East of Croydon

by Sue Perkins

  Sue Perkins

  * * *

  EAST OF CROYDON

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Journeys Past

  2. What’s It All About?

  3. It’s Not All My Fault

  VIETNAM 4. That Noo-dle That You Do So Well

  5. I Want to Be You

  6. I Don’t Like Mondays

  CAMBODIA 7. Kampong Phluk

  8. Piggy In the Middle

  9. Please Release Me

  10. Holy Moly

  11. The Pig of Kratie

  12. The Pig of Kratie 2

  13. Banlung

  14. Seebagh and the Kreung

  LAOS 15. The Lost Souls

  16. Lies, Dam Lies and Statistics

  17. It’s Oh So Quiet

  18. The School of Hard Knocks

  19. All That Glitters

  CHINA 20. Yunnan

  21. You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until …

  22. Ho Goes There?

  23. The Miracle at Cizhong

  24. It’s Not What You Do ? It’s the Way That You Do It

  INDIA 25. Kolkata: Arrivals

  26. Bow Barracks

  27. Faith, Hope and Love

  28. A Googly Near the Hooghly

  29. Just Dance

  THE GANGES 30. Gangotri

  31. I Saw a Mouse: Where?

  32. The Summit

  33. The Blackbird

  34. Checkmate

  35. Mirrors

  36. Say It

  37. The Strong One

  38. Fantasy Football

  39. And I Will Fix You

  40. It Pays to Go Premium

  41. Blackbird (Redux)

  VARANASI 42. Coincidence

  43. The Magnet Boys

  44. The City of Light/The Heart of Darkness

  THE FINAL PUSH 45. Return to Rakhi

  46. The Sundarbans

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  For Dad

  in the deep heart’s core

  If you never did you should these things are fun and fun is good.

  Dr Seuss

  Introduction

  I am deep within the forest, the raw heat of the day softened by the canopy above. The man in front of me is swaying, a gobbet of raw pig’s liver hanging from his ear. Another man, to his left, has what looks like a piece of lung adorning his fringe. As I draw nearer, someone flicks a bit of kidney in my direction, which hits the white of my eye and bounces off again. Nearer still and the tribesmen rush to adorn my shoulders with offal, a ventricle here, a pancreas there. I think I can make out a spleen on my shirt collar, but am not sure. I was never any good at biology.

  I am the only sober person in the forest.

  Further offerings are made to the spirits, to the ancestors they believe inhabit this ancient land. A bubbling handful of intestines is respectfully arranged on a makeshift shrine. Men, and it is only men here, bob and bow – though I’m not sure whether this is down to reverence or simple intoxication.

  The village elder is sitting next to a giant bottle, the glass stained with green fur. Inside is a strange liquid which smells like a holy trinity of gasoline, semen and Pimm’s. For all I know, it may well contain all three.fn1 One by one, the celebrants are invited to suck on the thick pipe that snakes from the murk. Some cough into the bottle as they drink. Some spit. Finally, the chief stares in my direction, his eyes glazed with grog. He beckons me over.

  It is my turn.

  The crew are some distance away, shooting on a long lens. I look towards them. It’s the look of a woman who is about to cross every health and safety threshold she once held dear; a woman about to be exposed to the full spectrum of gastro-intestinal diseases known to man, and a few hitherto yet unidentified by medical science. It’s a look that simply says, Help me.

  I know that a choice is presenting itself. I can play the squeamish Westerner, protect the delicate flora of my intestinal tract and offend a bunch of festive animists. Or I can be another person, a different Susan – a fearless explorer, embracing with open hands and open heart a strange new world.

  I know the sort of person I am. So I try to be the opposite.

  I steel myself. It is simply a case of mind over matter. I accept the blessings of the forest. I accept the glistening unknown in the vat beneath. I accept it all. Then, as I bend towards the liquid, breathing in its oily reek, someone leans over and pops a chunk of pig bowel on the end of the straw.

  And I drink.

