News from Ted
This is Part Two of a dispatch I sent to the Sunday Times after my detention by the Federal Police. If you didn’t read last week’s episode, please do that first:
>>> Fortaleza Part One
At two the team drifted back. There was nowhere to sit. I tried walking about. There was an older sergeant figure with a hard-boiled face. He pointed to the wall. “Fica!” (Stay) he commanded. I protested. Eloquently he mimed a spy taking photographs. His face expressed total disgust. “Fica” he roared and thrust me back to the wall. Nobody raised an eyebrow. At four I was summoned along a corridor and down some back stairs to a cellar to have my own photograph taken, then my fingerprints, each finger and thumb separately, then in groups, all repeated five times. “Do you play the piano?” joked the agent. To me it evoked a quick picture of crushed fingers.
By six I was alone again, with another dish of rice and beans. The hours stretched ahead endlessly. It rained. I noticed two walls were very damp. I tried taking my mind off my predicament but couldn’t. There was nothing to do but think. I slept with a second mattress on top of me to keep off the wet draught.
Saturday began without hope. The office remained empty. There was no work there on Saturdays and as the minutes piled up into hours I slipped further into dejection and fear. Fiercely I studied my prison. I counted the floor tiles (1,520 including fractions). Then the tiles on the wall (1,108). I invented escape plans. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was expected to escape. What better pretext for doing away with me altogether? This led easily to the notion that perhaps I was being observed and I began to look surreptitiously for a concealed camera or spy-hole.
Only two events interrupted the day. Rice and beans at twelve, and a strange radio message at four. It blared out loud and clear from the second floor. Each phrase was carefully repeated, so that I could understand several words and the general drift. The words were “Ingles . . . Marcello . . .to Rio . . .then . . . to Inglaterra.” The operator replied that he now had the “films of Africa and the coast.” The films could only be mine. The priest in whose company I walked around Iguatú was known as Marcello. I could no longer doubt they had convinced themselves of his guilt and deported him. The little hope I’d kept alive evaporated. I felt sure they suspected me of subversion. They “knew” something was wrong about me. (No.1 confirmed this to a third party later saying, “he smells.” But they would never find evidence. There was none. Eventually, I felt, they would be bound to try to force some out of me and that process, once started, might be irreversible.
Over the next six hours I came to terms with the idea. and wrote a letter to one of the two people I love most (on a scrap of paper I’d saved) and felt calmer as though I had talked to her. That evening Fortaleza had its heaviest cloudburst in 60 years. Water came through the roof and walls, and gurgled in the drains below.
Then the hatch opened and a bearded face appeared, framed in it.
“British?” it asked. I nodded. “Mathews,” it said. “I’m the British vice-consul in Fortaleza.” Nothing I’ve ever heard sounded so sweet as those few words. Spectres which only a few moments before had born down on me with stifling weight shrivelled and faded in the presence of Her Majesty’s representative. God bless consuls everywhere. Mathews could do little to alter the course of events but it was enough to know I could no longer vanish without trace. He tackled his duties squarely and insisted on telephoning No.1 at home. He was told that I was involved in “something very big,” which would be explained on Monday. Meanwhile I was only being retained “with full rights.”
I described what such privileged retention was like and begged him to fetch clothing and shaving things from Sâo Raimundo, and above all news of what was going on. Mathews was tired after a long journey but he slogged out to the parish and came back with some things and the welcome news that everything at São Raimundo seemed perfectly normal. No police had been there yet. Pleased but puzzled I let him go home to sleep.
He came back just before lunch on Sunday with some Agatha Christies from the twenties and told the “agente” on duty that I was permitted to go out to eat. As though amazed that I hadn’t thought to ask myself the agent said, “Of course” with a wide smile and we drove together to a restaurant on the beach. The moment I stepped into the sun for the first time in three days was a physical shock. My clothes had been saturated with moisture. I had a heavy cold and was slightly feverish. The sun boiled the water vapour off me in seconds. I felt it reach into my bones. Only then did I realise what an unhealthy hole I’d been locked up in. We sat at a table with a white cloth, looking across at the sea, eating good food, drinking cold beer, and I couldn’t help feeling the whole ordeal had ended. In fact it had just changed gear.
Altogether it was 12 days before I was released. There were endless pretexts and procrastinations, and I came to resent bitterly the wanton abuse of my life but I soon learned it was useless to complain. None of the agents appeared to place any value on personal liberty. The Consul’s intercession had broken through their indifference and some of the younger agents were interested now and tried to talk but were clearly bewildered by my impatience. An English-speaking girl came to chat at lunchtimes, and I tried to explain my anger at being imprisoned. She laughed at the idea. “Everyone is in prison,” she said. “Fathers, husbands, children, they all make prisons.”
On Wednesday Mathews left Fortaleza for four days. He had been “guaranteed” that my fate would be resolved before my return. No.2 insisted that he was still waiting for routine replies to his cables.
At lunch on Friday I was walking with a policeman when a black limousine rushed up alongside and slithered to a halt, Chicago style. The driver shouted and gestured wildly, ordering us into the car, and then shot off, spinning his wheels on the wet cobbles, in the direction of Sâo Raimundo. “This is it,” I thought wearily. Then, as suddenly, he took a sharp left turn and we were in front of the police station again.
We were rushed into No.1’s office, where he was standing, talking on the telephone. He paused and said, “The secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to talk to you.”
He went on talking and I heard him say I had been in custody four days.
“Eight days,” I said angrily, raising eight fingers. He ignored me. I had a long civilising conversation with the diplomat in Brasilia. I felt sure that his involvement would end my detention.
After the call N0.1 became quite effusive, slapping me on the back and practising his English as we left for our separate lunches. In the afternoon everything seemed to be happening. The Consul appeared a day early, with a Scotsman from the Bank of London. They went in to see No.1 and then came to talk. They seemed confident I would be out that day. Then Mathews went back alone and returned with the depressing news that they were still determined to hold on to me. I was outraged and cursed long and loud. Then he told me: “They say they are after another Englishman for subversion, and he has the same names as yours but in a different order. “In my more fanciful moments I had wondered whether there could have been another Englishman going about to explain the strange fragments of information I had heard. But with the same names?
On Tuesday afternoon I was finally delivered into the hands of the Consul, with the Bank of London acting as midwife. I had been put back on rice and beans the previous day and during the last 24 hours had nothing to eat.
The priests received me back into Sâo Raimundo with great good humour. My belt was still under the fridge, exactly as I’d left it. There were many stories to tell, and they told theirs with scabrous joy. If one didn’t know, one could mistake them for a rather high-class construction crew. When my cold died I got dysentery, and by the time I felt well enough to leave I’d been in Fortaleza more than a month. Was it worth it? One of those Irish stories seems nicely relevant. A stranger, lost in the heart of Ireland, asks the way from a passing local, who struggles with directions and becomes more and more confused himself, until admitting defeat, he says: “You know, if I were you, Sorr, I wouldn’t start from here at all.”
When I booked my passage on the Zoe.G I knew only that it sailed to Rio de Janeiro. Later, once on board, I discovered that it would first call in at Fortaleza, a city in the far north of Brazil. Though it had a population of a million I had never heard of it – an indication of my ignorance. I also did not know that Brazil was a police state, in the grip of a relentless dictatorship. I decided to disembark in Fortaleza and ride the 1,300 miles down to Rio.
Fortaleza, May 14?
The ship drifted in passing fishermen on the most primitive craft, little more than floating boards.
Then the ship docked. My bike was spirited away to customs. Two policemen came on board and questioned me about my Scuba gear. They were convinced I must have diving equipment. I stayed on board two days while the ship was unloaded and while I visited the town my cabin was searched.
The ship was delivering cashew nuts from Africa, and I watched them being hauled out of the hold.
Communicating through telex The Sunday Times suggested I make contact with some priests in Fortaleza and visit a flood catastrophe inland. I followed their advice and took some pictures.
When I returned I was “invited” to the police station. Several weeks later I wrote the following piece for the Sunday Times. Here is Part One.
Obviously I should have been locked up long ago. The Brazilian police have shown me to myself in an alarming new light as a person who’s very being excites suspicion and alarm.
The suspect was apparently born in Germany , of a German mother and a Romanian father. Yet he carries a British passport (with no indication of naturalisation) and lives in France. Physically, however, he looks more like an arms dealer from Baghdad and his passport contains several pages of Arabic script which might as well be a prescription for exploding coconuts. He claims to be traveling around the world on a motorcycle but when asked why can offer no credible explanation. His arrival in Fortaleza on a Greek freighter is inexplicable and unheralded since he has a paid passage to Rio. He presents himself as a tourist but immediately engages in a fierce telex exchange with his masters in London who machinate under the code name “Thomsonews.” They instruct him to join forces with a network of missionaries from Ireland who are vaguely affiliated to another organisation, unknown to the Federal Police at this time, called Oxfam. Under these auspices he slips out of Fortaleza at night by bus (?) to Iguatú, scene of a recent flood disaster and a hotbed of counter revolution. There he interviews flood victims and photographs them and their devastated homes. Two days later he makes the seven hour bus journey back to Fortaleza.
