by D. D. Mayers
My wife (not yet!) got a job she loved. She worked for the Voice of Kenya, reading the news and presenting programmes, but the thing she enjoyed most of all was reading ‘The Book at Bed Time’. It’s remarkable how she reads a story or a newspaper article. She doesn’t have to read it through first to get the emphasis right, she just reads it and it’s always right.
Our year came to an end, almost as though we’d just taken our first breath. The theatre offered me another year, but I said ‘thank you but I need to get back to London to further my career.’ How could I not have known, going back at that time, was the wrong thing to do for my career. I needed more of what I was doing, I needed experience. I needed as many years as they’d give me. If I had done that, my life would have been entirely different. In retrospect that was a pivotal point. My wife would not be my wife. She would have gone back to England on her own and I’m pretty certain she would not have come back. Instead, what we did was to seal our fate together forever. We drove back to England in a small Toyota Estate my father had given me. He couldn’t possibly recommend it for what we had in mind, he’d only given it to me because it had come to the end of its useful life and he was chucking it out.
Another thing, apart from the garden, with which I seduced my poor little, unknowing wife-to-be, was my Aunt Ginger’s astounding house on the coast near Mombasa. My Aunt Ginger was a wonderful, unique, eccentric, enveloping individual. Her real name was Penelope, but her hair was bright ginger, and as she got older there was no hint of grey, the ginger simply got softer. But her loving, warm, embracing personality never faded. She died a few days short of her hundredth birthday. Such a shame, she would have loved to have had a telegram from the Queen.
The cruelty of old age had taken her sight and her ability to walk. She’d taken to her bed for the last few years of her life and she held regular audiences for the many, many people who wanted to be with her, laugh with her. She never lost her lovely laugh, she’d close her eyes, her head would go back and a deep chuckle would pour out of this incredible, unique person. Whatever story you told her, she always said it was the funniest story she’d ever heard!
All the houses she ever lived in, she built and designed herself. She never made a drawing the builders could work from. They had no idea how to price or plan the work before they started. The central theme of her houses, rather like her enticing personality, was to let the outside in, the outside to be an integral part of the inside. So how better to achieve that, than to have no walls, or as few walls as possible. The whole structure of the house was there, ceilings, roof and corner supports et cetera, but you could look right through the house to the view beyond. The house became part of the view, you lived within the view, so the structure of the house and the views all around became as one.
I have a cousin who lives in Australia who took it one step further. When we last saw him, I asked him what was the first thing he would do when he got back home after being away for so long? He replied, ‘I suppose we’ll have to weed the sitting room.’
So the view Ginger brought into her house was the vast magnificence of the modern ocean-going ships and liners that sailed the world’s oceans and then berthed at Mombasa harbour.
She built her house atop a two-hundred foot high coral cliff whose base plunged deep down to form the edge of the creek. All the ships slowly slipped by, with a deep throbbing rumble, to get to their berths. Sometimes, if their berths were taken, and they’d have to wait a couple of days, they’d anchor right in front of the house, filling all the windows with their massive presence. As the tide changed, flowing in or out, they would swing slowly round on their anchor chains. The sterns so close you’d think surely one day, the pilots would misjudge the length of the ship and it would come crashing into the sitting room. All this was, of course, tantalising, enticing, to a twenty-one year old English girl still wet behind the ears.
And now the chance to make a trip almost beyond imagining with excitement and change. Quite understandably her mother was in panic mode. Her beautiful daughter, who she’d brought up with such care and attention to every detail, ready to be launched upon the marriage market to a suitable Englishman from a good background, with a sound income, was about to throw her reputation away. All for a worthless, unknown, out-of-work actor from the colonies. As I look back on that time now, I ache with sympathy.
