It was nightfall before a U-turning Mercedes drove us to Tamboi, a one water-buffalo town, dropping us off at the police station. Where could we stay? Oh, joy of the road! A cell was put at our disposal. The Dharma Bums unrolled their thieves-market sleeping-bags and set off in search of Kerouacian bliss. Where to begin? Opium dens, cock fights, a Chinese brothel . . . As we cruised the alleys, alert for tropical high-jinks, a group of uniformed Westerners staggered towards us – Aussie soldiers.
‘Look, mate,’ one of them yelled, clenching his fist and quickening his pace, ‘two fuck’n poofters.’
Mart and I decided to make it an early night.
We inched our way up the Malay Peninsula, on buses, trains and yes, a log-laden Thai truck, until we reached a fabled backpackers’ lodge in Bangkok, the Thai Song Greet Hotel. The dollar-a-night room included a corner shower and a sign above the bed: Passengers must not gambol, make phlegm or the smoking of hash and what have we. At the street-side lobby, inhaling an aromatic cloud of spices and carbon monoxide, Sharp scratched out cartoons, while I pecked away at the Olivetti. ‘Is the hitch-hiker a lonely intellectual,’ I asked, in a rhetorical thrust for the Herald, ‘exploring the world on a shoestring, driven by curiosity . . .?’ Fellow travellers worked the tables: student cards for sale; rumours of a new kind of innoculation against hepatitis, a job-offer selling pills to the locals. ‘No!’ I thundered. ‘The typical hitchhiker is a bludger who bisects the globe on a forged student card, smuggles watches and is driven by contempt for the locals . . .’
Which was true – up to a point. The antics of some were loathsome, while others were earnestly seeking satori. As for Mart and myself, our goal was time-honoured – cheap thrills. Thailand, never having been colonised, was uncoiling from cultural isolation and still to embrace mass tourism. The two of us were badgered by crowds wherever we went: ‘What your name? Where you go? Are you Beatle?’ The line about the Rolling Stones was abandoned after too many Thais replied, ‘Ah? So you very rich. Pay double.’ Having heard rumours about ‘blue movies’, but never seeing one, Sharp and I set off with an eager cab-driver to wrench the veils from the erotic Orient. Try as we might – zilch. Blank faces, shrugged shoulders, barred doorways. After further nocturnal sorties, we gave up. ‘Ah, so that’s what Westerners want,’ the locals concluded, setting off to invent the meat racks of Patpong.
There was a side trip to Cambodia, full of innocence and gaiety in those years before the killing fields, with queues around the block for the latest movie directed by the Head of State, Norodom Sihanouk. It was inconceivable to Sharp and me that an Australian politician would aspire to make a movie. Romantic clichés fuelled our wanderlust, so naturally we found ourselves on the floor of a woebegone hovel, where a toothless crone fuelled our opium pipe. It sure cleared up our head-colds. The most extravagant fantasy we encountered was all too tangible, Angkor Wat, a temple complex from the twelfth century embraced by a tropical rainforest. Here, wine-sodden backpackers recited fragments of Ferlinghetti under the moonlight, as I stretched myself on a crumbling Buddha and wondered why I had stayed so long in Mosman listening to the lawns being mowed. And so on, through Laos, Burma and the backstreets of Calcutta, until we found ourselves in Nepal, a land unknown to our geography teachers, but claimed by its embassy to be, with some justification, ‘the most beautiful place on Earth’.
The snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas stirred my inner wild man, Edmund Hillary in beatnik raiment. For tuppence a week, a sherpa had offered to do all the cooking and lug the kitchenware up to a glacier, but Sharp was still vomiting. The only place he wanted to climb was on to a jet. As we headed towards the town square, a mud-caked saddhu jabbed a staff at our feet:
‘For one rupee,’ he said, tugging a Santa Claus beard, ‘I will tell you the name of your wives.’
Sure. ‘We’re not married.’
‘Oh yes, sahib, you are – in your hearts. I will name the ladies who make your dreams so sticky.’ The imminence of magic seemed to quell Sharp’s nausea. A brown-bottomed toddler shoved a baby under the pump near a temple and soaped its hair.
Mart held out a rupee, which the saddhu brushed aside, as he beckoned us to sit. From his robes he extracted a pencil and paper.
Could he do it? The afternoon smelt of hash and dung, as always. Every week I’d been writing to Louise, aching for a reunion. Her replies were regular and warm – but not warm enough.