I was not so much seized as invited into captivity. I had long stopped expecting trouble. The first two days the police buzzed around me like flies. Then came the Sunday Times telex about the Irish fathers, Oxfam, and the floods at Iguatú. It smacked strongly of “journalism”, an association I preferred to avoid, and I was fairly sure such conspicuous communications were monitored. However, the police assured me I was “free to go anywhere.”
By now the priests in Fortaleza had invited me to stay. They are well established in the area of Sâo Raimundo with a large college, a church and a number of community projects. They have other groups in many parts of the country, including Iguatú, and one of their number was returning there after an illness. I went with him, by bus, and came back two days later.
The message waiting for me back at São Raimundo was casual and innocuous. Would I call at the Maritime Police office and ask for Samuel. I went the following afternoon. Samuel was the youngest and most sympathetic of the police who had talked to me at the docks. He apologised for the bother and said the Federal Police simply wanted to ask some questions for the record. We drove in a police car to their office behind the cathedral, a white plastered villa webbed over with aerials. We waited for an hour and a half and I didn’t think there could be much to worry about. Then I was taken into an office where several people were waiting. Opposite, across a desk, sat a short belligerent man who attacked me angrily right away. “You have been taking pictures in Iguatú. Are you a journalist?”
I have made a point on this journey of not traveling as a journalist. This adventure is a personal one and not a professional exercise. The Sunday Times does not employ me to investigate newsworthy situations, it helps me in return for an account of some of my experiences.
But behind this truth lurks ambiguity. I have been a journalist, and for emergencies I carry documents and an older passport identifying me as such. These I keep separately, with a reserve of cash in a money belt, and that belt was among my things at Sâo Raimundo.
Having arrived in Brazil as a tourist I was determined to stay as one, and I denied the charge. I cheerfully admitted taking pictures, and with genuine curiosity asked why not? But they were not there to answer questions.
Samuel was ordered to take me back to São Raimundo and fetch my cameras, films, everything. The affair was beginning to look serious. As we approached the crumbling outskirts I tried to form a plan. I thought I should keep those other documents to myself or they would create worse confusion. The house was empty, but I knew where the backdoor key was. I mumbled in English and dashed round the side of the house. Samuel waited patiently while I let myself in at the back, got the belt out of my room and slipped it under the dining-room fridge. Then I let him in through the front door. Samuel was probably the most intelligent of them all. He wasn’t worried because he’d taken the trouble to talk to me. He knew damn well I wasn’t a threat to Brazil or anyone. Unfortunately he didn’t explain earlier that the one thing that would have soothed his chief was documentary proof that I was a journalist. When I found that out it was too late.
The Inspector of the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS) had been quiet at our earlier meeting. He received us in his office, took the films, rocked himself gently in his padded chair and broadcast my exotic particulars to Interpol and a variety of domestic Brazilian intelligence departments. I began to realise that by refusing the label of journalist I had made room for other less comfortable labels. He said he would have to keep me there, perhaps for the night, until he had replies to his inquiries. Even then I was surprised.
I was taken to an office, with desks, chairs, tiled floor and walls. Once an open patio, a roof had been raised over it, leaving a three-foot space above the walls open to the air. Iron grills barred the exits to the street and the back. A shuttered widow opened on to the reception area where a military policeman and an “agente” stood duty. Shuttered double doors led into the main building. There were collapsible beds with straw mattresses in a corner. I was given a plate of rice and beans and left for the night.
I had nothing with me but my wallet, and the shirt, trousers, shoes and socks I’d arrived in. My shoes were still soaked from the day’s tropical downpour. In the night the wind blew surprisingly cold and damp. From a communications room on the second floor, morse code and telex chattered through the night. I cheered myself that they were bringing information that would release me.
Next morning I was allowed to the bathroom and looked longingly at the shower. There was no towel so I washed my face and dried it on lavatory paper. Then I waited in the office. At about eight the staff arrived. They seemed amiable enough though they ignored me completely. The office houses two departments, DOPS and a drug squad called Toxicos. Two attractive secretaries took their seats. Young men gathered, lounging about, chatting, playing with guns and handcuffs, 332 waiting for something to do. Many carried textbooks and notes and, I learned, studied in their spare time. Only one or two looked capable of real menace. My presence was neither surprising nor relevant to them. A few stumbling attempts to get breakfast were easily brushed aside. I stood against the wall because there was a general shortage of chairs.
Then at eleven a young Englishman arrived. I had met him before at São Raimundo. He had volunteered to help me make a statement. We were taken to the Superintendent, whom I came to think of as No.1 (the Inspector was No.2). No.1 spread himself on his armchair and addressed us on the importance of security. His job, he said, was to check subversion and frustrate the slanders of the international communist press. I had been photographing and interviewing destitute people in Iguatú. I replied that the Sunday Times could hardly be considered part of a communist conspiracy. He countered with an obscure reference to Le Monde.
I thought how foolish all this was. In fact I had formed a good impression of the government’s efforts to relieve the miseries of Iguatú’s homeless. I had seen them temporarily housed and fed as well as might have been expected. I had seen the beginnings of a very promising self-help housing project supported by Oxfam with some impressively ingenious brick-making machines. The land had been granted by the able and energetic governor of the State of Ceara, who had also mobilised the army effectively to repair flood damage and distribute free grain and seed stocks in the rural areas.
We were swept in to see No.2 who asked more questions. I was sad to find that the priests also were suspect. Eventually No.2 composed a three-page statement in triplicate which seemed truthful and harmless enough to sign. Only with the pen in my hand did I discover how strained I was. The pen refused to do what I asked of it. My first attempt was such a mess I had to cross it out and start again. Even the ninth signature was an awkward travesty of my usual mark. Then No.1 reappeared and the mood became quite genial. A day or two would set me free, he said, and repeated that he was waiting for replies to routine enquiries. Meanwhile I would be escorted out for meals if I wished. I asked for a towel, a razor, some clothes and something to read. My friend was due to return home to the next state but promised to let the British vice-Consul know where I was.
I returned to the office and waited to be taken to lunch. My shirt, once white, was grey and sticky from sweat and humidity My face had two days’ bristle. The office cleared for lunch and I was left locked in. After half an hour an orderly came with a bowl of rice and beans, and my morale took a sickening lurch. Clearly nothing said that morning was to be believed. The whole euphoric event seem to have been orchestrated to get my signature and send the Englishman away happy. The Consul? The Englishman had been late for his bus. The police had offered to drive him to the bus station. They could easily say “Don’t worry. You’re late. We’ll see to it.” The priests would be unable to help and that, I realised, disposed of my links to the outside world. It was buttoned up. I was in the hands of professionals.
Next week: Part two
Along the way through Africa I occasionally wrote small essays or mini-reports. A major issue of the day was Southern Rhodesia’s refusal to accept that an all-white government was not sustainable. Britain having divested itself of empire could not afford to be sheltering a white colony, and Ian Smith’s efforts to go it alone led to heavy sanctions. In theory British firms were forbidden to trade with Rhodesia. This is what I wrote:
In practice life on both sides of the Zambesi curtain proceeds moderately well in spite of economic difficulties. On the face of it, the Rhodesians do better. They are inordinately proud of their sanction-busting prowess. British brand names, like Dunlop and Lyons, flourish. I’ve seen machinery newly arrived from Britain, and Rhodesia now manufactures much of what it once imported. But the sanctions, which seemed so feeble are becoming deadly in their long-term effect. While the farmers can hold out well enough, the business community shows signs of quiet desperation. Several times I heard the same story. Shortage of foreign currency, combined with an average 50% extra cost involved in intricate importing procedures are causing stagnation. While Africans can make do (as can the Arabs) with a subsistence livelihood, white Rhodesians are used to high consumption and leisure.
As an interesting sidelight, several Rhodesian women I spoke with took perverse pleasure in telling me that their divorce rate was the highest in the world.
My journey offered an unusual opportunity to experience both sides of a confrontation. A story that illustrates the absurdity of the border closure – the price of high-sounding principles The Chinese contract to build the Tan Zam railway. Part of the price to Kaunda is a delivery of maize. This is produced in Zambia by African farmers – and European growers. To stimulate the African sector KK gives them a preferential selling rate. Instead of increasing the yield the yield drops. It turns out that the African grows only as much as he needs to cover his costs. Result is that Zambia must import maize to settle its obligations to China. The only source of maize is Rhodesia – but direct import is out of the question. So, it is brought in though Botswana. The price in Rhodesia is $3.50 a bag, but Botswana levies a heavy duty to cash in on its neighbour’s troubles. By the time it gets to Zambia it costs double the price. So Zambia is paying a colossal premium to provide China with Rhodesian maize (There is no evidence that the Chinese choked on it.)
The cob is, of course, a vital ingredient of African life. It’s an interesting plant – being flagrantly bisexual. The male half exhibits itself with a flourish at the uppermost tip with a flower (often seven or eight feet high) that sheds pollen. While the female component protrudes more coyly from the stem with bunches of fronds which collect the pollen as it drifts down from above and develops into the cob, packed with corn.