  1. Journeys Past

  Historically, the Perkins tribe were neither explorers, nor adventurers. Dad, in a moment of genealogical fervour, traced his family tree back two hundred years and discovered that all the men had been either labourers or soldiers, and all the women charladies. None of my ancestors got the chance to leave the UK, unless, of course, it was to offer up a limb or two at Gallipoli. Dad broke the mould, venturing as far as Kingston, Jamaica, while on National Service – but he was so terrified by the flora and fauna he vowed never to leave the shores of Britannia again.

  ‘The crabs, Susan! The crabs! They were the size of landmines!’ he’d recall hysterically – as if the crustaceans would prove the more dangerous factor in that equation.

  Mum was a little more intrepid. She had travelled to Ibiza in her mid-twenties, but pronounced it ‘not Spanish enough’ and returned a week later, disappointed.fn1

  Our parents didn’t do ‘foreign’, and hated sleeping in ‘strange beds’, so we tended to holiday places where you could arrive and return on the same day. These trips were planned with military precision, like Navy SEALs – and felt more like tactical strikes than mini-breaks. Occasionally, we visited my grandparents in their 117th-floor flat in Torremolinos. It must have been just ‘Spanish enough’ for my mum because we went twice. We’d get sunburn, drink Fanta, ride on a poor, beleaguered donkey in Mihas then fly home.

  When I was fourteen I went to Jersey with the Children’s Youth Theatre and got fingered on a ferry by a boy named Michael. At eighteen, I went to the east coast of America, got mugged and came straight home again. At twenty-one I went on a week’s trip to Madeira and drank vodka in an underwhelming villa with sea views so distant they stretched the very bounds of trade description.

  See, I told you – not adventurous.

  I’d never been one for leaving the comforts of home. That person wasn’t me, I didn’t spent my formative years youth-hostelling round Rwanda, or climbing Everest in a tie-dye playsuit to raise awareness of something or other. After all, why visit the Bora Bora crater, when you can stay right where you are and enjoy Netflix and salt and vinegar crisps?

  As an adult, the obsessive dynamics of self-employment meant it was impossible for me to take a break. What would happen if I disappeared for a week or two? I would be forgotten. For ever. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity would, doubtless, present itself – and I would miss the chance to seize it. That six-part series on krumping? Britain’s Best Kettles? Eamonn Holmes Under the Hammer? I’d never get those jobs if I went away. No. Best stay here, alert and primed at home in London, and wait.

  And then something wonderful happened – work itself afforded me the chance to go away. Finally I got to leave my desk with a clear conscience.

  In 2013, I was asked if I’d like to make a documentary about the Mekong river, following it for over four thousand kilometres from Vietnam all the way to the snowy peaks of Tibet. It had been a dark, difficult year. Poor Dad had been sick with throat cancer, and our days were spent bombing up and down the A30, taking him to and from his daily radiotherapy sessions. He was now in remission, but the treatment seemed not only to have shrunk his tumour but his horizons. Now, he rarely left the house, content only to explore the already-
explored, the safe, the pre-experienced – the familiar poles of armchair, bed and dining table. Occasionally his swollen legs would carry him as far as the biscuit tin and back. That would be a good day.

  I agreed to the trip. Perhaps, deep down, I felt I would be travelling for him. And for Mum too – who has an adventurer’s heart but a carer’s role, glued to her partner through times, of late, more thin than thick, and certainly more in sickness than in health.

  There was another reason. I have a voice inside me, a voice that drives me to darkness. It dims the lights, it drains the colour, it turns the sound down. It calls me in when I want to be out; it tells me to expect the worst, rather than hope for the best. To travel is to quieten that voice, to know that it cannot and will not control me.

  I take after my dad: he feels too much and cannot cope.

  I take after my mum – constantly fretful in times of safety but stoic in a crisis.

