The Garry Kilworth Wing. How cool is that?
My general fiction novel set in the Maldive Islands, In The Hollow of the Deep-sea Wave, attracted the attention of a film-maker Jamil Dehlavi, who optioned it for many years, but I understand Jamil could not raise the money to actually make it. It has now been optioned by a similar pair of film-makers and I await developments.
I was still writing fantasy for adults, but not much. Angel came out in 1993 and was reasonably successful and in 1996 A Midsummer’s Nightmare also did quite well, but I was about to change tracks yet again. Malcolm Edwards was now very high up in the giant HarperCollins publishing house. One day he gave me a call and asked if I would meet him for lunch. During that lunch, at which two film producers were present, he asked me if I thought I could write historical war novels.
‘You’ve been in the military. You have the background,’ he said. ‘These two gentlemen are the producers of Bernard Cornwall’s Sharpe series. They may want to venture into something other than the Peninsula Wars soon. Can you come up with any ideas for a new war? I was thinking of perhaps the English Civil War.’
I was chuffed to bits. Here was a new challenge.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.
I went home and thought long and hard about it. Although the English Civil War might have been made to work by somebody, I did not think I was the one to do it. Firearms used in that war were clumsy affairs, having to be rested on a forked staff and used in a slow lumbering way. Not at all given to swashbuckling action. Also, which side to choose for your hero? The puritan roundheads were boring buggers and the more colourful cavaliers on the wrong side as far as many people are concerned. Whichever side I chose I would lose readers who were not sympathetic to their cause.
I finally decided on the Crimean War, mostly because to my knowledge no one was working in that area, not Cornwall or Fraser, or any of the other well-known historical warists. I also wanted to work with a ranker, since every book of that genre I had read dealt with the officer class. So my hero was actually an aristocrat who joined the army as a private under an assumed name, due to circumstances which would be revealed later, and a man who was distrusted by his fellow soldiers because he had a posh accent and distrusted by his officers because he was obviously one of their class who chose to be in the ranks. Nice bit of tension there, from the outset. I began with Jack Crossman having been promoted to sergeant in charge of a group of saboteurs and spies, in a time when such men were not approved of, even by their own generals, but especially by Marshall Raglan who called them ‘skulkers’.
I covered the war in five novels, The Devil’s Own being the first, and Attack on the Redan, being the last. I shall ever be grateful to Malcolm for thinking of me, even though I didn’t fulfil his and my desire to interest the film company in those novels. I suspected their lack of interest from the start, when they yawned while I was outlining my project. I think they believed they were finished with Sharpe, whereas I’m sure there were other Sharpes that came after our two meetings. My Hong Kong friend, Major John Spiers gave me a lot of help, with information on the army at the time of the Crimea, and also David Greenwood, another pal, who took a long interest in the books. After the Crimea I took Crossman to India, then to New Zealand for the Maori Wars. He now has a cameo role in the Zulu Wars, written with my new younger hero, Ensign Seb Early, one of first military policemen of the ‘modern army’ which fought the Zulus.
My series of historical war novels have been indirectly instrumental in getting me elected as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the membership of which I am intensely proud. Yes, I would have liked a Booker prize. Of course, a Nobel prize. But heck, I’ll settle for putting FRGS after my name whenever I need to be formal and having the pleasure of going to some terrific lectures at the society, only open to Fellows like me.
I have always been a geography fan. I like amazing facts and geography, and astronomy especially, feed me with such material. For instance, did you know that because of continental drift the continents are moving apart at a pace of three centimetres a year? When you think I have lived seventy years this July, it means that during my lifetime America and Europe have moved over two metres away from each other. So it’s no wonder that Atlantic crossing air fares have increased: the distance is greater now than it was when I was a lad.
It was at an RGS lecture, and later at my grandson’s school at Felsted, that I saw and heard the man who had long been a hero to me for his brilliant oral storytelling of the Zulu Wars. David Rattray had an almost supernatural talent for spellbinding an audience with his historical recounting of the Battles of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift. He had an uncanny delivery, which in his soft South African accent, drew you dream-like into the African world of 1879. I have played his cds many, many times, and never fail to be mesmerised. He was especially sympathetic to the Zulus, who he grew up with and knew as friends.