Much expertise is involved in getting the best hybrid, and on both sides of the Zambesi the producers of seed maize are under great pressure to keep up the quality. I talked to experts on both sides. In Zambia an agricultural scientist – a white man who likes it here – said the government had set standards for seed maize that were the most exacting in the world. In Rhodesia a seed maize farmer was equally certain of his truth. The hybrid In Zambia, he said, depended eventually on Rhodesian expertise and since the border closure had degenerated to such an extent that compared with the Rhodesian variety it was hardly better than a weed.
These distortions and misconceptions, present across all the borders I’ve crossed, reach absurd proportions here. To many Rhodesians, Zambia is a land of economic chaos riddled with terrorism and ruled by proxy from China as part of a world communist conspiracy to destroy Rhodesia and ultimately South Africa.
[What actually happened? Instead of making some kind of reasonable accommodation with Tom M’boya, Smith hung on to the bitter end and gave way to Mugabe who pretty much destroyed Rhodesia’s brilliant farming economy. Well, that’s how I saw it. Now, back on board . . .]
When I first took my things aboard back in LM, the Zoe.G was all I had ever imagined a Greek freighter to be, from early readings of Greene and Ambler. The sight dented my morale severely for 24 hours. Evidently she could float but it seemed only a matter of time before the rust gave way somewhere important and let the sea in. I couldn’t see a clear painted surface or a glint of polished brass anywhere. Under the night loading lights the decks were littered with debris except where a great hole gaped. Far below in the hold some Black men where chanting and moving sleeper-sized bars of metal. There didn’t seem much of a cargo.
Now, after several days at sea the gale seemed to have had a cleansing effect. The captain of the ship was Fotius Fafoutis. All his officers, with the exception of the Philippino radio operator, are Greeks. They speak little or no English. I am the only passenger and I do not, as they used to say, “have Greek,’ Morning, noon and night I sat in the saloon watching the faces and listening to the talk. Food is consumed in silence. There is much time on shipboard, and it would be wasteful to duplicate diversions.
The faces generally have a mournful, introverted aspect, emphasised by the Greek talent for running to seed. Bristle and sweat, deep furrows and tangled hair, grubby singlets, grimy nails, the greasy remnants of last year’s shore-going best. Then, with the food almost gone, the talking begins. Usually the electrician started it, the first mate joined in, then the chief engineer, then one of the third engineers, in order of the different degrees of loquacity. The speech transformed them. Once animated their eyes flashed, intelligence illuminated their faces, they discarded their shirts for the robes of a Greek Forum and judging by their rhetoric they might have been debating the existential issues of our time, but Captain Fafoutis explained that the subject matter was cars, girls, furniture, girls, and more girls.
[Furniture?]
Captain Fafoutis overseeing the loading
“It’s a bad life,” he said. “Far from home and family. Children grow up, you don’t see them. And in port looking for girls. Then three months for worrying. The smallest trouble is gonorrhea, the worst syphilis. Is no good. But when seaman goes home and decide to stay on shore, in three months he looks for another ship. He can do nothing. No work. And go to sea again because is better than nothing.”
But the captain has his wife with him on board.
Painting over the rust – it never stops
I’ll see you again next week – same boat.
From Lourenço Marques my ship had to sail south and round the horn of Africa.
Thursday, May 9th, 10th, 11th
Sail along the coast [Mocambique, South Africa.] Calm sunny weather. On the 12th mountains of Cape Town barely visible in shrouds of mist. Then into Atlantic. Albatrosses. Small trawler. Disabled liner, listing to starboard, towed by tug. Chess games [with whom?]
Sunday 12th
Jog day. [‘Jog’ was a nickname for my girlfriend Jo. It was her birthday.]
Fine, clear, calm. Start a letter in which I falsely declare that we will meet in the same latitude that day. But I believe it so it stands. What counts? Fact or belief. The fact, after all, is only a belief ratified by consensus. In an infinite number of conjectural worlds we believe the one that gives us the greatest material dominium. In recent times it has seemed as though nothing can stand in the way of this system. It is the logical extension of the animal which reacts (we suppose) only to pain. In seeking to enslave nature we have enslaved ourselves to a system which makes all other forms of experience subordinate to a negative principle – the absence of discomfort. Perhaps this is why modern society is often called ‘hollow.’ In fact there is ample evidence to show that people are unsatisfied by ‘progress.’) But being slaves of the system, they can only fight fire with fire, and are burned all the more.
Contemporary strikers are abused for their irrational behaviour, in pursuing a factional advantage which reduces the common good. They are the levelers of our society.
[Britain is in turmoil. Coal miners are striking. My diary wanders off into wild political and philosophic speculation.]
The South Atlantic
Blue. Long swells, 100 – 200 feet. Mild, scattered cloud.
Bird life. Several large species, similar to albatross, wingspans up to a metre. Some with bodies and wings brown above, some white bodies, brown wings. Some with additional white markings on wings (the biggest). Also a medium-sized dark bird in groups. And once a flock of a dozen or so tiny birds, glinting, white, too small and bright to distinguish, skimming the waves on an opposite course to ours.
The Zoe.G
Deadweight 7000 tons. Displacement 4000. About 400 ft long. The main accommodation is amidships above and alongside the engine room. There’s a main saloon in which officers eat, with one long table down the middle and two shorter ones each side, all parallel to the keel. The portside table has a tablecloth on it, permanently, and is never used. I think it’s for passengers. The other small table has a knitted black–grey cover and is used for coffee, tric-trac and ash trays. Also the daily news sheet from Athens.
Saloon has double doors and 4 ports opening onto a gallery across the ship which is one level up from the deck. Above it is a second level and the three levels are joined by two gangways, one each side. The saloon faces back (astern). Forward of it are two corridors, all wood-paneled, with cabins opening off. The cabins have names like Corfu, Xanthos, etc. but the nail holes from the letters of the previous names, when the ship was Swedish, are still visible. Although the ship was much neglected it is clear that it could still be made quite sumptuous by old-fashioned standards.
Me on the Zoe.G
And here’s the deck hand who took the picture.
There was originally accommodation for twelve passengers, but now the crew uses most of this space (if not all). The two corridors lead to a sort of foyer from which a staircase rises, dividing in two and curling off left and right to meet a landing. About all this there is a touch of Thirties splendour, the Trocadero, Quagllno’s. The staircase throngs with ghostly celebrators in paper hats. It faces glazed double doors with frosted glass designs leading to the Mykonos Lounge, which has a bar and soft furniture. Now occupied only as an office. The officers live in style and space that was never meant to be. Atop of the stairs are the owner’s quarters (to port) and the captain’s quarters. I imagine them to be of similar size, although the captain has a private stairway up to the bridge, which is above both quarters. The owners’ (and I don’t suppose any of the owners have ever slept in it) has a living room, bathroom and double bedroom. The living room has two tables bolted to the floor with brass mountings. And several wall cupboards. All have roll-top type doors. There’s a refrigerator and above it a drinks cupboard.
[This where I’m quartered – but there were no drinks in the cupboard.]
Four windows. Each window in the ship is hinged with four screw-type fixings in heavy metal to clamp it to its frame. Bathroom has large twin basins, a lavatory with a broken seat, a bathtub with shower and curtains. Tub is dirty and has no plug. Shower only has one jet. Curtains torn. Door has warped and split into two layers of veneer and ply at the upper corner and won’t shut. All glazed surfaces are blue. Must have been very smart once. Beds are bunks, but good mattresses on sprung frames. One under windows, (three altogether) one against wall. Dressing table recessed, mirror with folding wings.
Up through the middle of this block the engine room rises, tapering towards the top, housing several big boilers, heated presumably by the exhaust gases from the diesel. The gases and hot air escape through a faired cowling like a vast eccentric blancmange, which is the evolved shape of the old funnel. On either side of this is a bell-shaped air intake, portside facing astern, starboard facing forward and out at an angle to catch slipstream from the funnel. The engine room itself is a great mysterious cavern. The door opens onto the deck below the saloon door. Looking down, it drops away, layer upon layer as in a cutaway model to the bottom of the ship, which seems improbably deep. In the centre of the picture are eight huge valves, in line in blocks of four, the rockers packing down on the valve stems, the springs like coiled pythons, monstrous images of my own diminutive [motorcycle] valves.
Ship has five hatches – of which the first is raised above the forecastle, the deck being of welded steel, pockmarked by rust and dents, and coated with paint like a custard skin. Other decks are wood, caulking half gone. A lifeboat each side.
Every now and again a siren whistle calls the telephone in the engine room.
Crew of thirty – twelve officers, Captain, First, Second and Third mates, Chief engineer, Second and two Third engineers, apprentice engineer, Radio officer, Electrical officer.
Before I sign off, here’s a little bonus (or penalty maybe?} Not required reading.
I had always planned to use the Atlantic crossing from Africa to the Americas to learn Spanish. It is one of the very few events I planned for this otherwise formless meander round the world. Rather than carry extra weight through Africa I thought I would get the book I wanted in Cape Town but as it turned out I was lucky to find any book at all. I visited all the big bookshops. From Stuttaford’s to Juta’s, to the Pilgrim and Makaus, the CNN and the Academy and the other big shops near it I trudged. All were sold out. None of them could tell me why. But there was an explanation, and that lay in the State Visit of the President of Paraguay. The first head of state to grace (or disgrace) the shores of the republic since heaven knows when, if ever.