We vaguely worked out the route of our whole trip, with the help of the AA in Nairobi. They were very helpful. The only thing we could be sure of was which countries we had to drive through to get to England. All the middle eastern ones needed visas for ourselves, and a carnet for the car. If it hadn’t been for them it would have taken weeks of trailing around Nairobi from embassy to embassy, standing in interminable queues for hours. Often to be told, when you finally get to the top, ‘The office is now closed, come back tomorrow.’ I don’t know about other African countries, but Nairobi is famous for ‘how to tackle a queue’. You have to know how to buy your way along. But the way in which you buy your way along is the art. Only Kenyans know how to do it, and only certain Kenyans specialise in certain types of queues. The AA need to get to the top of queues on a daily basis, so it’s vital they do it quickly or else a logjam will build up and they’ll cease to function.
You might have thought the vehicle we’d use, for what could well turn out to be quite an arduous expedition, would be a reasonably substantial 4x4. Spare wheels bolted around the body, roof rack, sand filters for the engine, heaters for going across the Alps and through Northern Europe at that time of year, a substantial vehicle. But no, it was a very ordinary, everyday, small run-about, Toyota Estate, my father had chucked out because it had come to the end of its useful life. From our meagre earnings, we’d managed to scrape together the tidy sum of sixty pounds each, which was to cover everything from petrol to food to breakdowns, the lot. Even for then, 1965, it was very little. How we thought we’d manage, I don’t know, we just wanted to do it, in our bones we had to do it.
The next task to be addressed was the procurement of a chaperone. Its achievement was probably even more vital than anything else, because without it, there was no chance of going anywhere. Funny now, but not funny then. But how to find one? We knew no one who fitted the bill. After a great deal of discussion we eventually decided to post an advert on the screen of one of the big cinemas in Nairobi, “Girl needed to chaperone unmarried couple to drive to England, for as long as it might take”. We went to the performance the evening it was shown. A little giggle trickled through the audience. I think they thought it was a spoof. We had one reply. She was a tall blond German girl called Hanalora, Honey. She’d come to Kenya as an au pair to an English family and her contract had come to an end. Like us, she wanted to do something different and exciting before settling back into everyday living in our home countries. She’d managed to scrape together the same amount of money as ourselves, so we started off on equal terms. She couldn’t quite understand the chaperoning bit, but as the three of us would be sleeping together in our little 6ft x 5ft tent, the duty of chaperone wouldn’t be particularly arduous.
How we ever thought, living in such close proximity, eating and sleeping and washing and everything else, would work for at least four months, I have no idea. But oddly, very oddly, it did work. It worked well enough for us to be on fond, kissing goodbye terms when we said goodbye in Hamburg. You might say, at least you deserve one night together now, no one would know. Well, you’d be wrong. I drove non-stop, other than a couple of hours on the boat, from Hamburg to Central London, to stay with my Uncle and Aunt, more than 24 hours later. I’d meant us to stay with my grandmother in Tunbridge Wells, but she inconveniently died while we were en route.
***
So, back to the beginning. The start of this trip was, for me, and as it happened for my wife-to-be, the beginning of my life again. I’ve told you about various episodes, and my education, but the whole direction of my life was witho
ut purpose, aimless, drifting about, no idea what I might do from day-to-day. The only thing I knew I had to do was get through the emptiness of a day, only to be confronted with another empty day. My poor parents had done their utmost to give me the best start in life they knew how. It had cost them more than they could afford. When all they need have done was, let me stay at home. I had a completeness at home, a satisfaction, a wholeness. Becoming an actor and joining a repertory company had, for the first time since leaving home, sent away from home, given me a sense of belonging. Being part of something and a direction in which I knew I would like to go. So finding this girl and starting out with nothing, really nothing, which I didn’t think a hindrance at all, quite the opposite, we would discover a whole new life together. This was July 1966. We got married on 1st December 1967. No one could have known, just nine quick years later, my life would take a devastating, shattering turn with which I had no idea how to deal. Even now in 2015, thirty-nine years after that dreadful day in June 1976, although we’ve found a reasonable contentedness and we’ve achieved quite a lot I suppose, given the limitations in the intervening years, I still feel we’re not lucky I’m alive.
