends down by the River Thames, where Rick could fish and the rest of us could applaud when he caught something.

At work in the Strike Command comcen, I found I shared a watch with Bill Fedden, the sergeant I’d met on the golf course at Masirah. He had quarters in the next village to Hazlemere, a place called Holmer Green. He explained that there were very few married quarters actually on the station and private houses had been purchased and turned into married quarters in various locations around the county. The furthest site was up near Oxford, quite a distance from work.

‘Hopefully you’ll get quarters in our street,’ he said, though we both knew there were only twenty houses in that street.

The gods were with us. We did indeed land up just a few doors down from Bill. We met Lisa, his wife, and their two kids. We all loved camping and so most of our holidays were spent under canvas, some in pouring rain, others in sunshine. Everyone was into wine and beer-making in the beginning of the ’70s. Bill made some very potent saki which we drank one evening on a camping holiday. I woke the following morning tangled in a camping chair that had somehow managed to thread its aluminium spars between my legs and arms, effectively binding me.

Since we were due to leave the air force within a short period of time Annette took a job as a post lady. We needed money for a deposit on a house and most of my pay went on household expenses. Annette was given a round which covered the countryside farms around High Wycombe. She enjoyed it immensely, getting up at 5 o’clock every morning and riding her bike on the round, delivering mail and emptying the post boxes. Annette maintained that the weather was always good at that time of day and she got to see the creatures of the wild when no one else was about. The farmers and their wives grew to like this pretty blonde woman with a cheery smile and would give her presents of eggs, pork sausages, cabbages, sprouts, and at one time, a whole chicken. We hardly needed to buy meat and vegetables any more. After one summer Annette had accrued enough to put a deposit of £1,000 against a mortgage of £9,600. For this we got a brand new semi-detached house on an estate named after famous painters. The house was only just being built, but its plot was off Picasso Way and stood in Raphael Drive.

We drove down to Shoeburyness, to the house, and stood proudly gazing on what would one day be ours. Our first. It seemed something of a miracle to us. If the king had given us a mansion in its own grounds, we could not have been more awestruck. Once it was built we let it to army personnel in Shoeburyness Garrison and it became a hiring. All our service life we had lived in hirings, but now we owned one. The rent paid the mortgage while we finished our time in the RAF and everything seemed to be panning out fairly satisfactorily. However, while there we found that the Essex way to pronounce Raphael was ‘Rayful’. So we were to live in ‘Rayful’ Drive among civilians, something that would be very strange to me at first, never ever having done so before.

That which I imbibed in childhood and early manhood on RAF stations has always stayed with me. Even today I have a subconscious desire for an environment which consists of white-painted kerbstones, flagpoles on neatly mowed greens, married quarters-type houses, neatly kept roads, gates with guards on them, smart men in uniforms, aircraft, and all the other things that go with an air force station. Once, we were driving through Spain in the twilight, looking for a place to spend the night. The road was on a rise and down below I could see a neat-looking establishment with lights lining the whole area.

‘There’s a nice hotel,’ I said to Annette, enthusiastically. ‘I like the look of that.’

Annette peered out of her window and shook her head at me sadly.

‘You silly dope,’ she said, ‘that’s an army camp.’

I passed by the place with a wistful sigh, remembering that I still fold my jumpers and shirts the air force way, I keep my socks and ties in rows in the cupboard, I like my bed made with the sheets drum skin tight, I iron creases in my trousers that you could shave with, I polish my shoes with the same brushes I was given on entering the service, I clean the brasses in the house and stand staring at the result with a heart full of pride, and I am as neat and disciplined in my living habits as any sergeant-major still serving today. My study, unlike those of other authors I know, has the pencils lined up, the notebooks in neat order, research books in their right places on the shelves, my completed and half-completed manuscripts in military-order files.

Many other authors I have found to be untidy. For instance Rob Holdstock typically had a study that looked like the inside of a council litter bin, with books and papers lying everywhere gathering dust, scrappy notes stuck together with last year’s jam, beer and coffee splashes on the monitor screen. John Clute, a writer and critic, once entered my study and cried out in alarm. He was concerned for my state of mind, believing that a creative person could not possibly work in such a clinical atmosphere. I suppose, had I never been in the RAF, I might be regarded as anal. But these habits have been drilled into me from birth and are impossible to prise out. When I finally leave this world I shall go lying to attention in my coffin and if there is an afterlife my soul will cry, ‘Fire in the hole!’ as I slide down the chute into the furnace.

What a fortunate thing it is that my wife is so understanding.

~

At courses in and around High Wycombe, Bill and I continued with murdering the golf we had begun at RAF Masirah. In those days I knew very little about individual club distances and indeed had no technique on the course at all. I was lucky if I went around under 120. Bill was much the same, but we enjoyed being in the open air and swearing a lot. As always, Annette and I took the kids camping for weekends and longer holidays, down by the early part of the Thames, and in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, the Lake District and Wales. They were fun days, with Rick, me and Shaney playing rough hockey and Annette taking us on long country hikes. On one of these treks over the Yorkshire Dales, Rick was getting very teenagerish. He just did not want to walk. Annette kept saying to him, ‘Once we get to the top of that hill, it’ll all be worth it – you’ll see a beautiful view from up there.’

When we did indeed reach the crest of the hill Rick put his hands on his hips and said in disgust, ‘So that’s beauty, is it?’

This has become a catch-phrase for the family, whenever one is determined that something is not going to come up to expectations.

~

Bill eventually got posted to Germany, I think for the second time, though I’m not certain about that. Annette began a three year course to become a school teacher, majoring in art. The teachers’ training college was at Chalfont St Peter, but she would have to do her last two years at Brentwood College, in an outpost at Southend-on-Sea, the closest to our new home in Shoeburyness. Her art tutor during the latter two years would be an eccentric Welshman, Eric Robinson, a talented artist with a wonderful personality. He would later re-enter our lives (or we, his) when we found ourselves chasing the sun of Andalusia. Eric and his wife, Gaynor, would become close friends.

~

In the early Spring of 1974 I prepared to leave to leave the RAF and the butterflies were rampaging in my stomach. I discovered I was entitled to career preparation and I decided to take a two year course leading to an HND in Business Studies. The RAF would pay for it and they would give me time off for classes, though much of it would be down to private study at home. The course consisted of economics, commercial law, applied economics, industrial relations, human relations and principles of business administration. To my surprise, I passed with a distinction in economics. Funny really because the only subject I really did take an interest in and enjoy was commercial law, which consisted of learning lots of different cases, mini-stories in their own right. In economics I discovered the perfect sleeping draught for insomniacs.

Although on certain postings it had not been possible to write creative fiction I was now back to writing short stories in my spare hours. Mostly science fiction and fantasy, but others genres too. Publishing them was another matter. I did send one or two off, but I was never very confident that they would be accepted. Indeed, the only writing that got into print at the time was my poetry, in a magazine called Envoi, run by a chap called Meredith Scott. He was a wonderful man who lived a sort of hermit’s life in the Scottish Highlands. Rather than choose which poems to publish himself, he farmed them out to a whole yardful of ‘editors’ who passed them among themselves and eventually came up with a batch for publication in the next issue. JCMS, as Meredith Scott was known to us, spent his life encouraging and praising, rather than criticising. Sadly, he died of cancer just as I left the RAF.

Len Kendall, an Essex poet, also read my work and was also very encouraging and helped me develop an individual style.

I continued to send the odd short story off to science fiction magazines. One of these was edited by a writer called Mike Moorcock. Mike was a well-known and much-published science fiction author, but he still took time to write me long letters about my stories, telling me which bits he liked before saying where he thought I’d gone wrong.

These were good people, assisting a poorly educated boy who was desperate to be a writer one day. Indeed, although when I left school my grammar had been non-existent, my spelling appalling and my punctuation laughable, I did know about the structure of stories, and how to surprise the readers and hopefully delight them, because I have always read avidly. By the age of thirty I had this burning desire to see one of my stories in print. In those days that was the epitome of my ambition.

Just before I left the RAF, Annette found an advertisement in the Sunday Times Review.

‘There’s a competition,’ she told me. ‘They want a collection of science fiction stories. It’s being run by the publisher Victor Gollancz in conjunction with the Sunday Times Review. You ought to send off some of those stories you’ve been writing all these years.’

So I did. One of the tales that was in that package had been penned only two days before I posted them. I had written it in my usual fashion, in a school exercise book, while sitting in a car waiting for friend to join me for a game of golf. The friend’s name was John Duke and the story was called ‘Let’s Go To Golgotha’. It was a time travel story about holiday makers revisiting the crucifixion of Christ. In the years to come that story would sell itself to different publications time and time again, including the only fiction that Lonely Planet Publications has published to date, an anthology called Not the Only Planet.

I have always loved time travel stories, ever since reading H.G. Wells as a boy. There are some absolute gems, including Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Sound of Thunder’ and Christopher Priest’s ‘Palely Loitering’. The idea of time travel has immense appeal to the imagination. I among many others would like time travel to be fact. The first trip I would make would be back to 1735 where I would seek out John Harrison, the inventor of the chronometer, and ask, ‘Excuse me, do you have the correct time?’

~

A New York critic reviewed ‘Golgotha’ thirty years after its first publication and criticised it for being ‘anti-Semitic’. I was appalled and sent him an email pointing out that there were actually no Jewish people in the story apart from Jesus himself. (In my tale Christ had been crucified by Christian time travellers.) So where was the anti-Semitism? After rereading it he eventually agreed he had been over-zealous in his judgement and because the review was still on the Internet, he removed the critical paragraph.

~

In the Spring of 1974 I began to apply for civilian jobs. I wrote to GCHQ, the government ‘listening post’ at Cheltenham. I had good qualifications for that job, having listened for the government in the RAF. They invited me to a day of exams, including Morse and geography. I passed and they offered me a course which would lead to employment with them. The salary was around £1,200 per annum.

I also tried for two other jobs. The first was for a teaching post at a polytechnic. I failed to impress. The interview involved a lot of forced chat and role playing, which didn’t suit my personality. You had to show qualities of leadership. As I think I’ve already said, I’ve always made a damn good adjutant, but a lousy general.

The second was for employment with the Immigration Service. I sat the exam along with dozens of graduates then went into a room for the interview. The interviewers, five of them, were ranged on a raised platform and peered down at me over the tops of their spectacles.

‘Mr Kilworth,’ said the one in the middle, ‘why do you want to be a Home Civil Servant?’

‘A what?’ I replied. ‘I don’t. I want to be an Immigration Officer.’

He smiled at me in a fatherly manner. ‘No, no, we don’t recruit Immigration Officers directly. If you join the civil service and your work impresses us, you may be selected for training later – perhaps in six years or so – to become an Immigration Officer.’

‘Then why,’ I asked, with a smouldering fury, ‘did you advertise in the Guardian for Immigration Officers? The advert said nothing about serving time first. It simply asked for . . .’

I stopped debating the point. I could see I was getting absolutely nowhere, so I got up and walked out.

I was both amused and furious when, several weeks later, I received a letter which began, ‘We are sorry to have to tell you that your application for the Civil Service was not successful. If you would like to apply in one year’s time, etc. etc.’ Bloody hell! I’m sure there are a lot of nice people working for the civil service, some of them are good friends of mine, but like elements of the RAF, they have their pricks too.

Finally I went for an interview with Cable and Wireless, the international telecommunications company that operated in almost fifty countries, mostly ex-colonies of Britain. C&W was an old-fashioned kind of firm, a civil service type company whose only shareholder was the Treasury. It was very like the RAF, with cousins and uncles working side-by-side, and thousands of overseas employees.

I was interviewed by the man who would be my immediate boss, Ian Bowles, who ran the International Telephone Section of the Traffic Department. (Telephone traffic, not road traffic.) He explained that C&W were like British Telecom. They didn’t make or sell things, they provided a service. They owned and operated telephone, telegraph and teleprinter networks abroad.

‘For example, Hong Kong Telco.’

‘Yes, I did know that – I’ve been posted to such places in the past,’ I told Ian.

‘Have you ever worked with erlangs?’ he asked me.

I had no idea what ‘erlangs’ were, but he explained patiently that they were a measurement of telephone usage and that the erlang formula was used to calculate the number of circuits needed for an international or indeed national telephone route.

‘Nope,’ I replied, crestfallen.

‘Oh well, never mind. How about Strowger?’

‘Automatic telephone exchange,’ I replied, ‘invented by the American undertaker, Almon Brown Strowger, who was convinced that the telephone operator in his town was giving a rival his business by redirecting calls from potential customers. The telephone operator’s husband was also an undertaker and was therefore without doubt given preferential treatment by his wife. We’ve been using Strowger exchanges since the late 1800s, haven’t we?’

Ian smiled. ‘Well, you’ve got that off pat, haven’t you?’

‘It’s a good story,’ I replied. ‘I like stories.’

The subject had also formed part of my telegraphist training in the RAF.

‘We’ll soon teach you all about erlang formulas – and a lot of other stuff. I’m impressed you went out and got an HND at your age. Shows initiative and a willingness to learn. You’ll come into the company as a Grade 4 Executive. That’s where our bright youngsters straight out of uni and school start, but I’m sure you’ll surge ahead, with all your previous experience in telecoms. All right?’

The salary, at £2,600, was over twice that offered by GCHQ.

I took the job.

~

I went back to Strike Command and was demobbed within a few days. I had grown a beard which upset the Station Warrant Officer. I also found I had gone one day over the rental week and they wanted rent on the married quarter for my final single night in the married quarter. I had served nearly eighteen years in the RAF and they were chasing me for one night’s rent amounting to two pounds! It revealed a particular meanness which is endemic in any large organisation.

Just before Easter 1974 I left the service with one month’s salary of £250 to begin a new life. I was not entitled to an immediate pension, for I had not served the minimum of twenty-two years. However, they had also arbitrarily changed the rules on the long-term pension which I should have got at sixty years of age. They (the faceless ones) had decided that they would not give a long-term pension to anyone who left the service before 1975. Any airman who had served for the same time alongside me and left a year later received his long-term pension.

Bitter? Moi? Certainly.

Just before we left RAF Strike Command, High Wycombe, I was lying in bed asleep when Annette burst into the room.

‘Garry!’ she shrieked.

I woke with a horrible start, after one hour’s sleep, having been awake for twenty-four hours doing my last night shift.

‘What?’ I cried, fuzzy-confused. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘You won!’ she said, her voice now a profound whisper. ‘You won the short story competition.’

I sat up, electrified. ‘I did?’

‘Here’s the telegram,’ she waved a piece of paper at me. ‘They want you to phone them immediately.’

Thoroughly awake now I ran down to the telephone booth and called the number in the telegram.

‘John Bush, Gollancz.’

‘Mr Bush, my name’s Garry Kilworth.’

‘Aha!’ he said. ‘One of the prize-winners. Congratulations. You’re sharing the prize with another writer. We couldn’t make up our minds between you, but still, very well done. Half-a-thousand pounds. How does that grab you? And we’ll be publishing the story. I think it’ll also be published in the Sunday Times Review.’

‘That’s-bloody-marvellous!’ I said, hardly able to catch my breath. ‘Bloody marvellous.’

‘So glad you’re pleased. The prizes will be awarded at the annual Science Fiction Convention a bit later on this year. Anyway, congratulations again and we’ll be seeing you soon.’

Like Alison, in Peyton Place, I danced up the street on my way back to the house, shouting hoarsely, ‘I’m an author! I’m an author!’

Lisa came out of the house and gave me a hug and told me ‘Well done, Garry.’

It was the third best day of my life to date, if you count getting married and having two kids, both of which are a given.

I went into High Wycombe and saw Westworld at the cinema and bought the latest Carpenters’ LP, the one with the terrific guitar riff in the middle of the song ‘Goodbye to Love’.

My eyes were opened wide when we attended my first science fiction convention in Newcastle in 1974. This particular convention was called ‘Tynecon’. There’s an organisation called the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA), but they do not formally arrange science fiction conventions. This is done by groups of science fiction fans, who by the by, never use the term ‘sci-fi’but abreviate science fiction to ‘sf’. For the first time I realised their was such a thing as ‘sf fandom’ where enthusiasts of the genre gathered like an outlawed clan.

Around 400 people were at the convention, including famous writers like Brian Aldiss, Bob Shaw and Harry Harrison. There were respected publishers and editors too, but for the most part the clan consisted of like-minded fans. Some were fairly geeky, quite a few really when I think about it, but others were serious scientists. Of the fans, many produced ‘fanzines’ in which sf was discussed, reviews of novels were printed, and the slings and arrows of outrageous insults were employed. The convention itself harboured second-hand booksellers, had an art show, had Guests of Honour (usually writers and artists in the genre), showed movies, had panels and talks, and a fancy dress evening (though many fans wore space suits or Conan-the-Barbarian loin cloths the whole period of the three days) but mostly consisted of groups of fans sitting in the bar downing alcohol and talking about their favourite genre.

I met the Gollancz publisher, John Bush, and he was very complimentary and enthusiastic about my future as a writer, which filled me with confidence. I was also given my prize cheque at the banquet which is always held at such cons on Saturday night. The man or woman who wrote the story ‘The Hibbie’ under the name James Alexander, who shared the prize with me, did not attend and to my knowledge has never been seen or heard of again in the book world. I have long since pondered on who it might have been, given that the story was probably written under a pseudonym. Why does the winner of a prestigious award simply disappear without a trace without ever showing his or her face, or writing another piece of fiction under the same name? I have tried googling ‘James Alexander – Science Fiction’ without the remotest success. There is a James B Alexander, an American author listed in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. JBA wrote one work which might be regarded as science fiction. This gentleman was born in 1831 and unless time travel has become fact, the mystery remains unsolved.

There were two writers who shared a prize for the best science fiction novel competition too. I remember the Scottish guy letting out a rebel yell when he went up to get his prize. I wish I’d done that, but I was quite shy among all these ‘academics’ and ‘professional writers’. I would soon get to befriend many of them, become one of them, but in those days I was still Sergeant Kilworth, a military man and the antithesis of most of those attending the convention. They were more likely to be New Age, Goths, tarot card readers, pacifists, bearded booksellers, left wing Ban-the-Bombers (well, I was too, though they didn’t know that) or NASA people. I was out of my comfort zone, even though all those I met were warm and friendly and didn’t really care whether or not I was the Marshal of the Royal Air Force.

18. Shoeburyness, Essex

Trinny Sutherland, also new to civvy street, helped me move into my new home and then he went off to a marvellous new job in Germany, working for NATO as a very superior storeman. I think he was in charge of millions of pounds worth of equipment. I know that after what seemed a very short time he had a Porsche and a Mercedes, which left me wondering why I’d gone for the romantic image of a ‘sparks’ instead of a ‘blanket-folder’, but hey, who knew where what would lead?

Of my other close service friends, John Chidlow was still in the RAF and would stay there for some time to come. When he was eventually demobbed he was serving in Portugal just outside Lisbon, working for NATO, and he stayed where he was and he and Grace bought a bar and turned it into a very successful English pub.

Johnny Ball had been demobbed for some time, only doing the minimum twelve years. He first took a course as a welder in Northampton, then went for the first love in his life (after his wife Brenda of course) sport and physical fitness. He became a physical training instructor at one of Her Majesty’s prisons. It was work I think he enjoyed a lot, being a people-person and a fitness addict. When he actually retired, he took a course in sailing and went around the world on a catamaran. I followed his progress with admiration and awe, as he hove into ports all along the South American coast and on through the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and finally back into the Atlantic. One hell of an adventure.

Bill and Lisa Fedden, as I have said, went to Germany. When Bill was demobbed he became an electronics engineer for Currys, testing their new products. He too had found the job he had been born to do. Lisa became high up in security at Heathrow Airport. She used to practise on visitors to the house using trained sniffer dogs and metal detectors as they stepped into the hallway.

I jest.

The first year of travelling up to London every weekday on the ‘misery line’ was not a pleasant one. The early morning trains were packed to the gills, often with rain-damp steaming people. Going up to the city I got a seat, since we were the first station on the line, but returning home in the evening when I was tired and dispirited, I stood most of the time, most of the way. Shoeburyness to Fenchurch Street, then a walk to Bank tube station, and finally a walk from Holborn tube to Theobald’s Road and Mercury House, the Head Office of C&W. When I could I wrote my stories and novels on the train. I used a pad on my knee, scribbling away while others played cards or read books. I was beginning to get stories published in science fiction magazines, but though I wrote two novels they were both rejected.

On that route I met some of my new neighbours, who were good enough people, but they weren’t servicemen and did not have the same sort of camaraderie I had been used to. We did make firm friends with the couple opposite us in Raphael Drive, Pete and Peggy Good. Pete had been in the merchant navy, but was then a butcher in a shop in Shoebury High Street, so he didn’t have the four-hour journeys up and down the misery line. The route was named thus because trains were always being cancelled, or postponed, and thus the carriages were ever late and crammed with irritable, unhappy commuters. It was a decade of union strikes when we would get stranded at some station or other, waiting for Armageddon to end, as the angels and demons were at war.

I was also getting regular migraines at that time, once a month temporarily losing my sight and suffering powerful headaches which left me unable even to move my eyelids without pain. These usually occurred not so much during work days, but at the weekend, when I relaxed, which upset my family who wanted to do things with our spare time. Once I had a flash migraine on Liverpool Street station and I have vague and hazy memories of being carried in the arms of a large black porter to my train and placed gently on the length of the seat. I still love that man.

We furnished the house with G-plan furniture, good solid and inexpensive. Our finances were stretched to the limit with a new mortgage, so I built our first king-sized double bed out of pine planks. I have to say I was surprised at the success of this venture, since woodwork had never been my strong point at school and I don’t ever remember progressing past the cliché of the woodwork class, the ubiquitous dovetail-jointed book shelf. Annette loved the bed. It had two little side-tables attached, for lamps and books, and ladies’ creams, and a headboard which matched.

Buoyed by this astonishing feat, I sent for the plans for a double canoe to be made out of marine plywood. This was an even more difficult and intricate task. It involved steaming and bending strips of plywood, the measurements of which had to be exact in order that they fitted together tightly enough to keep out water. The result was a beautiful canoe (even now I have no idea how I did it without screwing it up) which we treasured for several years. Pete-the-butcher and I won a 9-mile canoe race on the River Crouch two years running in that dear old bark, with nary a wet sock at the end of the run. Annette was absolutely gobsmacked by the double carpentry feat, which was both gratifying and a little irksome too. I was pleased that she was amazed by my skill and rather piqued that she had expected otherwise.

After these two efforts I never aspired to further carpentry. I quit while I was ahead. It was the right thing to do. I’m sure I was headed for a botched job. My DIY skills have ever been touch-and-go, with shelves collapsing and lumps of hard glue left bulging behind wallpaper. I suppose it was the ambitious scheme of these two projects which caused me to concentrate more, work with patience (a thing I am not at all good at) and come out with a double triumph.

The kids started at their schools, Rick going to Shoebury High and Shaney to Friar’s Primary School. Rick came home with a bloody nose the first day. As a ‘new kid’ he’d been beaten up on the way home and naturally he was quite distraught. Annette went storming down to the school the next day, found the culprits, and gave them a yelling in front of their schoolmates. Rick didn’t like this. He’d been bullied on the first day in the past of course, as I well knew, service kids having to join schools where all the civilians’ kids have known each other since birth. On previous occasions he had defended himself vigorously, but sometimes you get overwhelmed.

However, Annette’s fury worked, and very soon the other boys realised he was a good sportsman and he wasn’t picked on again. There are two ways to keep bullies at bay at school: either become the class comedian or become the school’s best athlete. The first worked for my godson, Luke, now a fashion designer in New York, and the second for Rick. I don’t think Shaney as a girl ever experienced that kind of bullying, though I could be wrong.

We were very hard up during the first two years of me leaving the RAF. I remember having holes in my shoes and having to cut out cardboard insoles to cover them. We were visited at that time by a New Zealand businessman who owned a fish paste factory in Dunedin. Fred Haslam was a religious man and wanted to turn my short story ‘Let’s Go To Golgotha’ into a play or musical. He stayed with us overnight and professed to be shocked at the standard of living of people like us in Britain, compared with houses in New Zealand. The script for the play was written by a friend of his, but only reached church level at Easter and other festivals, never the West End, or even the East End.

My work at C&W continued as I learned to do what was required of me. I made new friends. John Tibbles was a young man who knew the communications world inside-out and I learned a lot from him. Phil Monk, Roy Blane, several others. Phil has remained a close friend and often comes to our place in Spain with his wife Judy, another ex-C&W employee. We were all Grade 4 Executives at the time (except Judy, who was a Grade 2 and therefore our superior) and we all worked in the Traffic Department, run by a small thickset tyrant called Tug Wilson. My immediate boss was the section head Ian Bowles, a Grade 1 and a really good man, but above him was a manager who had never thrown off his early habits as a junior clerk. This fellow spent his time eating boiled sweets and correcting the punctuation of our letters.

I had only been at C&W a month when we had another ex-RAF man arrive in the section. He was none other than my old CO from Strike Command, a flight lieutenant. We were surprised to see each other and I was even more astonished to find he carried round with him a ragged magazine with a science fiction story written by him. The flight lieutenant did not stay long at C&W. I think he found it uncomfortable working alongside an ex-sergeant he had once reprimanded. In the not so distant past an airman on my watch at Strike Command had forgotten to put the words ‘EXERCISE EXERCISE EXERCISE’ on the bottom of a signal and almost launched World War Three. Bomber pilots who received the signal believed the situation was live. They set out to bomb a Russian submarine in the North Sea. I was able to prevent the outbreak of a world war, something even Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain never managed, but since the airman was under my immediate command I was hauled up on the carpet with two of my corporals and reprimanded for not keeping a closer eye on what my staff were doing.

I never saw another story by the same man and guessed that was his one shot at literary fame.

On the writing front, I had a letter from another would-be sf novelist, a Robert Holdstock, who asked me if I had any spare unpublished stories. He wrote, ‘I’m trying to get an anthology together entitled Time in Hand. Science fiction stories by new writers with only one or two under their belt, like you and me . . .’ Did I have any unpublished stories? Did Don Juan eschew the life of a celibate monk? Rob and I agreed to meet each other for lunch in Sicilian Avenue, close to Theobald’s Road where I worked. He was working on his PhD at the time, already having a Masters in Zoology, and was employed in doing something unspeakable to mosquitoes in a nearby laboratory.

I took to the man instantly. He was very tall and dark-bearded, not lean exactly, but not overweight either. He wore glasses that he constantly pushed up his nose. He laughed a lot, was amazingly enthusiastic about writing, and in short he became my closest friend. Rob was one of those people whose charismatic personalities ensure that a whole swarm of friends are always buzzing around. We talked about our plans for getting published and he talked about Christopher Priest, a young writer who was already being published by Faber and Faber. Rob knew just about everyone in fandom and in the sf writing world.

Rob took me along to a pub in Farringdon called The Globe where science fiction writers and fans gathered once a month. The bar was always packed with sf enthusiasts and alive with talk that centred around what had become my favourite genre. I met dozens of people who were desperately interested in sf and fantasy writing and indeed these meetings further served to fire my passion for the field. Later the venue moved to another pub, the One Tun and continued to thrive with the same level of high energy as it had at The Globe.

‘The science fiction editor at Fabers is a woman called June Hall,’ Rob told me one evening. ‘I’ve already chatted with her about getting a novel published. You should send something to her.’

I left Rob that day buzzing with ebullience, dying to get home to write the next chapter of my new novel Beloved Earth, set in the far future where the earth has exploded into small asteroids and those humans who have migrated to other planets seek pieces of it to put in lockets and wear around their necks and close to their hearts. My hero was a spaceman who searched the solar system for such ‘gems’ that would make homesick humans feel they had a chunk of the Old Planet next to their hearts. A prospector, if you like, a frontiersman, a happy-go-lucky guy who was always getting into trouble with the spatial police for trespassing in forbidden areas.

June Hall didn’t exactly hate it, but she thought it was pretty naff and told me to go home and write another novel.

That wasn’t an easy task for a working man. As I have said, I wrote on knee-pads. My longhand was typed by an elderly woman who had sixteen cats who slept everywhere, especially on nice warm sheets of paper. I had to air the manuscripts when they came back to me, to get rid of the feline smell. I kept writing to Rob, though Time in Hand never saw print, despite his furious efforts to get it to the right people. Eventually I finished a new novel entitled In Solitary about a human who had been under the domination of alien invaders of Earth since birth and whose human colleagues were trying to foment rebellion. My hero is finally unable to shake off Stockholm Syndrome and the book ends with him shooting off in a space ship with his girlfriend. It’s not a bad first novel and I’ve always held it in affection.

By the time the book was finished June Hall had left her job and my rather lean science fiction manuscript was read by the Chairman of Faber and Faber, a man who was a publishing legend.

Charles Monteith was a giant intellect and a tremendous personality: the Zeus of the book world. A colleague of T.S. Eliot, Charles was the first to publish a whole host of brilliant writers: William Golding, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, Seamus Heaney, many more. A massive array of talent in fiction, poetry and playwriting. And now me. He had decided to publish Garry Kilworth, the secondary modern school boy whose English was still raw in many ways and whose confidence could be shattered by even the slightest of criticisms. I was awestruck by the news that Charles liked my book and wanted to see me to tell me he would publish it.

Apart from everything else, Charles Monteith was the kindest person in the world, but I always felt like a schoolboy entering the Headmaster’s study when going into his office. He would beam at me with his round face and say, ‘Come in, dear boy, come in. Sit you down. You look nervous. Don’t worry, I have good tidings – did I ever tell you that story about T.S. and the crossword puzzle . . .’ Charles had a large spool of anecdotes involving famous writers, which he would love to reel out while I sat there sipping coffee and feeling fuzzy, being in the presence of a Titan of the literary scene. A man who spoke to me as if I knew these great writers and was a member of their pack. You don’t get published by a house like Faber and Faber unless you impress someone with your work. I had impressed Charles Monteith, an achievement that still leaves me feeling staggered by the enormity of its import.

One of Charles’s tales was about his discovery of William Golding. He told me that the manuscript for Lord of the Flies arrived on his desk having been rejected by at least a dozen other publishing houses. The front page of the MS was stained with coffee rings and on the title page someone had scribbled in pencil ‘Some rubbish about boys on a desert island’. Charles published the book and of course Golding went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, as did Seamus Heaney. I don’t know if there were any others, but with two Nobel prize winners under his belt Charles must have been immensely proud.

Charles Monteith was also able to create anecdotes for others to chortle over. I remember once there was a lecture in Holborn for writers and editors. The man delivering the lecture was Jerry Pournelle, who has in the past co-written sf novels with Larry Niven (the Pohl and Kornbluth duo of the second half of the century) though Jerry Pournelle is also a respected science fiction author in his own right. In the middle of the talk Jerry Pournelle told the audience he had a friend writing a vampire novel, but lacked a good title. ‘Since we have a roomful of editors and authors of sf and fantasy, perhaps someone here can make a suggestion?’ He then continued with his lecture, which contained a deal of serious scientific speculation. In the meantime Charles Monteith had leant over and whispered in the ear of the person next to him, ‘How about Carry on Sucking?’ There were shrieks of laughter from the crowd around Charles, and Jerry Pournelle, who had not heard the aside thought the hilarity was aimed at his propositions. His face clouded over with anger and he continued delivering his talk in a strained and disconcerted tone.

Also working at Fabers at the time was a woman by the name of Sarah Biggs, who was later to become Rob Holdstock’s partner for life.

Fabers published In Solitary around the same time as they published Rob’s first sf novel, Eye Among the Blind. I remember seeing a review which took in both our novels. The critic wrote, ‘I predict that if Garry Kilworth continues in this vein, he will become a very good writer, but Robert Holdstock will be a great writer.’ I was a little piqued by coming second best at the time, but the feeling has long since subsided. Rob’s fame has indeed risen higher than my own, since he found his seminal novel early in his career and Mythago Wood is indeed a brilliant and wonderfully imaginative work. I have not managed to capture the readership that has clustered around Rob’s novels, though I would not be a writer with a fervent faith in my own ability if I did not believe I have equalled his achievement in terms of literary worth.

The other writer I met at this time was Christopher Evans: no not one of the really famous ones, but even more talented than his celebrity namesakes. Chris is from the Welsh valleys, a graduate in Chemistry, an all-round great guy and a writer with a lot of psychological depth to his novels. Chris joined Rob and me at Faber and Faber with a novel entitled Capella’s Golden Eyes. Like my In Solitary and Rob’s Eye Among The Blind, Capella was Chris’s way of plunging into the science fiction with what we called a really ‘skiffy’ book. That is, a novel which is most definitely in the science fiction genre, involving aliens, space travel, distant planets, far suns, etc. Some of Chris’s later works, The Insider, for example, are much more on the edge, driven by psychological probing of character, indeed by the character probing himself. The Insider is closer to Kafka than to Asimov or Clarke and is a fine novel.

Chris Priest had been at Fabers for some time and already had Fugue for a Darkening Island and two or more others under his belt, when Rob, Chris E and I joined him. I believe it was Maxim Jakubowski who began calling the four of us the ‘Faber Mafia’. I don’t know what Chris Priest thought of this attempt at creating an sf Bloomsbury set, but the three newcomers thought it had élan. It kept us apart from the Gollancz writers, who tended to be hard core sf men producing stories about future machines and space travel. We were full of ourselves in those days and certainly going to turn the literary world on its head with our amazing futuristic novels. Publishers would be fighting to have us on their lists before the decade was out.

Ha!

There was a fan around at the time, who worked as a part time reader for John Bush at Gollancz. Malcolm Edwards was a bright young man and keen to become an editor himself. He wrote reviews in fanzines and even perhaps the nationals. In Solitary is not a long novel at 131 pages and 40,000 words. As I have said, the writing of it was physically not an easy task and I could never have produced something the length of Lord of the Rings without first giving up the day job. Malcolm’s very clever and erudite assessment of my initial venture into novels ended with ‘Kilworth seems to have verbal anorexia’.

The discovery of this review was tempered by a call on the same day from my new literary agent. Murray Pollinger, a man who instilled the same sort of awe in me as did Charles Monteith, but without the warmth of the Fabers editor, telephoned me while I was at work and announced, ‘With regard to In Solitary. Paul Sidey of Penguin Books has offered an advance of £300 for the paperback rights? What do you say?’ What did I say? First Faber and Faber, one of the most prestigious hardcover publishers in London, and now Penguin Books, the paperback giant? These people wanted my little book. I said YES, very loudly, and woke up half the C&W Traffic Department.

Three hundred pounds. Plus the advance from Faber and Faber. I was going to be rich and famous before very long.

Hah! And double-hah!

Hollywood and other dream factories would have the public believe that almost every book that’s written is set to become a best seller. If it doesn’t, the writer is a failure and should never lift another pen or tap another typewriter key. No account is taken of ‘middle-list’ writers. Men and women who make a living out of writing books, who never become household names or even close to it.

These days even publishers have come to regard the middle list as a waste of print and are forever seeking that magical money-maker, the best seller. It’s not easily recognised, otherwise publishers would know when they’ve got one, which they seldom do. Harry Potter was turned down by several agents and publishers and finally published without any great expectation of sales. Indeed it had a very small print run. Watership Down was turned down by over a dozen publishers. The histories of many if not most other best sellers, going back as far as Moby Dick, are altogether similar in their courses.

So, two great publishers under my belt. I was over the moon, and stars, and the sun too. I knew then that I could look forward to the day when I could give up the day job and write full time. Rob had already abandoned his PhD and was writing furiously. We both had wives who were also working, for Annette had now obtained her Teaching Certificate and was at a primary school, and Sheila, Rob’s beautiful Irish wife, was in full-time employment. So the early years of writing, which are always the hardest, could be cushioned by steady earners.

Annette soon got fed up with teaching infants and took another post at a tough secondary school on the other side of Southend. Several of her pupils were the children of gypsy families and a very interesting bunch of kids they were too. In the course of her career at the school they brought to school with them, variously, a cockerel, a horse, a cat and a rabbit. Henry, her favourite student among these wild ones, was a big lad, very difficult to teach. Henry wasn’t hostile, but he seemed unable to imbibe academic knowledge. English and maths were forgotten by the next day. He was a favourite because he was very protective of his teacher when other boys were giving her trouble.

Annette always thought she had failed Henry, but he turned up years later on our doorstep and gave her a kiss from his towering six-feet three-inches of height, then an estimate for a new lawn. After a quick glance at the area that needed grass, Henry told her, ‘You’ll need 230 strips for that, Miss,’ (like all ex-pupils he continued to call her ‘Miss’), ‘and at ninety-five pence a strip that’ll come to 218 pounds and fifty pee.’ Nothing much wrong with Henry’s spatial concepts, or his maths when it came to the business of making money and earning a living.

Still working at C&W, I gained promotion to Grade 3 Executive by applying for internal jobs. This worked again when a Grade 2 position came up in the Tariffs Department. The head of Tariffs was Len, who was a tennis player like myself. We used to play together at the firm’s tennis courts in Kingston-on-Thames. Len called me into his office and said, ‘Look, do you actually know anything about satellite communications, Garry?’ I confessed my knowledge was very limited, ‘But I’m willing to learn.’ ‘Never mind that, I’ll give you the job – but you’ll only have it until you get back into your office.’

Len was right. I had only just sat down at my desk again when I received an order to report toTug Wilson’s office, immediately. The department heads were rivals and they hated men going from their department to that of another. Len had ensured that news had travelled fast and Tug was obviously beside himself that one of his men wanted to leave his Traffic Department for Len’s Tariffs Department.

‘Betrayal,’ growled Tug, from behind his desk. ‘Where’s your loyalty, man?’

‘I need to get on, sir,’ I said, earnestly. ‘After all, I’m in my mid-thirties and work alongside men ten years younger.’

‘Huh!’ This clearly didn’t impress him. ‘What makes you think you’re better than the younger men?’

‘I’ve been in telecommunications eighteen years longer,’ I replied, a little rattled myself by this time, ‘that’s what. Over a decade’s more experience.’

Tug stared at me for a few moments, elbows on his desk top, his strong thick fingers linked together.

‘All right, you’ve got your Grade 2, now get out of here – and don’t try the same trick again, because it won’t wear.’

I danced out of his office. I had risen from £2,200 per annum, to £15,000 within four years. Not half bad. I was transferred to another section which dealt with standards and efficiency, and given the Caribbean as my patch. My job was to fly out to the West Indies two or three times a year to check on the work in the individual islands.

That was going to be miserable work – not.

And if I spent more than thirty-six days away from home on business, Annette could accompany me when I went out there.

That would upset Annette – not.

Those were my happiest years with C&W, and I made many new friends among the West Indian staff, including the very beautiful and famous Simone Caudeiron, who had taught just about every telephone operator in the C&W world how to manage a switchboard. I even got to visit Trinny Sutherland’s home island of St Vincent, several times, and a lovely island it is too.

Jamaica, Montserrat, Antigua, St Lucia, St Vincent, Barbados, the British Virgins, Dominica, Cayman, Turks and Caicos, I went to them all several times a year.

There were some great characters among the pilots who flew Islanders, small aircraft carrying about a dozen passengers. One of them used to pretend to be a customer, sitting in one of the passenger seats and continually looking at his watch, grumbling, ‘If the pilot doesn’t get here soon, I’m going to fly this bloody thing myself.’ When everyone was on board he’d suddenly get to his feet and say, ‘Right, that’s it – can’t wait any longer,’ and leap into the pilot’s seat. Within a minute he would be taxiing along the runway wearing a grin while a dozen white-faced and frightened passengers were yelling at him to stop.

Another ex-BA pilot in his sixties piloted an old DC3 between Miami and the British Virgins. During the flight he would back out of his cockpit with two pieces of string in his hands, obviously tied to something inside. Without looking at the passenger in the front seat he would gingerly hand over the two ends of the strings and say, ‘Here, hold on to these for a few minutes, while I go for a pee, will you? Tightly mind – but not too tightly – the joystick’s very sensitive.’

John Tibbles and I also went on a couple of courses in the USA, to Maryland and New Jersey. Once, we were in a hired car with a swarthy Portuguese guy and a Frenchman, from two other communications companies, when we were suddenly chased and forced to stop on the highway by the State Police. The cops came to the car with their guns out and ordered our driver, the Frenchman, to ‘Get out of the vehicle, sir, and put your hands on the roof of the automobile.’ The Frenchman did as he was ordered to do, but when they started asking question he emphasised his answers by using his hands. At this they backed away and screamed at him to replace his palms on the car roof. He did so, until further questions needed answering, and once more the appendages began to flutter, and the threats and shouts followed. This farce continued until I wound down the window and yelled at the cops, ‘He’s French. He can’t talk without using his hands, for Christ’s sake.’

It seemed that a car like our hired vehicle had been stolen from a garage minutes before we drove past the State Police. When they realised their mistake they gave us an escort to the house we had been invited to and stayed for a quick beer. They weren’t bad guys, but rigid, with very little flexibility in their personalities. Clichés really.

~

I published three more novels with Faber: Split Second, The Night of Kadar and Gemini God. The first two were not bad novels but I was ultimately disappointed with Gemini God. What I really wanted at this time was a collection of my short stories in book form. The short story has always been my greatest love and it’s what I do best. Anyone will tell you that. I, of course, believe myself to be one of the greatest short story writers who ever picked up a pen, but then I’m related to the author. However, Charles Monteith – and just about every other publisher on this Earth – knew that collections of short stories do not sell in any great number and he was extremely reluctant to publish collections.