This astonishing event did more to emphasise South Africa’s political isolation than anything in recent times. I don’t know whether Stroessner deserves his infamous reputation as the junta boss who hit on the horrible notion of offering a tax and extradition-free flag of convenience to international heroin smugglers. But it is a fact that he is notorious, and South Africa’s English opposition press was not slow to publish all the grisly accusations amassed from American news magazines.
The Nationalist Government however, as is its invariable wont, crashed on regardless of ridicule. But who spoke Spanish? I imagine the Afrikaaner Diplomatic Corps, buying up all the language books and performing its duties most solemnly by midnight oil, grinding through the declinations of obedicir: to obey. Either that or Vorster was determined to do his utmost to protect his new pal from public obscenities in his own language.
I prefer the first explanation because it promises a new and unexpected etymological wonder – Spanish spoken with an Afrikaans accent.
I did finally secure the last remaining copy of a Spanish textbook. Not the one I wanted but, as it turns out, a very good one called Spanish Made Simple (W.H.Allen: £1.00)
The theme of the book makes its first tenuous claim on my attention in Chapter Three, when I am introduced to Mrs Adams, a London businesswoman eager to learn Spanish, and her teacher, Seńor Lopez, a Spaniard living in London. To cries of “Buen suerte” and “Buen viaje” I set off to accompany Mrs Adams on the road which leads to a practical knowledge of the Spanish language.
It is clear from the start that Mrs Adams is not to be trifled with. She has four children, a ten-room house in the suburbs, and an office on the fifth floor of a very big building in Oxford street. Furthermore she has an agent in Madrid and she imports objetos de arte and otros articulos. Like all really successful business people she is well behind the times, and she is satisfying an insatiable provincial nostalgia for Torero dolls and Costa Brava wineskins, long after London has moved on through Djelabas, Afghan rugs, Dhotis, Mantras, and Vietnamese grass.
In another important respect Mrs Adams shows her mettle because she has acquired a husband who has sired the children, pays the mortgage on the ten rooms (out Wimbledon way, I fancy) and makes no other intrusion on her life except for brisk chats at breakfast time about the bills and the children’s schooling. Mr Adams is therefore free to devote herself exclusively to her business (objetos de arte) and her hobby (Seńor Lopez). To set the seal on this triumph of convenience she also has a maid to open and close doors.
The action now proceeds apace. Seńor Lopez, a formidable if old-fashioned pedagogue, makes a whirlwind series of arrivals and departures at Wimbledon, exhausting the maid, but contenting himself at first with a flurry of formal greetings and other bourgeois courtesies.
However he has now established himself securely as the one who wears the pantalones in the Adams nest. Gradually they now unfold their mutual passion for Spanish cooking, Talavera pottery, Basque dances, and counting from one to a hundred. Mrs Adams is succumbing steadily to Seńor Lopez’s charms. And leans more and more heavily on his worldly Latin words, while he ingratiates himself with constant flattery and attention.
After ten chapters she is seeking his advice on tummy upsets, while he has already penetrated her office to give his opinion on the latest consignment of articulos. The future could look bright for the sly Iberian. (Mr Adams can undoubtedly afford alimony) but there is a fly in his ointment. Mrs A’s pretext for these constant meetings is a projected visit to Spain. Now suddenly for Seńor Lopez this prospect assumes a dangerous reality, for in Madrid she is to meet her Spanish agent, a younger man. Seńor Lopez has no illusions about his countrymen, and when she shows him the letter she has written to Madrid it is easy to hear, through his urbane congratulations on her syntax, the sighs of a tortured heart. For her letter is signed, Jane Adams, the first time her immaculate business two piece has been sloughed off to reveal the maidenly creature beneath, and not for Seńor Lopez – por suppuesto – but for that sneaking Madrileno, Rufino Carillo, the Spanish Connection.
Seńor Lopez is desperate and in chapter nineteen he defies his mature years with a reckless visit to Wimbledon on a stormy night. The rain is coming down in cantaros (buckets) and the maid opens the door to find Seńor Lopez soaked to the skin and shivering. Normally Mrs Adams receives him in her salon but now it seems his wild gamble has paid off. Jane Adams herself rushes into the hall and leads the sopping Seńor upstairs. No doubt recalling how Jane Russell once infused her warmth into the icy body of her lover (they have discussed the cinema in chapter 15) he leaves his teeth to chatter and follows hopefully, but for the moment Mrs Adams makes do with tea and rum in the dining room.
So far the action has been fairly conventional. Something of a farce perhaps with those endless comings and goings and cries of Hasta luego, but with gathering satirical undertones for the discerning ear.
Chapter 20 disposes utterly of such fantasies and little conceits. With the savagery of Psycho it massacres every burgeoning bud of sentimentality, pulls out all the sops. In three relentless sentences the foolish edifice of ârticulos and dolores de estomago is brought crashing (cayendo) to the ground.
“All life long (todavia) Mrs Adams and Seńor Lopez are sitting in the dining room.”
“All life long (todavia) they are chatting and drinking tea and rum.”
“All life long (todavia) it is raining.”
How can I begin to describe the effect of those three hammer blows. Todavia, todavia, todavia. Henceforth all is fantasy, dreamed up along with the trappings of a spurious culture by two inadequate figures spiritually marooned in a Wimbedon dining room and supporting their ceaseless prattle on an infinite supply of tea and rum, the perfect concoction for futility.
Finally my ship, the Zoe.G, is ready to sail from Lourenço Marques for Brasil. It’s eight o’clock and dark.
L.M. Wednesday, May 8th
The pilot appears in the doorway of the captain’s cabin. A dark, bearded figure in a heavy coat. He seems shrouded in darkness and mystery. A portentous figure.
“Are you ready, Captain? “The boat has been shivering gently for hours, a soft, almost inaudible rustling in the paneling. Like the breath of a sleeping child, flowing and ebbing, flowing and ebbing. The Captain, in cream shirt and grey flannels with a zip that won’t quite close, has been like any office worker in a humdrum business tapping out tedious letters on a clapped-out Standard typewriter, and filling in forms. The agent’s clerk in charge of the manifest has noted the loading for fuel, water, the expected time of arrival in Fortaleza, the draught fore and aft and the anticipated mean draught at Fortaleza. He is a tall, graceful Portuguese Indian with a liquid charm and a wry smile which carries a permanent suggestion that behind the apparent reality of the moment is an altogether different and more significant reality which promises little good. We have been discussing the future of Moçambique after the coup.
“There will be trouble,” he says. “You will see. You will hear about it. there will be bloodshed.”
Politely he listens to my arguments, but they carry no weight, and don’t convince me either.
“I was four years in the army fighting this war. I left university to go to the army. When I finished I gave up university. There was no time anymore. It was necessary to put my feet on the ground. Now I am married. I have children. Am I going to go back to the army now? We can fight this war 4,8,12, 16 years but we will have to give it away in the end.”
The pilot puts an end to the talk. Amade (his name) uncrosses his legs and smiles encouragingly at me as though it were I who faced the miserable uncertainties of Africa. We shook hands and he jumped ashore from the rail.
“Go up on the bridge,” he said, “You will see it better from there.”
The pilot is on the bridge with the captain. Above them is another open deck around the funnel which is exuding steam like a simmering kettle. Far below me Amade is at the quayside. At last the stern is cast off and begins to part, very slowly, from the quayside. I hear the whistle and chatter of the walkie-talkies. Already the stern has swung clear of the bows of the next ship in line along the quayside. Amade gives a last wave and turns away to walk across the sidings, away from the lights into the shadows of the yard, over the coal black dust, back to the town. I’m going to Rio. He’s going nowhere. An immense sadness reaches out to me and then fades as he moves out of sight among the goods wagons.
The ship has now swung out at thirty degrees to the quay and crossing to the other side I see why. A long tugboat is hauling the stern out into the harbour – the “Chamite” – a throbbing power-house of energy.
Suddenly excitement rushes up in me with a flush of adrenalin. From this angle I can see the full line of vessels stretching out in both directions as far as I can see. . A magical sight. All brilliant, glowing, like a thousand lanterns, tantalising, inviting, promising joy, like department stores at Christmas time, like a giant festival, a fairground. Nothing gladdens the heart like lights shining in darkness. I am so overjoyed that I leap up and down and shout. Heaven knows what the Captain down below makes of my antics. The tug lets go of the stern now, and its bulbous padded nose slides along the side of the ship and rams into the bows, chugging again, swinging round to complete a full circle until at last we are pointing out to sea. Behind me the funnel belches exhaust, and the Zoe.G’s Burmeister engines take up the strain. The journey has begun, and the tugboat slips away, streaking away to port, flaunting her power, her work done.
Ahead of us a trail of blue flashing buoys perforate the black water and leads us out past other floating fairylands at anchor in the bay.
