I asked about their parents; nobody came here from stately homes and filthy riches. A few disliked their parents but most pitied the poor slobs who spent their lives working to make money, for what? Well, to rear these children and give them all the little luxuries like food, clothing, shelter and as much education as they would take. Money orders from home were welcome but accepted as due; the old man worked, he could afford the cash. Work was a four-letter word meaning slavery. They were not going to be slaves of the system.
I can now hear young voices telling me to knock it off, the kids were putting me on. (Did Margaret Mead ever suspect that the Samoans were putting her on?) True, someone who smokes nicotine not hash in such company is like a teetotaller in a saloon. I explained that I had tried pot once, before they were born or anyway lapping up baby food, and once was enough. For twelve hours I lay like a stone statue on a tomb, unable to move or sleep, while a few flies circled round, as loud large and terrifying as bombers. They said probably the vibes were bad. I said the vibes were first-rate, the trouble was me, I was allergic to pot and besides Mount Carmel wine did for me what joints did for them.
They thought I was crazy to smoke cigarettes, didn’t I know cigarettes gave you lung cancer? I said I was living dangerously, like them. In fact, apart from their hash and sex intake, they were living like a Boy Scout’s dream of camping, but much rougher than Boy Scouts’ well-equipped excursions. I think they hardly noticed me, being half sloshed most of the time. In the water tank, daylight filtered through a small square hole in the roof; I was also hardly seen. When a hump of blankets started to hump energetically, I wondered whether the blankets were due to my presence but, after further study, decided that this was daytime style for copulation.
They had no cliques or sets. Even if they thought someone heavy or otherwise a nuisance, they never shut anyone out. Children learn and adults perfect the social tricks for making a fellow being feel unwelcome. They did not practise this sort of unkindness. They were generous; whoever had anything spread it around. These are the good manners of the heart and altogether praiseworthy. I couldn’t tell whether a diet of hash explained a general lack of intelligence.
The girls surprised and amused me by confirming that the secret of success with boys is the same for hippy chicks as for debutantes, has always been the same for all girls: appreciative listening, tender care of male vanity, keeping your place in the background. How to be popular in a water tank. Poor little girls. Physically less resistant than the boys, they were often wrapped in a lonely blanket, coughing their heads off, shivering with fever, weak from diarrhoea. If attached to one man, they seemed like Arab women, permanently bringing up the rear. If unattached, they still did the cooking and washed the pots and plates under a distant spigot.
Like birds, they had all winged their way south to the slum they created at the tip of Israel, remarking that it was a pretty good place in the winter, as warm as you’d find. They knew nothing about Israel and didn’t approve of it; the fuzz was heavy. At least they knew something of the cops wherever they’d been, which is one way to learn about a country. At the end of a week, they began to make me nervous; I was afraid I might grow up to be like them.
Thinking of those kids at Eilath has given me a new slant on horror journeys. They are entirely subjective. Well of course. If I had spent any time analysing travel, instead of just moving about the world with the vigour of a Mexican jumping bean, I’d have seen that long ago. You define your own horror journey, according to your taste. My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom. Add discomfort, fatigue, strain in large amounts to get the purest-quality horror, but the kernel is boredom. I offer that as a universal test of travel; boredom, called by any other name, is why you yearn for the first available transport out. But what bores whom?
The young hippies had not been condemned to an indefinite sentence of aimless hardship travel. They believed they were living; the rest of us were merely existing. At their age, I travelled around Europe with a knapsack too but would have thought their doped and dirty communal drifting a horror journey then, as I did now. At the opposite extreme, people enjoy grand culture tours with an attendant charming scholar lecturer to inform and instruct. They are guided round the antiquities of Greece, the Coptic churches of Ethiopia, the mosques of Persia, and other splendours. The companions of the road are civilized and couriers spare them the trying aspects of travel. I would die of it.
As also I would die of a cruise which is super delight to vast numbers of travellers. It bores me even to think of such a trip, not that I mind luxury and lashings of delicious food and starting to drink at 11 a.m. with a glass of champagne to steady the stomach. But how about the organized jollity, the awful intimacy of tablemates, the endless walking round and round because you can’t walk anywhere else, the claustrophobia? One of the highly extolled features of a cruise is restfulness. If you really want the top in rest cures, take a three months’ cruise on the QE2, the penthouse staterooms at one hundred thousand pounds would be best but you can relax in some sort of hutch for a mere five thousand pounds.
The longest time I ever passed upon the waves was eighteen days in 1944, crossing the Atlantic on a dynamite ship. The ship was manned by Norwegians, forty-five of them, the Captain and the First Mate had a working command of English, talk was basic. The deck cargo was small amphibious personnel carriers, which left hardly any space to stretch the legs. The hold was filled with high explosives. There were no lifeboats. I was the only passenger. Smoking was forbidden though by special permission of the Captain I could smoke in my cabin with a big bowlful of water as ashtray. The food was terrible and we had nothing to drink.
Though we didn’t know it, this enormous convoy was part of the enormous final build-up for D-Day, eleven days after we reached Liverpool. It was freezing cold and the diversions were icebergs, a morning of splendidly snafu manoeuvres, evasive action against submarines, the air rent by curses, and gunnery practice, nice and noisy. Fog shrouded us most of the way. The Captain was worried about day and night fog, his cargo and the risk of collision with Liberty ships which he regarded as more dangerous than submarines, saying angrily, “They try to handle them like a taxi.” I didn’t understand enough to be worried about anything and thought it a pleasant interesting trip though not a barrel of fun, rather lacking in excitement. I kept skimpy notes, the last one is: “The voyage has been a fine rest cure.”