  We’re all contradictory souls at heart – a mix of intrepid and afraid, outgoing and solitary. The measure of your sanity, I guess, is where you draw the line between those poles. Perhaps this adventure would give me the chance for some much needed recalibration.

  So, even though I was frightened, I said yes. I will always say yes. I will throw myself into every experience, I will accept every dare,fn2 I will agree to maddening offers and crazy adventures.

  Yes.

  I’ve said I take after my mum. This seems like a good moment to introduce you to the nine-stone bag of true grit that is Ann Perkins.

  I grew up, as is a matter of public record, in the charming hamlet of Croydon. If you’ve not been, and want to conjure the aesthetics of the place, imagine a long scream into oblivion that has been commemorated in concrete. Architecturally, it was a curious mix of brutalism and the worst excesses of 1980s office building – as you approach by train, it looks like the skyline has been designed by a pre-school competition winner.

  But I was young: I didn’t care for beauty. I craved the important things in life, like cheap cider, knock-off fags and newsagents with a lackadaisical approach to security. In that regard, Croydon gave me everything I needed, and it was a blissful childhood.

  We lived in a house on a bank. The house was called High Bank. I admire the simple, honest pragmatism of that nomenclature. It’s like calling the Houses of Parliament ‘Swinging Dick Palace’ or Trump Towers ‘Look Upon My Gold Toilet And Weep, O Migrants’.

  I digress. Because the bank was, indeed, high, it meant that mowing the lawn was hard – unless, that is, you’re my mum. Ann Perkins is undeterred by petty inconveniences like gravity. For her, gravity is just another thing to be overcome – like stress incontinence and Dr Liam Fox.

  Mum had pioneered a revolutionary system for trimming grass on a gradient. This involved tying a long loop of string around the handle of the Flymo, letting the machine trundle down the bank and then pulling on the string to haul it back up.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  It was a rainy day.

  I could end the story there, couldn’t I? I could simply let your imagination fill in the blanks and save us all the horror – but both literary form and the contractual necessity that this book is 90,000 words long mean I should now elaborate further on the scene.

  It was a rainy day, and Mum decided that, what with the ground being sodden and extra slippy, this might, indeed, be the perfect day to go out and cut some grass. I watched her from my bedroom window, striding out into the mizzle. There was the sharp stink of two-stroke and a thin plume of black smoke as she fired up the Flymo. Then off she went.

  The next thing I heard was a cry – hard and fast – the sort of cry that has gone before it arrives. The sort of cry that lets you know something is seriously, seriously wrong.

  I found Mum slumped at the bottom of the bank in the mud holding her foot and muttering. I approached. It was then I noticed that the trainer on her right foot had been sliced off, and, by reason, her toes along with it.

  ‘David!’ I shouted. ‘Call an ambulance!’ thereby simultaneously sounding in charge while not having to actually do anything. This is what is known as Eldest Child Syndrome.

  ‘David!’ I shouted again. He was nowhere to be seen.

  My sister, Michelle, appeared and took in the scene. Rather than moving to help, she felt the best contribution she could make was to scream into Mum’s face.

  MICHELLE: Oh, God!

  ME: David!

  MICHELLE: Oh, no!

  ME: David!

  MICHELLE: Shit! Fuck!

  That’s when I knew things were really bad. My mum hates swearing, and even now isn’t averse to dragging me into the bathroom and anointing the inside of my mouth with the cleansing fire of Imperial Leather. The fact that she was getting a full four-letter fanning without batting an eyelid was of genuine concern.

  The commotion had, by now, attracted a few local kids who had pulled up on their bikes. My sister responded by rushing down the steps and directing the abuse at them instead.

  MICHELLE: No! Get lost! Go on! Piss off!

  David had now arrived, and was sizing up the situation.

  DAVID: FUCK!

  It was an excellent summary.

  MICHELLE: Yes, you! Go on, fuck off!

  DAVID: FUUCK!

  This carried on for several minutes, after which I decided it might be a good time to call the ambulance myself. It took nearly five minutes to explain to the bemused operator what had happened:

  OPERATOR: She was mowing. In the rain. On a bank?