There are several elements in this scene which I have not isolated but which combine to produce this sense of elation. First of course the prospect of Brasil. Every development brings that continent nearer. Then the pleasure of seeing massive objects in effortless motion, on water or in air. Then the lights, which provide an outline, illuminate a few planes and recesses, but leave the rest to the imagination. In every respect there is a benign magic at work, shaping the world for my special pleasure and benefit. I’m also impressed by the size of the harbour which seems immensely long. Counting the ships I can see there are more than 12 tied up (including the space left by the Zoe.G.) but the impression is of a far greater number. All the squalour and ugliness of the docks has disappeared, and it is pure magic.
The ecstasy endures for perhaps five minutes. The ensuing misery for perhaps 24 hours. In the morning I feel fine – it seems that yesterday’s magic will protect me from sickness, and with confidence I sit down to bacon and eggs at 7 am. The sky is cloudy, and the sea is swelling. By ten there is a gale blowing, and the sea has grown even more. My uneasiness has grown with it. Now the ship is see-sawing and rolling heavily, and I am pitched into full-scale sea sickness which I have never experienced before. There is only one place on the ship where I can bear to stand, on the starboard gangway at the pivotal point of the pitch. Here at least the possibilities for violent motion are reduced by one. By burping and belching constantly I can hold on to my stomach but evidently I can’t stay here all day and night. I decide to try lying down in the cabin. The effect is instantaneous and disastrous. The process which begins there is quite irreversible. My stomach goes into a floating wobble as though completely detached from its moorings, something grips my throat, my mouth fills with saliva which seems to be pouring out of it and reminds me of a beast of prey. There is time to get out to the rail. The vomiting is accompanied by an involuntary noise, and the sound of this ugly, croaking despairing noise issuing with my breakfast is perhaps the worst part of the experience. The palpitations continue. Then there is a period of beautiful peace. During the rest of the afternoon I resume my place on the gangway, watching the sea. The ship is swinging and rolling wildly now. The sea is in turmoil – lumps of black water with white crests rushing about in aimless fury, colliding with each other. The wind whips up a spray. The clouds discharge their rain. The two meet and for a while the sky and the sea merge into the same element, a swirling fusion of wind and water. It is impossible not to think of the sea as alive. Now I understand the origins of Neptune, the sprites. There is a life force at work here. The waves are merely cloaks for devils tearing about below the surface, the crests are a froth whipped up by their tridents.
The Zoe.G. is about 300 feet long and weighs some 4000 tons. She rides up on a swell and falls again through an angle of thirty degrees. When she comes down she hammers the sea with her bows and the sea rushes off screaming pain and vengeance. Where the Zoe.G. has hammered the sea, livid bruises appear, patches of the palest blue where the ships’ hull has smashed air and water together so hard that they remain entangled in the wake of the vessel as far back as one can see. Still the fury mounts. Every inch of water is covered with a lacy foam flying across the surface. Looking down into it makes you want to hold on to everything very tightly, because nothing could survive in that cauldron.
By dinner time it occurs to me that some soup might help. But it’s fish soup, and as I eat it I know it’s no help. Soon after I’m violently sick again. In the peace that follows I get into bed. The motion of the ship now declares itself in the purest geometrical forms. I feel myself tracing out patterns through the mattress. The most spectacular movement is the corkscrew which drills me down into the bed. Several doors are flying about and have to be secured but at last, inevitably, I sleep. The next day is clear and blue. The sea is calm, although the ship can still swing quite far in a gentle sea. Still I feel queasy and nervous of a recurrence. I’m resigned to three days of sickness but that seems like an eternal prospect. Since it began I have not been able to get my mind off it for more than five minutes. It is mentally and physically exhausting. I dare to eat a grapefruit. Nothing awful happens. Later I pick out what’s left of an over-ripe avocado. Still no disasters, but no real relief either. The mess boy tries to persuade me to have lunch. Says it’s better to eat. I refuse him and mean to keep off food until the next day. But at dinner time (5.30} on an impulse I go in and sit. What I’m more afraid of than the food is the effect of sitting down inside. But it seems better now. I eat a plate of sliced tomato. With each mouthful I feel stronger. It’s too good to believe. The main course arrives. Roast lamb full of garlic and a heap of greasy roast potatoes, but nothing can stop me. I eat the lamb. Delicious. Even a beer. Seems crazy. It’s over.
My bike was strapped up on deck under a tarp – a sad, huddled object. Later I took half a teaspoon of salt out of the carb.
Next week: Life on the ocean wave.
Here I am, in Lourenço Marques, waiting for my ship to sail to Brazil. I can hardly contain my excitement.
The Zoe.G – my rusty home for ten days as I sail into the jaws of the Policia Federal
May 3rd 1974
Tomorrow, I sail for Rio and leave Africa behind.
It’s the end of a journey that started in a war and ended in a revolution. In the aftermath of the Portuguese coup, Laurenco Marques simmers with a gentle excitement fueled by daily political demonstrations. Students flash their eyes and wave manifestos. Old colonials clench their jaws and let their veins stand out. But life here is lazy and generally agreeable. Nobody wants trouble and there would be no reason to expect it, if it weren’t for that old, hideous nightmare that poisons the atmosphere and haunts the sleep of white men all over southern Africa, a dream of black men in tribal frenzy swarming through the jungle night thirsting for colonial blood. That is what distinguishes between life in the north and south of the Zambesi.
I spent six weeks and dawdled 4000 miles in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia from the hot and thorny dustlands of the north to the ranches and mealie fields of the south. I met doctors, businessmen, farmers, missionaries, govt. advisors, teachers, all sorts. There were complaints, of course. Grumbling about shortages, and endless stories of African follies and inefficiency. But I did not meet a single European among the 37 I spent time with who wanted to leave. Nor did I meet an African anxious to see them go. They are known to each other now. For them, African and European alike, Idi Amin is a tragi-comic aberration, a black Mussolini.
[Amin was President of Uganda. His regime was noted for the sheer scale of its brutality.]
South of the border all this changes. There is fear and pugnacity. Endless talk of terrorists and racial problems. Amin is the universal example of what to expect from African rule. Time and again I was asked what trouble I had had in the north. Disbelief, even disappointment that I had had none. The first white man I met in Rhodesia was a butcher at Victoria Falls. He sold me a fine fillet steak for 15 new pence and said: “Surely you believe as I do that we are the victims of a world-wide communist conspiracy.”
[White Southern Rhodesia, still nominally part of the British Empire, was holding out against Black independence.]
Travelling alone on a motorcycle along a vast and unfamiliar continent seemed a hazardous enterprise. The prospect frightened me more than I dared to admit. When the Middle-East war broke out on the very day I left London it seemed like the worst omen. Now, 14,000 miles and seven months later I know this is the most rewarding adventure a man could hope for. My faith in human generosity has never been higher. I doubt there is any individual, sage or savage, I would not look to for help.
Alone, dusty, tired, unarmed and openhanded I have found no-one who would refuse me. Long after I stopped thinking of myself as a hero I have received endless respect, envy, and compliments on my “guts.” Perhaps I’ve been lucky, perhaps more cautious than I realise, but I conclude that whatever safety there may be in numbers, it doesn’t rival the impunity of a man on his own in a good frame of mind.
Only once did my journey look like coming to a sudden end. When four men manhandling the bike between two ferry boats, came within an ace of dropping it and its precious load to the bottom of the Nile.
Everywhere the way has been opened to me. My entry into Egypt was a positive triumph. It should never have been allowed. Every consul en route insisted it was impossible. The 1000 miles of highway from Tripoli to the border buzzed with soldiers and police. Countless times I was stopped and my passport examined (sometimes upside down), My visa expressly forbade me to cross the frontier overland. Yet I was welcomed as though the Egyptian army was expecting me and I was whisked through the most complicated formalities I’ve ever known with a glass of tea in my hand. My joy was so great that I became careless. Later that night I lost all my loose cash and papers on the road outside Marsa Matruh. A genuine disaster, but after two hours combing the road I found the all-important documents under a bush where a thief had discarded them. The £20 in cash was gone, but my relief was too great for it to matter.
On the recently tarred “hell run” from Dar es Salaam to Lusaka I overtook Chinese convoys by the dozen – olive-green trucks stenciled with Chinese ideograms – and caught glimpses of the railway they are building to link the copper belt with the East Coast. It was as neat and picturesque as an oriental print. Chinese labourers in straw hats, caricatures of inscrutability, were working on the gradients and viaducts in their hundreds, but they were the only people in Africa with whom I could make no contact.
At Victoria Falls I tried to break the blockade by riding across the Livingstone Bridge but I was firmly repulsed and had to take the usual 100 mile loop round into Botswana and back to Rhodesia. At the Kazangula ferry I met a party of South Africans crossing into Zambia on South African passports. Later, in South Africa, this news was met with astonishment. Most South Africans are convinced that their passports have made them prisoners in their own country. A trip to Zambia would do them a world of good.
Ironically it was the South African border that gave me the most trouble. First I was declared a “prohibited person” for not carrying a return ticket, in spite of liberal proof that I meant to travel on around the world. I was forced to lend the government £220, interest free, but there was more to come. I was carrying a sword, a quixotic mission for a friend in Cairo who wanted it delivered to his brother in Brazil. A chubby Afrikaaner wanted to confiscate it. We argued and a colleague leaned over and whispered, “Why don’t you ask your father?”