I wouldn’t willingly spend eighteen days afloat ever again but if the choice was between a cruise ship and a dynamite ship I’d have no trouble in choosing.
And then there’s Bali, a name of guaranteed glamour, known to all. Before the Second World War, I had heard of incomparable Bali from aristocrats of travel—those who could pay for the expensive journey—and plenty of picture books proved the beauty of tiny deadpan temple dancers with fingernails like quills, handsome native houses of woven mats and carved wood, a landscape of exotic elegance. Oddly enough I had no interest in seeing Bali, very odd considering my interest in seeing almost anywhere. I’m not sure why; perhaps I imagined it as a museum island, boringly exquisite, filled with poor beautiful people being stared at by rich beautiful people. But Bali was a transcendent experience for me too, in rare circumstances: the Japanese surrender.
This momentous occasion took place in March 1946. The reason for the delay, so long after the Japanese defeat, was that no one had time to get around to Bali. A single warship was assigned to handle the peculiar D-Day. For two nights we waited on deck, crammed with troops, in heat, dirt, thirst, everyone asking aloud and bitterly what we were waiting for. Then the great day dawned and we swarmed down nets into landing craft. The welcoming committee of Japanese officers could be seen on the black sand beach and in order not to lose face we were supposed to make a ceremonial approach, all landing craft in line abreast. There followed a scene of glorious confusion; landing craft scurried like maddened water beetles, if two got in line, the others strayed. The troo
ps became increasingly browned-off as well as seasick. We were pitched about inside these uncomfy steel jobs while the impassive Japanese watched, no doubt wondering how our side won the war.
Finally someone in command, outdone by this display of anti-seamanship, bellowed to get ashore and the hell with it, so we straggled in to land. Whereupon Japanese officers surrendered swords as if giving away fountain pens. A Japanese photographer from Domei sprang around clicking his camera as though this were a fashionable first night. I laughed myself into uncontrollable hiccoughs, further stimulated by seeing the neat composed Japanese officers drive ahead in fine cars which we followed in ratty old trucks. When the troops caught sight of bare Balinese breasts, they cheered. Breasts were covered at once throughout the island.
My notes on that week are as meaningless as if written in Sanskrit. Place names, people names, problems, politics, Balinese festivities, descriptions of scenery, kampongs, conditions under Japanese rule. All I remember is laughter, joy in life.
I think I had the best of Bali, better than the stylish pre-War travellers and much better than the hordes who now invade the island which has become a hippy haven as well as providing high-class international beach resorts. Rumour says that the gentle Balinese are as skilful at gouging tourists as everyone else in the mysterious East. It sounds like an Oriental Capri, and worth avoiding.
Yes indeed, what bores whom? The threshold of boredom must be like the threshold of pain, different in all of us.
With Gregory Hemingway in Idaho, 1941
Seven
NON-CONCLUSION
Amateur travel always used to be a pastime for the privileged; now it is a pastime for everyone. Perhaps the greatest social change since the Second World War is the way citizens of the free nations travel as never before in history. We have become a vast floating population and an industry; we are essential to many national economies not that we are therefore treated with loving gratitude, more as if we were gold-bearing locusts. People of all categories and ages travel with assurance. The grocer and his family are off to the Canary Islands to sunbathe and swim; the hairdresser is going to Seville for the bullfights; elderly ladies in drip-dry cottons have left their gardens for a coach tour to look at tulips in Holland; football fans in yelling hordes follow their teams from country to country; Icelandic housewives charter a plane to shop at Marks and Spencer where they find Arab housewives in yashmaks similarly engaged; Americans overload their own National Parks and resorts, fly by millions to Europe, inundate Mexico. Are we having the time of our lives?
I have seen many people who looked as if they were on their own kind of horror journey. Men with lightless eyes carrying parcels for voracious wives; how cheap these leather wallets are in Florence, this pottery in Oaxaca, these cuckoo clocks in Berne. Groups, in museums and palaces, cowed by guides, their shoulders drooping, their feet swollen. Friends and lovers in shrieking quarrels on that dreamed-of visit to a romantic city, Amsterdam, Venice, Bangkok. Weary queues in railway stations, pushing their luggage ahead inch by inch. Couples grey and silent with melancholia in any foreign hotel dining room. Young parents, laden with small children toys nappies bottles, scouring the streets for a bed and breakfast refuge. They were all pleasure-bent but seek and ye shall find does not necessarily apply to travel. Once safe again at home they could forget how awful some, much or most of it had been, bring out their souvenirs, their photos, their edited memories, and plan another holiday.
No sight is better calculated to turn anyone off travel than the departure lounge of a big airport. It’s like the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me . . . your huddled masses” and let them wait. If attendance at airports was compelled by law we would protest in marches, demonstrations, picket the White House and Parliament, take the case to the World Court, write to The Times, raise the roof. Of our own will we sit there, knee to knee, with our hand luggage and duty-free plastic bags around us, deafened by announcements, wan and palely loitering for anywhere from one to ten hours. We look beaten, exhausted, sick of the whole thing. Then the flight is called, we make the interminable trek to the departure gate, we clamber and crush into a bus or if lucky walk straight on to the aircraft. Inside the plane, our faces change, we toss jokes about, laugh, chat to strangers. Our hearts are light and gay because now it’s happening, we’re starting, we’re travelling again.
In temporary furnished quarters at
Claviers, Spetsai, Comino,
Icogne, Naxxar, Antigua, Ta’Xbiex,
Lindos, Symi, Marsalforn.
1975-1977
Travels with Myself and Another Page 33