On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  One day in Southend-on-Sea I was in a shop buying a tennis racket and I heard on the shop’s music system a wonderful piece of opera. I asked the guy behind the counter whether he knew what it was. ‘Dunno mate,’ he replied, dully. ‘I just sell tennis rackets.’ I rushed out of the place and went straight to a record store and hummed the tune. The assistant stared at me blankly. Fearing I would lose the music in my head I ran for a phone booth (yes, that’s what we had in the days before mobile phones) and called Andrew. Again I hummed the melody and Andrew, bless his cottons, said immediately, ‘That’s Puccini’s Turendot.’ Thus I came to enjoy a certain type of opera, though some operas still grate on the cultural nerves formed during my working class upbringing.

  Andrew and Cheryl have been firm and constant friends for nearly forty years now. Ex-schoolteachers now retired they are and always have been a deeply religious couple, the Anglican Church being all important to them.

  Cheryl is an attractive slim brunette with a tremendous dress sense. A Masters graduate, she understands good English and is often upset with those who are casual with our language. When our daughter needed a tutor for her A-Level English, it was to Cheryl we turned. She did an excellent job and Shaney got the grade she hoped for. When Cheryl was very ill she showed tremendous courage and my estimation of her, high as it was, went even higher still.

  Andrew is a man with a deep intellect and a broad knowledge of many subjects. He has his idiosyncrasies, some of which I would endorse and copy if I could. One of them is that he handles books he is reading so carefully they keep their newness intact. He tries to keep them as perfect as they were when he bought them. Even paperbacks.

  Andrew and Cheryl Hall are kind, generous people, the sort the Church needs as representatives. Their friendship has been invaluable to Annette and me. They have two children, Bryony and Luke. Bryony got a First for Classics at Bradford University and Luke got a First for Art and Fashion at St Martins. Bryony is in education management. Luke Hall is a fashion designer in New York. We are godparents to Luke.

  There is still one young man I need to write about.

  Christian Lehmann came into my life during the late seventies. In 1977 the author Mike Scott Rohan married an American who I know only as Debs. They kindly invited Annette and me to the wedding, which because Debs was a Quaker was conducted according to the custom of the Religious Society of Friends. It was a nice ceremony and probably sowed the seeds for my later conversion to Quakerism. At the wedding was a cousin of Mike’s, a tall, dark-haired young man often wearing a quizzical expression. His name was Christian Lehmann, a French youth from Paris, and he questioned me earnestly about writing science fiction and its sister genres, fantasy and horror. We talked a bit and got on well together.

  I met Christian again at Skycon in ’78 and Seacon in ’79, two science fiction conventions, and again he engaged me in earnest conversation. He was by this time on his way to becoming a doctor, but told me he was desperate to also become a writer. Indeed, after our third meeting he visited our house and thereafter visited and stayed with us countless times, becoming a fifth member of the family. I remember that as well as learning to love Annette’s custard – he and Rick used to fight over the dregs after an apple pie meal – Christian also developed a taste for sweet mince meat, which he could not get in France, and took jars of the stuff back with him to Paris in his suitcase.

  Shoeburyness is famous for its mud. It sits on the Thames Estuary and the tide goes out over a mile leaving a great expanse of primeval sludge through which less than fastidious people can wade. We took an incredulous and wary Christian Lehmann barefoot out on this stuff that could almost suck your foot off if you left it there too long. We took with us a bucket in which to collect cockles. After harvesting them from scrapes on the mud, making sure we weren’t trapped by an always swift incoming tide, we took the cockles home and fed them with bran to make them open their shells and so release any grit inside. Then we boiled them, let them cool, and finally dished them up on the plate for tea after spraying them with vinegar and powdering them with pepper.

  I can’t remember whether Christian actually ate any, but he certainly found the gathering of them a unique experience.