Dad was the Customs boss. They all gathered to admire the weapon, a ceremonial sword made in Birmingham, while he tried a few practice strokes with it.
“If we let you take this in, how can we stop the natives from having them,” he sighed.
Then they agreed that it could be sealed into its scabbard. I shall never forget the son dancing with pain as he splashed molten sealing wax on his thighs and his clean white gym clothes. In exasperation he cried: “Usually we have a native to do this sort of thing.”
Three times he told me I would go “straight to jail” if the sword were lost or stolen or the seals broken.
When I left South Africa, nobody even looked at it, but I had a hell of a job getting my money back.
Even so, I found South Africans to be good people – black, white and coloured. I’ve been there two months looking for a passage to Rio, and in the end it’s only apartheid, and the fear behind it, that ruins an otherwise splendid country. An easy thing to say but the only thing worth saying.
The latest issue of a South African Farmer’s Weekly advocates building a wall “like the Great Wall of China” clear across Africa from coast to coast. It’s the farmers, mainly Afrikaaners, who keep the Nationalists in power. No wonder a coloured friend in Port Elizabeth kept repeating, “Man, these Dutchmen are so stupid.”
I set out for Rio, but that’s not where I ended up. Follow my notes next week. Again, I want to emphasize these are notes just as I wrote them at the time.
I arrived in Lourenco Marques at the end of May, and made contact with the shipping line that had agreed to take me to Brazil on the Zoe.G. I struck up a very good friendship with the shipping clerk, who was of Indian descent. He wasn’t sure when the ship would leave and I had to hang around. I spent a lot of time in a coffee house called Raja’s.
Walking the streets of LM on Friday evening, a mysterious and most exciting bonus. Was attracted by the floodlights over the stadium thinking some game might be in progress. Turned the corner between the stadium and the brewery and noticed a stench of urine. A pretentious tablet set in a cement block like a gravestone announced the name of the street, and it had become an unofficial pissoir for people caught short at the bus stop round the corner. There was no game, just a few players shooting practice shots at goal.
Wandered on further down to the station, and saw this building for the first time, with its bulbus baroque cupola centred over the pale stone façade, a piece of pure Lisbon dropped from heaven on the shore of Africa. A perfect example of neo-classical proportions blown just beyond the limit, like over-ripe fruit. A heroic stone mother figure, symbolically bearing the burdens of Portugal, faces the station with a sorrowful look. She might be welcoming newcomers to her colony, or she might just as well be wishing she could take a train and get the hell out of there. Incidentally, it is through this terminus that the Zoe.G’s cargo of copper arrived, having trucked all the way from the Zambian copper belt through Rhodesia.
[Breaking all the sanctions.]
According to the shipping clerk who handles the ship’s manifests, there’s no doubt of it being Zambian rather than from Zaire, because it’s being openly handled by Anglo-American (Oppenheimer’s company) So that finally puts the stamp of authenticity on all that hearsay.
Walking back up to Raja’s place I experienced one of those sudden and revealing shifts of reality that make travelling ultimately worth doing. There was a sort of market or depot area, with Africans packing up lorries with empty crates and so on. Four men were hauling on ropes to tie down a high load, and began chanting as they pulled. It was an ordinary enough scene at first, until the chant took hold. In three time, a run of four notes in the first bar, then one note, and pause.
But of course, this in no way resembles the sound or the rhythm which had internal subtleties of resonance and emphases. It swelled hypnotically invading me completely, more compulsive and convincing than anything I’d heard before, partly because it was more musical. What made me realise it’s peculiar power was that while I listened, and for a while after, it quite cancelled out the familiar European atmosphere of the city, and then, quite quickly, although I clung to it as best I could, it faded away and I was left with just the hollow form, empty of feeling.
It was then that I understood how inimical the African culture might be with ours – and how miserable we should all be if that sound were to fade forever, as it did for me, and leave nothing but a tinkling Western version of a forgotten sound.
Raja’s café chairs have pneumatic seats, like Citroen suspension in reverse. You sit and it lowers you gently a couple of inches.
[Wanting to buy a pair of shoes I met the white owner of the shop and he invited me to a drink at his club. He had had been called up to fight the Frelimo, and told me about it I managed to get it down on paper.]
“It’s bladdy three and a half years. That’s a bladdy long time. Bladdy two and a half years in sequence. I tell you. We were losing men all the bladdy time, man. Maybe one man a day. Well, there’s maybe four bladdy lots like our fuckers. So that’s four bladdy men a day, so in a bladdy week, or months, and for six or seven bladdy years and you see we lost a lot of men and that’s what Spinola wants to stop.”
“But the bladdy worst was we couldn’t bladdy fight the fuckers. They had bladdy grenades and Kalashnikovs and bazookas, and bladdy mortars behind, and they would kill some of our fuckers and then they bladdy run away. We could only bladdy get them with helicopters, but when we bladdy ask for helicopters, they come bladdy 24 hours later.”
“Walking 40 bladdy miles in a day looking for the fuckers. But when we find them we can’t shoot them. We got to bring them back to question. That’s no bladdy good. Not the Navy men, though. They were bladdy good. They landed and bladdy shot everything. They didn’t bladdy care if it was us or the bladdy enemy. They kill anybody. You just get out of the bladdy way.”
[Somewhere during those days my 43rd birthday came and went. Last week my 95th also came and went, but this time with great eclat. My very good friend Guillaume invited me to his home for a party, and he and his wife Estelle found a way to pack 95 candles on to a cake. They were the kind that relights itself, so it took all the pathetic puff that I have to put them out.]
Bye-bye. See you again next week.
I left the Balmoral Hotel (which is still there today) to go back down to Durban, on the coast. Before leaving I parked my bike at the back of the hotel and left the engine idling while I checked on the oil pressure, which was still behaving oddly.
Monday, 22nd April. Kokstad to Durban.
Boy at hotel dancing to the rhythm of the engine as I look for oil pumping. He is almost concealed in a doorway – kitchen boy – hands bouncing up and down.
Monday morning, descend from Transkei into sugarcane belt, miles and miles of it. like grass magnified, leading to coast. Dirt road is short cut to High Flats. Look down on a section of country with strange contours, like a sheet of dough collapsed over a bed of nails. Innumerable small peaks of grassland with folds and drapes, all dimples, not a single flat bit. When I stop on road, passing Africans linger and watch, as though waiting for something (a handout, a miracle, a phenomenon of some sort?) Thinking – what’s it like to work in these cane fields? What a different view of the country I would have then.
Durban is warm and I’m grateful. Big port, several dozen ships in harbour. Drive straight to Mutual Beach Centre where Corinne (Peter Harland’s contact) lives – top of a vast block. Flat is smartly furnished. Her ex-husband is there, and her daughter. Drink too much coffee. Smoke too much, talk over the same topics, trying to make them sound bright and novel. What is there to see in Durban? She says it looks very attractive, but there’s nothing there. That same false allure that all cities show.
On to Gillits, 23 miles inland on the Moritzburg freeway. [I had promised my London agent, Pat Kavanaugh, that I would visit her mother.]
Pat’s mother and her husband, Sidney O’Brien, a pilot in the harbour. Nice man – a bit of Bill in him. [Bill was my stepfather]. Pat has many of her mother’s features and mannerisms. See the photograph on the cover of a Cruise O’Brien hotch-potch about Ireland. Stunning picture. Son Mike is spotty, stiff, awkward, enthusiastic, archeological, keen on looking things up. We try to locate the Karoo bird, but result is inconclusive. [A bird I saw somewhere coming south.]
I’m very tired, fragmented, spent. Grateful for hospitality.
Tuesday, 23rd. Gillits to Piet Retief.
Call at Renolds for chain. [Another sponsor: Lucky to find one at Gillits]
Then climb up escarpment, through rock-strewn, rising and falling, ground. First time in South Africa see Africans in full tribal dress – the Ndebele, I think. Women wear hats of bright cloth stretched over discs, coloured aprons, bangles on arms, legs, neck.
The scene reminded me of:
(a) An imaginary idea of red Indians living in their country
(b) Pastoral 18th Century paintings. Remember huts on platforms carved out of hillsides; the proportions of the rocks, the ring of outcropped sandstone holding life and sun in a benevolent bowl. Cascading landscape.
Keate’s drift; orange and apple sellers at roadside. Pix.
[I’ve lost those pictures. They may have been spoiled by the police, later in Fortalesa. There’s no mention of my going to Nelspruit for the parts I had sent on. It’s fifty-two years ago and my memory fails me. From Piet Retief I rode into Swaziland, now called Eswatini, where I stayed for a few days on a pineapple farm. It belonged to the family of some friends I’d made in Cape Town. After that it was a short ride to Maputo, which was then still called Lourenço Marques, a major port in Moçambique. The Portuguese still held Moçambique as a colony but were fighting a losing battle against the native Frelimo army. While I was there the white Portuguese government of Moçambique revolted against Lisbon. Soon after, they also surrendered to the native Frelimo. My ship, the Zoe.G, sailed for Brazil in the midst of this turmoil.]
Laurenço Marques.
Bushy faces, Jesus faces, slim-tailored shirts with buttons popping across youthful chests. Jeans slung anywhere from waist to crotch on heavy brown leather belts. Little shiny leather purses on loop handles.