So, on that July day in 1966, we three were standing on the upper deck of our elegant 8000 ton Dutch cargo ship, whose name escapes me, watching our little Toyota Estate being lifted off the Quay and onto its deck. This really was the beginning of a journey of a lifetime. There were only three or four cabins on the ship, so we were the only passengers. We’d been invited by the Captain to have dinner with him and his officers, that evening. I asked, as we’d be sailing early the following day if I could ask my father aboard, as there’d be nothing he’d enjoy more than having dinner at the Captain’s table. The picture of the meal he’d conjured up was quite infectious. We were all getting excited by the same idea. Oh dear, oh dear. The meal could not have been more ordinary. A few slices of a sort of Dutch cold spam and Edam cheese downed with a glass or two of sparkling water. This was a cargo ship after all. My father could only laugh as he walked down the gangway to the quay and wave goodbye. Early the next morning we sailed majestically past my Aunt Ginger’s house, everyone there merrily waving us on our way. The only person who wasn’t merry in any way whatsoever was my future mother-in-law. She hadn’t given up trying to stop us. She managed to get Aunt Ginger’s telephone number and begged her to stop us, or at least send her daughter, her precious daughter, back home.
The Middle East - Part One
Mombasa to Jericho
The first section of the trip was from Mombasa to Kuwait, stopping at Muscat and Bahrain and would take about ten days, depending on Company orders on the way. We’ve been back to all the same places again recently; you wouldn’t know they were on the same planet, the changes are so dramatic. Muscat wasn’t a city, by any stretch of the imagination. Looking at the photographs we’d taken then; the harbour was a natural harbour protected by a horseshoe shape of high natural rock cliffs. The small trading port, consisted of a few rows of white Arab-style little houses which almost immediately gave way to desert, with a sand track that ran for about a mile to a date-palmed oasis. What’s there now reminds me of the first Star Wars movie, when Liam Neeson goes back to his planet, a few hundred thousand light years away from Earth, turns to his young student, Ewan McGregor, and proudly says, ‘The whole planet is a city.’ Bahrain is the same. Back then, all those years ago, the taxi-driver automatically took us straight from the ship, to an especially designated beach for Europeans and the Sheik. As soon as we sat down on the sand, an Arab in a full-length white gown came running up with a tray of tea, milk and sugar, and fruitcake.
A couple of days after leaving Mombasa the standard of our evening food suddenly took a marked turn for the better. We were invited to the captain’s cabin for dinner. Not only did we have quite a sumptuous meal, it was downed with a couple of bottles of delicious rose wine, probably the only alcohol on-board. It quickly became apparent, however, why this delectable change had come about. The Captain’s eye was wandering, and his eye was wandering in the direction of our tall blonde chaperone. She played the game very well. I think she’d had quite a lot of practice. Her timing was perfect. The meals got better and better, the rose wine flowed with ever greater quantities before we contentedly disembarked at Kuwait, without him having his wicked way.
Potentially, a big problem awaited us in Kuwait. Well two really. On docking, I asked the first officer when our car would be lifted off. He paused, he said, ‘We sometimes have a little problem here, but I think we’ll sort it out.’ That didn’t sound too ominous. He said, ‘go into the city and I think we’ll have it off by this evening.’ Even then, the city was beautifully laid out. Tall, elegant, gleaming, glass and marble buildings, way ahead of their time, to us country hicks anyway. One of the most noticeable features was the number of extravagantly planted-up roundabouts. The rich density of colour and exotic variety of plants took your breath away. At their pinnacle, they nearly all had the tallest, multi-nozzle water fountains I’d ever seen. Where there weren’t fountains there’d usually be a little group of gowned and head-scarfed Arabs, sitting cross-legged on the bright green grass, sipping tea. The tea was dispensed from a colourful teapot sitting on a carved wooden tray. It turned out that tea drinking on the roundabouts had become a ritual and a small industry in its own right. The teapots and the glasses and the trays were all very carefully chosen. The values of a tea set could reach staggering sums. Then there was the type of tea, Indian, Malaysian, Chinese, East African, all the very best, but the most popular tea by far, was tea from a distillery in Scotland, whose name escapes me.