‘Sahib, don’t you think that is worth ten rupees?’
In a minuscule scrawl were the names of our absent lovers, Louise and Anou. The mud-man bowed, acknowledging Martin’s twenty rupees, and the two of us drifted towards the tourist bungalows. I muttered, ‘He must have a mate at the post office.’
We passed a Tibetan refugee centre, where a little girl struggled to improve her English with a hand-me-down paperback, Playboy’s Party Jokes. In a flash, I saw how this exotic anachronism, with its Buddhist ceremonials, temple virgins and budget-priced trekking would be transformed by tourism. The little Tibetan might grow up to be a Playboy Bunny.
With bits of lemon, I tried to scour the generations of ghee fumes from my tanka, as Mart stacked his artwork into separate envelopes, ready for posting – one lot for the Herald, the other for Oz.
‘What will you do in London,’ I asked, ‘apart from swing?’
‘Oh, I guess I’ll just wait for you.’ His jaw jutted in that quizzical, sly grin of his.
‘Come off it, Mart – you’ll be mobbed by Fleet Street.’
‘Snubbed, more like it.’ He paused. ‘What are you going to do?’
At the British Council library in Delhi, I had pored through the Observer and Sunday Times, humbled by the wit of the reviewers – books by Cyril Connolly, theatre by Kenneth Tynan. It took me an hour of intense concentration to write a passable sentence.
‘Do what you’re good at,’ Sharp said. ‘Start a magazine.’
Maybe – London had Private Eye, of course. Funny and snotty, but a bit of a black hole. What did it celebrate? Nothing. But then again, what did Oz celebrate? Like Private Eye, we knew what we were against, but what were we for? Being reared in the thrall of the stale, Sharp and I liked to think of ourselves as lovers of the new, but we defined the new only by tearing into the old. What we lacked was a world view.
‘Guide me you.’ A tough-looking Nepalese stood at the door. ‘Japanese teach cook me . . .’ He was ready to lead us to a volcanic lake, Goissonkundra, 18,000 feet up, starting soon – aiming to reach the foothills by nightfall.
‘Mart?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ll probably be here when you get back.’
‘If you’re not,’ I said, as the brooding sherpa beckoned me off to the far horizon, ‘give my love to Louise.’
Ten days later, when I returned from the climb, there was a note: ‘See you in Swinging London – Martin.’ A bit of a blow, yes, but almost a sense of relief. To be thrown on my own resources would intensify the journey, and break the mocking mould of a journey shared with a cartoonist.
At the British Embassy, which acted as a letterbox for Australians, I was given a note inviting me to ‘call for tea’ at the residence of Lady Anne Neville. She was a young Red Cross volunteer, who had noticed my name on an envelope and presumed a family connection. Over a pot of well-made Earl Grey, she disguised her disappointment. Through Lady Neville I ended up as the sole Australian in Nepal to be invited to an official reception for a parliamentary ‘fact-finding’ delegation from Canberra. Whatever ‘facts’ these shuffling geezers with their racist asides were seeking in Kathmandu, an editor of Oz wasn’t among them. I felt like a stripper at a State funeral. The protocol officer turned his back. A staffer from the British Embassy was reprimanded on the spot, for inviting the ‘dirty Oz man’. The High Commissioner demanded my departure and my career on the diplomatic circuit came to an abrupt end.
By August, I had reached Kabul; wired-up, without shoes or funds, weighed down with ethnic jewellery. I sat at the Khyber Café
, typing letters to friends, still high on the road, but wondering how I would make it to London. The manager shoved me into the street: ‘This is not your office.’ A party of Britishers in a Land-Rover offered me a ride to Europe, as their cook. Under the desert skies, arguing about the war in Vietnam, the absurdity of censorship and the meaning of life, I called upon all my inventiveness to concoct sinister stews from nameless ingredients.
In Teheran, as a change from gritty sleeping bags, a female passenger and I checked into a hotel. The door of the squalid room was semi-glazed and opened to the street, so I covered it with a sarong. Later, when we stepped outside, a boisterous queue of Iranians jostled for the favours of my companion. The surnames on our passports had revealed my friend and I were unrelated, so the ‘word had flashed around’ town that she was a prostitute. The timely arrival of our fellow passengers saved me from a beating . . . and her from worse. For the next thousand miles, I vented my wrath at the sexual hang-ups of the nation of Islam.
