On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

She told me.

  We had not long paid out for our house extension and the coffers were a unusually low at that precise point in time.

  ‘Next year?’ I said.

  However, when she went to work the next day I got in my old beat-up Mitsubishi Colt, the one owned for years by a Suffolk farmer and still covered in bits of straw in the back, and drove to the travel agent. Using my credit card I booked the holiday, then drove to Basildon Hospital where Annette’s office was situated – she worked with the Mental Health Team there – and told her what I’d done. We were both sure it was the right thing to do, because we were both thirsting for faraway places. She was ecstatic and so was I. Singapore and Malaysia were now a long way off in my youth and I had ever dreamed of going back again.

  We had a tremendous holiday which revived all my passion for the Far Eastern countries and climes. On return we found a letter on the mat containing a cheque for almost exactly the amount that the holiday had cost us. I had sold a book in Italy and this was the advance.

  ‘It was obviously meant to be,’ said my philosophic partner in life. ‘We should go again.’

  We tried Voluntary Services Oversees first, thinking we might as well do some good in the world at the same time as fulfilling our own desires. There was a job in Thailand for a couple. No pay of course, but food and lodging. On application we went to Sloane Square wondering why a charity needed to have a house right in the heart of London’s most expensive property area.

  It was obvious from the start of the interview, mainly conducted by a young man who appeared to assume that since I’d been in the British military for nearly twenty years I must be a right wing bigot. I was continually asked what my prejudices had been during my overseas tours. The idea that military men are more racist than civilians is a complete myth. I have found far more bigotry among English villagers who have barely come into contact with Africans and Asians, than soldiers and airmen who have been stationed in foreign countries and who have lived among them.

  The assumption was particularly ironic, since at the time I was a member of the International Defence and Aid Fund for South Africa (IDAF), a secret organisation raised by the pacifist John Collins, a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral. The fund was for the assistance of hundreds of black South African families, including children, who went on trial accused of ‘treason’ and crimes against apartheid. I was recruited by my friends Andrew and Cheryl Hall, who were also members. Every month I would receive a registered envelope containing a large sum of cash in notes. I had initially been given a list of the names and addresses of twelve black South African families, to whom I would write letters as if they were old friends and include a ‘present’ in with the letter. My instructions were ‘never use headed paper with telephone numbers for family correspondence’ and ‘never discuss these matters with anyone.’

  The money was used for legal fees and assistance for families whose main earner was incarcerated. If a family failed to reply to two letters in a row, I had to inform a London monk named Friar Sherrington, and was usually instructed to drop the contact from my list. It probably meant that my mail had been intercepted by the South African police or the family member I was writing to had themselves been arrested.

  Annette still has a cotton tablecloth with elephants printed on it, that was sent as a gift to us by one of the families who did indeed believe we were actually supplying the money. It was the last we heard from that particular correspondent. We were told she had been killed during one of the anti-apartheid demonstrations. In 1989 IDAF provided the funds for 198 children’s cases alone. In all £100,000,000 was smuggled into South Africa by Canon Collins and his helpers and though BOSS, the South African Secret Police attempted to infiltrate and break up IDAF in UK it never managed to do so. Unfortunately Sweden’s arm of IDAF was destroyed by BOSS, but the three-hundred or so UK participants in this cloak-and-dagger game were never discovered. (Anyone interested in reading more about IDAF should log on to the website www.canoncollins.org.uk/about/about/HistoryIDAF.shtml)

  On the VSO front, the panel did not impress Annette either, since they did not seem to know there was any difference between mental health and mental handicap, even after she had queried their definitions.

  We failed to get that particular job, though they did ask us to apply again when another opening came up. It seemed from further enquiry that we should have been more altruistic in presenting ourselves. According to someone we met in the hallway who had been successful, we should have proclaimed a desire to save the world, whereas we naively thought having a huge amount of overseas experience (in a time when people did not travel abroad as they do these days) and having lived in conditions and climates that people in the UK might find oppressive, it was a good bet we would stay put once they sent us there. It was a fact that the drop-out rate among those who were chosen to go was high and indeed one of those who were sent on the mission we had applied for was one of those drop-outs.