‘It was not so much a British defeat,’ he would say, ‘but a Zulu victory.’
Sadly he was shot and killed trying to protect his wife from burglars in the early part of the 21st Century and to me it was like losing a loved schoolmaster.
~
I have never, of course, given up the love of my writing life, the short story. In the ’90s my collection In the Country of Tattooed Men appeared from HarperCollins. As I have already said, John Clute called my Triptych, a set of three unlinked tales, ‘stunning’, a review which I now treasure. The writer Geoff Ryman also praised Truman Capote’s Trilby: The Facts as one of the best stories he had read for long time, a remark I also hold dear. At that time I also wrote a collection of fairy tales for young adults, entitled Dark Hills, Hollow Clocks, which I feel is among my best work in the genre of short stories, the solid base of any science fiction and fantasy writer. More recently a young man named Guy Adams, who was an editor at Humdrumming Books, wrote and asked if he could republish my collection In The Country of Tattooed Men.
‘I read the stories when I was twelve,’ he told me, ‘and I’ve never forgotten them.’
When he was twelve? I am old Father William . . .
I recall the line from the first True Grit film, the one with John Wayne as Marshal Rooster Cogburn, who when confronted by the gunfighter Ned Pepper was told to, ‘Get out of the way, old man!’ and how Rooster’s head jerked back as he suddenly realised that he was now an O.A.P. That was how I felt when I read Guy’s letter. The stories that in my head I had written only recently, were actually ancient history. Guy is a lovely fellah and I was immensely pleased to be republished by such a good writer and editor, but . . . oh mum, where have the years gone?
~
In 1996 my prostate problems were reaching crisis point. True, I had learned to assess the architectural landscape for the presence of toilets and was damn good at finding them in strange towns and places, but driving any distance was becoming a nightmare. I was having to stop on the hard shoulder of motorways to relieve myself and if I didn’t do it in time there was a blockage and pain. So I went into hospital and had the damn thing shaved like a lump of bacon. Given an epidural injection rather than regular anaesthetic I was able to watch the whole show on a monitor while I chatted to an Australian anaethestist. Afterwards I was able to pee with the force of a London fire hose. It felt wonderful. At a post op chat with the surgeon, Mr Ball revealed that when making love to my wife I would no longer ejaculate forwards, due to a missing valve, but would shoot backwards into my bladder.
‘It’s quite normal after prostate operations,’ he told me. ‘You won’t feel any loss of sensation. In fact I’m told it can prolong the pleasurable feeling.’
‘That’s all very well,’ I quipped, ‘but really – I won’t know whether I’m coming or going, will I?’
He stared at me blank-faced.
~
Once the butchery was over Annette and I did another world backpacking tour, similar to the one we had enjoyed in 1992. This time we stopped at Fiji and following a photograph
y course and exams Annette took a number of monochrome photos of the islands which now adorn our living-room wall. Superb pictures. We also played golf at the club where Veejay Singh was a boy caddie and played his first game of golf. The clubhouse was still a tin shack, with a club honours board behind the table where the man who took the money sat. On that board Veejay’s name had started appearing on a certain day in a certain year as winner of the monthly medal – and so on, to great fame and much fortune for the Fijian golfer.
On Fiji we went for a reef walk and I managed to scratch myself and get coral poisoning. It’s not pleasant watching a red line go up your leg towards your thigh. We were staying with some Fijians in a homestay, so I asked the lady of the house if she knew where I could get treatment for the poisoning.
‘A Filipino doctor lives just two streets away,’ she told me. ‘Just go and knock on his door.’
I duly knocked on the doctor’s door, but the Filipino woman who answered the knock told me the doctor was out.
‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘come in. I’ll deal with it.’
Off she went and came back with a hypodermic needle.
‘Um, are you the doctor’s wife?’ I asked.
‘That’s right,’ she replied cheerfully.