At a campfire of locals on a Turkish road, via a turntable hooked up to a truck, I was introduced to the passionate strains of the legendary singer Oum Kalsoum. In return, our group played a 45 of Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively Fourth Street’, which the Turks professed to love. At the height of the camaraderie I started thinking, this is the meaning of travel, to break down the barriers – these are the people who savaged my ancestors at Gallipoli and now here we are, brothers by the road. All people surely are one.
And I wasn’t even stoned. Despite the odd polite suck at a chillum en route, the herb had not wormed its way into my brain, or even my lungs, as I was incapable of doing ‘the drawback’. Merely an exotic version of tobacco, I thought, a Rothmans with curry powder.
In Istanbul, I picked up my Herald cheque from American Express, escaped from the Land-Rover and stuck out my thumb for Europe. I bedded down in the haystacks of Macedonia, the construction sites of Belgrade. In Salzburg, where I sought directions to the railway station, planning to nap on its benches, the respectable burghers shook their fists at my shaggy head and hitchhiker threads, shouting Nein! Nein! Munich, Cologne, I kept moving, not pausing until Amsterdam, a city captivated by its own youth. Here, the talk was of the Provos, idealists who had scattered a hundred white bicycles throughout the city for anyone to use, in the belief that the root of all evil was private property. The bikes were confiscated by police on the grounds that they might be stolen.
By the time I reached the ferry at Ostend, I was footsore and famished, clutching the last of my change. No one was permitted on board, according to the ticket-seller, unless travelling in a vehicle.
At that moment, the driver of a Mercedes swept up the ramp and beckoned me into the back seat, no strings attached. In the first class dining room, he treated me to champagne and lobster and I regaled him with tales of the Hindu Kush. I felt like Gregory Peck stumbling on the Million Dollar Note. Six months from Sydney, the road had come to the end, and when the white cliffs of Dover hove into view, tears sprang to my eyes.
6
In BED with the ENGLISH
Late one night in September 1966, I stood in a phone box on the misty outskirts of Dover, laden with luggage, making a reverse charge call to my sister Jill. She sounded sleepy and surprised. Her accent was pom to the hilt: ‘Daaahhhling . . . what time?’ With only two-and-six in my pocket, I told her, it would depend on the luck of the road.
And luck was on my side. ‘Where you heading?’ called the driver, as I scrambled in the back of my first lift, a newspaper delivery van.
‘To Swinging London,’ I said, and he snickered. It was well after midnight when the van dropped me at 70 Clarendon Road in Holland Park. A note was pinned to the front door in Sharp’s familiar hand: ‘TOO LATE. IT’S SWUNG.’ My hammering brought a yawning Martin to the door.
‘You smell of yak piss,’ he grinned, surveying my ankle-length Kabul coat. He said that Jill was still awake. Dumping my embossed Afghan flintlock rifle and the rest of the gear, I bounded upstairs to give her a hug. Her sleepy face was plastered with Nivea cream.
The kitchen was stacked with Sharp cartoons and unwashed coffee cups. My friend had holed up here for months – filling in for me, he claimed. No wonder Jill needed her rest. Her six-year-old daughter, her live-in nanny, the nanny’s five-year-old son and the nanny’s latest pick-up, whom I would later encounter washing socks in the bathroom, made up the household. The four-storeyed terrace was owned by a brigadier, stationed in Germany.
Sharp played the latest LPs, including Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, with its hallucinatory track, ‘Visions of Johanna’. The purple-hued living room overlooked a communal garden and through the French doors the golden foliage fluttered against the grey dawn. Full of despair, Dylan’s erotic dirge seemed to focus on a woman called Louise – ‘the ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face’ – who juggled a team of lascivious partners – ‘Louise and her lovers so entwined’ – much to the heartbreak of the balladeer. I tried to camouflage the pangs of coincidence with jokey asides, but could see from Sharp’s sidelong glances that he was relishing every allusion.
Late morning, after a sleep, a shower, a bowl of cereal – civilisation! – Martin took the keys to my sister’s Mini Minor and steered me through the Saturday morning traffic of Knightsbridge. London seemed familiar. Movie memories; the similarity of shopfront architecture, like a Sydney intersection endlessly multiplied.
In a maze of lanes off Sloane Street, we found Louise’s flat. A note was pinned to the door, but not for me. ‘Shane – Gone to Biba’s, Louise.’ I vaguely knew him, the bounder, last spied on the Fairsky as I was settling Louise into her cabin.