We had our own little ceremony, with real tea, in a cafe that spilled out on to the sweltering pavement. The canopy had dry ice flowing over it and falling to the ground, forming a curtain of coldness, so we remained cool while sitting outside on the pavement. Was that cool, or was that cool.
On the way back to the ship, for Honey to play her dangerous game one more night, because the car was still held hostage on-board, I threw my hands to my face, ‘Oh God, I’ve left my briefcase at the cafe. Stop, stop, turn round, turn round, Oh No, Oh God. Everything was in the briefcase, all the money, the passports, the carnets, everything. Without that briefcase we couldn’t move, we couldn’t stay, we couldn’t do anything. The horror of losing the briefcase made me want to vomit. The taxi-driver looked at me pathetically, and with a half whimsical smile said, ‘There is no crime in Kuwait, wherever you left it, it will be there.’ ‘Please don’t try to be nice to me now. Please go back as quickly as you can. You can’t realise what this means. Oh no! He turned back at the next roundabout, another little group of Arabs peacefully drinking tea in the middle. It took an eternity to get back to the cafe. Suddenly I saw it, its black leather with brass hinges, there, all on its own, exactly where I left it. All the tables and chairs cleared away, people walking around it, the picture I have of seeing it then, is as clear now, as it was at that moment. The relief, the relief was like a wave of warm water sweeping over me, as I lay on the hot sand of a bright white beach, on the edge of the Indian Ocean. I can feel that wave now, exactly as I felt it then. I didn’t deserve that piece of luck, I’d been so stupid. The car was bound not to have been offloaded. I’d used up all my luck for some time to come. No, it wasn’t there, we climbed the gangway and there it was, sitting waiting mournfully on the deck. I went to see the first officer. He said, ‘The harbour master wants to see you, he’s in a cabin at the bottom of the ship, we’ve given him most of the whisky we use for these occasions. I hope you have a head for whisky, he doesn’t speak any English, and he has noticed you have two girls with you.’ What on earth was going to happen? The cabin was in the middle of the ship and below the waterline. I opened the door; a wave of the stench of stale sweat and whisky on the breath nearly knocked me over. We both opened our arms wide, greeting each other like old friends and laughed. We warmly shook hands, more laughter, holding both hands now, sm
iling and laughing. He motioned me to sit, ‘Whisky, Whisky,’ he said. ‘Yes Yes,’ I said, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ more laughter. The glasses weren’t like the little tea glasses on the roundabouts, they were ordinary water tumblers. The whisky gurgled in. He said something, I said something. We touched glasses and laughed again. He rubbed his four fingers with his thumb. I knew what that meant, I laughed again, throwing my head back, he did the same and filled our glasses. How long this went on, I really don’t know, but the bottle, thankfully, was beginning to run out. Suddenly, seemingly for no reason, he stood up and said, ‘OK, OK.’ I stood up and said, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ and we both roared with laughter. We touched glasses and threw our heads back. We shook hands very warmly, laughing all the time, and I moved towards the door. We waved each other goodbye and I closed the door. I had to get to the cabin very quickly, I was about to be sick. I just made it in time before the whole contents of my stomach gushed out. I plainly had no head for whisky. That evening Honey was getting a bit worried about another goodbye dinner with the Captain. As luck would have it, the Officers asked us for a goodbye dinner with them. We gratefully accepted. It was a beautiful evening although the wine didn’t flow in the quantities it had on the bridge. It was going to be a long time before we tasted wine again. The first officer said, ‘I don’t know what you did, but we’ve been told to unload your car first thing tomorrow morning. So if you’re there just after sun-up, you can begin your long, long journey.’ The next morning, after many genuine thanks and shaking of hands, we drove out of the port as quickly as was seemly.
***
In Kuwait, petrol was free, so we took advantage of the unexpected bonus and filled any container we could lay our hands on, to the brim. Finally we started that long, long drive to its eventual conclusion in London. We turned to each other and laughed, with sheer exuberance.