  Today Christian Lehmann is a highly respected Parisian author, some of whose novels include La tribu (The Tribe), La folie Kennaway (The Madness of Kennaway), The Ultimate Game and one I would love to read if I was older, Le crocodile de la bonde (The Crocodile in the Drain). Several of his novels have been made into French movies. He also somehow managed dual careers, not only qualifying as an MD and running a surgery, but also finding time to write his many good novels. He and his lovely wife Veronique, a politician, still visit us on occasion, sometimes with their children. It is people like Christian, fired by the same fuel that drove me to first lift a pen, who make the world of writing something more for me than just sitting down day after day filling a blank page with words. When we talk together, we are effervescent with enthusiasm, the ideas fizzing from our brains.

  When he was writing his first novel, The Madness of Kennaway, Christian called me at Wychwater and asked me if he could use my surname for the main protagonist. ‘What’s it about?’ I asked, flattered. ‘Is this fictional Kilworth to be the hero?’ There was a short silence on the other end of the line, before Christian replied, ‘Not hero, exactly. Among other things he’s a cold-blooded, psychopathic killer.’ ‘Hmm,’ I said, ‘let me think about that. No, old chum, I’d rather wait for a novel in which Kilworth saves the world, if you don’t mind.’ It worried me just a little that my French doctor friend believed my family name was perfect for a vicious, murdering, Englishman with no conscience.

  We have laughed together over that call since, but then Christian is an unusual doctor. He has never seen the need to draw a definite line between medicine and his love of fantasy ficiton. I remember once visiting his surgery at Poissy, just outside Paris. There was a poster on his waiting room wall depicting a vampire with blood dripping from its fangs. I did wonder whether any potential patients of his had scampered off home on being confronted with that picture.

  Some authors consider their ideas too precious to reveal to their fellow writers, but others – like me, like Peter Beere, like Rob Holdstock, like Christian Lehmann, like many others – they can’t wait to discuss them with their friends and get feedback on them. They love to talk ‘writing’ and no discussion is too trivial, be it how one came by a novel concept or the problem of finding a stunning title for the book. The latest films, novels, music, experience, all feed into the conversation, and we always come away after such talks burning to get back to the lonely business of getting the next chapter or tale onto that waiting white paper.

  My other connection with Paris in the late ’80s, apart from Christian, were two warm-hearted Americans who lived there at the time. Scott Baker is an author who now resides in Monterey, California. At the time he and his wife Suzi were expats in Paris, where both did translations for various people. Scott and Suzi obviously knew many Parisian publishers and one of their friends was a man called Jacques Chambon, of Denoel Publishing. One night, while Annette and I were staying with them, they invited Jacques and his wife for a meal, hoping that Jacques would offer to publish my translated short story collection The Songbirds of Pain in Denoel’s Presence du Futur series.

  ‘Now remember,’ Scott warned me before the meal, ‘Jacques is especially proud of his wines. He will bring some bottles. I know you don’t usually drink wine, but this time just pretend, eh? You don’t want to offend him and it’ll all go that much smoother.’

  I told Scott I would do my best, for I dislike wine intensely. I’m not teetotal, I love a gin and tonic, but wine and beer give me migraines. Maybe it’s the additives or something. Who knows? I just find it best to avoid them and stick to what suits my physical make-up.

  Jacques and his wife arrived and the meal began. We got on a like a house on fire. However, I found that I could not drink Jacques’ wine,
indeed a beautiful looking liquid in a beautiful looking bottle, for fear my head would explode halfway through the evening. So, with a little nudge to Annette, we surreptitiously began swapping glasses when no one was paying attention to us. The subterfuge went well. Annette is good at drinking wine and never seems to get tipsy. Finally the evening was drawing to an end and no decision had yet been announced on the book.

  Jacques said, ‘Garry, before we can do business, I want to know – do you like Meryl Streep as an actress, or not?’

  Meryl Streep had been around for some time by the late ’80s, but she irritated the hell out of me. She was one of those actresses who are regarded as great stars before actually making any decent movies. Everyone was talking about Meryl Streep, saying what a wonderful actress she was and how they loved her movies and thought her the greatest actress ever to hit the screen. And though The Deer Hunter is a terrific film she always seemed to be mooning around the place, softly weeping. She has one of those thin noses that go red around the nostrils when she cries. It makes me squirm. I know, I know, the fault is mine, but that’s how it is. Everyone else loved and still loves Meryl Streep, Annette included, but I still wince and squirm.