  ‘I’m going to start applying for jobs abroad anyway,’ Annette told me, in one of her determined moods. ‘We’re not beaten yet. No more Mrs Nice Guy!’

  It took a year, but finally she got an interview for a job in Hong Kong, working for the military schools in the colony. If successful she would be in the Child Guidance Centre of Osborne Barracks, her boss the Educational Psychologist attached to the British Army. She would have the honorary rank of Captain, thus eclipsing her lowly ex-RAF sergeant husband.

  She did in fact, while we were lying in bed once, say in a commanding tone, ‘Ah-hum fetch me a cup of tea, will you sergeant?’

  I did indeed fetch her the cup of tea, but I promised that it was the last one she would get ever get from me if she continued to pull rank.

  Robin Moseley, the ed psych, was on the interviewing panel along with a severe-looking female who took an instant dislike to Annette. This woman whispered to Mr Moseley that she believed Annette was not a real blonde, thus quietly angering him. The assumption that he would hire someone for the colour of their hair made his hackles rise and and gave him cause to favour the only female in the short list.

  Of the six candidates they appeared to settle for a young man in his thirties and Annette went home prepared to hear that she had failed.

  We were at Rob and Sarah’s house – they frequently put us up when we were in London – when a phone call came from two women friends who were using our house for the night.

  ‘There’s a huge package arrived,’ chirruped Sandy, of Sandy and Andy, of the Country Maids, ‘from the Ministry of Defence.’

  Annette and I danced up and down the hallway, much to the consternation of Rob and Sarah, who couldn’t understand why we wanted to go to the other end of the world for three years. The big package could only mean one thing. Annette had got the job. Otherwise it would have been a slim letter saying sorry, but you were rubbish at the interview.

  Indeed, it turned out that the favoured young man had a girlfriend he had no intention of marrying. However he had wanted to take her with him to his new job in Hong Kong. Unfortunately for him the military in the 1980s took a Victorian moral stance on marriage and they told him they could not countenance employing a couple living in sin. This may sound incredulous today, but now is now, that was then, and so the young pretender was told he could not have the job, which then passed to the next candidate.

  Annette.

  Sorry mate, but yippee!

  Shaney and Mark were excited for us. Shaney had given birth to our first grandchild, Conrad, a terrific bundle whose first pair of shoes I lost when I took him shopping in a baby-backpack. Also the first time nanna and grampa babysat for him, he screamed the house down. We wondered how we managed to raise our own kids when we couldn’t handle the next generation. It should be easy, but in fact the weight of responsibility feels ten times greater and grandparents always imagine they have to keep their grandchild entertained and wildly happy.

  We managed to contact Rick in Melbourne and told him of our plans. He was ve
ry encouraging too, being a globe-trotter of some consequence by that time. His two spells in Israel had been followed by this round-the-world journey and at that particular moment in time he was driving a baker’s van in Melbourne and eating a lot of cream cakes. However, Rick never needed to worry about getting overweight. He has always been as lean and hard as whipcord. He told us he was going on to pick fruit in Queensland later that month, but hoped to visit us in Hong Kong after returning to UK. At his present rate of progress, considering he had to cross the Pacific and the United States, that would not be tomorrow or the next day. He still had adventures ahead of him.

  We had one big problem before we left for Hong Kong: what to do with the house. As fortune would have it, my old scouser mate had recently remarried to a lovely young woman, Marti. She had found a position in our local hospital and they needed somewhere to live. Our house, we said, was at their disposal. We charged them a nominal rent and they and their border collie would keep the house warm for us and mow the lawn. I told Pete I would get him a good ride-on mower to do the two acres, but I knew from experience that even with the latest machines the hedging and mowing would become very very tiresome.