Or soldiers on interminable military service with Steve McQueen haircuts. Students gather round café tables, eight at a time and fold in like petals of a flower, exclusive, intense, introverted. Primitive people face out at the world. Older people too. Find myself now very aware of the extraordinary self-consciousness of young men, who behave as though they were the cynosure of a thousand eyes which are weighing every move and every expression, waiting for the first faltering step, loss of direction, failure of acceptance. (And I remember the pain outside).
[I arrived looking for a hotel. I had heard of a place called the Carlton, and asked the first person I saw.]
He wore a short, tight red sweater and flared trousers with turn-ups, the colour of strawberry ice-cream running down the inside of a dustbin. “Hi man, how you doin’, I’m sure glad to meet you. Sure man, we’re all friends here. We don’t care about the colour here. I’m just at school, sure. But I’m in the bar here, fuckin’ plenty of businesswomen. Plenty, sure. Businesswomen from Moçambique, sure.”
His face was a smooth brown sixteen years or so under a wooly black fleece, and his breath boasted of spirits. He didn’t stop talking, and his three companions gathered about him fascinated by the trick they hadn’t mastered. One was a white Portuguese with a sensitive face, despite the loss of two front teeth, and the others were whispy in-between kids.
“Oh, you want a room, to sleep. Sure, I can show you. Great place, all South Africans up there. That one you talkin’ about is shit, man. That all Portuguese shit, shoutin’ and noise. I can take you alright, maybe fifty ‘scud. [Escudos] I don’t know. It was three months ago. We were smoking too, man, you know, grass, green grass, you know what I mean?”
We set off along the streets, darkened, fairly deserted, a ragged band, and as we walked one after another they opened their trouser flies and sprayed the pavement and the walls with a wide arc of silver piss.
Across the Republica and up two blocks we turned into an anonymous doorway and up green and brown stairwell to the first floor. Two Africans sat in chairs with their backs to the wall facing the stairs with a table between them. The nearest one had earlobes with big holes in them for hanging up big ornaments, but he wasn’t wearing them tonight being in his business suit. His skin was hard and dry and close pored like old walnut. He wouldn’t speak English though he plainly understood it. His price was 120 ‘scud for a night. For Portuguese it was only fifty, but for South Africans and lesser foreigners it was 120. That was a fixed price, h said, the same all over and couldn’t be altered in any circumstance.
I looked at what I would get for 120 ‘scud and saw four army beds in a nine-foot square cell. Each one was 120 ‘scud (unless you were Portuguese) which meant he was looking for twelve pounds a night, plus a free meal for his insects. The enormity of it had me laughing as I led my uneasy party down the stairs.
“Whisky breath,” I noticed, retained an equivocal stance on the matter. He protested that all peoples should be treated alike and that economic discrimination was a gross injustice, could hardly persuade me to accept the terms, but would have done well enough out of it, I suppose. There was a wistful sorrow at my guffaws, but I was relieved at being able to walk off with total conviction, in spite of being tired and a shade fed up.
So he led me to the place I had first wanted to go to, which was fifty yards or so from where we first met. Here I got a double room for myself with all the fixings for 90 ‘scud, and a good restaurant downstairs. I gave him 20 ‘scud because he said he wanted to eat. His white friends stood by and kicked his feet.
The Carlton Hotel and Restaurant. Next door is the Bar Luisa. Coming attractions. Portraits of the girls. Could have been picked from any bus queue, but there was a touching sincerity in their efforts to look like brides. Carlton has a separate ablutions building attached to main block by glazed corridors. White tiled bathrooms on left – lavs on the right. Said to be the oldest hotel in town. Girl bars have curtains across the doors. Nothing to compare with the Sunshine.
Well, I turned 95 on Friday – another surprising milestone on a path I never expected to see. It’s all a bonus, and to think that I might even outlast Trump!
I’ve come several thousand miles since Johannesburg and the bike is showing disturbing symptoms. I have already asked Lucas in Jo’burg for parts, and hope to get things fixed in Port Elizabeth, at Lionel’s shop.
Friday 19th April
Into Lionel’s first thing. Call Joe’s [in Johannesburg]. They have the parts. Just delivered [from England] but they won’t get to P.E [Port Elizabeth] today. Decide to re-sleeve damaged barrel and have the new parts sent on to Nelspruit. This means I have to go to Nelspruit before crossing into Swaziland, otherwise that whole “prohibited person” business again.
[Here’s a section of the only map I had at the time – one of the three maps by Michelin that covered the whole of Africa, so the scale is huge. You can just spot Nelspruit at the top, on the road from Jo’burg to Lourenço Marques. But I dipped down into Swaziland on my way to visit Anthony’s sister, “Small”]
Armed with letters for the pay desks I visit the Oceanarium and the Snake Park. Snakes in profusion. Strange demonstration by black snake warden in high leather gaiters, with cobra snapping at his heels. His voice soars and swoops without relevance to the words. Feel sorry for the puff adder which is pinioned ruthlessly for every demonstration. “Poison fangs. Nasty fangs. Sharp as a nail.” When he finishes with the snakes, he tosses them into the water where they squirm angrily.
Tropical house is full of beautiful birds. Most stunning are the toucans (Sulphur breasted) with beaks like pop art. The dolphins are delightful and impressive – weight up to 500 lbs, and when one leaps through a hoop three ladies in the front row are drenched by water. Dolphin whistles are very clear and convincing. Also two huge aquariums, and that particularly ogreish fish with thick white lips set in permanent snarl.
2pm. The barrel returns. I help to reassemble and don’t prime the pump: Result: No oil. It’s already too late to leave. I ask Yussuf, John and Lionel to have a drink with me. Wham! It hits me. We can’t drink together. The apartheid comes home to me. Yussuf invites me to his house, ten miles away in coloured estate called West End. Wife is very bright and pretty in scarlet boiler suit. She teaches in coloured school. Has niece in Brompton Hospital [in London]. Miss Bilby. Yussuf is very strict Muslim. No alcohol and normally doesn’t smoke. We have curry. No cutlery. Strong nostalgia for Sudan as we eat with our fingers. Then to hall with friends to play badminton. Yussuf is passionate about apartheid. “Dutchmen are stupid. Can be anything he wants because his skin is white.” Hoots his horn at white girls in protest. His resentment is lively and profound. Others dissolve their bitterness in religion. (cf: Priests Royal.)
[Royal Priesthood ministries still thrive in Durban, but then it was a way for Blacks to assert their dignity and individuality under a crushing regime.]
Saturday 20th
8.30 at Lionel’s again. (Have spent Rand 16.50 at Red Lion but good value by S.A. standards). Ready to leave by 12.30 with 30 litres of petrol – ten over the legal limit. Weather has become cold and cloudy. Air is frosty. Mean to sleep out but am unable to resist comfort of hotel at Komga when I find caravan park closed (costs one Rand anyway). Royal Hotel, Komga, is pleasant. Food is good. Owner is Alf Gunn and hairy-faced wife. They “traded” in the Transkei for twenty years before buying hotel.
Sunday 21st
Leave at 9 as Alf (all in white) leaves to play bowls. Big game in S.A.
Into the Transkei. Beautiful hill country, with huts everywhere, with compounds made of earth mounds planted with lovely flowering plant- flower is pointed and red, foliage deep green. Square plots of maize. Many horses, and riders reminding me of Judy’s grooms. [Judy, a friend in Cape Town] All Khosa [or Xhosa, tribal name]. Took pictures of African houses at Butterworth, and later of goats and village called Queque (with clicks). [I wish I could find those pictures.] Dried out sleeping bag, determined again to sleep out. Once more icy air deters me, and also those long hours of darkness. Into Balmoral Hotel at Kokstad. Girls ask me “Are you going to the Roof of Africa?” Say I’ve come from there – but they’re talking about a rally of some sort.
Talk to Xhosa from Cape Town, travelling as servant of an elderly Englishman, who represents a clothing firm. He is intelligent and articulate about black man’s problem – tells me about the Priest Royal. Started by white hippy in Cape Town after a film of something similar from the US. The top priest sits in a chair in a hall. Other sit on the ground after crossing themselves. They pray for equality and practice it among themselves. If a policeman comes in they pray furiously until he’s gone. There is a Priest Royal in Durban too, but they all call themselves Priests Royal. This fellow has widowed mother and six brothers. The eldest disappeared abroad and has not written since. This fellow works to send his young brothers to school. He still remembers it was a Friday in 1965 when his elder brother left a letter and walked out of the house. The letter said: “You will never see me again. But don’t worry. It’s alright.” His brother worries though whenever he hears a terrorist has been captured.
While riding through the Transkei I am made to look again for comparisons between these lives and more familiar ones in Europe. The white South African, it seems to me, builds his entire apologia on the persuasive assumption that the black people in their customs and origins are incompatible with white society and therefore must be kept apart until they have learned to want the same things as us, and are prepared to do the same things to get them. On this tacit presumption of a separate sub-species rests the entire apparatus of racial government.