Now, it was my guess that islands like Fiji have rather casual and informal rules regarding the medical profession, but I was wary of getting treatment from a doctor’s wife, even if she had seen her husband jab people a hundred times before.
‘Couldn’t I just wait for the doctor?’ I pleaded, as she squirted the air out of the hypo. ‘I don’t mind waiting.’
‘Now don’t be a baby,’ came the reply. ‘I happen to be a doctor too – it’s not the sole province of the male you know.’
My dormant prejudices were suddenly out there in the open, putting me in the glare of a spotlight. I felt very small and rather abashed. I did not turn towards Annette who was standing behind me, because I knew what sort of look she would be giving me.
The only other really memorable event on that tour, though we had a great time overall, was our visit to Aitutaki, a remote Cook island, where there lived an elderly man who was the ‘Speaker for the Seventh Canoe’. On those early Polynesian migrations in their hundred-men canoes – really rafts carrying whole families, livestock and plants – one man was allocated on each craft to memorise the voyage in all its aspects. I have already said these early Polynesians had fabulous memories, mainly due to the fact that they had no written language. These ‘records of the voyage’ were passed down from father to son, over the generations, and the latest holder of the record of the seventh canoe in the flotilla was held by this man, Mr Tunui Tereu, known locally as Papa Tunui, who lived with his wife on Aitutaki Island.
We flew to Aitutaki from Raratonga, courtesy of Turtle Airways Inc., on one of those flimsy Islander aircraft that had terrified Sarah when we were on Tioman. There we found Papa Tunui in a modest little bungalow. He was sitting on his veranda with his wife peeling mangoes. Without us even introducing ourselves he patted the concrete beside him for us to sit down. We sat, and he talked while I listened, for several hours, interrupted by drinks of various kinds. I went away with a notebook full of riches. Papa Tunui’s recollections, gathered from his ancestors, were later woven into The Navigator Kings. That wonderful man had a memory that could win Mastermind, if only he could choose Polynesian migrations as his special subject.
It was not so much the Polynesian folk lore: I had already read of ogres who could dismember themselves in order to hide in hollows; demons who allowed their severed heads to be carried by the waves in order to seek the flesh of men; giants who had jaws of flaming teeth which they replaced with tree-trunks. Nor was it about gods like Tiki, or even hero demi-gods such as Maui the cunning trickster. What I gathered from Papa Tunui were the navigational skills used by those intrepid seafarers. The star paths they followed, the fixed stars they used, were of course known by navigators of other nations. What was new was the knowledge they gained from the presence of certain land birds and sea birds. If they could not see land despite knowing it was somewhere close, they would put a dog or pig in the water. The animal’s sense of smell, a thousand times keener than that of a human, would have it swimming towards that land. They would look at the base of clouds: if that cloud was lit by a light shade of green they would know an island lagoon lay beneath. There were ‘feelers-of-the-sea’ on board, blind men who put their fingers into the waves and felt for changes in temperature. Most of all, those Polynesian seafarers knew about the direction of swells and the prevailing winds and followed them into the unknown.
In this way they sailed thousands of miles across open ocean to find new homes when the islands of their birth became overcrowded. Sometimes they sent only a handful of men ahead, to seek a new unpopulated land. This is how the Land-of-the-Long-White-Cloud, New Zealand, was discovered by a lone Polynesian sailor. His name was Kupe and such were those fabulous Polynesian memories that when he returned to his home island several years later he was able to recall the passage of his voyage for them to follow, finishing with the sentence, ‘Keep to the left of the setting sun in November and you will discover two large islands’.
There was more, much more, too much to repeat here. I simply enjoyed listening to Papa Tunui’s soft voice and throwing my mind back to those huge rafts carrying perhaps twenty families into nothing but blue water and blue sky. How brave they were. Columbus had it easy.
After an afternoon of listening and scribbling, that evening we went to see hula-dancing and to a feast where the favourite Polynesian food was on the menu. At that feast we met the film producer of the movie Babe who was married to a local woman. The ‘favourite’ food was of course roast piglet, one of Babe’s descendants.