  I returned with some advice.

  ME: David, we need to find the toes.

  DAVID: What?

  ME: Find them! Find the toes!

  That’s a role nobody wants, isn’t it? Chief toe-finder. Toefinder General.

  I bellowed again.

  ME: David! Pick up the toes!

  I felt it was more of a boy job, something that someone with a Y-chromosome should take care of. I was young. I was yet to learn about the toxicity of gender roles. David picked his way gingerly through the grass.

  DAVID: Is that a big toe? Is it? JESUS!

  While we waited for the paramedics, Mum eased into one of her favourite emotional states – martyrdom: Saint Ann of the Bleeding Feet became calm, a preternatural serenity descending over her

  MUM: I don’t know what the fuss is all about. I am totally fine.

  ME: Mum, there’s blood pouring out of your foot.

  MUM: Nonsense.

  MICHELLE: It’s like a fountain.

  MUM: Don’t worry about me, it’s nothing that a bit of Savlon won’t sort out.

  ME: Since when did Savlon glue toes together?

  DAVID: (spotting something pink and shiny in the grass) Oh, God! Oh, God. Fuck!

  She hopped into the ambulance, aided by a pair of paramedics. They were about to learn that Mum is the John Lewis of chat. Even with a severed foot, she is never knowingly under-talked. Once seated inside, she chose to display her home-economics prowess by randomly listing everything lurking within our chest freezer. She loved that freezer and was the only person on earth who could identify the grey cellophane-wrapped rubble buried in the permafrost.

  MUM: (clutching what’s left of her foot as her face turns green) OK. Dinner tonight. There’s mince. You could do that with boiled potatoes or some pasta.

  PARAMEDIC: Ann …

  MUM: And there’s bound to be a Bernard Matthews turkey roll in there somewhere. Let me think …

  (Mum consults her Menu Mind Palace.)

  MUM: Yes. Left section, underneath the Crispy Pancakes.

  ME: Is her face supposed to be that colour?

  MUM: Or you could have prawns.

  ME: It’s really green …

  MUM: And there’s that kilo block of Cathedral Cheddar. Mature. But, remember, no broccoli or courgette.

  ME: I know …

  MUM: It messes with your father’s bowel.

  ME: I KNOW.

  MUM: Viennetta for pu
dding. That’s in the bottom compartment. Oh, and, Susan …

  ME: Yes?

  MUM: Don’t, whatever you do, tell Dad where I am.

  ME: What?

  MUM: He’s not to know.

  ME: Well, what am I supposed to tell him? Where shall I say you are?

  MUM: Knitting class.

  PARAMEDIC: Ann, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’m afraid you’re going to be in hospital at least a week with an injury like this.

  MUM: Right you are. OK, lace class then, that’s more involved. Say I’m making an intricate bookmark.

  ME: You’ve gone away for a fortnight, without notice – making an intricate bookmark?

  MUM: Do you know, I think I might have some of that gas and air now …

  And with that, the paramedic, who had been waiting patiently for Mum to pause for breath, popped a mask over her face and whisked her to Mayday Hospital.

  2. What’s It All About?

  I’ve never been sure where holidays end and true travel begins. Perhaps the distinction lies in a deeper engagement with the local people, a lengthier, immersive stay in communities. Perhaps, more simply, it has something to do with the inherent difference between a rucksack and a suitcase. I don’t know. All I know is that holidays weren’t much my thing – I don’t tan and I’m not built for staying still – but travel, well, that turned out to be something altogether different.

  I know I look like a proper square; a total cube. But underneath that nerdish topcoat I am someone who eschews order for chaos. Routine is my nightmare, and the unexpected is my safe space. Nothing makes me happier than being thrown in at the deep end, and nothing excites me more than a journey where the destination is organic and unfixed. It turns out that what I’d been looking for all these years wasn’t a mini-break, but a proper adventure.