It was around this time that I decided to step aside from science fiction for a moment and write an autobiographical novel. The result was a manuscript entitled Waterwitch Country. Rob read it for me, and so did Chris Priest, who suggested I alter the title to read Witchwater Country, the hard first syllable giving it a smoother and more positive launch off the tongue. It is to date the only novel that I’ve put aside and completely rewritten without reference to the first draft. Most people say it’s the best of all the novels I’ve written, but then most people have not read the dozens of other novels that followed.

I would argue that the Navigator Kings trilogy is better and that House of Tribes is at least its equal. My agent Murray Pollinger didn’t think much of Witchwater Country, a novel about a 1950s childhood in and around the Essex marshes. He felt it should have been written in the third person. This made me look at his agency differently and think about finding someone who was on my wavelength, for clearly this particular novel needed the first person narrator.

Around this time I was invited as Guest of Honour at Novacon, the November science fiction convention, similar to the Eastercon which I had gone to, to collect my literary prize. Novacons were traditionally held in Birmingham and the Big Name Fan from Birmingham, who was also an sf bookseller, was a man named Roger Peyton. I liked Rog, who was now selling quite a few of my novels and I think it was he who put my name forward as the GoH. I enjoyed the con enormously, meeting and talking with an even wider number of authors and fans, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison among them. Brian was especially encouraging and always has been. A great man and a great writer. I also met Pete Crowther, who was to become important to me much later in life, when he and his wife Nicky had established PS Publishing, and he was good enough to bring out two collections of short stories, neither of which sold well, but which to me were immensely important.

The GoH at a convention gives a speech on any subject he considers important or funny enough to interest the fans. He or she also takes part in discussion panels, readings and book signings. The first two of these can be a pleasant uplifting experience, but unless you are a famous author the third will easily put an upstart writer in his place. Almost all the book signings I have done have resulted in massive sales of up to six or seven copies and for the most part I have sat behind two towers of my lovely new novel smiling at customers hurrying past the table, talking to shop assistants and saying yes to yet another coffee. I was once at a book signing alongside Terry Pratchett. Terry’s queue wound out of the shop and halfway down the road. There were three people in my queue and the first one, a woman, asked me, ‘Are you Terry Pratchett?’ She was gracious enough to buy one of my books and I amused her by writing the old chestnut, ‘In memory of our one night of forbidden ecstasy!’ on the title page. She then hurried away to join the other queue.

Two more GoH invitations followed this first one. One for a convention at Imperial College London and one for Essex University. I went to a number of conventions in the ’70s and ’80s, some of them Worldcons, with 4,000 to 6,000 attendees. They were good fun and I got to meet American authors and editors, as well as French, German, Dutch and other Europeans in the genre. Later the Czechs and Poles would attend too, after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

More recently I was invited to the Czech Republic convention in a town outside Prague as the Guest of Honour, after Rob Holdstock’s year there. I strongly suspect I have Rob to thank for that invitation. He was well-respected by the Czechs and Finns, but most especially by his Czech translator, Petr Kotryl, who has since become a good friend of mine too. On that tour I spent some time with an elderly Russian science fiction author, Igor Mojieko, who was an extremely interesting man. We visited local castles and buildings together. I was sad to learn later that he never made it back to Moscow, dying of a heart attack on the way. At Chotĕbŏr Annette and I were also introduced to Františka Vrbenkśa, an expert on Czech mythology and I managed to fill a whole notebook chatting to Františka, the result appearing in my young adult fantasy book set in Bohemia, The Hundred-towered City.

The con took place in Bohemia, but after it was over Petr took Annette and I to his home town in Moravia and there we met his family and stayed with his parents-in-law. His ma-in-law worked for a shoe shop and immediately we arrived at their modest house, a three-bedroom terrace, she took Annette to the shop and invited her to choose a pair of shoes. It was ten o’clock at night and the world was just going to bed! In the meantime pa-in-law invited me to look at his vegetable patch, but actually I was taken to the garden shed and introduced to slivovitz, an alcoholic beverage that almost took off the top of my head. This pa-in-law, when Petr finally got him to take a holiday in Majorca, took a whole suitcase full of his favourite beer with him, terrified he would not be able to get that particular brew in a Spanish resort. They were lovely people, treating us as family, and later we were able to return the hospitality when Petr and his family came to stay with us in Suffolk and in Spain.

~

However, we are still back in the late 1970s and at my day job I had just been appointed as a member of a project committee. C&W were laying an undersea telephone cable between Japan and Hong Kong, going through the Philippines. At one time Cable and Wireless owned the only ocean cable-laying ship in the world, which just happened to be Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Eastern, built in 1858 and the largest ship of its time. I felt a great sense of history working for a firm that had owned such a celebrated craft, built by such a celebrated man.

Anyway, this particular project was to be shared between ourselves and a Japanese firm. The cable junctions would be in Osaka, Luzon and Hong Kong. Thus we named the cable, using two letters from each of the cities. Our Japanese friends always sat rigidly formal on the other side of the long conference table, while we tried to emulate them on our side. Clearly there were cultural differences to overcome, protocols and formalities, with which we were not familiar, so of course we tried to bone up on them and bring ourselves to the table aware of the rituals and manners necessary to conduct the meeting well.

Still, we were aware by the third meeting that something was seriously wrong. The Japanese were not happy. Yet it was difficult to discover just what it was that had put them out of sorts. We could not ask them directly, for that would indeed be a loss of face for them. And they on their part seemed reluctant to give us any clues as to the reason for their gloom. Every time we mentioned the project by name our partners on the other side of the table winced. Finally we got a Japanese member of our own staff to attend, and he whispered in the chairman’s ear after only a minute, ‘The name you have given the cable. It’s a very rude word in Japanese.’ So, at last we had it. We had called our cable project after a Japanese curse. They had been too polite to ask for a change.

Of course we did change it and things went swimmingly from that point on. We even went on an outing with them, which included wives and girlfriends, to Winston Churchill’s birthplace, Blenheim Palace. Luckily, on the tour of the house, no one mentioned the war.

My time at C&W was coming to an end. Fully automatic switching centres were coming in. I was put in charge of planning an automatic exchange for the West Indies (who didn’t want it, because they used their operators as a source of news and gossip between the islands) and though I went out to the Caribbean once more, to help settle a local strike, I knew the time was near when I would leave C&W. I knew next to nothing about planning exchanges, my experience didn’t cover that kind of engineering, and I was forever relying on others to provide me with information to enable me to do my job. I had been at C&W for nearly eight years now, I’d built up a reasonable pension in this time, and the company generously added two of my RAF years to that total, to equal those men with the company who had done National Service.

Two developments helped me make up my mind about leaving C&W.

One, the company was changing. It was the late ’70s and privatisation was sweeping the land under Maggie Thatcher’s eager control. C&W was one of the first to be sold by the Tory government. At around the same time C&W’s overseas business, running the telecommunications in the old colonies, began to shrink as a consequence of new technology, combined with governments abroad developing an eagerness to shed foreign influence and run their own telephone services. Satellites were coming in, fully automatic systems, fibre optic cables: all these were revolutionising the communications industries. New directors at C&W wanted to branch out into manufacturing and supply. Wireless telegraphy (Morse) and the sending of telegrams had already slipped down the ladder of desired skills to the same level as that of a farrier shoeing horses. Our old-world talents were becoming superfluous. C&W wanted to let people go and offered voluntary redundancy terms which were very appealing.

Two, I was sent on a management course at Cranwell at this time, to improve my business and engineering skills. One of the things we did on that course was take the Myers-Briggs test. This consists of around a hundred or so questions to be answered honestly, out of which an analysis will show to which profession the person taking the test is best suited. I took it with nineteen other C&W executives and they all ended up in the ‘engineering management’ corner of a white square, while my lonely dot was down in the ‘creative’ corner.

‘You should be a writer, dancer or a painter,’ said the analyst. ‘You’re in the wrong job.’

Too right I was. And now was my chance to get out of it. I couldn’t dance or paint, but I could certainly write.

My last visit to the West Indies was a swansong. When I landed at Montserrat I found I could not enter the company offices because a big West Indian was sitting on the step with a big stick in his hands. He was, all by himself, a picket line. I sat next to him and after a long silence between us I asked if I could go inside.

‘No,’ he replied.

I asked, ‘Why not?’

‘Because we’re on strike.’

I told him I appreciated that, but I wasn’t there to break the strike, simply to talk to people in the building.

He turned to me and glowered. ‘My grandfather,’ he said, ‘was a slave of the white aristocracy.’

I was glad he added the last word to that sentence.

‘Funnily enough,’ I told him, ‘so was my grandfather.’

He looked me up and down, as if searching for some colour on my lily-white skin.

‘What do you mean?’ he finally asked.

‘Well, my grandfather, and the great-grandfathers before him, worked as a farm labourer. He lived in what we call a “tied cottage” which meant that he paid rent to the farmer who employed him. The rent was almost always more than he earned, so he could never leave his employment. That gentleman farmer had him by the short and curlies, and wouldn’t let him go. You could say he was a slave too.’

My companion looked at me searchingly.

‘Not the same thing,’ he said at last.

‘No, it’s not the same thing at all, but I just wanted you to see that not all Englishmen are lords and masters.’

His big hand came down on my knee and he gripped it hard, before he grinned saying, ‘Good enough. You can go in, man – but we ain’t endin’ the strike, even though your grandaddy was nearly a slave.’

On that trip I had been sent to discover why, every year, a new main cross-island cable was requisitioned. No one had ever asked before and they looked surprised when I did. I was told that the cable was laid over the sugar cane field. After the cane had been cut, the stubble was set alight, thus burning the cable and cutting off all the telephones on the island.

‘What about an aerial cable,’ I suggested, ‘which would escape the fire?’

‘Yes,’ they said, nodding, ‘that would work.’

One evening I watched some locals playing football and one young man, obviously mentally unwell, ran around the pitch alternately playing an invisible violin and trying to kick the ball. The other youths and men put up with this behaviour, though clearly it was disrupting their game. They seemed prepared to tolerate their less fortunate men and women on those islands and did not seem to need mental institutions.

It made me think of my Aunt May, who had been in Runwell Mental Hospital since the age of around thirty. May had married a policeman and they had a baby. When May suffered post-natal depression, which regressed into something deeper and darker, she was institutionalised. Her husband immediately divorced her. May remained in Runwell for most of her life. Indeed, until the State decided that people like her were best served by being out in the community.

I lay no blame because I do not know the full facts, but I know her illness meant a life of incarceration. The policeman went off with the daughter to Wales and married again. I was to meet May’s daughter, my cousin, much later in life under very unusual circumstances and learn that when May's ex-husband died his daughter went through his papers and found to her astonishment she had a biological mother living in a mental home in Essex. She set out to find her mother and May was reunited with her daughter for the last few years of her life. They had some happy times together. I suppose it's true to say that my father and his siblings did not have wonderful lives. Besides Aunt May's misfortunes, Uncle Peter became a recidivist, Uncle Charlie committed suicide by drowning himself in Sydney harbour and my father died young. Only Aunt Amy lived a reasonably long and happy life.

When Aunt May was finally released into the community she continued to repeat the fantasies I had heard from her before, that Hitler was living next door, that she, May, had written to the Queen to inform her of that fact; that there was a kind and loving man called Stan, who had looked after her two daughters (so far as we knew there was only one daughter, but there may have been a stillbirth) who would one day come and take her home with him. Stan was not the name of May’s ex-husband. Some of May’s other fantasies were just as strange and compelling, but actually for 98 per cent of the time she was completely sane, she simply lapsed into her favourite fictional stories every so often, always beginning with the words, ‘This is true, really it is . . .’

When I moved on from Montserrat to Roseau, in Dominica, Annette with me, we were told not to leave the hotel.

‘It’s near the date of the island’s independence,’ we were told, ‘and things might get a bit ugly.’

We put up with staying in the hotel for one whole boring day, then thought bugger it, we’ll risk walking the streets. In fact nothing happened to us and we encountered little worse than broad smiles. Annette was back into scouting at this time and went off looking for the local cub mistress, so their cub packs could exchange letters. She stopped in a shop and asked who to contact.

The shopkeeper said, ‘Just walk down that street over there and ask for Rose.’

No house number, no address, just ask for Rose.

Annette did as she was told, stopped the first person she came across and asked for Rose.

‘It is I,’ replied the lady brightly. ‘You must be the lady who runs the cub pack in England.’

The grapevine on those islands was nothing short of miraculous, since it was only minutes since Annette had spoken to the shopkeeper.

We later visited Rose and her family and had tea with them. They were absolutely charming of course. We had met with nothing but friendliness on all the islands. Actually, that’s not quite true. A man once shouted after our hire car, ‘White trash!’ but when I stopped he simply grinned at me and waved, adding, ‘How’re you doin’, eh?’

On another occasion I came out of the hotel on Dominica and began walking down a hill. An elderly man fell into step with me and without any introduction launched into a long story about someone I assumed was his daughter-in-law.

‘. . . so I said to the girl, I said, you can’t just come in here and laze around, lettin’ everyone else do the work and the cookin’ and all that kind of thing . . .’ This story continued without pause.

At the bottom the hill, without me saying a word in reply, he waved his hand and said, ‘Well, be seein’ you, man,’ and wandered off into the crowds.

Really, the only people we didn’t take to on Dominica were the Europeans. Simone Caudieron, the trainer of telephone operators, lived there. Originally Venezuelan, Simone was based on Dominica. She was not there at the time, being somewhere in the South Sea Islands, teaching women of the Pacific how to connect two callers together. However, her sister was married to a Lebanese man who owned, I believe, a huge firm specialising in coconut products. We visited the couple and were invited to a meal at their home. They told us to bring any friends if we so wished.

We invited the European manager and his wife, who disdained to come because they did not ‘fraternise with the locals’. They missed a great deal. Simone’s brother-in-law was a very cultured man with a large collection of jazz records. I was in my element. The evening was hugely enjoyable, with good company, great food and wonderful music.

19. King’s College, London University

I left Cable and Wireless Ltd in1981. I would miss many things about C&W but not the four hour journey back and forth on the misery line. There had been some distractions on those journeys of course. There are one or two that stand out. The foremost being the ‘jacket’ incident.

All businessmen in London have to work late at some time or another and those who worked at C&W were no exception. Quite a few times I had to catch the eight or even nine o’clock train home and on that train would be others like myself, kept late at the office for some reason or another. Usually they would have had a few drinks afterwards, to wash away the dust of the accounting books at the end of the day.

One night there were several of us, bankers, insurance men and women, others, some of whom were weary and tipsy enough to drop off to sleep. The train left Fenchurch Street and on the way we stopped at several stations including Basildon. We were just about to leave Basildon when a young woman got up and shook a young man who was fast asleep across the seats. Still lying supine the man opened his eyes which grew wider and wider.

‘It’s an angel!’ he said, slurring slightly.

‘Not really,’ laughed the girl, ‘where do you want to get out?’

‘Wherever you do,’ he replied, quickly.

‘Don’t be silly. Look we’re at Basildon.’

He sat up quickly and stared out of the window at the sign. Then still in his shirtsleeves he leapt up and ran for the door, just getting out in time as the train started to pull away. Then he seemed to have a fit and began running alongside the train, hammering on the window and yelling, ‘Jacket! Jacket!’ With great presence of mind the young woman grabbed a jacket draped over the back of a seat and pushed it through the window. It landed on the platform at the man’s feet.

Minutes after this incident another young man stirred from his sleep and then seemed to stare about himself for a few minutes. He appeared bemused, and finally asked in alarm, ‘Has anyone seen my jacket?’ There was of course another suit jacket laying nearby, but clearly not the one that went with the trousers he was wearing. Both the young girl and I, and others in the compartment, were suddenly very interested in the darkness that was swishing by the carriage windows.

That was an evening incident, but there were morning ones as well. One fine Spring morning the train was just pulling out of one of the stations when the door was wrenched open by a youth who flung himself into the carriage. His tie was still in his hand, he had a piece of toast stuck in his mouth, and his shoelaces were undone.

‘My garden,’ he explained as he finished dressing, ‘backs onto the station. I only have to run the length of it and climb over the fence to be on the platform.’

We all nodded sagely and one of the other passengers remarked, ‘So you were having breakfast when the train pulled in?’

‘No,’ replied the latecomer, ‘I was still in bed.’

If only there was an Olympic event for such things.

On leaving C&W I received a good redundancy payment, with which I cleared my mortgage. On the first day of my new career as a writer I dressed in my suit, shirt, tie and city shoes. I had breakfast at six o’clock and then drove down to the station and waited for the seven o’clock train for London. All my usual travelling companions were on the platform also waiting for the same train, including my accountant friend, Stuart Holliday. When it arrived, they boarded it, I did not. I stood there and waved it out, then went home, changed into casuals, made a fresh pot of coffee, then sat at my desk with a comfortable sigh.

I was a full-time author at last.

However, I was not earning a great deal with my writing at that point, not enough to contribute to the household expenses, so I took on a part time job. The music teacher who taught me to play the trombone, Sandy, started up a house cleaning business with her partner which they called ‘The Country Maids’. These two otherwise able women required a man to wield the heavy carpet cleaner while they zoomed through houses with their dusters and mops. I became that man. For eighteen months I was a carpet cleaner and supplemented my writing earnings with my wages. I still have my ‘Country Maid’ t-shirt.

During the same period I started teaching creative writing at evening classes. I don’t believe you can actually teach someone how to write, but you can give them some advice on what might work in a story. So, my lessons tended to be on catchy first lines, on last lines, on titles, and so on. I have had no training or experience with teaching so had actually no idea whether I was doing it correctly. The really important thing, I felt, was to get them excited about writing their own stories, and discussing things like first lines seemed to do that.

I have my all-time favourite first lines. There is the famous opening to Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: more a paragraph than a sentence, but to me the most stunning of all first lines was written by an author much less well-known, Gordon R. Williams, in his novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm: ‘The moment that Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon there were men in English villages who had never been more that fifteen miles from their own front door’. Sweetly succinct and mind-blowing. The shortest and probably the greatest first line is ‘Call me Ishmael.’ from Melville’s Moby Dick. Those few words carry so much information. The narrator says, ‘Call me . . .’ so we know Ishmael is not his real name. If he does not want to tell us who he really is, then what he’s about to divulge is contentious. Then there is the biblical Ishmael, which tempts us to look up the reference to see if we can gather any clues as to this secrets this young man might have to disclose.

With titles there are apparently key words like ‘Eagle’ and ‘Death’ that instantly attract a potential reader. The Eagle has Landed, Death in Venice, etc. There are also some gender peculiarities. Put ‘Wife’ or ‘Daughter’ in the title and you have a female-reader magnet. The Mapmaker’s Wife, The Time Traveller’s Wife, The Ironmonger’s Daughter. Such novels immediately become talking points for female book clubs. The male equivalent does not work. The Postmistress’s Husband? The Milkmaid’s Son? I somehow think titles in this vein would not work in a million years and it’s significant that I can’t think of a novel or short story with the word ‘Husband’ in the title. Fine, Dombey and Son, yes, but somehow there is the impression that the book is more about Dombey and the focus is taken away from junior.

Last lines? Frankly, Scarlet, endings need to leave one satisfied but also wishing the story did not stop there. One of my favourite endings is the last line of Christopher Priest's The Affirmation, which leaves the reader in the middle of a sentence that has no full stop or three periods, simply white space. It's a stunning end to a stunning novel and this reader was left staring into space, lost in thought, still holding the book in my hands. It’s the kind of novel that when you finish it and put it down, you simply sit there and reflect for a long while, listening to the silence.

With my own writing, I still remained somewhat under-confident. I was still rough-edged, with only a few O- and A-Levels from night school and an HND that had little relevance to a writing career. I wanted to feel I had really studied the art and craft of the profession I aspired to join. I put in for a degree course in London University.

Annette was now a fully fledged social worker, enjoyed her job immensely, but had always said she would not tolerate a tame writer at home not pulling his weight. She was prepared to give me some space and time to get established but she could not keep both of us on her salary, though a steady monthly income is almost essential to a writer who gets paid if and when the publisher feels like sending a cheque. When I ceased working for the Country Maids I began working part time as a ‘priming boy’ for my brother Ray, a house painter.

Ray had a van in which he took his men up to London every working day, starting at 5.30 a.m. with a stop on the way at a greasy spoon café for ‘bubble and slice’ (bubble-and-squeak and fried bread) before the day started somewhere in the city. He had a contract for painting a certain brewer’s pubs. We painters sat among the paint pots in the back of the van and chattered all the way to our destination and back. I was constantly asked to repeat a poem I’d written. It was not a very good piece of verse but the painters seemed to like it. It went:

There is an unknown river

flowing to the sea

which you and I must follow

to find our destiny.

Over jagged rocks of fear

down each crashing fall,

(something, something, something)

to find tranquillity . . .

I’ve forgotten many of the lines over the years, but as you can see, this not a work that would send the critics raving. I’d written it as a schoolboy and the painters kept asking for it, until every one of them had learned it by heart. Now if you ever met any of those painters you would know that poetry was not their first love in life and in the ordinary way of things they avoided it like the plague. But years later I found they ‘used’ my poem to pull girls at the discos, telling the said girls that they had made it up in their heads while observing the said female from the other side of the room. I could have written them a poem that would have knocked the socks off any young lady, much more suitably tuned to a love chant, but this little ditty about a river apparently worked, I was told, with regular success. In fact it had never been known to fail these lusty young men whose idea of a love affair was a quickie in a bus shelter while walking the girl home along the seafront.

One or two stories are worth telling about my time with my brother’s painters.

Once I went with Ray to assess the painting of a pub and we were talking to the landlord when Ray pointed up at what was once a white ceiling.

‘What are all the red spots?’

‘Oh, that’s what’s left of one of my customers,’ replied the landlord. ‘He came in here, stuck a shotgun under his chin, and pulled the trigger. That’s why I decided to redecorate . . .’

Nice.

Another story.

There was a base in the Angel Islington where Ray got his painting materials and where any window frames which needed replacing were made. The painters and carpenters who worked there parked their cars in the streets in and around the workshop, all on double-yellow lines, as did most of the locals. Throughout the day one might hear telephones ringing, starting at one end of the street, and travelling all the way down to the other end. Then with perfect choreography the painters and locals would rush into the roads, jump in their cars, and drive around for ten minutes – until the traffic wardens had moved on. Then the cars would be reparked and life and work continued as normal.

Finally, we were working on a new estate of houses when Ray asked me to paint a front door. While I was gaily swishing my brush over the woodwork two burly Irish labourers arrived and began laying a garden path. They were skilful, smoothing out the concrete with their tools until it looked like a lake of liquid glass. Once I had finished the door I did what most people do after such a job: I stepped back to admire my work. My right foot sank into newly laid concrete. I glanced around quickly to see that the labourers were unaware of my folly. My next move was in sheer panic. I bent down and tried to smooth out my footprint with my hand. At that moment one of the men looked up and his face registered absolute astonishment as he saw a painter happily running fingers through his fresh concrete.

‘What the fook?’ he yelled.

Those thick-set, heavy-shouldered, big-fisted pair of Irishmen chased me all over the site until I found a ladder and climbed up on a roof, drawing the ladder after me. They prowled around the houses, looking for another ladder, but luckily they were not successful in their search. They then spent twenty minutes shaking fists at me and subjecting me to some very ripe language. Finally they went away, Irish-lilted threats still tumbling from their tongues. I stayed on the roof until everyone had gone home, before descending, vowing that that I would do my utmost to get a place in university that September.

~

I was lucky enough to get on a BA Honours course reading English at King’s College, London, in the Strand. I went there with mixed feelings. I felt as if I had achieved something momentous regarding the Kilworth family, none of whom had ever been to university going right back to Edward Kilworth who came over from Ireland in the 1700s, yet I was also a mature student, forty years of age, and therefore somewhat after my time. Even after I had gained my degree, three years later, my mother would continue to boast that her Garry had ‘a GCE’ which in my mother’s mind was the epitome of educational achievements.

King’s College was everything I dreamed it would be. There were two other mature students in my year reading English, both about my age, but what was surprising was the lack of students who came from secondary or comprehensive schools. I believe there were only two of us. The majority came from independent schools with a smattering of grammarites. King’s was and probably still is a very traditional university, the fallback uni for those students who had marginally failed to get their Oxbridge entrance. The degree rested entirely on the results of final exams, rather than course work. My mind is now hazy on the number of papers we took for our finals but there seemed to be hours and hours of them. The number of books I read for the course went into the hundreds. Some of them had to be skim-read, but by the time I was into it by one year my mind was buzzing with literature.

I actually got a government grant of £2,000+ and friends of Annette, Marilyn and David Ross, let me use their London flat to bed down during the week. There was no furniture in it, but I had a sleeping bag, a canvas camping chair, and the use of a cooker. It was fine. Annette stayed at the flat couple of times when she got a social work placement south of the river. On leaving a year later they told her, ‘You were the wrong colour, the wrong age and the wrong class for this post, but somehow you fitted in and did a great job.’ That’s Annette: her smile carries her a thousand miles in the right direction and though she is of very middle class parents she has no side to her whatsoever. She will happily sit down beside a beggar and share her conversation and sandwiches. I admire her love of people above all things.

The first year at King’s was spent learning Old English or Anglo-Saxon, Shakespeare and Chaucer’s Middle English works. I seemed to manage though I’ve never been good at languages. I suppose I quite liked Anglo-Saxon for the sound of the words. Middle English was also quaint, with ‘brids’ for ‘birds’ and ‘aproche’ for ‘approach’. I love the idea of a dynamic language, words which twist and turn themselves into different shapes over the centuries, a bit like live creatures evolving into animals which only just resemble their ancestors.

I learned enough to get me through Anglo-Saxon and actually thrived on Chaucer, Medieval Religious Lyrics, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman and other works of the period. They opened up a whole new world of stories and poems for me. I had read poems by some of the metaphysical poets like Andrew Marvell. Also, Colonel Lovelace, Milton and the lesser known earlier poets and poems were new to me. Wyatt’s metaphoric doe bearing the words ‘Touch me not, for Caesar’s I am’ brought to mind those earlier days of my youth in London when the girls of that city scorned my boyish advances.

In the second year we got on to the old favourites, the Brontës, George Eliot, Jane Austen, etc. I fell into a trap when I went to a tutorial where I was the only state school student present. As I have written, much of my learning has come from books. Certainly my ancient history was learned by correspondence and therefore I have not heard many words pronounced aloud. I guess at them and probably pronounce ‘Thucydides’, ‘Aeschylus’ and other names of Greek people and places quite oddly, putting the emphasis on the wrong syllables. In this particular tutorial the Christian name ‘St John’ came up from one of the Brontë works. I pronounced it as it is written and the other students burst out laughing. ‘It’s pronounced “Singe-en”,’ our professor told me gently. I felt humiliated and not a little angry with the young snots who continued to snigger at me and for little more than a couple of old pennies would have socked a nose or two. Since our tutor said nothing to them I did. I let out a few expletives which unfortunately only served to confirm their suspicions as to my early schooling.

I very much enjoyed American novelists: Melville, Pynchon, Steinbeck, Stevens and, most especially, Faulkner. The last author’s As I Lay Dying was to me breathtakingly good. There’s a paragraph in that novel which talks of sawing up the ‘yellow days’ like the planks used to build the house in which the old woman is dying. Then the terrible odyssey over several USA states to find the wife and mother her last resting place which she had requested in her will. A fantastic book. And the Americans are so good at short stories. Writers like Poe, Hawthorne and O. Henry leave me yearning to make my mark. Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ is a superb tale, the writing of which I envy with every fibre of my authorial being. Also the playwrights, like O’Neill and Miller and Tennessee Williams. Finally the poets: William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickenson, Emmerson. All superb.

In the third year I read another thousand books, some of them fiction, some of them critical works and biographies. By the end of three years I was stuffed with knowledge. I took my finals in the Spring of 1985 and came out with a Desmond. I was a little disappointed with my 2.2, but in truth I had not worked as hard as I could have done and actually did not need the degree to get a job. It was an indulgence really, that period of study, but I learned a lot from it and I was immensely puffed with myself. I was a graduate, a BA (Hons) and no one in our family had ever done anything close to it before me. One of my professors wrote to me later and said I had been very close to a 2.1 but obviously had not quite crossed the line.

I made two new lifelong friends during my period at King’s. The first was my Icelandic saga tutor, John Porter, a man I admire greatly for his philosophical view on life and his ability to write and speak Anglo-Saxon fluently. The second was a student of my own age, Birgit Benkhoff, a German-born woman of powerful intellect who would eventually become a professor of economics at Dresden University. Both have influenced me, not so much with my writing, but through their hearts and minds.

During my time at King’s I had rewritten Witchwater Country and changed my agent. I left Murray Pollinger for a new agent called Maggie Noach, who had until recently worked for the giant agency A.P. Watt, but had been let go. She started her own agency and I was lucky to get in on the ground floor. It was the best move I ever made. Small, dark-haired and ferocious when necessary, Maggie was a brilliant agent. She was a single woman, born of upper-class parents and knew everyone and anyone in the publishing industry. She was tough and hard-working and she took on Witchwater Country.

‘I’ll place this if it kills me,’ she told me in her Sloane accent, the expression on her attractive narrow features a picture of determination.

She did indeed have a struggle with it, but eventually she placed it with The Bodley Head, a publisher like Faber and Faber that was respected and admired throughout the literary world. It was a brilliant coup and I was walking on air. My first ‘literary’ novel. Indeed it was longlisted for the Booker prize and the critics loved it. Annette and I went on several backpacking tours of the Greek islands on the advance I received from The Bodley Head, to Syme, Poros, Kos and several others, meeting a new set of friends on the island of Tilos who were to have great significance in our lives. Doris and Philippe, French-Canadian graduates from Quebec, were holidaying there and studying ancient Greek weaponry. They were both archaeologists and we got on with them extremely well, eating with them most nights at the only ‘taverna’ in town, an open-air barbecue site where the proprietor arrived every evening at six o’clock and said either ‘fish’ or ‘lamb’. Whatever he had managed to get, we ate, along with chips and Greek salad.

At around the time I changed my literary agent Faber and Faber were undergoing a change. Charles Monteith retired and the commissioning editor who took his place was a much younger man. I am told he does not like science fiction. Whether he does or not, Robert McCrum’s presence rid Fabers of all four science fiction authors within a year. We may not have left for all same reasons, but McCrum’s apparent dislike of science fiction was at the root of the departures

A short while after taking over as commissioning editor at Faber and Faber, McCrum wrote and published a so-called thriller, In the Secret State. I read it out of curiosity and failed to be impressed. It was an incredibly boring and immature novel. If this was the man who was going to judge whether my books were worth publishing then I was happy to be leaving Fabers. Robert McCrum was no Charles Monteith.

I applied instead to the Valhalla of science fiction books, Victor Gollancz Ltd. The new editor there, now that John Bush had retired, was another young man of a very different stamp. Malcolm Edwards had already read most of the tales in the collection of short stories I sent him and agreed to publish The Songbirds of Pain. The short story is the foundation stone of science fiction and I was and still am very proud of that collection which contains the story ‘sumi dreams of a paper frog’ written all in lower case and based on the unreal hours I spent on sentry duty in various pockets of the British Empire.

J.G. Ballard had read ‘sumi dreams’ in Extro magazine and he wrote to me, saying, ‘This is the best short story I’ve read for many years.’ J.G. Ballard was one of the Britain’s premier science fiction authors and getting a comment like that from such a respected author was a thrilling experience. So I was now with Victor Gollancz Ltd and thus my next few books proudly wore the prestigious yellow jacket which adorned all VG science fiction books.

The paperback of Songbirds was brought out by my editor Jane Johnson, who commissioned the artist Jim Burns to do the cover. It was the best cover I ever had – superb.

In the meantime I was getting on famously with Maggie Noach, who was everything I thought an agent should be: tough with publishers, soft with her authors, determined with the books she had to offer. Maggie became a friend and stayed with Annette and I many times when she was alive. We also stayed with her sometimes. She had a dog that was a damn nuisance, a small thing called Toby that was not well behaved, but I was willing to put up with Toby in order to be close to Maggie. When Toby eventually died an identical Toby took its place. It had a different name, but it was Toby all right, an impossible creature to escape.

In 1993 I asked Maggie if she could find me more work. Now that I was writing on a computer I could do at least three books a year, plus a few short stories. In those days I consistently wrote two-thousand words a day. That’s 10,000 words a week. I could easily finish a full 100,000 word novel in three months. No science fiction publisher wanted more than one a book a year, so it had to be in a completely different genre under a pseudonym.

Maggie took on the task immediately and went to Hodder Headline and told them I was good at family sagas. I actually had no idea whether I could write an historical novel set in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, usually about a family firm or business that goes from rags to riches and sometimes back to rags again, but the heroine always ends up happy. Maggie got me a contract for three fat novels, which I wrote under the pseudonym F.K. Salwood, my nan’s maiden name.

So appeared The Oystercatcher’s Cry, a novel about oyster farming on the River Crouch in Essex; The Saffron Fields about saffron farming at Saffron Walden, in Essex; and The Ragged School about teaching Victorian orphans in a school in Essex and in Sydney, Australia. The heroines were feminine, but characteristically tough and always got their man in the end and they enjoyed sex in a time when it was unladylike to do so. I had great fun writing them and the books did well enough to provide me with an extra income on top of the science fiction advances.

In the middle of writing the sagas Maggie got me the contract for a novelisation of the movie Highlander. This is still the book I mention if people ask me, ‘Have I read anything of yours?’ They probably haven’t read it, but they know of the movie and are usually impressed. I was allowed to see most of the film before it was actually finished and was blown away by the opening scene, where the warring clans came swarming over the hills to the sound of Queen’s stunning music. The story line, centred around ‘immortals’ who lost their magical status if they had their heads severed by a swordsman, was rather silly but hey, I was getting paid a good lump sum for novelising it.

I was given the dialogue script and told to produce a finished book within two weeks. It remains the one and only work I have written entirely on a typewriter and the first draft was the final draft. Every page I typed was the page that went into the manuscript. There were no revisions. It was my Frankenstein’s monster and considering the fact that I was working on it sixteen hours a day without a break for fourteen days, it ain’t half bad mum.

I was allowed to go to the London premier and felt like a showbiz personality for one night. No one there knew I’d written the book of course. Nobody really cared about books. Film people don’t. But I had a very small taste of Hollywood and I liked it a lot.

More or less at the same time as I was novelising Highlander, Rob was doing the same with a film called The Emerald Forest. The movie was produced by John Boreman and made more sense than my film. Rob did an excellent job of novelising The Emerald Forest and, unlike me, allowed the book to go out under his real name. Highlander was initially published under the pseudonym Garry Douglas, but later the publishers changed that to Garry Kilworth without asking me.

My favourite film maker at that time was Werner Herzog, with such magnificent movies as Where the Green Ants Dream, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, Wrath of God, starring that volatile actor and friend of Herzog, Klaus Kinsky. What a tremendous talent that man has, as does the unpredictable Kinsky, who starred in many of Herzog’s films. I would give anything to have be allowed to novelise one of Herzog’s great epics. Indeed, the writer Gwyneth Jones and I were enthusing one day at a Milford writer’s workshop about Fitzcarraldo and the documentary that followed it, The Making of Fitzcarraldo, when something she said gave me an idea for a short story. That conversation resulted in me writing the short story ‘Filming the Making of the Film of the Making of Fitzcarraldo’, one of the best tales that have come from the white-hot pen that I use to write short stories.

Writing shorts is a completely different exercise from writing novels. A novel is a slow-drip occupation. Each day you sit down and do a thousand, two-thousand, or whatever number of words, and the finished article seems infinitely improbable target somewhere in the future. The whole novel must be structured and crafted, it continually changes shape and form as it grows, and revisions need to be applied even as the pages gradually multiply. You cannot surge ahead with fire and sword, as you do with a short story. You must gradually work a novel into shape.

A short story can be held in the head, whole and ready for the pages. One can sit down and burn through a short story in one sitting if one has the stamina. I do. I love that fiery furious writing pitch that I can reach while getting a short story down on paper. I stop for nothing except coffee: not for revisions, not for spelling, not for checking facts. All that can be done later, once the brain has unloaded its fabulous cargo. Only then do I go through it, and through it, and through it, until I feel I have either a gem, or – yes – sometimes a dud. I revise a short story many many times, sometimes doing ten drafts, until I feel I have exhausted all that I have to offer it. Often I start with (what I think of as) a stunning last line in my head and have to get from the first sentence to that final impact.

My favourite short story writer of all time is an Argentinian who lived most of his writing life in Paris. I discovered Julio Cortázar in a copy of an American magazine I used to write for, Omni. Ellen Datlow was the fiction editor of Omni and she took many of my short stories for its pages, paying what was at the time (and probably still is) a sultan’s fee of $2,000. I didn’t get that much in the ’90s for some of my novels. Anyway, in one of the issues with a short story of mine I found this tale by Julio Cortázar entitled ‘The Final Caress’. It was a stunning piece of work that filled me with envy.

I subsequently discovered that Cortázar wrote the short story that inspired the ’60s film Blow Up starring David Hemmings: a brilliant movie. There followed readings of ‘We Love Glenda So Much’, ‘The End of the Game’, ‘House Taken Over’ and many many others. I think I’ve found every tale he has written and there are very very few I don’t like. Even just a single line can be impressive. In a story about two boxers in the ring, one of whom is good at ducking and diving his opponent’s blows, Cortázar writes, ‘He was an encyclopaedia of holes.’ Any man who can write a line like that has my undying admiration.

In one of his patchwork-quilt books, just notes and incidents, Cortázar explained, ‘Short stories are word tornadoes and one needs to start in the eye of the wind and write the tale spirally outwards from the centre.’

I think I know how the technique should work and I try to apply it when I feel able. I flatter myself that Julio might have liked some of the stories I have written too, such as ‘Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands’, a futuristic tale. Hogfoot was probably one of the weirdest stories I’ve written, and was very difficult to sell. It was eventually taken up by friends. Rob Holdstock and Chris Evans were editing a series of anthologies at the time called Other Edens and it was Chris’s idea to publish Hogfoot along with two other very short stories of mine, ‘The Black Wedding’ and ‘Murderer’s Walk’ under the generic title, ‘Tryptich’. Once published this hard-to-sell story was shortlisted for an award and the connoisseur John Clute described it in a review as ‘stunning’. At a convention later I happened to get into a lift with Stephen Donaldson, famous best-selling author of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, who looked at my name tag and said, ‘Garry Kilworth? I loved your story “Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands” – could I republish in it an anthology I’m putting together?’

Could he? Did he even need to ask.

So thank you, Julio, for your inspiration.

Julio Cortázar died in Paris in 1984.

20. Wychwater, The Chase, Ashingdon (First Time)

It was during my last year at King’s that Annette and I decided to move house. We found a flimsy wooden-framed cottage set in two acres of woodland and lawn, with cherry-plum trees, apple trees, oaks, willows, ashes and blackthorns in an Essex village called Ashingdon. Grey squirrels abounded in the wood, along with jays and magpies: they used to squabble over the dry old pears and the sweet cherry-plums that festooned the trees in autumn. There were foxes that crossed the bottom of the garden and badgers not far away up our unmade lane.

It was the squirrels who gave us the most fun. On some days, possibly festivals known only to Scuirus and their kind, they would go mad and run, leap, rush at magpies head on, spin and dash up tree trunks. Also, it was impossible to keep them from stealing the food we put out for the birds, even though we had squirrel-proof containers. I’m sure they had studied under Fagin and were immensely cunning and clever. Grey Squirrels are the scoundrels and scallywags of any garden.

The house, down a leafy unmade road, was not much from the outside: a single-storey building made almost of wattle-and-daub, which rested on zero footings. It sort of floated on the London clay beneath it. We were told it had once been a prefab.

Thus we moved to Greenacres which we promptly renamed Witchwater. We changed the spelling a little later to Wychwater after delivery men refused to come up the lane to a place with a pagan name. Nearby Canewdon had always been infamous for its ‘witches’ – they met in the graveyard every Halloween – and many locals were convinced that witchcraft was practised with regularity in the village of Ashingdon and in my grandfather’s birthplace, Canewdon.

Wychwater had outhouses and Rick was happy to cut from the family and live in one. It was only a few yards from the front door. Annette and I slept in the attic and Shaney had the only bedroom. Our neighbours were mostly settled gypsies, a great bunch, along with a smattering of newcomers like us. There was a lot of garden to look after: trees to trim, a vast hedge to cut, big lawns to mow, ditches to keep clear. There was no mains sewage. We were served by a temperamental septic tank in the garden which never stopped smelling the whole time we lived there. Our one delight was making bonfires in the clearing in our wood. My one abiding image of Wychwater is lighting fires in our special place, drinking, and roasting potatoes and sausages at midnight.

Writers and editors were invited once a year to come for a barbecue and it became a regular gathering which still survives today, though at different venues in and around London.

At Wychwater I became my grandfather for a while, looking after the land, even buying a scythe like the one he used to use, for cutting down thistles and cow parsley. I enjoyed it. In so far as our garden is concerned Annette has always been the creator, Brahma, and I in turn am Shiva, the destroyer. Going out to clear ditches and hack down vegetation and saw dead branches off trees was a good counterpoint to sitting at my desk and writing books. We still had only one car at that time, which Annette used for work, so I was kind of trapped during the day.