~
On return to England after our second ‘world tour’ we carried on life at Wychwater. I had planted two more trees in 1988, just before we had left for Hong Kong. One was a willow, down by the pond, the other was a ginkgo in sight of our kitchen window. Both saplings were as thick as my forefinger. When we got back the willow was a mature tree, fifteen feet high and badly needing a haircut. The ginkgo was still a finger-thick twig that stood two feet high, alive and thriving, but amazingly immature. It was still the same height and girth when we left it behind in 2001. I have seen fully grown ginkgos and they are giants. Clearly ginkgos grow vaster than empires and more slow. Beautiful leaves though.
Every year we had our garden party where we invited our writer and editor friends, many of them with children now who I took for rides in the trailer of my tractor. They were good happy times. My own kids were settled and Annette, like most nanas, fell into her role of grandmother with great relish. We saw Conrad, Christian and Jordan quite often in the mid to late ’90s, at their house in Shoeburyness. The boys were sport mad and we often played yard cricket or kicked a ball on the nearby green. All three grandsons were growing up strong and healthy. They were well-mannered too and treated their nana and grampa with great respect, Shaney and Mark saw to that.
To Julie and Rick’s two children Annette was ‘Swimming-nana’ the other nana being ‘Knitting-nana’. Annette took Alex and Chloe most weekends to the swimming baths and was instrumental in helping them to learn to swim. Once, Alex tried to test Annette by asking her if she would ‘Knit me a Postman Pat if my mum gives you the spring (string)’. Knitting being an anathema to Swimming-nana the refusal was forthright and telling. She was never again asked to knit anything.
My favourite grandchild story is about Alex. At his primary school they gave out talents and tokens. Talents were earned for being good, tokens were given out for being bad.
After his first week at school he came home and was asked by his mum Julie, ‘How did you get on, Alex? Did you earn any talents?’
Alex turned his angelic face to his mother and said seriously, ‘Hundreds and hundreds.’
‘And what about tokens.’
He shook his head. ‘Not a single on
e.’
‘Oh that’s wonderful. Well, next week I’m going to see your teacher and have a little chat about how you’re getting on.’
Alex screwed up his face in thought for a moment, then said, ‘Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t talk about the talents and tokens.’
~
In the ’90s too, we went on several expeditions to the West Country with Rob and Sarah, walking Offa’s Dyke, Dartmoor and visiting Maiden Castle. Both Sarah and Rob liked nothing better than striding out over frost-covered peat hags, breath coming out as sprigs of steam, finding a spot to picnic in a grove of stunted oaks. Once, I went through the ice of a shallow pond and filled my boots with freezing water. I had to trudge to the pub six miles away with fine spray flying from the tops of my boots while the others walked behind me making hilarious remarks. To be fair, Sarah showed concern over my freezing feet, but the other two could not stop laughing long enough to enquire after my condition.
Malcolm Edwards was now married to Jacks, a lovely young London editor whose parents lived in Somerset. I remember the wedding as being a very wet day under canvas, since it took place mainly in a marquee in the garden. Everyone sloshed around on duckboards, though the tent was warmed by jet engines that made its cheeks billow. Rob was best man and gave a wonderful speech fashioned from reworked lines from a poem by Seamus Heaney which ended something like, ‘Bog, fen, mud and ditch-deep peat – welcome to your new home.’
In the mid-90s, Rob, Sarah, Annette and I were invited to the home of Jacks’ parents for a winter weekend. On the way we stopped at Avebury to gather spiritual energy from the standing stones and ended up getting lost after dark in the fields beyond the site. We managed to trudge our way to a garage light on the motorway and thence back to the car, our boots thick with mud from the ploughed furrows. Jacks and Malcolm were there in Somerset to greet us and again we met Jacks’s family, who were charming and gracious, but were happy to engage us in a lively argument about fox hunting when my book Hunter’s Moon came up. It was probably Rob who mentioned the novel. He was always trying to promote my books and indeed got me several Guest of Honour spots in places like the Czech Republic with his selfless endorsements.
On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer Page 35