  Later, there would be a clash of personalities, not between people but between our half-feral cat Dylan Tom, and Pete and Marti’s rather gentle collie, Max. When Dylan realised he would have to share a home with a stinking bloody dog his eyes widened and his nostrils flared with indignation. He soon sent the feline message that if this arrangement was permanent, he was going to be the boss. Apparently he used to sit in a high place – on the spiral staircase or a windowsill – and if Max happened to stroll unawares beneath him, a paw would flash out and a claw would rake a nose. The poor collie must have walked in fear for three years, never knowing from which direction to expect the next attack.

  During the previous few years I had visited Pete at his remote home among the drystone walls and rushing, rocky becks of the rugged Lancashire dales. Pete, who has the physique and facial looks of Charles Bronson during the actor’s best years, has always been a slight enigma to me. He is immensely talented, his writing skills excellent, yet there is a half-hidden underlying vein of self-doubt that forces him to rewrite much of his work. His children’s books draw on a wry Liverpudlian humour that I have always envied. We wrote a novel together called Dog People which has never been published, about a man living alone who is suddenly invaded by a group of strangers. They take over first his garden, then move into his house, living in a corner of the kitchen, until finally the owner moves out and leaves the place to the newcomers.

  Pete is a wonderful friend and a good man. He loves his dogs, there has always been at least one collie at his heels, and he is at heart more of a romantic than the tough guy he looks.

  After his divorce from his second wife, before he met Marti, Pete came down to us at Wychwater feeling depressed. In order to cheer himself up he had dyed his hair with henna. ‘Why don’t you do the same, Gaz?’ he suggested. ‘Go red young man!’ I had recently grown my hair long so entering into the spirit of the thing I bought some hair dye and followed his fashion. Only, I was a few years older than Pete and bore many grey patches on my thinning scalp. These did not come out red. They turned bright pink. Not only that, my hair frizzed up, to emulate the cloud-like hairstyle of Art Garfunkel. Every day, when I went shopping, I had to pass small children playing in the park, and they would rush to the fence screaming, ‘Dandelion! Dandelion!’ It mattered not to those barbaric infants that dandelion seeds are not in any way pink, but fluffy-white.

  So, Pete and Marti would look after the house for us.

  Next, in that package that had arrived, was a form I had to fill in as the ‘dependant’ accompanying Captain AJ Kilworth during her tour in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong. It was a form that was usually filled in by wives of serving soldiers. A clerk had obviously gone through the form with a pen and wherever the word ‘wife’ appeared, he had crossed through it and replaced it with ‘husband’ in – as John Murry would have put it – the small neat handwriting of the illiterate. I filled in the necessary blanks but was confounded when I came to the sentence ‘If pregnant, date of husband’s confinement’. Clearly our clerk had become so bored with his work he had failed to pay attention to the small print.

  I would soon learn what it was like to be an army wife, now that our roles were reversed. As a dependant I would have to get my captain spouse to sign that I could have a library ticket. I would not be a member of the Osborne Barracks Officers’ Mess as she was, but would only be allowed to use the bar if she was present and accompanying me. In fact I had few rights or privileges that were not endorsed by her. She was indeed the master of the house, the boss, the rent-payer and the layer down of rules and regulations. The army would not listen to me for a moment, if I had any complaints about our accommodation. I barely existed so far as they were concerned. Only Captain AJ was important.

  Phoooeeey, I didn’t like that at all.

  The only good part about this new arrangement was that if we signed the inventory for a ‘Hangars aircraft’ instead of a ‘Hangers coat’ by mistake, Annette would be the one responsible and not me.

  Hong Kong is an amazing city. In 1988 it had eight million people living in an area not much bigger than Southend-on-Sea. It hummed, banged and bustled with commerce and business, from the man beating out pots and pans on the pavement outside an open-fronted shop in Mong Kok, Kowloon-side, to the mighty Jardine-Matheson building on the island. Even as we were landing on the long jetty that pretended to be a runway for Kai Tak Airport, I could see down below the Star Ferries going between Kowloon and the island; the tall buildings dominated by the new triangular Bank of China; the reticulated railway rising from Midlevels to the Peak; buses, cars, motorcycles, bikes, foot passengers and most impressive of all, the thousands of junks, between-island ferries and boats, sampans, ocean-going ships, smacks, motor boats and other craft that were criss-crossing the harbour and skirting Stonecutter’s Island.