I walked of course, down to the River Crouch, and to a little row of shops, and also went and sat on the seat outside the ancient church, built in 1025 by King Knut shortly after he had defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Edmund Ironside at the Battle of Ashingdon. Knut adopted Christianity at that time, but it was probably political rather than for religious reasons. Standing on the hill where the church is you can see the river up which sailed the Viking ships. In the near distance is the hill on which Canewdon Church stands. It was there that Knut ranged his horde of wild Viking warriors and it was on Ashingdon hill that Edmund had his Saxon forces. They met in the valley between. Halfway through the battle the king of Mercia changed sides for gold, from Anglo-Saxon to Viking, and thus Edmund was defeated. I have often wondered whether the word ‘mercenary’ came from that treacherous act.

Danes come over from Denmark every five years in part to celebrate their victory over the Anglo-Saxons. The first vicar of Ashingdon Minster was a man called Stigand, who went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury and crowned both King Harold and William the Conqueror. The choir wears scarlet cassocks and while we lived there the vicar received a letter telling him that his choir was not permitted to wear red as only ‘royal churches’ like Westminster were allowed that privilege. The vicar immediately penned a letter back to the effect that his church was indeed a royal minster, since it had been built by and enjoyed the patronage of King Knut. Full stop.

However, that part of Essex, the land behind Wychwater, was a bolt hole for London gangsters. Annette and I have always enjoyed walking but around the River Crouch were large houses surrounded by chain-link fences and patrolled by German shepherd dogs. If we did walk by one of these sinister mansions we could be sure that snarling, slavering canines would fling themselves at their side of the fence, desperate to get us and lock their jaws on some vital part of our anatomy.

I added a natural clay-based pond to the garden, which I dug out using only a spade and my finely tuned writer’s muscles. I filled it from a hose connected to our garden tap and yet even during the first summer it managed to stock itself with newts, frogs and a grass snake, along with many insects such as pond skaters and water boatmen. I suppose birds and the wind might be responsible for the insects, but the newts and frogs? How do these previously sterile patches of water suddenly populate themselves? Later, I added my own stock, some goldfish, orf and other small fish. You must know of the Peace Rose. I suggested we breed a new type of orf and call it the Peace Orf. (Say it quickly!)

During the mid to late ’80s Rick left college and had a series of jobs in and around Southend. Rick had by that time eased back on his running in favour of travel. He went to Israel twice, once on a kibbutz and once on a moshav on the edge of the Negev Desert. He wrote to us several times when on the moshav, telling us of the mirages he used to see out in the desert while driving the tractor. Just before he came home he took a trip down the Nile with a friend. They were on one of those boats where there is standing room only and passengers are nose-to-nose with one another. Having little money, he lived on water melons, but said the Egyptians and others he met were extremely kind and often gave him bread.

To our later consternation he also admitted to drinking Nile water and while he said he had added purifying tablets, we still had visions of liver fluke and other horrible diseases coursing round his young blood-stream. However, he survived without too much damage and went on to do an Art Diploma. Rick finally followed in his mum’s footsteps settling for a long career in social work, after forays as a chef in a golf club, a computer programmer, a worker in a wood yard, a worker in a care home and a hairdresser.

Having caught the travel bug from his two previous visits to Israel Rick then decided to backpack and work his way around the world, which he did. I admired that greatly. Rick had the spiritual and mental strength to go it alone, working variously in Australia as a fruit picker in Queensland and a baker’s van driver in Melbourne. He spent some time with our friends Pete and Carolyn, who lived in Melbourne. They treated him like one of their own kids, being the most hospitable people in the world.

During her sixth form year Shaney was Head Girl at Shoeburyness High School and left with A-Levels. She was the only one of our family to pass in mathematics, a considerable achievement. Shaney decided against tertiary education and went to work as a PA to a company director, a job for which she was extremely well-suited. Shaney is a great organiser and makes a brilliant PA. At that time she bought a Mini car and met her future husband, Mark, who was coincidentally the Head Boy at Shoeburyness High the year before she was Head Girl. The two were married in Ashingdon Minster.

Mark was a real go-getter who worked for a large investment bank in London and the two of them set out on a life voyage together from which neither of them has jumped ship. They are, now in their late forties, still a loving, loyal couple, unerringly attached. Mark had been partly raised in Italy and I think the fact that they were both ex-pat brats gave them a lot in common. Indeed Mark and Shaney would go on to live for several years in Canada, in Singapore and in Australia. There would be three grandsons for Annette and I, all very sporty kids – subaqua, football, rugby and cricket – who would go on to university educations. Conrad, Christian and Jordan are fine young men and of course their grandparents are inordinately proud of them.

However, we are still back at Wychwater, the house in which I have lived the longest. During those years my friendship with Rob Holdstock deepened. He and his wife, Sheila, had parted by mutual consent, Sheila going on to live in Holland with a new partner. After a period of being ‘single’ again, Rob met Sarah. They enjoyed many things together, such as hill walking and camping. We often joined them along the ridges of Derbyshire and Wales, walking up and along Mam Tor, Kinder Scout, Offa’s Dyke, Froggatt Edge and many others. During one of those walks Rob suggested we do at story together. He had a theme in mind and expounded it gustily while striding along. It sounded great to me and later we began working together on The Ragthorn, meeting once or twice a month in pubs, mostly North London, where Rob now lived with Sarah, to discuss the sections of the work.

The Ragthorn progressed slowly but surely, a novella which included many small, previously unseen chunks of verse and prose which the protagonist unearthed with diligent research. Fragments by Shakespeare, St John the Divine, Chaucer, and several other writers. These pieces of poetry and prose, hidden from humankind by necessity, contained the secret of the ragthorn, a unique magical tree that was the gateway to immortality. Rob would write a section, send it to me, and I would revise it. Then I would write the next section and he would revise that. Rob was happier doing the contrived prose pieces supposedly written by famous authors, while I did the poetry. Together we wove the story into a fine piece of fiction which eventually won several literary prizes and was translated into many different languages. It was great fun and it was a wonderful exercise. I have never managed to duplicate that experience and now our Rob has gone, I doubt I ever will.

It was around this time that I realised my science fiction would have to be supplemented by other books from a more popular genre, since I could not live on the money that was coming in. I still wanted to write sf, but it would have to be short stories and novellas, rather than novels. I couldn’t do full length novels in two genres at once.

I turned to animal fantasies and here I found much greater commercial success. I wrote a book about foxes from the fox point of view which became a reasonable success, enough for the publisher to put on my future animal fantasies ‘By the author of the bestselling Hunter’s Moon’. Hunter’s Moon was the result of a synopsis I sent to Jane Johnson at Allen and Unwin. The smart and lovely Jane snapped it up and I was at last paid a large advance, ten times the amount I had ever received for a science fiction novel. Hunter’s Moon then went into the Reader’s Digest abridged books and made even more money, along with translations and audio books, and other spinoffs. I immediately followed this book up with a wolf novel along similar lines, entitled Midnight’s Sun.

In these novels the animals do not wear clothes or talk to humans. They are as animalistic as I could make them. Yes, they communicate, but don’t animals communicate with one another anyway? The template was Adams’ Watership Down. William Horwood, of mole fiction fame, telephoned me years later. He had just written a book about wolves and had afterwards been told about the existence of Midnight’s Sun. He asked how my wolf novel had done on the market.

‘Not as well as my foxes,’ I wrote back, ‘I think there’s less sympathy for wolves. Historically, they’ve had bad press.’

But I added that William Horwood was a much bigger name than Garry Kilworth and would probably carry the day.

One of the nicest things that’s ever happened to me as an author was when I attended a Murder Mystery evening in Hong Kong. The hosts were a policeman and his wife. I’d never met them before and when we were introduced my friend said, ‘Garry is an author, you know.’

The lady of the house said the usual ‘How interesting’.

I made my usual reply. ‘What are you reading at the moment?’

‘Oh,’ she said, becoming very animated, ‘I’m just in the middle of a fantastic novel about foxes, called Hunter’s Moon, which I bought at Changi airport.’

This is the first and only time such a thing has happened to me, and I said rather shyly, ‘I wrote that. My surname is Kilworth.’

A loud shrill squeal rent the air which probably shocked all the foxes within ten miles.

~

Jane Johnson, who at the time lived with the rock-climbing science fiction author M. John Harrison, author of the Viriconium books, was a very encouraging editor, one of those who became a friend as well as my publisher. Jane suggested more of the same kind of book. I was more than happy to oblige, since my advances had quadrupled. Thus other animal fantasies followed, with a hare book entitled Frost Dancers (which keeps getting advertised as Frost Dangers due to an ear of a hare half-blocking the c of Dancers) and House of Tribes. The latter is one of my best works and it is centred on several tribes of mice living in a large house: the Library Tribe, who nibble on books and then come out with literary phrases they don’t understand; the Kitchen Mice, who are the fattest of creatures and also the most fierce, having the larder to defend against forays by less fortunate tribes; and several other groups and individuals, including a terrible rat named Kellog and a pet white mouse called Little Prince. It is quite a complex novel, with lots of twists and turns, and in the front where an explorer’s map might be is a floor plan of the house drawn by an architect friend. I had hoped for Hollywood interest, which indeed did stir but never actually fully woke up.

I had already had one of my science fiction novels optioned for a movie, by the playwright Dennis Potter, who wanted to turn my The Night of Kadar into a film entitled Cradle Song or Orphan Star. The movie was never made so the final title was never needed. Potter wrote the script but the project, with Twentieth Century Fox, never came to fruition. When I last checked the script was still in Fox’s archives. At the time I wrote to Dennis Potter and asked him how he came across my science fiction novel. ‘I found my son reading it at the breakfast table,’ he wrote back, ‘and took it away from him until he had finished his meal. I read the blurb on the dustcover and found myself getting interested in the theme of the plot.’ There you go, I influenced the great Mr Potter just a little, before his illness took him away. There are two pages of Dennis Potter’s biography (Humphrey Carpenter) covering The Night of Kadar.

~

During the late ’70s Rob Holdstock encouraged me to go with him to a writers’ workshop group called Pieria which had been formed mainly by Oxford graduates. There were several intellectuals in the group, David Langford possibly being the most powerful brain among them. There were also Diana Reed, Kevin Smith, Andrew Stephenson, Mike Scott Rohan, Allan Scott, Chris Morgan, Bobbie Lamming, Joseph Nicholas and John Jarrold (who later became an editor and then an agent), and one or two others before my time. Here is a typical list of people and the stories they brought for Pieria 23, held at my own house in Shoeburyness on 10 March 1979.

Garry Kilworth: ‘Dragons of the Mind’

Robert Holdstock: ‘Attachments’

Kevin Smith: ‘Multiple Reflections’

Bobbie Lamming: ‘Stairs and Jimmo’

Andrew Stephenson: ‘The Artisans’

Diana Reed: ‘The Woman Tempted Me’

Chris Morgan: ‘Left Hand, Right Hand’

Allan Scott: ‘Thorgrimm’s Saga’ (Excerpt)

David Langford: ‘Genocide for Fun and Profit’

Mike Scott Rohan: (No story recorded)

I remember a wonderful feeling of being among real writers at last and the immense valuable contribution they made to my sense of being a writer myself. Yes, sometimes my stories were hacked to pieces, probably deservedly so, but on other occasions praise was forthcoming, the criticism and advice always eagerly accepted. Over time I became aware that these offerings were only opinions and I had to make up my own mind whether or not to take them seriously or to heart.

The name Pieria was derived from the home of the ancient Greek Muses. I’m told that Rob wanted the workshop to be called The Flat Mars Society, which would have been much more fun and obviously much less pretentious. That said, Pieria came at a great time for me, having worked alone until that point. Here I could discuss methods and ways of writing, the technical details of writing and creativity.

At this point it might be interesting to the reader to learn what became of all these bright young meteors of literature.

Andrew Stephenson published several science fiction novels and then went on to become a name in graphic novels.

Mike Scott Rohan published many novels, mostly fantasy fiction.

David Langford published several novels but is most well-known for his science fiction fanzine (still going strong) Ansible.

Robert Holdstock wrote a multitude of science fiction and fantasy novels and is best known for the marvellous Mythago Wood.

Kevin Smith and Diana Reed married each other, had children, and so far as I am aware are still writing when they find time.

Chris Morgan began to write and perform poetry and in the new millennium became Birmingham’s Poet Laureate.

Allan Scott slipped below my radar and I have not heard of him since the ’80s.

Bobbie Lamming published several science fiction and fantasy stories, then went on to publish exceptionally fine literary novels, my favourite of which is The Notebook of Gismondo Cavalletti. R.M. Lamming is without a doubt a writer whose work should and hopefully will survive the centuries. Her books are few, due I believe to the fact that each one is wrung from her creativity with extreme care and effort.

She has become one of my closest friends in the writing world and I value her advice immensely.

My forays into workshops with Pieria led on to larger annual writer’s workshop at the Compton Guest House, Milford-on-Sea, attended not only by Brits, but also by foreign science fiction and fantasy writers. The French authors Marianne Leconte and Patrice Duvic, the Americans George R.R. Martin, Scott Baker, Lisa Tuttle (now more of a Brit than a Yank), J.W. Schutz and one unforgettable young itinerant Australian, Randall Flynn, a travelling disaster who managed to throw enough spanners into the Milford works to devastate many years of carefully nurtured relationships.

Other attendees at these workshops over the years, for those interested in names lesser and greater, were Ken Bulmer, John Murry, David Wingrove (who wrote the eight-volumed Chung Kuo series), Gwyneth Jones, David Garnett, Christopher Priest, Roberta Lamming, Chris Evans, Pip Maddern, Robert Holdstock, Tony Richards, Andrew Stephenson (whose immaculate records gave me the names and dates of all the Pieria and Milford meets), Alan Farmer, Dave Langford, John Brunner of Stand On Zanzibar fame, James Goddard, David Redd, Maxim Jakubowski, Rachel Pollack, Bob Shaw the inventor of slow glass, Kevin Smith, Malcolm Edwards, Diana Reed, Geoff Ryman, Neil Gaiman (Neil still remains accessible to his old friends despite his massive commercial success), Richard Evans, Mary Gentle, Pamela Boal, Kathryn Buckley, Duncan Lunan, Bruce Sterling.

There were others too, before my time, who were great names in science fiction. I know James Blish attended one or two Milfords, and Anne McCaffrey who on first meeting John Murry stared intently into his eyes and exclaimed, ‘My God, you have the eyes of a prune.’

John was shocked by the attack and henceforth avoided this fierce American writer of the Dragons of Pern books.

It was of course a misunderstanding. Apparently what Anne had actually said was, ‘You have the eyes of Elune’, but John had misheard and did not learn of his mistake until much later. Not having read Anne McCaffrey’s books I’m uncertain as to what or who ‘Elune’ refers to, but I imagine he or she is one of her characters.

Samuel R. Delaney was another well-known author from over the pond who was at the earlier Milfords: he who wrote Dhalgren, the novel with the wonderful first sentence ‘. . . to wound the autumnal city.’ And the last half-sentence, ‘I have come to’ which seems to almost complete a wrap-around, if you remove one of words.

Apart from my very close male friends, there were some other authors who I felt were kindred spirits in the field. All writers have something in common, but these were people I felt were directly on my wavelength. Lisa Tuttle, the horror-writing Texan from Austin was someone with whom I could discuss all aspects of writing and not run out of conversation. Of her books my favourite is Gabriel, a remarkable novel, but my introduction to her was the collaboration she did with George R.R. Martin, Windhaven. Then there was the ash-blonde Gwyneth Jones, an intelligent and powerful wordsmith, whose novels such as White Queen are outstanding. I also much enjoy her young adult books which she writes under Ann Halam, and of these the one that haunts my memory is King Death’s Garden, which she told me she wrote after sitting occasionally in her local graveyard in Brighton with her then infant son.

Gwyneth’s husband Peter is a great guy and clever mathematician who writes books on the mystery of numbers and therefore earns my eternal admiration and respect. Peter was the sort of Irishman I hoped my great-grandfathers had been: an amiable and wondrous man who gives the appearance of understanding the meaning of life.

My first Milford was in 1978. The owners of the Compton used to pass over the place to us (there would be no other guests) and we would be given free rein at the bar, entering our drinks in a book left on the bar. During the day we would variously attack and destroy, or praise and lift, the stories that were brought for discussion. We sat in a circle and took them on one by one, day by day, with frequent breaks for coffee or booze, or the odd walk into town or to the sea front. I found Milford thoroughly inspiring and invigorating, sending me home with a right hand itching to put pen to paper. Some did not enjoy it, it has to be said. One young woman hated it and vented her dislike in a fanzine when she returned home. True, the criticism could be sometimes quite daunting. I remember one story, savaged by Dave Garnett with the remark, ‘I think the title is terrible and the story went down hill from there.’ But for the most part the whole experience was invigorating and energising to people who spent all their working hours alone in a room scribbling down words.

In the evenings we would play word games (oh, these fatuous authors!) among them a version of the radio show Call My Bluff. John Murry’s famous ‘tappen’ beat everyone. He gave the definition of this word as ‘A wax rectal plug which forms in a polar bear’s anus during the winter months’. Everyone duly laughed and marked it down as ‘false’. It was not. A tappen really is a plug formed out of indigestible mass which prevents a polar bear from crapping itself during hibernation.

Dave Langford was a master of false definitions which had everyone rocking with laughter. One was of a Gallic-sounding word, which Dave defined as, ‘The French word for vol-au-vent,’ and another which also escapes me now he defined as, ‘A game played at Eton, involving a fish, a small boy and a long pole.’

Of course, the week got very boozy and smoky, with many discussions at the bar and late-night gatherings. Factions formed and factions died. The intensity of purpose among us, given the proximity of so many egos, grew and grew, until in our heads it seemed the real world existed only within the Compton Guest House, and those outside the walls of the hotel were insubstantial creatures, shadows drifting through an unreal region that was of no consequence. When visitors were finally allowed among us, the last two days of the workshop, I always felt a twinge of resentment, hating to have my precious atmosphere of storytelling and long-distance dreams punctured.

I always remember Lisa Tuttle saying as we left one year, ‘It seems like we’ve been in there forever. It doesn’t feel real out here. I hate leaving what we had in there behind.’

Milford was a ship in which we took marvellous voyages.

Among the many Brits was an author whose literary novels have deep excellence, and who was also to become a dear and valued friend. John Middleton Murry, son of the famous writer and critic of the same name, was probably the most elegant author I have ever read. Along with Bobbie Lamming, John Murry had an enormous influence on my own work, in terms of encouragement and advice.

John Murry, who used also to write variously as Colin Murry and Richard Cowper, was a man who remembered great names from his childhood, such as George Orwell and D.H. Lawrence. Walter de la Mare used to pat him on the head and call him Johnny. Naturally, I found that awe-inspiring and when I first met him I used to hang on his every word. John was indeed an open friendly man full of smiles and good humour. I walked with him to the Milford seafront the first day I met him. The whole sea strand was covered in huge boulders, dumped there to stop the ocean from invading the hinterland.

John surveyed the ugly scene with narrowed eyes and finally said, ‘Garry, dear boy, we’ll have to come back in fifty million years – this will be a lovely sandy beach by then.’

All authors are asked at some time, by people they meet casually, what they do for a living. When a stranger learns I am writer and asks my name, I invariably get the answer, ‘Sorry, I’ve never heard of you.’ It gets boring. John found it especially boring, since he had his famous father’s name, which actually should have been recognised. John used to tell the story about being on holiday in Cyprus with his wife, Ruth. When he was asked for the umpteenth time, ‘Oh, an author, what’s your name?’

To Ruth’s consternation, John replied firmly, ‘Graham Greene.’

The man stared at him while thinking hard, then came out with, ‘No, sorry mate, never heard of you.’

John wrote at least two books which should have won the Booker Prize: The Golden Valley, a novel based on his childhood in Norfolk, and The Pathway to the Sea. His science fiction novel Clone, written under his Richard Cowper pseudonym, was one of the first New Wave science fiction novels that I read, before I met the author, and it was both heart-warming and humorous. You just knew from reading it that you would like the author if you ever did meet him and that he would be a gentleman and a scholar. Corny as it sounds, that was John Murry to the core. He was amiable, generous and absolutely genuine. Not only that, he had a wife of Russian origin, Ruth, who was warm and lovely, and always welcomed us with a wonderful smile. They would invite Annette and me, first to their thatched cottage in Dittisham on the banks of the River Dart in Cornwall, and later to their house in Brighton. We would come away at the end of a weekend feeling that as long as there were people like the Murrys in the world, life was good.

To one of our annual garden parties at Wychwater, John and Ruth brought a guest. The woman who accompanied them was Jenny Rowe, the niece of Lord Digby of Sherborne Castle. In fact, Jenny had nursed Lord Digby on his deathbed. Jenny, whose mother was an Anglo-Irish baroness, had heard the story of my chambermaid great-grandmother being seduced by one of the then Lord Digby’s sons. John Murry had met Jenny Rowe at the United World College in Wales, where he taught English. There are two of these great free-thinking schools, the other being in Singapore. In one of those ‘small world’ scenarios I learned later that Gwyneth Jones’ husband, Peter, had taught at the Singapore UWC.

‘We must be distant cousins,’ Jenny said, smiling, as she shook my hand. ‘You must come and visit. Bring a photograph of your grandfather and we’ll study the portraits on the castle walls and see if we can find out which of the buggers was responsible for his birth.’

We did go and stay with Jenny at her cottage in Dorset and she fulfilled her promise and took us on a private tour of the castle. My grandfather had a very distinctive nose. None of the portraits were conclusive but in a dark corner of one of the rooms stood a bust which bore his likeness almost exactly.

‘Yes, I’m not surprised,’ murmured Jenny. ‘Captain in the guards. Always a womaniser. This is the bugger who did it.’

Of course, this is not proof of ancestry, nor would I claim it to be, but it was fun. Recently Jenny’s brother has suggested we take a DNA test and make sure. I’m half willing, wanting to settle the issue, but the other half is wondering whether I want to go to my grave still carrying the doubt with me. I always remember one of the last lines of The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance. ‘When the myth is more interesting than the truth, stick with the myth.’

At John Murry’s funeral Jenny introduced me to her first husband.

‘I don’t think you’ve met my cousin Garry, have you?’

He looked at me with an expression of astonishment. ‘I’ve never heard of a cousin Garry,’ he said with some exasperation.

Jenny’s daughter was also at the funeral. She too thought the story was fun.

As an interesting aside, one of John and Ruth’s two daughters, Helen, married Jamie Rix, son of Brian Rix the actor whose bedroom farces had most of Britain laughing in mid-1900s. John and Brian seemed to get on famously together. At John’s seventieth birthday party the two of them were like a comedy duo, entertaining the guests.

Towards the end of his life John Murry became disillusioned with the writing scene. He always wrote with fountain pen on foolscap paper, even after the rest of us were using computers. To him the act of writing was a spiritual thing: he might have been a monk setting down a sacred script. How one wrote was as important to him as what one wrote. He always said that his writing suffered once he had to stop smoking cigarettes, because that was part of his thinking ritual. One day, halfway through a new novel, halfway through a sentence, John put his pen down. He never again picked it up to write fiction.

‘I realised,’ he told us, ‘that I had said all I wanted to say and one of the worst faults of a writer is to repeat himself.’

He had always painted in his spare time and now he took it up as a full-time hobby. I still have two of his pictures on my wall, a still life and a figure painting. Of course I’m no expert but to me they look every bit as artistically good as his novels. He was a man who took a gentle pride in excellence. Ruth died in March 2002 after a long illness and John, desolate without her, followed almost four weeks to the day afterwards. Neither wanted to live without the other.

I have gone ahead of my chronological narrative, however, and need to go back to the early 1980s. In this era Christopher Priest married the American author Lisa Tuttle. I was a witness at their wedding. They settled down to life in a flat in Ortygia House, Harrow-on-the-Hill, the venue of many parties, gatherings and workshops. The actor John Grillo who appeared in such movies as Brazil and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery lived in the flat above. John joined us sometimes for Halloween night, when we took along ghost stories and tried to scare the pants off one another. We always promised ourselves that we would produce an anthology of those stories, Tales of Ortygia House, a wonderful Gothic title that sadly never came to be used.

Another two writers, not yet mentioned, were usually present at those Ortygia gatherings. Leroy Kettle and John Brosnan, who sometimes collaborated on novels. John was an Australian who had come to the UK as a young man and had, to my knowledge, never bothered to go back again. He wrote both humorous and serious science fiction. John Brosnan died not long after the millennium.

John’s funeral was a wake, with all his friends there to say goodbye. There was a foreign edition of one of his books on top of his coffin and a bouncing rubber dinosaur. John had written a novel, Carnosaur, which had been made into a terrible movie in which the prehistoric reptile did indeed look as if it were made of flexible material.

I detest crematoriums. Unlike a church or chapel they have no history and they lack any kind of atmospheric soul. When I leave this world, I want no one to go the crem. Please, please, those of you who wish to say goodbye, just have a memorial service at the nearest Quaker Meeting House. Leave my lifeless corpse to burn alone.

The year after John’s death, Annette and I, accompanied part of the time by our friend and editor, Lesley Levene, went to Australia. Annette and I stayed six months, Lesley joined us for a few weeks. We drove around Victoria state looking for a suitable place to deposit the Australian half of John Brosnan’s ashes. We found a vineyard in view of the Outback and a distant range of dark hills. The wine merchant, an Aussie named Rod Stott, called his vineyard Dulcinea, after the lady who Cervantes’ Don Quixote doted upon. We thought it a suitable resting place for an author who loved to write and who was also fond of a glass of wine.

We got a bit of stick from John’s Aussie fans and friends, for not inviting them to our ad hoc ceremony. But as we explained, we had no idea where we were going to do it, when we were going to do it, and simply waited for the right place and time to present itself. To get them all there within the hour would have been impossible. I think they understood in the end, for we had nice evening with them, drinking and talking of John, and the state of Australian science fiction in general.

The years at Wychwater, before we went to Hong Kong – 1983 to 1988 – were a tangle of worry, hope and joy. My friendship with Rob Holdstock continued to thrive, as did my affection for this man. By far the vast majority of people who met Rob developed an instant liking for him. A tall amiable fellow, he was full of life, generous and big-hearted, with a magical way of enthralling you with his talk. He was passionate about everything and anything, but most especially about masks, trees and mystery.

I spoke with Rob on the phone every few days, during which he was always encouraging. We shared a great deal of favourite subjects in common, but most especially poetry and the history of ancient Greece and Rome. Once or twice a month we would meet up and have lunch and talk over what we were doing and where we thought we were going.

Rob’s attachments to people were ever strong and he made many feel that he thought they were special. And to him they were, for he was the kind of man who opened himself to everyone he met. Shortly after his death I visited the Spanish optician who provided Rob with glasses when Rob was on holiday at my apartment.

‘I was devastated to hear of your close friend’s sudden death,’ Jose said to me. ‘He was such a nice man, and so talented. A very great loss to us all.’

Now Jose had only met Rob during the course of business, yet he had felt an immediate affinity with him. A few weeks ago I had the need to contact my French translator, a woman who also translated Rob’s novels. Sandra had never met Rob, had spoken with him only on the phone, yet she told me, ‘When I go walking now, and I see a bird on its own, I name it Robert, after our dear departed friend.’

When it came to practical work, such as fixing a broken toilet or repairing the car, I never saw Rob do any. If something needed mending, he turned to someone else. Likewise, if he was expecting a plumber or electrician to do work in his house, he postponed writing for the whole day, saying he could not think properly while he was expecting a workman to call. To look at him you would think he could build a house. He appeared strong and capable. Indeed, when his immigrant neighbours fell to fighting – and I mean fighting, sometimes with knives – or the house across the street was being burgled, Rob stepped up and stopped or challenged the troublemakers. He lacked no physical courage. Indeed, his navigating skills with maps were unbeatable. I would trust him to lead me across the Gobi without a false turn. A strange mixture, this man, of the competent and the inept, when it came to practicalities. I believe one of the reasons why he found some very ordinary everyday issues difficult was because he had never really been in the workplace. He had obtained his Bachelor’s degree, then his Master’s, and had then gone on to his Doctorate. Indeed, he did for a while work in a laboratory studying tropical diseases, but he never finished his Doctorate and from that point on worked at home, writing, writing, writing.

~

My friendship with Andrew Hall, the school teacher, also continued to be very important to me. He was, is and always will be a Venetian nut. He loves Venice to distraction and if the money were available, he would live in that exquisite city and never leave. His knowledge of the place is infinite and some of his zeal and fervour for its architecture, its customs and culture, its festivals and carnivals, have rubbed off on me. His house is decorated with pictures of Venice, even the toilet, and Vivaldi’s music fills the rooms. Long talks on our Friday night visits to the house – for thirty-five years now Annette and I have been going to Andrew and Cheryl’s for a curry at the end of every working week – have eventually resulted in a young adult novel The Silver Claw, in which Venice is populated by water rats whose government sends for a German otter, an ‘unraveller’ of mysteries, to solve a conspiracy against their rulership.

Conversations with Andrew have resulted in a number of plots for stories and novels. He has the kind of original dreams for which a writer would give a fortune. Some of them, it is true, have been so mundane they would bore the dullest of men. Andrew once dreamed he was a polystyrene tile stuck to a kitchen ceiling. ‘The worst part of it,’ he confessed, ‘was that they had stuck me upside-down, so I could see nothing of what was going on below me.’ Other dreams have had much more of a sense of wonder to them and it is from these I have gleaned one or two very good plots for short stories. Andrew would never use them. He is a conceptual artist by nature, producing among other things wonderful mobile works of art for his wife on each Valentine’s Day, all different, all ingenious in their way.

It was Andrew who introduced me to baroque music and I have since come to need my weekly, if not daily dose, of Purcell, Charpentier, Vivaldi, Telemann, Scarlatti, Bach and others. It’s the only kind of music I can work to without it interrupting my train of thought. It’s pleasantly unobtrusive in that respect, yet again I can sit down and listen to it fully and appreciate its wonders and glories. Baroque has filled a great hole in my life. I love rock, and more especially, jazz both cool and hot, and folk, and sea shanties, and several other forms of music, but baroque I need as food and drink. The only type of music I really don’t take to is Country and Western (Garth Brooks may be the exception) which according to Woody Allen is ‘Music for fascists who don’t understand Wagner’. Hmm, yes, don’t like Wagner either.

One day in Southend-on-Sea I was in a shop buying a tennis racket and I heard on the shop’s music system a wonderful piece of opera. I asked the guy behind the counter whether he knew what it was. ‘Dunno mate,’ he replied, dully. ‘I just sell tennis rackets.’ I rushed out of the place and went straight to a record store and hummed the tune. The assistant stared at me blankly. Fearing I would lose the music in my head I ran for a phone booth (yes, that’s what we had in the days before mobile phones) and called Andrew. Again I hummed the melody and Andrew, bless his cottons, said immediately, ‘That’s Puccini’s Turendot.’ Thus I came to enjoy a certain type of opera, though some operas still grate on the cultural nerves formed during my working class upbringing.

Andrew and Cheryl have been firm and constant friends for nearly forty years now. Ex-schoolteachers now retired they are and always have been a deeply religious couple, the Anglican Church being all important to them.

Cheryl is an attractive slim brunette with a tremendous dress sense. A Masters graduate, she understands good English and is often upset with those who are casual with our language. When our daughter needed a tutor for her A-Level English, it was to Cheryl we turned. She did an excellent job and Shaney got the grade she hoped for. When Cheryl was very ill she showed tremendous courage and my estimation of her, high as it was, went even higher still.

Andrew is a man with a deep intellect and a broad knowledge of many subjects. He has his idiosyncrasies, some of which I would endorse and copy if I could. One of them is that he handles books he is reading so carefully they keep their newness intact. He tries to keep them as perfect as they were when he bought them. Even paperbacks.

Andrew and Cheryl Hall are kind, generous people, the sort the Church needs as representatives. Their friendship has been invaluable to Annette and me. They have two children, Bryony and Luke. Bryony got a First for Classics at Bradford University and Luke got a First for Art and Fashion at St Martins. Bryony is in education management. Luke Hall is a fashion designer in New York. We are godparents to Luke.

There is still one young man I need to write about.

Christian Lehmann came into my life during the late seventies. In 1977 the author Mike Scott Rohan married an American who I know only as Debs. They kindly invited Annette and me to the wedding, which because Debs was a Quaker was conducted according to the custom of the Religious Society of Friends. It was a nice ceremony and probably sowed the seeds for my later conversion to Quakerism. At the wedding was a cousin of Mike’s, a tall, dark-haired young man often wearing a quizzical expression. His name was Christian Lehmann, a French youth from Paris, and he questioned me earnestly about writing science fiction and its sister genres, fantasy and horror. We talked a bit and got on well together.

I met Christian again at Skycon in ’78 and Seacon in ’79, two science fiction conventions, and again he engaged me in earnest conversation. He was by this time on his way to becoming a doctor, but told me he was desperate to also become a writer. Indeed, after our third meeting he visited our house and thereafter visited and stayed with us countless times, becoming a fifth member of the family. I remember that as well as learning to love Annette’s custard – he and Rick used to fight over the dregs after an apple pie meal – Christian also developed a taste for sweet mince meat, which he could not get in France, and took jars of the stuff back with him to Paris in his suitcase.

Shoeburyness is famous for its mud. It sits on the Thames Estuary and the tide goes out over a mile leaving a great expanse of primeval sludge through which less than fastidious people can wade. We took an incredulous and wary Christian Lehmann barefoot out on this stuff that could almost suck your foot off if you left it there too long. We took with us a bucket in which to collect cockles. After harvesting them from scrapes on the mud, making sure we weren’t trapped by an always swift incoming tide, we took the cockles home and fed them with bran to make them open their shells and so release any grit inside. Then we boiled them, let them cool, and finally dished them up on the plate for tea after spraying them with vinegar and powdering them with pepper.

I can’t remember whether Christian actually ate any, but he certainly found the gathering of them a unique experience.

Today Christian Lehmann is a highly respected Parisian author, some of whose novels include La tribu (The Tribe), La folie Kennaway (The Madness of Kennaway), The Ultimate Game and one I would love to read if I was older, Le crocodile de la bonde (The Crocodile in the Drain). Several of his novels have been made into French movies. He also somehow managed dual careers, not only qualifying as an MD and running a surgery, but also finding time to write his many good novels. He and his lovely wife Veronique, a politician, still visit us on occasion, sometimes with their children. It is people like Christian, fired by the same fuel that drove me to first lift a pen, who make the world of writing something more for me than just sitting down day after day filling a blank page with words. When we talk together, we are effervescent with enthusiasm, the ideas fizzing from our brains.

When he was writing his first novel, The Madness of Kennaway, Christian called me at Wychwater and asked me if he could use my surname for the main protagonist. ‘What’s it about?’ I asked, flattered. ‘Is this fictional Kilworth to be the hero?’ There was a short silence on the other end of the line, before Christian replied, ‘Not hero, exactly. Among other things he’s a cold-blooded, psychopathic killer.’ ‘Hmm,’ I said, ‘let me think about that. No, old chum, I’d rather wait for a novel in which Kilworth saves the world, if you don’t mind.’ It worried me just a little that my French doctor friend believed my family name was perfect for a vicious, murdering, Englishman with no conscience.

We have laughed together over that call since, but then Christian is an unusual doctor. He has never seen the need to draw a definite line between medicine and his love of fantasy ficiton. I remember once visiting his surgery at Poissy, just outside Paris. There was a poster on his waiting room wall depicting a vampire with blood dripping from its fangs. I did wonder whether any potential patients of his had scampered off home on being confronted with that picture.

Some authors consider their ideas too precious to reveal to their fellow writers, but others – like me, like Peter Beere, like Rob Holdstock, like Christian Lehmann, like many others – they can’t wait to discuss them with their friends and get feedback on them. They love to talk ‘writing’ and no discussion is too trivial, be it how one came by a novel concept or the problem of finding a stunning title for the book. The latest films, novels, music, experience, all feed into the conversation, and we always come away after such talks burning to get back to the lonely business of getting the next chapter or tale onto that waiting white paper.

My other connection with Paris in the late ’80s, apart from Christian, were two warm-hearted Americans who lived there at the time. Scott Baker is an author who now resides in Monterey, California. At the time he and his wife Suzi were expats in Paris, where both did translations for various people. Scott and Suzi obviously knew many Parisian publishers and one of their friends was a man called Jacques Chambon, of Denoel Publishing. One night, while Annette and I were staying with them, they invited Jacques and his wife for a meal, hoping that Jacques would offer to publish my translated short story collection The Songbirds of Pain in Denoel’s Presence du Futur series.

‘Now remember,’ Scott warned me before the meal, ‘Jacques is especially proud of his wines. He will bring some bottles. I know you don’t usually drink wine, but this time just pretend, eh? You don’t want to offend him and it’ll all go that much smoother.’

I told Scott I would do my best, for I dislike wine intensely. I’m not teetotal, I love a gin and tonic, but wine and beer give me migraines. Maybe it’s the additives or something. Who knows? I just find it best to avoid them and stick to what suits my physical make-up.

Jacques and his wife arrived and the meal began. We got on a like a house on fire. However, I found that I could not drink Jacques’ wine, indeed a beautiful looking liquid in a beautiful looking bottle, for fear my head would explode halfway through the evening. So, with a little nudge to Annette, we surreptitiously began swapping glasses when no one was paying attention to us. The subterfuge went well. Annette is good at drinking wine and never seems to get tipsy. Finally the evening was drawing to an end and no decision had yet been announced on the book.

Jacques said, ‘Garry, before we can do business, I want to know – do you like Meryl Streep as an actress, or not?’

Meryl Streep had been around for some time by the late ’80s, but she irritated the hell out of me. She was one of those actresses who are regarded as great stars before actually making any decent movies. Everyone was talking about Meryl Streep, saying what a wonderful actress she was and how they loved her movies and thought her the greatest actress ever to hit the screen. And though The Deer Hunter is a terrific film she always seemed to be mooning around the place, softly weeping. She has one of those thin noses that go red around the nostrils when she cries. It makes me squirm. I know, I know, the fault is mine, but that’s how it is. Everyone else loved and still loves Meryl Streep, Annette included, but I still wince and squirm.

So I gave Jacques an honest answer.

‘I don’t like her,’ I replied.

‘Good,’ he said, stretching out a hand, ‘we can do business.’

Jacques didn’t like her either, but I never did find out whether it was the red nose that put him off too, because he then smiled at me slyly and said, ‘And may I congratulate you on finding a wife who is not only charming and lovely, but drinks wine like a real Parisian.’

Obviously, we had been observed.

Les Ramages de la Douleur, the French edition of The Songbirds of Pain came out in 1989. My work has been published in twenty-two different languages now, from Korean to Indonesian, yet Les Ramages de la Douleur was special. The largest money advance I’ve ever had for a book was from Germany, but to be published by the French is like getting a painting into the National Gallery.

While I am writing about France and literature, I have to put down one of my lifelong puzzlements. The Frenchman Pierre Boulle wrote The Bridge Over the River Kwai a novel about an idiotic English officer who is demented enough to want to assist his Japanese captors – an enemy who has been relentlessly cruel towards the officer’s fellow prisoners, torturing them, murdering them, allowing them to die of disease and starvation – simply because he likes to see a good job done well. Excuse me M. Boulle, but here’s one Englishman who thinks you’re an arrogant Frenchman who’s made a lot of money out of mocking my countrymen and doesn’t understand why the rest of his nation can’t see that too. My puzzlement is why the British celebrate this novel which clearly ridicules them using a stereotype right out of a French handbook .

Equally, I have never understood why the American movie and play, The Lion King, isn’t abhorrent to the very nation which produced it. The USA is a republic which began life by detesting monarchs, thought that kingships were the very pit of evil, and yet this story written by one of their own vehemently supports the idea of hereditary rulership. Supports it even to the point where the weather gods are so outraged by the fact that an evil uncle has ursurped the throne, it ceases to rain. The Lion King is a Hollywood and Broadway hit. American audiences love it. Clearly, despite generations of our cousins over the other side of the pond protesting that royalty is the spawn of the Devil, a good many of them harbour in their psyche a longing to return to those good old days when they were persecuted for their religious beliefs and were happy not to govern themselves but to be maltreated and abused by a monarch who ruled through an accident of birth.

(PS Some of my best friends are French and American.)

~

I have said earlier that Annette introduced me to art and she has continued to put art galleries in my way throughout our long marriage.

Hopper is the first artist on my list, with his haunting gas stations and red-roofed farms. Unbeatable. Going back aways, the Pre-Raphaelites, but among their number Burne-Jones stands out for his painting of the expired knights caught in the deadly nets of giant brambles. The Impressionists, naturally, especially pointillists like Suerat. Those funny men, Miro and Paul Klee. Klee’s pen-and-ink primitive drawing of an angler and his fish still makes me laugh. David Hockney, being a Brit with lots of splash about him, has my attention, but I’ve always preferred the weirdness of Dali to the genius of Picasso, who like Gauguin moves me not. Gauguin’s South Sea Island pictures are too dark and gloomy for such a bright, colourful place populated by bright, colourful people. Paintings like Wyett’s Christine’s World, fascinate and chill me with their inferences. Chinese paintings, of Guilin’s strange mountains with their pines clinging to precipices, also draw my wonder. There are many many more artists of course, Turner and Constable among them, who can fill my hours with pleasant viewing and I’m most grateful to my wife for awakening my interest so early in our marriage in order that we could enjoy art together.