  So I gave Jacques an honest answer.

  ‘I don’t like her,’ I replied.

  ‘Good,’ he said, stretching out a hand, ‘we can do business.’

  Jacques didn’t like her either, but I never did find out whether it was the red nose that put him off too, because he then smiled at me slyly and said, ‘And may I congratulate you on finding a wife who is not only charming and lovely, but drinks wine like a real Parisian.’

  Obviously, we had been observed.

  Les Ramages de la Douleur, the French edition of The Songbirds of Pain came out in 1989. My work has been published in twenty-two different languages now, from Korean to Indonesian, yet Les Ramages de la Douleur was special. The largest money advance I’ve ever had for a book was from Germany, but to be published by the French is like getting a painting into the National Gallery.

  While I am writing about France and literature, I have to put down one of my lifelong puzzlements. The Frenchman Pierre Boulle wrote The Bridge Over the River Kwai a novel about an idiotic English officer who is demented enough to want to assist his Japanese captors – an enemy who has been relentlessly cruel towards the officer’s fellow prisoners, torturing them, murdering them, allowing them to die of disease and starvation – simply because he likes to see a good job done well. Excuse me M. Boulle, but here’s one Englishman who thinks you’re an arrogant Frenchman who’s made a lot of money out of mocking my countrymen and doesn’t understand why the rest of his nation can’t see that too. My puzzlement is why the British celebrate this novel which clearly ridicules them using a stereotype right out of a French handbook .

  Equally, I have never understood why the American movie and play, The Lion King, isn’t abhorrent to the very nation which produced it. The USA is a republic which began life by detesting monarchs, thought that kingships were the very pit of evil, and yet this story written by one of their own vehemently supports the idea of hereditary rulership. Supports it even to the point where the weather gods are so outraged by the fact that an evil uncle has ursurped the throne, it ceases to rain. The Lion King is a Hollywood and Broadway hit. American audiences love it. Clearly, despite generations of our cousins over the other side of the pond protesting that royalty is the spawn of the Devil, a good many of them harbour in their psyche a longing to return to those good old days when they were persecuted for their religious beliefs and were happy not to govern themselves but to be maltreated and abused by a monarch who ruled through an accident of birth.

  (PS Some of my best friends are French and American.)

  ~

  I have said earlier that Annette introduced me to art and she has continued to put art galleries in my way throughout our long marriage.

  Hopper is the first artist on my list, with his haunting gas stations and red-roofed farms. Unbeatable. Going back aways, the Pre-Raphaelites, but among their number Burne-Jones stands out for his painting of the expired knights caught in the deadly nets of giant brambles. The Impressionists, naturally, especially pointillists like Suerat. Those funny men, Miro and Paul Klee. Klee’s pen-and-ink primitive drawing of an angler and his fish still makes me laugh. David Hockney, being a Brit with lots of splash about him, has my attention, but I’ve always preferred the weirdness of Dali to the genius of Picasso, who like Gauguin moves me not. Gauguin’s South Sea Island pictures are too dark and gloomy for such a bright, colourful place populated by bright, colourful people. Paintings like Wyett’s Christine’s World, fascinate and chill me with their inferences. Chinese paintings, of Guilin’s strange mountains with their pines clinging to precipices, also draw my wonder. There are many many more artists of course, Turner and Constable among them, who can fill my hours with pleasant viewing and I’m most grateful to my wife for awakening my interest so early in our marriage in order that we could enjoy art together.

  One picture I have lost. I saw it but once in the Tate Britain. I think it was by an artist named Baum and it is of two men, in classy cafe, sitting one either side of a small table. In the middle of the table is a thin vase containing a single flower. The men, though they are dressed in business suits, have the appearance of being conspirators. One of them is saying to the other, ‘We can’t do it without the rose’. What a brilliantly mysterious scenario. It has had me lying awake at nights wondering what is the rebellion or plot that needs this bloom to make it work? Of course, it is all fanciful, there could be no such scheme that needed a rose to bring about a revolution or mission, but the idea of it is so intriguing it clings to the edge of my conscious like a tree on a Guilin cliff.