Biba’s boutique, a jungle of Art Nouveau, throbbed with the Animals, cash registers and skimpily clad women – one of them Jenny Kee, now a salesgirl. She wore a skin-tight jersey mini-dress and was hustling a plump nanny-type into a sailor suit – ‘just twelve and six, darls, amazing!’ Jenny blew me a kiss: ‘About time, Rick . . .’ and pointed in the direction she had last seen Louise. ‘We’re friends now, so don’t try any of your two-timing bullshit.’ The further we ventured down the stairs, the skimpier the attire. We stumbled into the communal changeroom where the floor was knee deep in discarded lingerie. The air was tinged with the perfumes of Arabia, and a whiff of its hashish. Okay, maybe it was incense. Frilly underwear hung from hat stands and bare breasts glimmered between the potted palms. I nearly fainted. Sharp told me to stop licking my lips. This was a long way from a frock salon in Mosman.
We found Louise, fashionably thin, staring at herself in a mirror. She was considering a silver lurex micro-mini. A shimmering macramé top exposed her midriff. ‘You’re here,’ she said.
We fell into the Mini, clutching each other. Sharp buzzed us back to Holland Park, where we picked up my sister and floated off to a beer garden in Portobello Road. The men had shoulder-length hair and several sported antique military jackets, brocaded with gold. Medals clinked. I assumed it was sartorial satire – a projection of anti-war sentiment. The Nevilles yabbered, while Mart and Louise exchanged cigarettes and laconic asides. My sister wore a mauve scarf over long red hair, fringed at the front, and a swirl of coloured glass around her neck. She looked like Monica Vitti. Jill had a job in advertising, a French lover and a second novel in the typewriter. ‘Let’s have a party,’ she said, ‘tonight.’
After a flurry of phone calls and a booze run, the guests gathered in the living room, hastily cleared of Sharp’s artboards and upturned bottles of Indian ink. My sister’s friends were older, seasoned chatterers in the literary vein, who welcomed me as ‘Jill’s long lost little brother’. Sipping Scotches, they rolled up the carpet and danced to Fats Waller, assorted rhythm and blues and the Phil Spector wall-of-sound treatment of Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High’. Six months on the road had restricted me to a second language: ‘Man’, ‘wow’, ‘How much?’, whereas here . . . here people knew how to shoot off their mouths.
One
twitchy aesthete introduced himself as an editor of the New Left Review, and demanded to be led to the record collection.
‘I’m just back from Chile,’ he announced. ‘I need to retune my cultural sonar, to re-actualise my sense of self.’ Wow – this was the intelligentsia. The nanny’s boyfriend, Bullus, flung off his shirt and swung from the sashes, swigging a bottle of Guinness. Louise wore her new silver lurex micro-mini. Jill’s bearded friends gawked. ‘They’ve never seen a woman like her,’ said Jill, ‘she’s a new species.’
Sharp moved out to share a studio off the King’s Road with a friend from Melbourne, Bob Whitaker, an official photographer of the Beatles. My sister and I slipped into an easy rapport, but not without arguments. In Chelsea restaurants, we debated the niceties of marijuana (Jill fiercely against, myself neutral) and the institution of marriage (me against). At first she was suspicious of Louise, daunted by the brevity of her speech and her wardrobe, but she soon came to appreciate her wry observations and her gift for friendship.
During the day, while Jill was at work, the nanny looked after Judy, my sister’s daughter from a disastrous marriage to Peter Duval Smith, a journalist and broadcaster. Sometimes I pitched in, re-creating the bizarre on-the-road curries and weaving bedtime fables of ‘Hindu Kush spaghetti monsters’ – but mostly I was preoccupied, on the look-out for parties, pocket money and ways of making a splash. It didn’t occur to me to offer Jill rent, but daily expenses ate away at the remains of my Herald money – so far scrupulously managed from afar by my father. Late at night in the living room, I tapped out a piece for Quadrant magazine, pondering the impact of Westerners on Nepal, my own included. Trekking to the deep blue mountain lake, I had discarded a copy of Newsweek at a goat-herder’s hut. On the way back, I noticed its pages had been glued to the inside walls, like pop art wallpaper.
Jill took Mart and myself to meet her employers, Collett, Dickenson, Pearce, with a view to finding us gainful ads to create. She tried again with Louise, arranging for her to be photographed in lingerie, peering moodily at passing traffic from an upstairs window. The colour ‘mock-ups’ resulted in the offer of a flight to New York and a sitting with Helmut Newton, but modelling bored Louise. Like me, she sensed a change in the wind.
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