One picture I have lost. I saw it but once in the Tate Britain. I think it was by an artist named Baum and it is of two men, in classy cafe, sitting one either side of a small table. In the middle of the table is a thin vase containing a single flower. The men, though they are dressed in business suits, have the appearance of being conspirators. One of them is saying to the other, ‘We can’t do it without the rose’. What a brilliantly mysterious scenario. It has had me lying awake at nights wondering what is the rebellion or plot that needs this bloom to make it work? Of course, it is all fanciful, there could be no such scheme that needed a rose to bring about a revolution or mission, but the idea of it is so intriguing it clings to the edge of my conscious like a tree on a Guilin cliff.

There is another form of art, which can be found in comics. Of course as a boy I was hooked by Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and other preternatural heroes. Later, as a grown man, I read the comic strips in newspapers and enjoyed Charlie Brown and Snoopy. But the one artist whose brilliance shines past or through every other brilliant cartoonist is Bill Watterson who invented Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin’s battles with his parents, especially with a father who when asked by Calvin for a scientific explanation of where the sun goes at night, informs his son gravely that it is pulled down by piece of string in the hands of an Australian Aborigine, and is then rebuked by his wife, are classic. Hobbes, the stuffed tiger that becomes philosopher and Calvin’s mentor, being fiercely real when adults are not around, is magnificent. These comic strips are the work of a genius and anyone who hasn’t discovered them needs to do so before they die or they will not have experienced genuine laughter. I have every book of Calvin and Hobbes that was ever published.

Poetry has always been with me and has needed no introduction by wife or friend. I have loved poetry since my first nursery rhyme and will do so until the grave. I love Robert Burns for all his work, William Carlos Williams for ‘El Hombre’ and ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, Coleridge for ‘Kubla Khan’, Emily Dickenson for the lines ‘Parting is all we know of Heaven, and all we need of Hell’. Tennyson for ‘The Eagle’ and ‘Ulysses’, Ted Hughes for ‘Snowdrop’ and many others, Ralph Waldo Emerson for ‘Brahma’ – absolutely terrifyingly enigmatic, James Elroy Flecker for ‘Stillness’, Colonel Lovelace for the lines ‘I could not love thee dear, so much, loved I not honour more,’ (though I am not in agreement with the sentiment, but in sympathy with a man trapped in his time), Laurie Lee for ‘The Wild Trees’, Roy Campbell for ‘Choosing a Mast’, oh many, many more. But my all-time favourite, because it fills me with such an overwhelming sense of what is lost, is William Soutar’s ‘The Tryst’, the last verse of which has two lovers parting forever, with the narrator telling his listeners, ‘Sae luely, luely, cam she in – sae luely she was gaen – and wi’ her all my summer days – like they had never been.’

21. Hong Kong

In 1987 my yearning to revisit the Far East of my youth was almost overwhelming. I was enjoying my life as a writer, a boyhood dream come true. I was now earning very good advances and had well overtaken my salary at C&W, so I felt established and well able to provide for the future. Annette too was earning a good reliable salary, one which did not require months of waiting for the cheque to arrive in the post. Our son Richard was in the process of backpacking around the globe and was at that time with our friends Peter and Carolyn Worth in Melbourne. Chantelle was happily married to Mark Lillie, who was making his way up the ladder in the banking world and doing very nicely. My cat Dylan Tom was the only dependant and he was actually well able to feed himself on the local fauna and was in truth a savage beast without a conscience. He bit or scratched those who tried to stroke him, only accepting a human touch on his terms. He would deign to climb onto my lap, or curl up close to me, as long as I did not reach out a hand. I did at one time think of offering Dylan as an understudy for the monster in the film Alien, since he had the same kind of ripping, tearing motion when devouring a mouse, blackbird, or at least once, a pigeon.

However, the wild Dylan was unjustifiably wronged on occasion. Annette came home one day and after putting the shopping away went into the living-room to find Dylan sleeping on the living-room table. This was of course forbidden. My wife stood there and yelled at him for at least five minutes to remove himself. Eventually the real Dylan came wandering in from the kitchen to find out what all the noise was about and found his mistress shouting at her own fur hat.

One evening around Easter, when Annette’s social working was getting on top of her, she said, ‘I passed a travel agent’s today and saw a holiday in Penang.’

Malaysia, my old stamping grounds.

‘How much?’ I asked.

She told me.

We had not long paid out for our house extension and the coffers were a unusually low at that precise point in time.

‘Next year?’ I said.

However, when she went to work the next day I got in my old beat-up Mitsubishi Colt, the one owned for years by a Suffolk farmer and still covered in bits of straw in the back, and drove to the travel agent. Using my credit card I booked the holiday, then drove to Basildon Hospital where Annette’s office was situated – she worked with the Mental Health Team there – and told her what I’d done. We were both sure it was the right thing to do, because we were both thirsting for faraway places. She was ecstatic and so was I. Singapore and Malaysia were now a long way off in my youth and I had ever dreamed of going back again.

We had a tremendous holiday which revived all my passion for the Far Eastern countries and climes. On return we found a letter on the mat containing a cheque for almost exactly the amount that the holiday had cost us. I had sold a book in Italy and this was the advance.

‘It was obviously meant to be,’ said my philosophic partner in life. ‘We should go again.’

We tried Voluntary Services Oversees first, thinking we might as well do some good in the world at the same time as fulfilling our own desires. There was a job in Thailand for a couple. No pay of course, but food and lodging. On application we went to Sloane Square wondering why a charity needed to have a house right in the heart of London’s most expensive property area.

It was obvious from the start of the interview, mainly conducted by a young man who appeared to assume that since I’d been in the British military for nearly twenty years I must be a right wing bigot. I was continually asked what my prejudices had been during my overseas tours. The idea that military men are more racist than civilians is a complete myth. I have found far more bigotry among English villagers who have barely come into contact with Africans and Asians, than soldiers and airmen who have been stationed in foreign countries and who have lived among them.

The assumption was particularly ironic, since at the time I was a member of the International Defence and Aid Fund for South Africa (IDAF), a secret organisation raised by the pacifist John Collins, a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral. The fund was for the assistance of hundreds of black South African families, including children, who went on trial accused of ‘treason’ and crimes against apartheid. I was recruited by my friends Andrew and Cheryl Hall, who were also members. Every month I would receive a registered envelope containing a large sum of cash in notes. I had initially been given a list of the names and addresses of twelve black South African families, to whom I would write letters as if they were old friends and include a ‘present’ in with the letter. My instructions were ‘never use headed paper with telephone numbers for family correspondence’ and ‘never discuss these matters with anyone.’

The money was used for legal fees and assistance for families whose main earner was incarcerated. If a family failed to reply to two letters in a row, I had to inform a London monk named Friar Sherrington, and was usually instructed to drop the contact from my list. It probably meant that my mail had been intercepted by the South African police or the family member I was writing to had themselves been arrested.

Annette still has a cotton tablecloth with elephants printed on it, that was sent as a gift to us by one of the families who did indeed believe we were actually supplying the money. It was the last we heard from that particular correspondent. We were told she had been killed during one of the anti-apartheid demonstrations. In 1989 IDAF provided the funds for 198 children’s cases alone. In all £100,000,000 was smuggled into South Africa by Canon Collins and his helpers and though BOSS, the South African Secret Police attempted to infiltrate and break up IDAF in UK it never managed to do so. Unfortunately Sweden’s arm of IDAF was destroyed by BOSS, but the three-hundred or so UK participants in this cloak-and-dagger game were never discovered. (Anyone interested in reading more about IDAF should log on to the website www.canoncollins.org.uk/about/about/HistoryIDAF.shtml)

On the VSO front, the panel did not impress Annette either, since they did not seem to know there was any difference between mental health and mental handicap, even after she had queried their definitions.

We failed to get that particular job, though they did ask us to apply again when another opening came up. It seemed from further enquiry that we should have been more altruistic in presenting ourselves. According to someone we met in the hallway who had been successful, we should have proclaimed a desire to save the world, whereas we naively thought having a huge amount of overseas experience (in a time when people did not travel abroad as they do these days) and having lived in conditions and climates that people in the UK might find oppressive, it was a good bet we would stay put once they sent us there. It was a fact that the drop-out rate among those who were chosen to go was high and indeed one of those who were sent on the mission we had applied for was one of those drop-outs.

‘I’m going to start applying for jobs abroad anyway,’ Annette told me, in one of her determined moods. ‘We’re not beaten yet. No more Mrs Nice Guy!’

It took a year, but finally she got an interview for a job in Hong Kong, working for the military schools in the colony. If successful she would be in the Child Guidance Centre of Osborne Barracks, her boss the Educational Psychologist attached to the British Army. She would have the honorary rank of Captain, thus eclipsing her lowly ex-RAF sergeant husband.

She did in fact, while we were lying in bed once, say in a commanding tone, ‘Ah-hum fetch me a cup of tea, will you sergeant?’

I did indeed fetch her the cup of tea, but I promised that it was the last one she would get ever get from me if she continued to pull rank.

Robin Moseley, the ed psych, was on the interviewing panel along with a severe-looking female who took an instant dislike to Annette. This woman whispered to Mr Moseley that she believed Annette was not a real blonde, thus quietly angering him. The assumption that he would hire someone for the colour of their hair made his hackles rise and and gave him cause to favour the only female in the short list.

Of the six candidates they appeared to settle for a young man in his thirties and Annette went home prepared to hear that she had failed.

We were at Rob and Sarah’s house – they frequently put us up when we were in London – when a phone call came from two women friends who were using our house for the night.

‘There’s a huge package arrived,’ chirruped Sandy, of Sandy and Andy, of the Country Maids, ‘from the Ministry of Defence.’

Annette and I danced up and down the hallway, much to the consternation of Rob and Sarah, who couldn’t understand why we wanted to go to the other end of the world for three years. The big package could only mean one thing. Annette had got the job. Otherwise it would have been a slim letter saying sorry, but you were rubbish at the interview.

Indeed, it turned out that the favoured young man had a girlfriend he had no intention of marrying. However he had wanted to take her with him to his new job in Hong Kong. Unfortunately for him the military in the 1980s took a Victorian moral stance on marriage and they told him they could not countenance employing a couple living in sin. This may sound incredulous today, but now is now, that was then, and so the young pretender was told he could not have the job, which then passed to the next candidate.

Annette.

Sorry mate, but yippee!

Shaney and Mark were excited for us. Shaney had given birth to our first grandchild, Conrad, a terrific bundle whose first pair of shoes I lost when I took him shopping in a baby-backpack. Also the first time nanna and grampa babysat for him, he screamed the house down. We wondered how we managed to raise our own kids when we couldn’t handle the next generation. It should be easy, but in fact the weight of responsibility feels ten times greater and grandparents always imagine they have to keep their grandchild entertained and wildly happy.

We managed to contact Rick in Melbourne and told him of our plans. He was very encouraging too, being a globe-trotter of some consequence by that time. His two spells in Israel had been followed by this round-the-world journey and at that particular moment in time he was driving a baker’s van in Melbourne and eating a lot of cream cakes. However, Rick never needed to worry about getting overweight. He has always been as lean and hard as whipcord. He told us he was going on to pick fruit in Queensland later that month, but hoped to visit us in Hong Kong after returning to UK. At his present rate of progress, considering he had to cross the Pacific and the United States, that would not be tomorrow or the next day. He still had adventures ahead of him.

We had one big problem before we left for Hong Kong: what to do with the house. As fortune would have it, my old scouser mate had recently remarried to a lovely young woman, Marti. She had found a position in our local hospital and they needed somewhere to live. Our house, we said, was at their disposal. We charged them a nominal rent and they and their border collie would keep the house warm for us and mow the lawn. I told Pete I would get him a good ride-on mower to do the two acres, but I knew from experience that even with the latest machines the hedging and mowing would become very very tiresome.

Later, there would be a clash of personalities, not between people but between our half-feral cat Dylan Tom, and Pete and Marti’s rather gentle collie, Max. When Dylan realised he would have to share a home with a stinking bloody dog his eyes widened and his nostrils flared with indignation. He soon sent the feline message that if this arrangement was permanent, he was going to be the boss. Apparently he used to sit in a high place – on the spiral staircase or a windowsill – and if Max happened to stroll unawares beneath him, a paw would flash out and a claw would rake a nose. The poor collie must have walked in fear for three years, never knowing from which direction to expect the next attack.

During the previous few years I had visited Pete at his remote home among the drystone walls and rushing, rocky becks of the rugged Lancashire dales. Pete, who has the physique and facial looks of Charles Bronson during the actor’s best years, has always been a slight enigma to me. He is immensely talented, his writing skills excellent, yet there is a half-hidden underlying vein of self-doubt that forces him to rewrite much of his work. His children’s books draw on a wry Liverpudlian humour that I have always envied. We wrote a novel together called Dog People which has never been published, about a man living alone who is suddenly invaded by a group of strangers. They take over first his garden, then move into his house, living in a corner of the kitchen, until finally the owner moves out and leaves the place to the newcomers.

Pete is a wonderful friend and a good man. He loves his dogs, there has always been at least one collie at his heels, and he is at heart more of a romantic than the tough guy he looks.

After his divorce from his second wife, before he met Marti, Pete came down to us at Wychwater feeling depressed. In order to cheer himself up he had dyed his hair with henna. ‘Why don’t you do the same, Gaz?’ he suggested. ‘Go red young man!’ I had recently grown my hair long so entering into the spirit of the thing I bought some hair dye and followed his fashion. Only, I was a few years older than Pete and bore many grey patches on my thinning scalp. These did not come out red. They turned bright pink. Not only that, my hair frizzed up, to emulate the cloud-like hairstyle of Art Garfunkel. Every day, when I went shopping, I had to pass small children playing in the park, and they would rush to the fence screaming, ‘Dandelion! Dandelion!’ It mattered not to those barbaric infants that dandelion seeds are not in any way pink, but fluffy-white.

So, Pete and Marti would look after the house for us.

Next, in that package that had arrived, was a form I had to fill in as the ‘dependant’ accompanying Captain AJ Kilworth during her tour in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong. It was a form that was usually filled in by wives of serving soldiers. A clerk had obviously gone through the form with a pen and wherever the word ‘wife’ appeared, he had crossed through it and replaced it with ‘husband’ in – as John Murry would have put it – the small neat handwriting of the illiterate. I filled in the necessary blanks but was confounded when I came to the sentence ‘If pregnant, date of husband’s confinement’. Clearly our clerk had become so bored with his work he had failed to pay attention to the small print.

I would soon learn what it was like to be an army wife, now that our roles were reversed. As a dependant I would have to get my captain spouse to sign that I could have a library ticket. I would not be a member of the Osborne Barracks Officers’ Mess as she was, but would only be allowed to use the bar if she was present and accompanying me. In fact I had few rights or privileges that were not endorsed by her. She was indeed the master of the house, the boss, the rent-payer and the layer down of rules and regulations. The army would not listen to me for a moment, if I had any complaints about our accommodation. I barely existed so far as they were concerned. Only Captain AJ was important.

Phoooeeey, I didn’t like that at all.

The only good part about this new arrangement was that if we signed the inventory for a ‘Hangars aircraft’ instead of a ‘Hangers coat’ by mistake, Annette would be the one responsible and not me.

Hong Kong is an amazing city. In 1988 it had eight million people living in an area not much bigger than Southend-on-Sea. It hummed, banged and bustled with commerce and business, from the man beating out pots and pans on the pavement outside an open-fronted shop in Mong Kok, Kowloon-side, to the mighty Jardine-Matheson building on the island. Even as we were landing on the long jetty that pretended to be a runway for Kai Tak Airport, I could see down below the Star Ferries going between Kowloon and the island; the tall buildings dominated by the new triangular Bank of China; the reticulated railway rising from Midlevels to the Peak; buses, cars, motorcycles, bikes, foot passengers and most impressive of all, the thousands of junks, between-island ferries and boats, sampans, ocean-going ships, smacks, motor boats and other craft that were criss-crossing the harbour and skirting Stonecutter’s Island.

It did indeed look like a colony that never slept.

Yet Hong Kong is not just a city. Kowloon is a triangular-shaped peninsula. Halfway up that peninsula is a row of hills which the Chinese call ‘dragons’. Indeed, the word Kowloon (Gau Lung) in Cantonese means ‘Nine Dragons’ and this refers to those hills, though one of the dragons has been excavated for building materials. Beyond the eight-and-a-half dragons, reached by the Lion Rock Pass, or round one of the two ends of the range, is the New Territories, which is mostly countryside. There are huge parks up there, and mountains like Tai Mo Shan, and yes one or two big towns like Shatin, Tai Po and the port of Sai Kung, but it is abundant with greenery and was once full of duck farms, and small banana plantations, and piggeries, and other such rural establishments. There you will find ‘spirit trees’ covered in ribbons and rags, and long tough walks on the trails, and hidden restaurants that serve the most delicious dishes.

Hong Kong is without question, magical, especially if you live there long enough to find all its pockets and seams.

The moment we landed and I smelled the old familiar smells of Singapore, I knew this was going to be a wonderful tour of duty. Not my tour of duty, but nevertheless, I was along for the ride. We were picked up by Robin Moseley, Annette’s new boss, and his wife Glynis. We liked them both immediately. They were affable, friendly and gave us plenty of information. The usual things had to be sorted almost immediately: bank account, work-place, accommodation, bus time-tables, etc. I seem to remember these were all done in a day. Miraculous.

This seems like a good place to put in an anecdote, a warning on the perils of travel as related by Robin Moseley, Esquire.

When Robin and Glynis lived in Cyprus they decided to go on holiday to Egypt with another couple we knew in Hong Kong, Fiona and Howard. Howard was a major in the army at the time and was convinced that if he stuck to drinking beer and avoided water in Egypt, he wouldn’t suffer from Pharaoh’s revenge. What actually happened was – yes – he became dangerously dehydrated. The quartet were staying in a Cairo hotel which they later described as horrendously dirty, with unusable bathroom facilities, but that is by-the-by. The couples’ rooms were separated by a long u-shaped corridor. In the middle of the night there was a terrible screaming and then a hammering on the door to Robin and Glynis’s room. Robin woke in a panicky, fuzzy state, got up and opened the door to be confronted by a distraught Fiona.

‘Quick, quick,’ screeched Fiona, ‘I think Howard’s dying.’

She then fled back down the corridor with Robin some yards behind, she in her nightdress, he in his pyjamas. Lining the corridor were the off-duty staff of the hotel, sleeping against the walls (presumably having no rooms of their own) who woke to see this hysterical European woman in her nightie being pursued by a gentleman trying to hold up his pyjama bottoms. Some of them rose to chase after the would-be rapist and his victim. When Robin reached the room of his friends, he had a number of hotel staff close on his heels.

Howard, however, was aware enough to know that his room was suddenly crowding with strange people and he pulled the sheet up to his eyes, crying, ‘I’m all right! I’m all right. Leave me alone.’

Next morning it was Robin’s job to scour the backstreets of Cairo looking for glucose for Howard. He entered a dingy-looking chemist shop which was not much more than a hole in the wall, indeed without much hope, but the chemist turned out to speak perfect Oxford English and disappeared into the back of his shop. He emerged with a large package and when it was unravelled he proudly presented the curious Robin with a stand, rubber tubes and bottle full of glucose complete with a nice long needle for treating a patient intravenously.

Robin said later he would dearly have loved to have gone back to Howard and begun to set up the equipment, saying, ‘You’ll be fine – I’ve just had a quick lesson on how to use this!’ However, he settled for some glucose tablets, vowing to get even with Howard some other way.

~

Our flat – there are very few houses in Hong Kong – was on the seventh floor of a building named Vista Panorama, which the military residents had swiftly nicknamed Vista Paranoia. It stood on a slope above the main highway through the Lion Rock Tunnel, and in the path of the aircraft that were heading towards a chequer-board that indicated the flight path to the Kai Tak Airport runway. From our balcony we could see the faces of the passengers on the jumbo jets. During a typhoon those faces would be chalk white with fear and who could blame their owners? Below the balcony was a steeply-sloping dual-carriageway that was the Waterloo Road and on wet days there would be at least two or three crashes. On the first day there we witnessed a glazier’s lorry carrying dozens of panes of glass spinning out of control and smashing into the central barrier. The reader surely has the imagination to envisage the outcome.

The civilian rent for a flat in Vista Panorama in 1988 was around £3000 per month, but we imagined that the armed services got special discounts or something. The car park underneath the flats was full of Rolls Royces owned by Chinese occupants of the building. Our twelve-year-old Honda sat quietly among them, saying nothing.

The water system in Hong Kong was interesting. Toilets, and any appliances that did not need fresh water, were flushed with sea water. Thus our bathroom smelled of the ocean briny and the toilet pan was always encrusted with shining crystals of salt. There were no hot water washing machines in Hong Kong. All machines were cold water. Indeed the clothes seemed just as clean there as they do in UK. The washing was hung out of the back windows on long bamboo poles and a fine sight it made, rivalling the hundreds of flags that had fluttered from Lord Nelson’s fleet of ships after the British victory at Trafalgar.

Annette’s salary was more than adequate and I was earning substantial advances for my books by this time. We soon settled back into military life, with its long round of Officer’s Mess occasions – formal dinners, informal dinners, modest dances, full-blooded balls, films and many other entertainments. If we were not going to our own mess we were going to one on another military base, such as Tamar Naval Base, or the Ghurkha Mess. Civilian restaurants in Hong Kong were, and I imagine still are, the best in the world. Schezwan, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Thai, French, Peking. All were available in their numbers and all were excellent. If one was short of cash for any reason, there were always the ‘clubs’ and ‘messes’ of Chung King Mansions, a huge slum building in the heart of Kowloon, beloved of penny-poor backpackers, which were just as good but because they had no fire exits or adequate kitchens were not allowed to call themselves restaurants. These clubs and messes served mostly Indian food, sometimes Ghurkha curries, very cheaply.

During the day, while Annette was at work, and sometimes when the two of us were together, there were a multitude of parks and other interesting places to visit. Bonsai parks, grown-up-tree parks, Japanese gardens, rock gardens. The open-air food markets were something else, selling snakes for the pot, frogs, newts and their cousin amphibians, always live fish cut open and laid out so that you could see their hearts pulsing, vegetables of strange shapes and designs, weird fungi, crunchy-looking insects, barrels boiling with eels, ancient black eggs, severed horse’s heads, every kind of mammal – in fact it was said, and I believe it to be true, that the Cantonese eat anything that walks or swims with its back to the sky. Sadly they are not into cannibalism, which is a shame, because that would have rounded off things very nicely.

We quickly learned that face was very important to our fellow citizens. No Canton man or woman wishes to lose face by saying ‘no’. Early on I went into a record shop and asked if they had a particular jazz number. ‘Yes,’ said the assistant, and disappeared into the back of the shop, never to be seen again. He did not have it, but he wasn’t going to give us the satisfaction of knowing that fact. A woman friend got in a taxi and asked to be taken to a particular school in a remote section of Kowloon Tong. The taxi driver had not understood her, but did not want to lose face by asking for the destination again, so he drove her to where he thought she wanted to go, a pig farm in the New Territories.

What I loved to do most, while Annette was at work, was visit Cat Street on Hong Kong Island, which was lined with antique and junk shops. There I would happily spend our money on bird cages (minus the birds of course), ancient clocks, carpets, Korean tansus, strange boxes, brass ornaments, pieces of jade, Chinese rosewood chairs of antique design, carved figures, masks. When I was not in Cat Street, Bird Street or the Jade Market, I was in Overjoys, who made ceramics. There I purchased beautiful porcelain bowls, lazy susans, Canton Rose vases and lots of lamps with wonderful oriental bases. Annette would come home of an evening and groan. ‘Not another clock? What are we going to do with them all? Where are we going to put them when we go home?’ True, that has been a problem and most of them have had to be given away to relatives and friends, leaving just my favourites to gloat over.

~

Annette spent a week in her army car, an old small Vauxhall with no air conditioning, getting used to the routes which she would have to take around Hong Kong. Twice she went illegally into mainland China by mistake, the border guards waving her through both ways, probably due to the fact that she had a crest on the doors of the car. They surely must have wondered why this pretty blonde lady obviously of Western origin, wanted to drive back and forth into the economic zone of Shenzen?

The problem with driving in Hong Kong was that there were no roundabouts and if you got into the wrong lane you were doomed. Whenever I did that, and Annette said it was the same for her, I always ended up in the maze of back streets in the most populated area of the planet – Mong Kok. Mong Kok was a densely peopled section of Hong Kong with tall buildings containing thousands of tiny flats and a multitude of small businesses such as pot-and-pan makers, paper makers, furniture makers, boiler makers, bicycle makers, every kind of makers. The noise level, of small strong men beating various metals, was horrendous.

Mong Kok also had Bird Street, with its wonderful bamboo cages of all shapes and designs. I hate the idea of wild birds in cages, even if they are taken for walks through the park on a Sunday, but the cages were works of art. The Jade Market was there too, with its dozens of stalls selling carved jade objects and simply lumps of the stuff. Some pieces of jade are worth thousands of Hong Kong dollars, others a few cents, and Gweilos like me have no idea what a Chinese person is looking for in a piece of jade. Patterns? Colours? Clarity? Probably all those, but the likelihood of a gweilo guessing right is down below zero somewhere.

Gweilo (often spelt gwailo).

The word means something like ghost person. Whether it was meant originally to be derogatory, or was simply a neutral description of the pale invaders from the West, I have no idea. Having lived in more than one colony I can tell you that the expats almost always happily embrace such nicknames. In the case of gweilo, it was used both orally and in print. The English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post, always referred to expats as gweilos, as did books and magazines. We used the word as if we had invented it for ourselves. We may have conquered distant lands without conscience, but no one could accuse expatriate Westerners of being unable to laugh at themselves.

Annette then, learned to drive around the Crown Colony. It was winter when we arrived, just a week or two before Christmas, so the lack of air conditioning in the car was not important. Hong Kong has a chilly, very very humid winter, which needs light bulbs burning permanently in wardrobes to keep clothes from going mouldy and causes photographs to wrinkle in their frames. However, the summers are stiflingly hot. Not a wonderful climate, but bearable for one who was brought up in Aden and Singapore, both of which are unbelievably hot and humid.

Annette adjusts herself to extreme climates almost immediately. She has this strange internal thermostat which drives me crazy. Any change in temperature outside a building is coped with without a murmur of complaint. Any small variation within a building has her declaring it has ‘suddenly’ got extremely hot or insufferably cold.

Just before Christmas Annette’s boss Robin came to the flat looking very solemn.

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you Annette, that your father died early this morning.’

Annette took the news calmly. Bill Bailey had been ill for about fifteen years with Parkinson’s disease. He had not taken well to the fact that just when he had retired, something he had been looking forward to for many years being stuck in a dull office job that failed to stretch him mentally or otherwise, he had fallen seriously ill. Contrary to his normal fighting nature he lapsed into apathy and quickly deteriorated to a depressed state where he neither wanted to talk to people, nor make any effort to battle the disease. Just before we left England he had fallen out of his wheelchair and broken his hip, requiring a serious operation. I think it was, for him, the last bitter blow from life and he had decided to opt out.

Annette took the next flight back to UK, to attend the funeral and support her mother Betty for a short time. Annette’s brother Colin was on hand, so Betty was not left alone in her grief. Left to my own devices in Hong Kong, I was visited several times by Robin and Glynis, but had not had time to make any other friends. I visited parks, went for long walks, went to the cinema, and wrote stuff. They were at that moment changing all the windows in Vista Panorama, so I had plastic sheeting flapping in the wind back and front of the huge flat, with cold draughts whistling through the bedroom and living room. It was not the best Christmas I’ve spent, but it wasn’t the worst either.

I was at that time using an Amstrad to write my novels. Those early pseudo-computers created by Alan Sugar were a godsend to writers like me, who like to write at a hundred miles and hour. I have been able to touch-type at eighty words per minute since I was fifteen years-of-age, having been taught in the Boy Entrants to teletype. When Robin saw me struggling with floppy discs, without which the Amstrad would not operate, he said, ‘Come on, my boy, we must get you a real computer!’ and promptly took me to a huge hive of Chinese computer geeks, pirated software and hardware known as the Golden Arcade. This typically Asian den of a thousand stalls and shops, was situated in the Shek Kip Mai district of Hong Kong, on the westward side of Kowloon.

When I walked in through the door of this place, the size of an aircraft hanger, my senses were attacked from every direction by sound, colour, movement and unbridled energy. Young men were zipping here and there, carrying computer parts or discs with luridly coloured covers. Piles of computer game discs covered the stalls. Intent workers, heads bent over their task, were building or repairing computers. Those computers were everywhere, stacked in corners or on rickety-looking display tables. It really was an Aladdin’s cave of computers and Robin, who had been completely besotted by computers since they became available, sighed deeply in satisfaction, as if he were actually confronted with baskets of rubies and emeralds.

I bought a state-of-the art desk computer, with a huge 10 meg hard disc, which Robin believed was the equivalent of a war-monger purchasing a fully-armed nuclear submarine.

‘You’ll be able to write dozens of novels on that,’ he said, patting my package affectionately, as if it were the computer that was going to do the writing, not me. ‘I expect to see the first one at the end of the week.’

~

Annette eventually came back to her lonely husband and we began life in Hong Kong proper. We joined the Hong Kong long-trekkers and weekends were spent walking the hills of the New Territories and the many islands that belonged to Hong Kong in the China Sea. We also joined the Royal Asiatic Society and met David and Edith Gilkes, who were to become close friends. David was the bursar at the Chinese University. Another society we joined was the Hong Kong History Society, which like the Royal Asiatic Society, had as members and fellows expats who could speak and write Chinese fluently. How I envied those brilliant academics who get a glimpse inside the Asian mind.

Indeed, I started classes in the local dialect, Cantonese. China has many spoken languages – Cantonese (Gwong dong wa), Shanghai-ese, Hok Yen (spoken in Singapore), Mandarin of course, and several others – which are quite different from each other. A Hok Yen speaker will not understand a Cantonese speaker. However, the written language, memorised characters, is known to all. One could sometimes see a Chinese tracing a character on his hand with his forefinger to communicate with another Chinese who has a different dialect. An everyday reader needed to memorise 4,000 characters to read the newspaper. A scholar needed 10,000. We in the west encode and decode twenty-six letters to make our language work. There is no encoding or decoding to be done with Chinese: it is purely an exercise in memory. Such a written language has its problems with abstract concepts like ‘world peace’.

Osborne Barracks had a language school, for teaching officers who needed to communicate with Chinese officials. Officers like the Military Attaché to Beijing. The classes often had a space spare and I would fill that space at no cost to me. It was a good arrangement, because they needed classes of ten or twelve to generate discussions and I was happy to join them. However I have never been good at languages and though I attended more than one course I never got beyond ‘getting by’.

Learning Cantonese is quite different from learning Malay, German or Greek. Or even Arabic. All of which I had a smattering at the time, having lived in those countries. Cantonese has no tenses, no plurals, no articles and no multi-syllabled words. When a Cantonese speaker says in English ‘Me sell many camera yesterday,’ that’s exactly what he would say in his own language. No ‘the’ or ‘a’, no tense, no plurals.

Simple, eh? What an easy language to learn – not.

The difficulty of Cantonese, and I imagine Mandarin and all the other dialects, is that it is a tonal language. One word means nine different things, depending on the tone used. Jai means God, but it also means pig, and several other things, depending on the tone used. ‘Good morning!’ in Cantonese is ‘Jo san’, but ‘Jo san,’ said slightly differently could mean something quite different. So I sat in class for a week, saying, ‘Wan, wan, wan – wan, wan, wan,’ in several different tones. (Six was all that a newcomer can cope with, the other three being ‘clipped’ tones.) Once the tones have been mastered, one learns ‘classifiers’ which help the listener to understand the context of what is being said. Goh, before a word means that what is being talked about is either ‘round’ (like a ball, or an orange, or the world) or a human being. Tiu means that the following word is long and thin, and flexible, like a tie or a piece of string or a long and winding road. (I know, a road is not ‘flexible’ in the true sense of the word, but it looks as if it should be flexible. Thank Goodness the Beatles came from Liverpool and not the Chinese province of Gwong Dong.)

So, I learned a little Cantonese, enough to help in the markets and in taxis, two places where English was not spoken. I tried practising on our Amah, the lady who cleaned and occasionally cooked for us, Ah-lai. But she always insisted on speaking China Coast pidgin. Pidgin is not a put-down language, so I was told by a lecturer at the Royal Asiatic Society, but a real go-between language which both parties find easier to communicate in than the languages spoken by each other.

There are some lovely phrases in China Coast pidgin, though I never heard them used by our cleaning lady, Ah-lai. One is a ‘piano’ which in pidgin is ‘toothy-face, bashy-in, cry.’ And the other is ‘mix-master from sky’ which apparently means ‘helicopter’. Those are pretty elaborate phrases, but more simply Ah-lai’s ‘udder one’ meant anybody else other than the person you were talking about. Thus when I came home one day and Ah-lai said to me, ‘Udder one say missy gone Stanley wid udder one,’ I knew exactly what she meant. The first ‘udder one’ was our neighbour, the second ‘udder one’ was a guest who was staying with us. Thus translated the sentence communicated: ‘Your neighbour says that Annette has gone to Stanley Market with your guest’.

This leads me nicely on to our relationship with Ah-lai, who is a remarkable woman. We have been back to Hong Kong several times to see her since leaving in 1992 and she has once come to stay with us for two weeks in England. When she was a young woman she lived in a very poor village north of Shenzen, in Mainland China. She ‘escaped’ over the border into Hong Kong, where she met and married ‘a Hakka man’. (The Hakka are a Chinese tribe, mostly fishermen.) Ah-lai’s new husband was a fireman for the Hong Kong fire service and thus had a good job, but Ah-lai wanted to work too, so she became an Amah for the expats. When we knew her she worked for about three or four families. She eventually gave birth to a son, Kong Wing, and also took in the daughter of her brother, smuggled over the border from China.

Ah-lai used to invite us to her home on Chinese festival days. There she would treat us to traditional food and drink. Her one-roomed flat in Tai Po measures four metres by eight metres. There is literally only a single room, containing kitchen, bedroom and living-room space. The toilet is out on the narrow balcony and beds are folded down from the walls at night. In the late ’80s two adults and two teenage children lived in that one room. It was not an unusual flat, it was typical.

In Hong Kong we often saw youngsters sitting on the steps of some public monument, doing their homework, using the space and relative peace. Young married couples still living with their parents would go to a Bridal Hotel for nights when they were trying to start a family. Space in Hong Kong was, and still is, the most valuable of commodities. A man who had purchased two small flats in the early years is now surely as rich as Croesus.

When the situation in China relaxed after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, Ah-lai took us to the village in which she was born. Her son Kong Wing and her adopted daughter Mai Ling, came with us too. Strangely, the children were not greeted by the villagers we met, who were otherwise most hospitable. If you consider there must have been uncles, aunts and for Fan Ling, even a father, among those villagers, it was peculiar indeed that the two kids were not fussed over as they would be elsewhere, especially since they had not been seen by their relatives since they were infants. Annette was given a baby to hold, a one-year-old with a bare bottom. Annette was wearing white slacks. Luckily the smiling little one did not suddenly erupt.

At that time Kong Wing was about fifteen years of age and typical of Hong Kong Chinese boys, he had crimped hair, which fell about his head in nice tight curls, designer jeans and white trainers, a silk floral shirt and a nice soapy clean smell about him. His country cousins had pudding-basin haircuts, bottle-green jumpers full of holes, muddy boots on their feet and short flannel trousers. These rough ‘cousins’ confronted the decadent Hongkonger and demanded he go out with them to shoot rats. Kong Wing looked terrified and though he rarely spoke to me, the gweilo who employed his mother, he grabbed me by the sleeve and croaked, ‘You come too, Mr Kilworth.’ Mr Kilworth indeed did go and actually we all had a jolly good time, shooting an ancient air rifle, riding on rusty old bicycles and generally getting Kong Wing’s lovely clothes covered in mud.

He thoroughly enjoyed himself in the end.

For the rest of the day, we ate with the villagers, out of newspaper: mostly dried mussels mixed with rice making a grey mess that was not really to our taste, but hey, it probably cost them an arm and leg and who were we to turn up our noses? Then we were invited to go to a ‘rich lady’s’ house and that lady showed us real taps with running water, of course making us appreciate what we had in Hong Kong. Finally, it was time to go home and we had since realised that our visa stipulated ‘SHENZEN ONLY’. We were well outside our permitted zone and had to cross an internal border to get back into the Shenzen Economic Zone.

My heart was beating a military tattoo as we showed our passports to a rather severe-looking official on that border, but luckily she only gave them a cursory glance before waving us through the barrier. Had she looked at them properly we would definitely have spent a night or two in jail and, as with most criminals in China, have to write out an essay-long ‘apology’ to the Chinese state for transgressing against their laws.

~

We had not been long in Hong Kong before the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. I had recently got a job as a book reviewer for the South China Morning Post and was therefore invited on occasion to the Foreign Correspondent’s Club on the island. In the FCC was a big TV screen, which while I was drinking at the bar, began showing the terrible events as they unfolded in that Beijing square. What struck me forcibly, as I watched, was that all the kids that were being killed represented a whole generation for every affected family. One child, one family. That was, and still is, the policy in China. Every death in the square was an only child.

I choked on my drink, rushed outside to get some air, and immediately burst into tears, shocked by what was happening. I ended up being hugged by an Australian woman, a complete stranger, who joined me in wetting the pavement outside the club. Other people were sobbing too, Chinese people, not at all inscrutable.

Our friends, Jane Stokes and Humphrey Keenlyside were in Beijing when all this was happening. Humph is a journalist and lawyer whose ethics and integrity I regard as impeccable. Jane is a speech therapist who like her husband works constantly and sensibly for the betterment of this planet which we all share. I very much admire this young couple. I would call them idealists if that word were not associated with impracticability. Jane and Humph actually do get things done.

Jane and Humph later gave us their first-hand knowledge of events in Beijing and the images still haunt me.

The whole experience resulted in me writing the young adult’s novel The Third Dragon, published by Scholastic Books.

~

Weekends, we occasionally took the ferry to the Portuguese colony of Macau, which at that time was in elegant decay. The colonial buildings, the architecture, had once been beautifully painted, but by the late ’80s had faded colours and the signs were that the owners were allowing them to drift towards abandonment. In 1999, two years after Hong Kong was due to be handed back to the Chinese government, the Portuguese were also going to return their grabbed land to its original owners. Macau stood on the mouth of the Pearl River and the Portuguese had built an amazing bridge over the harbour. It curved steeply but gracefully in what was almost a semi-circle. Going over it one was tempted to reach up and touch the base of the sky. On the far side of the bridge, from where the ferry landed, were restaurants that served the most delicious bacalao meals. It was worth going to Macau just for the cuisine.

However, the main attraction for Hongkongers was the casino. Gambling in Hong Kong was only permitted at the race tracks, Happy Valley and Shatin, and then only through the state tote. Casinos and all other forms of gambling were illegal in Hong Kong. Macau then, attracted Hong Kong Chinese, many of whom loved to gamble. Through the History Society we had made friends with a judge and his wife. Peter Surmon was an ex-RAF officer who was called to the bar after leaving the service and had been appointed as a judge, first in Gilbert Islands in the Pacific, then in Hong Kong. Peter always said he would not have made a good judge in UK. ‘I have to have pause for thought and in Hong Kong the translator gives me that. It gives me time to reflect.’ We first went to Macau with the Surmons and played a casino’s machines with a set amount of dollars. We lost but I retained one dollar of the set $200. (At that time £1 equalled $10). I left the casino ‘solvent’.

So, a trip to Macau or to one of the many outlying islands belonging to Hong Kong, such as Lantau with its magnificent giant Buddha and wonderful Sunset Peak, or Lamma Island where the fish restaurants abound. John and Grace Chidlow came to stay with us and we took them for a walk in the mountains of Lantau, climbing Sunset Peak. On the way up we encountered a pit viper which was sleeping stretched across the path. Grace and Annette had already walked over it without seeing it, but before John and I got to it, it was rearing ready to strike. There was a sheer cliff face to our left and a drop of several hundred feet to our right, with the path ahead only three feet wide. There was nowhere else to go. We had to ask the women to distract the snake with small pebbles while we jumped over it one at a time, hoping not to get bitten in mid-air. The viper got very very angry, but missed his strike. Another couple some way behind us spent the next several hundred yards fearfully tiptoeing along, not knowing where on the track they were going to encounter an incensed serpent looking for payback.

That was only one of our several encounters with snakes in Hong Kong. It was usually Annette who found them.

‘I’m always up to my neck in vegetation,’ she complained once, after encountering a vivid green bamboo snake at eye level. ‘Can’t we go for a gentle walk, like we do at home?’

Another time, on track over the Nine Dragons behind our flat, she went to sit down on a rock and a snake suddenly rose up out of some dead leaves. Luckly there was no contact. The snake was a red-necked keelback, and it was – like the bamboo snake and the pit viper – poisonous enough to be a little worrying. Once the snake had retracted itself, Annette got interested in it and followed it along a gully until it disappeared. It was quite a handsome creature.