  There is another form of art, which can be found in comics. Of course as a boy I was hooked by Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and other preternatural heroes. Later, as a grown man, I read the comic strips in newspapers and enjoyed Charlie Brown and Snoopy. But the one artist whose brilliance shines past or through every other brilliant cartoonist is Bill Watterson who invented Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin’s battles with his parents, especially with a father who when asked by Calvin for a scientific explanation of where the sun goes at night, informs his son gravely that it is pulled down by piece of string in the hands of an Australian Aborigine, and is then rebuked by his wife, are classic. Hobbes, the stuffed tiger that becomes philosopher and Calvin’s mentor, being fiercely real when adults are not around, is magnificent. These comic strips are the work of a genius and anyone who hasn’t discovered them needs to do so before they die or they will not have experienced genuine laughter. I have every book of Calvin and Hobbes that was ever published.

  Poetry has always been with me and has needed no introduction by wife or friend. I have loved poetry since my first nursery rhyme and will do so until the grave. I love Robert Burns for all his work, William Carlos Williams for ‘El Hombre’ and ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, Coleridge for ‘Kubla Khan’, Emily Dickenson for the lines ‘Parting is all we know of Heaven, and all we need of Hell’. Tennyson for ‘The Eagle’ and ‘Ulysses’, Ted Hughes for ‘Snowdrop’ and many others, Ralph Waldo Emerson for ‘Brahma’ – absolutely terrifyingly enigmatic, James Elroy Flecker for ‘Stillness’, Colonel Lovelace for the lines ‘I could not love thee dear, so much, loved I not honour more,’ (though I am not in agreement with the sentiment, but in sympathy with a man trapped in his time), Laurie Lee for ‘The Wild Trees’, Roy Campbell for ‘Choosing a Mast’, oh many, many more. But my all-time favourite, because it fills me with such an overwhelming sense of what is lost, is William Soutar’s ‘The Tryst’, the last verse of which has two lovers parting forever, with the narrator telling his listeners, ‘Sae luely, luely, cam she in – sae luely she was gaen – and wi’ her all my summer days – like they had never been.’

  21. Hong Kong

  In 1987 my yearning to revisit the Far East of my youth was almost overwhelming. I was enjoying my li
fe as a writer, a boyhood dream come true. I was now earning very good advances and had well overtaken my salary at C&W, so I felt established and well able to provide for the future. Annette too was earning a good reliable salary, one which did not require months of waiting for the cheque to arrive in the post. Our son Richard was in the process of backpacking around the globe and was at that time with our friends Peter and Carolyn Worth in Melbourne. Chantelle was happily married to Mark Lillie, who was making his way up the ladder in the banking world and doing very nicely. My cat Dylan Tom was the only dependant and he was actually well able to feed himself on the local fauna and was in truth a savage beast without a conscience. He bit or scratched those who tried to stroke him, only accepting a human touch on his terms. He would deign to climb onto my lap, or curl up close to me, as long as I did not reach out a hand. I did at one time think of offering Dylan as an understudy for the monster in the film Alien, since he had the same kind of ripping, tearing motion when devouring a mouse, blackbird, or at least once, a pigeon.

  However, the wild Dylan was unjustifiably wronged on occasion. Annette came home one day and after putting the shopping away went into the living-room to find Dylan sleeping on the living-room table. This was of course forbidden. My wife stood there and yelled at him for at least five minutes to remove himself. Eventually the real Dylan came wandering in from the kitchen to find out what all the noise was about and found his mistress shouting at her own fur hat.

  One evening around Easter, when Annette’s social working was getting on top of her, she said, ‘I passed a travel agent’s today and saw a holiday in Penang.’

  Malaysia, my old stamping grounds.

  ‘How much?’ I asked.