  It did indeed look like a colony that never slept.

  Yet Hong Kong is not just a city. Kowloon is a triangular-shaped peninsula. Halfway up that peninsula is a row of hills which the Chinese call ‘dragons’. Indeed, the word Kowloon (Gau Lung) in Cantonese means ‘Nine Dragons’ and this refers to those hills, though one of the dragons has been excavated for building materials. Beyond the eight-and-a-half dragons, reached by the Lion Rock Pass, or round one of the two ends of the range, is the New Territories, which is mostly countryside. There are huge parks up there, and mountains like Tai Mo Shan, and yes one or two big towns like Shatin, Tai Po and the port of Sai Kung, but it is abundant with greenery and was once full of duck farms, and small banana plantations, and piggeries, and other such rural establishments. There you will find ‘spirit trees’ covered in ribbons and rags, and long tough walks on the trails, and hidden restaurants that serve the most delicious dishes.

  Hong Kong is without question, magical, especially if you live there long enough to find all its pockets and seams.

  The moment we landed and I smelled the old familiar smells of Singapore, I knew this was going to be a wonderful tour of duty. Not my tour of duty, but nevertheless, I was along for the ride. We were picked up by Robin Moseley, Annette’s new boss, and his wife Glynis. We liked them both immediately. They were affable, friendly and gave us plenty of information. The usual things had to be sorted almost immediately: bank account, work-place, accommodation, bus time-tables, etc. I seem to remember these were all done in a day. Miraculous.

  This seems like a good place to put in an anecdote, a warning on the perils of travel as related by Robin Moseley, Esquire.

  When Robin and Glynis lived in Cyprus they decided to go on holiday to Egypt with another couple we knew in Hong Kong, Fiona and Howard. Howard was a major in the army at the time and was convinced that if he stuck to drinking beer and avoided water in Egypt, he wouldn’t suffer from Pharaoh’s revenge. What actually happened was – yes – he b
ecame dangerously dehydrated. The quartet were staying in a Cairo hotel which they later described as horrendously dirty, with unusable bathroom facilities, but that is by-the-by. The couples’ rooms were separated by a long u-shaped corridor. In the middle of the night there was a terrible screaming and then a hammering on the door to Robin and Glynis’s room. Robin woke in a panicky, fuzzy state, got up and opened the door to be confronted by a distraught Fiona.

  ‘Quick, quick,’ screeched Fiona, ‘I think Howard’s dying.’

  She then fled back down the corridor with Robin some yards behind, she in her nightdress, he in his pyjamas. Lining the corridor were the off-duty staff of the hotel, sleeping against the walls (presumably having no rooms of their own) who woke to see this hysterical European woman in her nightie being pursued by a gentleman trying to hold up his pyjama bottoms. Some of them rose to chase after the would-be rapist and his victim. When Robin reached the room of his friends, he had a number of hotel staff close on his heels.

  Howard, however, was aware enough to know that his room was suddenly crowding with strange people and he pulled the sheet up to his eyes, crying, ‘I’m all right! I’m all right. Leave me alone.’

  Next morning it was Robin’s job to scour the backstreets of Cairo looking for glucose for Howard. He entered a dingy-looking chemist shop which was not much more than a hole in the wall, indeed without much hope, but the chemist turned out to speak perfect Oxford English and disappeared into the back of his shop. He emerged with a large package and when it was unravelled he proudly presented the curious Robin with a stand, rubber tubes and bottle full of glucose complete with a nice long needle for treating a patient intravenously.

  Robin said later he would dearly have loved to have gone back to Howard and begun to set up the equipment, saying, ‘You’ll be fine – I’ve just had a quick lesson on how to use this!’ However, he settled for some glucose tablets, vowing to get even with Howard some other way.