There are six deadly snakes in Hong Kong, the most dangerous of which is the king cobra. Kraits and coral snakes carry lethal venom but they – like humans – are not fond of casual meetings and usually head off in the opposite direction. King cobras however are aggressive and will attack if disturbed or confronted. They stand six feet tall when they rear to strike and thus are able to look a man directly in the eyes. A little unnerving, to be sure. However, I heard of only one snake-bite death while I was in Hong Kong. A jogger in one of the parks was bitten by an unknown snake as he ran past a bush. He never made it back to his car.

The only other animals that were of any concern to us, apart from rabid dogs, were the rhesus macaque monkeys. These lived in the same hills on which we met the red-necked keelback. The macaques weren’t particularly big animals, standing at half-a-metre tall, but like the king cobra, they were antagonistic and would rush at you, snapping their teeth. They looked fairly stocky and muscular too. We began carrying brightly-coloured automatics on those walks. When they came at us we would point our weapons and press the buttons. The sudden explosion of colour as the brollies flew open in the animal’s face caused the monkey to shriek with fright and run back in the opposite direction.

On Lantau Island there were some shacks on a patch of unkempt scrubland. Dusty bushes grew into each other, the ground was covered with creepers and there were one or two dwarf trees. It was said there were cobras in the undergrowth. These shacks were owned by the army and could be hired out for the weekend by army personnel. We used them several times, to entertain our guests. Rob and Sarah came with us, when they were in Hong Kong. Peter and Marti Beere were going to until Marti heard about the cobras and who can blame her. The last couple to come with us were Pete and Peggy Good, our old friends from Shoeburyness. We usually arrived on the six o’clock evening ferry. The time we went with Pete and Peggy was no exception. It was beginning to get dark and I swept the area outside the shack with torchlight before opening the screen door and stepping inside ushering Peggy in ahead of me. Pete and Annette were coming up behind.

I switched on the light and Peggy turned towards the doorway through which we had just entered. I was facing her and I saw her expression change to terror. She screamed high, long and loud, pointing with a shaking finger towards the door. I did not want to turn round and see what was there. I was absolutely positive there was a cobra behind me. But of course I did turn and it was not a cobra but a giant spider spread across the screen of the door. Peggy had a phobia of spiders and she didn’t stop screaming and pointing until Pete, coming through the doorway now, opened the screen and gave it a slam, sending the spider hurtling out into the night. By God it was a big one though. Ordinarily spiders don’t bother me, but I wouldn’t have wanted that one on my lap.

‘Everything’s all right now,’ Pete reassured, Peggy. ‘It’s fine. It’s halfway to Hong Kong by now. I gave it the fright of its life.’

‘It gave me the fright of my life, you mean,’ she replied.

Peggy sat down, lit a cigarette with shaking hands, and almost took the whole fag down in one draw, quick as a dynamite fuse. I fully expected that we would pick up the suitcases and catch the same ferry back to Hong Kong, but though I shouldn’t have been, I was surprised by Peggy’s courage. She said she would stay, even though I could see she was still quite scared. Pete gave her a big hug and told her how brave she was and Peggy screwed up her nose as if to say, yeah, and probably stupid for not obeying my instincts and running off home.

The big hairy eight-legged fellah never returned, but Pete told me later he had woken the next morning and on opening his eyes had seen an enormous black cockroach scuttling across the ceiling. Peggy was on the point of waking up too. She would have seen the monster, if he had not grabbed her and surprised her with a big good-morning kiss.

~

I had spent quite a few years in the Sergeants’ Mess during my time in the air force. In Hong Kong I got a taste of the Officers’ Mess. Our first formal regimental dinner at Osborne Barracks was quite something.

Before the dinner there was the ‘Beating Of The Retreat’ on the parade ground outside, performed by the band of the Royal Regiment of Wales along with their mascot goat, Taffy. Quite a moving experience at sunset, looking out over Kowloon Tong.

Then we went in to the evening meal.

I was in my new dinner jacket, purchased from Sam’s Tailor (sic) of Tsim Sha Choi, suit maker to celebrities and princes. Sam had photos lining his walls: Prince Phillip, Prince Charles, pop stars, film stars. I tried to tell him I was a famous writer and should have my phizzog up there with the best. He laughed and nudged me.

Annette had a new cocktail dress and looked stunning.

Once seated at the long oak table I looked around me. Army officers of all ranks up to colonel sat there in their military finery, medals glinting, mess dress immaculate. They scrubbed up well, those mostly young men, looking smooth and suave, full of élan. Waiters hovered in the background, assisting ladies with their chairs when there was no gallant officer handy. A regimental band smaller than the one which had beat the retreat was in the corner of the ballroom, playing something. On the table was the regimental silver, the crowning glory of which were the condiments. I had never seen such a huge and magnificent salt cellar. I can’t remember what it represented exactly, but I have a mind it was a silver St George slaying a silver dragon. I do remember it was about the size of wok and the salt lay like a glinting white desert in its bowl.

I had been warned to go to the toilet before sitting down at the table. There was an unwritten law that no one rose from their seat until after the toast to the Queen, which was quite a way through the dinner. A lieutenant who had been too drunk to remember had once got up and when he returned his chair was missing. He had to crouch down on his haunches for the rest of meal, talking to the lady beside him as if he were fine and dandy when he was actually in great pain.

The wait was a bit uncomfortable for me because it was during the ’80s/’90s period that my prostate began to bother me.

Once the dinner had started and we were happily chatting to our neighbours, the band began to play regimental tunes. Osborne was a services camp, not an infantry regiment base. The infantry regiment was on the island, at Stanley. At Osborne there were educationalists, dentists, doctors, quartermasters, family therapists (Annette), schoolteachers, youth workers, speech therapists, transport men, others. A whole Quality Street box of officers and civilians. However, all these people belonged to a corps, even though they were not cavalry or infantry regiments.

So, when the band in the corner played the Education Corps’ tune, there were those who stood smartly to attention. The next tune was for the Dentists and a neighbour of ours, an officer and a lady, Marie, actually stood on her chair before saluting. (Her husband had been a Ghurkha officer and had joined me and a few others as a male ‘dependants’.) And so on, throughout the dinner, men or women officers stood up when the band played their particular corps march. Then towards the end of the evening I heard ‘Paperback Writer’ being played and knew it my turn to acknowledge them. I stood up and gave everyone an embarrassed little nod of acknowledgement. Finally, it was the turn of the Royal Navy officers present. They do not stand for bands or even the Queen’s toast. It is an old tradition with them. Otherwise on board ship they would bang their heads on the low bulkhead and knock themselves silly.

At the end of the evening the port bottle was passed round to the right. I’d always wanted to take part in an after-dinner passing round of the port, as in the movie Charge of the Light Brigade. It seems to me like a fine tradition which shouldn’t be lost. Get rid of fox hunting, yeah, but don’t get rid of passing the port.

A footnote about the Welsh regiment and their mascot.

The Ghurkhas always celebrate the Hindu festival of Diwali. The evening before one such ceremony a Ghurkha officer rang the Welsh CO and asked if his regiment could borrow Taffy for the next day. The CO, probably up to his neck in paperwork, silently pondered the reason for this request. After a minute or two he got it and slammed down the phone. It is the custom for the Ghurkha regiment to decapitate a goat for the festival of Diwali.

While on the subject of decapitation and death, there were four killings that I know of while we lived in Hong Kong. The first was an officer who was supposed to have shot himself twice in the chest, but there were other factors that pointed away from suicide and towards murder. The second was a soldier found on the Chinese border, chopped to bits. Apparently he had been having an affaire with another man’s wife. The third was the killing of a Nepalese Ghurkha officer. Quite a dramatic murder. The officer had been bullying one of his soldiers who was of a higher caste than himself. On a public parade one day the bullied soldier suddenly stepped out of the ranks, drew his kukri, and neatly beheaded the officer in question. (He got three years inside and discharged from the army.) The fourth – bearing in mind that four is an unlucky number in Cantonese because it is the same word as ‘death’ – was a British army major who went into his office one morning, pulled open his desk draw only to find a grenade wired to the drawer handle. He died instantly of course, after losing most of his head. There was talk that the major had denied the Ghurkha regiment under his command an expected posting to UK, where they would usually earn more money than is normal for their Far East postings. Moral? Don’t screw with the Ghurkhas.

Back to the more pleasant subject of evening entertainment. Annette and I were once invited to a colonel’s house for a private dinner. The colonel enjoyed his alcohol and liked others to do the same. One of his party tricks was spiking the drinks with vodka.

There were about eight guests at the dinner, one of whom was a young lieutenant and his wife. Eager to please the young man had downed several drinks before the first course. We were halfway through the soup when he suddenly fell forward, his face in his soup bowl, completely senseless. His very cool young wife grabbed him by the hair and gently saved him from drowning.

‘David’s not been feeling well lately,’ she said to our host. ‘I think I’d better take him home. If you will excuse us?’

She was assisted to the door by servants and we heard her drive away just as the fish was being served.

I was by that time deep in my cups myself. I’m told by Annette I kept putting my arm affectionately around a severe woman next to me and calling her ‘Roxanne’. Her name was apparently Charlotte and she was the wife of a captain who seemed quite amused by my hugging of his nearest and dearest. Annette extricated me from my surrogate teddy bear just as Arthur, another major, was explaining how he lost the army’s largest yacht in a gale on the way home from the Philippines.

Arthur hadn’t actually been on board himself, but had sent the yacht back with a crew of Ghurkhas. Ghurkhas are not sailors and this crew, once the storm blew up, were terrified and went into a state of panic. They tried hooking their yacht onto the stern of another vessel, which immediately pulled the bows of their boat under the water and the army’s best yacht sank. No lives were lost but Arthur was in a hell of a lot of trouble. He was pleading with the colonel to help him get out of it. The colonel appeared not to be listening.

It was an interesting if rather shallow evening. I have only a vague recollection of going home in the taxi, my dear wife giving the driver his instructions. We lived in Rhonda Road but this had to be pronounced in Cantonese as ‘Lon-dak-do’ to be understood. This she did before I fell asleep and I woke only when I heard her telling the driver to turn left into our forecourt. ‘Juen yau, m’goi nei.’ By that time my head was already hammering and I was cursing colonels who drink too much and were insecure enough to want others to do the same. Unfortunately the armed forces are full of men who feel it is manly to overindulge.

~

In Hong Kong Annette and I joined the Episcopalian Christchurch, Kowloon Tong, which being the only protestant church that held its services in English took care of all denominations from Quakers to C of Es. The vicar there at the time was the Reverend Norman Jones, a Liverpudlian like my mate Pete Beere, with the same sense of humour. Norman was a practical as well as a spiritual vicar.

Norman arrived in Hong Kong with his wife Sue around about the same time we did. He began structuring his church so that the whole congregation had a voice and in most cases an active part in running it. He grabbed me immediately and asked me to run the church magazine. Others were co-opted. Some had been doing church work for years of course. Simon and Frances Lee, Chinese-Canadians, had beavered away with the previous vicar too. But many of us were new. Norman got a council going which included both Annette and I as members.

He is a good organiser, that Rev.

Norman and Sue had three children, Ben, Sam and Laura, who have grown to be fine adults. They all live in Sydney, Australia now. Ben is a wonderful man who is in the caring profession and Laura has married a chap who knows he’s found a treasure and will tell you so. As a young boy in Hong Kong Sam injured his legs badly in a car accident. I remember taking him to see the film about the Ninja Turtles to get him out of the house for an afternoon. Years later, after he had become a businessman in the Far East, Sam kindly sent me a very expensive ticket to the 2012 Cup Final. It was a box seat which of course included champagne and dinner. (His scouser dad told me had it been up to him I would have got my reward in Heaven.)

Christchurch was founded and built to cater for both Chinese and gweilo Christians, but most especially for in-betweeners. Mixed-race marriages are of course fairly common in colonies and Hong Kong was no exception. Eurasians numbered heavily among our congregation. It was a church which needed to cater for all sorts of protestant groups: Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans and others. We did not have any Evangelists, because there was a remarkable woman in Hong Kong, Jackie Pullinger, who gathered in those of a more evangelical persuasion. Jackie held open-air services which lasted for hours. She was tireless and very successful in her crusade to get drug addicts off their deadly express train. Jackie Pullinger offered charismatic religion in place of heroin and cocaine. It seemed to work.

Along with Glynis and Robin Moseley, Cath and Richard Beacher, and Janine and Bob Thomas, none of whom were churchgoers, those friends we made at Christchurch formed the backbone of our social life in Hong Kong.

I am just as comfortable in the company of great friends like Rob Holdstock, who was a confirmed atheist, as I am with those like Andrew Hall who is deeply religious. My childhood was spent attending the church and going to schools that still had compulsory prayers and hymns during morning assembly. I therefore have engrained in my psyche, Christian stories, parables, biblical texts, customs, festivals, psalms. The Song of Solomon is a beautiful piece of writing. As is Corinthians 13 and Psalm 23. These have added to my love of literature

These are those from Christchurch who were hospitable and who offered friendship without reserve: Kit and Maureen Haffner, Peter and Jenny Baxter, Anita and David Bray. Anita always made me smile and want to hug her. She is the most delightful woman. David was a terrific man, full of zest for life, ready for any challenges. Sadly he developed motor neurone disease which eventually took him from us.

Frances and Simon Lee are Canadians of Chinese extraction. These two almost ran the administration for the church by themselves. Simon owned factories for manufacturing telephones. When we visited them in Canada in recent years they were the best of hosts, taking us on tours of Vancouver and surrounds and entertaining us in their amazing home.

Trish and John Spiers.

Being army, these two had feet in the same social camps as Annette and myself. Trish is remarkable for her enormous energy. She works tirelessly for any church within the catchment area of her house. On one occasion she managed to get a batch of the male members of the church interested in flower arranging and allocated one Sunday to each of them. (My own effort was a masterpiece of violent vegetation.) John Spiers is an army major, now ex-service, then an accountant at Osborne Barracks. A man with all the practical skills needed for orienteering, I would want him by my side if I were ever lost in the Gobi. He now works for the Light Infantry Museum in Hampshire. John has been an invaluable help to me while I have been writing my historical war novels, of which there are now ten. He has provided me with a huge amount of information on British army customs and quirks, and has researched various areas of the military for me.

John and Trish’s home is on the outskirts of Winchester near the AD 1132 Hospital of St Cross, which is not a ‘hospital’ but a hostel for retired single clergymen. These are the Black Brothers and the Red Brothers (the colour of their gowns) who live in ‘noble poverty’ in small houses around a quadrangle with a beautiful church and an even more beautiful garden. The hostel was founded by Henri de Blois, the grandson of William the Conqueror. The institution is presided over by a Master and sits in the middle of the River Itchen’s water meadows.

It was the water meadows that interested me and I listened as John and Trish told me that the fields were flooded in the winter using a system of sluices and channels, to a particular depth that would ensure that the grass beneath grew rich and edible for cattle before those meadows which were still exposed to the weather. The ‘drowning’ of the fields was a precise science and was carried out by an ‘engineer’ whose skills were unique.

I took all this in, ruminated on the information, and proceeded to write a ghost story, set in the River Itchen water meadows, near the Hospital of St Cross, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and was awarded a Commendation. The story is called The Drowners and is probably one of the best of my young adult novels, a lot of which I owe to Trish and John’s enthusiasm for St Cross. It was published by Methuen, one of the Reed imprints. My editor there was Elke Lacey, who worked under Miriam Hodgson. While I was writing The Drowners, Elke died of a brain tumor. The next children’s novel I wrote, The Phantom Piper, is dedicated to her, a fine editor and a lovely young woman. Miriam then took me directly under her wing and I have to say she was warm, caring and always ready to talk and offer advice. When Miriam retired I put Methuen behind me.

There were many others, a whole list of Chinese, Americans, Canadians, British, Australians, etc., acquaintances and friends we met every week at least who made our time in Hong Kong one of the best periods of our lives. We still see many of them, mainly at the Hong Kong reunions every year (which Annette initiated and which now flourish) and others we visit on special occasions, like the weddings of their daughters and sons, or their retirement parties. Really, any excuse.

~

The Reverend Norman Jones and I began playing tennis and climbing mountains together on his days off. At first I used to beat him at tennis, but as time went on his competitive spirit (and I suspect a little help from his boss) gained him ground and he started beating me as many times as I did him. He is a great sportsman, did marathon runs, and once did the famous MacLehose trail race, a hike of some 100 kilometres across the southern hills of the New Territories, from the east coast to the west. It was a gruelling trek, usually won by the Ghurkhas. Annette and I provided a ‘coffee stop’ along the trail for the three walkers: Norman, David Bray and one other whose name unfortunately has vanished from my mind. When they reached us it was 3 o’clock in the morning. They were already exhausted and they were only halfway to the finishing line. There were other teams resting at the same drinks stop who were in no better condition. I saw one man taking off his shoes and socks in order to massage his poor feet. He fell asleep with his hands gripping the right sock, still only halfway off his foot.

One of my hill climbs with Norman was on a clear day in the Spring, after the chill humid Winter had been folded and stored in the cupboard for another season and before the heat of the summer had been taken out and aired ready to use. The black drongos were building their nests. Civet cats were hunting in the undergrowth for small mammals. We went up the slopes of the mountain Tai Mo Shan with a colleague of his, Jim, an ex-army man turned priest, who had joined us for the day.

Halfway up Jim turned to Norman and said, ‘Can I have some of your water, Norm. I’ve left my canteen in the car.’

‘No,’ replied Norman. ‘Sorry. You should remember to bring your own water.’

Jim stared at him with an incredulous look on his face.

‘That’s not very Christian. You’re supposed to be a man of God,’ he said in a heavily aggrieved tone.

Norman calmly replied, ‘It’s my day off.’

Jim did not appreciate the joke, even when Norm grinned and gave him the water. I did though.

Norman’s wife, Sue, worked with the ‘boat people’ in the camps constructed to contain them. We had a number of these camps in Hong Kong, housing Vietnamese who had made the deadly journey over the South China Sea in flimsy craft that often sank and took many lives. When they got to Hong Kong they were taken in, but the colony was already heavily overcrowded and there was a policy of keeping the eye-eyes (Illegal Immigrants) in fenced camps and under guard. These people were from both North and South Vietnam and were not particularly fond of each other, and on occasion there were riots and even murders.

I believe Sue also worked with the ‘caged men’ and with the old folks’ homes.

The caged men were elderly, mostly Chinese, who would have been left out on the street without their cages to sleep in at night. From time to time politicians and charity workers expressed their horror at having such a system in the colony and tried to change it. I never saw the cages and have no idea of the conditions, but I do remember reports of the old men complaining bitterly when their cages were abolished. I read they felt secure in their cage at night, could sleep without hindrance, and their possessions remained safely in their keeping.

The old folks’ homes had women as well as men of course and they had many among their number who were not Chinese, but Russian, Indian, Korean and other nationalities. People who had drifted into Hong Kong in the years when immigration was not so tight and had remained there without making their fortune. In their old age, having nothing, they needed a place where they would be cared for.

~

From time to time Hong Kong gets hit by a typhoon. These usually come through the Philippines or Shanghai first, creating havoc, but when they come they often bring Hong Kong to a standstill. There are set procedures of course, for dealing with a typhoon (which means ‘big wind’ in Cantonese) and there are various stages according to the wind’s strength, culminating with taping up the windows of apartments and preparing for a massive disruption, even deaths.

By the time we got to Hong Kong the last of the shanty towns was being pulled down and their occupants housed in brick-built flats. The junk flotillas in Aberdeen harbour and elsewhere were also being dealt with by evacuating the boat families into safer areas.

Another vulnerable area was Kowloon Walled City.

This giant slum near to the airport was built with flimsy materials and was a huge shanty, four storeys high, which housed fifty-thousand illegal immigrants. Kowloon city was a legacy from the time when Britain first leased Kowloon from China. The Chinese did not trust the British (naturally) and retained a single square mile in the middle of the leased land. In those days it was the walled city of the Manchus and contained Chinese agents who spied on the devious British, passing on intelligence to the Chinese government. Gradually the place became a haven for illegal immigrants who came over the border from mainland China and headed straight for the security of its walls.

When we arrived in Hong Kong, Kowloon city was bursting at the seams. The walls were gone and in their place this monstrous square mile of slum, which was wormholed with a maze of tunnels and alleys leading to tiny misshapen rooms where families lived. There were rats running everywhere. Electric cables and water pipes – usually plastic hoses – shared the floors and ceilings with the cockroaches. There were very few lights inside and the alleys and tunnels were often pitch black. The occupants of Kowloon city were triad gangs, fish-ball makers, kerbside dentists and a variety of other things.

What always amazed me, when I passed the place in the mornings, was the children. They came out of this giant cube of dirt and squalor wearing pure white dresses and shirts, the boys’ hair cut and combed neatly, the girls’ in plaits with ribbons, ready for their day at school. They looked immaculate. Any middle class parent in Hampshire would have been proud to send their own children alongside them.

I once went inside the city, guided through its labyrinth of tunnels by a resident. I saw the conditions the people lived in. Some had no more than a few square feet of space for their living quarters. Indeed, those in the centre of the cube had to call out each morning to ask what the weather was like in the real world. I saw the rats, the cockroaches, and the dangerous mix of electricity and water. It was a hell-hole, that city, and people had been born there and had died there. If an adult went outside and was caught without papers, he or she would be arrested and returned to China. Their children appeared to be allowed to go to school unhindered and I’m not sure why that was the case. Kowloon city was demolished the day I left Hong Kong for the last time.

When typhoons were around though, the corrugated iron sheets and plywood walls that held the slum together might easily be ripped apart.

We had only been in Hong Kong a few months when Typhoon Brenda struck the colony. It was the most powerful typhoon in years. On the day that it raged at its worst a colleague of Annette’s was due to get married to her fiancée. Sue was a speech therapist who was to wed James who worked in the financial district of the island. All other weddings were cancelled, but Sue was determined to go through with hers, Typhoon Brenda or not. Sue arranged for coaches to take the guests from Kowloon Tong to a church on the island. We were on the first coach, which had a Chinese corporal driving it. I have never experience a ride like it, with screaming high winds buffeting the vehicle, trees and telephone poles crashing around us, and a myriad of objects flying through the air and hitting the sides of the coach like bullets.

We did make the church without being blown off the road or being crushed by a pole. However by that time the rain was coming down in torrents and flooding the church floor. The high church windows were flexing and threatening to implode and shower us with stained glass. Above me Noah’s Ark was warping and bending, the banshee wind squealing through the gaps in the lead seals. Water swilled around my best shoes and soaked the turnups on my trousers.

On the roof a thousand wet drumsticks beat a tattoo.

And while this pandemonium continued, Sue came down the aisle looking more lovely than most brides on wedding days that have taken place in calmer and more placid conditions. She was followed by James – I can’t remember the music, I probably couldn’t hear it – and they were married within a smarter time that was usual for the ceremony.

It was a great wedding, because no one would ever forget it. That wedding formed the basis of a short story I later wrote, which I called ‘Typhoon’ of course, parodying Joseph Conrad’s famous story. It was published recently in a collection of mine brought out by Peter Crowther of PS Publishing. The volume is entitled Tales from the Fragrant Harbour and Sue and James, if you ever read it, it is wild fiction. Please forgive me for taking your unforgettable day and embroidering it.

~

Halfway through our tour in Hong Kong we were visited by my Omni magazine editor and friend, Ellen Datlow, who was accompanied by the fiction editor of Playboy magazine, Alice Turner. These two lovely New Yorkers, who pronounce ‘coffee’ delightfully as ‘corfee’ arrived while Annette was away in England, looking at boarding schools for the army. They came by way of Japan and on arriving put away their constant companion for the previous week, Born To Shop Tokyo, and took out their companion for the coming week, Born To Shop Hong Kong.

We had a great deal of fun while they were there, touring the jade market, Cat Street, Temple Street market, all the shops on the island and most of the shops on Kowloon-side. We went up the Peak, over the harbour on the Star Ferry, and ate at some nice restaurants. Then one day I decided it was time to show them the other side of Hong Kong.

‘We’re going up into the New Territories,’ I told this indefatigable pair of big spenders, ‘so that you can see some greenery.’

Their enthusiasm was a little tepid, but I felt sure I could interest them once I got them on the road. I pushed them into the back seat of the Honda and drove through the Lion Rock Tunnel and out into the wilderness before they could start thinking about the air conditioned malls of Hong Kong island. I steered clear of Sai Kung, which indeed had a few shops worth the visit if one was bored with countryside.

However, no sooner were we in green hills and wild fields, with copper-coloured snakes wriggling across the hot road and purple herons decorating the ponds and clouds of white egrets the skies, when they both fell fast asleep in the rear of the car. They remained in that comatose state until we reached the Chinese border, which on the Hong Kong side was lined with stalls selling trinkets and gee-gaws.

‘Oh, shops!’ they both cried, instantly waking, and leapt out of the car to tour the stalls, chattering animatedly among themselves and with the glint-eyed vendors. New Yorkers! I gave up at that point.

~

Not long before we left Hong Kong Charlie Brown, American editor of Locus, the science fiction news magazine, came on a visit. When such visitors came, we often used to take them to the Peninsula Hotel. If hotels were warm blooded creatures and had royalty flowing through their veins, the Peninsula would be a Persian emperor, just as the Raffles of old Singapore would be the King of Babylon. The Peninsula has gold-plated taps in the loos and a musicians’ balcony above the coffee shop floor where violinists play Albinoni and Schubert. The Peninsula is sumptuous, opulent. I tried to take Charlie into the coffee shop but the Sikh doorman pointed to Charlie’s sandals, obviously offensive to other coffee drinkers, and refused us entry. I pointed to a woman in silver sandals, entering right at that moment. The doorman shrugged and shook his head, indicating that a different set of rules applied to the female of the species.

After Charlie had been to Hong Kong, the science fiction writers Fred Pohl and James White came through. Fred Pohl was one of those authors I had read as a youth. He was famous for his collaborations with another writer, Kornbluth. Pohl of Pohl and Kornbluth! And James White! It was wonderful to meet such men. A local Chinese sf fan group rang me and invited me to a meal they were giving Fred and Jim at a Jumbo Jau Lau, one of those immensely busy, giant, noisy restaurants in Hong Kong where they serve dim sum from handcarts. We went and met the great men. As with other big-name writers I have met – James Blish, Brian Aldiss, Harry Harrison, William Golding, others – Fred and Jim were open, friendly and generous with their time. I very much enjoyed meeting them both. We had to shout at each other, the jau lau being full of Chinese speaking at the tops of their voices, but though they were elderly they were still full of enthusiasm for science fiction.

William Golding I met at a literary party in Charles Monteith’s office at Faber and Faber in Russell Square. I did not know what to say to the white-haired gentleman and asked Charles for advice.

‘Oh, he likes boats – ask him about yachting,’ Charles said, airily.

Armed with this I went up to the great author, not then yet a Nobel Prize Winner, but still awesome to a fledgling writer.

‘I hear you’re a sailor, Mr Golding,’ I said.

He stared at me for a minute, then looked over my shoulder at a wickedly-beaming Charles Monteith.

‘I hate boats,’ William Golding replied, firmly. ‘I almost drowned when the yacht I was on recently got into trouble.’

Thank you, Charles.

~

In one year, 1990, we had seventeen sets of visitors to our Hong Kong apartment. On average they stayed about two weeks, so you can see we were rarely alone that year. Fortunately the apartment was two-in-one and some visitors we hardly saw. Glen and Wilma Swaik, Australian friends, were out and about on their own and we only joined them for the odd trip. Aussies do tend to be more self-motivated than Brits. It was our habit to show our visitors how to use the MTR (the underground) and the buses, and a map, then leave them to their own devices if they so wished.

Two final sets of visitors deserve a mention.

We met Werner and Kathy Hartmann-Campbell on our trip to Bali. Werner is a Swiss architect and Kathy an American life coach. They live in Switzerland but are fond of the Far East. They came to stay with us on their way to a holiday in the Philippines and we took them for a walk in the hills of the New Territories. In one remote valley a man walked by us followed by his dog. The hound passed me, then passed the women without a glance. Werner was following a few yards in the rear when the dog suddenly turned and savagely attacked him. Werner was badly bitten on the leg, which he took phlegmatically, without fuss.

‘It’s my height,’ said Werner, who is indeed a very tall lean man. ‘It confuses animals.’

The problem was the possibility of rabies.

We took Werner to the Queen Elizabeth hospital where they gave him an anti-rabies jab. He would need several more at different intervals throughout the next few weeks and it was vitally important that he got them on the right days. Not only that, the complications of rabies jabs are compounded by the fact that the serum is manufactured in batches and subsequent injections have to be from the same batch.

Werner and Kathy were on their way to a trek through the Philippine jungles, where they would be lucky to meet with a village let alone a town with a hospital. The timing indicated he would need one injection on the flight to Manila and one a few days later when they were on their trek. The one on the flight could be handled by using freeze bags and the aircraft’s refrigerator, but rabies serum deteriorates rapidly and there was no way Werner could carry the third injection through the heat of the Philippines’ climate. He would have to hope to find a hospital with the right batch number somewhere on his journey.

Me? I would have got on the next plane back to Switzerland, abandoning the holiday. Death from rabies is one of the worst ways to leave this imperfect but precious world of ours. Madness, hydrophobia, agonising pain. A death to be avoided at all cost, I would say. But Werner Hartmann-Campbell is made of sterner material than Garry Kilworth. Werner decided that his trek was important to him and the pair of them boarded their flight for the Philippines with Werner saying, ‘Well, that nurse in the hospital taught me one thing – how to shoot up.’ He was treating it all as a joke, but I really did fear for him and was anxious for news of them over the next two weeks.

The story has a happy ending. On the day Werner needed his third injection they came across a small jungle hospital run by nuns. Incredibly, in the nuns’ fridge was anti-rabies serum bearing the batch number required by my intrepid Swiss friend. Well sir, I certainly had sleepless nights over that incident, but I have no idea whether Werner did. When he returned to Switzerland he was contacted by the Swiss tropical diseases department and asked to write an article on his experience.

Werner later wrote to me about a desire to visit Australia.

‘The trouble with Switzerland,’ he said, ‘is that the horizons all tend to curve upwards. I want to go the Outback where I’m told I will be able to see to infinity without the landscape pointing at the sky.’

I’ve not yet learned whether he got there, but I certainly did.

~

One evening I went to pick up Annette from Osborne Barracks after she had spent a long hot day in her non-air-conditioned beat-up Vauxhall getting lost in the streets of Mong Kok. We came back to the apartment on Rhonda Road to find a young couple sitting on the steps of Vista Panorama. They had fold-up bicycles with them. Their expressions registered weariness and mild depression.

On enquiry we found that they were an American pair cycling round the world and they had been expecting to stay in the apartment of Annette’s workmate, Sue. However, we knew that Sue and James were on holiday.

‘You can stay with us the night,’ said Annette, ‘then perhaps look for somewhere else tomorrow.’

It was our policy at that time to offer beds overnight to waifs and strays and to tell them we would help them to look for a cheap hotel the next day. If they turned out to be reasonable human beings we let them stay. If we found we couldn’t cope with them, we did indeed intend assisting them in finding alternative accommodation. We had already given a bed to a temporarily homeless army corporal and his new wife overnight and on that occasion we learned they were delightful people and we had no cause to tell them their was no further room at the inn. In fact we never needed to chuck anyone out into the hordes that swarmed in the streets of Hong Kong, a testament to the fact that most people are reasonable human beings.

So we let the American cyclists stay, and indeed, they were a charming couple and full of stories about their travels. They called themselves the Roamin’ Wyomin’s, hailing from that state. They lived by sending home printed newsletters about their adventures and the woman’s mother sold these to neighbours and friends to provide travelling money. These two stayed a week and then left their bikes with us while they went up into China. They promised to be back within two weeks, but three weeks later there was still no sign of them. In fact they had tried to argue with Chinese officials about Tibet and had ended up in jail. A letter of apology to the Chinese government was finally penned and they were allowed to leave China. They came to us rather bedraggled but still full of enthusiasm for their onward journey. Later we learned it took seven years for them to complete their circuit of the globe. They continued cycling. Where they are now I have no idea, but I’m sure it’s not in Wyoming.

~

There were three main world events which occurred while we were in Hong Kong. In 1990 the Berlin Wall came down. Just about everyone I know has a little piece of it. In that same year apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. A wonderful thing for South Africa. Finally, in 1991 the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place, a wonderful thing for number of countries, many of them names I had never heard of mostly ending in ‘stan’. Living in Hong Kong, these momentous changes to our planet did not have the same impact as if we had been at home in England. Yes, we watched the news on television, but I actually needed my lifelong friends to discuss them with.

Not long before we set out for dear old Blighty after our last tour in the last outpost of the empire, Annette and I contracted typhoid and bacterial dysentery. (Well, if you’re going to get ill, why not go the whole hog and get several nasties over with in one go?) The good news was that you can’t catch typhoid twice, apparently, so now we never bother to look at eat-by dates on our meat and fish purchases, and even munch on garbage and remain perfectly healthy.

22. Bali, Thailand, Japan, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Sarawak, Sumatra

Bali is stupendously beautiful, an island that is nothing but one big garden, with flowers and blooms everywhere. Our favourite was Ubud, where we had a hut in the middle of the rice paddies. In the evening the duck herders with their long flexible poles would sing out a call for their ducks to come in out of the paddies, and amazingly they did, waddling towards their particular herder as he warbled his command. We also saw the semi-religious wayang kulit show, the shadow-puppets, which resulted in a short story much later on, the title being ‘Wayang Kulit’.

If you go out walking in Bali, you will be asked by passers-by, ‘Where are you going?’ The answer to this should always be, ‘Over there!’ This is a form of greeting similar to our ‘How do you do?’ You are not expected to reply with a specific destination to the Bali greeting, any more than you would spill out a list of recent illnesses to the British one.

~

Here’s a traveller’s tale set in Thailand. We wanted to journey by train from Bangkok to Chang Mai on an overnight sleeper train. Just obtaining the ticket turned the clock back to a time when Rudyard Kipling was in his youth. First we obtained a number at a kiosk. We took that number, just a simple figure like 8 or 9, to an office where a man wrote our names in a great ledger. We then went to another office where we were assigned seats and canvas bunk beds that unrolled from the side of the carriage. Finally, we went to the last office, where we were issued with tickets for the 6 pm train to Chang Mai.

We were excited. This was our first long rail trip in the Far East.

At quarter-to-six that evening we boarded a train which said ‘Bangkok to Chang Mai’ on the side in big letters. The platform from which it was leaving was registered on both our tickets. We stowed our luggage, sat in our seats and were delighted to be served curry from a man who had a portable paraffin stove set up in the linked bit between the next carriage and ours. We had especially opted for no air conditioning, because we like the climate of Thailand and don’t like to freeze.

The train pulled out at precisely 6 pm.

Once out in the countryside we would stop only at the odd station, but on the edge of Bangkok there were a number of suburban halts where people could board. At about 7 pm a Thai family entered our carriage. There was dad, mum and two children. The mild-looking man confronted us, inspected his own tickets, and said politely, ‘Madam and sir, you are in our seats.’

I took out our tickets, looked at the seat numbers, checked the carriage number, and shook my head.

‘I’m sorry, you’ve made a mistake. These are our seats.’

He shrugged and showed me his tickets. I showed him mine. They were identical. Damn railway clerks, I thought. They’ve either sold the seats twice, or made a stupid error. All those ledgers too! You would think the system infallible with so much bureaucracy.

‘I must fetch the ticket inspector,’ said the Thai gentleman. ‘He’ll know what to do.’

‘Good idea,’ I replied, safe in the knowledge that possession was nine tenths of the law. ‘He’ll sort it out.’

In the meantime I offered my seat to the man’s wife and Annette chatted to the two children.

The ticket inspector turned out to be a corpulent official covered in gold lanyards, medals and scrambled egg. He looked like an amiable general in Thailand’s army. However, he was accompanied by a lean narrow-eyed lieutenant who wore a gun at his hip. This one looked like an officer in the Vietcong, the one from the movie The Deerhunter who keeps yelling, ‘Wai! Wai! Wai!’ or some such word into the ear of Robert de Niro. This man’s hand never left his gun butt as he stared at me from beneath the slanted peak of his immaculate cap.

Neither of these rail officials spoke English.

The ticket inspector studied all the tickets on show and then spoke softly to the gentleman with the nice family.

‘He wants to know,’ said the gentleman, turning to me, ‘why you are on the wrong train?’

We were nonplussed. Stunned.

‘What wrong train?’ I argued. ‘This is the 6 pm from Bangkok to Chang Mai, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ came the calm reply, ‘this is the 3 pm from Bangkok to Chang Mai, running late as usual.’

‘What? You mean...’

‘All trains run late here, sir. The 6 pm will still be standing in the station. The ticket inspector says you will have to get off at the next station and wait for your right train.’

Annette and I stared out of the window at the blackness rushing by. The jungle stations we swept through had no lights whatsoever. They were deep pits of darkness in a world of slightly lesser darkness. I had visions of standing on one of those rickety wooden platforms trying to flag down an express. It was scary. Too scary to contemplate. I’m sure the people who lived near those stations were perfectly respectable citizens, but the night-time jungle does things with the imagination. There was no way we were going to get off our train, now that we were rattling towards Chang Mai.

Through our gentleman translator we managed to persuade the inspector to let us stay on the train. At first he wanted to sell us first class tickets to the air conditioned compartments. When that didn’t work – Annette digging in her heels – he found us similar seats to the ones we already had. It occurred to me he could have done that in the first place, but since all was well that ended well, I really didn’t care.

There is a post script to this short tale.

To avoid any repetition of this near horror story, we chose to return to Bangkok by a reliable bus. Annette and I boarded the coach to find our booked seats occupied by two young men in orange robes. Conscript monks. It seems that Thai men are expected to spend one year in the army and then one year as a Buddhist monk. During that latter year they are apparently entitled to all sorts of privileges, such as nicking booked seats with impunity. They are untouchable in that sense. These two refused even to make eye contact with us.

They wouldn’t budge. They knew their rights.

A fierce woman conductor intervened. She told Annette and me to ‘get off the bus’. We informed her we had tickets for the seats these two oranges were occupying. We were not going to leave. Other passengers began to get restless. The driver started looking panicky. Finally he came to us with his hands clasped as if in prayer and said, ‘Sir, Madam, I beseech you. I implore with you to understand my problem and leave the bus.’ We sighed, gave up and got off the vehicle. It’s a tough man who can withstand a Thai beseeching, I can tell you. Tougher than me, anyway. We collected our luggage from underneath the bus and waited for another coach. Hopefully Chang Mai had run out of monks and we could get back to Bangkok on the next one. And where do Thai bus drivers learn English words like ‘beseech’? I guarantee half the population of the English-speaking world doesn’t use that word. He had probably read Chaucer and Piers Ploughman, while all I know of the Thai language is ‘Good day’.

~

Thailand? Well, what else can one say about Thailand that hasn’t been said? We went to Hau Hin, where the film The Killing Fields was made, and visited the fabulous Railway Hotel which has a double staircase sweeping like two elephant tusks to the landing above. We also went on a trek from Chang Mai, into the Burma triangle with a couple half our age, Tony and Tracy Henstock. We still write to them. They have two children now, Summer and Clark. That trek, with a young guide named Pang, was gruelling though. It covered four or five days along rivers and up high hills in desperate heat. On the second night we stayed at a village of the Karen people. We were given a hut overlooking a wild river on the edge of the rainforest. Once you are away from civilisation and into the interior of a country like Thailand there is a raw atmosphere to the landscape. During the day the noise the cicadas make in the bushes could be mistaken for sawmills. Incredibly loud. At night the cicadas go to sleep and the crickets take over from them, making almost as much noise. Add to that the sound of the birds, the monkeys, the occasional Asian elephant, and you have a constant animal choir entertaining you.

After Pang had rustled up one of his amazingly quick and delicious meals, out of nothing but locally-gathered leaves and bits of chicken, we bedded down on our rush mats on the bare boards and prepared to go to sleep. I was woken again about eleven in the evening when a group of young men arrived and sat down beside us on the hut floor. They carried AK47 rifles and had just been into Burma to attack the Burmese army. We chatted with them for some while, they telling us of their problems with the Burmese generals who were oppressing the people and especially the Karen tribes. The exhaustion from the day’s walk and boat ride overtook me and I fell asleep.

In the morning we went down to the river and washed in the shallows, the white water swooshing round us. Then we had breakfast and were shown two female elephants. Annette and I had to ride one of them, Tracy and Tony the other. Managing these two giants were two small boys of about ten and twelve. The twelve-year-old seemed to know what he was doing and he was our guy. The journey lasted all morning and at lunch time we said goodbye to the lady pachyderms. The rest of the day we were force marched up a steep hillside, until we saw a village in the distance, the smoke curling up out of the bush.

This was the Akka village where we would spend the rest of that day and the night. On the way we passed a woman selling bottles of water from a lean-to. Pang told us she had been banished from the village for giving birth to twins. Both babies had been killed because one of them was ‘evil’ and no one knew which one that might be.

The village itself appeared to be chaotic. Every adult was smoking a drug, either pot or opium. Women and men had long curved pipes permanently in their mouths, puffing away. Many were walking around witha glazed look in their eyes. What was even more worrying was the fact that the men were all carrying long hunting rifles, slung casually over their shoulders or hooked under an arm. I didn’t think the mix was a good idea, drugs and guns, and had a job to get to sleep that night even though it was a fairly comfortable bed made of springy bamboo rods.