The principal characteristics of the black man, as described by white employers, are: Laziness, stupidity, mechanical ineptitude, drunkenness, prolonged absenteeism, a tendency to be overcome by an inexplicable melancholy leading to total unreliability and dishonesty. He is also said to be loyal, humorous.
I don’t know how he would differ from an English labourer of, say, the early 19th Century, who went to work far from his wife and family. On Judy’s farm, it seemed to me that the longer serving grooms responded to her as any British farm worker of the old days and lived in much the same way.
It will be said, that’s all very well, but it’s only fifty years ago that they were painting up and slaughtering each other. Even now different tribes will tear into each other given a chance. Look at that recent affair at the mines, when all of the Basuto’s left.
Well, look at Scots, Irish Skinheads, football crowds, Mods & Rockers, motorway pileups, etc.
How different is life in a Transkei village from the generations before Cider with Rosie? Well, of course the cultural aura is quite different.
Balmoral Hotel, rambling hotel with many rooms on two floors, lounge with hot coal fire, big dining room with many pillars decorated with yellow flowers. Waiter in yellow livery. Young Xhosa posing beneath flowers laughs shyly across room. Food is tasteless but plentiful.
I’m still travelling through fairly civilised country – if you can call apartheid civilised – being handed on from friend to friend, and taking a day off in Hermanus, another delightful village on the South Coast. Just to remind you, these are raw notes – it would take a book to explain what they all mean.
Sunday 14th April
Idleness. Paperwork. Walk on beach with ‘Fred’ – the fat labrador, who waddles off in all directions. Braai in wheelbarrow. Talk to Angela about magazines. To Anthony about “things.” Get address of his family in Swaziland.
Monday 15th
Leave Hermanus at 8.30. Difficult. Felt uneasy about Tessa. Dirt road to Caledon. Very mindful of sprocket. Town before Swellendam noticed loss of power. At petrol station, saw smoke from exhausts. Oil down in tank by at least two litres. Take rockers off before realising that oil return may be faulty. Curse, and reassemble. Oil return seems OK. Pipes stop smoking after a while. Fill up with three litres and take a spare. If piston is seized, what can I do about it anyway? Will try to get to Port Elizabeth. After a short distance engine is swimming in oil. Tighten up rocker box nuts. Keep going. Arrive at Riversdale and go to Wimpy. Grey haired lively gent comes over. Tall, Germanic. In fact old German family of paper makers, originally from Württemberg. At time of Gutenberg – Caxton they went to London, but Thames water was too acid. So they moved to South Africa, where they heard of chalky water flowing from mountains.
He has always ridden bikes – owned 20. Rudge, F.N. (1000cc four in line). Now Honda 4 – 750cc. Says it’s great, in spite of height. Asked me to sleep in their caravan in garden. Very pleasant evening. Cars, bikes. SABC (radio). Chapman (got off with Princess Margaret on Royal tours and was recently eaten by a lion.) [No idea what that was about.]
Flying in war, aircraft carriers (rescued pilots had to buy a drink for entire ship’s company.) Local school with white staff working for coloured headmaster – “If you told them that in the so-called independent countries they’d never believe it. Hell!” His name is Lunnan – or Lonnon – or something, any corruption of London. House in Truta road, Riversdale. Nice strong, smiliing German wife, youthful. Two children at ‘varsity’ in Stellenbosch. Younger girl at school. House big, ramshackle – bathroom in do-it-yourself chaos. Bechstein grand [piano]. Sleep very deep. Breakfast, eggs, and off.
Tuesday 16th
Riversdale to Plettenburg Bay. Check oil en route. Round about full mark – seems quite steady. Plett at lunchtime. Eventually find Jim Williams’ house “Maňana” Put up tent in garden. Cook a mutton chop. Bay is very beautiful. Housing is all posh suburban. People renting for holidays. Mid-afternoon overcast. Decide to buy torch batteries. In town I give Don’s friend Andrew Roberts a ring. Am asked over for a drink. Motley group of middle aged and elderly people have been playing bowls. Big new “West Coast” style house – built from a magazine picture. Rough plastering wasn’t right, says large wife Sally, who poured me an enormous Scotch (and soda) in new glasses, bought for their capacity. Sky is now overcast, and begins to rain. Then heavy wind, lightning, thunder. Only the palsied general and his very composed wife stay to eat. I offer half-heartedly to leave for my tent, and receive half-hearted invitation to stay. The old boy is hard to talk to. Half senile? Half stewed? She (the wife) certainly gets very merry. Clenches her fists over her breasts (she’s 63 and very fat) and cries out her “Valkyrie” passion for her children – shouts defiance of Dr. Spock. [Very influential on childcare at the time.]
One of her daughters is living with John Freeman [prominent British journalist]. The other is Colin Legum’s daughter [Legum was another famous anti-apartheid journalist]. Was she previously married to Legum? She declares it’s a pity her daughters aren’t here – she’d soon have me married off. Something desolate about this great, pretentious space with these two drifting around in it, collapsing with age. The servant lady next morning says they don’t get up till ten, says it with humour and a tinge of contempt. House faces a marshy inlet – there are heron, etc. In morning a cormorant dries out its wings.
7 hp Lister engine produces three and a half Kw. Has an alternator for lights and a generator for batteries.
Wednesday 17th
Ride back to Williams’ house to pack up things. Try oil level and find to my astonishment that it’s back up to top of dipstick, i.e. two pints have found their way back into tank. Very mystifying. Ride on comfortably enough through very comfortable landscape (except where two rivers cut down through tableland – chopped up by erosion like a waffle. In ravines it’s semi-tropical , with baboons, blue gums, and thick vegetation).
Then, after Humansdorp, I stop and something goes rattling around in the crankcase. Dire forebodings. I curse again. Why always short of the mark. Foolish. Why not? But the rattle vanishes as soon as it comes. Whatever it is has settled in the sump. I ride on, holding my breath, and get to Lionel’s Motors [about a hundred miles to Port Elizabeth] without further symptoms – although the oil level has meanwhile dropped right down again. Obviously the pump is not getting it back.
I was racking my brains as I rode to explain the symptoms:
1. Overheating
2. Smoky exhausts when first starting
3. Loss of oil from oil tank
4. Sudden and short-lived loss of oil from rocker boxes, etc.
5. Magical reappearance of oil in tank
I calculated that the best explanation was a moveable blockage in the oil return pipe above the T-junction that feeds the rockers. Then, extra pressure to rockers. No return to tank. Oil forced into combustion chamber via valves. [This last is nonsense]. Anyway, there was no such blockage. The pump was simply not working fast enough – rubbish in it had damaged the seat.
At Lionels the chief workman drains the sump and finds bits of barrel broken off, and the bolt head from one of the flywheel securing bolts. WHY! Is this the way it’s going to go?
Lionel Smith wishes he could get more bikes [Triumphs]. Complains of lack of service from England. Says we’re a second-class nation – but all with good humour.
Walked that evening from Red Lion to Docks and back (3 or 4 miles) Endless, soulless Main Street of super modern, clean high buildings. Not a thing of interest. Life is all locked away. Sign of a divided and insecure society? Street life is a good sign – hence Cape Town street-parties. Streaking also (perhaps?) [There was a craze for people to dash naked through public events, called “streaking”.]
Thursday 18th
No parts from Jo’burg. Talk to Sam Gozzoff [who?] again. He knows nothing. Spend day cleaning up, blowing out oil feed, changing chain and refitting wheel. Greasing rear wheel bearings.
Yusuf is the Malay foreman. Tall and ugly, with long hair and red woolen hat. Two front teeth missing and a strange “sing-song” intonation which makes his English quite unintelligible. Each phrase or sentence is pitched at the same note. The syllables tumble out without emphasis so that the phrase is like a single word. He has a most pleasing personality and a direct, affable approach. He has several other “coloureds” working under him, all long-haired with pom-pom hats, and one white apprentice also. He obviously does his job well and is respected. The white lad, Gary, thought at one time that he should have inherited the job, but Lionel claims to have no colour prejudice and put Yusuf in. Gary seems reasonably satisfied. He says he’s a Christian and does a lot to help the poor. [Apartheid created three classes – white, coloured and black. Coloureds were Indians, Malays, anyone in between.]
There are two Africans also. They are not supposed to do anything but the simplest work – repairing punctures and so on. This is the law, which defines which class can do what work, but the law gets overlooked where possible. One African keeps up a low, humorous monologue directed at one or other of the younger coloured guys – “I don’t want to hear you talking about God. You are the Devil. How can a dirty fellow like you know about God? You are just the Devil.” – or – “You asking me for help? No good all this helping. A man doesn’t always ask for help. A man has to help himself. Why don’t you do your own helping.”
In the “White Males” [bathroom] is an African with his hands in the Castrol cleanser tin. Yussef says “Look at this black man. He is not supposed to be here. If they catch him they put him in –“and he holds up his wrists in imaginary handcuffs. The African is grinning broadly. “I’m not a black man,” he says. “Yes, you are, you are a black man.” “No, no, I’m not a black man” – and so on.
There’s a pleasant conspiracy to defeat irksome laws. Yussef says he is all right with someone like Mr Smith – but it’s a bad country for a coloured man. You don’t get the job your talent merits.”
More next week. Have a good one!