We were relieved to get out of that particular village and on to the next one, which belonged to the Lahu tribe. Though not as colourfully dressed as the Akka, whose women wore headdresses decorated with silver coins, the Lahu did not appear to smoke anything dubious and merely took us to their grain store and proudly showed us the results of their harvest. They let us each have a go on the grinder, which was like a see-saw that went slightly sideways, as well as up and down.

After four days of trekking through the hills of northern Thailand we came down to civilisation again. We scrubbed ourselves in a beautiful waterfall and found a tea stall that sold real tea. A Land Rover then arrived to take us back to Chang Mai. I thoroughly enjoyed the trek, which I have on video. The most telling scene is of Annette struggling valiantly up a burnt-brush hill in the sweltering heat, pausing with the sweat dripping from her brow, then shouting above the sawmill noise of the cicadas, ‘Garry, you go on, love, and just leave me to die . . .’

~

The Philippines was a short visit with Trinny and Lorraine, who came to stay for a while. We passed rubbish dumps in Manila which had children camping on them, living under tents made out of plastic sheeting. They were there to be first at the rubbish when it arrived each morning. It was a sight I did not forget and the result was a children’s novel The Electric Kid which won the Lancashire Children’s Book Award, a prize that’s judged by schoolchildren alone. I’m mighty proud to have won it. At more or less the same time the BBC televised one of my children’s books, Billy Pink’s Private Detective Agency, which they did with a single actor performing all the parts. It was a not bad production set in the creeks of the Dengies, the Essex marshes.

~

We went to Japan at a time when we would see the plum trees in bloom. Corny, I know, but there you are. We took the bullet train to Kyoto and stayed in one of those inns made of rice paper and bamboo. You can almost see through the walls and you have to be incredibly quiet if you make love, stuffing the corner of a pillow in your mouth. It’s difficult to avoid making love in such a setting, after you’ve been walking under plum and cherry trees in bloom and have visited the hot tub.

We visited Nijo Castle, which had high stone ramparts but the rest of it was also made out of ricepaper and bamboo. We saw the emperor’s bedroom which had a ‘nightingale floor’ that ‘sang’ when you walked on it to give the emperor warning of any midnight assassins. We took bitter tasting green tea at the beautiful Kujomizu and Kodaiji Temples, the latter attached to a high cliff by wooden struts. Another, the Todaiji Temple, houses a fifty-three-foot high bronze statue of Buddha and is the world’s largest wooden structure. At the Imperial Palace there were of course fabulous gardens, ponds and lawns. We were told that stone represents ‘bone’, trees and bushes ‘flesh’and water ‘blood’.

Japan was horrendously expensive. We ate mostly noodle soup at the railway station buffet tent, but also bought obento box meals. The box was made of pine and the layout of the pieces of sushi worthy of a great artist. Eating it was a spiritual experience. On the last day we were due to meet with Claire, Shaney’s best friend at school. Claire had married a Japanese radio broadcaster (not without fierce opposition from the man’s relations, who were appalled that Akifumi Uchida wanted to marry a Westerner) and she had told us she would bring her new husband along. However, when she arrived there was no Akifumi.

‘He says he has stomach ache,’ Claire said, laughing, ‘but the truth is he’s too shy to meet you.’

Claire’s parents had never been to see her in Japan, so she told us we were to be her surrogate parents.

‘We’ll go home and surprise him.’

So, we all went back to their incredibly small flat and a shocked and surprised Akifumi opened the door to us. He was indeed very shy and fussed around in the kitchen for a while, but once he saw that we were not monsters he came out and we had a great time. Akifumi is a small, quiet and charming man, and he and Claire now have two lovely children. The family have suffered a lot of prejudice from certain quarters, the children being bullied at school, even by teachers. I have no doubt there are many Japanese who are not bigots – we have a good friend in a singer, Yumi Maeda, who we met on that trip in Tokyo who is certainly not chauvinistic – but there are still some who have a medieval mindset and the Uchidas have born the brunt of this narrow thinking.

We left Japan in a sombre and thoughtful mood after visiting the Peace Park at Hiroshima.

~

We flew to Sarawak one Easter and found this Borneo member of the Malaysian Federation one of the most fascinating countries we had been to thus far.

The capital of Sarawak is Kuching, which means ‘Pussycat’ in the Dyak language.

This obviously requires an explanation.

In late 1838 an English soldier touring the sea off Sarawak in his private yacht was summoned to the shore by a boat party of Malays, Dyaks and Chinese, the three races that inhabit the country. Their rajah was dying and he had asked to see the captain of the yacht. The Englishman’s name was Brooke and he’d recently recovered from a near fatal wound sustained during a battle in India. Brooke went with the vizier who was head of the delegation to the bedside of the dying rajah.

The rajah asked Brooke to take over the kingdom for him once he was dead. This astonishing request was followed by the explanation that, if the rajah left it to a Malay, the Dyaks and Chinese would soon depose him through revolution. Similarly with the other two. Jealousies among the three races were rife. It needed someone from another race to rule without favouring any one of the three. He asked only that Brooke impress his courtiers by clearing the sea around Sarawak of pirates, which the Englishman did, his large yacht having a cannon mounted on the bows with which to blow the Dyak pirate canoes out of the water.

It was a massive gamble on the part of the sick rajah. He had no idea what sort of man Brooke might be. He could turn out to be a tyrant. In fact James Brooke was a young man with a sound integrity, ethical character and a strong sense of justice. He ruled wisely and impartially, taking for his palace a modest three-bedroom bungalow and not exploiting the country for its wealth. Part way through his reign he offered the country to Queen Victoria, the Empress of India, but she had heard how well he was ruling Sarawak and said he should continue to do so. The Brookes, or White Rajahs as they were known, ruled Sarawak until 1946, when Sarawak became part of the Malaysian Federation. Each successive Brooke was as upright and honest as the last, all of them insisting that the Malays, Chinese and Dyaks were the equal of any Englishman and to be treated with the utmost respect, a view that was probably not universal among white men in the 1800s.

So, after this potted history, it remains to explain why Kuching translates as ‘pussycat’. When the grand vizier was leading Brooke to the bedside of the rajah they had to enter Kuching. Brooke pointed towards the city and asked, ‘What is it’s name?’ The vizier, no doubt distracted by the state of his master’s health, thought Brooke was pointing to a young cat lying asleep in a doorway. ‘Kuching,’ he said. Later, when Rajah Brooke began referring to the capital as ‘Pussycat’ his subjects did not like to correct him and so the nickname became the name.

I based a nice fat novel on the life of Rajah Brooke, entitled Shadow-Hawk, which is one of my best.

Sarawak has very few roads. Transport is mostly by river. Annette and I went down the river system by the usual method, high-speed enclosed launches continuously showing Kung-fu movies at full volume. One is mighty glad when the trip is over. We then went further into the interior, up a fast-flowing river by narrow canoe. There was a man on the bows of the canoe to watch for logs and other dangerous flotsam, of which there was a huge amount. The Dyak tribal long house was deep in the rainforest. There were human skulls hanging from the smoky rafters. Dyaks were once head hunters. Rajah Brooke tried to stamp the practice out, but his orders were rescinded during the Second World War when the Dyaks were told they could take Japanese heads. Some of those skulls I saw were probably on Japanese shoulders at one time.

We were on our own and as usual Annette was given a baby to hold. This is to show that the people have trust in the visitors. On this occasion the infant had on a nappy of sorts, but Annette had learned by now not to wear white trousers when visiting locals. I was taken out and shown how to blow a dart through a blowpipe and how to chuck a spear at a fish. Jolly good fun. We stayed with the long house people for the night, watching the dancing and taking part in the feasting, which was not for us but we just happened to hit on a festival day. Lucky.

The next morning we left for Bako National Park: 2,727 hectares on the tip of the Muaru Tebas peninsula, where huge bearded hogs roamed the campsite and monkeys stole all our biscuits. There was only rice and greens to be had in the park, which was quite wild, and so those monkeys ate better than we did. I really liked Sarawak a lot. Years later we visited friends who were teaching in Brunei and crossed the border into the middle country between Sarawak and Brunei, a country called Saba.

In Saba we had another taste of that beautiful rainforest when we tried to climb Mount Kinabalu. Unfortunately it was a time of torrential rain and we got no further than the base camp. Getting there was bad enough, since the vehicle taking us up had to negotiate a track thick with ooze and mud, and kept slipping sideways towards sheer drops of several hundred feet. Saba, and indeed Sarawak, is a land of wide deep caves and still unexplored jungle. Off the side of Mount Kinabalu, halfway up, is a deep largely unexplored valley known as Lows Gully.

In the 1990s a party of soldiers, Chinese and British, went from Hong Kong and descended into Lows Gully. Unfortunately they had only one experienced climber with them, an army corporal, and found they were unable to turn back and ascend the high cliffs down which they had abseiled. Two of the party went off into the rainforest to seek a way out of the steep-sided valley. They were lost for many days, barely survived the ordeal, but finally found a village where they got help.

Saba is also memorable to me for a game of golf. We stayed at a bed-and-breakfast on a beach there. There was a young man in the house who came in carrying a set of golf clubs. I asked him if he would care to take me for a game while I was there. ‘I’m very busy,’ said the young man, a Malay I believe, ‘but my dad would be glad to have a game.’ So his dad duly arrived in a jeep and took me to the golf course. He explained that we needed to have caddies because it gave local people jobs in a country where there was a lot of unemployment. So, accompanied by our caddies, who just happened to be young women – very progressive I thought – we went out on the course. Everyone we met greeted us with exceptional manners and bowed their heads politely. I thought this a wonderful custom and said so to my companion, who was a thick-set man of about fifty with a hell of a golf swing and drive.

‘Oh, they’re not usually this polite to everyone,’ he said, smiling at my naivety. ‘It’s only because I’m Chief of Police.’

In Saba we visited the orang utan sanctuary, where rescued youngsters are taken in until they’re fully grown, then released back into the rainforest. No one is very sure whether it works or not, but these gangly red-haired fellows seem to be maintaining their numbers. There are still poachers around, just like with the silverback gorillas in Africa, but control seems tighter in Borneo. One of the ‘inmates’ was an orang utan called Bullet, because he had a rifle round still lodged in his head. This poor chap had to be caged, albeit in a very large space, being subject to fits and bouts of violence due to the condition of his brain.

~

We went several times into China, once the dust of Tiananmen Square had settled. Once was with the History Society and we visited the area on the Pearl River where the 19th Century British had had a ship battle with the Chinese navy. Apparently half-way through the battle, big guns blazing, boarding parties hacking off arms and legs with cutlasses, the Chinese admiral requested a temporary halt to the fighting. He had lost the red button that crowned his velvet cap. The button that proclaimed him to be the Lord High Admiral of the Chinese fleet. The British, bless their cotton socks, agreed to a brief pause. The admiral duly found his button, replaced it, and the battle was allowed to commence again. The Brits won the fight and the admiral was no doubt taken to task by the Chinese emperor, who didn’t like the British selling his subjects the opium they grew in India.

That wasn’t what the fight was about though. The Brits were upset because the emperor had decided not to sell any more rhubarb to the British. I kid you not. Rhubarb, not then grown in UK, was highly prized for its supposed medicinal qualities and those in Britain were devastated to hear the Chinese wouldn’t sell it to them until they stopped supplying opium to their people. Sounds like a very sensible reason for a major war between two great powers, doesn’t it?

Another visit was with Christchurch Kowloon Tong. Our vicar Norman Jones arranged a meeting with the Chinese vicar of an Anglican church in Canton. We had a great time, being shown over the city by the congregation of Christchurch Canton. The vicar, Peter Fan, was a remarkable man who had been imprisoned by the Mao’s Red Guard for seventeen years, his church confiscated and used as a wood store during his incarceration. Immediately he was freed from prison and while we were resident in Hong Kong, he demanded rent from the state for misappropriating his church. I thought that showed immense courage.

Finally, when Pete and Peggy Good were staying with us, we all took a flight to Guilin. Apart from the fact that the plane was very basic and my seat was wet with urine, that the baggage room was reached through a hole that had been knocked in a brickwork wall, and that Peggy freaked out when told the meal she was eating was jellyfish, we had a terrific few days in that beautiful area which is depicted in many Chinese paintings. Usually its a fir tree clinging to a cliff edge. Guilin is limestone country and over millions of years water has turned a large plateau into wonderful blue-tinged mountains. Coming out of the hotel in the morning and looking towards these hills, they seemed to fold into one another, smooth hill upon hill, stretching out into forever. Annette, who had been taking classes in Chinese painting during her time in Hong Kong, drew inspiration from Guilin, the source of a million works of art.

~

By far our best visit was to Malaysia, where Annette and I had been several times before. This particular trek was with Sarah and Rob. They had come to stay with us in Hong Kong for several weeks. Sarah wanted to go into China but Tiananmen Square was still raw and we had been advised by the Foreign Office not to venture over the border. Sarah was disappointed so we suggested backpacking through Malaysia.

The four of us flew to Kuala Lumpur and took a rickety bus across the forested centre to the east coast. Before our journey was halfway over there was one of those huge tropical downpours, of flood proportions, which washed away a bridge over a gully. The driver of the bus acquired a set of planks from a nearby hut which he laid across the chasm. Below was a fast river which would have swallowed anyone who fell. It was getting dark by the time the planks were ready.

Indeed, we all managed the precarious walk across the planks, the young people assisting the elderly, without losing a single soul. Then came the turn of the bus itself. The driver revved the engine while another man guided his wheels onto the start of the two planks. Finally, white-faced, the driver released his brake and shot out over the ravine. We watched in horror as the planks bowed downwards in the middle, thinking that at any moment they would break or fly from under the wheels. Fortunately the planks held and the bus got to our side of the ravine. The driver jumped out, absolutely ecstatic and insisted on shaking hands with every passenger travelling on his vehicle.

That night we took lodgings at a hostel on the coast and asked Rob and Sarah where they would like to go next.

‘Tioman Island,’ they said.

There was a small aircraft that could take us to Tioman in thirty minutes or a slow fishing boat that would take four or five hours. They chose the fishing boat and Annette and I spent the whole time hanging over the gunwales throwing up. When we arrived at the island the rain was coming down like a waterfall. Sarah told me off because I had suggested leaving her anorak behind, knowing she would have been too hot in it. There was a precarious climb up to a make-shift jetty and we then went to find our accommodation – A-frame huts.

The huts let in the rain. There was little food on the island because it was Ramadan and the fishermen had not gone out. No alcohol of course, the island was Muslim. Damp beds, banana porridge and Fanta lemonade. This was to be our lot for the next few days. Rob was appalled and asked a stall holder if he had any chicken.

‘I can kill that one,’ said the man, pointing with his chopper at a skinny pullet that ran beneath the tables. ‘Make you nice curry, sir.’

It made a curry, but nice? Well, better than nothing.

On top of it all, the rain had washed the signatures off our passports and most of the print off our air tickets back to Hong Kong.

Then the sun came out.

Hurrah.

We went for a walk in an ancient forest with trees like cathedrals. Rob was now ecstatic. That man did love his trees. A four-foot monitor lizard dropped from a branch and thrashed away through the undergrowth. One lean snake slid across the path. Magnificent birds flew through the canopy and out over the seashore: hornbills, frigate birds, a sea eagle. We found a crystal clear stream and waterfall where we stripped down to our underwear and bathed. The next day we went in search of coral gardens beneath the waves. Rob learned to snorkel and was in heaven, following the multi-coloured reef fish over their coral lairs. Rob later told me it was the best holiday he had ever had.

We flew back from Tioman, much to the consternation of Sarah, who did not like the flimsy 8-seater aircraft we were in. Below us the rivers were like brown serpents weaving through the rainforest. The shallows and lagoons of the Pacific revealed every shade of green. Again, Rob was fascinated by it all, never having been to the Far East before, with its clear light and brilliantly painted waters and landscapes. He kept borrowing my video camera to capture it all for when he was back in London.

Once back on the mainland we remained on the east coast, staying at some thatched huts at a place called Cherating. The mosquitoes there were horrific but everyone survived. Rob and I bought some quails’ eggs in a local market and made a fire on the beach to cook them that night. It was Boy’s Own stuff. We were back to being twelve again. We had river trips in local canoes at Cherating, seeing iguanas on the banks and a reticulated python in a tree. There was a massive charcoal burning hut close to the camp where we stayed and Rob was fascinated by that too. He liked anything that had its roots in antiquity.

The four of us finally flew back to Hong Kong to continue the holiday. We had a weekend at the huts on Lantau, where Peggy had been attacked by the giant spider. We visited other islands, Lamma and some off Sai Kung, where we had a day out with Cath and Richard Beacher. As with all our visitors we took them to our weekend haunt, the United Services Recreation Club (USRC), with its swimming pool and tennis courts and other facilities. There we drank ‘gunners’ a refreshing beverage of iced ginger beer, ginger ale and angostura bitters, which was drunk by just about every expat that ever lived in Hong Kong.

At the USRC that day was Bob and Jan Thomas, who lived in the apartment above us. Bob and Jan were teachers at the Gun Club School, a primary for expat kids. Bob was a man who took up causes and at that time he was incensed with the British Government. The janitor at Gun Club School was a man named Mr Ho, who had been a cook in the British Navy at the time of the Falklands War. He was on board HMS Sir Galahad when it was sunk and had spent time in the freezing water before being rescued. In 1996 we were handing Hong Kong back to the Chinese and the Head of Gun Club School was transferring to Singapore. He wanted to take Mr Ho with him, but to do that Mr Ho had to have a British passport. The Tories wouldn’t give him one, even though Mr Ho had fought for her in their stupid war and almost lost his life. Bob was on a mission to get Mr Ho his passport and had conscripted my assistance. It was my job to write to the newspapers about the injustice.

Mr Ho never did get his British passport.

After a great holiday it was time for Rob and Sarah to go. We drove them to the airport, kissed ’em goodbye and then went off to the cinema. When we got back late that evening we found a note from them, saying they would pay us a visit very soon. Shortly afterwards there was a knock on the door and there they stood.

‘What the hell?’ I said.

Rob grinned. ‘The plane got struck by lightning as we took off over the harbour.’

‘Are you all right?’ asked Annette, anxiously.

Sarah said, ‘We’re fine, but we had to fly around in circles getting rid of the fuel before we landed, so we’re a bit dizzy.’

They had one extra day with us, then they really did go home.

~

Our last journey while we were in Hong Kong was to Sumatra, in Indonesia. It was over Christmas and New Year. We landed on the coast and made our way to Lake Toba, which had an island in the middle on which there were some beach huts. Sumatra is volcano country and we passed many of these smoking giants on the way. We stopped in a town above the peaceful and beautiful Lake Toba, which had a backdrop of immensely high cliffs and thin waterfalls, a paradise on view. It was Christmas Eve and we decided to attend Midnight Mass, the locals being mostly Christian. (They told us their ancestors ate the first two missionaries, but then felt a bit guilty and let the third one convert them!) It was a lovely service, though the congregation was split with women on one side of the aisle and men on the other. This was not, my feminist friends, a sexist class system, but in order to keep the sopranos and the baritones (and indeed the several bass singers) in separate choirs.

The singing was absolutely beautiful. Yet they were only a normal town with a normal congregation. We have been to several other services since, on the Cook Islands in the Pacific, in Sarawak, on Fiji, and the singing has always been of the highest quality. Nothing like the dreary mumbled hymns of an Anglican church in England. The service was of course in Indonesian, but we all knew our own words to ‘Silent Night’, Indonesians and any tourists – there were Germans, Dutch and Swedes who had gone along like us – and we came away quite lifted. Christmas ain’t Christmas for us, without a Midnight Mass.

The next morning, Christmas Day, the two of us went down to a wooden jetty where the ferry came in. All along the lake’s shore was a market which consisted of people with blankets spread on the ground and their produce laid on it ready for sale. Some blankets had only a handful of green beans and it is times like that, seeing real poverty, that my heart sinks. I feel wretchedly useless, knowing I can’t feed the whole world, and I feel guilty because I’m so fortunate. These are not good sensible feelings, for if I was strong enough I would be working among such people and doing what I can to assist them.

While we were buying our tickets for the ferry at a kiosk made of boxwood a strange thing happened. A Land Rover pulled up just beyond the blanket market and a man got out dressed as Father Christmas. He was obviously a Westerner and the sweat was running down his face under the false white beard because it was a very very hot day and he was wearing very very thick clobber. He marched through the market to the edge of the lake, put his hands on his hips and stared out over the water. Then he swore deeply, turned, went back to his vehicle and drove off.

The whole market was stunned. Chatter had ceased. People stared at each other. Even the dogs had stopped barking.

The mouth of the man in the kiosk had dropped open and he asked us in hushed tones, ‘Who was that? Moses?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Santa Claus.’

The vendor screwed up his face.

‘Oh, him,’ he said, in a contemptuous tone.

He never did explain the reason for his disdain for Father Christmas.

23. Wychwater (again)

We returned to England over Christmas 1992/3. Peter and Marti Beere had left the house a couple of months previously. Rick was now installed while making repairs to his own flat in Westcliff. We spent a quiet Christmas, seeing everyone we needed to see, then immediately set off on a five month backpacking tour of the world. We had purchased New Zealand Air tickets and set out eastwards. So long as we kept going in that direction we could land anywhere we wanted to and stay as long as we wished. Our first stop was Singapore, then we flew on to Australia, to stay with Pete and Carolyn Worth in Melbourne.

After two weeks in Victoria State we went up to Sydney and stayed at the YWCA. Then on to Queensland, staying first at Rockhampton. There in a cabin on a beach we met some miners from the interior and their wives. The men had come to the coast for the fishing. The wives? Well, it seemed they were simply there to look after the men. Some of the wives cornered Annette one day and asked to see inside our cabin. It was the same as theirs. We couldn’t see the point, but let them in anyway.

‘Where’ve you been?’ asked one.

‘Oh, all over the place,’ replied Annette.

‘Have you been to the malls in Sydney?’ asked another, eagerly.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s what I’d like to do,’ said the woman, firmly. ‘See the malls in Sydney.’

We also met a teacher there, who taught at a school in the Outback where the students had to come in from a long way, some by small aircraft. She told us that on a Friday night all the parents made the trip into the small town to get haircuts, shopping, and all those things they couldn’t do or get out on the farms. One of the teacher’s jobs was to keep the grass runway mowed short so that the small planes could land.

‘And the kids like a swim in the river,’ she told us, ‘so it’s useful to have the parents there to watch for crocodiles.’

From Rockhampton we went on to Yeppoon, to go to the Great Barrier Reef, which was fine. We met an Aborigine man there who unlike many of the indigenous people was philosophical about his land being invaded by Europeans. His name was Jack Splinter and he was an Outback scout, taking tourists into the interior.

‘Better everyone gets along together,’ he told me, ‘because yesterday is gone.’

An enlightened man, but then of course he had a good job, showing visitors the wonders of his birthplace.

After Yeppoon came Townsville and then a flight from Brisbane to Auckland, New Zealand.

When we arrived in Auckland there was a gay festival going on and we had a job getting accommodation. That first night we went down to the shoreline and to a restaurant overlooking the harbour. It was a bizarre evening. There were three big tables near us. One was full of Japanese tourists, one was occupied by a party of gay men and the last by Hell’s Angels, Maoris. We foresaw trouble between the Hell’s Angels and the gays, but such was not the case. In fact the Angels were annoyed by the chatter of the Japanese and finally one big Maori got up and walked over to the Japanese table and mimicked machine-gunning the tourists making them gape at him in amazement. The gays were mostly interested in the harbour. The Round-the-World yacht race was in progress and every time a boat came in the gays would rush to the parapet of the restaurant and call and wave to the sailors on the yacht.

We left Auckland in a hired car and toured New Zealand, almost from top to bottom, staying mostly at farms offering accommodation. We learned that New Zealand’s rivers, unlike our own in UK, are braided and therefore not contained by set banks. They roam over miles of landscape. One farmer told us that a river that had been a mile from his door two years previously was now six miles away. These farmers had once raised cattle and sheep but most we met had turned to deer which were hunted by parties of Japanese businessmen who wanted to shoot things.

At Lake Taupo we gathered our breath. The night sky there was absolutely crystallised with stars. Breathtaking. We and some others hired the sailing yacht that had once belonged to Errol Flynn. The outgoing trip was good but we found ourselves in a storm coming back. Lake Taupo is enormous, an inland sea, and though we had a captain with us and four other tourists to man the rigging, it was not an easy home-getting. I felt we were in the pages of Moby Dick.

The next day we left for Waimangu valley, an area of thermal springs, some of which are used to heat homes.

We met up with a couple we had come across on a Malaysian island and had kept in touch with, as is our wont. They were environmental scientists and took us to a ‘prehistoric forest’ which went back to a time when trees were cycads. I foolishly threw away an apple core I had been eating and we then spent the next hour searching for the seeds of that core. They did not, of course, want a modern apple tree growing to blight their ancient forest. They also took us to some thermal pools – New Zealand has a lot of those – and warned us not to put our heads under water.

‘There’s a mite that enters your ear and eats away your brain,’ we were warned.

For a land which has absolutely no dangerous wild animals, indeed which has had mammals only since the Maori landed there not long after the first millennium, this was a nasty shock. Is there nowhere on earth one can go without there being a killer on the loose?

On 4 February, 1992, we set out for Franz Joseph Glacier on South Island. We attempted to walk up the glacier but the rain had been constant for several hours and the meltwater rivers were too swollen and turbulent to cross. Failing to reach Franz Joseph we then tried for Fox Glacier, some twenty-five kilometres further on. There were managed to wade across several fast streams to the nose of this aquamarine river of ice. There were huge caves under the nose, but the rain was still coming down heavily and we advanced no further that day.

Next morning, backpacked and booted, we set out along the Copland Trail, one of the many two-to-ten-day wilderness trails in NZ. We left at nine am and one hour later hit a raging torrent of freezing water. A party of climbers arrived and showed us how to link arms and walk across, keeping our boots on to prevent slipping on the rocks below the surface. This meant, of course, we had cold wet feet for most of the rest of the day. Then there were muddy ledges and suspension bridges to traverse, and deep rugged chasms to negotiate. The length of the trail to the first night’s stopover, the Welcome Hut, was a seventeen kilometre walk. There were difficult arduous treks along rocky river beds, through bush and up steep slopes overhanging deep gorges. We reached the thirteen kilometre mark when the trail ran out. The rain had washed away the scree leaving a loose three-inch path on a steep slope above a three-hundred-foot drop onto boulders. The alpine climbers had obviously managed it, but we had not the right equipment and, to be honest, not the courage or the skill either.

So just before evening we began the long walk back. We had a tent and sleeping bags with us, for just such an emergency. We managed to reach the river beds in the light but rather than camp among an incredibly vicious swarm of sandflies we decided to go the whole way. Annette once again had to balance on a mossy log that spanned a deep gorge and cross a flimsy rope bridge while humming her favourite hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’. The line ‘Oh still small voice of calm’ is a genuine nerve-settler. With the aid of a torch we finally arrived back at the start point in darkness at nine o’clock, our legs like jelly. Rather than return to our campsite both of us fell fast asleep in the car.

Before we left glacier land Annette had a birthday helicopter flight to the top of Mount Cook. She took a video of the flight. I only watched it once and ended up vomiting in the toilet with motion sickness. God knows what I would have been like on the actual flight.

We pulled in on the way north at a small village and saw people gathering at the entrance to a church in anxious-looking knots. Stopping, we learned that two youngsters in their late teens had gone trekking along one of those lonely New Zealand trails. Somewhere out there the youth had changed packs with his girlfriend, hers being too heavy for her. Unfortunately, she was a diabetic and her insulin was in the pack the young man was then carrying. They became separated. The youth found his way back to the village, while the girl remained lost. Search parties had gone out just before we arrived and they were holding a church service to pray that the girl would be found. We stayed and took part in the service, but never did learn if the outcome was good.

Over the next few days we made our way up to Picton in the hire car to cross over the divide between South and North Island, then on to Napier, an amazing town which is completely built in art deco style after an earthquake destroyed the original buildings in the 1930s. Indeed, even the fire station is art deco. Anyway, halfway to Napier we picked up a young Swedish lad with a backpack. He sat behind us while Annette studied his face in the rear-view mirror.

Finally she said to him, ‘You’ve been to Hong Kong, haven’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said the blond youth. ‘Last year. I went with some students to visit the police academy . . .’

‘. . . run by Paddy, a friend of ours,’ finished Annette. ‘You had a group photo taken. It’s on Paddy’s mantelpiece.’

Both the youth and myself were stunned by this observation. Annette had actually recalled his face from that group photo, never having met him, and only once having seen the photo. And on top of that, she had done it by recognising him in a car rear-view mirror.

‘I can’t believe this,’ I commented. ‘You must be physic, Annie.’

The Swedish boy said politely, ‘Sir, I believe the word is psychic.’

No sense of humour, some Swedes.

~

From New Zealand we flew to Raratonga, the main island of the Cook group. After visiting a college and museum on that small island I began to gather fragments for the trilogy I was to write on returning to the UK, already mentioned. The Navigator Kings trilogy consists of The Roof of Voyaging, The Princely Flower and Land of Mists. Again, it is one of my best works, full of folk lore, Polynesian mythology and amazing voyages across the Pacific Ocean without maps, navigational instruments or indeed a written language. I am immensely proud of that project, yet the books sold in tiny numbers, not reaching the readership for which it was really intended.

Fantasy readers, I learned too late, did not want Polynesian myths. They wanted their familiar Tolkienian fantasy. Non-fantasy readers never learned about the trilogy, since it was aimed at readers of fantasy. Not the fault of my editor, Tim Holman, who tried his best to relaunch the books at the right market but it was by that time too late. Reviewers are not interested in relaunched novels.

(After the Polynesian disaster, Tim suggested I write ‘regular’ fantasy under a pseudonym. So using the name Kim Hunter I wrote a trilogy The Red Pavilions, consisting of Knight’s Dawn, The Wizard’s Funeral and Scabbard’s Song. It did not fare as badly as the Polynesian books but it was no best seller. I’m told it’s because the story is more like ‘folk lore’ than fantasy. Well hey, I was brought up on fairy tales and I make no excuse for using folk lore as the basis for my story lines. I think the truth is that my style of writing, which does not involve pages of detailed description of a brooch or jewelled dagger, is not what fantasy readers want to read. I use a blunter instrument.)

Before leaving Raratonga we tried walking across the middle of the island, coast to coast. Everyone on Raratonga lives around the edge. Go a short way into the middle and you are in thick jungle. We got lost, of course, and only managed to get out by finding a pipeline which we knew must somehow reach a pumping station and civilisation. Scratched, dirty and torn from the dense undergrowth we finally reached the sea again, not a little chastened by our foolishness. It had taken us six hours to cover only a few kilometres of tropical landscape.

~

From Cooks we went to Tahiti, where Gauguin painted his dark and dreary pictures. I know, I know, a matter of taste. We didn’t stay on the main island, it being expensive, but went to Morea a nearby island rich in volcanic shaped mountains, in which one can easily see bird shapes, talons, hooked beaks, swirling feathers in the mist. A mystical landscape which has served several of my young adult fantasy novels. There was some magnificent coral on Morea. When I was on Gan Island, I used to walk out to the reef and stand on the island’s skirt of coral looking out over the vast Indian Ocean, just to get a sense of my own vulnerability and insignificance. That may seem a strange exercise but I can assure you it’s good for the soul. It helps to put small worries into perspective and to broaden one’s vision of the world. I did the same on Morea with the Pacific Ocean. They are both mighty expanses of beautiful blue water and I couldn’t choose between them.

We ran out of reading material on Morea and could only find novels in French. Annette has some French but not enough to be able to read a novel. I have none. So we left and flew to California where we went to stay with the writer Kim Stanley Robinson and his wife Lisa in Davis, a small agricultural town. After a week with Stan and Lisa we went on to San Francisco, then hired a car and drove to Yosemite National Park where we langlaufed and took photos.

We took the Forty-Niner trail to a town called Sutter’s Creek, which was right out of a cowboy film. I loved it. Thence to Lake Taho in Nevada, where we stayed at an inn with a hot tub outside. The hot tub had another single occupant, a Scot on holiday with his wife. After exchanging greetings we got talking and eventually Hong Kong came up.

‘I have a friend who lives in Hong Kong,’ he told us.

‘You mean Jack Burns,’ we said.

He gave us an astonished looked and replied, ‘Yes, how did you know that?’

We knew because his accent and Jack’s were identical. After further discussion we learned that this fact wasn’t surprising since they were raised in the same street and were best friends at school. Still, our Glaswegian bathing companion himself found the co-incidence amazing enough to run off and tell his wife. We never saw him again but kept repeating to each other ‘small world’ as one does.

~

We flew out of San Francisco to New York. Ellen Datlow and Alice Turner, the two lady editors who stayed we me in Hong Kong, were expecting us and Alice was kind enough to put us up for the week we stayed in the mighty city of dreams. (Ellen would have done so, but her apartment was only big enough for one human being and one small cat!) Alice lived in the heart of Greenwich Village, so we got a real taste of cultural New York. We covered the usual sights: Statue of Liberty, Chrysler Building, Twin Towers, Central Park, museums and art galleries, and travelled on the subway. John Gotti, the mafia boss of the Gambino family of mobsters was on trial at the time.

New York was vibrant and exciting, but seemed a little run down during 1992. The police cars looked old and worn and the streets were potholed, but I guess if an American went to London he might say the same thing. One tends to notice these things when visiting, rather than when living in a city. I was asked by a large angry man if I wanted my brains sucked out of my skull through my eyesockets. It seemed I had been ‘looking’ at him. Actually I was probably staring into the middle distance thinking about my next story, as is my wont.

After New York, we flew to our last destination, Quebec city. There, in April’s subzero temperatures, with the St Lawrence still bearing six feet of ice on its broad shoulders, we stayed with our archaeologist friends who we met in Greece, Philippe and Doris. We had exchanged letters ever since we had met on that small Greek island of Tilos. Now they welcomed us with wonderful hospitality and showed us much of Quebec. We saw waterfalls hurtling down crevices and wild open country. We saw the beautiful and very French city of Quebec. There is of course one of those language battles going on, as with the Basques and Catalans, the Welsh and the Newcastle Geordies, where the main language is an anathema to the locals and public signs in that language are peppered with buckshot. But though I do not speak French I must look Quebequois, because everyone chatted away to me in Canadian French without reserve and did not seem to mind when all I did was look simple, smile and nod my head occasionally.

The highlight of our visit was a maple syrup party in the forest. There was a large hut in the snow-bound woodlands where the syrup was drained from the trees, like the sap from rubber trees. Then the raw viscous fluid was processed in the hut. At a maple syrup party you pour the stuff on everything you eat – egg and bacon, potatoes, apple pie, whatever – and look as though you’re enjoying it. Outside were troughs where you could leave maple syrup to freeze into ice lollies. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the music which was a bit like Cajun music, and the dancing, in fact everything about it.

Luckily too there was a coachload of school teachers whose first idea was not ‘let’s string up these English-speakers from the nearest maple tree’ but who wanted to talk with us in English. Philippe did confess to me that he was a little worried that we would meet someone who might be rude, but if you ever met my French Canadian friend – big, dark-bearded, tough-looking – a man who could pass as a lumberjack at any maple syrup party, you would think twice about being rude to his guests. Just to be on the safe side though, we thought it best not to mention General Wolfe and the Battle for the Heights of Abraham, just as it’s wise not to praise De Gaulle and his speech containing the words ‘Long live free Quebec!’ to English-speaking Canadians.

We have since returned to Quebec in more clement weather and enjoyed seeing Doris’s wonderful garden in full bloom. The wooden houses of the Quebequois are stunning buildings. They look like something out of a fairy tale, with their elaborately carved eaves and colourful exteriors. You really feel that you live in a culture that has survived a foreign onslaught and is still blooming in its old and original form without too many changes having occurred.

Doris and Philippe have been to see us in England a number of times too, the last was a visit to York, the place of my birth. Now there’s a city with a thousand museums and a Shambles down which to wander. They were, I think, as impressed with York as I had been with Quebec city.

And so, to England.

When we arrived back at Wychwater, Rick was surrounded by big boxes. They were in the living-room, bedroom, even in the kitchen. These were our purchases in Hong Kong. We furnished the whole house with oriental chairs, tables, tansus, cupboards, sideboards, vases, lamps, antique lunch boxes, chests and ornaments. Thirteen bamboo bird cages had to go somewhere. Five antique clocks. Even the drawers of the Chinese medicine chest were full of curiosities like jade carvings, Indonesian bibles made of bark, bamboo calendars from Borneo, small brass figures of warriors and dragons – plenty of dragons – and a whole crate full of porcelain, my purchases from Overjoys during the three years of our expatriation. Rick was looking harassed from lack of sleep, since there was not a spare place to lie down and rest one’s head.

While we had been away he had had a party at the house. We had stipulated that this could take place so long as the party-goers stayed out of our bedroom. Rick was now thirty years of age and back at college. He took our request seriously and we found an enormous padlock on our bedroom door that Houdini would have found challenging.

He had wanted the party so that he could invite a girl he rather fancied but did not want to ask out directly. He had just had a rather long and harrowing affair with another young woman and I believe was feeling rather vulnerable. He need not have worried. Julie McKenzie was just as keen on him as he was on her.

The pair were married not long after we arrived back and a fine wedding it was too at Julie’s church in Hadleigh, Essex, where her father Joe was a lay preacher. The ladies of the church seemed to organise the whole wedding between them. Rick’s Best Man was Taz, one of two brothers of West Indian origin. The other, Daly, was the photographer for the event. Taz has an art degree and is a talented sculptor, while Daly is a London teacher of mathematics.

All I can remember now from Taz’s speech, apart from his story about getting stopped by the cops for speeding on the way to the church, is the bit about him giving Rick the nickname ‘Snake-hips Kilworth’, which is very apt, since Rick has been wiry-lean from the age of ten and can dance like an anaconda with its tail on fire.

Rick and Julie have since added to our collection of fine grandchildren, making five in all, which we would keep on our mantelpiece if our kids would let us. Alexander came along first and then Chloe. Like his dad, Alex is a brilliant runner, dyslectic, but has been determined to become an engineer from the age of four. At eight he brought a big book of aircraft mechanics to me to read to him and asked, ‘Tell me how the brakes work on an aeroplane, grampa.’ Grampa did his best, being an effete writer with very little real knowledge of hydraulic braking systems. Alex is now at engineering college in Somerset. Chloe has wanted variously to be a dancer, playwright, doctor and pop singer. So far as I’m concerned she’s eminently qualified to be all four, but then I’m a bit biased. As the only girl of her generation a grampa is blinded by the dazzling feminity of her gender. I am convinced my granddaughter will one day be something wonderfully Chloe.

Once married, Rick took yet another diploma – he had by that time qualified as a chef, hairdresser, computer analyst and tractor driver – and finally settled into the job that he seems made for – social work. He and Julie moved to Somerset and there they have an isolated farmhouse nestling under the Quantock Hills. Rick is observed mostly driving across the heights of Exmoor seeing to the needs of elderly people in remote dwellings. Julie, now a qualified nurse, often follows him into the same houses, to attend to the medical needs of her patients, who naturally give her the smug news, ‘Your husband’s been to see me just an hour ago.’

~

My son-in-law Mark was promoted rapidly in the bank for which he worked at the time, eventually leaving to join United Bank of Switzerland. I used to tease him, asking what his bank had done with the Nazi gold. Mark and Shaney, and the three boys, were sent to Toronto, Canada, for three years. We visited them twice, once for the millennium celebrations. They took us the Niagara Falls and once to Ottawa in the dead of winter, where we all skated on the Rideau Canal that runs through the city.

From Canada they were sent to my old love, Singapore, and were there for four years. Naturally we visited them many times and were always made wonderfully welcome. It was on one of those visits that we went up into Malaysia, to Taman Nagara, the densely-jungled National Park in the centre, reachable only by canoe. A Chinese couple who had never been out of Shanghai before, clamped themselves to us like limpets, terrified of the natural wilderness in which they found themselves. We also met a young Australian couple with whom we played cards to while away the time. We were walking along a beach on a revisist to Langawi Island on our way back from Australia, fourteen years later in 2007, when we bumped into the same couple. After a reunion meal we promised to meet them again in another fourteen years at another Malaysian venue to be chosen by Fate.

On a separate trip to Malaysia, Annette and I, and a Swedish lad of about nineteen, hired a guide to take us into the southern end of Taman Nagara. We went in with just a small backpack and a rush mat each. The guide took a day to lead us to some caves deep in the rainforest where we slept on the rush mats for two nights. Annette thought she saw elephants passing the cave at dawn, but only I believed her.

The Swedish boy was terrified of snakes and had asked if he could sleep in between Annette and myself, a request which was immediately rejected. I’m sure his intentions were honourable but Annette is a jealous wife and would not sanction such an arrangement. One amazing pool we came across on that trek, the sun dancing through the canopy and creating a magical scene on the clay-red waters, had at least three dozen kingfishers swooping and diving on the fish. The guide also taught us how to eat rainforest fare, but alas I’ve lost my notes and if my plane crashes in the jungle today I will probably starve.

From Singapore my daughter’s family went to Australia, to St Kilda, Melbourne, and yes, we visited them there also, once for a whole six months. Mark is an amiable and generous son-in-law who I very much admire, not only for his prowess at banking, scuba diving and six-a-side football, but for his ability to put up with his parents-in-law foisting themselves on him for long periods. He is always most welcoming and eager for us to enjoy ourselves whenever we descend upon his household. We are fortunate indeed with both Julie and Mark, our in-laws, who have always treated us with the utmost kindness and hospitality.

~

Our kids settled in their jobs and marriages, Annette decided to do her Masters degree at the University of East Anglia. Her subject was ‘Third Culture Children’, these being the offspring of expatriates whose children are raised in a society not that of their parents, so they emerge into adulthood having not been entirely immersed in either culture, but a mixture of both. My own childhood is a case in point. I was born and bred partly in England, but also spent teenage years in South Arabia and Singapore. Christian and Muslim influences are intermingled. We have met many third culture kids raised in Hong Kong, Singapore, Kenya, others. Annette’s thesis, written after interviewing many of these children made interesting reading. In essence it was what you might expect. The subject kids were highly confident when faced with change – change of geographical location and lifestyle – and able to make new social connections easily. However, they were often restless and required change when forced to follow routine for too long.

~

One day during the ’90s, while still at Wychwater, I received a letter from the head of one of the families we had corresponded with and sent money to during the apartheid years. Wandile Dayile, like Nelson Mandela, a Xhosa, was no longer in fear of going to prison of course, but he asked me if I would assist him with sending his eldest son, Vuyisa, to university. No one in the family had employment, due to the situation in South Africa and not because they were reluctant to work.

‘If we can just get one of us out at work,’ he told me, ‘the family can start to get on its feet at last. A university degree would ensure that Vuyisa could obtain a government job . . .’

After discussing it with Annette, for the cost would go into thousands of pounds, I wrote to Wandile and told him we would do it. However, he had suggested we take Vuyisa through to his Masters degree and I had to tell him we could not afford that, but we would fund him through to his Bachelor degree and try to get funding from a charity elsewhere to get him his Masters. Vuyisa did indeed get his first degree and eventually managed to obtain his Masters. He’s now in a good job, married with two children, and helps to support the wider family. Wandile still writes to me. His latest letter tells me that he himself is now in work ‘for the Department of Correctional Services’ as a parole officer.

Just before the millennium we got a phone call from a woman who called herself Valencia who had come to England to work for the Social Services. Her real name is Nozuko, but presumably she chose Valencia in order to make it easier for the British tongue. Valencia told us she was the sister of Wandile. We met Valencia several times, a delightful lady, who even came to a Beetle Drive at a Suffolk village hall with us, though she had never been to anything like it in her life before. She tried to teach me some Xhosa and went into hysterics at my attempts with the clicking words in the language. Valencia now works in one of the London boroughs and calls us occasionally to give us news on the family back in the South African township.

~

My writing during the ’90s was in several different genres. I was producing a young adult fiction novel every year. The Brontë Girls got me my second short-list for the Carnegie Medal, but was beaten by Philip Pullman’s famous trilogy. I did six ‘Welkin weasel’ books, which are humorous novels in which the world is run by stoats and weasels, the first three were set in Medieval times, the second trilogy in Victorian times. Collectively they have been my most successful kids’ books, selling up to forty and fifty thousand copies each.

One nice thing that occurred, which did not involve literary prizes but came directly out of my children’s books, was that Boswells secondary school in Chelmsford, Essex, named a new wing in their building after me.

The Garry Kilworth Wing. How cool is that?

My general fiction novel set in the Maldive Islands, In The Hollow of the Deep-sea Wave, attracted the attention of a film-maker Jamil Dehlavi, who optioned it for many years, but I understand Jamil could not raise the money to actually make it. It has now been optioned by a similar pair of film-makers and I await developments.

I was still writing fantasy for adults, but not much. Angel came out in 1993 and was reasonably successful and in 1996 A Midsummer’s Nightmare also did quite well, but I was about to change tracks yet again. Malcolm Edwards was now very high up in the giant HarperCollins publishing house. One day he gave me a call and asked if I would meet him for lunch. During that lunch, at which two film producers were present, he asked me if I thought I could write historical war novels.

‘You’ve been in the military. You have the background,’ he said. ‘These two gentlemen are the producers of Bernard Cornwall’s Sharpe series. They may want to venture into something other than the Peninsula Wars soon. Can you come up with any ideas for a new war? I was thinking of perhaps the English Civil War.’

I was chuffed to bits. Here was a new challenge.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

I went home and thought long and hard about it. Although the English Civil War might have been made to work by somebody, I did not think I was the one to do it. Firearms used in that war were clumsy affairs, having to be rested on a forked staff and used in a slow lumbering way. Not at all given to swashbuckling action. Also, which side to choose for your hero? The puritan roundheads were boring buggers and the more colourful cavaliers on the wrong side as far as many people are concerned. Whichever side I chose I would lose readers who were not sympathetic to their cause.

I finally decided on the Crimean War, mostly because to my knowledge no one was working in that area, not Cornwall or Fraser, or any of the other well-known historical warists. I also wanted to work with a ranker, since every book of that genre I had read dealt with the officer class. So my hero was actually an aristocrat who joined the army as a private under an assumed name, due to circumstances which would be revealed later, and a man who was distrusted by his fellow soldiers because he had a posh accent and distrusted by his officers because he was obviously one of their class who chose to be in the ranks. Nice bit of tension there, from the outset. I began with Jack Crossman having been promoted to sergeant in charge of a group of saboteurs and spies, in a time when such men were not approved of, even by their own generals, but especially by Marshall Raglan who called them ‘skulkers’.

I covered the war in five novels, The Devil’s Own being the first, and Attack on the Redan, being the last. I shall ever be grateful to Malcolm for thinking of me, even though I didn’t fulfil his and my desire to interest the film company in those novels. I suspected their lack of interest from the start, when they yawned while I was outlining my project. I think they believed they were finished with Sharpe, whereas I’m sure there were other Sharpes that came after our two meetings. My Hong Kong friend, Major John Spiers gave me a lot of help, with information on the army at the time of the Crimea, and also David Greenwood, another pal, who took a long interest in the books. After the Crimea I took Crossman to India, then to New Zealand for the Maori Wars. He now has a cameo role in the Zulu Wars, written with my new younger hero, Ensign Seb Early, one of first military policemen of the ‘modern army’ which fought the Zulus.

My series of historical war novels have been indirectly instrumental in getting me elected as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the membership of which I am intensely proud. Yes, I would have liked a Booker prize. Of course, a Nobel prize. But heck, I’ll settle for putting FRGS after my name whenever I need to be formal and having the pleasure of going to some terrific lectures at the society, only open to Fellows like me.

I have always been a geography fan. I like amazing facts and geography, and astronomy especially, feed me with such material. For instance, did you know that because of continental drift the continents are moving apart at a pace of three centimetres a year? When you think I have lived seventy years this July, it means that during my lifetime America and Europe have moved over two metres away from each other. So it’s no wonder that Atlantic crossing air fares have increased: the distance is greater now than it was when I was a lad.

It was at an RGS lecture, and later at my grandson’s school at Felsted, that I saw and heard the man who had long been a hero to me for his brilliant oral storytelling of the Zulu Wars. David Rattray had an almost supernatural talent for spellbinding an audience with his historical recounting of the Battles of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift. He had an uncanny delivery, which in his soft South African accent, drew you dream-like into the African world of 1879. I have played his cds many, many times, and never fail to be mesmerised. He was especially sympathetic to the Zulus, who he grew up with and knew as friends.

‘It was not so much a British defeat,’ he would say, ‘but a Zulu victory.’

Sadly he was shot and killed trying to protect his wife from burglars in the early part of the 21st Century and to me it was like losing a loved schoolmaster.

~

I have never, of course, given up the love of my writing life, the short story. In the ’90s my collection In the Country of Tattooed Men appeared from HarperCollins. As I have already said, John Clute called my Triptych, a set of three unlinked tales, ‘stunning’, a review which I now treasure. The writer Geoff Ryman also praised Truman Capote’s Trilby: The Facts as one of the best stories he had read for long time, a remark I also hold dear. At that time I also wrote a collection of fairy tales for young adults, entitled Dark Hills, Hollow Clocks, which I feel is among my best work in the genre of short stories, the solid base of any science fiction and fantasy writer. More recently a young man named Guy Adams, who was an editor at Humdrumming Books, wrote and asked if he could republish my collection In The Country of Tattooed Men.

‘I read the stories when I was twelve,’ he told me, ‘and I’ve never forgotten them.’

When he was twelve? I am old Father William . . .

I recall the line from the first True Grit film, the one with John Wayne as Marshal Rooster Cogburn, who when confronted by the gunfighter Ned Pepper was told to, ‘Get out of the way, old man!’ and how Rooster’s head jerked back as he suddenly realised that he was now an O.A.P. That was how I felt when I read Guy’s letter. The stories that in my head I had written only recently, were actually ancient history. Guy is a lovely fellah and I was immensely pleased to be republished by such a good writer and editor, but . . . oh mum, where have the years gone?

~

In 1996 my prostate problems were reaching crisis point. True, I had learned to assess the architectural landscape for the presence of toilets and was damn good at finding them in strange towns and places, but driving any distance was becoming a nightmare. I was having to stop on the hard shoulder of motorways to relieve myself and if I didn’t do it in time there was a blockage and pain. So I went into hospital and had the damn thing shaved like a lump of bacon. Given an epidural injection rather than regular anaesthetic I was able to watch the whole show on a monitor while I chatted to an Australian anaethestist. Afterwards I was able to pee with the force of a London fire hose. It felt wonderful. At a post op chat with the surgeon, Mr Ball revealed that when making love to my wife I would no longer ejaculate forwards, due to a missing valve, but would shoot backwards into my bladder.

‘It’s quite normal after prostate operations,’ he told me. ‘You won’t feel any loss of sensation. In fact I’m told it can prolong the pleasurable feeling.’

‘That’s all very well,’ I quipped, ‘but really – I won’t know whether I’m coming or going, will I?’

He stared at me blank-faced.

~

Once the butchery was over Annette and I did another world backpacking tour, similar to the one we had enjoyed in 1992. This time we stopped at Fiji and following a photography course and exams Annette took a number of monochrome photos of the islands which now adorn our living-room wall. Superb pictures. We also played golf at the club where Veejay Singh was a boy caddie and played his first game of golf. The clubhouse was still a tin shack, with a club honours board behind the table where the man who took the money sat. On that board Veejay’s name had started appearing on a certain day in a certain year as winner of the monthly medal – and so on, to great fame and much fortune for the Fijian golfer.

On Fiji we went for a reef walk and I managed to scratch myself and get coral poisoning. It’s not pleasant watching a red line go up your leg towards your thigh. We were staying with some Fijians in a homestay, so I asked the lady of the house if she knew where I could get treatment for the poisoning.

‘A Filipino doctor lives just two streets away,’ she told me. ‘Just go and knock on his door.’

I duly knocked on the doctor’s door, but the Filipino woman who answered the knock told me the doctor was out.

‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘come in. I’ll deal with it.’

Off she went and came back with a hypodermic needle.

‘Um, are you the doctor’s wife?’ I asked.

‘That’s right,’ she replied cheerfully.

Now, it was my guess that islands like Fiji have rather casual and informal rules regarding the medical profession, but I was wary of getting treatment from a doctor’s wife, even if she had seen her husband jab people a hundred times before.

‘Couldn’t I just wait for the doctor?’ I pleaded, as she squirted the air out of the hypo. ‘I don’t mind waiting.’

‘Now don’t be a baby,’ came the reply. ‘I happen to be a doctor too – it’s not the sole province of the male you know.’

My dormant prejudices were suddenly out there in the open, putting me in the glare of a spotlight. I felt very small and rather abashed. I did not turn towards Annette who was standing behind me, because I knew what sort of look she would be giving me.

The only other really memorable event on that tour, though we had a great time overall, was our visit to Aitutaki, a remote Cook island, where there lived an elderly man who was the ‘Speaker for the Seventh Canoe’. On those early Polynesian migrations in their hundred-men canoes – really rafts carrying whole families, livestock and plants – one man was allocated on each craft to memorise the voyage in all its aspects. I have already said these early Polynesians had fabulous memories, mainly due to the fact that they had no written language. These ‘records of the voyage’ were passed down from father to son, over the generations, and the latest holder of the record of the seventh canoe in the flotilla was held by this man, Mr Tunui Tereu, known locally as Papa Tunui, who lived with his wife on Aitutaki Island.

We flew to Aitutaki from Raratonga, courtesy of Turtle Airways Inc., on one of those flimsy Islander aircraft that had terrified Sarah when we were on Tioman. There we found Papa Tunui in a modest little bungalow. He was sitting on his veranda with his wife peeling mangoes. Without us even introducing ourselves he patted the concrete beside him for us to sit down. We sat, and he talked while I listened, for several hours, interrupted by drinks of various kinds. I went away with a notebook full of riches. Papa Tunui’s recollections, gathered from his ancestors, were later woven into The Navigator Kings. That wonderful man had a memory that could win Mastermind, if only he could choose Polynesian migrations as his special subject.

It was not so much the Polynesian folk lore: I had already read of ogres who could dismember themselves in order to hide in hollows; demons who allowed their severed heads to be carried by the waves in order to seek the flesh of men; giants who had jaws of flaming teeth which they replaced with tree-trunks. Nor was it about gods like Tiki, or even hero demi-gods such as Maui the cunning trickster. What I gathered from Papa Tunui were the navigational skills used by those intrepid seafarers. The star paths they followed, the fixed stars they used, were of course known by navigators of other nations. What was new was the knowledge they gained from the presence of certain land birds and sea birds. If they could not see land despite knowing it was somewhere close, they would put a dog or pig in the water. The animal’s sense of smell, a thousand times keener than that of a human, would have it swimming towards that land. They would look at the base of clouds: if that cloud was lit by a light shade of green they would know an island lagoon lay beneath. There were ‘feelers-of-the-sea’ on board, blind men who put their fingers into the waves and felt for changes in temperature. Most of all, those Polynesian seafarers knew about the direction of swells and the prevailing winds and followed them into the unknown.

In this way they sailed thousands of miles across open ocean to find new homes when the islands of their birth became overcrowded. Sometimes they sent only a handful of men ahead, to seek a new unpopulated land. This is how the Land-of-the-Long-White-Cloud, New Zealand, was discovered by a lone Polynesian sailor. His name was Kupe and such were those fabulous Polynesian memories that when he returned to his home island several years later he was able to recall the passage of his voyage for them to follow, finishing with the sentence, ‘Keep to the left of the setting sun in November and you will discover two large islands’.

There was more, much more, too much to repeat here. I simply enjoyed listening to Papa Tunui’s soft voice and throwing my mind back to those huge rafts carrying perhaps twenty families into nothing but blue water and blue sky. How brave they were. Columbus had it easy.

After an afternoon of listening and scribbling, that evening we went to see hula-dancing and to a feast where the favourite Polynesian food was on the menu. At that feast we met the film producer of the movie Babe who was married to a local woman. The ‘favourite’ food was of course roast piglet, one of Babe’s descendants.

~

On return to England after our second ‘world tour’ we carried on life at Wychwater. I had planted two more trees in 1988, just before we had left for Hong Kong. One was a willow, down by the pond, the other was a ginkgo in sight of our kitchen window. Both saplings were as thick as my forefinger. When we got back the willow was a mature tree, fifteen feet high and badly needing a haircut. The ginkgo was still a finger-thick twig that stood two feet high, alive and thriving, but amazingly immature. It was still the same height and girth when we left it behind in 2001. I have seen fully grown ginkgos and they are giants. Clearly ginkgos grow vaster than empires and more slow. Beautiful leaves though.

Every year we had our garden party where we invited our writer and editor friends, many of them with children now who I took for rides in the trailer of my tractor. They were good happy times. My own kids were settled and Annette, like most nanas, fell into her role of grandmother with great relish. We saw Conrad, Christian and Jordan quite often in the mid to late ’90s, at their house in Shoeburyness. The boys were sport mad and we often played yard cricket or kicked a ball on the nearby green. All three grandsons were growing up strong and healthy. They were well-mannered too and treated their nana and grampa with great respect, Shaney and Mark saw to that.

To Julie and Rick’s two children Annette was ‘Swimming-nana’ the other nana being ‘Knitting-nana’. Annette took Alex and Chloe most weekends to the swimming baths and was instrumental in helping them to learn to swim. Once, Alex tried to test Annette by asking her if she would ‘Knit me a Postman Pat if my mum gives you the spring (string)’. Knitting being an anathema to Swimming-nana the refusal was forthright and telling. She was never again asked to knit anything.

My favourite grandchild story is about Alex. At his primary school they gave out talents and tokens. Talents were earned for being good, tokens were given out for being bad.

After his first week at school he came home and was asked by his mum Julie, ‘How did you get on, Alex? Did you earn any talents?’

Alex turned his angelic face to his mother and said seriously, ‘Hundreds and hundreds.’

‘And what about tokens.’

He shook his head. ‘Not a single one.’

‘Oh that’s wonderful. Well, next week I’m going to see your teacher and have a little chat about how you’re getting on.’

Alex screwed up his face in thought for a moment, then said, ‘Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t talk about the talents and tokens.’

~

In the ’90s too, we went on several expeditions to the West Country with Rob and Sarah, walking Offa’s Dyke, Dartmoor and visiting Maiden Castle. Both Sarah and Rob liked nothing better than striding out over frost-covered peat hags, breath coming out as sprigs of steam, finding a spot to picnic in a grove of stunted oaks. Once, I went through the ice of a shallow pond and filled my boots with freezing water. I had to trudge to the pub six miles away with fine spray flying from the tops of my boots while the others walked behind me making hilarious remarks. To be fair, Sarah showed concern over my freezing feet, but the other two could not stop laughing long enough to enquire after my condition.

Malcolm Edwards was now married to Jacks, a lovely young London editor whose parents lived in Somerset. I remember the wedding as being a very wet day under canvas, since it took place mainly in a marquee in the garden. Everyone sloshed around on duckboards, though the tent was warmed by jet engines that made its cheeks billow. Rob was best man and gave a wonderful speech fashioned from reworked lines from a poem by Seamus Heaney which ended something like, ‘Bog, fen, mud and ditch-deep peat – welcome to your new home.’

In the mid-90s, Rob, Sarah, Annette and I were invited to the home of Jacks’ parents for a winter weekend. On the way we stopped at Avebury to gather spiritual energy from the standing stones and ended up getting lost after dark in the fields beyond the site. We managed to trudge our way to a garage light on the motorway and thence back to the car, our boots thick with mud from the ploughed furrows. Jacks and Malcolm were there in Somerset to greet us and again we met Jacks’s family, who were charming and gracious, but were happy to engage us in a lively argument about fox hunting when my book Hunter’s Moon came up. It was probably Rob who mentioned the novel. He was always trying to promote my books and indeed got me several Guest of Honour spots in places like the Czech Republic with his selfless endorsements.

A winter Devon visit took us to the home of the Frouds. Wendy and Brian Froud live in Devon, in a dingley-dell cottage. The previous owners could well have been Hobbits. Wendy is a puppet maker and had fashioned the creatures for several films, including the fantasy movie Dark Crystal. The house is full of her creations, every nook and cranny harbouring a strange creature. Simply going to the toilet is an adventure in Wonderland. Brian is a writer and illustrator of fantasy books. My favourite is Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book: fairies caught by the young Lady Cottington and pressed like flowers between the pages of heavy tomes before being mounted. One or two of the fairies did not need to be pressed, since they were peeled from the windscreens of cars.

Brian told us that one day he wanted to do a book of Sheela Na Gigs. These are quasi-erotic carvings found on Romanesque churches, usually of an old woman squatting and pulling apart her vulva. They’re more prevalent in Ireland than most countries, but are found in UK and on the continent too. Some think the Sheelas are pagan, but they are always found on churches and so must have something to do with the early origins of Christianity. However, it is strange to have such an erotic symbol on a church and no one quite knows how old they are or what was their purpose. Brian was fascinated by them but admitted they wouldn’t make a children’s book. To my knowledge he hasn’t yet produced his volume of Sheela Na Gigs.

~

About this time we had also taken to going on European city breaks with Bill and Lisa Fedden, to Prague, Vienna, Berlin, etc. It was while we were in Prague that I recalled that Peter Beere, a writer who like many of us sometimes questions the literary value of his work, once sighed and said to me, ‘When I sit down to write, I hope to emulate Kafka, instead I always end up writing like Peter Beere.’ I therefore sent Pete a postcard from the great writer’s house near Old Town Square. On it I scribbled, ‘When I sit down to write, I hope to emulate Peter Beere, instead I always end up writing like Kafka’ and signed it ‘Yours, Franz’.

~

Birgit Benkhoff, my German pal from King’s College, had moved from Claygate, just outside London, to take up a professorship at Dresden University. After several years teaching at the London School of Economics she had separated from her husband and was free-flying. I am very fond of Birgit and admire her greatly. We have now been to Dresden many times to stay with Birgit in her art deco flat and seen some of the magnificent buildings which were not burned in the fire-bombing of the Second World War. Those which were scorched have been left blackened, while the rebuilds, such as the Frauenkirche, are of course new looking. The Green Vault, which houses treasures of old Germany, has a huge, astonishing collection of magnificent golden, bejewelled objects and ornaments.

Dresden was also one of the homes of Karl May, born in 1842, who wrote Western stories and tales of the Orient. Old Shatterhand is one of his most famous cowboy stories. There is some doubt that ‘adventures’ he claimed to have had ever really took place, but Karl May was a popular writer of his time and later regarded by the literary world as an innovator. We visited his house, now a museum, several times. It is full of interesting paraphernalia collected by the author.

~

Over the turn of the century we visited Canada several times, once a return to Quebec, twice to Annette’s cousin Elizabeth in Vancouver, and twice to Shaney and Mark and the boys in Toronto. With Elizabeth and her husband, Karl, we did a long, lengthy tour of the Yukon and Alaska by car. Karl, a Canadian-German tour guide, had recently been given northern Canada as his new route. It was a great holiday, driving in the land of the midnight sun – well, midnight and all night. The sun never went down. We stayed first at White Horse, then at Dawson City, which was awesome having only dirt roads and the sort of wooden buildings you see in Western films. There was a motorbike rally going on in the Yukon at the time, which added to the excitement. We visited the Klondike gold claims, which were still operated part-time by some residents of Dawson, supplementing their incomes.

When we entered Alaska we were in USA territory of course and the first stop was a town called Chicken with a hundred residents. It had been named when the first settler saw a ptarmigan standing on a rock and decided it was the local equivalent of a hen. A grisled male resident eyed us over a can of beer in the Trading Post and grunted sourly, ‘Welcome to Alaska, where men are men, and women win the Iditerod!’

The Iditerod is a hard gruelling sled dog race which covers over a thousand miles of snow-bound Alaska, usually in around nine to fifteen days. A woman called Susan Butcher had recently won the race four times, a fact which was clearly difficult to stomach for some of the frontier mountain men in that tough, unforgiving land.

~

From Chicken we covered just about the whole of mid and south Alaska right down to Skagway where the gunfighter and criminal Soapy Smith met his match in the lawman John Reid. John Reid shot Soapy dead in a gunfight on Juneau Wharf at 9.15 pm, July 8, 1898. Unfortunately for law and order, Reid also died of his wounds, later on that day.

The four of us then struck southwards to Denali National Park where we saw our first wild grizzly bear, a blond giant of a beast chasing a rodent. I had not realised before then that bears could be different shades and blond grizzlies are quite common in that part of Alaska.

We covered thousands of Alaskan and Canadian miles on that trip, all of it in the light, with nary a dark moment.

~

The late ’90s also saw a visit to Vietnam, where Glen and Wilma Swaik were based. Glen works for an Australian oil company and they told us they would put us up and we could use them as a base. We had a terrific time. We went with Wilma and her kids to the Cu Chi tunnels dug and used by the North Vietnamese army when they were fighting the Americans. There were three levels of tunnels, each at a deeper depth. Ben, Wilma’s son, who was about eight at the time, wanted to go in the lowest tunnel and Wilma would not let him do it without an adult. I was the mug. I followed our guide, a young Vietnamese with deep scars on his face, who’d been born in the tunnels during the ’60s.

The first layer of tunnels were big enough to crouch inside. The second layer had us crawling on our hands and knees. The lowest level was a wormhole. I was terrified. It was pitch black and I had to position my body as if I were diving into a swimming pool. In this way we had to wriggle along the hot, earth-smelling hole as if we were trying to enter a house by way of the drain pipe. I was conscious of the weight of the earth above and around me. There were questions. What if the soil collapsed and buried me alive? What if I ran out of air? What if our guide had only hate in his guts for Westerners? What if my heart raced too fast and I had a cardiac arrest here in the intestines of Vietnam?

These questions did not need answering in the end of course, because I came to a place where it opened up into a cubic room made of nothing but clay. Ben was effervescent with joy at doing his thing. I was quietly relieved we were all still alive. The guide was smiling one of those oriental smiles I have never been able to decipher. He led us back to the surface where he proved that he did not hate me by letting me have a go with his AK47. I blasted a sandbank with a whole magazine of rounds, before we went on to be shown the mantraps – iron maidens made of sharpened bamboo – that when sprung pierced the stomachs and chests of many an unwary American soldier, spilling giblets on the floor of the jungle. Ben loved these too. In fact Ben liked most things that made an adult’s stomach churn, including handling large snakes, which he made me do with him later on in the day, at a snake farm.

I was actually very fond of that eight-year-old iconoclast.

It was the Swaiks who revived our interest in the Hash House Harriers, that fine Far Eastern tradition which we had come across in Singapore and Hong Kong. Expats get together and do a cross-country run, very often a paper chase, through bush and rainforest, desert and cattle country. The idea is to raise money for charity. At the end of the run you had beer and a hash meal. Ben was asthmatic, the dust made him choke and heave for breath, but the boy still did the run. The money raised went to the orphanage for children whose sight had been lost following the use of Agent Orange in the war with the Americans. When we got back to UK Annette and I ran our own Hash and raised enough to purchase two more Braille machines and a sackful of toys.

It was in the streets of Ho Chi Min city, which the locals still call Saigon, that I saw some amazing sights. The place was swarming with small motorbikes and I saw a farmer with a live pig sitting upright on the pillion, its forelegs tied around his neck, its bristled cheek next to his own. They looked a handsome couple. I saw a young man standing on the pillion-rider’s pegs, his arms at full stretch sideways holding a huge sheet of glass, while the driver weaved in and out of the masses of vehicles that clog the roads of the city. I saw two beautiful young women, slim and elegant, wearing lilac choeng sams, and evening gloves which covered their arms to their elbows (to protect their skin from the sun), on their heads those oriental conical hats, also lilac coloured. They rode straight-backed, complexions flawless and gleaming, looking as cool as Catgirl.

Our time in Vietnam ended with an evening at the French Embassy Ball. We rode there wearing evening dress in an open-topped 1930’s Citroën owned by Glen. Such style. The French Ambassador greeted us with, ‘Welcome, to the foreigners!’ Foreigners? I suppose we were, in his embassy, but I felt he had a cheek since we were all in the middle of Vietnam.

~

After Vietnam we took to returning to our old favourite, Malaysia, on several different occasions. On one of these trips we returned to Frazer’s Hill in the highlands of mainland Malaysia, and to the Cameron Heights, the old tea growing area, where we had taken Rob and Sarah after the Tioman Island trip. Malacca, the old Portuguese colony, has always drawn us with its elegant and stylish ‘Nonya’ families of mixed Chinese and Malaysian descent. And Penang island. And of course Taman Negara, the huge national park reachable only by river.

On one of our last trips to central Malaysia we were both ‘leeched’, Annette worse than me. The journey to the airport was difficult, since we got diverted to an Indian festival on the way and tried to catch a bus afterwards with 10,000 Indians. Bus after bus left the festival area packed with people and after pleading with a driver we managed to cram in next to the gear stick and give way when told to move. Late for our flight, we found ourselves at the airport filthy dirty, with socks and trainers sodden with blood.

As is their wont the leeches had pumped in anti-coagulant where they had bitten and though the creatures had been removed with the assistance of a lighted cigarette end, the wounds refused to stop bleeding. We took off our socks and shoes, threw them in a bin, and climbed aboard the jumbo jet in our bare feet. They were so dirty I don’t think anyone realised we hadn’t got any footwear on, though I noticed we were not given the offer of an upgrade.

The flight was around fourteen hours.

We were so looking forward to a shower.

We arrived back at Wychwater still filthy only to find that the septic tank had backed-up and covered the lawn and the shower room with sewage. There was no bath to be had until we had cleaned up the mess. Rick had already made a start, having visited to get things ready for us and found the devastation. Three hours and a visit from the sewage truck later we were able to get our blessed wash and go to bed. I think that was possibly one of the worst homecomings of my life. It was also one of the best sleeps I’ve every had. Completely comatose.

~

In 1997 Annette’s favourite aunt Marjorie had died and left Annette a few pounds in her will. Aunt Marjorie and uncle Reg had lived in Minorca for much of their retirement and we thought it appropriate to put it towards the money to buy a place in Spain. Eric Robinson, Annette’s art tutor at teachers’ training college, was already living in Spain with his wife Gaynor. We had been out to Eric and Gaynor’s Spanish village a couple of times, once with Pete and Peggy Good. They had an apartment in a row of single-storey apartments overlooking the sea on the coast of the Granada province. The Costa Tropical is the most southern part of Andalusia. The foothills of the Sierra Nevadas swept down to their doorstep. A short drive takes you into the mountains, with their Moorish white villages, high vineyards and orange groves. In the tiny village of Gaujara Alto, Carmen has her little bistro tucked away. At Carmen’s you can eat wild rabbit, conejo, with poor man’s potatoes, pobre patates. This meal, preceded by a wonderful soup and accompanied by locally produced wine, is one of my all-time favourites.

So, with aunt Marjorie’s bequest and some money from my writing, we purchased Eric and Gaynor’s apartment. Underneath the main flat is a studio flat, a single room, which Eric used as his painter’s studio. It was the only apartment in the row that was piggy-backed in this way and the two sections are joined by an external staircase. All four of us had to go before a Notary who officiates in the buying and selling of houses in Spain. Gaynor and Eric pledged they were selling ‘in good faith’ and we likewise that we were buying ‘in good faith’ and so the deal was done. We were Spanish-home-owners in a pleasant community with beautiful communal gardens around us.

The Spanish people of the small fishing village of La Herradura are remarkably tolerant and cheerful. They have been invaded by hundreds of Brits, Swedes, Danes, Germans and other odd nations, yet they invariably greet us with a happy ‘Hola’ in the street. I have often said the same would not be the case if a few hundred Spaniards descended on a village in England and took it over. Yes, the incomers swell the economy of the village, but many of the Spanish residents don’t need expats and tourists to make a living. They can do very well without us, thank you very much. Yet even non-restaurant and shop owners say ‘Buenos dias!’ as they pass, the sage old men nodding gravely, the young women flashing smiles.

When you buy a holiday apartment in Andalusia it is almost always fully-furnished, right down to the last teaspoon. And so it was we had nothing more to do than move in and enjoy our new property right from the start. The view from the balcony was at first stunning, the place being high up overlooking the bay, but a Spanish doctor right in front of us has since grown some huge pine trees and blocked off the sea. We can still see the Sierra mountains to our left and hey, looking at trees ain’t so bad, they are usually covered in birds, serins mostly, and the occasional hoopoe. I did offer to have the trees pruned at my expense, for they are ragged and unkempt things and blighted by the notorious ‘processional’ caterpillars. The owner refused. ‘You people just come out here to die,’ he informed me, ‘so you have no need for views.’

Nice man, our Spanish doctor neighbour and totally untypical of our other Spanish neighbours, most of whom come from the city of Granada.

The processional caterpillars, which collect in their hundreds in web-like balls that hang from the pine branches, drop to the ground in February each year and form a line, head to tail, before marching off to unknown destinations like thin green snakes. The hairs on their backs are quite poisonous and can make a human ill and even kill a dog or a cat. If thrown on bonfires the hairs fill the air and can enter a person’s lungs. Yet our friend in front never has his trees treated, as do other residents. Perhaps the caterpillars help swell his list of patients?

Eric and Gaynor moved to a much larger place two doors down, which they purchased from a Dutch couple. They remain good friends and neighbours. Without Eric and Gaynor the place would not be the same. Gaynor manages our apartment when we are absent.

Ana Johnson, a Spanish lady of mysterious age is also a wonderful person to have as an immediate neighbour. Both Gaynor and Ana, permanent residents, keep the community on their toes and assist with the problems of those who arrive at their holiday home to find flood, fire or some other disaster has overtaken their Spanish dwelling.

La Herradura is an idyllic village in a horseshoe-shaped bay. La Herradura means ‘horseshoe’ in Spanish. It is an hour east of Malaga and an hour south of Granada. The beaches are not golden sand, but shingle with grey sand patches, which is a good thing. There are no big hotels, very few holidaymakers, and quite a few expat residents. In the background are the magnificent Sierra Nevadas, snow on their tops in the winter. Palm trees line the waterfront of the village, which has several restaurants, shops and a small market. Now that Annette has retired we spend our winters there. The days are around 20 degrees Celsius and the nights a lot cooler, but we have a log fire in the living-room which warms our evenings.

It became a tradition in the late ’90s and after the millennium for Rob and Sarah to join us in Spain over the New Year. We had a lot of fun, walking in the mountains, visiting the white villages of the Alpuljarras that cling to the steep sides and crags. Rob would usually cook for us, he being a very good chef. Annette would often assist him, while Sarah and I stayed clear of the kitchen. One year Rob and Annette decided to cook a suckling pig for New Year’s Eve dinner.

Sarah and I were a little squeamish about the whole thing, having recently seen the movie Babe. So as usual we two left the practicalities of cooking the beast to Rob and Annette. The evening before the day of the meal, Rob quietly followed instructions on how to prepare a suckling pig for the oven. In the middle of the night a thirsty Sarah rose to get a drink. Still half-asleep she went to the kitchen tap with her glass and in the moonlight stared down into a sink filled with water. A submerged pale creature stared back up at her with wide, haunted eyes. Sarah let out a terrible scream and dropped the glass, which shattered on the kitchen floor and woke the rest of the household. Annette and I were in the lower apartment but Rob rushed to the aid of his beloved. He spent twenty minutes explaining to her that all she had witnessed was tomorrow’s lunch undergoing a night’s soaking before being roasted.

~

One year at Easter the four of us went to Ronda, to witness the Semana Santa parades of religious figures. Semana Santa is when the men of Spain wear those uniforms we associate with the American Klu-Klux-Klan: a robe with a pointed hood that hides the whole face. I’m sure these one-colour burkas must have come out of the Inquisition. The ‘Brotherhoods’ who wear them carry heavy, ornate platforms on which sits a statue of Mary or Jesus, or both. Or they follow behind with chains or crosses. I confess to a certain ignorance of the details. The statues are carried from the church and through the streets, sometimes by sixty or more men, the platforms being fashioned of heavy metals and hardwoods. Sometimes the parade is silent and at other times a band or simply a drum is used to time the slow march through the town. Some parades are made up of hundreds of men, and perhaps women, wearing their mono-coloured pointy-hooded gowns with slitted eyeholes.

Ronda is located on a plateau and the two parts of the town are separated by a chasm several hundred feet deep. A bridge joins the two halves under which falcons glide and choughs have their nests. We have had the excitement of witnessing a Bonelli’s eagle soaring above and through through the gorge. On the darker side, we’ve been told that during the Spanish Civil War one side or the other tossed their enemies off that bridge into the chasm. It is not an image I like to dwell on, quite apart from being bewildered by the inhumanity of the act.

Rob, Sarah, Annette and I watched the evening Semana Santa parade through the streets, then went to our hotel thinking all the religious festivities were over for the day. We said goodnight around 11 o’clock and I climbed into the hotel bed and fell fast asleep.

At around one o’clock I was woken by an excited wife.

‘Go to the window.’

‘What?’

‘Look out of the window.’

I did as I was asked and there below was a completely silent Semana Santa parade filing past the hotel: a long, colourful snake of hooded marchers swathed in robes. There were those wearing chains and those carrying heavy crosses. It was a very sinister scene, with hundreds of figures solemnly treading through the night streets. They all looked down or straight ahead, neither glancing to the right nor to the left, nor up at the buildings or sky. The sight sent a shiver down my spine. I was witnessing a ritual that had been going on for centuries, which to my understanding was steeped in secret rites and cryptic practices.

Annette picked up the phone and said, ‘I’ll ring and tell Sarah and Rob to look out of their window.’

The next morning I heard the tale of a half-asleep Rob, who had stumbled to the window and whipped back brass-ringed curtains along a hollow brass rail, thereby creating a great deal of noise. Down in the street several hundred people in hoods indignantly jerked their heads up to stare at the man who had created the disturbance. There, spotlighted by the hotel’s bedside lamp, was a naked science fiction writer.

~

On another visit to the same town we took Rob and Sarah to the Pileta cave, ten miles north of Ronda. This site is rarely visited by tourists, being off the beaten track and poorly advertised. It’s owned by a local farmer who has fitted an iron grill over the entrance and he alone holds the key to the rusty padlock. A telephone call is necessary to ask the farmer to meet you at the cave and when you enter you are in for a real experience. I have never been to Lascaux but I have recently seen Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams a film of the Chauvet cave and its astonishing hoard of prehistoric paintings.

The pictures on the walls of Pileta are not as rich and numerous as those in Chauvet, but they are amazing none the less. The cave is narrow most of the way and one is uncomfortably close to the walls that wind through the side of the limestone mountain. Annette and I had been there once before and were not disappointed with Rob’s expression and reaction when he saw the finger-paintings of bison, goats, horses and other creatures in black, ochre or red, accompanied by one giant fish. The walk through the cave, walls still drizzling with water and pools every so often, takes around an hour to cover a half-mile. The farmer’s colourful English adds to the experience as he explains:

‘This painting five-times more old than Egypt pyramids.’

Some of these Paleolithic pictures were indeed painted over 20,000 years years ago.

‘This is terrific,’ Rob told us, his eyes alive with interest. ‘What a place!’

I believe Sarah was just as impressed, but there probably weren’t any story-lines beginning to buzz around in her head.

~

Granada is of course home to the Alhambra, the Big Red, which is one of the world’s most beautiful buildings. We also went to Cordoba and Seville together, both cities with amazing architecture. Sarah drove within the city limits both times, since I am now extremely wary of Spanish towns. The narrow streets, often two-way, mean backing into tight alleys to allow traffic to pass. Once, I drove down a street the width of a motorway hardshoulder in a mountain village and before long the walls of the houses were brushing my wing mirrors. I had to ask a woman to open her front door so that I could edge the car back round and escape. All the occupants of the houses came out to watch and give advice as the sweat rolled down my brow. I hate driving in Spain. You need to be born there to be able to do it without losing your head. On the other hand, if your name is Sarah, you could be a gifted driver.

In 1998 we had a furious storm in Spain. Annette and I were lying in bed listening to the hurricane blowing tiles off the roofs and hurling loose bins and other material at the walls of houses. Whenever an object struck our apartment wall Annette would say, ‘Is that something we ought to investigate?’ and I, from under my sheets would answer, ‘No, that’s just a dustbin,’ or whatever. Suddenly, around one o’clock there was a huge crash and the whole room shuddered. ‘Is that . . .?’ Annette began. ‘Yes,’ I interrupted. We got up and looked out of the window. A huge pine tree which stood on the bank between our house and that of our Spanish neighbour, Señor Carasco, had come crashing down. It had missed our bedroom by inches but had crushed Señor Carasco’s kitchen extension and part of his bedroom. Luckily he was not in residence at the time, though he did come down the next day and wailed.

At the previous Community Meeting, we had been informed that the insurance company wanted several of the trees removed from the property because they were considered dangerous. The tree outside my apartment, the giant pine that had fallen on the Granadan’s holiday home, was one of those which had needed to come down. However, the persuasive Señor Carasco alone had argued against removing the pine, as he said he loved the natural world.

‘You extranjeros,’ he said at the meeting, ‘have lots of wonderful trees in your home countries and we have very few in Andalusia, so we need to keep what we’ve got.’

Everyone appreciated his point of view and the tree was given a reprieve.

Naturally the insurance company gave poor Señor Carasco the finger.

That’s what you get for loving the environment.

~

In 1997 I was contacted by a guy called Mike Stone. Now, there have been a few Mike Stones around, one of them being a convicted murderer, so naturally I was slightly wary about answering his unsolicited letter. However, other prisoners who’ve written to me have always had to use headed notepaper bearing the words Her Majesty’s Prison and there were no such words on Mike’s notepaper. He turned out to be one of the nicest guys I’ve met and selflessly offered to assist me in getting my books read by a wider readership. Mike was interested in becoming a writer himself and liked my own approach to the imaginative genres. He began producing and editing a fanzine which centred around my work. It was called Spiral Words, after my story and novel, Spiral Winds. Over the next few years twelve of these very well produced little magazines came out and if they didn’t expand my readership, which they may very well have done, they certainly boosted my confidence and helped translate enthusiasm into energy.

Today, Mike (along with a hugely energetic man called Lloyd Butler) helps in managing my website. Mike is now a published writer himself and going on to great things. His first collection of four novellas Fourtold (neat title that, eh? You get it – ‘Foretold’?) is an excellent debut for a young man immersed in the mysterious waters that I have swum in for most of my life, that of supernatural genre writing. He will go far and no one deserves it more.

~

In the late 1990s I was contacted by Stephen Baxter and Ian Watson, two science fiction writers. They had been asked to produce a book by a zoo guy named John Regan who was intent on raising awareness regarding the fact that the Asian elephant was heading for extinction. There are quite a few Asian elephants alive today, it’s true, but they live for up to eighty years and many of them are elderly. Asian elephants need to be in a herd before they will breed and most of them are single, being used for work on moving felled trees and similar labour. Chester Zoo was building a new elephant house which they intended to populate with a small herd of Asian elephants, hoping that the females would produce young.

Steve and Ian asked me to join them and we devised a plan for publishing an anthology of elephant stories, the proceeds of which we would put towards the elephant experiment. Each of us wrote an elephant story and then we tried selling the idea to publishers, who almost to a body rejected the project. We continued to pursue the idea, Ian and Steve doing far more work than me, without any tangible results. John Regan was appreciative of the effort though and was instrumental in getting us invited on a private tour of parliament by a sympathetic MP.

It was evening when we went, the place being virtually empty, and we were shown over the nation’s political engine room. I couldn’t believe how small the rooms were, both the Commons and the Lords. They must have crammed the MPs into those Houses. Clearly you have to be thin to be in politics. (There must be a special dispensation for Ann Widdecombe.)

When the new elephant house was ready, we three and our families were invited to the opening day. Ian unfortunately couldn’t come but I went along and met with Steve, taking my son’s family, including of course two of my grandchildren. Alex and Chloe had a fine time being treated like VIPs, the highlight of which was a buffet lunch, the sort of meal that Alex dreamed of as a teenager.

Since then the zoo’s breeding herd of eight elephants have produced five calves: Tunga, Sundara, Raman, Nayan and Jamilah. Quite a success story. Ian, Steve and I were also sent copies of a volume entitled The Great Indian Elephant Book – An Anthology of Writings on Elephants in the Raj edited by Dhriti K Lahiri-Choudhury. It’s a lovely looking work and I’m only sorry that we three did not have the same success in producing our own elephant book, though I have since sold my individual story and have hopes the other two did the same.

~

The late nineties was a bit of a whirl. Not already mentioned are the week-long visits in which we went to Jordan and saw the amazing rock-carved city of Petra and swam in the Dead Sea, went to the Oberammergau passion play with Trish and John Spiers, and returned to Cyprus for the first time since our RAF days only to find that the house we lived in during the 1960s, which was then on the wasteland at the edge of Limassol, was now in the centre of town. We also returned to Malaysia couple of times and visited Brunei. There might have been one or two other brief visits, but these are those that stood out.

~

The telephone rang at 3 o’clock in the morning. It had rung around that time on three or four occasions in my life before then. A call in the small hours is never, ever good news. I picked up the phone and said, ‘Yes,’ my mind still fogged with sleep, waiting to find out whether the news was just bad, very bad or terrible. On such occasions I just prayed it was not a grandchild or one of my kids in trouble.

‘Garry, it’s Ted. Your mother died an hour ago.’

I stood there still doped with sleep. I had seen my mother just a few hours before and had left her at about nine in the evening. She had been labouring for breath in a hospital bed, reaching for the nebuliser every ten minutes. Mum had smoked heavily all her life, until three years ago, then when the doctor told her she was killing herself, she stopped. Her stopping smoking did not arrest the emphysema and her air passages had been closing down slowly ever since. I had thought she would make it through the night, perhaps another week, or even a month, since we had been through a stage like this a couple of times before.

‘Thanks, Ted,’ I said, after a long while. ‘Thanks for telling me. I’ll be round in the morning. Are you okay?’

‘I’ll be all right, now. She went peacefully. I was holding her hand. She told me she loved me.’

Dear old Ted. He had always come second to my father and I don’t think she had told him many times that she loved him. Perhaps this was even a first? My father died of cancer and a year after mum married Ted, he developed cancer himself and after an operation had lost the ability to give her anything but a celibate marriage. He was only in his thirties at the time, my mum in her forties. It must have been hard for both of them but they remained together. There must have been love for that to happen and a lot of it but my mother had lost a young husband and son within a short period of time and that had damaged her. Now she had gone to join her first husband and I know Ted was quietly jealous of what my mother and father had shared, because he did not want them to share the same grave. He had said as much to me.

I miss my mum, a great deal. I still went to her on occasion for advice and she always made me feel special. A son remains a boy to his mother. I had an enormous amount to thank her for. When I was growing up she instilled in me the idea that no one was better than me. That I could do anything if I put my mind to it. Exams. A good job. Fame and fortune. She never measured my ability and calculated my expected achievements by it. She just perceived a glow that without a doubt was not there. Certainly I was pretty poor at school and showed little promise of doing anything of note. Yet my mum made me believe I was capable of all things and was as worthy as any man that walked the Earth. Praise was showered on me, for not very much actually, but heck, such treatment fills you with confidence in yourself and you really do think you’re a prince. When we were kids, my brothers and I used to pick wild flowers for her, buy her presents when we had any money, brush her hair for her standing behind her chair. We did it purely to see her eyes sparkle with delight. She received things from her sons that made her know she was treasured and she gave as good as she got. She had a white-hot temper, was like an avenging witch at times, was not a great cuddler or even hugger and she wacked us hard when we were bad. But all three boys, Derek, Ray and me, we loved the heck out of her.

I hate crematoriums. They are soulless, dark cells of misery which give mourners nothing in the way of comfort. A bonfire out in the open would be much better. Throw the corpse on a pile of flaming wood and send it off in the natural world. I hope I die in the open countryside, in a green field on a warm summer’s day. That would be a good death. Then I will be gone and you can do whatever you like with the rest, because its purpose will be over and nothing of me will remain. Play Ashokan Farewell for me and then bury or burn the rest without anyone there, though I’d like a memorial service in a Quaker Meeting House. I won’t have gone anywhere, because there’s nowhere to go, but it’s nice now to think that I’ll get some good reviews after I’ve left the world. Nobody would dare to give an author a bad review at his own funeral.

24. Tattingstone, Suffolk

By 2001 I had had enough of mowing two acres of grass and digging out blocked ditches. Annette too was ready for a move, being close to retirement. I had spent several years in Felixstowe as a child and had fond memories of it, despite being flooded out. Annette had a friend, Mary Jones, who lived on the Shotley Peninsula between the Orwell and Stour rivers and we had visited her many times. We loved the area – Mesopotamia I called it – and decided to move there. Shaney and Mark were now in Canada. Rick’s family had gone to live in the West Country. Annette’s brother and his wife Valerie had bought a derelict farmhouse in the Catalan region of Spain and had transformed it into a beautiful residence with olive and carob trees. They moved there permanently. Annette was close to retirement, so it was a good time to move. We sold Wychwater and bought a small flat in Rochford and a house in Tattingstone village, Suffolk. The three-storey terraced house was perfect for our needs. One of 30-odd in a refurbished hospital that had started out life as a workhouse in 1766. It was a lock-up and leave home, just right for travellers.

The old, unconsecrated graveyard containing paupers’ plots, are opposite the building across a narrow road. The ground there now belongs to the Suffolk Wildlife Trust and is a small wood where hundreds of daffodils appear in the Spring. Here lie the unmarked graves of the residents of the workhouse who had died in poverty and whose relatives were unable to afford a churchyard tomb. Remembering that my grandfather was born in a workhouse in Dorset I have often wondered what happened to my great-grandmother. Perhaps she ended up in such a grave, which though distressful enough to believers in former centuries, seems now a pleasant, peaceful resting place and one I would not mind myself when the time comes to find a spot.

Our gated community numbered just over 30 homes. We had come from a detached cottage with two wild acres. In Tattingstone we were in a terraced house with a small front garden and a postage stamp back garden surrounded by a six-foot high wall. There are formal gardens around a fountain in the common square. However, outside our back door lies the long narrow reservoir called Alton Water, a lake surrounded by beautiful countryside. The sea is ten miles away at Felixstowe, Ipswich four miles to the north, and the pretty town of Woodbridge on the Deben River just twenty minutes away.

The village itself is a friendly place and we were welcomed almost the moment we set foot in it. There are incomers and incumbents here. Some villagers live in the houses in which they were born. Many of the former have come from the USA, Holland, Germany, South Africa, Norway and all over the UK. It’s a mixture of cosmopolitan and firmly-rooted residents who for the most part love the place. We made friends straight away with Ben and Ruth Connor, also new to the village. Ben is an expert with any practical building work, while Ruth is one of those personal assistants that keep men like Alan Sugar sane.

As I have said, the villagers are a great mixture. Colin and Sue Waters live in a cottage near the church and they invited us to a party where we were able to meet many neighbours. Colin, now in his fifties, is an eminent physicist, the inventor in 1981of the ‘supertwisted nematic liquid crystal display’ (STN – LCD), used in the first generation of mobile phones and computers. A brilliant man, though he’s as down to earth as any science fiction author. Sue is among other things a school teacher. We’ve since been sailing with the pair of them in the Aegean on their yacht the Hilda May and intend going again and again. Just down the road from the Waters are Tamzin and Dean. Dean is an American, an engineer, who has worked in Saudi Arabia. A super guy. Tamzin taught ballet and has the poise of Audrey Hepburn playing a princess.

The Ennifers, Derek Page, the Pearces, the Browns. Unlike us ‘incomers’ these are friendly born and bred Suffolk men and women. They and others like them form the foundation stone of our village community, having lived in this great county all their lives.

All these people, and more, helped us settle into our new home.

Annette and I joined the carpet bowls club, helped to form a cinema club, joined the tennis club, are volunteers at the Anglo-Saxon visitors’ centre at Sutton Hoo. Annette also assists the Suffolk Wildlife volunteers and is a member of Woodbridge Art Club. We both play badminton with Lloyd and Elaine Butlerand and attend pilates with Steve and Jane Kirk. It’s a great village and we wonder why we took so long to find it. Everything centres around the village hall, which pulsates with activities every week. All right, it’s not Monte Carlo or New York, but hell, I’m not twenty-five any more and I like the pace of life to be a little more measured now. We still get away to the Far East, or Europe, whenever we wish. All we need to do is lock up and leave the house in safe hands.

~

We left Wychwater in February of 2001 and went to live in the one-bedroom Rochford flat while our house in Tattingstone was renovated. The hospital had been derelict since the late ’70s and only the show house was so far fit for habitation at that time. Our house would be ready in the Spring. Dylan was now eighteen years of age and showing it. He slept most of the day where he used to hunt and had to summon up the enthusiasm and energy to bite people. In fact he grew more affectionate with age. I was very fond of that old cat. When I used to write in my office in the attic of Wychwater, he would go to sleep in the open top drawer of my desk. In the mid-afternoon I would often take a nap, just twenty minutes on the floor by the desk with a cushion as a pillow – a trick learned on shift work in the RAF, when I would sleep on marble if I had to – and on waking in the foetus position I would find Dylan curled up in the hollow of my tummy. He was a character, that cat.

Dylan died in 2002, a year after losing his Wychwater hunting grounds, where he had spent so many happy hours stalking the wildlife and triumphantly dragging the carcasses through the cat door. I missed my gnarled old friend once he had gone, but I didn’t miss finding gall bladders on the kitchen floor of a morning. They were the only part of the creatures he caught that he refused to eat.

In the Spring, three months after the sale, we went and took our last look at Wychwater, probably the most loved of our many homes. The new owner, a roofer and builder, had ripped up all the hedges that had once surrounded the house. In their place were chain link fences. The house itself had been razed and rebuilt. Our beloved trees were gone too. The wild wood, where we had had so many great bonfire parties and had told spooky stories into the night, was now gone. In its place was more lawn. It was still called Wychwater, but it was now a sterilised version of what it had once been. Every bit of wildness had been clinically removed. Every crooked corner had been straightened. Yet – yet even a builder had not been able to conquer the septic tank. We noted with great satisfaction that every so often a waft of stink came drifting out on the air as a bubble rose through the sewage and burst in the fermenting tank that was buried in London clay.

~

Shaney and Mark moved to Canada with the three boys at the end of the ’90s. We visited them twice in Toronto and spent the last day of the 20th Century with them. It was a great evening, watching the fireworks and seeing the old 100 years out. The family spent two years there then Mark was moved to Singapore. Naturally we visited them there too, several times. My old dictator pal Lee Kwan Yu was still in power after all these years. He was there when I arrived in 1959, still there on going back in 1990, and still there again in 2003. He is one hell of a stayer that man and I don’t think he’s gone even now. He is a dictator but a relatively benevolent one. Certainly Singapore has gone from a banana republic in my youth to a thriving and rich island whose people seem to have grown into a high standard of living. There are no kampongs of stilted huts any more, no wasteland with bamboo stalls, only modern buildings, parks and a flourishing port.

Shaney, Mark and the boys first lived in 6th Avenue, a suburb, but eventually moved to Bukit Timah, on the edge of a wild park full of beautiful trees, monkeys and snakes. They had a cobra in the back yard for quite a time and though they called in the snake catcher he told them it was best to leave it there and avoid that part of the garden. However, the dog, Toffee, a street mongrel from Thailand, was spat at in the eyes and had to have treatment. Their Filipino maid Catalina also got attacked by a snake that had wrapped itself around the gate post, but she was a no-nonsense woman and took its head off with a carving knife.

In Singapore we hooked up again with Robin Moseley, Annette’s boss from Hong Kong days, and Glynis his wife. They had relocated there, still working with schools. Now that Shaney and Mark are back in England, Robin and Glynis let us stay at their house whenever we are in Singapore. I still get a great kick out of going back to the stamping grounds of my youth. There’s always plenty to see and do, though the island has been somewhat sterilised by rules and regulations. The rain still falls in torrents at exactly four o’clock in the afternoon during the monsoon season and the wet smell of the jungle still wafts from the parks. There are still stalls that sell curry mee and noodles on street corners and Changi village has hardly changed since the days when my billet stood on the hill above it. That billet is now a rest home for civil servants and old soldiers.

~

In 2004 the publisher of my series of six Welkin Weasel books, Random House, decided to send me on a two-week book tour of New Zealand schools and libraries. My editor there, Philippa Dickinson, seemed rather amused by the idea, since New Zealand had no indigenous mammals – only birds – and those weasels and stoats which had crossed the seas to get there were seen as a menace by the local wildlife societies. Still the Kiwi kids seemed to like these jokey novels, in which the weasels are the good guys and the stoats the baddies, because they were selling well in New Zealand at the time. New Zealand had then a population of around four million people. Trust me to get a bestseller in a country with a population the size of greater Birmingham. Maggie, my agent, said it was a pity that sheep couldn’t read, since there were sixty million of those.

As ever I wanted Annette with me. We had a wonderful time, even getting time off from book talk to go whale watching. One of the towns we visited was Dunedin. On the way from the airport to the town we passed the impressive statue of ‘Speight’s Southern Man’, a lifesize pioneer figure mounted on a horse and wearing a long raincoat with a high collar and many capes, a broadbrimmed hat, riding boots and an expression that told you he was a man who had tamed one vast wilderness and was looking for another one to have a go at.

In the library at Dunedin on South Island an elderly couple approached me after I had given a talk to some schoolkids.

‘Hi, remember me?’ said the man. ‘Let’s Go To Golgotha?’

It was Fred Haslam, the man who had been responsible for turning my first published short story into a stage play in the mid-1970s.

Fred and his wife then took over and showed us all the sights of Dunedin then took us to dinner. Another circle completed.

That was our last visit to New Zealand and it was mostly on the house. Random House. New Zealand is a very beautiful land and I could certainly have lived there very happily, given different circumstances. I almost bought a holiday home there. Almost. However, Spain is just a little closer to England.

~

In 2005 my friend and accountant for thirty-five years, Stuart Holliday, died of lung cancer after a brave fight. He had never smoked a cigarette in his life. Stuart was a strong Christian and believed to the last that he was bound for Heaven. If there is such a place, then Stuart is most definitely there, for a more devout man you could not meet on this side of the altar. He loved Jesus and his God and was convinced he was going into the arms of both. A cruel pathway to Paradise though.

~

Shaney and Mark’s family spent four years in Singapore before moving again to Melbourne, Australia. We decided it was time for a long stay in a new country and Annette and I set out in 2006 to spend six months in Oz, staying alternately with Shaney and Mark, and Pete and Carolyn. In between we intended to roam the country. We flew first with Andrew and Cheryl to Hong Kong. They were on their way to Bali for a holiday and when we lived in Hong Kong they had always intended to visit but never managed it. Now we wanted to show them where we had lived and some of our favourite places. We stayed in a hotel on Kowloon-side and the first morning in Hong Kong I left the others at breakfast to look for a cyber café to check my emails.

I found a large place full of Chinese youngsters playing computer games and settled down at one of the forty machines. The third email I opened was from Jill Hughes, my foreign rights agent at the Maggie Noach Literary Agency. Jill was and still is a whizz at selling my books to foreign publishers and I thought she was telling me of another coup. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The email began:

I’m sorry to tell you Maggie died yesterday . . .

Maggie Noach? Dead? Just like that?

I was shocked to the core with this sudden, unexpected tragedy and immediately burst into tears. This attracted the attention of the boys on the other computers. Some of them came to me and patted me on the head, not knowing what was wrong, but seeing I was distressed they tried to comfort me. I ran back to the hotel, still weeping heavily, and found the other three in the foyer where I blubbed the terrible news.

I believe Maggie died of cancer of the spine. I knew she had been complaining of back pains, but like her and everyone else I thought it was simply something like a sprain. Apparently she had expired in the ambulance on the way to hospital. As with Stuart, Maggie had been my friend and agent for over thirty years. She and her daughter had been to stay with us many times and we with her at her two homes, one in London and the other in Gloucestershire. She was irreplaceable as an agent and she was irreplaceable as a dear friend. Maggie was an amazing character who was known throughout the literary world. She could be soft and vulnerable, and she could be a virago. Once, I had hugged her in my arms when she had dissolved in tears over a battle with a taxi driver and many times I had seen her spitting fire. Small, dark-haired, absolutely jam-packed with energy, Maggie blitzed through the book world scoring victory after victory. She was unique. A wonderful friend, a terrific agent, and a huge loss to many authors and friends.

Like my accountant, Stuart, Maggie was only in her fifties.

We caught the plane to Australia a few days later, bereft of Maggie Noach, and spent Christmas with Shaney, Mark and the three boys on Phillip Island south of Melbourne, where we saw the mutton birds flying in of an evening. We played cricket on the beach and went to see the small fairy penguins march up the sands to their homes as the mid-summer sun went down. It was a strange Christmas with the heat and the flies, but then Aussies do live in this upside-down world.

Then Annette and I went off with Pete and Carolyn to Tasmania, to the Bay of Fires, where we stayed at a fabulous house we had exchanged with two KLM stewards for two weeks in our Spanish apartment. There’s not much to say about our stay on Tasmania, except that it is one of most beautiful islands on this Earth. The wildlife was prolific and mostly visible around twilight. We saw wild wombats, pademelons (small kangaroos), echidnas, blue-tongued lizards and a huge variety of birds including brilliant blue fairy wrens. There were dolphins that roamed the surf below our beach house, the water of which was absolutely freezing, as it stretches out into the South Polar Ocean. Tasmania is the Botanic garden of southern Australia.

Much later we did another house exchange with a family who owned a deconsecrated wooden church in a ghost town near Ballarat. The wooden buildings had sprung up during the 19th century golf rush and many were now empty and derelict. It would be a great setting for a vampire movie. Our editor friend Lesley Levene was with us for a couple of weeks. She refused to sleep upstairs, which was the darkest part of the house and I didn’t blame her. Here the scenery was the opposite to Tasmania, being mostly dry and sandy with sparse vegetation. One day I said to the girls, ‘I’ll drive you somewhere for a cup of tea and a cake.’ Foolish man. We drove, and we drove, and we drove, and all we found was empty wilderness.

The car was almost out of petrol when we came across a small settlement of about a dozen shacks. One of the shacks had a sign outside which read: TRADING POST. We went in and found a combination general store, cafe and post office, though all those titles were a little bit highbrow for the rickety wooden building we had entered. We ordered tea and sat on tattered camping chairs at a table whose fourth leg was about three centimetres shorter than its brothers. The tea came in mugs and with a good deal of chat from the hostess.

After a few minutes an Aborigine man entered, sat down with us and began, without ceremony, to talk. ‘Anyway, I’ve just been out in the bush and Willy lit a fire. I told him there’s a drought on and the fire might spread but he took no notice. You’ve got be careful of fires in this weather . . . etc etc etc.’ He was a nice old man who seemed keen on company and I asked him where the nearest petrol station might be. He said, ‘Joe’s got one in his back yard, three doors up.’ So I drove to Joe’s and knocked on the door of his shack. Eventually Joe answered and I asked, ‘Can I fill my tank? I’m almost out.’ Joe pointed to a rusty old hand-pump in the back garden and said, ‘Help yourself, mate.’ I filled up and paid him no more than I would a petrol station.

By that time Lesley had asked the woman in the trading post if there was anything of interest in the region. The woman directed us to the ‘sculptures’ out on a dust road a few miles away. On our way back to Ballarat we found these carved tree trunks which lined the highway and told the history of Australia, from prisoners and settlers, to the First and Second World Wars. They were beautifully crafted, standing out in the middle of nowhere, and had probably only been seen by a handful of visitors at the most. All around us was the Australian bush, a landscape of dust and scrub, and here were these wonderful sculptures. No name of the artist could be found anywhere, I would have guessed they had been carved with a chain saw by a local man. I would definitely replace the bricks in Tate Britain with one of these works of art.

There wasn’t a great deal to do in Ballarat. Their lake had dried up, since there was an eleven-year drought in Victoria state and thus the vegetation in the park was not in any great shape. We were taken around a local graveyard by one of the residents of the town. In that graveyard was the tomb of young man in his late teens. The woman explained that he was a relative of hers who had died in a car crash.

‘He was going too fast,’ she said.

Since arriving in Australia and especially around St Kilda where Shaney lived, we had experienced young men driving like maniacs, yelling out of their car windows at passers-by, and had been told they were ‘hoons’, the equivalent of Britain’s yobs.

‘Was he a hoon?’ I asked her.

She looked thoughtful for a moment, then replied, ‘No, I wouldn’t say as bad as a hoon – more of a larrikin.’

I liked that. It seemed there were three levels of bad behaviour in young men. Starting with the worst: hoons, revheads, larrikins.

Lesley stayed with us at the Worths’ for a few more days before going on to New Zealand. We oscillated between Pete and Carolyn’s house and Shaney and Mark’s place. The two were not more than six miles apart. We also went to Melbourne Quakers’ Meeting House while we were there, which was well attended. When we had first arrived in Melbourne we had purchased second hand bikes and did most of our town roaming on those. Where it was too far to ride we used the tram system which connects almost every area of Melbourne. It’s a city with art galleries, an opera house, a huge cricket ground, several golf courses, a Formula One race track, museums, open air markets, a seaside, a port, an Olympic swimming pool – just about anything you could want – all within a few square miles. I could live there very easily. The Aussies may make fun of Poms, but Captain Cook and Captain Flinders are great heroes of the Aussies. They name railway stations and towns after them, so you’ve got to think that deep down, they’re just kidding.

Sport of course, is massively big in Oz. The boys, Conrad, Christian and Jordan, were easily accepted being good at cricket, rugby and five-a-side footy. However, the Ashes of 2006/7 were on during our stay and any Barmy Army fan will tell you it was a disaster from the English point of view. The ‘England and Wales Cricket Team’ were slaughtered at all five venues. I went to the Melbourne games with my three grandsons and my son-in-law, all decked out in George Cross Flags, only to witness the complete destruction of Vaughan’s miserable team. Even the great Freddy Flintoff couldn’t save them. The only cause for a smile were the songs of the Barmy Army, who sang, ‘God save YOUR gracious queen, long live YOUR noble queen . . . long may she reign over YOU . . .’ all the while pointing at the stands where the Aussie fans were staring with seething eyes at the Pom contingent. They also sang a parody of Waltzing Matilda – something about taking her behind the bike sheds for a shag – which brought a smile to my face and a glower to those who love the Banjo Patterson folk song.

True enough though, cricket is the National sport of the Antipodes and though we may win occasionally, it can never last very long, because every kid in every back yard of Melbourne – and indeed all the other cities and towns – has a cricket bat in his hand and stumps in the lawn. In Engand I never see kids playing cricket, except on the beach. Only football. It’s only because we’ve got fifty million people to help make up a team, and even then we find we’re asking the South Africans to lend a hand in defeating the Aussies.

The cricket came and went. In our last few weeks of our long stay in Australia Annette and I took a trip up the Murray River from Adelaide on a paddle boat. The bird life alone was fantastic. I spent all day, every day on the deck photographing spoonbills, darters, pelicans, eagles, hawks and scores of others. Annette read and painted, occasionally lifting her head when I gave an excited yell and pointed at some creature doing something natural. There’s nothing for the soul like it, just drifting slowly along a great river, watching the wilderness slide by on either side. The wildlife is not wary of a great lump of wood out on the water, even if it is carrying a bundle of humans. Animals and birds seem to know when we are safely contained and no threat to them. If they are grazers, after one lazy look they carry on grazing. If they are killers, they do not even bother with the look: they pounce, they stoop, they strike, they eat their prey right in front of your wincing face.

~

In the early part of the new millennium Annette was recruited by one of our Hong Kong friends to teach as a volunteer at a school in Bihar, Northern India, near the border of Bangladesh. Bihar is perhaps the poorest state in India. An eye doctor who came to Britain early in his career founded the school in his old village, where he had grown up as an untouchable. His name was Mahto – I use the past tense for Dr Mahto recently died of old age – and somehow he was educated despite his low status. When he became relatively rich, by Indian standards, he wanted to give something back. English is a national language in India but many of the rural people speak it so poorly they have difficulty in being understood by Europeans. If they want to get a job in telecommunications, which many of them do, they have to iron out their accents and learn to speak English a great deal more slowly.

Once a year Annette has paid for her own air fare and internal fares to get to the school, where she and her friend Roz, attempt to help the children with their pronunciation of English. They stay a month living at the school in basic conditions. I remember a friend, who knew the extreme temperatures of the climate, saying to Annette:

‘Do you have air conditioning?’

‘Air conditioning?’ Annette replied. ‘We don’t have windows.’

The whole school, including visitors, live on buffalo milk and bean curds. At night there are watchmen patrolling, it being a dangerous area for bandits, who blow whistles to communicate. Naturally those whistles wake anyone who is not used to the sound. Annette finds the visits rewarding but exhausting, taking handfuls of sleeping tablets with her. She has not long done her final visit, having developed deep vein thrombosis and having entered her late sixties. The time has come to retire from her retirement work abroad.

Here’s a short story of resourcefulness in the young.

One of her thirteen-year-old pupils at the school, paid for his own school fees by passing on the knowledge he gained in the classroom. He gathered local children even poorer than himself in the shade of a tamarisk tree after daily lessons. There he charged them one rupee to teach them what he had learned in class that day. In this way he gained an education and helped to raise that of the other village children. We, who have so much more in the West, need to adjust our values.

~

Before Annette was to start her visits to the school in Bihar we decided to investigate India together. It was Fe Evans, Chris’s lovely and adventurous young wife, who whetted our palates for a taste of this vast exotic country. Fe had talked to us about her backpacking years in India and Nepal and it sounded great. Also I was preparing to write two novels set in North India, which meant that I could get tax relief for research, probably the only bonus a writer gets.

‘You’ve done Malaysia to death,’ Fe had said, a couple of times. ‘Try India – you won’t regret it.’

And we haven’t.

Our first visit was to the old perennial, the golden triangle. We went out of season and during a SARS epidemic thus ensuring that we were the only two tourists in the whole subcontinent. This was a good thing because the locals drive the wrong way down motorways, weave around potholes and end up on the wrong side of the road, triple-overtake on blind corners and force each other into ditches. Add to that elephants wandering down dual carriageways, slow camel carts crossing high-speed junctions and the odd pack of dogs careering through the traffic chaos and we might well have never returned to England.

We spent much time assisting people getting their cars out of ditches and gawping at horrific accidents. The temperatures were around fifty degrees Celsius. Mighty, mighty hot. One day, out in the Rajastan wastelands (they had been suffering a several-years drought) the air conditioning in the Fiat Panda exploded, scaring the hell out of us and our driver, Subish. In order to have some air in the car he dropped the front windscreen and we drove into a cloud of unbreathable dust and grit all the way across the plains to Jaipur. Even when the air was clean the wind came from a bank of hair driers on at full blast. When we got to the outskirts we learned our hotel had been closed for two years.

In the late 1900s the Indian government had told its rajahs and maharajas that the state would no longer assist with the funding of aristocrats’ estates, so we were staying at palaces and hunting lodges that had by necessity been turned into hotels. A traditional tour tailor-made to our requirements. These places were stunningly beautiful of course, with all the magnificent architecture one associates with an eastern palace. And in each place we stayed we were the only guests, which had the staff hovering and swooping on our every need. At the hunting lodges we found waiters wanted to take us out and show us the bird life of the region and name the trees for us, which of course was just superb.

I gathered a huge amount of information for my book, Rogue Officer, set during the Indian Mutiny, also called the Sepoy Rebellion or the First War of Independence, depending on your nationality. In the lodges too there were photographs of the British Raj – Indian princes and British colonels – each with one foot on a dead tiger. We abhor such killing now of course, but this was of its time and as such, fascinating to see the arrogant expressions and the display of pomp and riches.

At Jaipur we went to the Indian Tourist Agency to remonstrate with them over a closed hotel.

‘You must show you are very angry with them,’ said Subish. ‘You must hit the table with your fist and demand the best compensation.’

That’s probably what Subish would have done, but westerners with inhibitions were probably going to say, ‘Excuse me, sir, but the hotel you sent us to does not exist. Can you help us?’

In fact, we were called into the Head Manager’s office and did not even have to open our mouths. They put us in the best hotel in Jaipur, another grand palace, and added a bonus of a visit to Ranthambhore Game Park. I put on my fiercest expression on leaving the office, so that Subish could see we had been obdurate. I nodded to him grimly.

‘Best hotel in Jaipur,’ I said.

Subish nodded back, firmly, obviously pleased that he was not driving a pair of wimps around the Rajastan plains.

Ranthambhore is one of the best places in India to see a tiger and we were delighted to be going there. However, we were warned that seeing one of these regal beasts was still very chancey. Bill Clinton had just left the region after two weeks at Ranthambhore and had not even glimpsed one of these shadowy creatures. We were to have a single afternoon.

Back out on the plains again, on our way to the game park, we had to pass through a remote village. As we drove down the main dirt track which led through the shacks we were aware of something happening. There were raging mobs of people, wailing and screaming hysterically. A group of men came storming up to our Panda, which Subish had brought to a halt, and one of them immediately cracked our windscreen with a rock. Subish quickly slammed the vehicle into reverse and shot backwards all the way to the edge of the village. Things seemed a little calmer there, though there was still a bad atmosphere.

Subish called a man over and asked him what was wrong. He told us a lorry driver had just ploughed into a crowd in the market killing four people, including a child. The whole village was grief-stricken and on the rampage. In the east a hysteria builds up in such situations and the people attack anything and anyone who is not of their community, whether innocent or guilty of the crime that has taken place. Subish knew he couldn’t drive through the village now, so he took a route over the ploughed fields and ditches. We found others, vehicles that had been behind us on the road, following us across the landscape. Fortunately the Panda had a high chassis and though it got a battering we made it to the other side of the troubled village and on to Ranthambhore, thanks to the cool thinking of our excellent driver.

We stayed at yet another hunting lodge. Here there was another British couple, the only other guests, who had braved SARS and the out-of-season heat, only to fall sick of enteritis. (We always go vegie in India, since a great percentage of the population are also vegetarians and the food choices are wide and excellent.) A jeep came to pick up Annette and me, to take us into the game park. In the front was a driver and sitting next to him, a guide. However, in the back was another very distinguished looking gentleman. The guide explained.

‘This is M.D. Parashar (sic),’ he told us, ‘the famous painter of tigers. Mr Parashar painted the logo for the Esso petrol company.’

We shook hands with Mr Parashar.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said the artist, ‘but I’d like to come out with you. I have a free afternoon and I want to take some photos. Afterwards I would be glad if you would join me in taking some tea at my studios, not far from here.’

We were quite happy with such exulted company. The guide whispered to us a little later that we were very lucky having Mr Parashar with us, because he was allowed into areas of the park that tourists like us were not normally permitted to enter. In fact the artist was a very amiable and knowledgeable man, who gave us a running commentary on all that we saw, from sambar deer to ruined lodges. We could not have had better company. And indeed, he knew where to find the tigers and led us first to a big male, who it had to be said stayed in the shade under a thorn bush and made himself very difficult to see, but then in the early evening to a beautiful female who walked right in front of us, clawed the trunk of a tree while we watched, then strolled away into the forest.

Unfortunately my camera (the old-fashioned film kind) was not working properly and we got only one poor shot of her, but still we have that precious photo now in our album. Afterwards we did indeed visit Mr Parashar’s studios where he showed us his latest paintings of tigers, both by himself and by his students, all of which were far too expensive for Mr and Mrs Kilworth of Tattingstone, Suffolk.

So ended our first taste of India. We saw the Taj Mahal, the Pink Palace, the Red Fort, and all the other buildings of course and like many others before and after us could not fail to be impressed. We’ve since returned twice more, but those latterly times to Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Kerala is our favourite state in the more green and pleasant south, it having a wonderful bird sanctuary, Thattekkad, with hundreds of species of birds, from the Sri Lankan Frogmouth to the Pied Kingfisher. As usual we wanted a homestay at the bird sanctuary for our accommodation, which is a bit like a bed-and-breakfast except one eats with the family as well as sharing their home with them. Annette called a man named Gireesh and he confirmed that he had a room free.

‘I’ll meet you in the town,’ he told us, ‘outside the courtrooms at midday.’

We had one of those hairy rides coming down through the mountains of the Western Ghats, narrowly avoiding death on every corner and were duly in the right place at the right time. Just when we were getting twitchy a man in barrister’s robes came leaping down the courtroom steps and opened our car door. It was our host.

‘Sorry,’ he said, breathlessly, ‘still in the middle of a case – but my mum’s coming to fetch you. See you later.’

He then ran back up inside the courtooms.

Mum arrived five minutes later in another car.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘jump in.’

She took us to a delightful two-storey house painted purple, nestling in the jungle of Thettekkad wildlife park and bird sanctuary. There were four generations: a three-year-old girl, Gireesh and his wife, mum and grandmother. All the adults spoke good English except grandmother, who spoke none at all, but insisted on hugging us every time she saw us in place of a verbal greeting. She was lovely and during the course of the week got out her photo album to show us pictures of her husband who had passed away just a few years earlier.

Gireesh’s father had also passed away, so he was surrounded by women. The whole household were keen bird watchers and guides, and mum took us out that evening to a lake where we saw three kinds of kingfisher. We enjoyed every moment of our stay with the family, having come from a homestay in a Karnataka wildlife park, where there was only one occupant of the house. However, it has to be said that particular host was the most wonderful chef and grew everything he cooked in his own garden, including the coffee beans.

We obviously met and joined occasionally with other travellers while we journeyed around south India. This included a group of four Australians. I developed a sort of friendly word-battle with Gwenda, one of the Aussies, in the way that Pommies and Aussies do.

At one point I dropped my guard and said to her, ‘You know, this is a great group. Often you get one person who spoils it for the rest, but we seem to have been lucky.’

Gwenda looked me straight in the eyes and replied, ‘So no one’s told you yet?’

Kerala is a Christian state, which also has local Communist councils. You see the red flag with the hammer and sickle flying from the towers and spires of churches and cathedrals. Very quirky and very Indian. One of my favourite advertisement boards stated that ‘Chadda Boiler Valves Are Serving God’s Country!’ But my all-time favourite company was the ‘Infant Jesus Radiator Works’. Such boards help to bring a smile to the face of the most weary tourist.

The kids in Kerala, as elsewhere in India, are endlessly, tirelessly playing cricket. Any spare piece of wasteland will find several matches going on, with a tatty ball and piece of boxwood for a bat. They will play from dusk until dawn and be there the next day. One homestay in Fort Cochi was opposite a ‘parade ground’, a flattened grassless area of packed earth which the police and army used to practise marching up and down. When the military weren’t there, the kids used this ‘maidan’ for their cricket pitches. We returned to this same homestay the second time we visited Cochin and this time I took with me two dozen cricket balls: twelve match balls and twelve practice balls. The utter pleasure on the faces of the children when I handed then round was priceless.

There is no easy way to travel around India. Using a car is highly dangerous. Travelling on a springless, crowded bus for hours is uncomfortable. The best way to travel is by rail. The trains, if a little grubby and insecty, are excellent. Food and tea vendors walk through the carriages, calling in soft voices, ‘Chai. Chai.’ ‘Curry. Curry.’

However, the railways do not serve every corner of India. If you want to go to a remote game park, you need at some point to go on the road, which means a car or bus. It has to be said though, the end is always worth the means.

~

In 2006, some Boy Entrants from my military school days in the 1950s arranged a reunion of the 29th Telegraphists. Eddie Owen and Bob Nottage worked hard to get us all together at a hotel in the Midlands. I recall there were only about twenty of us, out of a possible ninety. It’s quite strange walking into a room to find a bunch of old men you last saw 50 years previously. Some you recognise – those whose features remain fairly intact – some you have no idea who they are. My old Scottish pal Tam Keay was there, John Chidlow, Rod Williams, Bob Nottage, Alan Cake, Dorset, Ed, and others. We had a great dinner, with good speakers, and told many old stories. We all went home with warm memories stoked into fires again. Sadly, a short time afterwards Alan Cake had climbed onto the roof of his house to adjust the aerial to his ham radio – and fell, killing himself. A communicator to the last, Alan was the brightest of us and one of the most genial men you could meet.

It was in 2006 too, that myself and many of my classmates received the Pingat Jasa Medal, awarded to us by the Malaysian King and his Government for the Malaysian Campaign. Those of us who served in Malaysia and Singapore between 1957 and 1966 were awarded the medal which the British Government immediately told us we could not accept, even though the Aussie and Kiwi governments had accepted theirs. Lobbying ensued in parliament and eventually we were told we could accept the medal but not wear it. What? I’m not likely at my age to have an occasion to wear a gong and being a Quaker now I probably wouldn’t have done so anyway, but being told I can’t by those twits in Whitehall makes a massive difference. If ever I have to join a military parade again, or attend a formal dinner, that bloody medal will be on my chest alongside my GSM for the South Arabian Campaign.

~

In the same year my young adult novel Attica was published by Little Brown. It’s a story about an attic that expands to become a continent across which three young adults trek and meet various adventures. The children are accompanied by a three-legged cat called Nelson, who in real life was our Hong Kong friends Cath and Richard Beacher’s moggy. Nelson was a Tabby Persian, one of those tangle-haired scruffy-looking cats whose fur seems to be unravelling. He was a real character, Nelson. Unfortunately he died during the writing of the novel thus ensuring the book was dedicated to him.

Unlike other portal-into-another-world stories – the Narnia tales for example – the attic does not change its physical characteristics. It doesn’t become a world with grass, rivers and trees, but remains essentially an ordinary attic of boards, rafters and junk, though of course there are supernatural elements. Warner Brothers purchased the film option and four years later, in 2011, exercised that option. The film is now supposed to be in the making having been subcontracted to Johnny Depp’s new movie company Infinitum Nihil, but I was told not to hold my breath, which I took to mean it will be a long time coming.

~

At the end of November, 2009, my great friend and sometime collaborator Rob Holdstock died suddenly of multiple organ failure at the relatively young age of 61. It was a devastating blow, not just to me, but to all his friends. He was my rock in the writing world. Without him I would never have been the multi-published author I am today. He encouraged, he praised, he assisted. Above all he was good at laughing and making light of things bad like savage reviews. One of the main needs of a writer is to talk to another writer. Yes, there are those I can still talk with, but none can replace Rob, who was always there, always ready to help dispel the fears and discouragements, the insecurities that writers labour under. He was also a wonderful companion, who along with Sarah came on many holidays with Annette and me, and many long walks in wild places. Others too are as bereft, for Rob was a universal man, who was loved and valued by all who knew him.

Rob had a non-religious funeral attended by many, many friends and relations, several of whom had their Rob Holdstock stories to relate. The place was festooned with photographs of this well-loved man who went to a green resting place in a wicker coffin. He now stands as a young oak on a hillside in Kent, the county of his birth.

~

My biography effectively ends here. My children are well and seem happy with their lives. My grandchildren are almost all grown up, the oldest two are adults already. I am happy living in my two villages, La Herradura in the winter, Tattingstone in spring, summer and autumn. I play golf twice a week with some good old boys at my Seckford club. The village cinema club is thriving, Annette and I are are still volunteers at Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon site, and Annette is a Suffolk Wildlife volunteer, teaches English to immigrants and is probably more busy than she ever was as a working person. My former skills – especially that of a Morse code operator – are mostly obsolete. I experience what a blacksmith must feel as he watches cars go flashing by. Probably worse, as there are indeed still some horses to shoe in the world.

Through Facebook I have reconnected with several old friends from my distant youth – two being Tom Hasler and Dave Thompson – both of whom live in my part of Spain. With John Porter, my now retired King’s College professor, I go on visits to art galleries in London. Writing friends, Hong Kong friends, they are mostly all still thriving. My darling Annette, love of my life, is still at my side and ever patient with an author who drifts off into a dreamworld every now and again.

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.